And threats don’t get more direct than this: either AG Holder starts investigating ACORN, or Breitbart dumps what he still has on the scene in time to make a difference in the 2010 elections.

And this message is to Attorney General Holder: I want you to know that we have more tapes, it’s not just ACORN, and we’re going to hold out until the next election cycle, or else if you want to do a clean investigation, we will give you the rest of what we have, we will comply with you, we will give you the documentation we have from countless ACORN whistleblowers who want to come forward but are fearful of this organization and the retribution that they fear that this is a dangerous organization.  So if you get into an investigation, we will give you the tapes; if you don’t give us the tapes, we will revisit these tapes come election time.

Italics in original. If this is a bluff… well.  Every time somebody thought that Andrew Breitbart has been bluffing on the ACORN scandal, he’s turned out not to be.  The latest one has Patterico almost gibbering in glee as he rakes the LA Times and James Rainey over the coals for their uncritical willingness to believe Lavelle Stewart; it doesn’t seem particularly safe to hope that this time is the time that Breitbart’s got nothing left.

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Here in New York, the Obama Administration’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda terrorists in the civilian justice system in downtown Manhattan has garnered plenty of well-earned criticism, including from New York’s leading anti-terrorism experts like Rudy Giuliani, Michael Mukasey (who handled the blind sheikh trial as a district judge before becoming President Bush’s third Attorney General) and Andrew McCarthy (who was one of the prosecutors), and Long Island Congressman Peter King. And not just from the Right; even arch-liberals like Daily News sportswriter Mike Lupica have weighed in against the decision. Now the people are being heard from, and while the polls as usual show some diversity of opinion, the public is deeply skeptical of this enterprise even before it gets underway, let alone after what promises to be many months of grandstanding by the terrorists, gridlock in lower Manhattan, possible setbacks in the prosecution and the hemmhoraging of scarce resources on the trial(s) (as my retired-NYPD dad put it: “there’s going to be plenty of overtime for the cops.”).

The critics’ bases for opposing a trial are numerous, and several of them are reviewed by Erick here. And the polls now show those criticisms are shared by a majority of the nation’s voters and a significant minority even in liberal New York City, with the rest uncertain.

To quickly summarize the case against the trials:

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Pardon me if I am seeing red this morning:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday.

WHAT IN THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

So, Barack Obama will be staging his own New York production of Chicago, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as Roxy Hart (”You had it coming, you had it coming, you only have yourselves to blame….” ). We will be treated to months upon months of front page headlines giving a platform to this lunatic war criminal. The courthouses and City office buildings in lower Manhattan (City Hall, the state courts, the immigration offices, the Court of International Trade, the US Attorney’s Office, the DA’s office, and the main city office building that does marriage licenses and the like are all within about a two-block radius of the federal courthouses and the Metropolitan Correctional Center) will be snarled with massive security, as if lower Manhattan needs more traffic and more armed men. We’ll have to have pretrial hearings on the inevitable countless motions about how KSM was apprehended and the evidence against him collected, undoubtedly to the detriment of vital sources of intelligence, like when we lost the ability to track Osama bin Laden by cellphone after our tracing of his calls was revealed by a prosecution under the DOJ Criminal Division then headed by…Eric Holder. And that’s even before he starts in on the sob stories about being waterboarded. I’m not seriously concerned that KSM stands any chance of being acquitted, but a hung jury? It only takes one person with extreme political or religious views, one juror who just can’t abide the death penalty (even assuming Obama’s DOJ pursues it). Just imagine the controversy, if there are Muslims in the jury pool, over what questions prosecutors are permitted to ask them and whether they can be challenged. And of course, it sends the message to our enemies that there’s nothing you can do to us that will get you sent through a process rougher than the one we used on Michael Vick or Martha Stewart.

I know I have spoken and written many rough things about Obama, but as Michael Moore would say, most New Yorkers voted for the man - why is he doing this to us?

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Actually, in this context ’same as the old boss’ would be a comfort. To me, at least, if not the folks who made such a hullabaloo over the PATRIOT Act; I’m not worried about the government abusing its authority so much as I worry about it making an utter hash of its attempt to try to use it. But of course said ‘abuse’ was not the least common election-year theme - usually in the context of how things would change, once the Republicans weren’t running things.  And usually argued by people who really should have known better.

Which is why I’m more amused than anything else about this:

Attorney General Eric Holder endorsed the Senate’s version of legislation that would extend three provisions of the Patriot Act that are slated to expire at the end of the year.

Holder wrote in a letter today to Senate Judiciary Committee members that he offers “strong support” for the USA Patriot Act Sunset Extension Act, which would reauthorize the “lone wolf,” records and “roving wiretap” powers. By contrast, a House version of the bill would not continue the “lone wolf” provision, which lets the government track targets who don’t have any discernible affiliation with terrorist or other foreign groups.

…although I admit that I’m kind of curious of which member of the current ruling party thought that it was a good idea to hamper lone wolf surveillance.  The timing for that seems… suboptimal.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

As I see it, there are three possible ways that you could investigate claims of CIA abuse of suspected terrorists during interrogations under Bush.

1. Don’t.  This would infuriate the Left, most of whom spent considerable amounts of time, effort, and money to elect a President and Congress that would revisit the Salem Witch Trials (with possibly even the mass hangings); and give no net gain to the Right (it’s what they should be doing, anyway), the CIA (ditto), and the Middle (they just don’t care).
2. Do.  This would infuriate the CIA, a bureaucracy that easily outmatches the current administration in the arcane art of Beltway warfare; quietly please the Right (as that means that a lot of embarrassing* documents would finally get put in the public record); and give no net gain to the Left(it’s what they should be doing, anyway) and the Middle (they just don’t care).
3. Do, but ostensibly only those claims that violated Bush-era guidelines.  This would anger the CIA (ex post facto career blighting), the Left (it’d legitimize the guidelines), the Right (tailor-made for scapegoating); and give no net gain to the Middle (they just don’t care).  In other words, it’d be the single most politically tone-deaf solution.

So yes, that’s the one that they’re going with.

Moe Lane

PS: Oh, you want a solution?  Easy.  The administration comes out and says that now that it’s had a chance to look at all the information, they’ve changed their mind on their previous position with regard to appropriateness of the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism strategy; and that they’ll be doing a thorough review with the CIA to fix the system to make sure that anything that slipped through the cracks won’t happen again.  Then they actually do the review in a bipartisan fashion, with enough well-known CIA advocates involved to reassure the Agency that there’s not going to be a witch hunt.  That satisfies everybody.

Well, everybody except the Hard Left, but what are they going to do?  Vote Republican?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

There is a game of distractions being played in Washington, D.C. right now. It is both intentional and designed to minimize conservative strengths.

We must not play the game as the left would have us play it.

Here is how the game is played.

The President pushes cap and trade to the Senate while also advancing socialized healthcare.

As those balls advance, the Attorney General makes rumblings about prosecuting individuals who engaged in enhanced interrogation techniques.

While conservatives get distracted by the Attorney General, the administration claims Dick Cheney refused to disclose a CIA program and the Democrats will investigate.

Tomorrow Sonya Sotomayor begins her confirmation hearings.

By throwing all of these balls around, the left hopes to distract the right. Our natural inclination is to be distracted by the shiny national security balls. Some of us will fixate on Sotomayor.

Meanwhile, the leftist agenda makes it way further through Congress. Already, some Blue Dog Democrats are leaning toward supporting socialized healthcare. And the right is suddenly intrigued by the Cheney story, which is as much about distracting us from Nancy Pelosi’s lies about the CIA as it is to distract us from coming policy.

Don’t play the game.

Sonya Sotomayor will be confirmed. Ignore that ball as best you can.

Dick Cheney will need some help, but we don’t all need to focus on that ball.

The interrogators will not be prosecuted. It is a ruse. Do not be distracted.

Cap and Trade and Obamacare are the balls in play. Keep focusing on them.

We cannot afford to be distracted from these two policy initiatives. They are trying to distract us. We must target Congress on healthcare and cap and trade.

It is a telling point of the game’s existence that the Democrats have not revealed the terms of their healthcare legislation. They want us fully distracted by these other matters before they do and rush it through.

Our singleminded focus right now must be on defeating healthcare reform. These other balls can keep bouncing off the walls.

Last year, two federal courts ordered the State of Georgia to implement a system to verify the citizenship of registered voters. This arose after Karen Handel, Georgia’s Secretary of State, sent letters to 4,771 voter registration applicants whose records at the Georgia Department of Driver Services indicated they were not U.S. citizens.

Federal law requires the Secretary of State to make sure the information is accurate. Nonetheless, several groups filed a lawsuit over the letters, but two separate federal courts ordered the Secretary of State to continue verifying citizenship. The procedure the Secretary of State established was put together with the help of the U.S. Department of Justice.

In the November General Election, 230 voters had their ballots rejected because there was no proof they were U.S. citizens.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

Though the U.S. Department of Justice helped craft the verification procedure, the procedure had to be pre-cleared by the DOJ pursuant to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

As the pre-clearance review was going forward, the Presidential administrations changed. And now Barack Obama has denied pre-clearance. In other words, if the Georgia Secretary of State wishes to make sure people voting are citizens of the United States, she is going to have to sue the federal government.

Georgia’s Inspector General is presently investigation 30 different cases of non-citizens casting ballots in 2008’s federal elections in Georgia.

The verification process has raised flags on the attempts of 2,100 different people trying to register to vote in Georgia.

Secretary of State Karen Handel, in a statement released by her office, noted:

“DOJ has thrown open the door for activist organizations such as ACORN to register non-citizens to vote in Georgia’s elections, and the state has no ability to verify an applicant’s citizenship status or whether the individual even exists. DOJ completely disregarded Georgia’s obvious and direct interest in preventing non-citizens from voting, instead siding with the ACLU and MALDEF. Clearly, politics took priority over common sense and good public policy.”

Secretary Handel will talk about this and related matters at RedState’s August 1st gathering in Atlanta.

Encouraged by the green light President Obama recently gave to his Attorney General, Eric Holder, left-wing liberal/progressive extremists are seeking disbarment of a dozen Bush administration lawyers linked to legal opinions concerning the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

The extremists are seeking retribution by persecution because these lawyers concluded, after a legal review, the enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, did not violate the legal prohibition of torture.

Any discussion of the enhanced interrogation techniques must specify how Congress defined torture. According to Victoria Toensing, once chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, Congress defined torture in a 1994 criminal statute:

The 1994 law was passed pursuant to an international treaty, the United
Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. The law’s definition of torture is circular. Torture under that law means “severe physical or mental pain or suffering,” which in turn means “prolonged mental harm,” which must be
caused by one of four prohibited acts. The only relevant one to the CIA inquiry was threatening or inflicting “severe physical pain or suffering.” What is “prolonged mental suffering”? The term appears nowhere else in the U.S. Code.

Congress required, in order for there to be a violation of the law, that an interrogator specifically intend that the detainee suffer prolonged physical or mental suffering
as a result of the prohibited conduct. Just knowing a person could be injured from the interrogation method is not a violation under Supreme Court rulings interpreting “specific intent” in other criminal statutes.

Toensin also notes “the Senate rejected a bill in 2006 to make waterboarding illegal,” a fact which “negates criminalization” of the interrogation method. Congress did not prohibit use of waterboarding until 2008.

Attorney General Holder has already made his mind up about the left’s assertions that the legal authority justifying the CIA interrogation methods was more than wrong. Holder’s prejudgment of this issue creates an appearance of a conflict of interest, which ought to cause Holder to recuse himself, as Attorney General John Ashcroft did in the Plame investigation.

(H/t: Hot Air) The more often I reread this open letter by Andrew McCarthy declining the government’s invitation to a round table meeting on detention policy, the more depressed I get:

…in light of public statements by both you and the President, it is dismayingly clear that, under your leadership, the Justice Department takes the position that a lawyer who in good faith offers legal advice to government policy makers—like the government lawyers who offered good faith advice on interrogation policy—may be subject to investigation and prosecution for the content of that advice, in addition to empty but professionally damaging accusations of ethical misconduct.  Given that stance, any prudent lawyer would have to hesitate before offering advice to the government.

Beyond that, as elucidated in my writing (including my proposal for a new national security court, which I understand the Task Force has perused), I believe alien enemy combatants should be detained at Guantanamo Bay (or a facility like it) until the conclusion of hostilities.  This national defense measure is deeply rooted in the venerable laws of war and was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the 2004 Hamdi case.  Yet, as recently as Wednesday, you asserted that, in your considered judgment, such notions violate America’s “commitment to the rule of law.”  Indeed, you elaborated, “Nothing symbolizes our [adminstration’s] new course more than our decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay….  President Obama believes, and I strongly agree, that Guantanamo has come to represent a time and an approach that we want to put behind us: a disregard for our centuries-long respect for the rule of law[.]”  (Emphasis added.)

Given your policy of conducting ruinous criminal and ethics investigations of lawyers over the advice they offer the government, and your specific position that the wartime detention I would endorse is tantamount to a violation of law, it makes little sense for me to attend the Task Force meeting.  After all, my choice would be to remain silent or risk jeopardizing myself.

It’s depressing primarily because I never expected that an administration could so thoroughly muck up what I naively thought was a bedrock concept of our system of government: that there were limits to how hard the game was played. And, yes, this is a game that the White House is playing right now. Badly.

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President Obama has basked in the international glow of his decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, but he’s never yet answered the hard question at the core of opposition to this decision: what are you going to do with the detainees? It’s a question some of our allies have proven much less interested in asking themselves (witness France’s announcement that it would take one detainee - one can practically hear the French snickering “I told him we already had one!”). It’s also a question of great concern to ordinary Americans who may not be thrilled that Al Qaeda detainees are coming to their own home town.

Congressman Peter King, the ranking Member of the House Commitee on Homeland Security, released a letter today to Attorney General Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, co-signed by 12 other Members, asking that question and a variety of detailed followups. From King’s statement:

[President Obama] made this decision without an exit strategy, without a plan of what to do with these 245 enemy combatants once Guantanamo is closed. The Executive Order to close Guantanamo was signed over three months ago, and the American people are still waiting to learn what their government plans to do with these deadly terrorists.

The ball is in the Obama Administration’s court now to level with the voters about its plans to bring terrorists into the United States. A copy of Congressman King’s letter is below the fold.

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Eric Holder, President Obama’s Attorney General, has shamelessly adopted the tactics of the disgraced prosecutors of Senator Stevens.

Holder has now released 11 formerly classified legal memoranda. These cherry picked legal opinions have been seized upon by left-wing extremists to call for prosecutions of those involved in interrogations of terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” The terrorist has also admitted involvement in some 30 other terror plots.

The left’s call for the political retribution of show trials over a disagreement over War On Terror policy was given a green light this week by President Obama.

Like the Stevens’ prosecutors, Holder didn’t bother releasing documents that could be used to defend the War on Terror policies the left, Holder and Obama now find so abhorrent. Former vice president Cheney called for the Obama Administration to release the exculpatory files as well.

Holder, to his great discredit, claims he isn’t aware of memos Cheney says should now be released. Watch the following exchange between Holder and Congressman Frank Wolf:

As Wolf said, Holder has an “obligation to release the rest of the memos.” Holder’s obfuscation that he is “not familiar with those memos,” that he has “not seen them,” and that he doesn’t “know
that they exist,” simply does not cut it.

Holder, having released the documents he and the left find so damning, must find and release the documents which Cheney says will detail the valuable intelligence gained from the use of the now objectionable policies. Holder’s failure to do so would be no different than what was done by the prosecutors, or is that persecutors, of Senator Stevens.

Fred Thompson takes Obama to task over the President’s latest amateurish flip flop — the green light that begins the process to provide the left its long-sought show trials of Bush Administration officials.

Listen to the following YouTube audio clip:

Fred really nails it.

Show trial: a trial (as of political opponents) in which the verdict is rigged and a public confession is often extracted — Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

President Obama was presented with another opportunity to rule out political retribution dressed up as investigations of the looney left-wing’s fanciful allegations of Bush administration war-crimes.

Instead of standing by his previous obfuscation that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” Obama gave a green light to Attorney General Holder to start the show trials — a political theater relic of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge of political opponents from the former Soviet Union.

Watch the following CBS video report:

Obama has been planning this for a long time. In a December 2007 KJFK radio interview with Christiane Brown, Obama promised that one of his first acts as president would be to call on his new Attorney General to investigate the Bush administration.

Nothing is left to chance by Obama leaving the decision up to Holder. Obama’s attorney general has already made his mind up about the left’s assertions that the legal authority justifying the CIA interrogation methods was more than wrong. Holder is on record with strong opinions about not only allegations of torture, but also the Guantanamo terrorist detention facility, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detentions of non-U.S. citizen terror suspects and the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program.

Her dig at George W. Bush notwithstanding, it is clear that Nancy Pelosi’s veto of any prospect of reviving the assault weapons ban that Eric Holder and the Obama Administration want, demonstrates that despite the election, Second Amendment rights are still very much on the march. This little incident shows a great deal; we see that Congressional Democrats are very much aware of lines that they ought not to cross and that the Obama Administration should not cross, and that the Attorney-General and the Administration did nothing by way of consulting with Congressional Democrats before coming out in favor of the assault weapons ban.

Political clumsiness + a misreading of the sociopolitical situation = potential trouble down the line for the Obama Administration. The Speaker may have pulled them back from a misstep in this particular case, but the Administration’s (pardon the pun) jumping-of-the-gun signals that there could be serious political missteps in the offing.

Kudos to Senators John Ensign (R-NV), John Thune (R-SD), Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) for using the bill to provide a vote in the House of Representatives to the District of Columbia to force votes today on expanding gun rights and trashing the idea of the federal government regulating the radio airwaves.  These senators used an unconstitutional bill to essentially treat the District of Columbia as a state to force votes on guns and free speech.

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“Without a doubt, people are stepping more gingerly. People are tiptoeing their way through this.”- Ted Rall, liberal editorial cartoonist.

Last week’s firestorm over an editorial cartoon at the New York Post is still burning it’s way through the media and the blogosphere, and in the wake of Eric Holder’s declaration that Americans (read: white Americans) are cowards and James Clyburn’s claim that rejection of stimulus funds is motivated by racism, the reactions are naturally mixed and sometimes contentious. Reverend Al Sharpton, for example, is demanding investigations and protests. MSNBC is having shouting matches. Some cartoonists are simply preparing to self-censor and nevertheless suffer unintended consequences. The controversy is not soon to die down.

In light of the cartoon war, the Associated Press ran a story Saturday, from which the above quoted material was pulled, examining the overall shift to caution by that normally incautious breed of political commentator, the editorial cartoonist. Because Barack Obama is black, to summarize the article, political cartoonists now operate under the duress of fear. In America, there is no worse stigma than that of being called “racist,” especially in the age of Obama. The armies of political correctness and so-called progressivism feel free to act more boldly, now that a man who owes his political career to the forces of the far left holds the highest office in the world. The left is, therefore, if even possible within physics, more likely than ever to throw the “racist” gauntlet.

There is a difference, though, between a thing that can be taken a certain way, and which may or may not offend the person who so takes it, and a thing that is overtly racist: racist in tone, racist in intent. It is clear, to the objective observer, that at most the Post cartoon is the former, and in no way is there any reason to think it the latter. I have ample evidence, click through to keep reading.

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“We, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race,” said average American Eric Holder, Attorney General for the Obama administration, in a speech to Justice Department employees earlier today.

Holder, whose speech was meant to honor Black History Month, went on to call America “a nation of cowards” which “never been at ease with…frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us” despite the fact that “this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot.”

Holder continued:

[T]he need to confront our racial past, and our racial present, and to understand the history of African people in this country, endures. One cannot truly understand America without understanding the historical experience of black people in this nation. Simply put, to get to the heart of this country one must examine its racial soul.

Though he admitted the workplace is now “largely integrated,” Holder complained that, in his opinion, Americans “self-segregate” into “race-protected cocoons” on the weekends and in their private lives.

Apparently our esteemed Attorney General has a bit of a problem with the free association of a free people, as well as with the fact that we’re not all starting our conversations with fellow Americans with statements like the facetious title of this post.

The fact is, folks like Holder, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, and their race-minded fellows are clinging to an increasingly outdated and obsolete worldview like a man long-since rescued from the sea clinging to a life preserver.

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Let the pain start now:

President Obama’s choice to run the Justice Department has assured senior Republican senators that he won’t prosecute intelligence officers or political appointees who were involved in the Bush administration’s policy of “enhanced interrogations.”

Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, a Republican from Missouri and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.’s nomination for Attorney General because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama’s Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee hours ago voted 17-2 to approve the nomination of Eric Holder to be the next Attorney General.  A floor vote on his nomination is expected for next week.   The only two Conservative stalwarts voted no: John Cornyn (R-TX); and Tom Coburn (R-OK).  Eric Holder, former Deputy Attorney General for President Bill Clinton, has taken actions that disqualify him from Senate consent to be the next Attorney General of the United States.

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