Later On

From a story by Daphne Eviatar:

… Some of the facts set out in the report strongly suggest that further investigation is warranted as to whether the legal conclusions were reached in good faith by the lawyers, and whether policymakers acted reasonably in relying on them. That’s critical to the defense put forward by Bush administration officials such as former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Vice President Dick Cheney, who have consistently defended the Bush administration’s conduct by saying they all reasonably relied on the good-faith advice of government lawyers.

The Senate Armed services report repeatedly calls that “good faith” into question.

“The report talks about Haynes disregarding the advice from JAGS [Judge Advocates General], and disregarding other legal opinions,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights who has been calling for years for appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. “If you’re a prosecutor, that gives you something. That questions good faith.”

The Armed Services report concludes that “leaders at GTMO … ignored warnings” from lawyers within the Defense Department and FBI that “the techniques were potentially unlawful and that their use would strengthen detainee resistance.” It adds that Chairman of Joint. Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers cut short the legal and policy review initiated by his legal counsel, which “undermined the military’s review process.” And the report finds that the conclusions reached about the legality of the interrogation techniques “followed a grossly deficient review and were at odds with conclusions previously reached by the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Criminal Investigate Task Force.”

As one example, the report cites a meeting between Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA’s CounterTerrorist Center, and GTMO staff about aggressive interrogation tactics. According to the meeting minutes, Fredman said that ”the language of the [torture] statutes is written vaguely … It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”

Bush administration critics claim the committee report and OLC memos support their claims that senior officials knowingly flouted the law and used administration lawyers to justify it.

“The consistent story is that there was high-level pressure to authorize these things,” said Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “That certainly bears upon the question of whether DOJ lawyers were merely ratifying their bosses’ wishes.”

As Ratner puts it, “the facts on what they did and who they ignored in getting their legal advice is quite damning.” …

Read the whole thing.

An op-ed in the NY Times by Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005:

For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — …

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Glenn Greenwald has another column that examines in detail how the media work to protect the powerful. It is exceptionally good. It begins:

Karl Rove on torture prosecutions:

It is now clear that the Obama White House didn’t think before it tried to appease the hard left of the Democratic Party.

Gloria Borger on Karl Rove:

When Rove speaks, the political class pays attention — usually with good reason.

Chuck Todd on Obama’s concession that the DOJ decides whether to prosecute:

There does seem to be a little bit of a reaction to how this was received on the left. . . frankly this feels like a political food fight now. . .. The hard left, the hard right, fighting over this in the blogosphere.

Chris Matthews on the same topic:

This whole torture debate is likely to tell us a lot about the kind of president Barack Obama intends to be. Will he buckle to the left, the netroots, and pursue an investigation into torture having said he didn’t want to? Or will he go post-partisan and leave the past to the historians?

David Gregory on what he calls (with scare quotes) "the politics of the ‘torture’ debate":

What [Obama officials] got on their hands is a highly politicized and very partisan issue about the treatment of 9/11 prisoners.  . . . At a time when the administration and the President will already be under scrutiny for being tough enough, is this a fight they really want to have?  I would also point you to, if you haven’t see this already, the Wall St. Journal Editorial Page today, which I think raises some really tough points about not only what signal you’re sending to the rest of the world, but also to potential Terrorists out there, about just what it is that U.S. interrogators would do and not do, but also the point that’s raised there is:  did the Bush administration go out of its way to make sure they were adhering to the law and not crossing over that bridge when it came to getting into torture?

(By the way:  can someone tell me what a "9/11 prisoner" is?; and is there anything less surprising than the fact that Gregory looks to The Wall St. Journal Editorial Page for guidance on such questions?)

* * * * *

For years, media stars ignored the fact that our Government was chronically breaking the law and systematically torturing detainees (look at this extremely detailed exposé by The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest and Barton Gellman from December, 2002 to get a sense for how much we’ve known about all of this and for how long we’ve known it).  Now that the sheer criminality of this conduct, really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates as a result of the OLC memos, media stars are forced to address it.  Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses — things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions, and accountability when they abuse their power.

The rules for how media stars behave are vividly evident as they finally take part in what they are calling The ‘Torture’ Debate.  Here are three key rules for Beltway media behavior that, as always, are shaping what they say and do:

(1) Any policy that Beltway elites dislike is demonized as coming from "the Left" or — in this case (following Karl Rove) — the "hard Left."  Media stars recite that claim regardless of how widely accepted the belief is in American public opinion and regardless of whether there is anything "leftist" about the view in question.  For years, withdrawing from Iraq was demonized as the view of the "left" even though large majorities of Americans favored it… 

Continue reading, since it gets even better.

Good column by Glenn Greenwald.

After President Obama announced last week that he opposes prosecutions of CIA officials who tortured detainees in reliance on OLC memos purporting to legalize that conduct (a decision which is not Obama’s to make), the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, announced that Obama’s policy of immunizing CIA torturers violates international law and, specifically, the clear obligations of the U.S. under the Convention Against Torture (signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988). 

This morning, I conducted a 20-minute interview with Nowak — which can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below — regarding the specific legal obligations of the U.S. to provide accountability for crimes of torture; how Obama’s invocation of the "state secrets privilege" to block torture victims from having a day in court independently violates the Convention; and the detrimental impact that will result for the U.N.’s ability to hold torturers around the world accountable (which is Nowak’s prime mandate) if the U.S. announces to the world that its own political leaders who systematically ordered torture will be shielded from all accountability.

On a quite related note, many people, such as Scott Horton, have argued that prosecutions of Bush DOJ lawyers who authorized torture find precedent in the Nuremberg prosecutions (as part of the Justice Case) of German lawyers who also declared various war crimes to be legal.  International law professor Kevin Jon Heller — who questioned the applicability of that precedent — today writes about a separate set of prosecutions by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, as part of The Ministries Case, in which German officials were prosecuted for doing nothing other than stating, when asked, that they had no objection to the deportation of 5,000 Jews from France.  Those officials, who were convicted at Nuremberg, did not order the deportation or carry it out; rather, they merely failed, when asked, to object to the policy on the ground that it violated international law.  Professor Heller argues that this case provides an almost perfect precedent for holding OLC torture-authorizing officials accountable (emphasis in original): …

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Interesting report by Margaret Talev of McClatchy:

A newly declassified narrative of the Bush administration’s advice to the CIA on harsh interrogations shows that the small group of Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

At the same time, the narrative suggests that then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell were largely left out of the decision-making process.

The narrative, posted Wednesday on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Web site and released by its former chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., came as Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters that he’d "follow the evidence wherever it takes us" in deciding whether to prosecute any Bush administration officials who authorized harsh techniques that are widely considered torture.

In a statement accompanying the narrative’s release, Rockefeller said the task of declassifying interrogation and detention opinions "is not complete" and urged prompt declassification of other opinions from 2006 and 2007 that he said would show how Bush Justice Department officials interpreted laws governing torture and war crimes.

These developments come days after the Obama administration declassified four Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 that revealed in detail authorized interrogation methods, such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning, sleep deprivation and putting detainees in containers with insects.

The drafting of the narrative began last summer, at the prompting of Rockefeller. The Senate Intelligence Committee staff drafted the document, with heavy input from the Bush administration, in a multi-department effort largely coordinated through the Director of National Intelligence’s office.

Bush’s National Security Council, however, refused to declassify it.

Obama’s National Security Adviser, James L. Jones, signed off on its release last week and the Senate panel cleared it Tuesday.

Among other details, the narrative shows that: …

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I’ve noticed that, in general, Army self-investigations clear everyone of any wrongdoing, or at the most punish a few enlisted men or women, with officers extended the courtesy of being found faultless. The same seems to be happening with Israel’s military. Dion Nissenbaum reports in McClatchy:

After an internal investigation, the Israeli military said Wednesday that its soldiers had unintentionally killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but said there were no widespread abuses and declared that its soldiers never violated international law.

Innocent Palestinians were killed only as a result of “intelligence or operational errors,” the Israeli investigation concluded.

“We didn’t find one incident in which an Israeli soldier intentionally harmed innocent civilians,” Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, the Israeli military’s deputy chief-of-staff, told reporters in announcing the findings.

U.S., Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups called the Israel Defense Forces investigation a cover-up and called on Israel to allow an impartial probe of the Gaza offensive.

The military investigation examined charges that Israeli soldiers targeted civilians, killed medical crews trying to help wounded Palestinians, used white phosphorous shells in densely populated areas, needlessly demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes and attacked United Nations compounds.

After probing one of the most controversial incidents during the 22-day Israeli offensive in Gaza that began on Dec. 27, the investigation determined that soldiers accidentally targeted a Palestinian home packed with civilians and killed 21 people who were seeking refuge from the fighting.

The military said a “professional mistake” caused soldiers to target the civilians instead of a nearby house that they suspected was being used to store weapons.

In another case, the military said, soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian woman who apparently was attempting to return to her home, which Israeli forces had seized.

After an internal investigation, the Israeli military said Wednesday that its soldiers had unintentionally killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but said there were no widespread abuses and declared that its soldiers never violated international law.

Innocent Palestinians were killed only as a result of “intelligence or operational errors,” the Israeli investigation concluded.

“We didn’t find one incident in which an Israeli soldier intentionally harmed innocent civilians,” Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, the Israeli military’s deputy chief-of-staff, told reporters in announcing the findings.

U.S., Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups called the Israel Defense Forces investigation a cover-up and called on Israel to allow an impartial probe of the Gaza offensive.

The military investigation examined charges that Israeli soldiers targeted civilians, killed medical crews trying to help wounded Palestinians, used white phosphorous shells in densely populated areas, needlessly demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes and attacked United Nations compounds.

After probing one of the most controversial incidents during the 22-day Israeli offensive in Gaza that began on Dec. 27, the investigation determined that soldiers accidentally targeted a Palestinian home packed with civilians and killed 21 people who were seeking refuge from the fighting.

The military said a “professional mistake” caused soldiers to target the civilians instead of a nearby house that they suspected was being used to store weapons.

In another case, the military said, soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian woman who apparently was attempting to return to her home, which Israeli forces had seized. The soldiers suspected that the woman might be a suicide bomber, but later determined that she was carrying no explosives.

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said the IDF statement “is an insult to the civilians in Gaza who needlessly died and an embarrassment to IDF officers who take military justice seriously.” It added: “The IDF leadership is apparently not interested, willing, or able to monitor itself. We consider the IDF investigations announced today a cover-up for serious violations of international law.”

According to Palestinian human rights researchers, more than 1,400 Gazans were killed during the 22-day Israeli offensive, and two-thirds of them were non-combatants.

The Israeli government has asserted, without providing supporting evidence, that many fewer civilians were killed in Gaza.

Thirteen Israelis, three of them civilians, were killed during the fighting…

Continue reading.

Jameel Jaffer and Ben Wizner in McClatchy:

Last week, in response to litigation filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Justice released memos that had been commissioned by the Bush administration to "legalize" torture. Any lingering doubts that the Bush administration authorized a far-reaching and sadistic torture program have now been definitively put to rest.

These latest disclosures join a vast and growing body of public information about the Bush-era torture regime. Government documents show that hundreds of prisoners were abused in the custody of the CIA and Department of Defense, some of them killed in the course of interrogations. And a devastating report by the International Committee of the Red Cross – the entity mandated by the international community to assess compliance with the Geneva Conventions – concluded unequivocally that prisoners in CIA custody were unlawfully tortured and disappeared.

Ordinarily such unmistakable evidence of grave criminality would lead to a thorough investigation by prosecutors. But no such investigation is underway. President Obama has already announced that interrogators "who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice . . . will not be subject to prosecution."

On Sunday, Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, appeared to go a step further, suggesting that even those officials who devised the Bush administration’s illegal torture policies should not be prosecuted. Emanuel is not alone: indeed, there is a concerted effort underway in Washington, spearheaded by many of the same lawyers who once advocated the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies, to portray any investigation of Bush-era abuses as the "criminalization of politics."

But it would be a grave mistake to foreclose an investigation before it has even begun.

The domestic laws against torture were …

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This is interesting. Julie Sell, reporting for McClatchy:

The chief justice of the British High Court on Wednesday gave the British government one week to obtain the U.S. release of classified information about the alleged torture of a British resident who’d been detained at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The court indicated that it would issue its own order if the government doesn’t respond or justify why continued secrecy is warranted.

Noting that President Barack Obama had released highly sensitive documents tracing the decisions on torture during the Bush administration’s war on terror, the high court judges voiced exasperation that the British government hasn’t acted in what they said was the British public interest in being similarly open.

The hearing illustrated how Obama’s decision to be more transparent about his predecessor’s detainee policies is having ripple effects abroad, but it also threw the ball back to the Obama administration to approve release of the contested information.

The White House said it had no comment yesterday.

Lord Justice John Thomas scolded Britain’s Foreign Office for not directly seeking clarification of the new U.S. administration’s policy on the release of classified documents in the case of Binyam Mohamed, who was returned to Britain in February after seven years of detention in several countries, including four years in the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Noting the change of tone between …

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At last:

A federal judge will allow an Afghan citizen held at Guantanamo Bay to challenge his detention in U.S. court, the ACLU said Wednesday. Mohammed Jawad, who was 16 or 17 when arrested, is charged with killing injuring two U.S. soldiers and an interpreter in a 2002 grenade attack. A lawyer for the ACLU said that the judge’s ruling supported the long-standing right to challenge indefinite imprisonment in U.S. courts under habeas corpus. The lawyer called for a prompt trial because Jawad’s “mental and physical well-being continue to be jeopardized by the harsh conditions in which he is being held at Guantanamo.” (Reuters)

Interesting book review:

Europe Between the Oceans: themes and variations: 9000 BC-AD 1000
by Barry Cunliffe

A review by Peter N Miller

Playmobil, the German company that specializes in detailed snap-together plastic toys, makes a Viking ship. Seventeen inches long and five wide, with six sweep oars, a steering oar, and a single movable square sail, the toy precisely models surviving Viking ships in museums in Roskilde, Denmark and Oslo, Norway. It also floats in bathtubs. Most of its users will not realize, of course, that the Viking ship was the plank-built descendant of the much older hide-covered ships that had sailed the northern seas for well over a thousand years before the Vikings, or that the Vikings themselves were but the last of a long sequence of ocean-going migrants.

Perspective is something that readers of Barry Cunliffe have come to expect. In Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples, which appeared in 2001, and now in its sequel, he has chosen to study Europe’s oceanic destiny. Europe was, and is, the land between the oceans. Its deeply convoluted coasts and island fragments make for a total of 37,000 kilometers of interface between land and sea — equivalent to the world’s circumference. It was "no accident" that Europe’s first civilization arose in the Aegean Sea (on Crete), where the ratio of coast to land was at its greatest. The seashore is also where Europe came from — whence Europa was kidnapped to Crete, "a reminder, if one were needed," Cunliffe notes with characteristic charm, "that the seashore is a liminal place where unexpected things can happen!"

Observations of this sort occur on nearly every page of this captivating book. Cunliffe makes the best possible case for archaeology as a specifically human science: not the study of mute objects, but of the walking, thinking, feeling human beings who made or transformed those objects. Europe Between the Oceans is a work of great humanity, looking back across the abyss of time to catch a dim echo of our earlier selves. What is re-constructed is the early history of Europe, from the end of the last glaciation to the emergence of the continent’s first nations. What is re-interpreted is something closer to human nature itself. Archaeology, at this vanishing point, blends back into anthropology, from which it separated either a hundred, two hundred, or three hundred years ago, depending on whom you ask. And Cunliffe, himself, takes on the role of sage, like those early anthropologists whose vocation was a way of glimpsing the eternal while talking about the particular. (Both Durkheim and Levi-Strauss were descendants of rabbis.)

The great advantage of deep distance in time (archaeology) or space (anthropology) is that the significant comes into focus and the trivial blurs to insignificance. For humans, the most important thing is food. And so, romantic encounters at the tideline aside, riverbanks, deltas, and sea coasts were important, because they offered a fantastically rich and regular caloric harvest — a side benefit of which was the presence of iodine, which boosted fertility.

Coastal middens, or garbage dumps, often of gigantic proportions, still amaze with the power of the sea’s nutritional wealth. At a couple of sites in modern-day Denmark, we find middens over 6.5 feet tall, 800 feet long, and 160 feet wide. These testify to …

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The Rooney Style 3 Size 2 seems enormous—hard to believe I used to use a Rooney Style 3 Size 3 once. Still, it did a fine job. One thought occurred to me this morning, triggered by an email from a friend: Asking whether a brush is a “soap brush” or a “shaving cream brush” is like asking whether light is a particle or a wave. (For more info on the latter, I highly recommend Richard Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.)

At any rate, the Rooney worked up a fine lather from QED’s Wild Orange shave stick. And the Gillette Aristocrat (late model) with a PolSilver blade produced a smooth shave with little effort. Royall Mandarin seemed a perfect finish, and so it was.

Read it here. Fascinating.

Very interesting animated graphic.

This is disgusting:

National and state wildlife protection groups say South Carolina is trying to use a phony homeland security designation to dodge a new federal regulation aimed at protecting one of the most endangered species of whales.

The S.C. House Judiciary Committee was scheduled to take up Tuesday afternoon a measure placing the state’s harbor boat pilots within the South Carolina Naval Militia, a new agency whose creation coincides with the imposition of the federal rule to safeguard the North Atlantic right whale.

That federal regulation, developed under the Endangered Species Act, sets a new speed limit of 10 knots per hour — 11.5 mph — for boats 65 feet or longer to prevent them from striking right whales, scarcely 300 of which remain on the planet.

An average of two North Atlantic right whales are struck and killed each year, mostly by larger boats traveling at higher speed.

"That may not seem like many, but with only 300 right whales left, it’s a lot," said Connie Barclay, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "We absolutely must do something to stop the number of ship strikes."

A Spartanburg couple operating a 31-foot boat six miles east of Hilton Head struck a 40-foot right whale March 31, putting out a mayday call when their blood-stained craft began to sink. The stricken whale’s fate is unknown.

"Even one death of a female of calf-bearing age seriously undermines the ability of this species to survive," said Hamilton Davis, project manager of the Coastal Conservation League.

The federal rule partially exempts law enforcement personnel and their vessels, a status Port of Charleston officials and their S.C. General Assembly allies hope to obtain via the new state regulation moving through the legislature.

Senior officials with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, which developed the federal regulation, are skeptical…

South Carolina is the only state along the Atlantic seaboard that is fighting the federal rule, which took effect in December after years of development and the filing of 10,252 public comments…

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Interesting article on how the US has adopted "disappearing" people. It begins:

Last week, we pointed out that one of the newly released Bush-era memos inadvertently confirmed that the CIA held an al-Qaeda suspect [1] named Hassan Ghul in a secret prison and subjected him to what Bush administration lawyers called "enhanced interrogation techniques." The CIA has never acknowledged holding Ghul, and his whereabouts today are secret.

But Ghul is not the only such prisoner who remains missing. At least three dozen others who were held in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas appear to be missing as well. Efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them. (See the full list. [2])

In September 2007, Michael V. Hayden, then director of the CIA, said [3] "fewer than 100 people had been detained at CIA’s facilities." One memo [4] (PDF) released last week confirmed that the CIA had custody of at least 94 people as of May 2005 and "employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these ".”

Former President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA program in September 2006, and transferred 14 prisoners from the secret jails to Guantanamo. Many other prisoners, who had "little or no additional intelligence value," Bush said, "have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments."

Bush did not reveal their identities or whereabouts — information that would have allowed the International Committee for the Red Cross [5] to find them — or the terms under which the prisoners were handed over to foreign jailers. The U.S. government has never released information describing the threat that any of them posed…

Continue reading. The disappeared traditionally were tortured, murdered, and buried anonymously. See this article in Wikipedia. The US under Bush went places that it traditionally has avoided.

Why not? It looks relatively easy. Except that I can’t find anyplace that sells pork belly.

Excellent post by John Cole of Balloon Juice:

I’m Not a Lawyer or a Constitutional Scholar

And as such, will probably not understand the legal intricacies of this case that was debated in the Supreme Court yesterday. However, I can state that as someone with an IQ over room temperature, the fact that we are debating whether it is appropriate for school authorities to strip search kids is a sure sign that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with this country and our sense of perspective, and I blame the war on drugs.

*** Update ***

Government by old men afraid of Advil is disgusting:

On the courthouse steps after argument today, Redding is asked what she’d have wanted the school to do differently. “Call my mom first,” she says. You see, we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked. And the parents? They are always the last to know.

Where is the outrage? Oh, yeah. They are too busy protesting the fact that Bill Gate’s taxes are going to go up 3%! Tyranny!

Via Balloon Juice, this section from the transcript of Anderson Cooper’s 360 Degrees show:

COOPER: All right, Ed, thanks. We will be no doubt talking about this a lot tomorrow.

Digging deeper now with former Clinton staff and CNN contributor Paul Begala, also former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.

We spoke late this afternoon, before these new developments came to light indicating that some of these harsh techniques may have yielded results.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: Ari, you said it’s basically opening up a Pandora’s box for the president, leaving — leaving the door open to a possible prosecution.

How is that opening a Pandora’s box?

ARI FLEISCHER, FORMER GEORGE W. BUSH WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Well, number one, we didn’t release any Clinton memos. Clinton didn’t release any previous President Bush top-secret memos.

The problem that I have with all of this is, now that the White House is doing this to its predecessor, what will future White Houses do, depending on how the world turns under Barack Obama? Something will go wrong during Barack Obama’s presidency. Do you really want to be in a position where whoever follows him says, it was your fault; you must have done something; there’s this top-secret memo we will find somewhere that makes you look or sound culpable?

COOPER: Paul, is this a slippery slope, a Pandora’s box?

PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, first up, the president was compelled to release them by a lawsuit, a lawsuit that his lawyers, the Justice Department and the White House counsel, decided they could not successfully defend.

We have a Freedom of Information Act. I know it’s — it’s an adjustment, but we now have a White House that lives under the rule of law and obeys the laws. So, he released them because he was compelled to release them.

This is very different from the Bush administration, which selectively leaked national security information, top-secret information, in order to build what I think the record shows was a dishonest case for war, or, in the case of Valerie Wilson, to destroy the career of a covert CIA agent.

That’s the politicization of intelligence information and — and top-secret information. This was the president obeying the law.

The dialogue goes on, so you may want to read more.

Extremely interesting. In two parts.