Richard A. Clarke, a prominent counterterrorism expert who has served under almost every president since Reagan, has long been convinced that the worse president in his lifetime was George W. Bush — even through much of the early period of President Donald Trump’s administration.
But on Monday, The Daily Beast published new comments from Clarke suggesting that he is growing less sure of this assessment.
“He’s eviscerating the government. He’s eviscerating capabilities that we need,” Clarke told the Beast. “And it’s not as though if the Democrats win the 2020 election you just turn those capabilities back on. The people go away, the skill sets go away, the capabilities atrophy. And it will take years to undo the damage.”
The following article by Charlie Savage and Michael D. Shear was posted on the New York Times August 9, 2018:
Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, denied in 2006 that he had been involved in terrorism detainee policies. Credit: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Brett M. Kavanaugh volunteered to prepare a senior Bush administration official to testify about the government’s monitoring of conversations between certain terrorism suspects and their lawyers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a newly disclosed White House email shows.
The email appeared likely to become a focus at Judge Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing this year. Democrats have suggested that he misled the Senate at his 2006 appeals court confirmation hearing, when he turned aside questions about the George W. Bush administration’s handling of terrorism suspects by saying that he was “not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants” and by portraying his portfolio as focusing on “civil justice issues” like terrorism insurance.
The email, released Thursday, was part of a trove of about 5,700 pages of documents involving Judge Kavanaugh’s time as an associate White House counsel.
The following article by Karen Greenberg was posted on the AlterNet website October 15, 2017:
The Trump administration just classified its first American prisoner from the battlefields of Syria an “enemy combatant.”
Credit: Ivo Antonie de Rooij / Shutterstock.com
Eight years ago, when I wrote a book on the first days of Guantanamo, The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, I assumed that Gitmo would prove a grim anomaly in our history. Today, it seems as if that “detention facility” will have a far longer life than I ever imagined and that it, and everything it represents, will become a true, if grim, legacy of twenty-first-century America.
It appears that we just can’t escape the perpetual pendulum of the never-ending war on terror as it invariably swings away from the rule of law and the protections of the Constitution. Last month, worries that had initially surfaced during the presidential campaign of 2016 over Donald Trump’s statements about restoring torture and expanding Guantanamo’s population took on a new urgency. In mid-September, the administration acknowledgedthat it had captured an American in Syria. Though no facts about the detained individual have been revealed, including his name or any allegations against him, the Pentagon did confirm that he has been classified as an “enemy combatant,” a vague and legally imprecise category. It was, however, one of the first building blocks that officials of George W. Bush’s administration used to establish the notoriously lawless policies of that era, including Guantanamo, the CIA’s “black sites,” and of course “enhanced interrogation techniques.“ Continue reading “HUMAN RIGHTS Trump Is Restoring the Darkest Elements of Bush’s War on Terror”
Richard A. Clarke, a prominent counterterrorism expert who has served under almost every president since Reagan, has long been convinced that the worse president in his lifetime was George W. Bush — even through much of the early period of President Donald Trump’s administration.
