So glad to see Spirit of Justice has her freedom again

Ashcroft is rolling in his grave.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

John Ashcroft Hired by Qatar

Qatar has paid $2.5 million to the law firm of a former attorney general under U.S. President George W. Bush to audit its efforts at stopping terrorism funding, a matter at the heart of the Gulf diplomatic crisis that erupted last week.

John Ashcroft personally will lead his Washington-based firm’s efforts “to evaluate, verify and as necessary, strengthen the client’s anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing” compliance and potentially lobby lawmakers and the media, according to documents filed to the U.S. Justice Department.

Qatar hiring Ashcroft, who was attorney general during the Sept. 11 attacks and then helped push through the Patriot Act, appeared aimed at appeasing Washington as several Gulf nations try to isolate it. Officials in Qatar, home to a major U.S. military base, and Ashcroft’s firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

  AP News

I never realized how much James Comey looks like his old boss. This is John Ashcroft then and now:

And here's James Comey:

Fat Chance

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether to block a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft and others by non-U.S. citizens, mainly Muslims, swept up after the Sept. 11 attacks who said they were abused in detention.

  HuffPo

Even if Hillary is the one to appoint the remaining judge - and the fact that there hasn't been a replacement all this time is another American scandal - and that new judge is a "liberal", the answer to this decision is a resounding "no way, Mr. Muslim." Besides, even if they rule to allow the suit to continue, it will end with the same verdict: "no way, Mr. Muslim."

In a similar previous case, the Supreme Court in 2009 backed Ashcroft, saying a lawsuit by detainees failed to contain specific details on Ashcroft’s involvement.

[...]

The civil rights lawsuit seeks to hold the former officials responsible for racial and religious profiling and abuse in detention that the plaintiffs said they endured after being detained following the 2001 attacks by al Qaeda Islamic militants on the United States.

Yeah, we're sorry about that, but, hey...war.

The brief order said two justices, liberals Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, will not participate, meaning only six justices will hear the case. The court remains one justice short following Antonin Scalia’s February death.

Two women? Why not?

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have recused themselves. Although the court gave no reasons, as is typical, Justice Sotomayor may have heard portions of the case when sitting as a lower court judge in New York, and Justice Kagan may have worked on the government’s defense in her previous post of U.S. solicitor general.

  WSJ

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

When Domestic Surveillance Was UnAmerican

Remember John Ashcroft - W's Attorney General?

The Program

Part I of a Frontline special report is available here. It's a nice recap of the beginnings of the collect it all program of the NSA, the attempts of people in the past to have it reined in and/or stopped, repercussions for them, and a lead in to the Snowden leaks. Not just reminders of how we got here, and where we are, but revelations of things I had not known about the people involved in trying to get the information out.

You’ve seen the history of how the Bush administration launched an unprecedented surveillance campaign after 9/11 at the National Security Agency, and how Obama later expanded what had become known as “The Program.”

Now find out how the NSA got all that data.

On May 20, FRONTLINE continues the story of mass surveillance in America in part two of United States of Secrets, an investigation into the secret relationship between Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency.

  PBS

Trailer for part 2.


Petition re government attempt to force reporter James Risen to reveal his sources:

Legacy of the Big Dick

Mark Danner has an interesting article on Dick Cheney wherein he recounts the movie moment (one of them) in Dubya’s presidency where – if you are to believe Dubya’s memoir – the dunce prince was not even involved in his presidence enough to know that the surveillance order he signed was being resisted by his justice department.

The key passage, I think, is this:

The president had approved Stellar Wind on October 4, 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attack, and given the temper in Washington and in the country at that time he likely could simply and easily have amended the law. “We could have gone to Congress, hat in hand, the judicial branch and the executive together,” Royce Lamberth, then the chief FISA court judge, tells Gellman, “and gotten any statutory change we wanted…. But they wanted to demonstrate that the president’s power was supreme, and the judiciary was just a tagalong when necessary, but not appreciated.” They didn’t want to change the law, that is; they wanted to circumvent it, and so demonstrate that, in the face of the president’s wartime powers, the law didn’t matter.

And I believe that Dick Cheney’s agenda all along was to take the oval office himself at the end of Bush’s second term. But then it all went horribly wrong for him.

Read the article – very interesting, even though some assessments may be questionable. (For instance, he calls Dubya “intelligent” – what does that make every other president? Genius?)

It is an astute point, all the more so for seeming obvious: the unique policies put into effect by Bush and Cheney were not consequences of the September 11 attacks but calculated responses to them. There was nothing fated about Stellar Wind, or “black sites” and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were practiced in them, or Guantánamo and military commissions; these and the other distinctive post–September 11 policies that still cast their shadows over us were born of choices made by government officials and, in the event, by a vanishingly small number of them.

Which makes the secret way our government runs a recipe for disaster. Barton Gellman, quoted by Danner, says Cheney ushered in a new world where the executive proceeded “by rules invented on the fly.” Unfortunately, he’s right.

But the reader is left to puzzle out who exactly Bush is referring to when he writes that “some in the White House” wanted him to let [Deputy Attorney General James] Comey, [FBI Director Robert] Muller, and their colleagues, and perhaps [Attorney General John] Ashcroft himself, resign. Even writing his memoirs years after leaving office Bush is loathe to identify Cheney as the antagonist who almost scuttled his presidency—though had he done so, his account, which portrays an incurious president very much out of touch, might have been less embarrassing to him personally.

Perhaps he’s too clueless to be embarrassed. Or perhaps he thought it better not to be shot in the face.

It goes on still. This is the way of the post–September 11 world, where whistleblowers and news organizations reveal what would have once been considered illegal and then, years later, find themselves “revealing” it yet again, and then again. So it has been with torture and extrajudicial killing and warrantless wiretapping. We might call these frozen scandals, which begin in revelation and white-hot controversy and end with our learning to live with secret wrongdoing that is in fact no secret at all. This is our new normal—and a vital attribute of the world Dick Cheney bequeathed us.

This Should Be Interesting

resident Obama will nominate former Deputy Attorney General James Comey to be the next director of the FBI, according to sources.

Comey is a Republican who served in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, and is perhaps best known for his time as acting Attorney General, when he refused to certify parts of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program.

  The Hill

You remember Comey – he of the infamous scramble to get to John Ashcroft in the hospital.   In the long run, it doesn't seem to have mattered, but at the time, it was pretty exciting stuff.

I will pay top dollar for a ticket to Comey's confirmation hearings.

  Charlie Pierce

Yeah, I wonder. I don't have any idea how that might play out. Times are strange and everybody's got an angle.