What a difference twelve years makes. Remember when John Yoo helped the Bush/Cheney crime family start a war with Iraq based on deliberate misdirection and misinformation? Of course we look back upon that time with horror and disbelief that we could have ever been led down that road by our own White House. True, Korea and Vietnam were also falsely engineered tragedies, but this happened in the modern era. We even had the Interwebs for heaven's sake! This was unconscionable.
More critically, we also had a man in the White House who was willing to invoke more Executive Privilege than the GOP's most delusional portrayal of President Obama. Thanks to that privilege, there is something President Obama can do, right now, that would end all talk about nixing the Iran Deal.
Torture memo writer extraordinaire, John Yoo, the deputy of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, was the very same author of a memo that would give the president the power to take all the guff from Tom Cotton and his 46 traitors, along with Debbie, Chuck and Bob on the 'Left' and tell them to shove it up their asses. From
the Federation of American Scientists:
Despite an explicit statutory requirement to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the President may withhold proliferation-related information from Congress if he determines that doing so could harm the national security, according to a sweeping opinion from the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that was prepared in 2003.
The opinion, written by then-OLC deputy John C. Yoo, was released this week under the
Freedom of Information Act. See Presidential Authority to Protect National Security Information, January 27, 2003.
The OLC opinion takes an uncompromising view of presidential authority. It reviews multiple statutes that mandate disclosure of various types of information to Congress, including requirements to report on WMD proliferation and to keep the intelligence committees “fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities.” It then concludes that those statutes cannot override, modify or limit the President’s constitutional prerogatives.
“Despite Congress’s extensive powers under the Constitution, its authorities to legislative [sic] and appropriate cannot constitutionally be exercised in a manner that would usurp the President’s authority over foreign affairs and national security,” the OLC opinion said.
That's right. These creeps really cooked their own bacon, and it's all in black and white written to Bush's AG, Alberto Gonzalez. The FAS piece continues:
The six page OLC opinion does have some positive features.
* It was prompted by an inquiry to OLC from then-White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales as to “whether the President has the constitutional authority to withhold sensitive national security information from Congress involving the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by other nations.” So the very fact of the inquiry is an indication that the authority to withhold was not self-evident even to the George W. Bush White House.
* The opinion discloses the title of at least one previously unknown OLC opinion on Congressional Notification for Certain Special Operations (November 1, 2002).
Check out Stephen Aftergood's piece here. There's more, there's always more. H/t to Capper for that infinite truth.
