What's At Stake

Andrew Sullivan has a powerful post on just what this election is really about. Here's the video he posted:



He also quotes Esquire's endorsement. Read it there. In another post, he quotes Gary Wills on the same subject.

This is what that means. Here's a story from Wired, via C & L:

The CIA can hide statements from imprisoned suspected terrorists that the agency tortured them in its set of secret prisons, a federal judge ruled Wednesday,

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the Washington D.C. Circuit Court declined to review the government's assertions that the allegations of torture from men held in the CIA's black site prisons -- whether truthful or not -- would put the nation at risk of grave danger if allowed to be made public.

"The Court, giving deference to the agency’s detailed, good-faith declaration, is disinclined to second-guess the agency in its area of expertise through in camera review," Lamberth wrote (.pdf), referring to a procedure where a judge looks at evidence in his chamber without showing it to the opposing side.

Lamberth himself is not such a prize as all that:

Lamberth on Saturday told a packed room at the American Library Association's national conference that he'd "seen no evidence of government wrongdoing" He said it a couple times. It sounded funny.

As has been well documented, the Bush administration ran a complete end-around on FISA and the court that is supposed to approve warrants for domestic surveillance (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, over which Lamberth presided from 1995 to 2002). And last week, An internal FBI audit of the NSL program that covered 10 percent of the national security investigations since 2002 turned up over 1,000 instances in which the FBI may have broken the law. In 700 of those, telecoms and ISPs gave the FBI information the bureau didn't request. Instead of destroying the information, the FBI kept it and filed more NSLs, which don't require any judicial oversight.

If that's not wrongdoing, what is? The government has generally chalked up what can only be described as profound and sustained abuse to lax oversight and confusion. Lamberth more or less concurred.

"Bungling," he called it. "They didn't cross all their 't's or dot all their 'i's."

Wonder who appointed him?