Who is Dawn Johnsen, newly appointed to Office of Legal Counsel, DOJ

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11rich.html

The Press Representative of Lynn Woolsey just sent me this article... What I found most hopeful in it was:

"We could certainly do worse than another 9/11 Commission. Among those Americans still enraged about the Bush years, there are also calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials and, in a petition movement on Obama's transition Web site, a special prosecutor in the Patrick Fitzgerald mode. One of the sharpest appointments yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who last week was chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

This is the same office where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles for Slate last year, she wondered "where is the outrage, the public outcry" over a government that has acted lawlessly and that "does not respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency." She asked, "How do we save our country's honor, and our own?"

The last is not a rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can't be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also "resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists."

As if to anticipate the current debate, she added that "we must avoid any temptation simply to move on," because the national honor cannot be restored "without full disclosure." She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the aftermath of our government's descent into the dark side of torture and "extraordinary rendition." But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike."


I guess we have to display some "Outrage and Public Outcry".... Like we haven't been doing that????? What bubble are they within?

ADW

[thunder rising]

1. where is the outrage, the public outcry? Getting our ass bailed out of jail ... where was she?

If she hasn't notice the CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HAVE BEEN SCARED OF THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT!

I would like to go out and scream bloody murder, but if I am to loose everything (which some have in this campaign) I want it to be effective.