That makes sense. The wording that Gore used seemed to hint at that when he says:
David “Senior Senior Journalist” Broder’s take on Gore:
The first – and to my mind weakest – instance is the claim that Bush took the nation to war on the basis of false intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But there is no clear evidence as yet that Bush willfully concocted or knowingly distorted the intelligence he received about Saddam Hussein’s military programs. Interpretations of that intelligence varied within the government, but the Clinton administration, of which Gore was an important part, came to the same conclusions that Bush did – and so did other governments in the Western alliance.
It is a reach to attempt to make a crime of a policy misjudgment.
But the other cases Gore cited are more troubling. The Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, for which only low-level military personnel have been punished, traces back through higher and untouched levels of command to the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House, all of which failed in their duties to ensure that the occupation forces were adhering to recognized international standards for the treatment of prisoners.
Similarly, the administration’s resistance to setting and enforcing clear prohibitions on torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism raises legitimate questions about its willingness to adhere to the rule of law. From the first days after Sept. 11, Bush has appeared to believe that he is essentially unconstrained. His oddly equivocal recent signing statement on John McCain’s legislation banning such tactics seemed to say he could ignore the plain terms of the law.
If Judge Samuel Alito is right that no one is above the law, then Bush’s supposition deserves to be challenged.
Gore’s final example – on which he has lots of company among legal scholars – is the contention that Bush broke the law in ordering the National Security Agency to monitor domestic phone calls without a warrant from the court Congress had created to supervise all such wiretapping. If – as the Justice Department and the White House insist – the president can flout that law, then it is hard to imagine what power he cannot assert.
Gore is certainly right about one thing. When he challenged the members of Congress to “start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you’re supposed to be,” he was issuing a call of conscience that goes well beyond any partisan criticism.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011801874.html
Ahahahhahahaha! Give me a break, you’re having me on, right? Do you honestly take that drivel seriously? If so, you are such a complete and utter tool.
Good link Desslock!
Just last month President Bush reaffirmed, “this government does not torture…we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad.” He spoke these words after signing Sen. John McCain’s ill-advised bill to extend Geneva Convention guarantees to terrorists. Not a single investigation into the actions of Private England, et. al. has uncovered any complicity from the Bush administration. Lt. Gen. Randall “Mark” Schmidt and Brig. Gen. John Furlow told the Senate Armed Services Committee last July, “No torture occurred” at Guantanamo Bay, either.
I’ve heard Republicans absolutely insist that the fact that Clinton lied about his extramarital sex is they were so mad about, not that he had sex in the first place. In other words, he broke the law by committing perjury.
Clinton/Gore did NOT break the law according to the 1995 Foreign Surveillance Act revisions. What I don’t get is why the fuck aren’t you pissed about Bush breaking it NOW?
Thanks guys, for your usually “thorough” rebuttal. Completely unable to substantively debate the merits of his points, yet again, I guess. It’s readily apparent to any capable lawyer that Bush didn’t breach any laws, and it’s getting tiresome how the Democrats just keep trying to think up new goofy ways to refight the 2004 election.
Does anyone seriously doubt that the Demcrats would be arguing that the Government should be impeached if Bush had NOT had calls of known Al Qaeda members monitored after 9/11? And for once, I’d actually agree with them – as usual, they’re completely ass-backwards, and they’re making yet another serious mistake if they think the American people will support them on this position. It’s just common sense that terrorist conversations should be monitored, even if (or ESPECIALLY if), they are communicating to U.S. residents.
Well, we should all certainly be extremely grateful that Gore was never President. His rant is so inaccurate, so misleading, it actually seems deranged.
I don’t argue with street people any more than I respond to “arguments” from a David Horowitz publication. You could look at everyone else’s replies which do that, however.
Good point, D. I would totally be arguing for impeachment if the President ignored calls by known Al Qaeda operatives after 9/11. And if he had tried to get a warrant to monitor those calls, and some judge had refused the warrant, I’d be calling for the impeachment of the judge.
Because, IN WHAT KIND OF TWISTED ALTERNATE UNIVERSE DO YOU EXIST IN WHERE YOU THINK THEY COULD BE REFUSED A WARRANT FOR A CALL BY OR TO A KNOWN AL QAEDA OPERATIVE?
Whatever. I guess you’re comfortable just being a political hack and have given up any pretense of actually debating issues based upon their merits, that’s disappointing.
You just look silly when you ignore facts and any arguments you just “don’t like”. Keep burying your head in the sand and pretending that anything contrary to the positions you’ve predetermined you need to take are equivalent to the views of “street people”. That’s as intellectually bankrupt a position as most of the pundits you enjoy espouse.
You know, I was kind of hoping you hadn’t read that article and would come back and say something like “Yeah, OK, that was excessive.” But no such luck, I guess.
Maybe I will address a few of Ben Johnson’s highly intellectual points.
This first point, about FISA.
I think it’s completely, totally clear that the president breached laws in this case. He has essentially stipulated that. The argument put forward by the weirdly unbalanced person you linked to is that FISA is essentially meaningless, that Congress does not have the Constitutional authority to make an enforceable statute limiting Presidential intelligence-gathering. That’s an argument made in today’s WSJ online, too. That argument is not as clear a winner as Mr Johnson claims, or FISA would never have been passed in the first place.
The second point about torture.
Johnson presents multiple quotes from administration officials that agree that there was never any torture. He uses this surprising agreement to conclude that there was definitely no torture. The fact that no inquiry ever blamed anyone with any real rank for any abuse is not, to him, evidence that there is an institutional bias in military courts to protect the military from embarrassment, but evidence that there was no institutionalized torture program, just lots of different people saying “Hey, you know what would be cool? Naked pyramids. Yeah.”
Skip down to where he becomes irredemably reprehensible.
[quote = Ben Johnson]
[SIZE=3]Even openly torturing terrorists would not violate the Geneva Conventions – which do not apply to terrorists – otherwise Senator McCain’s [/SIZE][SIZE=3]recent torture bill[/SIZE][SIZE=3] would have been unnecessary.[/quote][/SIZE]
This is about 15 different kinds of unacceptable in public discourse.
The Geneva torture convention applies to everyone. Always.
Ben is confused, he is thinking of the POW convention, which does not apply to terrorists.
In this case Gore is completely, totally correct. The torture convention outlaws torture by everyone against everyone, and the Senate ratified it and enacted a statute that makes it illegal under US law to violate it.
Benny says that reaffirming the illegality of torturing terrorists is ill-advised.
Because he is an idiot.
Next.
He then cites two government reports found no evidence of pressure from above in an industry with no whistleblower protection. He feels this is definitive.
He gets upset when Gore dares to suggest that Iraq is not the central front in the war on terror. As though there is some objective standard here, like there might be if it were a war on something that’s not an emotion, and it were possible to actually define a “central front” in any way that isn’t rhetorical.
Then lots more about the Democrats being ashamed.
Bottom line is this guy has neither style nor substance, and you lose at the internet.
Does anyone seriously doubt that the Demcrats would be arguing that the Government should be impeached if Bush had NOT had calls of known Al Qaeda members monitored after 9/11?
Incompetence is not an impeachable offense. Breaking the law is. This is why Republicans pushed so hard to get Clinton to testify under oath. Once they got him to say the words they dug and dug and dug and dug until they could prove he lied.
So to answer your question, while I’m sure there probably would have been a general popular wish for impeachment, no one in Washington would have (or should have) taken it seriously.
Bush’s recent actions I take very seriously. He broke the law. I want some Democrats to grow a pair and initiate impeachment proceedings, for consistency’s sake if nothing else.
There a middle ground here that you are completly ignoring – getting a warrant, and then monitoring the calls.
Ahahahhahahaha! Give me a break, you’re having me on, right? Do you honestly take that drivel seriously? If so, you are such a complete and utter tool.
Hey Ben. How does that particular article compare in any way to somebody who agrees with the position that its perfectly acceptable to torture people that you label as terrorists because they have been labelled as terrorists?
Hey Graeme, note what sort of organization Jasper reads and links from.
I’m sorry, are you seriously suggesting that Desslock’s article is somehow less disgusting because Jasper linked to an article from a completely different source on a completely different topic several months ago?
What? I’m suggesting that Jasper’s anti-bias stance is a relatively new development.
How’s the view up there?
Dude, come on. Horowitz makes Ann Coulter look rational.
I guess if it makes you feel better. I do read National Review articles, for example; they’re pretty much always wrong, but at least I don’t get the impression the author thinks the black panthers are still chasing after him. Horowitz is like the LaRouche of the right or something.