Raves on Torture Speech, Awaiting Action

Update II: McClatchy: Cheney talk full of well lies

Update: Text of Obama address on national security

No thinking American wants President Obama's performance to merit Charles Krauthammer's making a valid point in his Obama in Bush Clothing column. That would be unusual for Krauthammer.

Progressives are waiting. Reaction can be summed in Glenn Greenwald's piece:

Obama's speech this morning, like most Obama speeches, made pretty points in rhetorically effective ways about the Constitution, our values, transparency, oversight, the state secrets privilege, and the rule of law. But his actions, in many critical cases, have repeatedly run afoul of those words. And while his well-crafted speech can have a positive impact on our debate and contained some welcome and rare arguments from a high-level political leader -- changes in the terms of the debate are prerequisites to changes in policy and the value of rhetoric shouldn't be understated -- they're still just words until his actions become consistent with them.

Obama and Trust

Update: What Are We Fighting For? (Rick Reyes)

It really would not take much for President Obama to renounce and halt torture and two American wars of aggression while he's at it.

That's actually why a lot of people put him into office.

Obama is breaking a trust right now for what he stands for, for what we stand for. Will he continue?

From Noam Chomsky, Unexceptional Americans:

Occasionally the conflict between ‘what we stand for’ and ‘what we do’ has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the U.S. has a ‘transcendent purpose’: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since ‘the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide.’ But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with that ‘transcendent purpose.’

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not ‘confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.’ Reality is the unachieved ‘national purpose’ revealed by ‘the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.’ What actually happened was merely the ‘abuse of reality.’

The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the U.S. is ‘just one great, but imperfect, country among others.’ Cohen agrees that the evidence supports Hodgson's judgment, but nonetheless regards as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson's failure to understand that ‘America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward.’ The American idea is revealed in the country's birth as a ‘city on a hill,’ an ‘inspirational notion’ that resides ‘deep in the American psyche,’ and by ‘the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise’ demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson's error, it seems, is that he is keeping to ‘the distortions of the American idea,’ ‘the abuse of reality.’ ...

‘Come Over and Help Us’

The inspirational phrase ‘city on a hill’ was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation ‘ordained by God.’ One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words ‘Come over and help us.’ The British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of ‘the idea of America,’ from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a ‘shining city on the hill,’ while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the ‘humanitarian intervention’ led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described ‘the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union’ by means ‘more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.’

Dick Cheney Stays on Point

Update: Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP

Dick Cheney is competing with Rush and Newt as the leader of the new GOP.

We wish him luck.

Maureen Dowd and Juan Cole analyse Cheney's macabre machinations that apparently will not stop ever. From Cole:

This week's news is about the grand old pit bull's struggle to continue to define his own party. Cheney emerged last Friday to warn on a North Dakota radio program that it would be a mistake for the Republican Party to moderate its message. (Does that mean it is now radical?) Then on Sunday Cheney told Bob Schieffer of 'Face the Nation' that it was a mistake to stop using waterboarding and other forms of extreme interrogation, and that they did not constitute torture. He also poked fun at Colin Powell, questioning his credentials as a Republican and expressing a preference for the waspish Limbaugh as the party's leader.

Here's ... Condi

Update: Post reports on 4th-Grader Questioning Rice on Waterboarding, she said it's legal.

Pathetic.

Said Condi last week at Stanford (April 27): Trust us; and the president says it's legal, then it's legal; and "We did not torture anyone" at Git-mo. No reason to doubt her integrity.

Here's the video of Condi answering questions at Stanford:

Terrorists Rejoice as Obama Renounces Torture

I wonder if Joe Lieberman and Company who repeated the talking point that we need torture, though we don't do it, as a weapon against terrorism really believed it.

No matter.

From The Christian Science Monitor's Warren Richey reports:

Obama moves to overhaul ‘war on terror’ practices
In three executive orders signed Thursday, he departs sharply from Bush's policies on Guantanamo, CIA prisons, and harsh interrogation tactics.

President Obama is taking swift and dramatic action to shift the direction of America’s efforts to fight terrorism, counter the threat from Al Qaeda, and safeguard the nation. On Thursday, on his second full day in the White House, Mr. Obama signed three executive orders and a memorandum that provide the broad outline of a major overhaul of US national security policy. The actions mark not only a sharp departure and rejection, but a rebuke, of policies that formed the backbone of President Bush’s global war on terror.

Mr. Obama’s executive orders call for:

• Closing the terror prison camp at Guantanamo within a year.

• Closing 'as expeditiously as possible' all secret CIA prisons overseas.

• Banning the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics not authorized by the Army Field Manual.

• Requiring the International Red Cross be granted access to any individual detained by the US in any armed conflict.

• Requiring that all US detainees be treated in accord with at least the minimal protections of the Geneva Conventions.

It would funny though if a Lieberman, Cheney or Bush or some other Republican were to say, 'Well, I was wrong and I lied anyway.'

U.S. Torture Truth Commission Needed

In this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof calls for the establishment of a Truth Commission to document and investigate the human rights violations of the United States government under the Bush administration.

Kristof writes:

The first step of accountability isn’t prosecutions. Rather, we need a national Truth Commission to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing. ... Both Barack Obama and John McCain should commit to impaneling a Truth Commission early in the next administration. This commission would issue a report to help us absorb the lessons of our failings, the better to avoid them during the next crisis.

Good idea on not prosecuting the perpetrators, as any rational accounting could sensibly hold most of us reading these words accountable. And that's not so realistic.

So, let's establish the Truth Commission and take the folks directly responsible for conceiving and carrying out the despicable American torture program: George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, David Addington, the whole stinking lot of them; subpoena the bastards, grant total immunity save the vow to prosecute any lie or half-truth left out under testimony.

As for Kristof's suggestion that we stack the proposed commission with military personnel--forget that, let's stack the commission with human rights activists, investigators, and journalists who have a demonstrated history of reporting on human rights violations.

Allan Nairn, human rights activist and journalist, would be the model.

Some resources on human rights:

- United States Constitution
- Fourth Geneva Convention (full text)
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Physicians for Human Rights Report on American Torture

Waterboarding Is Torture: Hitchens' First-hand Account

Christopher Hitchens, on assignment from Vanity Fair, arranged to be tortured by waterboarding and write a first-person account. He lasted for 17 seconds during the exercise.

From Vanity Fair (video follows below here), Hitchens writes:

Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, 'waterboarding' was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.
[Read the entire piece at Vanity Fair.]

The video is not for children to watch, but very much for adults to watch and act against this obscenity of our government.

One can only guess how many innocents have suffered at the hands of the modern-day Torquemada: America under Bush and his assorted chickenhawks.

I have not been a fan of Hitchens' writing the last several years, but Hitchens deserves credit for his first-hand account exposing the cowardice and betrayal by the Bush administration.

Secret Torturing US Government

From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. ...

Bush Stonewalls CIA Torture Tapes Destruction

Do we have a right to know what George W. Bush's role was in the destruction of the CIA torture tapes?

Apparently not.

From the Times:

President Bush deflected questions on Thursday about the destruction of C.I.A. interrogation tapes, saying that he will withhold comment until investigations into the affair are complete.

When the investigations are over, Bush will say: Time to move on.

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White House Reeling from Torture Tape NYT Story

Update: The Hill reports, "Catherine Mathis, senior vice president of corporate communications for the newspaper, stated that the sub-headline [reading “White House Role Was Wider Than It Said” ] has been changed, adding that a correction would be printed. However, Mathis also pointed out that the White House did not challenge the contents of the article."

The White House is fighting against the latest scandal involving the destruction of the CIA torture tapes and White House lying about its knowledge of the destruction.

The Statement by the Press Secretary says the NYT story is "pernicious and troubling..."

Reads the NYT story:

WASHINGTON — At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

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Canadian Federal Court: U.S. Does Torture

Karl Rove, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are ideologues of different abilities and temperaments.

But one thing they all share in their rigid, authoritarian ideology is their enthusiasm to torture people, and then lie about it.

Human rights attorney and Harper's writer Scott Horton reports on a key decision announced last Thursday by Canada’s Federal Court.

Writes Horton: "Here’s the short version: '''We do not torture?' That claim has been formally reviewed by a court and found to be a lie."

Horton's longer version (and the work of Professor Jaya Ramji-Nogales) are worth reading, if you object to torture and our government lying about torturing, especially innocent people.
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Alexandrovna Blasts Dershowitz' Pro-torture WSJ Column

As defenders of torture go, militarist Alan Dershowitz has rightfully become the scorn of the anti-torture, anti-militarist American progressives, you know: Anti-Semitic Israel haters.

Larisa Alexandrovna takes down Dershowitz, and writes that Alan Dershowitz was against Nazis before he was for them.

Welcome to the dessert of the real in which a Jewish man can cite Nazis in defense of torture tactics. I was raised on the Holocaust. I went to a highly religious school where many of my teachers and guest lecturers were Holocaust survivors.

My family talked about the Holocaust at every opportunity, remembering those who were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered, including members of my family. I lived under the Soviet regime, which also tortured and murdered. I have never met or spoken with any Jew who has ever defended torture, no matter who the "scapegoat" is.

Apparently, there are some Jews who are more than willing to become the very monsters they abhor.

This mentality I do not understand and never will.

Take for example the latest Alan Dershowitz column in the Wall
Street Journal. Aside from getting the new meme on Mukasey about how the Democrats are beholden to MoveOn.org - echoed by meister Rove, President Bush, Dick Cheney, and the right wing propaganda machine as if one ring ruled them all - Dershowitz actually writes this:

"There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives."

This statement defies logic. Even if in some instances Nazi tactics worked, why would anyone endorse them for any reason, especially a Jewish man? Dershowitz, and others like him - Joe Lieberman, et al - do not speak for Jews, nor do they speak for Israel. In fact, the far right regime that has co-opted Israel and the US both is not representative of Judaism or Christianity for that matter. Whatever or whomever it is they represent, it is not the Israeli people or the American people. It is as though a multi-national organized crime syndicate has taken over both countries and is using the cover of religion as a shield against criticism.

No Jew, no real Jew, would ever support torture. When torture becomes policy for politically influential American and Israeli Jews, then the whole of our history becomes polluted with monsters whose crimes we lose the right to condemn. It is the responsibility of other prominent Jews in both countries to
take our religion back from these political parasites, because if we don't, their handy work will create the kind of antisemitism not seen since WWII. Ever since this morally repugnant right wing extremism has in a "paper coup" taken over both Israel and the United States, antisemitism has skyrocketed.

To look at the global situation, racism and xenophobia had become more acute, particularly anti-semitism. Worldwide, there had been 590 cases of deliberate violence and vandalism against Jews, an increase of 31 per cent from the previous year, with the most incidents in Europe and the Middle East.

If Israeli citizens will not demand a more moderate government, then Jews around the world will have to ask the hard question: what is more important, the country of Israel or the Jewish people as a a whole?

And if American Jews do not demand that right wing political prostitutes, Jews in name only, stop the US march toward world domination, then American Jews might have to ask themselves a hard question as well: Is the United States more important than our traditions, morals, values, and history as a Jewish people?

In both cases, Jews of the world have to stand up against torture that other, more visible Jews in the US and Israel publicly endorse. We have to do this because we are a good people, a victimized people, and because we know what it means to be on the other side of the torture argument.
- Larisa Alexandrovna
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DoJ Official Experienced Waterboarding, Told WH It Is Illegal, Was ‘Forced Out’

Via ThinkProgress:

Last night, ABC World News reported that in 2004 then-acting assistant attorney general Daniel Levin was so concerned about the administration’s use of waterboarding that he went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure himself.

Levin took over former Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith’s job when he resigned and immediately began reassessing the administration’s interrogation techniques.

Levin released a new memo in Dec. 2004 that replaced the 2002 Bybee memo. Levin’s memo declared that “Torture is abhorrent” but also cautioned in a footnote that his memo was not declaring the administration’s previous opinions illegal. “The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.”

ABC reported that after Levin personally experienced waterboarding, he told the White House that it could be considered torture:

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn’t die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.

Levin was working on a second memo that would have imposed tighter controls on the use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. While working on that memo, ABC reported “Levin was forced out of the Justice Department when Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General.” Watch it:

ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg reported, “Sources said Levin was seen as too independent by the Bush administration — not someone who could be counted on to endorse White House policies.”
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Human Rights Writer Blasts Bush

There is much to despise in the administration of George W. Bush. Its secret program for inflicting torture certainly leads the counts of the anti-democratic indictment of this reprehensible regime.

Scott Horton, a human rights attorney, writing at Harper's has written among the most incisive commentary on Bush's human rights violations, and has broken much ground uncovering the administration's corruption of the Department of Justice that has often functioned as a political machine using the power of the prosecutor on Republicans' political enemies.

Many agencies of government of been similarly corrupted and used for purposes that can only be labeled as indecent.

For those Americans, and there are tens of millions of them, for whom human rights, liberty and clean and open government remain the foundations of a decent society, acting against this administration is a moral imperative.

What the historian Norman Cohn called the "mood of passive compliance" that enabled the Holocaust and the rise of the NAZIs ought not allow continuation of Bush's atrocities that (though not comparable to the Holocaust) have claimed millions of victims, corrupted the foundations of a society, and functioned with the same levers of citizen disengagement.

Horton latest column can be read at We Do Not Torture.

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We Don't Torture Lie Continues

George W. Bush defended himself against revelations of a Justice Department opinion allowing torture by pushing the same “This government does not torture people” line that he has been saying for years.

In the face of any new evidence, the administration will simply convey its message repeatedly and then refuse to provide the documentation demonstrating the falsity of administration statements.

This track is leading into some upset people on Capital Hill.

The Times SHERYL GAY STOLBERG writes:

President Bush, reacting to a Congressional uproar over the disclosure of secret Justice Department legal opinions permitting the harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, defended the methods on Friday, declaring, “This government
does not torture people.”
... But his comments only provoked another round of recriminations on Capitol Hill, as Democrats ratcheted up their demands to see the classified memorandums, first reported Thursday by The New York Times. “The administration can’t have it both ways,” Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement after the president’s remarks. “I’m tired of these games. They can’t say that Congress has been fully briefed while refusing to turn over
key documents used to justify the legality of the program.”
In two separate legal opinions written in 2005, the Justice Department authorized the C.I.A. to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological
tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
... Administration officials have confirmed the existence of the classified opinions, but will not make them public, saying only that they approved techniques that were “tough, safe, necessary and lawful.”
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Bush Lied, We Do Torture

The New York Times has a blockbuster revealing that as Bush and Company ran around pushing the "we don't torture" line, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other administration toadies were secretly issuing orders expanding the limits of U.S.-sanctioned torture.

Bush and his cronies lied to the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the American people to pursue an anti-human program of torture over the objections of many government attorneys. James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, was derided as a "disloyal" "wimp" for his moral and legal objections.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central
Intelligence Agency.

... Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
... Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.
“For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste — extremely hazardous to their health,” Mr. Horton said.
“If you give the administration what it wants, you’ll lose credibility in the academic community,” he said. “But if you hold back, you’ll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.”
... Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.
But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.
“On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,” said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

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Nuclear Whistleblower Vanunu Appeals Jail Sentence for Speaking, Free on Appeal

Via Reuters:

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu is contesting a new jail six-month sentence received for maintaining unauthorized ties with foreigners after he completed an 18-year prison term for treason (blowing the whistle on the development of nuclear weapons), his lawyer said on Monday.

The unauthorized ties were specifically speaking with reporters and writing in Internet chatrooms on the topics of human rights, freedom and a nuclear-free world, communications violating the terms of his parole from an Israeli prison.

Most of his prison sentence was spent in solitary confinement, conditions that human rights organisations have condemned on humanitarian grounds.

The government's refusal to let Vanunu leave Israel is not popular with many citizens of Israel. See Haaretz' Let Him Go Already.

Attorney Avigdor Feldman said that Vanunu had filed an appeal on Sunday with the district court in Jerusalem, where a lower court sentenced him to six months behind bars in July.

"The immediate significance is that my client will not be going back to jail any time soon," Feldman told Reuters, adding that he expected a decision on the appeal within three months.

Vanunu was first imprisoned in 1986 after giving a tell-all interview to a British newspaper about his work as a mid-level technician at Israel's main atomic reactor outside the southern desert town of Dimona. The disclosures all but blew away the iron-clad secrecy around Israel's assumed atomic arsenal.

Vanunu was freed in 2004 but barred indefinitely from leaving Israel by order of defense officials who argued that he had more state secrets to spill. Vanunu, 52, has denied that.

Under the terms of his release, Vanunu was also required to seek official permission for contacts with foreigners. Several unauthorized interviews he gave to international media about Israel's nuclear program landed him back in court.

Israel neither confirms nor denies having the Middle East's only atomic weapons under a policy of "strategic ambiguity" billed as warding off enemies while avoiding arms races.

Should the Jerusalem District Court rule against Vanunu's appeal, he could turn to the Supreme Court, Feldman said. However, the Supreme Court has already rejected a petition by Vanunu to overturn the travel ban imposed on him by the state.

A Jewish convert to Christianity, Vanunu argues that by refusing international inspections at the Dimona reactor Israel inflames regional tensions and risks a "second Holocaust".

Jerusalem District Court had held off implementing July's sentence pending a decision by Vanunu on whether to appeal.

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They Hate Us for Our Freedom

... and of-course the related commitments to human rights and dignity.

Jane Mayer in the New Yorker offers a glimpse into Bush's idea of freedom, human rights and dignity.

Check out: The Black Sites, A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program.
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'Signing Statements' Study Finds Bush Has Ignored Laws

Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post reports that George Bush not only politicized the Department of Justice, but in his position of chief executive in carrying out the laws, chose self-consciously what laws he can follow, and what laws he can ignore, consonant with his administration’s view of the unitary executive—the doctrine that proclaims Bush's nearly unlimited executive power.
President Bush has asserted that he is not necessarily bound by the bills he signs into law, and yesterday a congressional study found multiple examples in which the administration has not complied with the requirements of the new statutes.

Bush has been criticized for his use of "signing statements," in which he invokes presidential authority to challenge provisions of legislation passed by Congress.

The president has challenged a federal ban on torture, a request for data on the administration of the USA Patriot Act and numerous other assertions of congressional power. As recently as December, Bush asserted the authority to open U.S. mail without judicial warrants in a signing statement attached to a postal reform bill.
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