Whining All The Way

The very manly Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blessed with the manliest of manliness, have decided to take their toys and go home rather than participate in a probably-toothless study of the CIA torture program, because they're so personally hurt that anyone could be held responsible for lawbreaking.

Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said Friday that they will no longer participate in an investigation into the Bush administration's interrogation policies, arguing that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s decision to reexamine allegations of detainee abuse by the CIA would hobble any inquiry [...]

"Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the President to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the Committee's review," the ranking Republican on the intelligence panel, Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said in a statement. "What current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the Committee's questions? Indeed, forcing these terror fighters to make this choice is neither fair nor just."

"Terror fighters." That premieres right after 24 on Fox this fall, right? (It's certainly not going to be on after Law And Order.)

I suppose another word you could use in place of "terror fighters" is "murderers," but that would be grossly uncouth and would cause a run on fainting couches in Washington, particularly in the Republican caucus.

I will say that the bravery on display by these Republicans, not seen since the times of Sir Robin, is truly inspiring. They know just how to treat allegations of wrongdoing - with the most studied indifference and, if necessary, outright ignorance. They make me proud to be an American.

The only problem with their strategy is that others will not forget so easily. There are multiple court challenges and civil suits and investigations and FOIA requests. I suppose the defense attorneys in these cases can take the example of the Senate GOP and walk out of the proceedings, but it's unlikely to have the same impact.

I think the next step for Kit Bond and his charges will be to write a minority report, refuting whatever comes from the committee investigation and pressing for expanded CIA powers to, I don't know, pull the fingernails out of suspects in the name of fighting terror. Watch for who leads that minority report authoring, it may be important later.

But there were dissenters. A number of House Republicans on the committee cheered Colonel North on. One who led the way was Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who praised Colonel North as “the most effective and impressive witness certainly this committee has heard.”

Mr. Cheney the congressman believed that Congress had usurped executive prerogatives. He saw the Iran-contra investigation not as an effort to get to the bottom of possible abuses of power but as a power play by Congressional Democrats to seize duties and responsibilities that constitutionally belonged to the president.

At the conclusion of the hearings, a dissenting minority report codified these views. The report’s chief author was a former resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael J. Malbin, who was chosen by Mr. Cheney as a member of the committee’s minority staff. Another member of the minority’s legal staff, David S. Addington, is now the vice president’s chief of staff [...]

The report made a point of invoking the framers. It cited snippets from the Federalist Papers — like Alexander Hamilton’s remarks endorsing “energy in the executive” — in order to argue that the president’s long-acknowledged prerogatives had only recently been usurped by a reckless Democratic Congress.

Above all, the report made the case for presidential primacy over foreign relations. It cited as precedent the Supreme Court’s 1936 ruling in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, which referred to the “exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.”

History, the report claimed, “leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States.” It went on: “Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down.”

Maybe they'll just dust off that old report and replace "Iran-Contra" with "torture" and be done with it.

Cheney's Attack On The Criminal Justice System

Yesterday a British court followed the rules of their country's legal system and convicted people for illegal acts. It's a novel idea, to be sure, and certainly more expensive than simply locking up anyone you suspect of a crime - just think of the court costs! - but hey, they're such cute kids in England, let them have their little idealist system.

After two trials and the largest counterterrorism investigation in Britain’s history, three men were found guilty on Monday of plotting to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners on a single day with liquid explosives smuggled aboard in soft-drink bottles and detonated by devices powered with AA batteries.

The convictions came three years after the global airline industry was thrown into chaos by the plot. The bombers’ plan to drain plastic soft-drink bottles with syringes and refill them with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a bleaching agent also used as a propellant for rockets, led to new measures prohibiting passengers from carrying all but small quantities of liquids and creams onto flights.

With those measures still in force and causing backups at airport security checkpoints around the world, the police and intelligence agencies in Britain and the United States had waited anxiously for verdicts in the six-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court in London, where eight men were accused of conspiracy to stage the airliner bombings [...]

In Washington, the Obama administration praised the verdict on Monday.

“British authorities have worked diligently to investigate and prosecute those involved in the 2006 aviation plot,” Mike Hammer, a National Security Council spokesman, said via e-mail. “We congratulate them on those efforts and extend our thanks to the British government for seeing these efforts through to today’s conclusion.”

I also want to thank Dick Cheney for almost ruining the successful effort to bring these convicted terrorists to justice, because his political party needed a high-profile capture to help them in the 2006 midterm elections.

Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, nearly destroyed Britain’s efforts to bring the airline bomb plotters to justice, police and intelligence experts said today.

By ordering the early arrest of Rashid Rauf, the bombers’ link man in Pakistan, Washington forced British police to detain the suspects in the UK before all the evidence had been gathered, it was claimed [...]

Although Britain was running the investigation, including a massive round-the-clock surveillance of 200 suspects, the UK was not warned that Rauf - the al-Qaeda facilitator who kept the English plotters in touch with bomb experts and terrorism trainers in Pakistan - was going to be arrested.

What the early arrest did was force an early arrest and trial, where a more deliberate course could have netted more people and broken up the entire cell.

Never let it be said that Dick Cheney doesn't hate the current criminal justice system. He obviously hates it so much that he overtly acted to thwart its success back in 2006.

If Accountability Is The Standard

The Dean rides to the rescue of that poor Mr. Cheney in the most predictable way possible. He's been at this forever. I'm surprised he wasn't a John Edwards fan, since he clearly believes in Two Americas, one for the Village and one for everyone else. In 1974, Broderella wrote enthusiastically about the prospect of Nixon beating the impeachment rap and Republicans surging in the midterms. While he lies about that in today's piece, he does admit that he supported Nixon's pardon. He's been covering for Republicans for so long he must feel like an umbrella.

But there's something very interesting, if unintentionally so, in what he says today:

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

"If accountability is the standard." Nice.

Broder, of course, takes the wrong lesson from this, arguing that the country couldn't take such an assault on cherished criminals like Dick Cheney, and as long as everybody promises to never, ever do it again, we need to bind up our wounds and move forward. But he's giving voice to what many of us have been saying - that low-level interrogators are not ultimately responsible for an illegal policy, and that criminal culpability demands a response from the justice system. That Attorney General Holder has indemnified anyone who got a legal scribbling authorizing torture, in effect privileging the legal memos as legal regardless of what they say, is completely outrageous. Accountability should indeed apply to the policymakers. Hey, Dean Broder, don't bogart our argument!

That isn't just wrong, it's outrageous. It ratifies the most toxic aspect of the whole legal war on terror: that anything becomes permissible if it's served up with a side of memo. Paper your misconduct with footnotes and justifications—even after the fact—and you can do as you please. Prosecution of those who strayed beyond the new rules, without considering the culpability of those who strayed in creating the new rules, would mean that in America, a law degree amounts to a defense. Rep Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., put it this way earlier this month when he warned that it makes no sense to prosecute the guy who used 8 ounces of water to water-board but not the lawyer who said it was OK to water-board someone with 3 ounces of water. We must either look into both sides of the post-9/11 legal breakdown or neither. The alternative is the same kind of scapegoating that occurred after Abu Ghraib [...]

The American legal system isn't just about crime and punishment. It's a set of guideposts to direct us in the future and to send a message about our values to the rest of the world. This proposed Holder-Durham regime of semi-accountability—we're sorry for that whole torture thing but not sorry enough to investigate seriously how it happened in the first place—serves the dangerous dual purpose of allowing us to reinstate the Bush-era torture rationales, should they be necessary again in the future, and advising our allies and enemies that under desperate circumstances, they can plausibly do the same. Opting to be only halfway responsible means that torture is, going forward, only halfway reprehensible. Ta-Nehisi Coates says, "I really have no doubt that we could—indeed would—start torturing again, in the event of another terrorist attack." If we don't dismantle the foundations of the torture regime, he'll be right.

It's a pretty good rule of thumb that, if Alberto Gonzales supports your torture investigation, it's not a very good torture investigation.

This would be the reason that the prescription should not be just to "fix" everything and move forward, without providing accountability - full accountability - for those who thought they could get a permission slip to violate federal and international law and get useful idiots like David Broder to hold them harmless. The very real threat to the country lies in the breakdown of the rule of law, not the restoration of it. And it might make the authorizers and the CIA sad and gloomy, and lower their morale, but that's precisely the point. In general people ought to be deterred from breaking the law; that's what makes them think twice about doing it. If investigating and prosecuting torture has a chilling effect, that's probably because it's supposed to. Kind of the basis of the entire criminal justice system, but if you want to dismantle that for everybody, at least shoplifters and petty thieves would be on a level playing field with those who murdered prisoners in custody.

At least Broder isn't quite the monster of his "liberal" colleague Richard Cohen, who follows up his "only a fool, or a Frenchman" classic with a robust defense of torture, including a note of how Judith Miller's imprisonment was "a wee bit of torture" and closing with the image of the smoldering World Trade Center. Pitted against that shamefulness, Dean Broder's practically a civil liberties absolutist.

...my 1,000-odd words, Tom Tomorrow's six panels. He wins.

Must Have Had A Restful Vacation

Robert Gibbs appears to be on his game today. In response to Fourthbranch's rantings on Fox News, he gave the appropriate rejoinder:

I’m not entirely sure that Dick Cheney’s predictions on foreign policy have borne a whole lot of fruit over the last eight years in a way that have been either positive or, to the best of my recollection, very correct.

In other words, why would you give a crap what Dick Cheney has to say?

Later, asked about Mike Enzi attacking health care reform while also serving as one of the key bipartisan negotiators, Gibbs replied:

"In Senator Enzi's case, he doesn't believe there's a pathway to get bipartisan support and the President thinks that's wrong," Gibbs said. "I think Senator Enzi's clearly turned over his cards on bipartisanship and decided that it's time to walk away from the table."

Now it's time for the President to walk away from the table. Not sure if Gibbs' new, more aggressive approach signals something similar from Obama, but I know that the base would reward such feistiness.

Cheney, Like Real Men, Would Go To Tehran

On top of everything else, Dick Cheney wanted to bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran before waltzing into the sunset:

WASHINGTON -- Former Vice President Dick Cheney hinted that, in the waning days of the Bush administration, he had pushed for a military strike to destroy Iran's nuclear-weapons program.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Mr. Cheney described himself as being isolated among advisers to then-President George W. Bush, who ultimately decided against direct military action.

"I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues," Mr. Cheney said in response to questions about whether the Bush administration should have launched a pre-emptive attack prior to handing over the White House to Barack Obama.

"I thought that negotiations could not possibly succeed unless the Iranians really believed we were prepared to use military force," Mr. Cheney said. "And to date, of course, they are still proceeding with their nuclear program and the matter has not yet been resolved."

But certainly, a nuclear strike in the heart of the Islamic world would have solved things. No blowback expected there!

It's a testament to how truly crazy Dick Cheney was that even George W. Bush thought him out there in right field.

They Don't Make Political Dynasties Like They Used To

We've gone from generations of Kennedys to generations of Cheneys, and now a whole new round of Bushes.

NBC's "Today" show has hired someone with White House experience as a new correspondent — former first daughter Jenna Hager.

The daughter of former President George W. Bush will contribute stories about once a month on issues like education to television's top-rated morning news show, said Jim Bell, its executive producer.

Hager, a 27-year-old teacher in Baltimore, said she has always wanted to be a teacher and a writer, and has already authored two books. But she was intrigued by the idea of getting into television when Bell contacted her.

"It wasn't something I'd always dreamed to do," she said. "But I think one of the most important things in life is to be open-minded and to be open-minded for change."

I don't doubt that the producers contacted her, either. Having worked in television for a while, I know a whole lot about the persistence of failing upward.

You'd think this country would be more embarrassed of itself than it is.

Clearly A Political Move

I didn't bother to watch Dick Cheney's Traveling Emporium and Snake Oil Sales Extravaganza on Fox News Sunday, mainly because I knew that pro-torture Chris Wallace and the whole pro-torture team over there would treat it like a fanzine fluff piece. Wallace's hourlong fellatio session probably satisfied Cheney immensely, and predictably, the other networks saw fit to publicize Little Dick and his concubine, because what a former Vice President says is automatically news! News! News! Don't you remember all those prime-time slots for Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle and Al Gore recently?

In this case, there was some news made, although not of the variety that's being reported. First of all, Cheney, who appears to think that the Bush White House functioned under the auspices of the law, believes that the Attorney General of the United States is a political appointee. I'm sure that, in the case of Alberto Gonzales, that was true. It's not how the American system works, of course.

The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the administration. He’s now saying, well, this isn’t anything that he’s got anything to do with. He’s up on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and his attorney general is going back and doing something that the president said some months ago he wouldn’t do [...] Well, I think if you look at the Constitution, the president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land. The attorney general’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the cabinet.

Fourthbranch would have been the world's best Revolution-era Tory. He truly believes in the divine right of kings. Witness later in the interview, where he in his capacity as chief law enforcement officer of the United States decides to toss out the law books.

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. … It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.

CHENEY: I am.

Worked so well, in fact, that CIA and military interrogators killed dozens of detainees in their custody. But what's a little torture and murder when you're talking about saving lives? Oh, and Cheney's answer is a lie, but that's redundant.

Perhaps the most absurd thing about Fourthbranch, and also what gets him through the night, I would gather, is how he actually thinks his Administration has a good record on counter-terrorism.

I seem to recall the Bush/Cheney era a little differently. Cheney thinks it was a sterling success when it came to national security and counter-terrorism. Perhaps there's something to this. After all, except for the catastrophic events of 9/11, and the anthrax attacks against Americans, and terrorist attacks against U.S. allies, and the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush's inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, and waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush's international unpopularity, the Bush/Cheney record on counter-terrorism was awesome.

After the previous administration established a record like that, President Obama didn't ask Cheney for tips? The nerve.

You see what Cheney is doing here. He wants to politicize the Bush terror policies - the investigations being sought by the Attorney General are "clearly a political move," he says - so that any attempt to question them becomes a partisan food fight instead of simply the application of law. This is his metier and he does it very well, judging from all the attention he receives every time he emerges from the bunker. Conservatives, ever on the lookout for victimization, cry that the Justice Department is being all political by investigating torture and murder, and the media cover the ping-pong match.

But they do more than that. They print fallacious articles that continue to muddy the waters, still trying to determine if torture "worked" (using anonymous sources and expertly cherry-picked information), and declare themselves unable to read the unbiased evidence that shows the opposite of Cheney's blathering.

And thus, the public is confused. About torture.

Bravo, Fourthbranch.

...Also, Cheney won't cooperate with any "improper" investigation. A Justice Department-directed investigation. You know, "fuck you" and all that.

The Darkest Of The Dark Sides

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Keith Olbermann talks with Jane Mayer in this clip about the release of the CIA IG report and the preliminary investigation into some of the worst practices of the torture regime. She talks about how the IG report reads like "a crime scene," foregrounding the idea that the architects of the policy at CIA were warned in this 2004 report and repeatedly thereafter that their agency would be in deep legal trouble for continuing these actions, and yet they kept justifying them and/or actually engaging in them for years afterward. Nobody took the warnings seriously, knowing both the makeup of the Justice Department and the Presidency at that time, and perhaps banking on how Washington would view these efforts, as part of the past and best kept their, given the Establishment culpability for torture.

Here's just a few of the facts of what CIA interrogators did in our name, just the ones that come from this IG report, as masterfully summarized by Glenn Greenwald:

• Threats of execution, using semi-automatic handguns and power drills
• Threats to kill detainee and his children
• Threats to rape detainee's wife and children in front of him
• Restricting the detainee's carotid artery
• Hitting detainee with the butt end of a rifle
• Blowing smoke in detainee's face for five minutes
• Multiple instances of waterboarding detainees, of the type we prosecuted Japanese war criminals for using:
• Hanging detainee by their arms until interrogators thought their shoulders might be dislocated
• stepping on detainee's ankle shackles to cause severe bruising and pain
• choking detainee until they pass out
• dousing detainee with water on cold concrete floors in cold temperatures to induce hypothermia
• killing detainees through torture techniques, whether accidental or not
• putting detainee in a diaper for days at a time to live in their own filth

On that last point, Digby notes that this could have been used in tandem with another technique we know about, the use of forced enemas, a particularly degrading technique, part and parcel of the humiliations heaped on prisoners that were psycho-sexual in nature. A lot of these stem from misreadings of books like Raphael Patai's "The Arab Mind," which presumed a host of dubious generalizations about Muslims and their predispositions, all of it willingly lapped up by neoconservatives willing to believe that their opponents were somehow subhuman. As if anyone would react favorably to being made to live in their own shit. These stereotypical projections that manifested themselves in essentially an allowance for torturing brown-skinned people have dangerous and deadly repercussions.

But whatever Patai's intentions, the kind of thinking he engaged in does have real-world consequences, ones that reverberate far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib. In their recent book "Occidentalism" (Penguin), Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue that a reciprocal negative stereotype of the West has arisen in the Arab world, one that holds that the West is licentious, amoral, overly sexualized, aggressive, and engaged in a crusade against Islam. Buruma and Margalit trace this stereotype back to thinkers of the Western counter-Enlightenment, but events like the abuse at Abu Ghraib, in which soldiers reportedly not only raped prisoners but forced them to eat pork and drink alcohol, suggest that an Occidentalist worldview has sources much closer at hand, in the actual experience of domination.

In the wake of the Iraq war, mutually reinforcing Occidentalist and Orientalist stereotypes have contributed immeasurably to the fear and apprehension that divides Islam and the West. It should be observed that the human rights violations that took place in Abu Ghraib would have been no less horrific had they taken place in Madison, Wis. But the explosiveness of the situation makes them far more dangerous as we enter an era where each side defines the other only by its worst excesses. Rather than plumbing some mythical "Arab mind," we should affirm the shared humanity that transcends our differences and binds us all together.

Because of the reliance on stereotypes, the lack of factual information and the pressure from the top to come up with any information in the early post-9/11 period, this all led to "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented" being used repeatedly and in violation of multiple federal laws and international conventions. None of them made Americans safer, in fact many of them probably made the country less safe, and all of them were decidedly illegal, debasing and severely damaging to our moral capability. We have made a mockery of the presumption that in America, the law is king. Now a generation of torture-loving conservatives believe that the ends justify any means, up to and including murder.

They don't. And as soon as you begin to have an argument over torture's effectiveness, the argument is immediately lost. But it's worth noting that Dick Cheney, the Great Dissembler, claimed for months that documents would show the how torture worked in saving lives, and yet, while those documents were released along with the IG report, as Mayer says none of the information contained in them prove Cheney's hypothesis.

OLBERMANN: What about Mr. Cheney's assessment that there would be documents that prove that torture worked where traditional and legal interrogation did not or would not. Is there anything in those documents that were released today that supports that contention?

MAYER: Well, the documents that I've seen, and maybe I'm missing something, but so far, I am amazed at how little support there is for the things that Vice President Cheney has been saying. There is nothing but a mass of claims that they got information from this individual and that individual, many from KSM, who apparently has been the greatest fount of information for them, but there's absolutely nothing saying that they had to beat them to get this information. In fact, as anybody knows who knows anything about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he was dying to tell the world, when he was interviewed by Al Jazeera before he was in US custody, about everything he knew and everything he did. He was proud of his role as the mastermind of 9/11. He loves to talk about it. So there's no evidence that I see in this that these things were necessary. I spoke to someone at the CIA who was an advisor to them who conceded to me that "We could have gotten the same information from tea and crumpets."

OLBERMANN: Or buying a copy of the Al Jazeera interview.

The Cheney documents were deliberately created at the time to rebut both this CIA Inspector General report recommending prosecutions, and the heat put on by Congress about allegations of torture. They were actually conceived to deceive people into believing that torture works, an irrelevant point at best. And yet these same memos do not support Cheney's claims. They say that certain individuals gave up information, but only after questioned through traditional means, which was happening contemporaneously to the torture. It is impossible to say definitively, therefore, which information came as a result of what techniques.

And yet, not only has traditional media largely ignored the fact that the documents do not support Cheney's claims (which were given tons of media attention previously), but an extremely carefully worded statement by Cheney, stating that "The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda" - which says nothing of WHAT techniques caused this intelligence to be gleaned - has been taken completely at face value by reporters, in particular CNN, which ran Cheney's comments as facts:

Cheney says documents show interrogations prevented attacks

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says documents released Monday support his view that harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects prevented attacks and yielded crucial information about al Qaeda.

A simple read of the documents shows this to be completely untrue. Jane Mayer, as expert a journalist on this subject as anyone, calls them unsupportable. But too many reporters just write down these things and run with them, the facts be damned. It's part of a disturbing pattern, as Digby says:

If you have followed the torture revelations over the years, you can't help but be just a tad disillusioned by the fact that the mainstream media acts over and over again as if they were born yesterday and each time these stories are validated it's as if it's the first time they've heard it.

We already know they tortured. We know that DOJ bureaucrats illegally approved the torture on Dick Cheney's request and we know that a bunch of unprofessional, untrained interrogators complied and then went beyond even what was approved. We know that innocent people were tortured and we know that prisoners were killed. We've known all this for a long time. The question is not what happened, it's whether anyone will be held accountable for it.

On that point, here's Jane Mayer talking about the Durham investigation, actually hopeful about what it may find:

MAYER: Well, my guess is that if they actually open some kind of serious investigation, and Durham is said to be a very serious prosecutor, that even if they start at the very bottom, it's going to keep leading up and up through the chain of command. Because, if nothing else, if they actually bring charges against anybody at the CIA who was at the bottom of the food chain, the first thing that person's going to do is say "I was authorized, let me tell you what my orders were." So they've begun a process that could lead to the top.

OLBERMANN: Well, if it works along the Archibald Cox lines, as I analogized last week, where they've supposedly circumscribed it, but people want to get out from the scapegoat for the whole operation, then I think your assessment is correct.

We know that none of the torture here happened by happenstance, but through a directed policy emanating from the top. Instead of prosecuting "bad apples" who were young MPs on the night shift in Baghdad, we're talking about mid-level career CIA. They aren't dupes, and they know how to shift the attention up the chain of command. I don't think these interrogators will live with being the scapegoats. It may take some time, but we really could see some legitimate accountability here. And I hope so - because otherwise this will remain a black mark that can never wash out.

The Incredible Shrinking Investigation

Marcy Wheeler doesn't think John Durham has the juice to effectively probe the Bush torture regime:

As I said in my panel at Netroots Nation, we'll know a lot about whether Holder intends to do a real investigation, or just a whitewash investigating the Lynndie Englands, by the stature of the prosecutor he names. And while Durham is already neck deep in the investigation of torture on the torture tapes, he doesn't necessarily have the stature to go after--say--Jim Haynes and John Rizzo for setting up the torture regime.

I guess Holder wasn't that serious about investigating torture after all.

The White House has now weighed in (though with the Press Secretary's office attached, not the President) praising Holder for limiting the scope of the investigation.

The President has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward, not back, and the President agrees with the Attorney General that those who acted in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance should not be prosecuted. Ultimately, determinations about whether someone broke the law are made independently by the Attorney General.

Doesn't seem like much will be gained from this investigation, after all. It'll look good in the papers, though.

By the way, the IG report is out, along with the "Cheney documents," the ones he claim vindicate the use of torture. Of course, the CIA used torture techniques in tandem with other, more traditional interrogation tactics, so it's really impossible to answer Cheney's question, which I find irrelevant anyway, because torture is torture.

As for the IG report, Spencer Ackerman and Marcy Wheeler are documenting the atrocities. What we know so far: the CIA lied to Bybee and Yoo so they could get approval for torture; they shut off the cameras for 21 hours during a waterboarding interrogation; and the torturers were engaging in techniques before being given the verbal OK by higher-ups. That's just a taste.

The Tanks Of Lackawanna

This is the second story in a week about how noble George W. Bush averted disaster. First he stuck to his principles about honesty and refused to pardon Scooter Libby (who he did already commute, incidentally, somehow that didn't make it into the paean of an article). Today we learn he was all that stood between us and tanks rolling down the streets:

Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

It's not that I disagree that this was brought up as an option, it's the positioning of Bush as the defender of the Constitution that kind of galls me. Cheney was the Constitution's chief beta-tester ("testing the Constitution" is quite a turn of phrase, no?), and considering the wealth of other illegal actions, all justified like this one by at-the-ready memos from John Yoo, I just doubt that Bush really made these decisions, even if he felt like he did.

Frankly, all this dumping on Dick seems like part of the Bush Legacy Project to me. While Fourthbranch has been ready for his closeup throughout the Obama Administration - right up until the moment that Eric Holder started talking seriously about prosecutions that didn't involve him, that is, then he slithered back into the undisclosed location - Bush has kept a low profile in Dallas, gave a couple speeches, told stories about walking his dog and being jus' folks, and one by one all of these articles showing how he wasn't SO bad - he didn't want to use the military in American cities, after all! - keep popping up, using anonymous sources. It's a nice kickoff for the library.

Meanwhile, there is an important component to all of this, namely, the stated reason why the authority to use military force was sought:

Former officials said the 2002 debate arose partly from Justice Department concerns that there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna. Mr. Cheney, the officials said, had argued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody.

Earlier that summer, the administration designated Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and sent him to a military brig in South Carolina. Mr. Padilla was arrested by civilian agencies on suspicion of plotting an attack using a radioactive bomb.

(This shows once again how the construction of Bush as a savior of the Constitution is false - he USED the powers granted by Yoo to designate Padilla an enemy combatant.)

So because of concerns that the evidence was weak, Cheney wanted to use "a lower threshold of evidence," and denote the Lackawanna Six enemy combatants to keep them outside the criminal justice system. We've gotten rid of the enemy combatants term, but not really the thinking of getting around the standards of evidence when dealing with terrorism suspects. While the report on detention policy and Guantanamo Bay has been delayed a number of months, in the preliminary report, we see the seeds of a three-tiered system of justice based on the amount of evidence gathered, altering the due process granted to ensure that the government can continue to confine anyone it captured relating to the so-called war on terror. As Glenn Greenwald writes today, in reaction to the NYT article:

All of this underscores why it is so important to vigorously oppose the efforts of the Obama administration (a) to continue many of the radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism programs and even to implement new ones (preventive detention, military commissions, extreme secrecy policies, warrantless surveillance, denial of habeas corpus) and (b) to endorse the core Orwellian premise that enables all of that (i.e., the "battlefield" is anywhere and everywhere; the battle against Terrorism is a "War" like the Civil War or World War II and justifies the same powers). By itself, the extreme injustice imposed by our Government on the individuals subjected to such tyrannical powers (i.e., those held in cages for years without charges or any prospect for release) should be sufficient to compel firm opposition. But the importance of these issues goes far beyond that. Even if the original intention is to use these powers in very limited circumstances and even for allegedly noble purposes ("only" for Guantanamo detainees who were tortured, "only" for people shipped to Bagram, "only" for the Most Dangerous Terrorists), it's extremely dangerous to implement systems and vest the President with powers that depart from, and violently betray, our core precepts of justice [...]

Those are the stakes when it comes to debates over Obama's detention, surveillance and secrecy policies. To endorse the idea that Terrorism justifies extreme presidential powers in these areas is to ensure that we permanently embrace a radical departure from our core principles of justice. It should come as no surprise that once John Yoo did what he was meant to do -- give his legal approval to a truly limitless presidency, one literally unconstrained even by the Bill of Rights, even as applied to American citizens on U.S. soil -- then Dick Cheney and David Addington sought to use those powers (in the Buffalo case) and Bush did use them (in the case of Jose Padilla). That's how extreme powers work: once implemented, they will be used, and used far beyond their original intent -- whether by the well-intentioned implementing President or a subsequent one with less benign motives. That's why it's so vital that such policies be opposed before they take root.

Those Presidents who fail to show respect and deference for the system of justice that has held over two centuries and more, even if they do not use the powers granted to them, set in motion a process to devolve that system. The precedents set by the Bush Administration, and potentially the Obama Administration, will have a lasting impact. So pardon me if I don't send a thank you note over to the 43rd President for not ordering an up-armored Humvee through a Buffalo suburb.

Bravely Bold Sir Dubya

Time decided to do some reporting about the final days in the Bush bunker, particularly about Dick Cheney's efforts to extract a pardon for his pal Scooter Libby. It's clearly from Bush's perspective, but nevertheless it's a pretty fascinating article just for seeing how the Bush loyalists spin the tale.

Petitions for pardons are usually sent in writing to the White House counsel's office or a specially designated attorney at the Department of Justice. In Libby's case, Cheney simply carried the message directly to Bush, as he had with so many other issues in the past, pressing the President in one-on-one meetings or in larger settings. A White House veteran was struck by his "extraordinary level of attention" to the case. Cheney's persistence became nearly as big an issue as the pardon itself. "Cheney really got in the President's face," says a longtime Bush-family source. "He just wouldn't give it up."

And there was a darker possibility. As a former Bush senior aide explains, "I'm sure the President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up." It had been an article of faith among Cheney's critics that the Vice President wanted a pardon for Libby because Libby had taken the fall for him in the Fitzgerald probe. In his grand-jury testimony reviewed by TIME, Libby denied three times that Cheney had directed him to leak Plame's CIA identity in mid-2003. Though his recollection of other events in the same time frame was lucid and detailed, on at least 20 occasions, Libby could not recall details of his talks with Cheney about Plame's place of employment or questions the Vice President raised privately about Wilson's credibility. Some Bush officials wondered whether Libby was covering up for Cheney's involvement in the leak of Plame's identity.

That makes it seem like Bush just wanted to separate himself from the Libby case altogether, despite the fact that Libby was a special adviser to the President, not the Vice President, and he was protecting both Bush and Cheney. It makes sense for Bush to compartmentalize the Libby leak, as if he were an innocent bystander, and refusing to pardon obviously helps him in that case. But it's not true at all. Marcy Wheeler has a lot more on this.

But this just blew me away. After Cheney lays out the case for a pardon, repeatedly, incessantly, for weeks:

A few days later, about a week before they would become private citizens, Bush pulled Cheney aside after a morning meeting and told him there would be no pardon. Cheney looked stricken. Most officials respond to a presidential rebuff with a polite thanks for considering the request in the first place. But Cheney, an observer says, "expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the decision ... He didn't take it well."

Two days after that, Libby, who hadn't previously lobbied on his own behalf, telephoned Bolten's office. He wanted an audience with Bush to argue his case in person. To Libby, a presidential pardon was a practical as well as symbolic prize: among other things, it would allow him to practice law again. Bolten once more kicked the matter to the lawyers, agreeing to arrange a meeting with Fielding. On Saturday, Jan. 17, with less than 72 hours left in the Bush presidency, Libby and Fielding and a deputy met for lunch at a seafood restaurant three blocks from the White House. Again Libby insisted on his innocence. No one's memory is perfect, he argued; to convict me for not remembering something precisely was unfair. Fielding kept listening for signs of remorse. But none came. Fielding reported the conversation to Bush.

OK, is it normal for the subject of a possible Presidential pardon to personally lobby for it on his own behalf? Has that ever happened before? If it has, I don't recall it.

The article is decent enough, but don't start to drink a glass of water when you read this part, or you're in for a surefire spit-take:

While packing boxes in the upstairs residence, according to his associates, Bush noted that he was again under pressure from Cheney to pardon Libby. He characterized Cheney as a friend and a good Vice President but said his pardon request had little internal support. If the presidential staff were polled, the result would be 100 to 1 against a pardon, Bush joked. Then he turned to Sharp. "What's the bottom line here? Did this guy lie or not?"

The lawyer, who had followed the case very closely, replied affirmatively.

Bush indicated that he had already come to that conclusion too.

"O.K., that's it," Bush said.

Yes, that moral paragon, truth-teller extraordinaire, George W. Bush, Honest George I think they called him, comes down firmly on the side of truth in virtually every circumstance. History will judge him as the most forthright human who ever bestrode the earth. A colossus among men.

Incidentally, the man, Jim Sharp, that Bush is talking with here? It's his own defense attorney.

... you have to love Cheney's response to the story. I guess the Bush loyalists got under his skin.

Reyes Goes After Intelligence Oversight

House Intelligence Committee chair Silvestre Reyes will seek an investigation into the CIA's hiding of operations from the Congress:

After careful consideration and consultation with the Ranking Minority Member and other members of the Committee, I am announcing an official Committee investigation into possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1974.

“This investigation will focus on the core issues of how the congressional intelligence committees and Congress are kept fully and currently informed. To this end, the investigation will examine several issues, including the program discussed during [CIA] Director [Leon] Panetta’s June 24th notification and whether there was any official decision or direction to withold information from the Committee.

Note "including the program discussed." The alleged assassination squad should be seen as the latest example of the CIA acting without oversight, not the only one. The National Security Act is pretty clear about oversight responsibilities of intelligence operations, and it's been abused time and again. The Obama Administration doesn't want to change the "Gang of Eight" style of briefing, but Democrats are seeking more transparency for their members. Marcy Wheeler notes this as well:

First, Reyes says he consulted with Crazy Pete Hoekstra. I look forward to seeing how Crazy Pete spins this.

That'll be particularly interesting given the scope here. The investigation will include the reported assassination squad. But the core issue is more general--how CIA informs Congress. Which means that, in fact, this should also include whether or not CIA fullly briefed Pelosi and Goss on torture back in 2002.

Finally, the investigation will examine whether there was any "direction" to withhold information from Congress. I do hope they look at the question generally, as well as in the context of the reported assassination squad, because I suspect we'd see a pattern of Cheney instructing the Counterterrorism folks to lie to or withhold information from Congress.

The big question here is how far up the ladder they'll reach. But it's time to end the broken system of intelligence oversight and start again, and this investigation can be a catalyst.

Not Buying It

Jeremy Scahill raises objections to the Democrats' anger over a secret CIA program to allegedly assassinate Al Qaeda leaders.

Partisan politics often require selective amnesia. Over the past decade, we have seen this amnesia take hold when it comes to many of President Bush's most vile policies. And we are now seeing a pretty severe case overtake several leading Democrats. It makes for good speechifying to act as though all criminality began with Bush and -- particularly these days -- Cheney, but that is extreme intellectual dishonesty. The fact is that many of Bush's worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes. To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in US war zones and warrant-less wire-tapping.

Regarding the Bush-era assassination program, there is great reason to be skeptical that the program CIA Director Leon Panetta alleges was concealed from Congress is actually the program the public is currently being led to believe it is. Why would the CIA need to conceal a program that never was implemented and, if it never was implemented, why did Panetta need to shut it down? Moreover, who was running this inactive program from the minute Obama was sworn in until June 24 when Panetta supposedly announced its cancellation? This program -- as it is currently being described -- should hardly be a major scandal to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as some are now treating it. As they well know, President Obama has continued the Bush targeted assassination program using weaponized drones and special forces teams hunting "high value targets." As former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and others have pointed out, "The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time." Cannistraro told Talking Points Memo that there is no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife.

Except no Democrat has actually talked about the nature of the program. They have raised anger at having the secret program concealed from Congress, apparently at the behest of Dick Cheney. But no Democrat has ratified the print media's take that the program in question concerned targeted assassination squads. And these stories just keep on coming. The AP writes that George Tenet cancelled the hit squads, because he found the details problematic. The American Conservative discussed the program and how it ran into trouble in Kenya. The Washington Post fingers the hit squad policy as the one Cheney ordered kept from Congress, saying that it never reached more than an aspirational stage. Then they contradicted themselves on that point today, claiming that CIA officials were about to activate the plan when Leon Panetta found out about it and ordered it terminated. In the same article, Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, said that the CIA didn't break the law in concealing an aspirational program from Congress, which Jan Schakowsky rebuked, but only on the technical grounds of withholding classified information.

There is no reason to believe, in my view, that this particular program is the same as the one that has raised Congress' ire. There may have been an assassination squad program; it's apparently been reported as far back as 2001. But nobody really knows what program Panetta closed with a flourish and reported to Congress, and those who think they do are either speculating or getting information from unreliable sources. It defies belief that Dick Cheney, on the ropes for ordering the CIA to hide information from Congress, would hide this particular information, in continuity with what past Administrations have done. And it defies belief to think that dozens of sources would come out of the woodwork on Cheney to describe a program of "killing bad guys," which is very favorable to the former Vice President. Nope, this was something bigger. Much bigger.

The Rush To Judgment

Pretty much every news outlet has confirmed that the secret CIA program held from Congress by Dick Cheney concerned targeted assassinations of Al Qaeda members abroad, basically the "executive assassination ring" discussed by Sy Hersh earlier this year.

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel's Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.

The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme.

I'd like to know more about that Kenya incident. Put it this way, when 15 year-old kids who committed no crime other than being valuable to an Afghan warlord seeking a bounty ended up at Guantanamo, I can only imagine what the fever dreams of Dick Cheney led to out in the world.

But something's not right here. Targeted assassinations of heads of state are illegal, President Ford signed that in 1975. But Peter Bergen explains that we have had assassination policies on Al Qaeda since before 9-11 and after.

Peter Bergen, a senior security analyst at the New America Foundation, said that the secret operation must have gone further than that to have created such a backlash in Congress: "If it's an assassination programme of al-Qaida leaders that is hardly surprising. Clinton had an assassination programme against bin Laden. There have been 27 drone missile strikes against al-Qaida alone this year."

It could be the case that Congress is merely upset about not being properly informed, also a crime under the National Security Act of 1947, and not the contents of the program. But two things stick out. It's completely unclear why this action, out of all the others, would be hid by the Bush Administration from Congress. Most terror policies were justified under the concept that we were at war with Al Qaeda, and the executive has broad discretion to carry out the policies he sees fit to protect the nation. I don't agree with the expansiveness of that view, but this kind of assassination ring would fall squarely inside that construct, no? Why would the Bush White House not be afraid to argue that we can torture suspects in the war on terror but terrified to explain that we can take out Al Qaeda safe houses with targeted strikes, the way that the Clinton Administration clearly did in the past? Why would it be so radioactive that Leon Panetta couldn't hear about it for six months after being made CIA Director?

The second thing that bothers me about this is the lightning quickness with which the program has been explained to the press, mostly through unnamed sources. You'd almost think that some members of the Bush Administration wanted to convince the public that their secret program only dealt with killing bad guys. And when I say some members, I mean Dick Cheney.

Bobby Ghosh at TIME has some different information:

But two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there's another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA's purview -– it's usually the FBI's job – and it's easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they're only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

“People may want this to be about hit squads bumping off shady Saudis in Geneva, but that's very unlikely,” says one official. “More likely, it was a plan to spy on some suspicious American citizens or organizations, without telling the FBI.”

A third CIA official who is familiar with details of the program says it was deemed unworkable and cancelled in 2004. It is not clear when or why the program was revived as a possibility, but it never got very far from the drawing board, as Republican Congressmen who received a confidential briefing about it by CIA Director Leon Panetta said.

The Cheney Administration ran so many secret programs that only him and David Addington, in all likelihood, know which program corresponds to which set of briefings or lack of disclosure from Congress. In fact the Inspector General report stated that the wiretapping program had little effectiveness precisely because of all the secrecy. So when every newspaper in the world reports about targeted assassinations within a day of the disclosure of some secret program hid by Cheney, I'm immediately dubious of the information, or rather the disinformation.

One thing is clear - there are potentially tons of unturned out there, unbeknownst to the President and his staff, and these landmines can detonate at really any time, throwing the White House off track. They might want to send in a special prosecutor simply to defuse them.

Why A Special Prosecutor? Let Me Count The Ways

We have so many reasons from the last Administration that highlight the importance of a special prosecutor to deal with the wreck of the previous eight years, it's a serious task to count them all. Aside from torture, warrantless spying, black sites, indefinite detention, the suspension of habeas corpus, outing a covert CIA operative, lying the country to war in Iraq? You mean we need more reasons?

More broadly, one can highlight the problem of an accountability-free zone in Washington, regardless of the issue. If there is literally no issue where top officials can ever be held to account, this does nothing but give government, in particular the executive branch that deals with security and secrecy, a license to run wild. Consider just the past 48 hours:

• We finally got a report on the scope of the Administration's spying programs, the consensus of five Inspectors General, and while we learned a fair bit of interesting details about the nature of the internal debate over the program, the fact that John Yoo was one of the only human beings in America to know about it because the Cheney/Addington crowd knew he would produce favorable rulings legitimizing it, and the fact that the secrecy ultimately undermined whatever the program was designed to produce in terms of intelligence, all we really learned is that some surveillance program operated completely outside the boundaries of the law, without oversight by Congress, and we to this day have no idea about the extent or nature of the spying. As Glennzilla says, this does not comprise an investigation:

Nonetheless, because the Obama administration is actively blocking any real investigation -- Obama opposes all Congressional investigations into Bush-era crimes and, worse, is engaged in extraordinary efforts to block courts from adjudicating the legality of Bush's surveillance activities by claiming that even long-obsolete and clearly criminal programs are "state secrets" -- it is quite likely, despite how blatant is the lawbreaking, that there will be no consequences for any of it. In a Look-to-the-Future-Not-the-Past political culture, it's irrelevant how severe is the lawbreaking by high government officials. They know they will face no consequences even when, as here, they deliberately commit felonies -- which is precisely why criminality is so rampant in our political class [...]

The IG Report is more notable for what it fails to address than for what it discloses, but that's the nature of IG Reports. Most of the key players who authorized the illegal domestic spying -- David Addington, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, John Ashcroft, George Tenet -- simply refused to talk to the IGs or, in many cases, didn't even bother responding to their request. The IG's have no power at all to compel them to do so; it's entirely optional. That -- aside from the fact that they work within the Executive Branch and for the very agencies they are supposed to investigate -- is what makes IGs such an inadequate substitute for real oversight: no matter how much integrity and independence they might have, they are extremely limited in what they can achieve.

As any litigator will tell you, the lack of power to compel key witnesses to answer questions and produce documents severely hampers any ability to conduct a real investigation. Yet, when they passed the FISA Amendments Act -- which legalized Bush's spying programs and immunized lawbreaking telecoms -- Democratic leaders kept pointing to the requirement of an IG Report to placate those complaining that they were whitewashing and legalizing Bush abuses. But IGs are simply incapable, given their very limited powers and their institutional allegiances, of any real investigation of this sort. What they were unable to disclose in this Report underscores how limited are their investigative abilities [...]

Over the past couple of years, there have been isolated leaks suggesting abuses of these eavesdropping powers, but there has been no real investigation into the ends to which these surveillance powers were used. As a legal question, it matters little: eavesdropping without warrants is a felony no matter the purpose for which it was done. But since FISA's warrant requirement arose from the recognition that widespread surveillance abuses were virtually inevitable if eavesdropping was conducted without judicial oversight, the lack of any investigation into this question reveals the extent to which both parties have been eager to help cover-up the crimes that were committed during the Bush years. The IG Report sheds some light onto what happened, but most of it, as intended, remains in the dark, and real accountability is still as far away as it was before this Report was issued.

Russ Feingold said in a statement that "This report leaves no doubt that the warrantless wiretapping program was blatantly illegal and an unconstitutional assertion of executive power."

• The United States government, under two Presidents, blocked any investigation into the mass slaughter of perhaps thousands of Afghans by a warlord.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.

“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

These are the prisoners stuffed into metal containers without food and water, and left helpless as guards shot into the containers. And we never investigated it, despite having a military presence in the country for seven years. Agence France Press has more.

• And then there's this:

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Remember that we have no idea what this program is, although there are some indications that this may be the infamous executive assassination ring. So because of the lack of accountability, the Vice President can order the CIA to keep a sensitive counter-terrorism program completely secret and therefore beyond oversight.

I would offer that all of these programs and secret plans and extra-Constitutional deployment of powers, well summarized here by Tom Watson, are a direct result of the complete lack of accountability for the actions taken by officials in the executive branch. The processes of oversight through the Congress and the Inspector General reports offer little opportunity for sanction. The expansion of executive power over the years gives many opportunities to short-circuit accountability through invocations of state secrets or national security. So without an independent prosecutor with subpoena power allowed to follow out the dictates of equal justice under the law, we will see an increase of air into the balloon, more and more, until it consumes us all. We have to pop the unaccountability bubble.

Wired For Conservatism

E.J. Dionne is one of the first traditional media journalists, to my knowledge, to openly state that the media tilts to the right, in the context of how the chattering class leaps at any utterance from the Newt Gingrichs and Rush Limbaughs and Dick Cheneys of the world, and he explains how this distorts the debate in Washington and what people pick up in the cultural milieu.

If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don't. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.

The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina [...]

This was brought home at this week's annual conference of the Campaign for America's Future, a progressive group that supports Obama but worries about how close his economic advisers are to Wall Street, how long our troops will have to stay in Afghanistan and how much he will be willing to compromise to secure health-care reform.

In other words, they see Obama not as the parody created by the far right but as he actually is: a politician with progressive values but moderate instincts who has hewed to the middle of the road in dealing with the economic crisis, health care, Guantanamo and the war in Afghanistan.

Dionne goes on to describe a panel he witnessed Tuesday with Jared Polis, Donna Edwards and Raul Grijalva - three of the most progressive members of Congress, but three whose names aren't in the Village Rolodex, and whose views have almost no impact on the way the debates in Washington are presented to the public. That doesn't mean they don't have power and importance - their decision along with the Progressive Caucus to pool their power and force the public option into the health care debate was masterful - but it confuses the way Obama is presented, and the space to criticize him from the left. Edwards explained this very specifically:

Polis, Edwards and Grijalva also noted that proposals for a Canadian-style single-payer health-care system, which they support, have fallen off the political radar. Polis urged his activist audience to accept that reality for now and focus its energy on making sure that a government insurance option, known in policy circles as the "public plan," is part of the menu of choices offered by a reformed health-care system.

But Edwards noted that if the public plan, already a compromise from single-payer, is defined as the left's position in the health-care debate, the entire discussion gets skewed to the right. This makes it far more likely that any public option included in a final bill will be a pale version of the original idea.

Her point has broader application. For all the talk of a media love affair with Obama, there is a deep and largely unconscious conservative bias in the media's discussion of policy. The range of acceptable opinion runs from the moderate left to the far right and cuts off more vigorous progressive perspectives.

And actually, this SUITS Obama. If he wanted to pick his enemies, he's much rather have Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney than Jared Polis, Donna Edwards and Raul Grijalva. For one, the public has a fairly definitive opinion of those conservatives, at least relative to Obama, and the President wins those debates without saying a word. For another, Obama has no need to move from the moderate center if the Beltway criticism doesn't approach him from that perspective. His choice of advisers and policy options clearly put him in that moderate mainstream of the Democratic Party, and it's where he feels - has always felt - the most comfortable.

The media has an interest in defining the terms of the debate, indeed a self-interest, given the conglomerates that they are. When ABC News gives the same amount of space to Sean Hannity as they do to the Secretary of State, implicit in that editorial decision is the fact that Hannity has spent many years as part of the ABC Radio Network. When business stories betray a perspective more sympathetic to corporate America than the working class, the very fact of the corporate behemoths that populate modern media bear a lot on that decision. But these decisions also enable Obama to operate without equal pressure from all sides of the policy argument, essentially a free hand. This may keep conservatism alive, but it also co-opts the Democratic Administration by giving them the only pressure they consider important - pressure from the right.

The Dark Side

I thought this was a known known, but WaPo treats it like a scoop - Dick Cheney sat in on CIA briefings about torture in 2005.

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees.

The Cheney-led briefings came at some of the most critical moments for the program, as congressional oversight committees were threatening to investigate or even terminate the techniques, according to lawmakers, congressional officials, and current and former intelligence officials [...]

The CIA made no mention of his role in documents delivered to Capitol Hill last month that listed every lawmaker who had been briefed on "enhanced interrogation techniques" since 2002. For meetings that were overseen by Cheney, the agency told the intelligence committees that information about who oversaw those briefings was "not available."

Several members of Congress who took part in the Cheney meetings declined to comment on them, citing secrecy concerns. But there was little doubt that he was leading the charge on the issue.

"His office was ground zero. It was his office you dealt with at the end of the day," recalled Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who jousted with Cheney over the system of interrogations.

As Greg Sargent notes, you can just go ahead and throw those CIA documents right in the garbage. Enough errors have been found in them that I could write up something more plausibly just by going through old blog posts.

Remember what was going on around 2005. Republicans on the Hill were revolting after allegations of torture started reaching the mainstream. Lindsey Graham and John Warner and John McCain wanted to ban the practice. Democrats were calling for a full-scale investigation. These sessions, as I read them, were basically designed to keep the Republican caucus on board with the policy. They were in charge of Congress at the time, and they could shut down any probes into the torture regime. You can see that at work in the one briefing described at length:

One of the most critical Cheney-led briefings came in late October 2005, when the vice president and Porter J. Goss, then director of the CIA, read Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) into the program on the interrogation methods, according to congressional and intelligence sources.

One knowledgeable official described the meeting as contentious. Cheney and Goss, with other CIA officials present, tried to persuade the former Vietnam POW to back off an anti-torture amendment that had already won the support of 90 senators.

The McCain amendment would have ended practices such as waterboarding by forbidding "cruel, degrading and inhumane" treatment of detainees. The CIA had not used waterboarding since 2003, but the White House sought to maintain the ability to employ it.

In the meetings with lawmakers, Cheney was adamant that the enhanced interrogations were needed to preserve national security, according to two participants. He advocated briefing more lawmakers about the program, against the wishes of National Security Council officials who sought to inform only the top members of the intelligence committees.

Lawmakers at times challenged Cheney and CIA officials about the legality of the program and pressed for specific results that would show whether the techniques worked. In response, the CIA briefers said that half of the agency's knowledge about al-Qaeda's plans and structure had been obtained through the interrogations.

In case you needed more evidence that the CIA lies to Congress. Just the fact that they hid Cheney's involvement in these briefings is an example of that.

Marcy Wheeler reports on a couple other interesting parts of the story:

First, the WaPo reports that Jello Jay pushed for an investigation, but Pat Roberts quashed it. I guess that explains why Roberts is so quiet now. But in case anyone wanted any more affirmation that Democrats opposed torture and Republicans sustained it, there's yet one more data point.

And then yet another Gitmo trip for Addington, this time with some Senators in tow. Was this an all-Republican affair as well? The question is particularly relevant, since Lindsey Graham has helpfully reminded us that all these Republican-only briefings are proof of criminal intent. Or was it just Graham, McCain and the few other anti-torture Republicans, off on a field trip to be coerced by Cheney's right hand man?

If anyone needed yet more proof that torture was Cheney's baby, his active lobbying of Congress--hidden as "CIA briefings"--ought to do the trick.

Hopefully the Post will develop this angle in future articles. For now, we know that Dick Cheney was the torture lobbyist, he worked with the CIA to shut down any investigation, and the CIA lies to Congress.

Honest Dick

Nancy Pfothenpfhaupfer wants you to know that salt of the earth Dick Cheney, the guy who chopped down the cherry tree at Mount Vernon (OK, shot it in the face, actually) and admitted it to his father, would never tell a lie:

"You know, obviously you've got different opinions on the whole issue of harsh interrogation techniques. And of course, Cheney wasn't running in the last election, but Sen. McCain, for who I worked, was very clearly opposed to all these harsh interrogation techniques. And he went on record saying, as a former prisoner of war for five years, you don't get high quality information from these types of interrogations. People will basically say anything in order to make it stop. I don't believe, however, that the former Vice President would be making statements that he knew to be inaccurate."

Shuster just breaks up laughing from that one. And mockery is the right reaction. Because we're now seeing Cheney backtracking from his own statement that CIA classified documents will show that torture saved lives.

The key moment came when his interviewer said: “You want some documents declassified having to do with waterboarding.” Cheney replied:

“Yes, but the way I would describe them is they have to do with the detainee program, the interrogation program. It’s not just waterboarding. It’s the interrogation program that we used for high-value detainees. There were two reports done that summarize what we learned from that program, and I think they provide a balanced view.”

Bear with me here, because this is crucial. Cheney is carefully saying that the documents summarize what we learned from the overall interrogation program. Torture, of course, was only a component of that program. So he’s clearly saying that the docs summarize what was learned from a program that included non-torture techniques, too.

Here’s why this is important. It dovetails precisely with what Senator Carl Levin, who has also seen these docs, says about them. Levin claims the docs don’t do anything to “connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques.”

Of course, Cheney's only hedging in the event that the documents do get released, so he can find some other rhetorical ground. He was perfectly content to lie when he thought that the documents would never get released to the public. The same way he lied yesterday about the Iraq war saving lives, an unprovable negative based on things Saddam Hussein had no capacity to do. It's an obvious falsehood, but he can retreat to some ground where he can claim that nobody else could prove him false. The same with him foisting 9/11 off on Richard Clarke, on the grounds that counter-terrorism was his job so only he must be responsible. Never mind that Cheney takes all kind of credit for keeping America safe AFTER 9/11. And of course this analysis neglects plenty:

When the moderator reminded Cheney that Clarke had repeatedly warned the administration about al Qaeda’s determination to attack the U.S., Cheney snarkily replied, “That’s not my recollection, but I haven’t read his book.”

In fact, it was Cheney who “missed” the warning signs, not Clarke. New York Times reporter Philip Shenon’s book, “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation,” reprinted some of Clarke’s emphatic e-mails warning the Bush administration of the al Qaeda threat throughout 2001:

“Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack” (May 3)

“Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot” (May 23)

“Bin Ladin’s Networks’ Plans Advancing” (May 26)

“Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” (June 23)

“Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” (June 25)

“Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” (June 30)

“Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays” (July 2)

Similarly, Time Magazine reported in 2002 that Clarke had an extensive plan to “roll back” al Qaeda — a plan that languished for months, ignored by senior Bush officials:

Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. … In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, “Response to al Qaeda: Roll back.” … The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush.

Dick Cheney is a pathological liar, who knows enough to give himself a minor rhetorical out should anyone call him on it. He's also a pathetic child for relying on 9/11 trauma to explain their terror policies.

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America." [...]

Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

Read that whole thing. It's an indictment of the worst Administration in history, who used a crisis to pursue long-sought goals, and rationalizing them through fear and deception.

Barack, Get Yourself To West Hollywood

When Ted Olson, who argued Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court, took the case alleging that Prop. 8 violates equal protection laws and that same-sex couples have a Constitutional right to be married, that's one thing. When Republicans like Meghan McCain and Steve Schmidt make pronouncements in favor of gay marriage, it's another. But when Dick Cheney offers his support, and nobody bats an eyelash because he's supported gay marriage since 2004, basically, the political world should take notice.

"I think that freedom means freedom for everyone," replied the former V.P. "As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. ... But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."

Obviously, if he didn't have direct personal knowledge of gay relationships because of a member of his family, he probably wouldn't have the same position. And you can also see that in Bill Clinton's answer about gay marriage late last week. For context, Clinton signed DOMA and reportedly told John Kerry to endorse local bans against gay marriage and even the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Asked about same-sex marriages, Bush defended the "sacred" institution of wedlock between a man and a woman. Clinton said that the more he knows gay people, the more he thinks their relationships "should be up to them."

Barack Obama needs to talk to some gay Americans. Certainly that would be preferable to talking to the consultants that have him paralyzed with fear over extending civil rights to homosexuals.

Of course, one recognizes that Clinton and Cheney are not in office right now.

...Obama goes out on a limb, reiterates for the 500th time a promise to end the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Which he could do by putting a moratorium on firing soldiers today.

My Administration has partnered with the LGBT community to advance a wide range of initiatives. At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Here at home, I continue to support measures to bring the full spectrum of equal rights to LGBT Americans. These measures include enhancing hate crimes laws, supporting civil unions and Federal rights for LGBT couples, outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights, and ending the existing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in a way that strengthens our Armed Forces and our national security. We must also commit ourselves to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic by both reducing the number of HIV infections and providing care and support services to people living with HIV/AIDS across the United States.