John A. Macdonald

Sir John Alexander Macdonald GCB KCMG PC PC QC (11 January 1815 – 6 June 1891) was a Canadian politician and Father of Confederation who was the first Prime Minister of Canada (1867–1873, 1878–1891). The dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, he had a political career which spanned almost half a century. He drank heavily, and in 1873 was voted out during the Pacific Scandal, in which his party took bribes from businessmen seeking the contract to build the Pacific Railway. Macdonald's greatest achievements were building and guiding a successful national government for the new Dominion, using patronage to forge a strong Conservative Party, promoting the protective tariff of the National Policy, and building the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway. Economic growth was slow during his years in office, as Canada verged on stagnation; many residents migrated to the fast-growing United States. He fought to block provincial efforts to take power back from Ottawa. His most controversial move was to approve the execution of Métis leader Louis Riel for treason in 1885; it permanently alienated the Francophones who saw themselves humiliated.

John A. Rizzo

John A. Rizzo (born 1948) was a lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency for 34 years. He was the Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the War on Terror, during which the CIA held dozens of detainees in black site prisons around the globe. So-called "Enhanced interrogation techniques", widely considered to be torture, were approved by the George W. Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice in memos to Rizzo for use by CIA interrogators at the black sites. Rizzo signed off on all CIA-directed drone strikes from September 2001 until October 2009.

He is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Senior Counsel at the Steptoe & Johnson law firm.

Early life

A Boston native, Rizzo attended college at Brown University. He earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School. His first job out of law school was at the Treasury Department.

CIA career

Rizzo was hired at the CIA in 1976, just after the Church Committee released its report on the assassination of foreign leaders. By 1979, Rizzo became the staff lawyer for the Directorate of Operations, the CIA's clandestine branch. He served as the liaison between the CIA and the congressional investigators studying the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. Rizzo became Acting General Counsel of the CIA in November 2001, a position that was traditionally filled by someone from outside the agency.