united colours of vruz

DemocracyNow.org

Former top CIA counterterrorism officer Glenn Carle has revealed the Bush administration sought damaging personal information on Juan Cole, an academic and prominent critic of the Iraq war, in an attempt to discredit him. Carle says the Bush White House made at least two requests for intelligence about Cole, whose blog “Informed Comment” rose to prominence after the Iraq invasion.

Carle refused to carry out the request. In a joint interview, Carle and Cole join us to discuss the explosive revelation and why Cole is now calling for a congressional investigation. “I think I was targeted because this was a propagandistic administration … full of people who thought they could pull the wool over the American people’s eyes,” says Cole.

“The Bush administration was starkly at odds with the intelligence community as a whole—the CIA, in particular, and the National Intelligence Council even more so,” Carle says. “I do know the context of tension and hostility between the Bush administration and the intelligence community, and more broadly, any critic of their policies.”

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DemocracyNow.org

The New York Times recently broke the story that President Obama rejected the views of top administration lawyers when he decided he had the legal authority to continue U.S. military participation in the war in Libya without congressional authorization. Obama continues to face congressional opposition to the ongoing Libya attack.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner has called on the White House to further clarify the legal basis for the war in Libya or face a cutoff of war funds. Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers filed a lawsuit accusing President Obama of violating the War Powers Act of 1973.

To examine the legal dimensions of U.S. military intervention, we speak with Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com. “The idea that presidents can start wars on their own, without any congressional authorization, violates not just the law but the Constitution,” Greenwald said. “In theory, when the president violates the law and the Constitution, that’s an impeachable offense. At the same time, we’ve set a very low standard for our tolerance of rampant presidential law breaking.”

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vruz: impeachment? no chance if obama doesn’t flash his presidential hind parts first.

why so serious about the rule of law now?

—via jonathan-cunningham:

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

Juan Cole responds that he “hope[s] that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees will immediately launch an investigation of this clear violation of the law by the Bush White House and by the CIA officials concerned,” though I doubt he is of any illusions that anything will really be done.

by Adam Martin, The Atlantic

Last November, federal agents at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport seized a laptop belonging to computer scientist David House, an activist who helped found a group supporting Bradley Manning, the Army private currently in custody and charged with leaking classified information that reached Wikileaks. House says the agents took the laptop “without a hint that it contained evidence of wrongdoing,” according to the Washington Post, and he and the ACLU sued the federal government on Friday. House also went on a message board at Firedoglake to answer questions about the suit and said, among other things, that the State Department and Army had offered to bribe him to give them tips on Boston-area hackers. Here are some of the highlights from House’s Q&A

— read more —

by Andrew Sullivan, The Dish

Doug Mataconis catches Congress ignoring the War Powers Act. Conor Friedersdorf demands Congress vote to authorize or end the Libyan war. Matt Yglesias sees little chance of that:

Congress has enormous power over all kinds of things but only if they actually want to use it. But over the years, Congress has shown very little interest in constraining presidential warmaking power. At times presidents have shown interest in demanding that congress vote on their war proposals—like when George W Bush forced a vote on invading Iraq timed right before the 2002 midterms but months before he initiated military action—but that’s something initiated by the White House for political purposes. For most of the same reasons, members prefer to duck votes on these things when possible.

Of course, I’m with Conor. The war in Libya becomes illegal from now on. And the imperial presidency grows even more powerful.