Bush's Oily Embrace

Bush took yet another swipe at last week's major Supreme Court decision-- the third time in four years the Court concluded that his detainee policies violated basic precepts of the American legal system.

"We received a fresh reminder of the importance of the courts last week," Bush said "A bare majority of five Supreme Court justices overturned a bipartisan law that the United States Congress passed and I signed to deliver justice to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. With this decision, hardened terrorists -- hardened foreign terrorists now enjoy certain legal rights previously reserved for American citizens. This is precisely the kind of judicial activism that frustrates the American people. And the best way to change it is to put Republicans in charge in the Senate and John McCain in the White House."

Bush concluded: "This is the final time I'm going to speak to this event. And when I ran for President eight years ago. . . . I promised to uphold the dignity and honor of this office. And to the best of my ability, I have tried to live up to that promise. (Applause.) Next January I will leave with confidence in our country's course -- and the proud work we have done together."

Torture Watch

Members of the House Judiciary Committee heard more testimony yesterday on Bush's interrogation policies. Here's some video. Here's the prepared statement from Daniel Levin, a former acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under Bush.

Laura Rozen blogs that Levin concluded his prepared statement with one additional observation: "As a witness sitting here in a hearing, I feel like I have some obligation to say something about this. And I'm very limited, I think, in what I can say. But if the subcommittee has been informed that there was a total of three minutes of waterboarding, I would suggest the subcommittee should go back and get that clarified, because that I don't believe is an accurate statement."

Legal blogger Marty Lederman notes that, when Levin was asked if he knew "of any Administration that has so consistently advanced positions that are at odds with mainstream and judicial opinions regarding the scope of its powers?," he replied: "I don't."

Here is the prepared testimony of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell and has emerged as a leading administration critic.

"At what level did American leadership fail?" Wilkerson asked. "I believe it failed at the highest levels of the Pentagon, in the Vice President's office, and perhaps even in the Oval Office, though [some evidence] tends to make me think the President may have been ignorant of the worst parts of the failure."

He said Cheney's view is "that any evil is justified in the name of security."

War Crimes Watch

I wrote in yesterday's column that Anthony Taguba, the two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

Warren P. Strobel writes for McClatchy Newspapers that Taguba "is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes."

Scott Horton writes for The New Republic that a war-crime prosecution of Bush officials is not in the cards domestically. But, he writes: "Is it likely that prosecutions will be brought overseas? Yes. It is reasonably likely. [Philippe Sands's new book The Torture Team] contains an interview with an investigating magistrate in a European nation, which he describes as a NATO nation with a solidly pro-American orientation which supported U.S. engagement in Iraq with its own soldiers. The magistrate makes clear that he is already assembling a case, and is focused on American policymakers. I read these remarks and they seemed very familiar to me. In the past two years, I have spoken with two investigating magistrates in two different European nations, both pro-Iraq war NATO allies. Both were assembling war crimes charges against a small group of Bush administration officials. 'You can rest assured that no charges will be brought before January 20, 2009,' one told me. And after that? 'It depends. We don't expect extradition. But if one of the targets lands on our territory or on the territory of one of our cooperating jurisdictions, then we'll be prepared to act.'