Word: johnsen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Late on April 9, amid a flurry of news over the retirements of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and Congressman Bart Stupak, the White House quietly backed down from a yearlong battle with Republicans, announcing that Dawn Johnsen, President Obama's pick to lead the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, had withdrawn her nomination. The timing, some observers noted, was not accidental...
...rancor around Johnsen's nomination reached an unusual pitch for a position that until recent years was typically filled quickly and without controversy. The vitriol flowed in part because of the candidate herself, with her pro-choice positions and national-security stances. But the other reason was the long shadow that hangs to this day over the office known as the OLC. That shadow is torture...
...wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it was the Office of Legal Counsel that generated the legal memos justifying enhanced interrogation techniques, which some critics prefer to call torture. Johnsen, who headed the office on an interim basis during the Clinton Administration, did not mince words with respect to those memos and the Administration that generated them. Rather, she spoke openly and critically about what she saw as the excesses of the Bush lawyers. Writing in a blog post three years ago, for example, she decried the "shockingly flawed content" of one of the memos, writing that it encouraged...
...Republican Scott Brown's election in January, the confirmation would not be easy. And it wasn't, despite support from hundreds of law professors and one Senate Republican, Richard Lugar of Indiana. After her nomination was first reported out of committee, it languished through 2009. Obama had to renominate Johnsen again this year, resulting in a second hearing in March...
...recent U.S.-assisted attacks on alleged al-Qaeda strongholds in Yemen appear to be a stepped-up attempt to stamp out the threat. However, Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton University expert on Yemen, contends the strategy will ultimately prove counterproductive: "You can't just kill a few individuals and the al-Qaeda problem will go away." Indeed, a primary target in the attacks - Qasim al-Raymi, the al-Qaeda leader who is believed to be behind a 2007 bombing in central Yemen that killed seven Spanish tourists and two Yemenis - is still at large. And reports of a U.S. role, plus...