Addington behind Bush gambit on Vienna Convention

As Time notes, both anti-U.N. type right-wingers and internationalists alike were baffled earlier this week over the Bush Administration arguing against the state of Texas that a Mexican national convicted of murder should get a new trial because, contrary to the 1967 Vienna Convention, he never had a chance to be aided by Mexican consular officials.

But, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington, appears to have been behind this political chess playing:

Back in 1969, the U.S. had joined the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, part of which requires countries to give arrested foreigners access to consular officials. … The Administration renounced that part of the treaty after the ICJ ruled Medellin should get a retrial. (The U.S. still abides by the parts of the Treaty governing immunity for embassy officials and sovereignty of embassy buildings.) Yet Bush told Texas to retry Medellin anyway — since the ICJ ruling came before the U.S. backed away from the treaty. In essence it was a double power grab: Bush wanted the right to unilaterally leave a treaty — and still order state courts to comply with obligations while the treaty was in effect.

The Supreme Court said treaty implementation details were up to Congress. That, on the other hand ignores the clear language of the Constitution that a treaty, when approved by the Senate and signed by the president, becomes part of the “supreme law of the land.”

Most treaties, the Court ruled, don't automatically apply domestically unless the full Congress passes a separate law specifying how and when the treaty should be implemented. … Law professor Marty Lederman of Georgetown University, writing on the widely read Scotusblog after the decision was handed down, called the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts "an implausible interpretation" that was "potentially very troubling for construction of treaty obligations going forward." He worried that by letting states ignore treaties unless Congress ordered them to abide by them, the Supreme Court had opened the door for chaos in compliance with all international law.

Of course, that then gets into knotty issues of treaties versus “executive agreements,” which need the approval of both houses of Congress, but only by simple majorities — and are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. (That, in essence, is how John Tyler did an end run around the Constitution when leaving office in 1845 and got an independent Republic of Texas admitted to the Union without a formal treaty.)

As Time notes, most countries approve formal treaties in that fashion, just like other legislation. Time tries to put a silver lining on the issue, arguing we may move in such a direction, perhaps through enabling legislation being attached to treaties. But, whether that itself would require constitutional amending or not is unclear.

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Crazed, Sick Cretins or Opportunistic Fascists?

The following is from an article in the New York Times Magazine by Jeff Rosen scheduled for release on September 9, 2007. The article describes the thoughts and experiences of Jack Goldsmith, a former head of the Attorney General's Office of Legal Counsel.

..Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, which was highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts. “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.

In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: “They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations,” he writes. Goldsmith’s first experienced this extraordinary concealment, or “strict compartmentalization,” in late 2003 when, he recalls, Addington angrily denied a request by the N.S.A.’s inspector general to see a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal analysis supporting the secret surveillance program. “Before I arrived in O.L.C., not even N.S.A. lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department’s legal analysis of what N.S.A. was doing,” Goldsmith writes.

Goldsmith also witnessed perhaps the most well-known confrontation over the administration’s aggressive tactics: the scene at Ashcroft’s hospital bed on March 10, 2004, when Gonzales and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, visited the hospital to demand that the ailing Ashcroft approve, over Goldsmith and Comey’s objections, a secret program that was about to expire. (Goldsmith refuses to identify the program, but Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, has publicly indicated it was the terrorist surveillance program.) As he recalled it to me, Goldsmith received a call in the evening from his deputy, Philbin, telling him to go to the George Washington University Hospital immediately, since Gonzales and Card were on the way there. Goldsmith raced to the hospital, double-parked outside and walked into a dark room. Ashcroft lay with a bright light shining on him and tubes and wires coming out of his body.

Suddenly, Gonzales and Card came in the room and announced that they were there in connection with the classified program. “Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest,” Goldsmith recalls. “All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn’t appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn’t the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I’ve ever witnessed.”

After a bit of silence, Goldsmith told me, Gonzales thanked Ashcroft, and he and Card walked out of the room. “At that moment,” Goldsmith recalled, “Mrs. Ashcroft, who obviously couldn’t believe what she saw happening to her sick husband, looked at Gonzales and Card as they walked out of the room and stuck her tongue out at them. (Emphasis added)

Well, here we have what is unquestionably the most powerful lawyer in the Bush Administration, Cheney Chief of Staff and Counsel David Addington, pining away for another terrorist bombing of the United States so that the Administration can cravenly grab even more power and completely eviscerate the Fourth Amendment. And, as Goldsmith relates, that extra authoritarian/dictatorial power is exactly what everybody in the Administration wanted desperately; so you can easily presume they were all similarly hoping for just such an event so they could grab their dream. Wonderful, eh?

If that were not enough cretinous craving for you, we now have the further details of their attempts to take advantage of the medically debilitated and incapacitated John Ashcroft in the hospital ICU. My hat is off to Mrs. Ashcroft for sticking her tongue out at these evil rubes. My answer to the question posed in the title to this piece is both.

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Developing -- David Addington Shifts Cheney's Ground Slightly

Rawstory is claiming an exclusive on a story involving a letter sent by Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, David Addington, to Senator John Kerry. Rawstory's link to the letter was broken at the time of this posting, but apparently Addington refined the Vice President's claim that he is not obligated to protect the nation's secrets in accordance with the President's Executive Order because the Vice President is not an "agency." Addington's letter is reported to contain the following:

"The executive order on classified national security information -- Executive Order 12958 as amended in 2003 -- makes clear that the Vice President is treated like the President and distinguishes the two of them from 'agencies.'

"The executive order gives the [Information Security Oversight Office], under the supervision of the Archivist of the United States, responsibility to oversee certain activities of 'agencies,' but not of the Vice President or the President.""

Unfortunately for Addington and the Vice President, Senator Kerry points out that, in addition to agencies, the executive order applies to "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information." The Vice President would seem to be an entity. Wouldn't he?

I can't wait to read the letter.

It would appear that Addington's legal argument might be a little addled.

I am still asking my basic questions about this mess. What secret documents has the Vice President or his office lost? When did he lose them? Why the cover-up? Is the Vice President a traitor or just an incompetent old fool?

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