From the moment he entered the White House, President Obama's attitude towards the crime, corruption and politicization of the Bush Justice Department has been to "look forward and not backwards." As we've seen for the third time in just the last several days, that's working out just fine for the Bush lawyers.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Nora Dannehy announced she would bring no charges against Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, Monica Goodling or any of the key players behind the purge of 9 U.S. attorneys. That scandal, part of a larger effort to target Democratic politicians and suppress Democratic voter turnout, will go unpunished despite the key roles of Rove and Miers, and the apparent perjury of former Attorney General Gonzales. As Dannehy, selected by Gonzales' successor Michael Mukasey, summed it up:

"Evidence did not demonstrate that any prosecutable criminal offense was committed with regard to the removal of David Iglesias," the Justice Department said in a letter to lawmakers Wednesday. "The investigative team also determined that the evidence did not warrant expanding the scope of the investigation beyond the removal of Iglesias."

Prosecutors also said there was insufficient evidence to charge someone with lying to Congress or investigators...

Dannehy faulted the Justice Department for firing Iglesias without even bothering to figure out whether such complaints were true. That indicated "an undue sensitivity to politics on the part of DOJ officials who should answer not to partisan politics but to principles of fairness and justice," the Justice Department wrote in its letter.

But that was not a crime, and was not an effort to influence prosecutions, the letter said.

That slap on the wrist for the Bush legal team followed another this week. Scott Bloch, the disgraced Bush DOJ lawyer convicted for withholding information from Congress about files that he ordered be erased from office computers, will likely be given probation. While ethics advocates like Debra Katz of the Government Accountability Project argued probation for Bloch "understates the true scope and impact" of his crimes and "would represent a miscarriage of justice," Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Leon apparently had no issue with it:

While the charge carries a sentence of up to six months in prison, prosecutors did not object to Bloch's request for probation, noting that he has no criminal history and faces a likely sanction on his ability to practice law. Bloch works at the Tarone & McLaughlin firm in Washington.

While Scott Bloch for now is still practicing law, Bush torture team architect Jay Bybee sits as a judge on a federal court. Among other things, Bybee, as you'll recall, affixed his name to the August 2002 memo largely authored by Office Legal Counsel rubber stamp John Yoo, a document which proclaimed that torture "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Now in closed-door testimony to a House Committee, Bybee revealed that CIA interrogators may have exceeded even his almost-anything-goes guidelines:

Jay S. Bybee, who headed the department's Office of Legal Counsel, told investigators in May that he never approved some interrogation techniques that detainees say were used against them, including punching, kicking and dousings with cold water. Techniques his office did approve, such as waterboarding, or simulated drowning of terrorism suspects, were used excessively, Bybee said.

As you'll also recall, in February Judge Bybee along with John Yoo narrowly avoided disbarment and other recommended sanctions for creating the Bush administration's framework for detainee torture. As we learned this week, Bybee's only regret was his own victimization:

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As the Scooter Libby affair showed, no one circles the wagons like the Republican Party and its conservative allies. Now that Bush torture architects John Yoo and Jay Bybee barely escaped disbarment in the final version of the report from the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, the right-wing counterattack and near orgasmic celebration is well underway. Leading the clarion call is none other than John Yoo himself, who in his Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday proclaimed his legacy of unlimited war powers - and a virtually unlimited regime of detainee torture - "my gift to the Obama presidency."

Following the cheerleading from the usual Republican mouthpieces including the National Review, Commentary and the Wall Street Journal, Yoo took a victory lap Wednesday, stepping over the broken bodies of American prisoners and shattered national honor. Rewriting both the history of the OPR report and its conclusions, Yoo crowed:

Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe...

Without a vigorous commander-in-chief power at his disposal, Mr. Obama will struggle to win any of these victories. But that is where OPR, playing a junior varsity CIA, wanted to lead us. Ending the Justice Department's ethics witch hunt not only brought an unjust persecution to an end, but it protects the president's constitutional ability to fight the enemies that threaten our nation today.

Of course, as the likes of Jack Balkin and Glenn Greenwald documented in detail, only by avoiding ultimate condemnation and exile from the legal community could John Yoo claim to have won "a drawn-out fight." As Greenwald pointed out, OPR's David Margolis assessment of Yoo's legal framework for the commander-in-chief's power to torture hardly constituted exoneration, let alone an endorsement. On page 67, Margolis concluded:

For all of the above reasons, I am not prepared to conclude that the circumstantial evidence much of which is contradicted by the witness testimony regarding Yoo's efforts establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that Yoo intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client. It is a close question. I would be remiss in not observing, however, that these memoranda represent an unfortunate chapter in the history of the Office of Legal Counsel. While I have declined to adopt OPR's finding of misconduct, I fear that John Yoo's loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to adopt opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, views of executive power while speaking for an institutional client.

The shorter version is that David Margolis accepted Yoo's George Costanza defense of torture. That is, it's not a war crime, if you believe it.

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"Senator, that I don't recall remembering." With those six words uttered during the furor over his purge of U.S. prosecutors, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales likely etched his epitaph. But as it turns out, "hypothetical" may be the most important word Gonzales ever spoke to Congress. New revelations this week suggest that in the spring of 2002 then-White House Counsel Gonzales personally approved the use of waterboarding, months before the Justice Department's infamous Bybee memo blessed the practice. By labeling such questions "hypothetical" during his 2005 confirmation hearings, Attorney General Gonzales may well have committed perjury.

As NPR reported this week, Gonzales apparently played a central role in authorizing the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques months before the August 2002 Bybee memo defined torture as "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." In April and May 2002, it was White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales who gave CIA interrogation contractor James Mitchell the greenlight to waterboard detainee Abu Zubaydah:

One source with knowledge of Zubaydah's interrogations agreed to describe the legal guidance process, on the condition of anonymity.

The source says nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA's counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration's legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

But that's not what Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his January 2005 confirmation as Attorney General.

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Announcing his Christmas 1992 pardons of Caspar Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra figures, President George H.W. Bush introduced a time-honored Republican scandal evasion by decrying "the criminalization of policy differences." Now, 22 years after his own role in a Congressional minority report which blasted the allegations of Reagan administration abuses of power as "hysterical," Dick Cheney is back to defend the "little guys" now at the center of the Bush 43 administration's regime of detainee torture.

In an interview with 9/11-Iraq fabulist and chief Cheney hagiographer Stephen Hayes, the Vice President explained why he was not following George W. Bush's guidance that President Obama "deserves my silence." Just like Oliver North and Cap Weinberger all those years ago, the "little guys" who architected and carried out waterboarding and other potential war crimes, Cheney insisted, deserve his protection:

"I went through the Iran-contra hearings and watched the way administration officials ran for cover and left the little guys out to dry. And I was bound and determined that wasn't going to happen this time. I think to George Tenet's credit-I don't agree with George on a lot of stuff-but I think he was of the same view and that's why we had all of these requests coming through for policy guidance and for legal opinions. And this time around I'll do my damndest to defend anybody out there-be they in the agency carrying out the orders or the lawyers who wrote the opinions. I don't know whether anybody else will, but I sure as hell will."

Looking back on then-Representative Dick Cheney's hand in the 1987 Congressional Iran-Contra Committee minority report, one could be excused for performing a mental copy and paste. Substitute Bush for Reagan and torture for Iran-Contra, and you'd thnk you were reading an excerpt of Cheney's upcoming book:

"The bottom line, however, is that the mistakes of the Iran-contra affair were just that - mistakes in judgment, and nothing more. There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for ''the rule of law,'' no grand conspiracy, and no Administration-wide dishonesty or coverup. In fact, the evidence will not support any of the more hysterical conclusions the committees' report tries to reach."

Then as now, Cheney and his allies insisted Democrats were "criminalizing politics." Rep. Cheney even anticipated Michael Mukasey's claim that "the Bybee memo, to paraphrase a French diplomat, was worse than a sin, it was a mistake." Which makes the use of the same language by Attorney General Eric Holder ("we don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist") and President Obama ("whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake") all the more disconcerting.

Karl Marx famously said that historical events occur twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce. Of course, Karl Marx never met Dick Cheney.

I like this video very much. It's simple and to the point and you can sign on to help.

Jay Bybee signed off on notorious Bush-era torture memos. And now? He's serving as a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, thanks to George Bush.

Jay Bybee showed no respect for our laws and isn't fit to be a federal judge. Can you sign this petition urging Congress to impeach Jay Bybee?

Talk Left's Big Tent Democrat has a good post up called: Condoning War Crimes.

d-day writes on Hullabaloo:

We can start by ensuring that a violator of international laws and a moral reprobate is removed from the federal bench. Call and email Congress, particularly the members of the House Judiciary Committee, and ask them to open hearings.

Jonathan Turley writes that the idiot known as Rep. Peter King thinks Bybee should be given a medal.

He now stands by the torture memos and Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) says that Bybee should be given a medal for rationalizing torture.

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Notably, while Judge Bybee appears entirely unaware of the fact, but the prohibitions on torture specifically rule out such contextual justifications. For example, the Article 2 of the Convention Against Torture reads in part: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political in stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Perhaps he'll have time to modify his position after he's impeached:

WASHINGTON — Judge Jay S. Bybee broke his silence on Tuesday and defended the conclusions of legal memorandums he had signed as a Bush administration lawyer that allowed use of several coercive interrogation practices on suspected terrorists.

Judge Bybee, who issued the memorandums as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and was later nominated to the federal appeals court by President George W. Bush, said in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times that he continued to believe that the memorandums represented “a good-faith analysis of the law” that properly defined the thin line between harsh treatment and torture.

[...] Until recently, Judge Bybee had been a largely unseen figure in the debate. In contrast, John Yoo, his deputy at the Office of Legal Counsel, who is generally believed to have been the memorandums’ principal author, has defended them regularly. But Judge Bybee has come under renewed attention. Some people have called for his impeachment, he is being investigated by the Justice Department on his professional standards, and he has even become estranged from friends.

Judge Bybee said he was issuing a statement following reports that he had regrets over his role in the memorandums, including an article in The Washington Post on Saturday to that effect. Given the widespread criticism of the memorandums, he said he would have done some things differently, like clarifying and sharpening the analysis of some of his answers to help the public better understand the basis for his conclusions.

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I want to congratulate d-day, the Courage Campaign, John Podesta and everyone who signed all the many petitions put there because the California Democratic Party heard you loud and clear. (C&L joined with the Courage Campaign.)

d-day explains:

Thanks again to all of you who signed petitions and made phone calls and helped push the resolution to open a Congressional inquiry into Torture Judge Jay Bybee, which the California Democratic Party adopted at its convention yesterday. I have been told by the authors of the resolution that the pressure from the outside really aided their efforts.

The passage of the resolution was a beginning, not an ending. I view the impeachment of Jay Bybee from the 9th Circuit Court as a moral and legal imperative, but also an entryway into the larger fight for justice and accountability for those who authorized and directed torture in our name.

UPDATE: Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post has the full story of the passage of the resolution at the convention.

So what do we do next? Keep the heat on.

So what do we do now? Members of the California Democratic Party include 34 members of Congress, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and six men and women who sit on the House Judiciary Committee, where an impeachment inquiry would be remanded. They need to hear that their party just recommended that they open an immediate Congressional inquiry into Judge Bybee, with all appropriate remedies and punishments available. In fact, the entire House Judiciary Committee needs to hear this.

You can contact all the members through d-days site, the tools were provided for by Jane, and you can call you can call your members of Congress and tell them that they must support an immediate inquiry into the actions of Jay Bybee, federal judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Congressional switchboard at 1-866-220-0044 can connect you to your member of Congress as well.

Not content with its past role in screening candidates for positions in the Bush judiciary and Justice Department, the conservative Federalist Society is back to defend the Bush torture team it helped create. Ironically, the Federalists' conference call Monday came just three days after McClatchy reported that Steven Bradbury - one of its members and a figure at the center of the storm over the release of the OLC torture members - refuted their claim that the military's SERE training program proved the United States did not torture terror detainees.

As Politico reported, the National Review hosted a media conference call featuring many of the usual suspects among the Bush torture apologists:

The lawyers' group, which was a pipeline for judges in the Bush White House, is hosting a call this morning with National Review writer Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, lawyer David Rivkin, and Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman.

Their claim, as Politico noted, was that the "much-criticized memos from the Office of Legal Counsel were perfectly reasonable." McCarthy brushed off the CIA's use of waterboarding on terror suspects by proclaiming "they were not going to be killed by the tactic." Eastman, whose university is hosting Federalist Society member and Bush torture architect John Yoo as a visiting professor, insisted the treatment was no worse than that undergone by American service personnel:

Eastman responded to The New York Times's Scott Shane about the use of waterboarding during the Spanish Inquisition and by the Japanese military, and responded "that psychological reviews of graduates of the military's SERE program, in which members of the U.S. military were waterboarded, is a more relevant example.

"Why would I go and look at something the Spanish Inquisition did just because it was also called 'waterboarding'?" he asked.

Perhaps because, as the Bush Office of Legal Counsel chief and 2005 torture memo author Steven Bradbury concluded four years ago, "SERE trainees know it is part of a training program."

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John McCain admitted to Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation that the US violated the Geneva Conventions under George W. Bush regarding the abusive treatment of prisoners.

You know, that torture thing.

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (Ranking, Armed Services Committee): First of all let me repeat what you just said, Bob. I have opposed torture. It's violation of the Geneva Conventions. I worry about treatment of Americans in future conflicts.

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: The-- the allegations are that they gave the wrong counsel that’s and—- and that bad things were done. And we violated fundamental commitments that the United States of America made when we signed the Geneva Conventions. And we disregarded what might happen to Americans who are held captive in the future. And by the way, those who say our enemies won’t abide the Geneva Conventions they will if they know there’s going to retribution for their violation of it.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you about this quickly, Jay Bybee who was one of the people at the Justice department that wrote the memos that gave the CIA what they call the legal reasons to go ahead with all this, he’s now a federal judge. We understand that he very much regrets, or at least he’s told people, he regrets having written those memos. Do you think that he should be impeached or do you think that he should resign or you-- you think he should be left alone?

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: Well, a resignation would be a decision he would have to make on his own. But he falls into the same category as everybody else as far as giving very bad advice and misinterpreting fundamentally what the United States is all about, much less things like the Geneva Conventions. Plus--under President Reagan we signed an agreement against torture, we’re in violation of that...

So tell me what are the penalties for violating the Geneva Conventions? John McCain freely admitted that our great country violated the agreements we signed up for. Is it an act of vengeance that the people who broke those treaties should be prosecuted or is it just following the law?

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On CNN's "State of the Union" program today, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress took a seemingly middle-of-the-road position on the torture memos: He indicated that he thought pursuing potential prosecutions of the torture-regime architects was a bad idea -- but at the same time, called for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee for his role in authoring them:

Podesta: The one thing I disagree with you and David [Gergen] about is I do think there's a distinction between going back and prosecuting in criminal courts the actors who were involved in these memos and letting Judge Bybee continue to sit on a court one step removed from the Supreme Court. He's acting and listening to cases, making judgments of others, and we know he authorized things that were illegal under U.S. law and violated the U.S. obligations under international treaties.

If he would do the right thing, he should just simply resign. If he doesn't, I think this is one matter where he continues to sit -- he doesn't have the moral or legal authority to continue to do that. And I think a simple matter would be to remove him from office.

King: We need to move on, but do your friends at the White House agree with you on this?

Podesta: You'd have to ask them. But I suspect they don't.

The Village may shake its collective finger at Podesta, but this is just the beginning of the effort to remove Bybee. As DDay reports, the California Democratic Party is preparing a resolution calling for his impeachment as well.

Still, it's amazing how the Beltway Villagers -- particularly the political-media pundit class -- seem to have wholly absorbed the Rovean idea that the fight over the torture memos and the calls for investigation are about "revenge" and partisan recrimination, that this is about "criminalizing politics."

That was the entire context of the discussion of the memos in this show, not to mention most of the discussions I've seen on Fox and MSNBC too. It's the context of David Broder's recent blatherings on the subject.

You have to wonder when these people will wake up to the reality that judging these kinds of political endeavors by the ostensibly dark motives of the people behind it is simply blithering nonsense. It's also worth noting that, within the confines of the Village, this kind of judgment is only ever to be raised against liberals and the Left generally. It's "partisan" to do that with the Right, you know (see, e.g., the Clinton impeachment brouhaha).

These are, of course, the same people who dismissed those same Dirty Freaking Hippies when they warned that invading Iraq would turn into a disaster -- because, of course, they only opposed the war out of Bad Motives (i.e., they reflexively hated Bush).

Of course, this narrative -- liberals proceed from knee-jerk, visceral motives -- constantly repeated is also a very comforting and self-serving one for the established classes of the Village. It's also been repeatedly proven wrong -- to very little notice inside the Village.

This isn't about Right and Left. This is about Right and Wrong. Not that the Village would ever get such alien concepts.