"along with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman -- I've been named as the receipient of the first annual "Izzy Award for special achievement in independent media" by The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College."

The honor is well deserved!

GG: If the claims from Klein and Brooks' sources are true about the intentions of the White House, then why can't they just attach their names to those claims and why aren't they made to do so by the journalists before having their statements amplified to the public?

What I don’t understand at this point is how ANY assertion by an anonymous source [beyond the understandable need to actually protect the source from reprisal] can be taken as ANYthing BUT misinformation. IMO, the use of “anonymous source” is a cue to NOT believe whatever the assertion is, until there is on the record information.

"High government officials" and the journalists who brown nose them are nothing but Cowards.

For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

From the SF Gate article linked above:

Mason, the Justice Department lawyer, said Yoo had no authority over Padilla and merely "gave very general advice about very general problems" for Bush to decide. Any court scrutiny of Yoo's actions "requires inquiry into the highest levels of the United States government," she said.

What is she getting at with statement?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/06/BAFD16AQ7Q.DTL&tsp=1

Thanks for the response and I apologize for being so slow to answer—more than usual muddle headedness due to illness. I can’t seem to think clearly…so, FWIW:

Emptywheel’s post at Firedoglake is very informative, with links to many pertinent articles. The commenter Mary, to whom you refer, clearly understands a lot about the issues involved, and reading her comments is quite helpful. http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/03/07/they-picked-a-bad-week-to-stop-sniffing-glue/#comment-140251

There do seem to be circle-games being played by the Government and I agree that this will continue until the “central issue” can “be resolved”

[Mary said] So either the torturers are being truthy, and they were not relying on actual protection from what Yoo is claiming were just broad statements of legal principles and not actual authorizations to any one person to take any specific actions against any other person, or Yoo is being truthy in claiming that his opinions weren’t the final torture authorization step in actual and specific torture that took place.

Hope Metcalf, one of Pedilla’s lawyers seems to hit this “central issue” on the head when she says:

“Defendant Yoo,” she said, “must not take refuge in the legal no man’s land that he helped to create.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/us/07yoo.html

The judge did not seem to find the Government’s arguments convincing. I wonder what he thought of Ms. Metcalf’s?

One other thing I found interesting: The photo at the NYT link has the following caption:

“John C. Yoo, flanked by David S. Addington and Chris Schroeder, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in June 2008.”

Important point: ADDINGTON!

Following is a new entry in the Torturous Timeline:

April 2003-Bybee resigns as head of OLC and begins tenure as a judge in the 9th Circuit. The WH pushes for John Yoo to be promoted to the position at OLC, but Yoo is “blocked by Attorney General John Ashcroft and his senior aides, who reportedly "had grown weary of what they saw as Yoo's end runs to the White House,"” [115] Jack Goldsmith, who had been working in the Legal Counsel’s Office of the DoD under Haynes, becomes the new head of OLC. Ashcroft and the others who interview Goldsmith “make quite clear that they did not feel sufficiently in the loop about what [Yoo] was doing, especially vis-à-vis the White House.” For more about Goldsmith’s tenure at OLC, see [116] See also December 2003. Goldsmith resigns in summer 2004.

Sources:

[114] OPR letter to Durbin, Whitehouse, H. Marshall Jarrett, 2/19/08 http://gulcfac.typepad.com/georgetown_university_law/files/jarrett.letter.pdf

[115] Beyond the Pale, John Dean, 3/6/09 http://writ.news.findlaw.com/scripts/printer_friendly.pl?page=/dean/20090306.html

Reading Goldsmith’s account of interactions with Addington in particular, one can readily see how influential he is…almost like “the mouth of Cheney”. Clearly, intimidation and threat are his MO. Yoo seems to have been a “follower” who played into his hands nicely. Goldsmith, not quite so much.

Reading about these Yoo "end runs to the WH" made me think of the Stovepiping of "intelligence" Seymour Hersh wrotes about in The Stovepipe, New Yorker, October 2003

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/27/031027fa_fact

[116] Bill Moyers interviews Jack Goldsmith, Frontline, PBS, 10/16/07 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cheney/interviews/goldsmith.html

Also, please ignore the "s" at the end of "wrote". Thanks.