Every Day A Torture Memo

Now that I've had some time to marinate in these depraved memos justifying and finding legal rationalizations for torture, I am convinced that the members of the Bush Administration who directed and authorized all this just willed themselves to believe they were doing the righteous and just thing. Sure, they knew enough to find some thin strand of legal reasoning to cover their naked bodies, but that was seen by them as a brave and forthright act. I don't see another way to live with approving Room 101 techniques like putting someone in a box with a bug unless you've convinced yourself of your own worthiness. The memos also produce a fact pattern of deliberate lies by the CIA to put their proposed torture of Abu Zubaydah in the best possible light (claiming he was of sound mental health when contemporaneous reports term him a basket case, for example). Combine that with typical Republican victimhood status, and you have the squealing pigs in the media today despairing about the release of these documents.

Two of the rogue's gallery, Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey, argue in the Wall Street Journal that the President "tied his own hand on terror" due to the release. Here's a choice quote from these moral lepers.

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

We're always supposed to remember that we simply had to violate laws and shrink to the level of our enemies because that's how they operate, which is certainly telling on behalf of the cretins defending themselves in this. But the contempt of our enemies was never in question; it's the contempt of our allies, of indeed the entire world, which is only exacerbated by the defense of these actions, especially considering that they have for the time being been put outside the criminal justice system and above the law. It's not the "publicizing of the techniques," as this unnamed coward given sanction by useful idiot Mike Allen to rant today, that weakens national security, it's the constant defense of them, the daily shame that there are powerful people in the US government convinced that drowning people is a necessary activity that "can never be used again" - as if that's a bad thing.

In this sense, Richard Armitage is an anomaly - someone who after the fact would be reflective enough to consider the moral issues involved. The others have brainwashed themselves into believing not just the legality of this monstrousness, but the essential nature of it all. And because they continue to run out in the media and talk about the importance of being torturers, and never face a consequence, they harm national security with each passing moment.

And so do those who refuse to hold them to account. I agree that the largely unredacted release is a praiseworthy act by the President. The push to "move forward" and offer no accountability for violations of domestic law and international convention is a huge mistake - one compounded every day by the continued issuing of "torture memos" in newspapers and on cable TV from the Bush Administration weasels who aren't satisfied with just getting away with the crime, but feel the need to glorify it. This is a Justice Department decision, and they ought to appoint a special prosecutor, taking it out of the political realm. Believers in the rule of law should be screaming for that. Because every day that passes, another torture memo puts distance between us and the world.

As for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, who sits on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and spends his days officially passing judgment when his judgment is on display in the torture memos for all to see, I know of a movement upon which we can all latch. I have to confirm it, but please stay tuned.

The Lies Of The Intelligence Community

This happened a couple days ago, but it was so jarring to consider Jay Rockefeller and smackdown in the same sentence that I thought it deserved a mention.

Dear Director Hayden:

If today’s article describing an interview you gave to the Washington Post is accurate, I am surprised and troubled by your comments.

The positions attributed to you are not consistent with assessments that have been provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee over the past year. If the Intelligence Community’s assessment of al-Qa’ida has changed, I would expect the Committee to be made aware of these changes immediately. If the assessment has not changed, then I ask that you explain why you would portray the terrorist movement as “on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.” In fact, I have seen nothing, including classified intelligence reporting, that would lead me to this conclusion.

If Jay Rockefeller isn't buying the bullshit, you can be pretty sure that there's no bullshit to buy. In fact, Bush's own Deupty Director of National Intelligence has admitted that there will be little headway made on top national security projects before Bush leaves office. Every NIE on terrorism that has been released describes Al Qaeda as resurgent and reconstituting in the FATA region. And the Bushies have no strategy to deal with that. It's a legacy of failure, and you can only put so much lipstick on that pig.

Rockefeller also makes an important point:

There is no doubt that our superb military has had success against al-Qa’ida in Iraq over the last year. It also is accurate that the government of Saudi Arabia has had success at disrupting plots internal to that country. Both of these efforts are important in the global battle against al-Qa’ida, but these were always regional battlegrounds and the recent improvements represent tactical, not strategic, successes. As all of the quotes above illustrate, the primary threat to the United States emanates from the ungoverned regions of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, not from Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Likewise, the deaths of three senior leaders that you mentioned, while important, are unlikely to have long term effect. Al-Qa’ida has been losing senior operatives on a regular basis for more than six years and there has been no shortage of replacements.

The idea that we can just kill our way to victory in the war on terror is just deeply flawed. So long as we are engaging in imperialist adventures in the Middle East and occupying Muslim countries there will be no shortage of recruits. That's especially true if we aren't putting any pressure on the world's most dangerous trouble spots, like Pakistan.

Good for Rockefeller, at least in this instance.

Well, It Certainly Sounds Like An Independent Investigation

Michael Mukasey taps a career prosecutor to investigate the destruction of the torture tapes:

The CIA acknowledged last month that it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two al-Qaida suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry and a preliminary investigation by Justice.

"The Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation," Mukasey said in a statement released Wednesday.

Mukasey named John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, to oversee the case.

Durham apparently went up against the FBI and sent a bunch of public officials in Connecticut to prison, so he's not afraid of taking on the government. He's basically acting as the US Attorney for eastern Virginia because that USA, who would normally have jurisdiction over the CIA, recused himself. And the head of the CIA, Michael Hayden, has also recused himself, along with John Helgerson, the CIA Inspector General.

This has all the earmarks of a legitimate independent investigation, but with the Bush Administration nothing is assured.

UPDATE: It's interesting that this is coming out on a day when 9/11 Commission co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton reiterated in the New York Times that the CIA stonewalled their investigation and lied to their commission.

UPDATE II: Conyers seems unhappy, wanted a special counsel and thinks the scope of the investigation is too limited. I have to agree to an extent that the Justice Department has defaulted on its ability to independently investigate the White House. So the Congress should engage in a parallel probe.

Torture Tape Update

So after belligerently trying to shut down the House Intelligence Committee investigation over the detroyed torture tapes, and faced with imminent subpoenas which would have bipartisan support, the CIA and the Justice Department relented, offering documents and allowing the CIA's top lawyer, John Rizzo, to testify to the committee. Whether or not they'll allow Jose Rodriguez, who is the prime subject for a committee subpoena, to testify is an open question. It's a minor victory for the separation of powers, but I stress minor. And so far, based not only on the documents given to the committee but also testimony from Michael Hayden, it looks like Abu Gonzales and John Bellinger advised against destroying the tapes, adding to other accounts that Harriet Miers advised against destruction as well. Only one lawyer known to have been present at the discussions is left out: David Addington, Cheney's lawyer. It was obvious that Addington would be the figure most likely to argue for their destruction, seeing as he's bathed in the light of Fourthbranch and believes himself to be not bound by any laws, a Javier Bardem-in-No Country For Old Men kind of person, if you will.

Additionally, a CIA lawyer has put to rest Hayden's ridiculous concern that the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of the agents involved. There are ample ways to blur out faces or obscure identities, he said, plus they were in the hands of the CIA the entire time, and "If a tape is not safe in the CIA, we’re in trouble."

The 9/11 Commission is weighing in as well, claiming that the tapes were withheld from them prior to their destruction. This is almost the harmonic convergence of Bush Administration secrecy, because so many different groups, including Congress, independent panels like the 9/11 Commission with the force of law, and even the courts have been stonewalled. In the case of the 9/11 panel, the administrators are looking to see whether the CIA violated federal law.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.

In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.

What may not pan out is the court case that some thought would pry open more documents into further view.

A federal judge appeared reluctant Friday to investigate the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes while the Justice Department is conducting its own inquiry.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy is considering whether to delve into the matter and, if so, how deeply. The Bush administration is urging him to back off while it investigates.

"Why should the court not permit the Department of Justice to do just that?" Kennedy asked at a court hearing.

Can I answer that? Because they're hopelessly partisan and implicated in the investigation at the highest levels?

It's very unclear where all of this is going. My goal would be to see Addington forced out of the shadows.

They Destroyed The Tapes To Cover Up The Crime

Not only have federal courts ordered preservation of all relevant documents AFTER the revelation of the destroyed CIA torture tapes, apparently the same orders were in place before.

The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.

Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.

While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videotapes of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed.

That certainly fits with the torture timeline of the tapes being destroyed soon after Dana Priest uncovered the CIA black sites on the pages of the Washington Post. Now the ACLU is asking that the CIA be held in contempt for destroying the tapes. I'm not sure what that means (are you going to throw the whole CIA in jail), but clearly this controversy is spinning out of control. And more and more detainees and suspects are revealing that their interrogations were videotaped and audiotaped, long after the CIA claims it ended the practice. Michael Hayden has now admitted that the agency failed to disclose to Congress what the hell was going on. This all points to the failure of intelligence oversight, which has been going on more some time (although I don't think David Ignatius has a clue about what to do about that). Destruction of evidence and lack of disclosure is a persistent problem, not a brand new thing. We have to determine a way to oversee the intelligence collection meaningfully and with due haste. Part of that comes from getting leaders in those oversight committees who are committed to the rule of law. The other part may come in the form of legal liability, which always tends to button things up for a while.

Talk About A Buried Lede

So the NYT, the WaPo and the LAT all wrote the same story about the closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, probably because it was closed-door and there was a limited amount of information. They all quoted Michael Hayden's "I know nothink" shtick, where he claimed he wasn't there when the taping of interrogations was authorized and he wasn't there when they were destroyed (except he claimed that he supported their destruction in his initial message, might want to button that up, General). They all quoted Jay Rockefeller calling the hearing "useful but incomplete" and vowing to call other witnesses. They all covered Michael Mukasey's hem and haw session, where he struck down the idea of a special prosecutor by claiming the completely compromised Justice Department can do the job. But at the end of two of the reports came a remarkable little nugget. From the NYT:

Elsewhere in Washington, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued an interim order on Tuesday directing the government not to destroy any evidence of torture that lawyers for a Guantánamo Bay detainee say they believe exists.

The order came after lawyers for the detainee, Majid Khan, filed a request asserting that he had been tortured in secret C.I.A. prisons for more than three years before he was transferred to Guantánamo last year.

J. Wells Dixon, one of Mr. Khan’s lawyers, said Tuesday that he believed the judges would not have issued the order “if they did not think there was any risk” that the government might destroy evidence of torture.

The WaPo had pretty much the same item, also at the very end of the story.

Shouldn't that be its own story? You have a three-judge panel warning the government against destroying evidence that may came up at trial, evidence that would implicate them in war crimes and violations of international law. Why is that buried in the back of a completely different story?

We keep getting these little tidbits in these stories. Yesterday it was one former detainee asserting that he saw cameras filming interrogations well after the CIA claims it ended the practice. Today it's this motion from the DC Court of Appeals.

There is evidence out there. It's beyond clear. That's the cumulative effect of these nods and winks. And if it's out there, the government might as well put it out now, because there will be a release at some point.

Meanwhile, the legal adviser at Gitmo seems to think that evidence gathered by torture is admissible at trial (or whatever they call the kangaroo courts down there), and refused to answer if waterboarding would be illegal if used on an American soldier by the enemy. The previous chief prosecutor of military commissions, Morris Davis, had a categorically different view on the admissibility of torture-generated evidence. He quit, and was invited to the Senate testimony yesterday, but the Defense Department WOULDN'T LET HIM TESTIFY even though he no longer works under them.

We're so far down the rabbit hole we can see ourselves on the other side. It's almost time to stick a fork in this democracy.

UPDATE: You can view an excellent timeline of the torture tapes at TPM Muckraker.

World's Most Confident War Criminal

This is really unbelievable. Michael Hayden's whole weak excuse for his agency destroying tapes of torture interrogations was that he was looking to protect the identities of those agents involved. And then one of them comes out on national television and admits to it.

A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.

In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.

"The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson" and "Nightline."

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

First of all, of course he broke in 35 seconds. You were drowning him. Not simulating drowning, but actually drowning.

Second, the idea that Zubaydah disrupted dozens of attacks can reasonably be called into question. Kevin Drum has led efforts to retrieve the truth about Zubaydah from the memory hole.

"The guy is insane, certifiable, split personality," [Dan] Coleman told a top official at FBI after a few days reviewing the Zubaydah haul....There was almost nothing "operational" in his portfolio. That was handled by the management team. He wasn't one of them...."He was like a travel agent, the guy who booked your flights....He was expendable, you know, the greeter....Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar's Palace, shaking hands."

....According to CIA sources, he was water-boarded....He was beaten....He was repeatedly threatened....His medication was withheld. He was bombarded with deafening, continuous noise and harsh lights.

....Under this duress, Zubaydah told them that shopping malls were targeted by al Qaeda....Zubaydah said banks — yes, banks — were a priority....And also supermarkets — al Qaeda was planning to blow up crowded supermarkets, several at one time. People would stop shopping. The nation's economy would be crippled. And the water system — a target, too. Nuclear plants, naturally. And apartment buildings.

Thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each flavor of target. Of course, if you multiplied by ten, there still wouldn't be enough public servants in America to surround and secure the supermarkets. Or the banks. But they tried.

This is actually somewhat backed up by Kiriakou's account. He says that dozens of attacks were thwarted. But to believe that you have to believe that Al Qaeda had dozens of attacks ready, when 9/11 took 18 months to plan and years more to gestate.

Whatever the case, what was done to Zubaydah is obviously torture. And this guy Kiriakou is complicit, admitting that they waterboarded him, which has been in violation of international law for decades. He basically incriminated himself on TV. He's even admitting now that waterboarding is torture that shouldn't be used, although he sounds conflicted by it because he believes this mentally ill person accurately described dozens of attacks.

Kiriakou said the feeling in the months after the 9/11 attacks was that interrogators did not have the time to delve into the agency's bag of other interrogation tricks.

"Those tricks of the trade require a great deal of time -- much of the time -- and we didn't have that luxury. We were afraid that there was another major attack coming," he said [...]

Now retired, Kiriakou, who declined to use the enhanced interrogation techniques, says he has come to believe that water boarding is torture but that perhaps the circumstances warranted it.

"Like a lot of Americans, I'm involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique," Kiriakou told ABC News. "And I struggle with it." [...]

"At the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do. And as time has passed, and as September 11th has, you know, has moved farther and farther back into history, I think I've changed my mind," he told ABC News.

Part of his decision appears to be an ethical one; another part, perhaps, simply pragmatic.

"I think we're chasing them all over the world. I think we've had a great deal of success chasing them...and, as a result, waterboarding, at least right now, is unnecessary," Kirikou said.

Brian Ross: "Did it compromise American principles? Or did it save American lives? Or both?"

John Kiriakou: "I think both. It may have compromised our principles at least in the short term. And I think it's good that we're having a national debate about this. We should be debating this, and Congress should be talking about it because, I think, as a country, we have to decide if this is something that we want to do as a matter of policy. I'm not saying now that we should, but, at the very least, we should be talking about it. It shouldn't be secret. It should be out there as part of the national debate."

Honestly, this is someone who is conflicted because he was witness to madness and he wants to forgive himself. But what you have to ask yourself is, how can it be that Kiriakou feels completely able to come forward and admit to a war crime? It's clear that the CIA destroyed the tapes to avoid prosecution. But I have to say that the destruction is almost irrelevant now. You have a material witness on the record. All the DC-area Staples are probably out of shredders given the gap of several days between the revelation of the tapes and an order for preservation of documents, but again, it doesn't matter. Why is this guy so confident?

Of course, it's because the Bush Administration won't possibly prosecute, no matter who asks for a legal determination of the CIA program. The Democratic leadership and the leadership of the intelligence communities are ethically compromised on the issue as well, having learned of plans to enact torture and meeting them with silence. The US is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court and would do anything in their power to avert prosecution on these grounds.

This is what happens in a country without the rule of law. Torturers can go in front of the cameras and casually admit their guilt. And absolutely nothing will happen to them.

UPDATE: Gerald Posner:

In my 2003 New York Times bestseller, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, I discussed Abu Zubaydah at length in Chapter 19, "The Interrogation." There I set forth how Zubaydah initially refused to help his American captors. Also, disclosed was how U.S. intelligence established a so-called "fake flag" operation, in which the wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by U.S. agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers.

Instead, when confronted by his "Saudi" interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. "He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah assured them

That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd's nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.

American interrogators used painkillers to induce Zubaydah to talk -- they gave him the meds when he cooperated, and withdrew them when he was quiet. They also utilized a thiopental sodium drip (a so-called truth serum). Several hours after he first fingered Prince Ahmed, his captors challenged the information, and said that since he had disparaged the Saudi royal family, he would be executed. It was at that point that some of the secrets of 9/11 came pouring out. In a short monologue, that one investigator told me was the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.

He named two other Saudi princes, and also the chief of Pakistan's air force, as his major contacts. Moreover, he stunned his interrogators, by charging that two of the men, the King's nephew, and the Pakistani Air Force chief, knew a major terror operation was planned for America on 9/11.

These three Saudi princes died within a week of one another under highly questionable circumstances, including one who died of "thirst."

UPDATE II: I almost forgot that the CIA was given blanket immunity as part of the Military Commissions Act. This guy is off scot-free. And as I excerpted, Kiriakou declined to use the "enhanced interrogation techniques," i.e. torture. Except he's at the very least an accessory to a war crime, and if he subjected the detainee to extended sleep deprivation, etc., he's complicit.

Cover-Up

There's one man in America most qualified to answer questions about warrantless wiretapping and this push for telecom immunity. His name is Mark Klein. He worked for AT&T when he discovered a secret NSA surveillance room on Folsom Street in San Francisco. He has clearly and succinctly explained why telecom immunity would be a great tragedy for this country.

Klein explained why he traveled all the way from San Francisco to lobby Senators about the issue: if the immunity provision passes, Americans may never know how extensive the surveillance program was -- or how deeply their privacy may have been invaded.

"The president has not presented this truthfully," said Klein, a 62-year old retiree. "He said it was about a few people making calls to the Mideast. But I know this physical equipment. It copies everything. There's no selection of anything, at all -- the splitter copies entire data streams from the internet, phone conversations, e-mail, web-browsing. Everything." [...]

Its very location in San Francisco suggests that the program was "massively domestic" in its focus, he said. "If they really meant what they say about only wanting international stuff, you wouldn't want it in San Francisco or Atlanta. You'd want to be closer to the border where the lines come in from the ocean so you pick up international calls. You only do it in San Francisco if you want domestic stuff. The location of this stuff contradicts their story."

We still don't know, nearly two years after the initial revelations, the extent to which Americans have been spied upon by their own government. And without allowing the legal process to move forward, we'll never know. What's already in the public domain is shocking.

Beginning in February 2001, almost seven months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government's top electronic eavesdropping organization, the National Security Agency, asked a major U.S. telecommunications carrier for information about its customers and the flow of electronic traffic across its network, according to sources familiar with the request. The carrier, Qwest Communications, refused, believing that the request was illegal unless accompanied by a court order [...]

However, in February 2001, the NSA's primary purpose in seeking access to Qwest's network apparently was not to search for terrorists but to watch for computer hackers and foreign-government forces trying to penetrate and compromise U.S. government information systems, particularly within the Defense Department, sources said. Government officials have long feared a "digital Pearl Harbor" if intruders were to seize control of these systems or other key U.S. infrastructures through the Internet.

A former White House official, who at the time was involved in network defense and other intelligence programs, said that the early 2001 NSA proposal to Qwest was, "Can you build a private version of Echelon and tell us what you see?" Echelon refers to a signals intelligence network operated by the NSA and its official counterparts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Uh, OK, it was only "hackers" you were interested in. I see. And regardless, it's still an illegal action. Their excuse was that they were only tracking "metadata" like the phone number or the length of a call, and that's not technically an invasion of privacy. As emptywheel notes, there's a ring of familiarity there.

This excuse sounds precisely like public denials about the program Hayden made after the NYT revealed the problem with the program involved data mining [...]

In January, 2006, Gen. Michael Hayden: Let me talk for a few minutes also about what this program is not. It is not a driftnet over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about.

This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda.


GEN. HAYDEN: You know, I tried to make this as clear as I could in prepared remarks. I said this isn't a drift net, all right? I said we're not there sucking up coms and then using some of these magically alleged keyword searches -- "Did he say 'jihad'?

In other words, faced with the anonymous description that the problem with the warrantless wiretap program had to do with data mining, Hayden neatly parsed that it couldn't be data mining because they didn't "[suck] up coms and then [use] some of those magically alleged keyword searches." Hayden denied that they had mined content, but he stopped well short of saying that they hadn't mined metadata.

Which strongly suggests that Michael Hayden was well aware that the NSA was mining metadata, long before 9/11.

Mr. Klein and Chris Dodd sat down for an interview, and it left the Senator more convinced than ever that this would be a grave injustice and legal travesty to grant retroactive immunity. The Judiciary Committee marks up this bill TOMORROW. It's time to contact anyone and everyone on that committee and tell them that the deceptions and lawbreaking of the Bush Administration cannot be allowed to vanish from history. They cannot put telecom companies above the law.

Watching The Detectives

The CIA doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation these days. While being shielded from real scrutiny and prosecution by the White House, the revelations on secret prisons, illegal kidnappings and renditions, and torture have damaged the credibility of the nation's chief intelligence agency. Obviously there's only one recourse in this case; investigate the inspector general.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has mounted a highly unusual challenge to the agency's chief watchdog, ordering an internal investigation of an inspector general who has issued a series of scathing reports sharply critical of top CIA officials, according to government officials familiar with the matter.

The move has prompted concerns that Hayden is seeking to rein in an inspector general who has used the office to bring harsh scrutiny of CIA figures including former Director George J. Tenet and undercover operatives running secret overseas prison sites.

This is obviously an attempt to intimidate the IG into backing off with the oversight. And the group heading the investigation is working directly out of Hayden's office. The New York Times has more.

I don't know what more you can say about it, this is the standard operating procedure of federal agencies in the Bush era; avoid accountability, threaten opponents, rule by fear.