Here's a real shocker: Congress passed a new law to coordinate and oversee the government's anti-terrorism activities, and the President ignored it. I wonder if that information might be permitted to influence any current or future legislation - say, the FISA bill - that depends upon the willingness of the president to carry out the law?

Last August Congress passed and Bush signed a law implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. Among other provisions, it created a new national coordinator for preventing nuclear terrorism. Bush administration officials like Michael Chertoff had been warning for years about the nuclear terror threat.

But as the Globe's Bryan Bender reports, during the last ten months Bush has essentially refused to appoint the coordinator. In early 2007 Bush had tried and failed to convince Congress not to create the high-level position.

Some congressional leaders said Bush's failure to fill the job nearly a year later marks an outright evasion of the law...

Well, yes, it's pretty clear Bush didn't get the law he wanted so he refuses to implement it. That's not in doubt. The real question, as so often, is what Congress will do about it. So far Congress has never enforced its will on Bush.

After describing Bush's long record of hollowing out laws with his signing statements, Bender continues:

This time, however, the White House seems to be ignoring the nuclear terrorism coordinator requirement not for constitutional reasons but simply because the administration thinks it is a bad idea. It is a stance some legal scholars called an even more blatant disregard of the checks and balances on presidential power.

"It is one thing when the president claims it infringes on his constitutional authority," said Phillip J. Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who specializes in separation of powers issues. "It is something else altogether when no such argument is made."

"Congress has the authority to create by statute different responsibilities in executive departments," he added. "You can't ignore a valid statute. I don't think he has the authority to do that."

That's wrong, actually. The president doesn't have the power to ignore a valid statute, but he does have the authority to do it as long as he acts with impunity. Congress choses to cede authority, or not, to the president. In recent years Congress has been doing nothing but cede authority.

In this matter, unsurprisingly, federal policy on nuclear terrorism is adrift.

"I believe that until there is a senior official with direct access to the president who has specific and singular responsibility for coordinating efforts to keep nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction out of terrorist hands, we will not get the action we need," [said Charles Curtis, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative] ... "We need a centralized means in the office of the president to set priorities, assign responsibilities, ensure resources, and hold people to account."

"It's the law," he added. "But it's not enough to have a law."

The Bush administration's record has shown over and over again that "it's not enough to have a law". And yet here Congress is set to give the president sweeping new surveillance powers under a FISA law that depends entirely upon the willingness of the president to carry out all of its provisions, including those that aren't welcome.

Congress: always the last to learn the lessons of history.

People have short memories. I think Condi's 9/11 commission testimony, running in a constant loop, would be sufficient to sink McSame/Rice '08

For starters, there was this lively display of idiocy with Mr. Beneviste...

Recently, I posted a diary which started with this quote from an Op-Ed piece by CA Senator Dianne Feinstein:

Judge Mukasey has my vote
LA Times Nov. 3, 2007

Judge Mukasey is not Alberto R. Gonzales. In our confirmation hearings (and subsequently, in writing), Judge Mukasey's answers to hundreds of questions were crisp and to the point, and reflected an independent mind. That's why I intend to vote to confirm him to be our next attorney general. I truly believe he will be a strong advocate for the American people.
....

The bottom line is this: I hope that Judge Mukasey will fairly and evenhandedly represent the American people and direct the Justice Department wherever the facts and the law lead, not where the White House dictates.

Our nation needs a strong and independent attorney general, and I believe that Judge Mukasey will rise to the challenge.

This week, Mukasey came to Feinstein's turf, stuck a fork in her, and clearly demonstrated that he has given up any pretense of independence as Attorney General and has become simply an older Alberto Gonsalez.  The story below the jump.

The Sydney Herald’s March 8th edition carries a detailed excerpt from a new book, due out Monday, which chronicles White House efforts to cover up the clear incompetence of then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice in the months leading up to 9/11.

Other news stories have provided some details of this story, but Philip Shenon’s The Commission - The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation by (Little, Brown, $35), brings together an array of material which, taken in total, paints a devastating picture of Rice’s incompetence and lack of attention to the threat of Al Queada attacks on the U.S. despite a deluge of warnings.  It also details how the head of the 9/11 Commission made it his job to make sure those facts were kept away from the public.

Shocked, I tell you, shocked. I know you are. Uncle Karl is the soul of honesty and decency, and would never ever...

ralphs into flight bag

Okay, I'm better now. Max Holland from Washington Decoded has information on a new book by NYT reporter Philip Shenon that details the 9/11 panel commissioner, Philip Zelikow, "engaged in 'surreptitious' communications with presidential adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during the commission’s 20-month investigation into the 9/11 attacks."

Yes, you're as stunned as I am. Not.

The Real ID Act is going to make America safer, persecuting illegal immigrants is God's will and Santa Claus is joining the Republican primaries to vote for Mitt Romney. Please! If we are willing to swallow such arguments, we deserve what we have. This entry is the letter I have sent The Examiner with respect to the commentaries quoted from the St. Louis Post on January 17 and the Buffalo News on January 18 on the Real ID Act, one of the most deceitful pieces of legislation of the last times and result of one of the most shameful pieces of recent history. I hope that we do not wake up one day realizing that we have suffered another catastrophic attack because we diverted our security forces to please the xenophoby of these people.
In the Germany of the 30s a psychopath used the existing anti-Semitism of his society to make most of the country join him in blaming the Jews for the painful conditions of the Versailles Treaty and most of the German people, no matter how stupid the arguments, felt comfortable believing it and then other tales. We all know what happened next. When I see that 20% of the Republican base in Iowa, a state hit by the economic coming recession in a country at war, considered persecuting illegal immigrants a priority at the primaries, I worry.

Let me say at first to forgive the brevity and the lack of links etc in this diary.  I don't often use my disability as an excuse but I am legally blind and the internet connection for the computer I usually use is down.  It is extremely difficult for me to navigate the web on this one.

Now, on to some content.  Recently most everyone is aware that both chairmen of the 9-11 Commission wrote an editorial in the NYT stating that "government officials obstructed" their investigation.

In Wednesday's op-ed in the NYT, 9/11 Commission Chairs Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton complained that:

"What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction."

After the 9/11 Commission Report was published, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds wrote a number of articles which demonstrate that even when the Commission was informed about serious matters related to 9/11, the Commission ignored them. These omissions meant that the public never became aware of the full story of 9/11, and importantly, that the Commission's recommendations were flawed.

I'd call that obstruction.

Today, the NY Times featured an op-ed from Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, Co-Chairs of the 9/11 Commission.  They reiterated the original goals of the commission, then offered a stunning, point blank criticism of the CIA and the Bush administration:

The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

I am sure that it will come as no surprise to the online community that the Bush administration obstructed the investigation.  Activists and 9/11 family members have been raving for years about the obstruction.  But, to my knowledge, this is the first time the co-chairs of the commission have made such serious allegations.

Kean and Hamilton state that they repeatedly asked the Bush administration and the CIA for information regarding the interrogations of two of the detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri.  We now know that the infamous (and allegedly destroyed) tapes included hundreds of hours of the interrogations of these two men, and yet not one word of their existence to the commission.  The CIA provided written reports of the interrogations, but those reports apparently only created more confusion:

The C.I.A. gave us many reports summarizing information gained in the interrogations. But the reports raised almost as many questions as they answered. Agency officials assured us that, if we posed specific questions, they would do all they could to answer them.

So, in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A.’s general counsel. One set posed dozens of specific questions about the reports, including those about Abu Zubaydah. A second set, even more important in our view, asked for details about the translation process in the interrogations; the background of the interrogators; the way the interrogators handled inconsistencies in the detainees’ stories; the particular questions that had been asked to elicit reported information; the way interrogators had followed up on certain lines of questioning; the context of the interrogations so we could assess the credibility and demeanor of the detainees when they made the reported statements; and the views or assessments of the interrogators themselves.

Not content with the vagueness of the answers provided by the CIA, the 9/11 Commission asked - and were denied - permission to interview the the detainees.

In a lunch meeting on Dec. 23, 2003, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, told us point blank that we would have no such access. During the meeting, we emphasized to him that the C.I.A. should provide any documents responsive to our requests, even if the commission had not specifically asked for them. Mr. Tenet replied by alluding to several documents he thought would be helpful to us, but neither he, nor anyone else in the meeting, mentioned videotapes.

A meeting on Jan. 21, 2004, with Mr. Tenet, the White House counsel, the secretary of defense and a representative from the Justice Department also resulted in the denial of commission access to the detainees. Once again, videotapes were not mentioned.

So, not only did the CIA refuse the request and neglect to mention the tapes, but all of the usual players - Tenet, Rumsfeld, Gonzales (and Bush/Cheney by extension) - seem to be intimately involved as well.  It makes sense because we know that the "circle of trust" in the Bush adminstration has always been a very exclusive club.

Hamilton and Kean conclude by practically begging for an investigation.

As a legal matter, it is not up to us to examine the C.I.A.’s failure to disclose the existence of these tapes. That is for others. What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.

As of this afternoon, it looks like Attorney General Mukasey is going to comply.  Given the recent record of investigations into the Bush adminstration, I don't have high hopes that justice will be done.  But, it is a new year....an election year....and the political winds are changing.  Stranger things have happened.

For the past seven years, like so many on this site, I have dreamed of the day when some authority could force accountability from our current administration.  My hopes that Congress could provide oversight, supervision and accountability were certainly a little too optimistic.

If you look back at the past thirty to thirty-five years it is easy to see that the only meaningful way to deal with the power of the executive branch, especially this executive branch, is to appoint a special prosecutor.  For this administration there was only one situation where we have gotten anywhere close to the bottom of what was going on.  (Well, maybe the DOJ scandal was an exception.)  Yep, it was the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation.  Now perhaps we have been given the impetus we needed to force the appointment of another.

Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean couldn't put in any plainer. A quick read should tell anyone exact how mad they are to have been bent over. They name a few names and hint at others that they blame like the White House Counsel.

But the commission never felt that its earlier questions had been satisfactorily answered. So the public would be aware of our concerns, we highlighted our caveats on page 146 in the commission report.

As a legal matter, it is not up to us to examine the C.I.A.’s failure to disclose the existence of these tapes. That is for others. What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.

Stonewalled by the C.I.A.

News tonight in a Christmas weekend present, the infamous Friday dump, "The 9/11 Panel Study Finds That CIA Withheld Tapes," and Kennedy takes information under advisement in detainee case with lawyer saying Justice cannot be trusted.

To be expected: The CIA is actually using the lame argument for not handing over the CIA Torture Interrogation Tapes to the 9/11 Commission this: the Commission did not ask for them specifically. They did not ask for "videos." Tis the season for Ho-Ho-Ho!

The Commission has decided they were lied to. They had asked for ALL relevant information to interrogation of terrorist suspects and were assured they had been given such. At the same time, Judge Kennedy has taken his decision under advisement. The Justice Department argued that Kennedy should "await results of the AG's "preliminary inquiry." So Judge Kennedy asked the detainee's lawyer, David Remes, a question. --read below.

Back in the days of the Roman Republic, when things got out of hand, matters were referred to a temporary dictator, Cincinnatus.  He would be approached on his farm, and asked to come fix things, temporarily.

With the latest news about the CIA destroying the tapes which almost certainly would have demonstrated torture, surely we are at the point that most people believe we cannot afford even another year of this administration.

Consider that Nixon resigned in August 1974, two years before the next election.  Why not have an interim President and Vice President now?

History demands that we get history right. We have no choice Especially when its the history regarding the seminal event in the new age of The Global War On Terror(GWOT) and the Iraq war era. When very credible and exceptional individuals speak up and address the need to correct the historical record of 9/11 we have to act.

This diary will not posit alternative persons or theories for who may have been involved in the 9/11 attacks.
That does not mean I do not read, research and ponder. I have noticed recently on talk radio, television and here at DKos people often preface their remarks by saying, I'm not a conspiracy theorist ... but..."

It's as if the house rules here at DKos have been adopted far and wide.
Certainly the traditional media does not portray the degree and intensity of the debate about 9/11. Much of the debate is condemned because it takes place in internet forums and websites. Ahhh yes, you can find people who say anything on the internet. And surely some of the 9/11 debate has been warped by highly speculative and rather silly theories.

A new poll released today by Zogby suggests that we participate in burying the debate at the risk of mis-reading what Americans are thinking and asking, and what they expect from the next government of the USA.

Former 9/11 Panel member Tim Roemer (former Indiana congressman) delivered the Democrat's weekly radio address yesterday. After discussing the failed bombing attacks in the U.K. last week, Roemer said that the United States is still not sufficiently protected from similar terrorist attacks.

"Only half of these bipartisan recommendations have been passed... The White House's execution and funding of them has received failing grades... We still do not have the ability to know fully who and what is crossing our borders and sailing into our ports. We've left the door open to attacks."

By now, you've already heard that Senate Republicans have denied that body  the opportunity to hold ex-Senator Frist's very favoritest thingy -- an "Upperdownvote" -- on the Employee Free Choice Act.

By a vote of 51-48, the Senate ran into the 60 vote brick wall that enables Republicans, from the minority, to block just about anything. Still, 51 votes in favor marks some significant progress on the issue. Unfortunately, those 51 votes were votes on whether or not to vote on the actual bill. In other words, the votes were on a motion for cloture, and not the underlying bill itself.

Yet more procedural roadblocks were in evidence today on the bill to implement the still-not-enacted recommendations of the 9/11 commission, and the ethics and lobbying reform bill -- both of which have already passed the House and the Senate.

How, then, were Republicans able to obstruct bills that have already passed? Good question!

The House and Senate have each passed different versions of the bills, which means the discrepancies have to be resolved in conference. That's just what it sounds like: a conference of House Members and Senators get together and settle on one version -- known as the conference report. Then, that conference report gets voted on in both the House and the Senate, so that each chamber eventually passes exactly the same language.

But because process rules everything, before you actually have that conference, you have to go through the process of setting it up. So for a body -- two bodies, in fact -- that can't execute anything without either having a vote on it or unanimously agreeing to it, that means:

1. One of the two houses has to vote (or agree unanimously) to request a conference with the other house in the first place;
2. The other house has to vote (or agree unanimously) to agree to have that conference with the other house;
3. Each house has to vote (or agree unanimously) to appoint conferees to attend that conference.

And that's where things hung up today in the Senate. The Senate's procedural rules make it much more difficult to dispense with these steps than it is in the House, where a majority vote can take care of things. But with the Senate and its rules permitting "extended debate" (i.e., the filibuster), all things -- even simply agreeing to agree to set up a conference to see if the people you agree to send to seek agreement with the House can agree to agree -- require (or can be made to require) 60 votes.

Now, what happens technically with these things is that both the House and the Senate can, when things are going smoothly, take care of the three steps above by asking unanimous consent that a conference be requested or  agreed to, and that conferees be appointed. (How conferees are selected and who gets to go is another matter.) But when things aren't going smoothly, any Member of the House or any Senator can object to such a unanimous consent request. In the House, this usually poses little difficulty, since the remedy for such an objection is to hold a vote, and if a majority votes to go ahead with the conference, that's all it takes. And in the House, as we know, the majority is ready-made.

In the Senate, however, pretty much anything that's subject to debate is subject to extended debate, and that means it's subject to a filibuster. What's more, often all it takes is the threat of a filibuster to make everyone else back off. Nobody wants to have to sit through an actual Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style filibuster, so the threat of it -- in the form of an objection to a unanimous consent request (in this case, to go to conference or appoint conferees) -- is all it takes to gum up the works. It's assumed that the Senator who objects is, if push comes to shove, willing to actually filibuster by holding the floor indefinitely. Rarely is anyone put to the test.

So that's what happened today. Republican obstructionists objected to the unanimous consent request that the Senate go to conference on these bills. In order for Dems to call his or her bluff, someone has to make a motion to go to conference. Then, when the Senate begins to debate that motion, the Senator who objected can opt to filibuster right there. Which means that until the Senate votes for cloture (if it can find the 60 votes to do that at all), everything comes to a halt. And at this point, even if cloture is achieved, all you've done is agreed to 30 more hours of debate on the question of whether or not to go to conference. Assuming that motion passes, you still need to appoint conferees. And guess what? That's subject to debate, too. And thus, to yet another filibuster.

You can see how this can get out of control pretty easily. And you can see  now just how many opportunities a few obstructionist Senators have to prevent just about anything from ever finally getting done. They can block the motion to consider a bill in the first place. They can block the ability to end debate on the bill in order to vote on it. They can block the motion to go to conference or agree to a conference. They can block the motion to appoint conferees. And finally, they can block the consideration of the conference report (though not the motion to begin considering that report -- conference reports are privileged business).

Annoying, huh?

Fox News continues it's long standing tradition of spin with an attack on congressman Ron Paul and his statements made during the May 15 GOP debate.

Fox News John Gibson with Michelle 'Hot Air' Malkin not only wrongly claim that Paul blames the U.S. for 9/11 and defend the unquestionably patriotic Rudy Giuliani. But they then take it a step further and claim he is part of the 9/11 Truth Movement! I guess we should expect this kind of absurd reporting by now from Fox.

But why spend time smearing a longshot like Ron Paul? One reason could be that many polls including Fox News'own poll show Paul had a better showing in the debate than their golden boy Giuliani. Paul could pose a serious threat by representing true conservative politics.

But let's look specifically at the exchange between the two candidates and see who is supported by the facts and who is blowing hot air. Follow below the fold: