Eric Holder

Congress, Eric Holder

AG Holder, Senate Judiciary Committee showdown abruptly postponed

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Attorney General Eric Holder was to appear this morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee. CNN is reporting that, all of a sudden, Holder is not available and the hearing was postponed:

Holder is out of town on travel the rest of this week, and Congress is out the following week, so no new hearing date is scheduled. The last-minute delivery of Justice Department responses to questions asked by the Republicans more than four months ago appeared to fuel an already agitated group of senators from the staunchly partisan Senate judiciary panel.

GOP staff members were scrambling to go through the documents in advance of what they expected would be Holder’s scheduled 9:30 a.m. appearance before the committee. If the hearing had taken place, it would have marked Holder’s first appearance before the Senate panel since November, a few days after he proclaimed his decision to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City.
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Republican sources say the minority side was prepared to bombard Holder with what they see as inconsistencies and errors. They said Justice Department officials acknowledged in Monday’s last-minute dump of documents that they can not provide the details to back their assertion that 300 terrorists have been successfully tried in civilian courts.

Republicans also prepared to attack Holder on other fronts, including his failure to disclose seven legal briefs he had written in support of positions in federal court cases.

Maybe Holder is just off practicing his next “Nation of Cowards” speech, while avoiding Congressional oversight.

Update: Word is the hearing is rescheduled for April 14. As Holder said last week that a decision “is weeks away” on where the 9/11 trials will be conducted, I suspect the administration worked out a deal with Senator Pat Leahy to avoid his testifying before an announcement on that is made.

9/11, al Qaeda, Debra Burlingame, Eric Holder, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Lawfare

Stalking the CIA; Justice lawyers at daggers drawn with the ­intelligence community

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Following up on Monday’s op-ed, ‘Gitmo’s Indefensible Lawyers,’ Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn have more about Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and current Department of Justice Gitmo Task Force lawyer Jennifer Daskal today in The Weekly Standard. Here is an excerpt and the link:

President Bush “will go down in history as the torture president,” Daskal told the Associated Press in March 2008. “The Bush administration continues to insist that CIA and other nonmilitary interrogators are not bound by the military rules and has reportedly given CIA interrogators the green light to use a range of so-called ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, and exposure to extreme cold,” Daskal added.

Daskal’s anti-CIA activism was not limited to making hyperbolic statements to the press. Daskal and Human Rights Watch played a significant role in uncovering the CIA’s secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, where top terrorists were detained and interrogated.

On November 2, 2005, Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported that the “CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.” The Post, citing the government’s security concerns, did not name the countries where the facilities were located. But just a few days later, on November 6, 2005, Human Rights Watch revealed the countries in a posting on its website. The organization said it had “collected information that CIA airplanes traveling from Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 made direct flights to remote airfields in Poland and Romania.” The organization encouraged European officials to investigate further, and the Europeans did just that.

Next week, when Attorney General Eric Holder appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I hope they ask him if Daskal has had direct access to the CIA’s agreements with the countries that assisted America, the transportation assets, and what intelligence Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other high-value al Qaeda detainees provided. I mean, it seems like a good place to start.