Kind of like the Daily Show.

I may be wrong, but isn't military action taken against American citizens considered to be unconstitutional, absent the declaration of martial law? The Bush administration and, apparently, the "Justice" Department (let's use that term very loosely) claim that the President is afforded the power to take MILITARY action to protect the country. So if the spying on American citizens is considered to be "military action", then doesn't that open an entirely new can of worms?

If it is "military action", then it's wrong; and if it's not "military action", then it's wrong. Either way one looks at it, it's wrong...and illegal.

http://drewlbucket.blogspot.com

Worth reading and not yet mentioned here was yesterday's NY Times citation to docs, the most interesting of which for me was the recent letter sent to congress by what I am embarrassed to diminish with the title "legal scholars," these guys are so highly regarded in the legal community. [time out for an insider scholastic haha: Epstein and Tribe! Together on one letter! oh I'm holding my sides.] This stellar group of lawyers and scholars had to have left Gonzales pooping his pants and I can no longer imagine anyone willingly facing any Senator carefully and simply quoting these arguments, line by unbelievable line. I would recommend stopping only to say "and here's what else Richard Epstein of the Hoover Institute and Chicago Law School - among a few other scholars - thinks. You do know Proferssor Epstein, do you not?" SMALL ASIDE: Just about every lawyer in the USA has learned the law from a textbook written by one of these guys.]

This pantheon of big shots from the conservative and liberal scholastic galaxy is spiced up with a few who are now or once served as law school deans and provosts -- including from Condi's and Bushie's alma maters. And, oh yeah - a former director of the FBI. I can't stop laughing.

For those eschewing the article itself, here is the list of signatories:

Curtis Bradley, Duke Law School, former Counselor on International Law in the State Department Legal Adviser's Office[14]

David Cole, Georgetown University Law Center

Walter Dellinger, Duke Law School, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel and Acting Solicitor General

Ronald Dworkin, NYU Law School

Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law School, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

Philip B. Heymann, Harvard Law School, former Deputy Attorney General

Harold Hongju Koh, Dean, Yale Law School, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, former Attorney-Adviser, Office of Legal Counsel, DOJ

Martin Lederman, Georgetown University Law Center, former Attorney-Adviser, Office of Legal Counsel, DOJ

Beth Nolan, former Counsel to the President and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel

William S. Sessions, former Director, FBI, former Chief United States District Judge

Geoffrey Stone, Professor of Law and former Provost, University of Chicago

Kathleen Sullivan, Professor and former Dean, Stanford Law School

Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard Law School

William Van Alstyne, William & Mary Law School, former Justice Department attorney

For those who want to read the letter, linked from a NYT article currently on the top 20 list and headlined as "Legal Rationale by Justice Dept. on Spying Effort" it is found in Findlaw at

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18650

and will apparently also be published in the New York Review of Books on Febr 9.

Those with even a small background in the law will note the clear flow of the argument. This letter/memorandum is in fact a classic archetype: a layout that displays to perfection a cache of formidable legal arguments that lead to one inexorable conclusion: Mr. Gonzales would have flunked his ConLaw exam presenting such tripe.

To be fair the long suffering DOJ lawyers charged with the unenviable task of propping up Mssrs Gonzales and Yoo in an argument doomed to failure must have been squirming as they typed every execrable word. The letters clipped language cannot mask the underlying derision as these folks, for example point repeatedly, [oh how embarrassing] to DOJ’s forgetting to mention [OOPS !!] the fairly deep pothole of explicit statutory text granting a President 15 days from the start of any war [if indeed, as he does, Mr Bush claims we are at war] in which the President may employ warrantless wiretaps while he follows the clear process laid out for securing longer-term arrangements.

Then there is the minor detail causing a problem with arguments of inherent authority that preempts any statutory governance: The president had already acknowledged that he was stuck with governing statute, when his administration asked informally about the chances of getting some changes made to statutory law in order to avoid the twin responsibility of [1] going before a neutral member of the judiciary and [2]showing reasonable cause. Advised that such changes would likely fail to garner sufficient support, the President chose not to pursue the case for changing the statute. Even those without fancy schooling know the fallacy of arguing 'it was my car not yours and by the way I didn't dent it when I stole it.'

Although no lawyer can pass the bar by ignoring a glaring argument rather than attempting to make of it a straw man, perhaps, I suppose that I too, were I stuck at the DOJ - would have tried to get really stupid arguments across by conveniently ignoring one problem [those unmentioned 15 days] and the Black is White argument as a just-in-case. Yeah, right - just before I slit my wrists in shame.

Mr. Yoo by the way also comes in for some particularly unpleasant attention.

Note that all documents relevant to the spy scandal are together on Findlaw at

http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/documents/archive_n.html#nsa

I'm reminded of the adage "much truth is said in jest."

Why did you once think the dictatorship line was a joke? I didn't. Not for a second.

The one thing about Republicans and other people who work against your best interests: they can't resist telling you the truth. It's human nature. There has been little this illegal administration has done that they haven't telegraphed in advance.

The Republicans almost always tell you how they're going to destroy American and then they do it. Nobody stops them, democracy is dead, and life in 21st Century America goes on.

How on Earth anyone could listen to that line at any time and think it was a joke is beyond me -- but I guess it sure explains a lot.