[IP] Interesting article on inside-DOJ struggles
Begin forwarded message:
From: Paul Levy <plevy@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 30, 2006 7:38:20 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Interesting article on inside-DOJ struggles
Palace Revolt
They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a
quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror.
And they paid a price for it. A NEWSWEEK investigation.
By Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
Feb. 6, 2006 issue - James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor
who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney
general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed.
Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice
Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt,
appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual
passage. Comey thanked "people who came to my office, or my home, or
called my cell phone late at night, to quietly tell me when I was
about to make a mistake; they were the people committed to getting it
right*and to doing the right thing*whatever the price. These people,"
said Comey, "know who they are. Some of them did pay a price for
their commitment to right, but they wouldn't have it any other way."
One of those people*a former assistant attorney general named Jack
Goldsmith*was absent from the festivities and did not, for many
months, hear Comey's grateful praise. In the summer of 2004,
Goldsmith, 43, had left his post in George W. Bush's Washington to
become a professor at Harvard Law School. Stocky, rumpled, genial,
though possessing an enormous intellect, Goldsmith is known for his
lack of pretense; he rarely talks about his time in government. In
liberal Cambridge, Mass., he was at first snubbed in the community
and mocked as an atrocity-abetting war criminal by his more knee-jerk
colleagues. ICY WELCOME FOR NEW LAW PROF, headlined The Harvard Crimson.
They had no idea. Goldsmith was actually the opposite of what his
detractors imagined. For nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004,
he had been the central figure in a secret but intense rebellion of a
small coterie of Bush administration lawyers. Their insurrection,
described to NEWSWEEK by current and former administration officials
who did not wish to be identified discussing confidential
deliberations, is one of the most significant and intriguing untold
stories of the war on terror.
.....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11079547/site/newsweek/print/1/
displaymode/1098/
Paul Alan Levy
Public Citizen Litigation Group
1600 - 20th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 588-1000
http://www.citizen.org/litigation
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