I bring to your attention a great series of articles about the behind-the-scenes life of Dick Cheney.  Very interesting series that the Washington Post is running and worth reading.  The expansion of executive power, the increased role for a vice president all comes at a time when Cheney himself claims he's not truly a member of the executive branch.

Washington Post Series Here

I bet this is some fascinating reading.  I have this gross desire to print off these records and read them for the sheer weirdness of it all.  Botched assassination attempts, spying for Nixon.  It's all in there.

Article on CIA classified docs opened:

Hundreds of pages of decades-old documents declassified and released by the CIA yesterday revealed a 1970s-era agency in the throes of unaccustomed self-examination, caught between its traditional secrecy and demands that it come clean on a history of unsavory activities.

Prompted by the then-unraveling Watergate affair, and by fears that CIA involvement in that scandal would be exposed along with other illegal operations, the agency combed its files for what it called "delicate" information with "flap potential." The result was a collection of documents the CIA called the "family jewels."Partly disclosed yesterday, the documents chronicle activities including assassination plans, illegal wiretaps and hunts for spies at political conventions. One document spoke of a plan to poison an African leader. Another revealed that the CIA had offered a Mafia boss $150,000 to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro.

I see that members of the GOP are defecting from the Iraq policy and speaking out against the president.

Washington Times Article Here

Key Republican senators, signaling increasing GOP skepticism about President Bush's strategy in Iraq, have called for a reduction in U.S. forces and launched preemptive efforts to counter a much-awaited administration progress report due in September.

In an unannounced speech on the Senate floor Monday night, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said the U.S. military escalation begun in the spring has "very limited" prospects for success. He called on Bush to begin reducing U.S. forces. "We don't owe the president our unquestioning agreement," Lugar said.The harsh judgment from one of the Senate's most respected foreign-policy voices was a blow to White House efforts to boost flagging support for its war policy, and opened the door to defections by other Republicans who have supported the administration despite increasing private doubts.

Pretty late in the game to apply critical thinking but perhaps the atmosphere is finally one where they're not afraid to speak out.  Or that they're simply afraid of losing their jobs in the next election.  What an interesting world it would be if all congressmen and senators started saying what they believed.

Far more signing statements attached to bills that any other president in American history, King Bush continually proves himself willing and able to ignore the will of the people and the idea of checks and balances.  One must ask why is a signing statement disagreeing with a ban on torture necessary?  Who does it serve?  National intelligence?  Now we rely on torture.  Apparently, evangelical Christians must think torture is A-ok - their poster-child does.  The statements are blatantly illegal.  You cannot have Congress sign into law...anything...and have the president simply ignore it with a wave of a pen.  Executive kingmanship.

Washington Post Article Here and Excerpt Below:

President Bush has asserted that he is not necessarily bound by the bills he signs into law, and yesterday a congressional study found multiple examples in which the administration has not complied with the requirements of the new statutes.

Bush has been criticized for his use of "signing statements," in which he invokes presidential authority to challenge provisions of legislation passed by Congress. The president has challenged a federal ban on torture, a request for data on the administration of the USA Patriot Act and numerous other assertions of congressional power. As recently as December, Bush asserted the authority to open U.S. mail without judicial warrants in a signing statement attached to a postal reform bill.

For the first time, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office -- Congress's investigative arm -- tried to ascertain whether the administration has made good on such declarations of presidential power. In appropriations acts for fiscal 2006, GAO investigators found 160 separate provisions that Bush had objected to in signing statements. They then chose 19 to follow.

Of those 19 provisions, six -- nearly a third -- were not carried out according to law. Ten were executed by the executive branch. On three others, conditions did not require an executive branch response.

The instances of noncompliance were not as dramatic as some of the signing statements that have caused the most stir, such as Bush's suggestion that he was not bound by a ban on torture in U.S. military detention facilities. But congressional aides said they were significant.

For example, Congress directed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to relocate its checkpoints around Tucson every seven days to improve efforts to combat illegal immigration. But the agency took the law as an "advisory provision" that was "not always consistent with CBP's mission requirements." Instead, the agency periodically shut down its checkpoints for short periods of time, believing that would comply with congressional demands.

Frustrated by the Pentagon's broad budget submissions for the "global war on terrorism," Congress demanded in its 2006 military spending law that the Defense Department break down its 2007 budget request to show the detailed costs of global military operations, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The department ignored the order. While the Pentagon did break out the costs of operations in the Balkans and at Guantanamo Bay, it did not detail expenditures in other operations.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency also ignored Congress's demand that it submit an expenditure plan for housing assistance and alternatives to the approaches that failed after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA told the GAO that it does not normally produce such plans.

In all those instances, presidential signing statements had asserted that congressional demands were encroaching on Bush's prerogatives to control executive branch employees as he sees fit and to receive effective services from his employees. White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Congress should not be surprised that the administration carried out the recommendations of the signing statements, although he cautioned that he could not know whether the agencies took action because of the statements.

"The signing statements assert the president's understanding of how the law should be executed, pursuant to his understanding of the Constitution, and that's the way we deal with them," Fratto said.

But Democratic lawmakers jumped on what they see as the actions of an imperial presidency with little respect for the law or the legislative branch.

"The administration is thumbing its nose at the law," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who requested the GAO study and legal opinion along with Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.).

"This GAO opinion underscores the fact that the Bush White House is constantly grabbing for more power, seeking to drive the people's branch of government to the sidelines," Byrd said in a joint statement with Conyers.

This should warm everyone's heart.  More evidence that partisan politics is the name of the game in the Bush administration, not the rule of law.  Proving that he is more interested in pandering to Christian mythologists and special interest social issues, personnel are hired based on party affiliation and a willingness to "tow the line."  Screw experience and qualifications.  It would seem it's more important to corrupt what law the USA has.  Disgusting.

From the Washington Post:

The Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws that preclude such considerations, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law, Justice Department, immigration court and other records show.

Two newly appointed immigration judges were failed candidates for the U.S. Tax Court nominated by President Bush; one fudged his taxes and the other was deemed unqualified to be a tax judge by the nation's largest association of lawyers. Both were Republican loyalists.

Justice officials also gave immigration judgeships to a New Jersey election law specialist who represented GOP candidates, a former treasurer of the Louisiana Republican Party, a White House domestic policy adviser and a conservative crusader against pornography.

These appointments, all made by the attorney general, have begun to reshape a system of courts in which judges, ruling alone, exercise broad powers -- deporting each year nearly a quarter-million immigrants, who have limited rights to appeal and no right to an attorney. The judges do not serve fixed terms.

Department officials say they changed their hiring practices in April but defend their selections. Still, the injection of political considerations into the selection of immigration judges has attracted congressional attention in the wake of controversy over the Bush administration's dismissal last year of nine U.S. attorneys.

If someone is a criminal, a terrorist, why not tell them why you are arresting them?  Provide the list of charges?  After all, they're going to prison.  Instead we have indefinite imprisonment, no habeas corpus and little regard for what should be the law.  Interesting and disturbing times...

Washington Post Story Here:

In bringing three detainees to Guantanamo since March, the Defense Department has signaled a willingness to keep approximately 385 detainees there in indefinite custody and to increase the population held there, despite bipartisan sentiment in favor of closing the facility. In September, President Bush ordered 14 high-value detainees to be moved from CIA secret prisons to Guantanamo, the first new detainees brought there since September 2004.

Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said Arale was transferred to Guantanamo earlier this week and that he was captured recently in the Horn of Africa region. Gordon declined to offer more details. Arale was in U.S. custody overseas for an unspecified period of time before his transfer.

A group of human rights organizations plans to release a report today naming as many as 39 people believed to have been taken into secret CIA custody and who have since disappeared. Arale is not among those listed. The report decries the Bush administration's secret imprisonment of those people and calls on the United States to end the program, acknowledge who is in secret custody and provide the International Committee of the Red Cross access to them.

Today, three of the groups -- Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University -- plan to file in federal court a lawsuit seeking documents and information about the people who have apparently disappeared. The suit is to be filed against several U.S. government agencies, including the Defense Department, the CIA and the Justice Department.

"The duty of governments to protect people from acts of terrorism is not in question," said Claudio Cordone, a senior director at Amnesty International. "But seizing men, women and even children, and placing people in secret locations deprived of the most basic safeguards for any detainees most definitely is."

Especially with Cheney and Bush.  For two politicians that often claim a moral and religious highground, they sure know how to stompt the Constitution into the ground, not to mention bully those trying to stop them.

From the Washington Post:

Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.

Comey's disclosures, made in response to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas.

Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.

The disclosures also provide further details about the role played by then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales. He visited Ashcroft in his hospital room and wrote an internal memorandum on the surveillance program shortly afterward, according to Comey's responses. Gonzales is now the attorney general. He faces possible congressional votes of no-confidence because of his handling of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

"How are you, General?" Gonzales asked Ashcroft at the hospital, according to Comey.

"Not well," replied Ashcroft, who had just undergone gallbladder surgery and was battling pancreatitis.

The new details follow Comey's gripping testimony last month about the visit by Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then President Bush's chief of staff, to Ashcroft's hospital bed on the night of March 10, 2004. The two Bush aides tried to persuade Ashcroft to renew the authorization of the NSA surveillance program, after Comey and other Justice Department officials had said they would not certify the legality of the effort, according to the testimony and other officials.

Ashcroft refused, noting that Comey had been designated as acting attorney general during his illness.

The episode prompted sharp criticism from Democrats and some Republicans, who questioned whether Gonzales and Card were attempting to take advantage of a sick man to get around legal objections from government lawyers. It is unclear who directed the two Bush aides to make the visit.

Democrats said yesterday that the new details from Comey raise further questions about the role of Cheney and other White House officials in the episode.

"Mr. Comey has confirmed what we suspected for a while -- that White House hands guided Justice Department business," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "The vice president's fingerprints are all over the effort to strong-arm Justice on the NSA program, and the obvious next question is: Exactly what role did the president play?"

If you need any more evidence that the Bush Administration is a full scale disaster that has only just begun, you can watch events unroll as 20 years of progress with Russia comes to a screeching halt.  Nuclear arms race?  Cold War?  I think Bush looks on this with nostalgia.  Perhaps the mythical "War on Terror" needs an older enemy...

From the NY Times:

PRAGUE, June 4 — At a moment of rising tensions between Washington and Moscow, President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appear likely to use a meeting in Germany this week to focus on the one area where they appear to share a common interest: slowing Iran’s ability to produce nuclear fuel.

On virtually everything else — independence for Kosovo, missile defense and a sharp turn toward authoritarianism in Russia — Mr. Bush’s aides say they expect to have little leverage over Mr. Putin. Over the weekend, the Russian president threatened to once again point missiles at European targets if the United States went through with its plan to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“If part of the strategic nuclear potential of the United States finds itself in Europe and, according to our military experts, threatens us, then we will have to take corresponding retaliatory steps,” Mr. Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript of an interview with journalists from Group of 8 countries that took place on Friday. “What are these steps? Of course, we will have to have new targets in Europe.”

From www.defcon.org:

DefCon to Creation Museum: Thou Shalt Not Lie
This past Memorial Day, the religious right’s $27 million “Creation Museum” – an institution dedicated to promoting the lie that science supports the notion of a 6,000-year-old Earth – finally opened its doors.
Over the last few weeks nearly 25,000 concerned Americans have joined our effort and signed our petitions condemning the museum’s blatant attempt to push bad science and deceive children, including 5,000 educators from all 50 states.
Last Monday, DefCon took our message directly to the “Museum” and the organization behind the anti-science campaign, Answers in Genesis. As the first public visitors walked through the doors, a plane flew over head carrying a banner that read, “DEFCON SAYS THOU SHALT NOT LIE.”
View a video of the plane here.
Despite the claims of Answers in Genesis (AiG), our opposition has nothing to do with religion; it’s about bad science.
The museum is only the most recent attempt by the religious right to create controversy where none exists – whether that means pushing intelligent design in the classroom or inserting anti-evolution stickers in text books.
Our concern is ensuring Americans know what’s really at stake, and thanks to the hard work of thousands of DefCon members, we succeeded.
Over the last few weeks DefCon’s effort has garnered national media attention, shining a light on the bunk science that AiG had hoped to disguise with their $27 million “Museum.”
In fact, last Monday night, DefCon advisory board member and noted physicist Lawrence Krauss debated AiG head Ken Ham on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor. Watch the video of the debate here.
We’re not giving up on our campaign. Be sure to sign our petition condemning the museum if you haven’t yet done so and keep up the great work.

Focus on the Family Takes on DefCon Over Creation Museum
The May 22 edition of CitizenLink, the Focus on the Family daily email, carried this headline: “Liberal Group Assails New Creation Museum.”
The article went on to provide cover for the “Creation Museum,” and an opportunity for AiG head Ken Ham to continue to push the pseudo-science the "Museum" is based upon.
Quotes from DefCon were pulled from an email we sent to Focus in response to an interview request. As usual, they selectively chose the aspects they wanted to take, but we thought you would be interested in the full letter we sent to Focus on the Family:
"DefCon focuses on a number of issues – one of the most important is fighting attempts to undermine science education and scientific understanding.
"AiG has every right to build the “Creation Museum” and we’re not challenging that. Our campaign is focused on exposing AiG’s attempt to institutionalize a lie; namely that science supports the notion of a 6,000-year-old earth. To be clear, science does not.
"To claim that the Earth is only 6,000 years is simply not scientifically sound – your own website reveals this reality as it discusses the Cambrian Explosion which you acknowledge was “an event that began 530 million years ago.”
"Millions of faithful Americans acknowledge the important role science plays in our country and our culture – from medicine to travel to the internet. These two areas are only exclusionary when people like Ken Ham declare that you can’t believe in God and evolution. That’s preposterous.
"Unfortunately, Ken Ham has spent $27 million to target children and create a controversy where none exists. Our opposition to the museum has nothing to do with religion, it’s about bad science. We want Ken Ham as well as the rest of America to know that Americans are opposed to his war on science education, and we call on him to stop promoting this falsehood at the expense of our children.
"Lastly, representatives from DefCon have in fact visited the museum – including our board member Chris Hedges. AiG has also made no secret of what is inside the museum, including a virtual tour."

We’re gearing up for an exciting summer with a number of new campaigns.
In the meantime, please stay tuned to the DefCon Blog for daily updates.
Thank you so much for all of your hard work.
Clark and the rest of the DefCon Team