I hadn't heard of David B. Rivkin before. Something kept nagging at me yesterday while I was watching him do his obfuscation dance at the Leahy hearing. Then “mistakes were made” hit me in between the eyes. Evidently, “mistakes were made” but “bad things” just “happened” [not “were perpetrated”]. His argument was just like one Cheney made during Iran-Contra.

“[…] As the President himself has said, mistakes were made. […]But there are some mitigating factors; factors which, while they don't justify Administration mistakes, go a long way to helping explain and make them understandable. […] In my opinion, there's no justification for further restrictions on the power and flexibility of future Presidents. […]”

And, like Rivkin wanted to compare the W. Administration favorably with past ones [this is what Whitehouse was responding to when he made the “under the bus” challenge], so Cheney tried to deflect from Reagan:

[Cheney-7/25/87]: “Frankly, Mr. Secretary, one of the things that concerns me about these proceedings is that we develop sort of a hot house atmosphere. We've got . . . the best reporters in the business and some of the most distinguished members of Congress focused on these series of events. But it's sort of a mutually reinforcing kind of an operation. There's a strong incentive on the part of both groups to dramatize these events. They are important events, I don't mean to downplay them at all, but sometimes our intense focus upon the problem we're analyzing, I think obscures some relevent comparisons, if you will, to other periods of time or other events in other Administrations.

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40713F83C590C768EDDAE0894DF484D81

See Sean Wilentz in “Mr Cheney’s Minority Report”:

“ The minority report stressed the charge that the inquiry was a sham, calling the majority report’s allegations of serious White House abuses of power “hysterical.” […] The Reagan administration, according to the report, had erred by failing to offer a stronger, principled defense of what Mr. Cheney and others considered its full constitutional powers. Not only did the report defend lawbreaking by White House officials; it condemned Congress for having passed the laws in the first place.[…]”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/opinion/09wilentz.html?pagewanted=print

Part of Rivkin’s bio:

Deputy Director, Office of Policy Development, Department of Justice, 1988-1990. Legal Advisor to the White House Counsel, 1989-1990, Counselor to the then Vice President Bush, 1988-1989.

http://www.martindale.com/David-B-Rivkin/362907-lawyer.htm

When I looked Rivkin up in Wikipedia, [it doesn’t have a page on him] I learned the following:

1a-Rivkin made a statement in support of I Lewis Libby and presidential powers:

[Wikipedia]: Rivkin, a partner in Baker Hostetler, LLP and former member of the White House Counsel’s Office, began his statement by pointing out that the President's powers of clemency and pardon are, for all intents and purposes, absolute. He claimed that exercise of presidential clemency power, for large offenses as well as for small, was crucial to the preservation of the republic envisioned in the Constitution since in certain cases what is right should be decided by the president, not the law: […]”

1b-And, as he did yesterday, complaining about the prosecutorial “narrative” [Cheney’s “dramatization”]:

[Wikipedia] Rivkin reserved especially strong criticism for "how unfair and politicized this whole exercise has been"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Libby_clemency_controversy

2-He is a notable current contributor to National Review.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Review#Notable_current_contributors

3-In Fall 2003, he wrote an article called “Leashing the Dogs of War”

[…] The core of this divergence can be traced to efforts--largely initiated during the Vietnam War era--both to leash the dogs of war and make the laws of combat more humane by mimicking the rules governing domestic police activities, in which deadly force is always the last resort and must not be applied in an "excessive" manner. In the process, "humanitarian" concerns were to be elevated above considerations of military necessity and national interest. […]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_73/ai_109220701

4-With regard to the Israel/Lebanon war, he wrote in the Washington Post:

"Unfortunately, heavy civilian casualties are the inherent and inevitable result of the type of asymmetric warfare deliberately waged by Hezbollah [...] Responsibility for any additional civilian casualties must be attributed to those groups, not to Israel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_civilian_areas_in_the_2006_Lebanon_War

5 In May 2005 Rivkin co-authored “Amnesty Unbelievable” in which they basically accused Amnesty International of being “hysterical”:

Amnesty International’s 2005 “Report” [quotation marks in original] [...] accuses the United States of “war crimes,” and openly compares the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with the Gulag Archipelago.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/rivkin_casey200505270804.asp

Another topic of yesterday’s hearing which seemed to be an echo from 1987:

Senator James A. McClure, Republican of Idaho, was the only legislator today who was critical of the hearings themselves. ''I'm not sure,'' the Senator said, ''that the public is best informed by telling everything that we know, nor that U.S. policy is best served by an absolute revelation of the innermost negotiations of our Government."

Senator Paul S. Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, challenged Senator McClure's position. ''Some see these hearings as paying a price, as though it's a negative,'' Mr. Sarbanes said. ''I would argue just to the contrary. I think that an open and free society is the source of our strength, that a democracy is based on an informed and consenting public.''

Senator Inouye [D-HI], “'Vigilance abroad does not require us to abandon our ideals or the rule of law at home. On the contrary, without our principles and without our ideals, we have little that is special or worthy to defend. […] a great nation betrayed the principles which have made it great, and thereby became hostage to hostage-takers.''

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40716FF3A540C778CDDA10894DF484D81