Addington's Methods

[babylonsister]

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/06/addingtons-meth.html

Addington's Methods

by emptywheel

Before I get too deep in the detail of today's installment of WaPo's series on Cheney, I'd like to remind you of a point I made in my Take Back America speech. While David Addington's theories on executive power are tremendously dangerous, Addington does believe in the rule of law. He admitted in his Libby trial testimony, for example, that the "Treated as Top Secret/SCI" stamp that OVP had used with all the evidence turned over to investigators was not covered by the Presidents EO on classification. And he described scolding Dan Bartlett after the White House exonerated Libby and Rove publicly in Fall 2003. Whereas Alberto Gonzales appears to blithely transgress all normal legal limits on behavior (as when he coached Monica Goodling's testimony), Addington respects those limits, so long as they don't clash with the power of the presidency.

Which is why this passage from the WaPo article is so telling:

Flanigan said that Addington's personal views leaned more toward Olson than against him, but that he beat back the proposal to grant detainees access to lawyers, "because that was the position of his client, the vice president."

The issue was whether enemy combatants could have a lawyer represent them. And on that issue, Addington appears to have suppressed his own judgment (which sounds like a pragmatic judgment on how best to retain presidential powers) in favor of Cheney's intractable stance.

The rest of the article describes how Addington repeatedly found ways to implement Cheney's theories. In the first installment, we saw how Addington provided people like James Yoo and Alberto Gonzales finished interpretive memos that they could sign with their own name. Apparently, that practice extends to the President himself.

The vice president's counsel proposed that President Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive. Detainees would be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of" the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued his public decision two weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.

The method, then, is that Addington writes all the legal arguments. The content, though, is just as instructive: ambiguity. David Addington has been preserving presidential power by repeatedly writing ambiguous memos so as to reserve the largest possible area of activity outside the rule of law. Most instructive is the description of the way to retain for the CIA the ability to torture detainees. Addington and Cheney made sure that the McCain anti-Torture bill carved out space for the CIA, reasserted US law, rather than international law, as primary, and in the end issued a signing statement reasserting the Unitary Executive.

more...

[Bonhomme Richard]

1. So he is only being a "Good German". n/t

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

2. Addington DOES NOT BELIEVE IN but rather finds creative ways to break the rule of law.

After I read the assertion, ",...Addington believes in the rule of law,...", in the second sentence, I was barely able to force myself to read the rest.

The only proposition I found believable was that Addington utilizes ambiguity when writing legal positions for the SOLE PURPOSE of giving the Bush/Cheney cabal whatever the fuck they want. However, he utilizes ambiguity to skirt/break/ignore the law,...NOT because he believes in it.

Just remember, Addington is part of the power pact/cabal pissed that Nixon couldn't get away with a "unitary executive" (eg DICTATORSHIP) and that same cabal seeks to reinstate such absurd concentration of power in direct breach of the balance of powers the Constitution instituted TO PREVENT A DICTATORSHIP.

Addington does not fucking believe in the rule of law. That's a big fat lie!!!

[librechik]

3. "his client the vice president?" His "client" trumps the constitution?