As has often been noted, the White Paper the Bush Administration released on January 19, 2006 largely repeats the analysis Jack Goldsmith did in his May 6, 2004 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion on the warrantless wiretap program. So I decided to compare the two documents.

Not only did such a comparison help me see things in both documents I hadn’t seen before. But there are a number of things that appear in the White Paper but not the unredacted parts of the opinion. Some of this, such as Administration statements after the warrantless wiretap program was exposed in 2005, simply serve as the publicly acceptable discussion of the program.

A standard tactic of the last two Administrations has been to operate in secrecy and then accuse those who have been denied access and information of not having standing to sue over, in this case, wiretapping, because they don’t have evidence that they’ve been targeted. It’s a cynical technique, but a successful one, until now.

They tortured the detainees to get claims of plots against the US. And then–even though the detainees insisted they had stopped planning against the US–they used intelligence about canceled or absurd plots to write scary memos so they could continue to use their illegal wiretap program.

As MadDog and I were discussing previously, the May 6, 2004 Jack Goldsmith opinion on the warrantless wiretap program references an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that appears not to have been publicly released or, even in the course of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), disclosed.

As Josh Gerstein and Jack Goldsmith note, The Department of Justice (DOJ) just released two of the opinions underlying the warrantless wiretap programs. They both focus on the May 6, 2004 opinion Goldsmith wrote in the wake of the Ashcroft hospital confrontation.

What’s so horrible in Walker’s rulings that the government might entertain “letting the terrorists win” in exchange for vacating the rulings? It seems there are three possible parts of Walker’s July 2008 ruling the government might want vacated.

Once again, torture and domestic surveillance are acceptable abuses of executive authority for Republicans. But a blowjob or a loving marriage requires impeachment.

There are now four versions of the cooperation between Wikileaks and its journalistic “partners:” Vanity Fair, NYT, Guardian, and Spiegel. A comparison of them is more instructive than reading any in isolation.

The U.S. Department of Justice just announced that Assistant Attorney General David Kris just resigned, effective March 4. No reason for his departure was given, though Kris did mention his two year tenure; that might explain the March departure, two years after he was confirmed.

AT&T and Verizon are now blocking Wikileaks sites internally, too. Maybe we can just find out who is spying for the government based on which companies implement these kinds of blocks on Wikileaks?