On Thursday, June 26, the House Judiciary Committee will conduct hearings into the legal genesis of the Administration’s torture policies. Featured witnesses will be David Addington and John Yoo, who was the principal draftsman of the torture memoranda. KPFA and participating Pacifica Network stations will be carrying the hearing live, gavel-to-gavel, starting at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time. Pacifica’s Larry Bensky and Harper’s legal affairs contributor Scott Horton will be co-anchoring the broadcast, which can be monitored through a streaming webcast.

From the archive:

While the gregarious Mr. Yoo continues to insert himself into the limelight and is now the best-known, it’s clear that his role is subsidiary to that of Haynes and Addington.

From Mike, from May:

David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, refused to testify without a subpoena. No date has been set for his appearance before Congress.

"We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court," Addington had told me in his typically sarcastic style during a tense White House meeting in February of 2004.

After 9/11 they and other top officials in the administration dealt with FISA they way they dealt with other laws they didn't like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations.

From last year:

The most provocative aspect of Goldsmith's argument, however, is also the least persuasive. He contends that the problem was not that Addington and the administration did not care sufficiently about the law, but that they cared too intensely, so much so that they were "strangled by law." He claims that "this war has been lawyered to death," and describes government officials as overly chilled by the prospect that they might be held criminally accountable for actions taken in the name of the country's security. Goldsmith prefers the good old days when matters of national security and war were, for the most part, not regulated by federal legislation, and presidents, such as FDR, were free to shape their judgments without regard for law, and could concentrate instead on "political legitimation."

Also from last year:

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review.

See also:

a typical display of Mr. Yoo’s dubious talents; "is it true that in America, Bush can fire prosecutors he doesn't like?"; In America today, the mentality of courtiers has reappeared; "Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists"; "If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant ..."; the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.