'A full accounting is the only way to ensure these abuses never happen again. '

[BurtWorm]

Unsigned NY Times Editorial:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/opinion/17fri1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Editorial
Illegal, and Pointless

...

For four years, until The Times revealed the warrantless wiretapping, Mr. Bush reauthorized the eavesdropping every 45 days based on memos from the intelligence community and Justice Department. The report said that when the “scary memos,” as they came to be called, were not sufficiently scary, lawyers under the direction of Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel and later attorney general, revised them or ordered up additional “threat information.” Each ended with a White House-written paragraph asserting that communications were intercepted from terrorists who “possessed the capability and intention” to attack this country.

After Mr. Yoo and his boss, Jay Bybee, left the Justice Department, their replacements concluded that the wiretapping program was illegal. The White House did eventually change parts of the program and then demanded that Congress legalize it, but only after the White House tried to force the Justice Department to ignore its own conclusions and after Robert Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., threatened to resign.

Mr. Cheney has tried to head off a reckoning by claiming that the warrantless wiretapping saved thousands of lives. The report said the C.I.A. could point to little direct benefit. The F.B.I. said most of the leads it produced were false. Others never led to an arrest.

This is not an isolated case. Once the Bush team got into the habit of breaking the law, it became their operating procedure that any means are justified: ordering the nation’s intelligence agents to torture prisoners; sending innocents to be tortured in foreign countries; creating secret prisons where detainees were held illegally without charge.

Americans still don’t have the full story. Even now, most of what the inspectors general found remains classified, including other wiretapping that Mr. Bush authorized. Mr. Yoo’s original memo is also classified.

President Obama has refused to open a full investigation of the many laws that were evaded, twisted or broken — pointlessly and destructively — under Mr. Bush. Mr. Obama should change his mind. A full accounting is the only way to ensure these abuses never happen again.

[hootinholler]

1. SO long as a full accounting includes jail time for the perpetrators, I'm ok with it

Otherwise it will be bidniss as usual.

-Hoot

[BurtWorm]

2. Yep.

:patriot:

[Solly Mack]

7. Yeppers

[crickets]

9. Yes. -nt

[90-percent]

3. my thoughts

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=385&topic_id=338312&mesg_id=338441

I just hope I die before America goes FASCIST!

-90% Jimmy

[NewJeffCT]

4. We need multiple special prosecutors

for all these crimes.

[bvar22]

5. "Looking Forward" = Looking the Other Way.

K&R

[truedelphi]

6. Boy is it ever! n/t

[gratuitous]

8. Welcome to the party at last, New York Times

I like their self-serving little clause "until The Times revealed the warrantless wiretapping." The Times certainly took its sweet time in making that revelation. They had the information and the goods on the Bush administration's lawbreaking late in 2003 or early in 2004, but decided to sit on the story until after the 2004 election because in their delicate sensibility, they didn't want to influence the course of the 2004 election.

While I'm glad to see The Times editorializing on this vital security issue, and reaching the proper conclusion at last, the facts of the matter are that when it would have been far more effective to air this issue, The Times choked.