darkblack: 5 Is The Magic Number

Faithful Progressive : George Lakoff on Obama, Tea Parties, and the battle for our brains

The Rude Pundit: What is enhanced interrogation tecnique number 12?

MAL Contends: Gates calls Europe's anti-war mood a danger to peace

James Wolcott: The lunatics have taken over the salon

Newshoggers: Joseph Stack, frustrated American

"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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Will Bunch today writes that the Philadelphia Inquirer still won't admit they screwed up by hiring torture architect John Yoo as a columnist.

It doesn't surprise me. Let me tell you why.

The Inquirer, long a 'liberal' paper, underwent some changes a few years ago when they (and the Philadelphia Daily News, where Will blogs) were purchased by the Philadelphia Media Holdings. The new publisher was Brien Tierney, a well-known Republican media strategist. (Until then, Tierney was best known to Philadelphians for his aggressive media defense of local Catholic churches against child molestation charges.)

When his group of investors bought the paper, he made a public pledge not to interfere with the papers' editorial slant. Since then, Citizen Tierney has hired several conservative columnists, including Rick Santorum and Mike Smerconish, and has overseen (mandated?) the occasional use of opposing editorials, presumably to make sure readers don't take the one with the "wrong" (read: liberal) opinions seriously.

Last week, Will Bunch noticed that Yoo, someone who was thought to be an occasional op-ed contributor, had actually been hired as a regular staff writer, and he generated a blogswarm asking for Yoo to be fired. The NY Times covered the uproar:

Harold Jackson, The Inquirer’s editorial page editor, said he was surprised by the sudden delayed anger directed his way over Mr. Yoo. He said the decision to hire a columnist was his, but that “Mr. Yoo was suggested by the publisher,” Brian Tierney.

Big surprise there. After all, freedom of the press belongs to he who owns the press! Tierney is just as principled in all his activities:

There’s a little-publicized story that the parent company of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC allegedly sought a $10-million bailout from the state of Pennsylvania according to lawsuit filed by a Chester County, Pa. charter school. However, the Associated Press reported on April 24 that the company’s chief, Brian Tierney – received $1.175 million in salary and bonus compensation in 2008, despite being forced into bankruptcy protection in February for $395 million in debt.

“Recent court filings also show that Tierney collected $1.175 million in salary and bonuses last year, somewhat higher than previously disclosed,” Maryclaire Dale wrote for the AP. “Tierney's compensation included $650,000 in salary, a $350,000 bonus for 2008, a $175,000 bonus for 2007 and $81,000 in transportation costs.”

Recently, as The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported, Tierney appeared before a House committee making a plea for government help.

“The biggest request for help at the hearing was from the Philadelphia Inquirer's Brian Tierney, who wanted protection for newspapers to talk about creating a national alternative to Craigslist,” Milbank wrote in the Post on April 22.

Funny how those free-market principles go right out the window when they affect your positive cash flow, eh?

“There was a conscious effort on our part to counter some of the criticism of The Inquirer as being a knee-jerk liberal publication,” Mr. Jackson said. “We made a conscious effort to add some conservative voices to our mix.”

Asked if the release of the memos affected his view of hiring Mr. Yoo, Mr. Jackson said: “From a personal perspective, yes. We certainly know more now than we did then, but we didn’t go into that contract blindly. I’m not going to say the same decision wouldn’t have been made.”

But Mr. Tierney said the memos did not alter his opinion.

“What I liked about John Yoo is he’s a Philadelphian,” Mr. Tierney said. “He went to Episcopal Academy, where I went to school. He’s a very, very bright guy. He’s on the faculty at Berkeley, one of the most liberal universities in the country.”

To critics of the hiring, he said, “The most important speech to defend is the speech you hate,” and he said there were not all that many critics. “I’ve gotten more mail recently on our making our comics smaller than I have on John Yoo.”

So this is all about defending free speech? Hmm. If I didn't know better, I'd almost swear Tierney handed Yoo the spot to help him defend himself (and thus, BushCo officials) against war crime charges. Greg Sergeant:

On March 15, he published a long broadside against “civil libertarians” who have criticized the Bush administration’s expansion of executive powers amid the war on terror — expansions that Yoo helped author.

Needless to say, those “civil libertarians” are the same people that are demanding a probe into the Bush era torture program — one that Yoo himself helped create. At the time of Yoo’s piece, of course, it was still unclear how or whether to probe the architects of that program, as it remains today. You’d think the paper would ask Yoo to recuse himself from writing about such stuff.

It would be one thing for a paper to invite someone under scrutiny to air his side of the story in an occasional Op ed. It’s quite another for a paper to give such a person a regular platform on contract for use in attacking political opponents in an ongoing and potentially criminal governmental dispute.

Oh, don't be silly! They had to do it, Craigslist made them! I hear the next new hire will be Roman Polanski, who will be giving advice on how to cultivate relationships with underage girls and how some people are trying to legislate away his freedom.

It's true. John Yoo got a job writing for the Philly Inquirer. One of the men responsible of the rotting of our American morals once again is given a prime time job. It's sickening. The conservative movement is so devoid of thinkers that the traditional media is left to hire moral-less scoundrels that found legal jargon to try and justify torture for Cheney's henchmen.

Will Bunch explains: Inquirer defends the indefensible: A monthly column by torture architect John Yoo

By late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top Justice Department lawyer lies at the root of the period of greatest peril to the U.S. Constitution in modern memory. It was widely known in 2008, for example, that Yoo had argued for presidential powers far beyond anything either real or implied in the Constitution -- that the commander-in-chief could trample the powers of Congress or a free press in an endless undeclared war, or that the 4th Amendment barring unreasonable search and seizure didn't apply in fighting what Yoo called domestic terrorism.

Most famously, Yoo was known as the author of the infamous "torture memos" that in 2002 and 2003 gave the Bush and Cheney the legal cover to violate the human rights of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, based on the now mostly ridiculed claim that international and U.S. laws against such torture practices did not apply. Working closely with Dick Cheney, Cheney's staff and others, Yoo set into motion the brutal actions that left a deep, indelible stain on the American soul.

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Sen. Harry Reid talked at length today on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell about Arlen Specter, the closing of Gitmo and possible prosecutions over the torture memos.

Reid said that he talked to Specter after he read that Arlen supported Norm Coleman when he was interviewed by the NY Times, and Specter says he misspoke.

CQ Politics:

The political whirlwind that surrounded Sen. Arlen Specter ’s switch from the Republican to Democratic party had him forgetting which team he is rooting for in 2010.

But after voicing support for Republican Norm Coleman in his contested Minnesota Senate race, Specter said he misspoke in a New York Times magazine interview and is supporting Democrats.

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Asked whether he cared about a shortage of Jewish Republicans in the Senate, Specter replied: “I sure do. There’s still time for the Minnesota courts to do justice and declare Norm Coleman the winner.” But questioned outside the Senate chamber Tuesday, Specter said the comment was a mistake.

“In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates,” he said. “I’m ordinarily pretty correct in what I say. I’ve made a career of being precise. I conclusively misspoke.”

Asked who he’s backing now in elections, Specter said, “I’m looking for more Democratic members. Nothing personal.”

Specter's idiocy forced Harry Reid to come out and talk the whole story down. I'm sure he was really giddy about that. And is Specter's support for Franken only based on the fact that he switched sides? Reid also said that he wanted to wait until Dianne Feinsten's investigation into the torture memos was completed before he gave an opinion on the Bush Co. torture memos. Are you sold on her investigation, or the OLC's?

The minute Feinstein became the great congressional leader on torture, I wondered if it wasn't kabuki. It's DiFi we're talking about. She rushed in "begging" the president not to launch any investigation until she'd finished hers. The village babblers were using her investigations as the primary reason not to pursue prosecutions. It makes perfect sense that they would bottle the thing up in secret hearings and a very slow investigation as long as possible.

We already saw them do this with phase two of the pre-war intelligence investigation. It took years and the media treated it as old news, not worth talking about, when it was finished. But it helped keep a lid on the political hot potato that was the dawning realization that the Bush administration had manipulated the intelligence to get us into war.

Secret investigations are a junk yard for rear view mirrors.

We need a special prosecutor, period.

I was surprised that Reid held back on this because he has shown no interest in going after the torture authors, you know, like the Mormon Judge Bybee, but he was very careful today on MSNBC. I wonder if he practiced with Blitzer, because I heard he was mumbling and stumbling his way through The Situation Room.

BLITZER: It certainly sounds like he wants Norm Coleman to beat Al Franken, the Democratic candidate, when the dust settles.

REID: Arlen has said -- that is the way that he said that. I'm not here to put words in his mouth. All I know is he told -- he's told everyone that that isn't the way that it was meant to be. He wants Franken to win ...

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Laura Ingraham, subbing for Bill O'Reilly last night on Fox, decided to bounce off reportage of the second-guessing now coming from ex-CIA chief Porter Goss, who's claiming that Obama's release of the torture memos had demoralized the agency.

So she invited on a couple of "experts," who start out by giving us the amusing prospect of Fox pundits complaining about TV-crew ambush tactics when conducted by ABC. (They may have a point, but hearing it on Fox is rich.)

One of the "experts," a New York City detective/tough guy named Bo Dietl, argues that the Obama administration's decision to eschew torture will come back and haunt them thus:

Dietl: What would happen, God forbid, if your two daughters were kidnapped by Al Qaeda, and they said they were going to do something, and we had information from people, where they were. Mister Obama, what would you like me to do? You don't want me to interrogate anybody?

Eh, sure, Bo, you can interrogate anyone you need to. But torture?

Of course, this all sounds like a lot of Jack Bauer fantasizing. Though you get a sickly feeling, watching Dietz, that torturing detainees might not just be a fantasy for him.

And why, exactly, does anyone consider Porter Goss a credible critic of the release of the memos?

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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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They just can't seem to get their stories straight. No matter how hard they try to justify torture, the facts don't seem to support them:

WASHINGTON — The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

That undercuts assertions by former vice president Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials that the use of harsh interrogation tactics including waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, was justified because it headed off terrorist attacks.

[...] "It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program," Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department's principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a May 30, 2005, memo to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, one of four released last week by the Obama administration.

"As the IG Report notes, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks. And because the CIA has used enhanced techniques sparingly, 'there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness'," Bradbury wrote, quoting the IG report.

Nevertheless, Bradbury concluded in his May 2005 memos that the program had been effective; that conclusion relied largely on memos written after the still secret report by Inspector General John Helgerson.

Helgerson also concluded that waterboarding was riskier than officials claimed and reported that the CIA's Office of Medical Services thought that the risk to the health of some prisoners outweighed any potential intelligence benefit, according to the memos.

The IG's report is among several indications that the Bush administration's use of abusive interrogation methods was less productive than some former administration officials have claimed.

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(h/t Heather)

Bill Kristol is upset that the release of the CIA torture memos will open up the potential for criminal prosecutions of Bush officials. William "the Bloody" Kristol wants to release all the CIA memos and have Dick Cheney testify about them. Wow, he even admits that torture is a crime, but brings up another right-wing canard: that releasing the CIA memos and more photographs of abuse hurts our national security.

(rough transcript)

Kristol: Torture is a crime, that is agreed upon. If these memos are so crazy, so ridiculous in their legal analysis ... three people being waterboarded, a few instances of waterboarding might not qualify as torture under certain circumstances, which is what the memos argued, then he (Obama) opened the door, and once he opened the door they're going down that road...

It's the Bush administration who authorized these things, they're still running against the Bush administration. Let's stipulate that the Bush administration did a lot for things wrong. How does that legitimize do something now that will damage our national security?

Williams: How does it damage out national security? I think when you have President Obama say somewhere we have lost our moral bearings. I don't think there's any doubt about that...

Kristol: There's a lot of doubt...

Williams: You said a moment ago that torture is illegal. You gotta remember President Reagan was out there signing the UN convention, we will not participate in torture as an American people. So something went wrong there.

Mara Liasson then argues about the Justice Department officials involved, and Brit Hume (as usual) just thinks it's all a farce. Yeah, torturing people is soooo comical, so inconsequential.

Mara: You might think that the lawyers of the Bush justice Department came out with a decision that was wrong, legally wrong and morally repugnant, but it doesn't mean that they committed a crime. That they said, ohhh we know this is torture, we're just going ot cook this up. The question is whether they did this in good faith or not. and if...

Hume: I predict Mara, based on what you're saying that any prosecution which will come out of this will be a total farce.

There will be a series of show trials with "grand inquisitions' and all the kinds of things we've been associated with. It's possible that those lawyers will get hauled before Congress and do to any investigation there Oliver North did to the e9/11 commission, which was to render it the farce that it always was from the beginning, that would be a good outcome, but this whole area ... what should be a closed chapter -- I don't see any national benefit to it...

Kristol:... I think now that the door is open, I say "bring it on." Let's have a big national debate on this. Let's have Steve Bradbury confront his accusers, who are one tenth the lawyers he is, and we're not under the pressure he was under and not a real threat. Let's have George Tenet testify. Let's have Mick Hagen testify. Let's have a serious debate, let's have Dick Cheney take on anyone that the left wants to produce about whether we were responsible, whether it was a dark chapter in our history that we have to be ashamed of or whether the US government behaved in a very fine way and I think a very impressive way...

Bloody Bill thinks Bush and Cheney's torturing of people is a very impressive way to handle prisoners.

I always love when right-wing hacks use the word "serious." It's only they who are the "serious" people, and therefore the world is only properly ruled by their hand. And he's confident that the propaganda that would be spewed by Cheney and his ilk will muddy up the waters enough to fool the American people.

Me, I'd like to see Cheney have to get in front of Henry Waxman.