This time there can be no discussion about how "having to choose the lesser of two evils only leaves you with evil" or "there's not a dime's bit of difference between the two parties."
Last time we heard that, we got the War in Iraq, Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, Samuel Alito and John Roberts on the Supreme Court, domestic surveillance and waterboarding.
There's no end to how bad a president Donald Trump would be. And I just don't know what America will look like with Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
#ImWithHer
POST SCRIPT: For my friends who may be thinking of voting for Pat Toomey, as far as I know, he still hasn't said he won't vote for the lying, cheating, science-denying sexual predator who's waay to enamored with torture. Perhaps that's something for you to think about when you see his name in the voting booth.
Human Rights Watch, the nonprofit nongovernmental human rights organization formed in 1978 has issued a report telling us that:
It is now well established that following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention—sometimes for years—or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or otherwise ill-treated them. While the program officially ended in 2009, the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing.
Many detainees were held by the CIA in pitch-dark windowless cells, chained to walls, naked or diapered, for weeks or months at a time. The CIA forced them into painful stress positions that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep for days, to the point where many hallucinated or begged to be killed to end their misery. It used “waterboarding” and similar techniques to cause near suffocation or drowning, crammed detainees naked into tiny boxes, and prevented them from bathing, using toilets, or cutting their hair or nails for months. “We looked like monsters,” one detainee said of his appearance while in CIA custody.
In other words: WE TORTURED. Or at the very least, THE CIA TORTURED IN OUR NAME.
Prosecute the torture.
HRC goes on:
US officials who created, authorized, and implemented the CIA program should be among those investigated for conspiracy to torture as well as other crimes. They include: Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, Assistant Attorney General for Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Jay Bybee, OLC Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, an individual identified as “CTC Legal” in the Senate Summary, CIA Director George Tenet, National Security Legal Advisor John Bellinger, Attorney General John Ashcroft, White House Counsel Legal Advisor Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the Vice President David Addington, Deputy White House Counsel Timothy Flanigan, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes II, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President George W. Bush. In addition, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, CIA psychologist contractors who devised the program, proposed it to the CIA, and helped carry it out, should also be investigated for their role in the initial conspiracy.
Torturers all.
Prosecute the torture.
Why is this important? Look:
The failure to credibly investigate and prosecute torture committed in any territory under US jurisdiction violates US obligations under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and other treaties to which the US is a party. Other countries and entities should open their own investigations into CIA torture and should exercise universal jurisdiction, where applicable, over US nationals and others implicated in torture or other abuses. Additionally, countries that were complicit or otherwise unlawfully assisted the CIA program should also conduct investigations into the alleged illegal conduct of their own nationals.
Besides violating international law, the US government’s inaction in the face of clear evidence of torture sends a message to future US policymakers and officials that they too can commit torture and other ill-treatment and not fear being held accountable. Several presidential candidates for the 2016 elections have already indicated they would consider using so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” if they were to be elected.
Because Trump and Jeb! have both indicated a willingness to bring it back.
Prosecute the torture, Mr President. So it can't happen again.
Doing something a little different today - I think.
In today's Tribune-Review, I find two pieces written or co-written by columnist Salena Zito. We've looked at Zito's writing before, by the way. But today might be something new - or at least newish.
But before we go any further, let's see who Salena Zito is. Here is her bio at Townhall.com:
Salena Zito is a political analyst, reporter and editorial page columnist. She has also reported on Pennsylvania politics for The Weekly Standard. A board member of the Center for Media & Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation, Salena Zito honed her skills working on the campaigns of George H.W. Bush, Senator Rick Santorum, Bush2000, Bush-Cheney 2004 served on the senate staff of U.S. Senator Arlen Specter. Salena Zito has interviewed one on one Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director General Hayden, Homeland Security Director Chertoff, Attorney General Gonzales and First Lady Laura Bush. Zito spends a third of her time on the road interviewing legislators as well as current policy makers.
We'll try to ignore the conservative credentials when we read this news article about Governor Romney's visit yesterday to our fair city where Zito oh-so-subtly covers for him:
Mitt Romney repudiated President Obama’s attacks on his personal finances on Tuesday, calling it “a sad day when that is the course that the president takes.”
“I think it is beneath the dignity of the presidency for him to wage a campaign of personal attacks, and particularly when it is based on dishonesty,” Romney said in an interview with the Tribune-Review.
He referred to the Obama campaign’s two weeks of criticism of the former Massachusetts governor’s record at Bain Capital, a venture capital firm Romney founded in 1984 and headed until 1999, and his refusal to release more than two years’ worth of tax returns.
Did Romney actually leave Bain in 1999? I hear there are some SEC documents that say otherwise. But the 1999 date remains unchallenged by Zito.
And we'll also try to ignore Zito's conservative credentials in this other news article about Romney's fundraiser in North Huntington:
Mitt Romney sharpened his attacks on President Obama’s economic and health-care policies in appearances at a Westmoreland County business and a Pittsburgh fundraiser on Tuesday.
“He has to recognize that his policies have failed to get Americans work again,” Romney told a crowd of more than 1,000 people at Horizontal Wireline Services in North Huntingdon, which runs wires into gas and oil wells to help extract Marcellus shale gas. “I have an answer for him: liberal policies don’t make jobs.”
Later, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and former Massachusetts governor attended a fundraiser at the Duquesne Club, Downtown, where tickets ranged from $2,500 for the reception to $50,000 for a private dinner. More than 300 tickets were sold.
In the piece Romney says Obama is out of touch. I wonder how the construction of Romney's car elevator is going.
For the Romney campaign, they must be happy to know that they have such good friends in the news media.
Take a look at this Editorial from today's Tribune-Review (by the way, it's titled "Ed the terrorist?":
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell is so self-serving that he accepted apparently illegal payments for speeches supporting an Iranian-dissident organization that the State Department has listed as a terrorist group since 1997.
The Treasury Department has subpoenaed records related to payments that Mr. Rendell admits taking in exchange for advocating removal of the People's Mujahedeen of Iraq, aka Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), from State's terror-group list.
He denies wrongdoing and says he and his agent are cooperating. Yet a Treasury spokesman told The Washington Times that "U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with or providing services to this group."
As always, when you peek into the details you'll see what Scaife's braintrust has decided you don't need to know. From there you can decide for yourself their credibility.
In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A "confidential" April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.
The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain's National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, "creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture." The six were former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon's former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. The human rights group contended that Spain had a duty to open an investigation under the nation's "universal jurisdiction" law, which permits its legal system to prosecute overseas human rights crimes involving Spanish citizens and residents. Five Guantanamo detainees, the group maintained, fit that criteria.
Most Pittsburghers have some familiarity with Wecht's trial (read here if you don't) and some thought his case was an example of selective prosecution by the Bush administration and U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan.
Less Burghers may have followed the case of Don Siegelman. Way back in 2007, The New York Times in an editorial titled "Selective Prosecution" described it thusly:
Putting political opponents in jail is the sort of thing that happens in third-world dictatorships. In the United States, prosecutions are supposed to be scrupulously nonpartisan. This principle appears to have broken down in Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department — where lawyers were improperly hired for nonpolitical jobs based on party membership, and United States attorneys were apparently fired for political reasons.
Individual Democrats may be paying a personal price. Don Siegelman, a former Alabama governor, was the state’s most prominent Democrat and had a decent chance of retaking the governorship from the Republican incumbent. He was aggressively prosecuted by both the Birmingham and Montgomery United States attorney’s offices. Birmingham prosecutors dropped their case after a judge harshly questioned it. When the Montgomery office prosecuted, a jury acquitted Mr. Siegelman of 25 counts, but convicted him of 7, which appear to be disturbingly weak.
The prosecution may have been a political hit. A Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson, has said in a sworn statement that she heard Bill Canary, a Republican operative and a Karl Rove protégé, say that his “girls” — his wife, the United States attorney in Montgomery, and Alice Martin, the United States attorney in Birmingham — would “take care” of Mr. Siegelman. Mr. Canary also said, according to Ms. Simpson, that Mr. Rove was involved.
But Siegelman wasn't having any of that. He stood outside his panel room and literally grabbed people in the halls (including me) to convince them to hear him speak with the line, "I'll be speaking during the first 10 minutes -- just stay for that."
I did just stay for his part (mostly because I already knew a lot about his case and the Wecht case), but if you're not as familiar, I urge you to check out his website, watch the 60 Minutes piece and then take action.
By the way, Siegelman did have something new to say in those first 10 minutes.
He had a chance to speak with Valerie Jarrett -- one of Obama's most trusted advisors -- that very day. He implored her to remove Rove's clones from the DOJ.
I found her reported response to be terribly discouraging. He said she told him that it was up to us to lobby for that reform.
[sigh]
You can contact Jarrett via Siegelman's website here. .
On January 25, 2002, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales advised George W. Bush in a memo to deny al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners protections under the Geneva Conventions because doing so would "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act" and "provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
Two weeks later, Bush signed an action memorandum dated February 7, 2002, addressed to Vice President Dick Cheney, which denied baseline protections to al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners under the Third Geneva Convention. That memo, according to a recently released bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee, opened the door to "considering aggressive techniques," which were then developed with the complicity of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and other senior Bush officials.
And we all know what happened after that.
By the way from the same article, a few paragraphs later:
The Supreme Court held in 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the prisoners were entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.
The Senate Armed-Services Committee issued a report today. It's title is "Inquiry to the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody" and it describes what was done in our name.
From the Executive Summary:
The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the Committee's inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about.
Today we're releasing the declassified report of the Senate Armed Services Committee's investigation into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. The report was approved by the Armed Services Committee on November 20, 2008 and has, in the intervening period, been under review at the Department of Defense for declassification.
In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration's interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse - such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan - to low ranking soldiers. Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a "few bad apples," were simply false.
The truth is that, early on, it was senior civilian leaders who set the tone. On September 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that the United States turn to the "dark side" in our response to 9/11. Not long after that, after White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales called parts of the Geneva Conventions "quaint," President Bush determined that provisions of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to certain detainees. Other senior officials followed the President and Vice President's lead, authorizing policies that included harsh and abusive interrogation techniques.
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
And because there was no link, the interrogations got harsher.
Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on other points: They will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.
The six defendants—in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith—are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.”
As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.
Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?
But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.
The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A grand jury in South Texas indicted U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and former attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday for "organized criminal activity" related to alleged abuse of inmates in private prisons.
The indictment has not been seen by a judge, who could dismiss it.
The grand jury in Willacy County, in the Rio Grande Valley near the U.S.-Mexico border, said Cheney is "profiteering from depriving human beings of their liberty," according to a copy of the indictment obtained by Reuters.
The indictment cites a "money trail" of Cheney's ownership in prison-related enterprises including the Vanguard Group, which owns an interest in private prisons in south Texas.
Former attorney general Gonzales used his position to "stop the investigations as to the wrong doings" into assaults in county prisons, the indictment said.
There's not much for me to disagree with in this week's column. Jack Kelly even calls the results a "landslide in the Electoral College" and as we all know, when Jack says something, it's gotta be true.
Right?
So Electoral College landslide it is. Thanks, Jack!
At one point, Jack writes:
I give the McCain campaign a C- at best. It often seemed a pudding without a theme. On the paramount issue, Mr. McCain didn't have a message that resonated until Joe the Plumber found one for him. And the way the McCain campaign mishandled its prize asset -- Gov. Sarah Palin -- was appalling.
All this may be true, but Governor Palin's own performance was no less appalling. National Review columnist Kathleen Parker way back in late September called for Palin to withdraw from the ticket. Parker wrote:
Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.
Then Jack writes this:
There apparently was more fraud in this election than in any other in the recent past. But because Mr. Obama's margins in key states were large, the votes of the ineligible and the dead didn't affect the outcome. Republicans weren't robbed. They were beaten, fair and square.
Of course Jack doesn't say where there was "apparently was more fraud in this election than in any other in the recent past" so we're left to fill in the blanks.
So where was this "more" fraud? Any reports of widespread voter fraud in any of the non-partisan organizations set up to watch for it? I couldn't find any.
But I wholeheartedly agree that the GOP was beaten (in Jack's own words) "fair and square." But then Jack immediately contradicts himself with the next paragraph:
Because Republicans cannot reasonably blame defeat on tactical mistakes by the McCain campaign...
Didn't he just give the McCain campaign a C- on its "pudding without a theme" (whatever that means)? So it's now unreasonable to blame the (Electoral College landslide) defeat on the campaign's mistakes? I don't get it.
Jack follows a few paragraphs later with that desperate last-ditch meme of the rightwing noise machine. Here's how Jack puts it:
Despite Mr. Obama's victory, I think America remains a center-right country. But the right cannot prevail if it alienates the center.
Uh, no. Tell me how, when more than 52% of the electorate votes for the guy the GOP branded as "a socialist" we live in a "center-right" nation. Mediamatters.org reports that Democracy Corp released poll numbers showing strong support for the policies outlined by now-President-Elect Obama. How then can we be in a "center-right" country? Michael Grunwald of Time, writing the night of the election, puts it this way:
The pundits are already warning that Obama could overreach, that Democratic congressional leaders are still unpopular, that this is still a center-right country. But it wasn't tonight. Obama will have the luxury of taking office at a time when the GOP is the AIG of electoral politics, when his predecessor has set the lowest bar since James Buchanan, when a supposedly conservative Administration just started nationalizing the banking system, when the public is desperate for change. What is it about tonight's results that suggests Obama should be afraid of progressive action on the cusp of a depression?
And reminds us of the national nightmare we're leaving:
Remember what eight years of Republican rule has wrought: missing weapons of mass destruction, the promises we'd be greeted as liberators, Jessica Lynch, torture, the disintegration of Afghanistan. Also: Enron, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie and Freddie, GM, Chrysler, Social Security privatization, the $700 billion bailout. Also: Brownie, John Ashcroft covering up that bare-breasted statue at the Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales politicizing the Justice Department, Harriet Miers, the oil lobbyist who edited those global warming reports. Also: Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Ted Stevens. Also: the Vice President shot a guy, and the President almost choked to death on a pretzel.
The election was a mandate for change, an electoral college landslide and a clear repudiation of both conservative policies in general and the last eight disastrous years specifically.
The DOJ authorized the CIA to torture prisoners in its custody.
The DOJ's investigation into eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without proper warrants was shut down to protect AG Gonzales.
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has ruled in every case on the side of Republicans as "part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens."
Even if a DOJ job applicant was a Republican, one could be rejected merely because they were married to a Democrat.
Of course even a rumor that you might possibly begay could cost you your job at the DOJ.
And, even if you were a good Republican who was able to secure a job at the DOJ as a US Attorney, you would be fired if it was deemed you weren't acting sufficiently Republican enough.
All of which led to DOJ lawyers talking in code because they were afraid of being wiretapped by their own government and fired.
I'm sure I must have missed some -- hell, there's been nearly eight years of this shit.
Help me out!
What is your favorite Department of Injustice scandal? .
The Department of Justice's inspector general continues to conduct its wide-ranging investigation of the U.S. attorney firings and the general politicization of the Department under Alberto Gonzales. And as we reported back in August of last year, one area of focus by investigators is allegedly political hiring practices by Monica Goodling. The inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility sent out a questionnaire to anyone who had interviewed for a job at the DoJ during Gonzo's tenure. One thing investigators wanted to know about was whether the interviewer had asked about the applicant's sexual orientation.
NPR today provides some more evidence that Goodling and her associates might have decided that being gay was a disqualifier. Leslie Hagen was the liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys' committee on Native American issues until her contract was suddenly discontinued in October of 2006.
The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating whether a career attorney in the department was dismissed from her job because of rumors that she is a lesbian. The case grew out of a larger inquiry into the firings of U.S. attorneys and politicization at Justice under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. [emphasis added]
Wait, wait. It can't be something as stupid as that can it? There must be some other reason she was let go, right? (I know, I know - we're talking about the Bush administration here. But let's keep playing. It's kinda fun.)
How was she doing at her job? From NPR:
Hagen received the highest possible ratings for her work as liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys' committee on Native American issues. Her final job evaluation lists five categories for supervisors to rank her performance. For each category, a neat X fills the box marked, "Outstanding." And at the bottom of the page, under "overall rating level," she also got the top mark: Outstanding.
You can even see the evaluation here. Maybe the issue was political (as illegal as that might be). Maybe Hagen was a Democrat or something. Nope:
But by all accounts, Hagen was a GOP loyalist.
There's more:
The Justice Department's inspector general is looking into whether Hagen was dismissed after a rumor reached Goodling that Hagen is a lesbian.
As one Republican source put it, "To some people, that's even worse than being a Democrat."
Life inside the ultra-politicized Bush "Justice" Department. Where torture is justified but lesbians (even Republican lesbians) are worse than Democrats.
Did you know that 99% of us Americans would support waterboarding??
That's what Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) said yesterday. from thinkprogress, here's what Smith said to Attorney General Michael Mukasey yesterday:
In regard to interrogation techniques — and I know you’re going to be asked a lot of questions about that today — I just want to express the personal opinion that I hope the administration will not be defensive about using some admittedly harsh but nonlethal interrogation techniques, even techniques that might lead someone to believe they’re being drowned even if they’re not.
My guess is that 99 percent of the American people, if asked whether they would endorse such interrogation techniques to be conducted on a known terrorist with the expectation that information that might be derived from such interrogation would save the lives of thousands of Americans, that 99 percent of the American people would support such interrogation techniques.
Think progress adds a link to this CNN story about what the American people really think:
Asked whether they think waterboarding is a form of torture, more than two-thirds of respondents, or 69 percent, said yes; 29 percent said no.
Asked whether they think the U.S. government should be allowed to use the procedure to try to get information from suspected terrorists, 58 percent said no; 40 percent said yes.
Huh. So I guess Representative Smith's guess is, well, wrong.
On waterboarding, TPM Muckraker has more on yesterday's hearings with AG Mukasey. When asked by Representative John Conyers (D-MI) if he's going start a criminal investigation:
"No, I am not," was the direct answer.
His reasoning was a repeat of his answer to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) last week. The CIA waterboarded those detainees with the authorization of a Justice Department legal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel. So the Justice Department "cannot possibly" investigate, he said, U.S. employees for an act they committed on the basis of Justice Department advice. Such an action, he explained, would send a message that interrogators could no longer safely rely on that advice going forward.
Mukasey also refused Conyers' request to see the OLC opinions that authorized waterboarding, because they discussed techniques of what remains a "classified program." Conyers protested that every member of the committee was cleared to see top secret material, but Mukasey was unmoved, though offered to continue "ongoing discussions" with the committee -- discussions of which Conyers seemed to be unaware.
This has led David Kurtz, over at talkingpointsmemo to post:
Cynics may argue that those aren't bombshells at all, that the Bush Administration would never investigate itself in these matters. Perhaps so. But this is a case where cynicism is itself dangerous.
We have now the Attorney General of the United States telling Congress that it's not against the law for the President to violate the law if his own Department of Justice says it's not.
It is as brazen a defense of the unitary executive as anything put forward by the Administration in the last seven years, and it comes from an attorney general who was supposed to be not just a more professional, but a more moderate, version of Alberto Gonzales (Thanks to Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer for caving on the Mukasey nomination.).
President Bush has now laid down his most aggressive challenge to the very constitutional authority of Congress. It is a naked assertion of executive power. The founders would have called it tyrannical.
The Justice Department has reopened a long-dormant inquiry into the government's warrantless wiretapping program, a major policy shift only days into the tenure of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
The investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility was shut down after the previous attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, refused to grant security clearances to investigators.
"We recently received the necessary security clearances and are now able to proceed with our investigation," H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the OPR, wrote to New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey. A copy of the letter, dated Tuesday, was obtained by The Associated Press.
It's been said that there are no coincidences in politics. I wonder where this story will go.
A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.
Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.
After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.
Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.
And what happened to Levin after that?
The administration at the time was reeling from an August 2002 memo by Jay Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, which laid out possible justifications for torture. In June 2004, Levin's predecessor at the office, Jack Goldsmith, officially withdrew the Bybee memo, finding it deeply flawed.
When Levin took over from Goldsmith, he went to work on a memo that would effectively replace the Bybee memo as the administration's legal position on torture. It was during this time that he underwent waterboarding.
In December 2004, Levin released the new memo. He said, "Torture is abhorrent" but he went on to say in a footnote that the memo was not declaring the administration's previous opinions illegal. The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.
But Levin never finished a second memo imposing tighter controls on the specific interrogation techniques. Sources said he was forced out of the Justice Department when Gonzales became attorney general.
This is where Keith Olbermann takes up the story.
Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.
Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.
And they waterboarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die — still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn't drowning.
Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.
Keith takes it a step further:
Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't who approved the waterboarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.
It is: Why were they waterboarded?
Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.
Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.
If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.
If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn't interrupt.
If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,
Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?
He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.
Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you're going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it?
That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.
The U.S. Inspector General may recommend criminal prosecution of departed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the conclusion of an investigation, possibly as early as next month, the fired former U.S. attorney for Western Washington told a Spokane audience Friday.
Some details from McKay:
Gonzales “lied about” reasons for the firings when questioned under oath in July by the Senate Judiciary Committee and now has hired a lawyer and is refusing to answer questions from the Inspector General, McKay said.
The White House said McKay was fired for poor performance ratings of his office, but the ex-U.S. attorney said he and his office got exemplary reviews just three months before he was fired.
“The chief law enforcement officer for the United States should not lie under oath,’’ McKay told the bar association.
It was reported last week that Gonzales has now retained a high-profile defense lawyer, and apparently is refusing to answer questions from the Inspector General, which could signify the investigation is nearly complete, McKay said.
Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl remarked of the new hire, "Myself, I'm tired of questions about who I eat or play golf with. After an exhaustive national search I've found someone to advise me on ethics and honesty and Alberto Gonzales is my guy."
Ravenstahl added, "I'm moving forward with this thing and I better get some points in the media for diversity too."
After the mini press conference, Ravenstahl and Gonzales changed out of their suits and played nine holes. Mayor Ravenstahl said he would have preferred to get in 18 but it was, after all, a work day.
