Posted on 01/30/2006 3:25:32 PM PST by Anthem
They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for it. A NEWSWEEK investigation.
Feb. 6, 2006 issue - James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed. Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt, appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual passage. Comey thanked "people who came to my office, or my home, or called my cell phone late at night, to quietly tell me when I was about to make a mistake; they were the people committed to getting it right—and to doing the right thing—whatever the price. These people," said Comey, "know who they are. Some of them did pay a price for their commitment to right, but they wouldn't have it any other way."
One of those people—a former assistant attorney general named Jack Goldsmith—was absent from the festivities and did not, for many months, hear Comey's grateful praise. In the summer of 2004, Goldsmith, 43, had left his post in George W. Bush's Washington to become a professor at Harvard Law School.
...Goldsmith was actually the opposite of what his detractors imagined. For nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004, he had been the central figure in a secret but intense rebellion of a small coterie of Bush administration lawyers. Their insurrection, described to NEWSWEEK by current and former administration officials who did not wish to be identified discussing confidential deliberations, is one of the most significant and intriguing untold stories of the war on terror.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Hahaha, sure, they're not talking. Get a clue dude - if they weren't talking, there wouldn't be an article.
Two words: Moral authority.
You have more "Moral Authority" than the President?
Boy you really do have a tinfoil hat.
That is enough eh? Pity that sometimes it isn't, although personally I don't think doing what is necessary to defend and protect is immoral, as long as the legislative branch is clued in, as it was. That way, if the legislative branch does not like it, they can impeach and convict, if they disagree with the president's judgment. The courts are out there too, but notice how circumspect they are, about curbing the president when it comes to waging war.
And we both know that science isn't arrived at by popular vote. Moreover, it takes a certain courage to speak out against such a powerful government. Go do the work, and see where your mind takes you.
I am certainly not going to plant a halo on anyone's head, least of all Sadddam, bin Laden, or any government thug anywhere in the world. However, if we engage in torture and terrorising populations ourselves, then we lose moral authority, a very powerful element in the psychology of warfare.
The fact that the Bush gang could not produce an adequate report explaining 9/11 further undermines the notion that we are not the aggressors. Couple that with the multiple agendas for going to war in that part of the world -- oil, the population agenda (dose Muslims just havin' too many rug rats), and Israel -- and we no longer look like a free republic defending ourselves. We look like a neo-colonial power picking strategic targets and using the transparent figleaf "democracy" as our pretext.
You think the better course would have been to leave Saddam in place? Does it bother you about leaving mass and dangerous killers in place? It bothers me.
Even as the those who resigned don't speak?
As perfect an example of cognitive dissonance as I've ever seen.
LOL, not better than the example you set. You are ready to accept the word, intuition and accusations of the writers without a word from the men whose thoughts they claim to represent or the administration, I'm not.
What? Not enough proof that islamic terrorists did it?
Couple that with the multiple agendas for going to war in that part of the world -- oil, the population agenda (dose Muslims just havin' too many rug rats), and Israel
Well, if it were about oil, at least in the way you are suggesting, we would have treated Saddam the way the UN and the Euro-appeasers did to keep it flowing.
The population agenda? We are trying to wipe out muslims here? That doesn't rate a rebuttal.
Israel? jeez, not that straw man again.
-- and we no longer look like a free republic defending ourselves. We look like a neo-colonial power picking strategic targets and using the transparent figleaf "democracy" as our pretext.
The democracy thing is a potential benefit, not the root purpose of our actions. And in war, your targets better damn well be "strategic". We simply don't have the wherewithal to take overt military action against every arab state assisting terrorists. I wish we did. So we have to pick and choose who to go after. Neo-colonial? Sorry, but I don't come from the school of thinking which believes pursuing the defense and self interests of your own country is neo-colonial. Do you honestly think the UN is interested or capable of fighting terrorism? Do you think they give a crap about Americans murdered by terrorists?
You can't separate motivation or "who done it" from the act. You're intimating that the WTC towers collapsed for some reason other than the fact that two heavily fueled airliners were flown into them. If you're advancing some "alternate reason for collapse" theory, then "who" and "why" become essential elements for evaluating your theory. Especially since many, many other reputable scientists and engineers have no problem accepting that the WTC collapsed because of the airliner collisions, and since al Qaeda quickly took credit for the attacks.
It was evident during Powell's UN presetation that the WMD argument was hooey. UNSCOM had already succeeded in disarming Saddam. The wars Saddam fought were local conflicts, and with the April Glaspie transcripts, we see that the Wolfowitz gang suckered Saddam into believing that we had no opinion on what he did to Kuwait. The Iran Iraq war was fought over the oil ports on the gulf, and the Shia in the south were (and are) heavily infiltrated by Iran. Saddam had a civil war on his hands, and an ongoing threat from Iran, thanks to Bush I.
Look, there is a lot of propaganda to maintain popular suppport for a pre-emptive war. In my conversations with Iraqis, I was amazed to hear that they did not view Saddam as a monster. One fellow who is here now, lost both his son and his father (both civilians) in this war. He told me that Saddam had been doing good things for his country back in the 80's. One man's point of view, granted. Not one that he offered easily either. I had to convince him that I wasn't a brownshirt personality first, and then when he decided he wanted to talk, he could barely contain his grief. He believes that the American people don't really know what's going on.
I don't know what kind of guy Saddam was, and maybe he's everything the US government says he is. There are murderers all over the world, like Mugabe and whoever now runs the concentration camp known as North Korea. Frankly, from what I have been able to glean, they are far worse than Saddam (or Milosevic) was. What I do know is that it's time to take the blinders off regarding our own government; the only one we have a right to control.
Perhaps we'll hear from them if they've been misrepresented.
First get the facts of what happened clear, then work backwards to see who had the opportunity, means, and motive to do it.
And what, pray tell, do YOU believe happened on that day?
Another career bureacrat democrat who had to bail out because he realised he was never going to get promoted.
This is utter BS.
The problem is the low level DOJ lawyers are trained by leftist law schools and themselves invested in the left wing agenda.
Sadly these days most ALL federal judges come from the DOJ prosecutor ranks.
Failing for whatever reason, some good maybe, some bad, to bring down a genocidal killer in one place, is not an excuse to fail to bring down one, elsewhere, when the opportunity presents itself.
Unconvincing evidence that the WTC collapsed as described.
--Well, if it were about oil, at least in the way you are suggesting, we would have treated Saddam the way the UN and the Euro-appeasers did to keep it flowing.
Why would we take that approach?
The population agenda? We are trying to wipe out muslims here? That doesn't rate a rebuttal.
The population agenda is to change their reproductive behavior.
Israel? jeez, not that straw man again.
Israel has nothing to do with our Mid East policy?
We simply don't have the wherewithal to take overt military action against every arab state assisting terrorists. I wish we did.
Would there be terrorists if we were not trying to control oil, aiding Israel, and funding the population agenda?
Neo-colonial? Sorry, but I don't come from the school of thinking which believes pursuing the defense and self interests of your own country is neo-colonial.
Having bases all around the world isn't neo-colonial? How long do you think the US can maintain the expensive burden of these bases? Who do you think the reigns are going to be handed to if not a UN like body?
Disingenuous. At least hold as an argument that the additional agenda items add weight to this particular choice.
What's really amazing to me about willful ignorance, especially among the intelligent, is the clear difference between Mugabe and the M.E. Early on, before all the settlers were wiped out, it would have been a cakewalk to take Mugabe out -- a few sorties by air -- as opposed to the predictible morass in the M.E.
There is no grand conspiracy. It's all in black and white if one reads the think tank publications. The Wilsonian belief in power to extend democracy, and all it's "benefits" to humanity is in full effect. The problem is that democracy is itself the problem. It is a system more akin to what the Bolsheviks set in place than the free republic founded in 1789. We are not yet done losing our freedoms. Barring some course correction that reverses the trend both here and internationally, we are headed for Plato's Republic on an international scale, with media contolled elections as the opiate of the masses, and military action against any "terrorists" who want to govern themselves.
1-We are not trying to "control" oil. Are we trying to keep it flowing to all of the free world? Yep.
2-Yes, we are aiding Israel. Justifiably. We are also aiding the Palestinians (stupid). Is our relationship to Israel the cause of terrorism? No. In case you hadn't noticed, over the last 20+ years, a whole lot more than just Americans have been targeted by terrorists.
3-The "population agenda" as you put it, is primarily funded and pushed by the socialists in the UN. And every time the US tries to cut funding for these programs, the left in the US goes bonkers. The "population agenda" is the baby of the left.
This notion that the US is responsible for this barbarism, or in some perverted way deserves it, is patently absurd. The responsibility for the actions of these animals lies with them. And no amount of self flagulation is going to alter that fact.
A distinction without a difference. How are we going to "keep it flowing to all of the free [heh] world" without control?
If you don't think that "terrorism" in the middle east is related to our Israel policy, you are in some sort of denial. It would take megabytes to educate you, and all the screaming Sabras would decend upon us. Maybe another time.
Thank you for confirming that Bush I and Kissinger are lefties:
George H. W. Bush on population control.Henry Kissinger's National Security Study Memorandum NSSM-200
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