Impeachment will hang in the balance

Huge article on the front page of the WaPo on the whole panoply of questionably legal tactics the Bush administration has ordered from the CIA since 9-11. This article focuses solely on the actions taken by the CIA, so other programs like the NSA stuff are barely mentioned.

The "presidential powers during wartime" argument just got alot more significant, because if the Bush administration's argument does not meet legal muster, the president himself, according to actions outlined in this article, could be at the sharp end of hundreds, if not thousands, of criminal charges, although I doubt that it would ever reach that point.

But, this article states, fairly clearly from a knowledgeable and on record, named source, that Bush has been hip deep in all this, and seems to "relish... the dirty details." So, there is no plausible deniability.

Huge article. There's alot more here than I'm excerpting. Read it, read it, read it.

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.....

"In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action," said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. "But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations." .....

In four years, the GST has become larger than the CIA's covert action programs in Afghanistan and Central America in the 1980s, according to current and former intelligence officials......

Bush delegated much of the day-to-day decision-making and the creation of individual components to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet, according to congressional and intelligence officials who were briefed on the finding at the time.....

Tenet, according to half a dozen former intelligence officials, delegated most of the decision making on lethal action to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. .....

One way the White House limited debate over its program was to virtually shut out Congress during the early years. Congress, for its part, raised only weak and sporadic protests. The administration sometimes refused to give the committees charged with overseeing intelligence agencies the details they requested. It also cut the number of members of Congress routinely briefed on these matters, usually to four members -- the chairmen and ranking Democratic members of the House and Senate intelligence panels.

So, authorized by presidential signature, based on questionable internal legal opinions, and hidden from oversight. If he doesn't have the legal power that he claims,....

Another great article from Dana Priest(also the author of the secret prisons story.) Sorry I left her off my list of honest journalists earler.