Is Attorney General Mukasey Playing Caretaker or Terrorism Fighter?
Some had hoped Attorney General Michael Mukasey would fire a number of Justice Department insiders from the regime of his predecessor and investigate officials who approved harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects.
Instead the former judge is leaving questions about terrorism interrogations and past political hiring for the federal courts and ethics watchdogs, the Washington Post reports.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has complained that Mukasey is “content to serve as a caretaker for the regime of excessive executive power established by the Bush administration,” the story says. But Mukasey’s supporters say he is making independent judgments that will protect the United States from terrorism, even if his decisions don’t play well in the press.
“There is nothing frivolous about him,” Mukasey’s son, Marc Mukasey, told the Post. The younger Mukasey is a criminal defense lawyer in New York. “He doesn’t do politics, and he doesn’t do popularity contests. He doesn’t do flavor-of-the-month. He does law.”
Rather than listening to his critics, “Mukasey appears to be judging himself on a short list of his own criteria,” the article says. It cites these actions in which the attorney general:
–Worked for passage of a new eavesdropping law governing national security probes.
–Limited the number of Justice Department personnel who may receive calls from the White House and spoken out against political-based decision-making in criminal cases.
–Appointed a special prosecutor to investigate missing tapes of harsh interrogations.
–Backed a gay and lesbian group that wanted to use workplace rooms for meetings.
–Refused to criticize past Justice Department officials.
–Developed a plan to handle legal claims by detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
–Objected to a plan to move the cases against several Guantanamo detainees into the civilian courts.
