addington

That’s the claim made by the Wall Street Journal editorial board over the weekend, hammering Obama for his aggressive assertion of executive power to hide evidence of warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration.

As every lawyer knows, language matters. Bill Clinton was famously impeached because his definition of “sexual relations” didn’t include oral sex – a definition that Republican lawyers didn’t agree with.
So does it matter if the interrogation techniques that were used, authorized and encouraged by senior officials in the US government for use on suspected [...]

We’ve long known that the CIA waterboarded at least three Al Qaeda detainees.
We’ve also long known that the Justice Dept., at the behest of a Central Intelligence Agency deeply fearful about its legal vulnerabilities, endorsed the torture techniques that CIA leadership desired. And we’ve recently learned that George W. Bush’s principal aides, including Condoleezza Rice, [...]