by Justin A. Martell

Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) took one of the first steps in holding the Bush Administration accountable when he introduced House Resolution 1531 on Thursday.

The official title of HR 1531, which was introduced to the House Judiciary Committee, is "Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the President of the United States should not issue pardons to senior members of his administration during the final 90 days of his term of office."

'Justifying' Torture: Two Big Lies

By Coleen Rowley and Ray McGovern
July 19, 2008

One can assume that former Attorney General John Ashcroft didn’t mean it to be funny, but his testimony on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee might strike one as hilarious, were it not for the issue at hand — torture.

Ashcroft is the Attorney General who approved torture before he disapproved it, but committee members spared him accusations of flip-flopping.

He explained that he initially blessed the infamous torture memoranda drafted by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and others in mid-2002 because he (Ashcroft) believed it imperative to afford the President “the benefit of genuine doubt” regarding how to protect American lives in the “war on terror.”

But Ashcroft added that, despite this, when concerns about that earlier guidance for interrogations were brought to his attention, changing his mind “was not a hard decision for me.” A very flexible Attorney General.

July 8, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Air of Truth
By JERROLD NADLER

IN her recent testimony before the House subcommittee that I lead, Christie Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, played a shell game intended to create confusion about the federal government’s failure to protect rescue workers and others in New York after the World Trade Center towers fell on Sept. 11.

In the days after the attacks, the agency repeatedly gave blanket assurances about air quality. For example, Mrs. Whitman said on Sept. 18, 2001, that she was “glad to reassure the people of New York” that “their air is safe to breathe.” Such broad assurances contradicted government tests Mrs. Whitman had showing dangerous levels of asbestos both on the World Trade Center site — the so-called pile — and in surrounding neighborhoods. She now says that her statements referred to air quality in Lower Manhattan generally, not to air quality on the pile where rescue personnel were working.