Barnes, speaking at The Atlantic’s Green Intelligence Forum today, said that health care reform was one of Obama’s top priorities during the campaign. “One of the things that we heard is that we had to deal with the issue of health care,” she said.

Barnes also demurred on the question of a climate and energy bill’s legislative prospects. “One of the things that I’ve learned is that when you start to put your money down on when Congress will act, you’re going to lose your money,” she said. But she stressed that while Congress was far from “crossing the finish line” on a climate bill, the Obama administration is committed to using its regulatory authority, at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, to address climate change.

Barnes expressed frustration with those who oppose measures to address climate change. ”There is no debate globally about the importance of this issue, it’s when we return home that we are pushing and shoving and trying to convince people of the importance of this issue,” she said. But she added that she is seeing a shift in the viewpoint of the American people on climate change, though she acknowledged that many Americans still question the science of climate change.

“Even if you, for whatever reason, don’t believe the science, you’ve got to believe the economic imperative of a clean energy economy,” she said.

The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 soldiers were shot and killed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, paradoxically took my memory back to April 2004, when I was embedded with a Marine battalion during the first battle of Fallujah. The battalion just happened to have in the ranks a corporal of Syrian descent who did double duty as the commander’s translator for his meetings with the Iraqis. The young Muslim corporal was arguably the most valuable member of the battalion: simply by his presence he was able to cast the battalion in a different, more positive light among the locals.

The United States military needs more troops of Muslim origin within its ranks. We need a military that looks like the larger world for the global challenges ahead, such as helping to protect the “commons,” the air space and sea lanes. Think of the Navy’s slogan in its new television recruitment commercials: “A Global Force for Good.”

There are a whole bunch of right wingers who ought to read this piece. Quite possibly Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), too.

Update: Have I taken Kaplan’s argument a step too far? I don’t think so. But James Joyner does, and he’s a smart guy, so you make the call.

This seems more likely to be raised in defense of the CIA interrogators than against the lawyers. An investigation of the relationship between the OLC and the executive might turn up criminal wrongdoing, but bad legal work isn’t prosecutable on its own.

Of course bad legal work isn’t prosecutable.  And of course CIA interrogators will say they’re not guilty because they were just following vaguely worded guidelines — which sounds an awful lot like “just following orders.” My point is that a prosecutor can’t simply stop his investigation of the over-the-top CIA interrogations there. Not because shoddy lawyering is a crime, but because it’s very likely that the Justice Department lawyers knew better.They knew that the CIA’s instructions were vague but approved them anyway, possibly because they were told by senior Bush officials not to constrain the interrogators. And if the lawyers knew that was likely to lead interrogators to cross the line from “enhanced interrogation” to torture, then the lawyers could themselves be liable for participating in a criminal conspiracy.

All of which is to say that any real investigation of how and why some CIA interrogators broke the law by torturing and even killing detainees in their custody must look at the orders they received — and at who signed off on them.

While Sotomayor thus apparently supported terrorism, the ad warns that she also “Wants to Take Away Your Guns.”  Which would, of course, leave you defenseless against those Puerto Rican terrorists.

From the report itself, John Yoo’s Office of Legal Counsel memo — and the lightning-fast reporting of Spencer Ackerman, Marc Ambinder and others on Friday — we now know that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, aware that ignoring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might come back to bite them later, sought the drafting of a legal opinion that would approve the president’s secret surveillance program and shield them from later attack.

The fact that the White House sought the assistance of Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo in the OLC, though is itself evidence that the White House was trying to get around, rather than comply with, the law.

As I’ve noted before, legal memos justifying an unreasonable or inaccurate legal position don’t necessarily provide a “golden shield” for the executive.

Yoo, after all, was known when he was hired as the Berkeley law professor and staunch Federalist Society member who held theories on executive power that were far outside the legal mainstream. And the memos and academic analyses he then proceeded to write were so extreme and so mischaracterized law and history in an effort to reconcile conservative “originalist” principles with his own aggressive view of an all-powerful president as Commander-in-Chief that they’ve been characterized as an “outrageous theory of presidental dictatorship” by Yale University law professor Jack Balkin and as “simply hooey” by Marty Lederman at Georgetown (now in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Obama administration).

The inspectors general report details how Yoo and the administration ignored parts of the FISA law that conflicted with his theory, for example, and made the outrageous argument that a warrantless search doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on “unreasonable” searches and seizures because it can’t be “unreasonable” for the president to authorize it in wartime. Why it’s “reasonable” to prevent even secret judicial review of such searches is never explained.

For an academic to hold extreme views of executive power, of course, is arguably a matter of academic freedom, and even a form of creative theorizing that one might admire. (Although some of Yoo’s Berkeley colleagues, such as economist Brad DeLong, among others, have described his theories as reaching so far beyond the bounds of creative academic theorizing as to be simply dishonest and undeserving of that protection.)

But Yoo’s memos at OLC were not part of an academic exercise; they were making policy. Setting aside for a moment the potential culpability of Yoo himself, the more important point here is that, as the inspectors general report makes clear, the White House specifically sought him out and excluded his superiors, ignoring the usual chain of command in the Justice Department, apparently because they knew that John Yoo would give them the legal opinions that they wanted to hear.

That is not the purpose of the Office of Legal Counsel, as Dawn Johnsen, the Obama nominee to head that office has repeatedly made clear, along with more than a dozen other alumni of that office.

As Johnsen wrote in a law review article describing the ten “Guidelines” that should govern the Office of Legal Counsel: “OLC should provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that advice will constrain the administration’s pursuit of desired policies … In short, OLC must be prepared to say no to the President.”

That the president and vice president apparently chose someone who they knew in advance would not say no to the president is more than an abuse of that legal office; it strongly suggests an intentional and unlawful abuse of executive power.

The latest news accounts that Attorney General Eric Holder is leaning toward appointing an independent prosecutor suggest he may finally be starting to reach the same conclusion.