Jack Balkin asks a few good questions of Sen. John McCain. Ones that I'd like to know the answers to as well. Because last year, McCain said this:: "All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today," Mr. Mr. McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, said in a telephone interview. Of presidential candidates like Mr. Giuliani, who say that they are unsure whether waterboarding is torture, Mr. McCain said: "They should know what it is. It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture."...

Over at my home blog, my co-blogger MEC informs me that with the issuance of Executive Order 13457, “Protecting American Taxpayers From Government Spending on Wasteful Earmarks”, Bush has broken the law yet again and given himself a line-item veto:In effect, the Executive Order declares the Bush has the power to reject against any part of the budget passed by Congress that Bush doesn’t like:

John Dean succinctly dissects why skepticism should greet assertion of state secrets: As one commentator nicely states it, the state secrets privilege was "born with a lie on its lips." When the government says "national security," the federal courts seem to cower. Yet anyone who has worked in this area knows that seldom is nation security truly at stake when the government claims it to be.

There is a movement afoot to revise the government's ability to assert state secrets privilege as a means to shut down avenues of legal redress. Rep. Nadler held hearings on this issue last week, and it is one that has been simmering for quite some time -- mainly due to that bad taste that the Bush Administration's penchant for obeisance, ass-covering and utter silence has left in everyone's mouths. When the

There's nothing I enjoy more right now than breaking an egg into a bowl, gradually adding flour until I get a pliable mound, and then flattening the mound out with a rolling pin and flour until it's thin enough for me to cut into ribbons. A similar sense of accomplishment is achieved by working to keep Bush and Cheney from getting immunized from prosecution for their illegal wiretapping.

A Monday tra la through the news spin cycle: I'm with Aravosis -- some public comment on the Bush Administration's plan to yank counterterrorism funding from police, fire and rescue departments would be a good thing. Howie raises some excellent points on war profiteering and the Bush Administration that are worth asking over and over until there are solid, public answers to them....

While CNN this morning has a headline implying that Bush is offering tongue to the Saudi King to get oil prices down, there is one other historical piece of logic that has too often shaped U.S. foreign policy and is clearly winning what little mind George Bush has.It's always Munich 1938 for Bush and his kind and they are always Churchill and the rest of us are always Chamberlain.

I expected this Balkinization post to be an indictment of Jane Harman, but it's more about the intelligence oversight process itself. Marty Lederman starts out by reviewing Jane Harman's letter to the CIA in which she inquires about the CIA's plan to destroy the interrogation tapes, but does not go far enough:

Most term papers are written, read, graded, returned, and forgotten. Then there are the execptions, like the one written by the chief judge of the military tribunals at Guantánamo, calling such a system "ill-advised" and the criticism of the system "reasonable." Ooops. How'd he get this job, anyway?

There are a lot of woulda, coulda, shouldas in play with the current FISA bill debate that is set to start any minute in the Senate. One of the biggest is why the substantial power of Rule 14 was not put into play by Democratic leadership to wholly undercut any capitulation to a Cheney-esque misinterpretation and subversion of the rule of law. Yet, here we are. KagroX details all