zelikow

One last thing from today’s Zelikow/Soufan hearing. Phil Zelikow was an aide to Condoleezza Rice when she served as secretary of state during George W. Bush’s second term. In his testimony, perhaps unsurprisingly, he portrayed Rice as pushing to restrict the Bush administration’s torture policies. “As Secretary of State, Dr. Rice placed a high priority [...]

Former State Department adviser Philip Zelikow at this morning’s Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing testified that when he saw the so-called torture memos written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, “It seemed to me that the OLC interpretation of U.S. Constitutional Law in this area was strained and indefensible. I could not imagine [...]

While we’re all duly praising Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) for calling a hearing next Wednesday on the torture memos, I’m still puzzled by one thing: why isn’t the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts calling the authors of the memos to explain how and why they reached their legal conclusions despite clearly [...]

To follow up on my earlier post about Sen. Pat Leahy’s (D-Vt.) refusal to hold hearings on the torture memos as chair of the Judiciary Committee, we now learn, as Spencer just wrote, that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has boldly taken the reins, using the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, which he chairs, [...]

While much of the mainstream media — Charlie Savage at The New York Times and John MacKinnon at The Wall Street Journal, among others — were reporting yesterday on how it would be virtually impossible to prove that the Bush administration’s lawyers’ approval of torture amounted to a crime (relying in large part on the [...]