Goldsmith: “Extreme Secrecy… Led to a Lot of Mistakes”
In October, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a riveting hearing with Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel. The record of that hearing has just been published.
As was widely reported at the time, Mr. Goldsmith challenged the legality of certain aspects of the President’s warrantless surveillance program and raised questions about other policies and procedures in the “war on terrorism.”
“There’s no doubt that the extreme secrecy [surrounding the Terrorist Surveillance Program] — not getting feedback from experts, and not showing it to experts, and not getting a variety of views, even inside the executive branch — led to a lot of mistakes,” he said.
The PDF version of the hearing record includes Mr. Goldsmith’s answers to questions for the record from the Senate Committee members (pp. 38-49). In most cases, he deflected the Senators’ pointed questions. But several of the exchanges are interesting nevertheless.
Asked about the Administration’s refusal to disclose to Congress the legal memoranda justifying its interrogation program, Mr. Goldsmith stated:
“I believe it is the President’s prerogative not to disclose these opinions. And I believe it is the Congress’s prerogative to use political pressure to try to force the Executive to disclose the opinions.”
See “Preserving the Rule of Law in the Fight Against Terrorism,” hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, October 2, 2007.
To empower new voices to start their career in nuclear weapons studies, the Federation of American Scientists launched the New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship. Here’s what our inaugural cohort accomplished.
Common frameworks for evaluating proposals leave this utility function implicit, often evaluating aspects of risk, uncertainty, and potential value independently and qualitatively.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ August 2023 pulse panel, 60% of public schools were utilizing a “community school” or “wraparound services model” at the start of this school year—up from 45% last year.