McCarthy says "No"
Andrew McCarthy explains why he declined to advise the Obama administration's Justice Department:
"I had to say no. As I explain to Attorney General Holder in a letter, which was posted this morning on the website of the National Review Institute, I declined for two reasons.
First, President Obama and Attorney General Holder have created an untenable situation for lawyers asked to advise the government on policy matters.
Former Justice Department attorneys John Yoo (now a law professor at Berkeley) and Jay Bybee (now a federal appeals-court judge in California), as well as other government attorneys, were asked during the emergency conditions that followed the 9/11 attacks to advise Bush administration policymakers on U.S. interrogation law. They did that in good faith and, despite the fact that it’s now de rigueur to castigate them, quite reasonably (as I’ve argued in an online Federalist Society debate, see here). For their service to our country, they are now being tormented by the Obama administration with both a criminal investigation and an ethics inquiry by Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility. (There have even been calls on the left for Judge Bybee’s impeachment, which — even if he had done something wrong years earlier as a Justice Department lawyer — would be absurd: The Constitution reserves judicial impeachment for misconduct committed during the judge’s tenure on the bench, and Bybee is an excellent judge.)"
Good stuff here.
"I had to say no. As I explain to Attorney General Holder in a letter, which was posted this morning on the website of the National Review Institute, I declined for two reasons.
First, President Obama and Attorney General Holder have created an untenable situation for lawyers asked to advise the government on policy matters.
Former Justice Department attorneys John Yoo (now a law professor at Berkeley) and Jay Bybee (now a federal appeals-court judge in California), as well as other government attorneys, were asked during the emergency conditions that followed the 9/11 attacks to advise Bush administration policymakers on U.S. interrogation law. They did that in good faith and, despite the fact that it’s now de rigueur to castigate them, quite reasonably (as I’ve argued in an online Federalist Society debate, see here). For their service to our country, they are now being tormented by the Obama administration with both a criminal investigation and an ethics inquiry by Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility. (There have even been calls on the left for Judge Bybee’s impeachment, which — even if he had done something wrong years earlier as a Justice Department lawyer — would be absurd: The Constitution reserves judicial impeachment for misconduct committed during the judge’s tenure on the bench, and Bybee is an excellent judge.)"
Good stuff here.
I feel like I am living in the Frank Sinatra song “The world we knew” where the refrain is “over and over I keep going over the world we knew”-- this course the President has placed us on, this whole fools errand of playing legal semantics with these people is being watched closely by our enemies, they consider it weakness and it will directly result in the deaths of Americans.
I say this: if we have an incident and it is linked to any of these people who are being released, then the President has violated his oath. As McCarthy has written, the President has already released Binyam Mohammed who has worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as well as Jose Padilla on the 9-11 plot.
Just exactly what the hell is going on in someone’s mind that allows them to believe that any of these people should be released? To characterize what we have done so far to keep us safe (the Bush administration) as “above the law” and to continue with the help of the media to set up a stage and call it the moral high ground on the issue of America's image and the abuse of our laws is absurd. This is not a game and we are talking about lives here. The President and his administration are playing games though, a child's game, a political game. It has no goal or purpose except to make ones self taller by standing on the crushed bones of others.
There is a common thread to all of this type of “change” we are seeing with President Obama. He seriously thinks he knows more, knows better and is fixing what is broken.
C.S. Lewis told us: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
It is the seemingly complete lack of conscience of the President that scares me most.
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Great Lewis quote. Very true.
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