Not a bug, it’s a feature? via yamiq.

There will be another release of OLC memos today from the Obama administration.

More details on them to come, but thus far AG Holder has issued a fairly strong statement that CIA agents and others who operated in good faith reliance on OLC memoranda as controlling law — and within the parameters of conduct as outlined in those memos — will not be prosecuted.

No particular word, though, on those whose conduct and actions may fall outside the parameters of OLC memos and timeframe. Also, no word on military personnel whose conduct may fall within OLC parameters but outside the UCMJ.

Without having all the memos in hand it is impossible to definitively line out what would or would not be included conduct. More on that as I get it. dday has more.

UPDATE: Memos can be found here.

In the meantime, here is the statement issued by President Obama regarding the memo release:

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During his European trip, President Obama had this to say to the Turks:

He implored the Turks to embrace “an enduring commitment to the rule of law” as the “only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people.”

But it’s been do as we say, not as we do for far too long, hasn’t it?  From the motion filed Friday by the Obama administration:

…the President has established, by Executive Order, a deliberative process to address questions concerning Executive detention authority and options. The Task Force will be reviewing the processes currently in place at Bagram and elsewhere, and will make recommendations to the President regarding those processes. If this Court were to proceed with these cases during the pendency of the appeal, the Court would impose serious practical burdens on, and potential harm to, the Government and its efforts to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. Although in this Court’s view the burdens of litigating these habeas petitions are not insurmountable, there is no dispute that Bagram Airfield is in a theater of war where the Nation’s troops are in harm’s way….

The re-location of the defendant to a war zone does not negate the need for the rule of law and application of justice.

These are not mutually exclusive concepts, nor have they been in the years that we have operated under a military code of justice — from George Washington’s day forward.  Nor should they be.

As you can see from the YouTube above, candidate Obama understood the need for the rule of law, calling this sort of indefinite detention without lawful habeas checks and balances a "black hole."  Without a means to challenge detention — and habeas was such a sacred right to the Founders that they wrote it into the Constitution itself — how can an innocent prove that detention is unlawful?  Just ask the Uighurs how that’s worked for them.

It is the decisions made to uphold the rule of law in the tough times that show our character. We are still failing the test that Robert Jackson set forth at Nuremberg:

In a wiser past, we tried Nazi war criminals in the sunlight. Summing up for the prosecution at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson said that "the future will never have to ask, with misgiving: ‘What could the Nazis have said in their favor?’ History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. . . . The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength."

The world has never doubted the judgment at Nuremberg. But no one will trust the work of these secret tribunals.

Glenn has more. Much more. As does Digby.

STEVE KROFT: One question about Dick Cheney and Guantanamo — I’m sure you want to answer this.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Oh, absolutely.

KROFT: A week ago, Vice President Cheney said essentially that your willingness to shut down Guantanamo and change the way that prisoners are treated and interrogated was making America weaker and more vulnerable to another attack. And that the interrogation techniques that were used at Guantanamo were essential in preventing another attack against the United States.

OBAMA: I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney. Not surprisingly. You know, I think that Vice President Cheney has been at the head of a movement whose notion is somehow that we can’t reconcile our core values, our constitution, our belief that we don’t torture with our national security interests. I think he’s drawing the wrong lessons from history — the facts don’t bear him out. I think he is…that attitude, that philosophy has done incredible damage to our image and position in the world.

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Honestly, some days the stupid just gets overwhelming. None more blatantly idiotic over the last few years than the extent to which our nation’s legal system was end-run for reasons that are still not quite apparent beyond “because we said so and we want to, so there.” Al-Marri was indicted in a US court in Peoria, IL, this past week.  Note that the world has not come to an end.

We know the backstory: secrecy and legally incompetent boobery masking wholesale gutting of the rule of law. But something in Jane Mayer’s most recent reporting on the al-Marri case made me pause: Unlike the staff at Abu Ghraib, the brig staff had been trained for the job. Their mission, as they saw it, was to run a safe, professional, and humane prison, regardless of who was held there….

Let’s take a closer look at the latest round of reporting on the as-yet-still-not-released OPR report on legal reasoning (or lack thereof) at the Bush/Cheney OLC. On the heels of Isikoff’s Saturday leakfest, Newsweek coughs up with some intriguing tidbits…

Ready yourself for the shrieks, the cries, the dittohead fury…the wingnut run on Depends: Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told Congress today that instability in countries around the world caused by the current global economic crisis rather than terrorism is the primary near-term security threat to the United States….Blair also raised the specter of the “high levels of violent extremism” in the turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s along with “regime-threatening instability” if the economic crisis persists over a one- to two-year period.