There literally is no end to the extent by which Republican politicians will lie, distort, and manufacture statements in their efforts to disrupt, deny, and destroy the Obama administration's attempts to govern. At today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on 9/11 trial, the Fort Hood shooter, and terrorism, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) decided to flip-flop on the designation of the Gitmo detainees. Are they "unlawful enemy combatants" or are they "prisoners of war"?

SESSIONS: The enemy, who could of been obliterated on the battlefield on one day, but was captured instead does not then become a common American criminal. They are first a prisoner of war, once they're captured. The laws of war say, as did Lincoln and Grant, that the prisoners will not be released when the war - until the war ends. How absurb is it to say that we will release people who plan to attack us again?

Sessions seems to be saying that because these detainees were captured by the military, they have become prisoners of war and should not be released - even if found not guilty or after serving a prison term (assuming less than a life sentence) - until the "war on terror" is over (which, under a Republican point of view, will never be over). But on the other hand, SecDef Don Rumsfeld and the other fun-loving bunch of Bushites were very firm about NOT calling them "prisoners of war" because they were not supposed to get rights under the Geneva Convention (or any other form of legal writs - see waterboarding, justification of).

In fact, as one of the commenters at the TPM post notes, there was public law developed to explicitly designate any non-US citizen who was accused of supporting terrorism or acting against the United States as a terrorist as being eligible for military commissions.

I thought like you until I read this, from the Military Commissions Act: "‘(e) Geneva Conventions Not Establishing Private Right of Action- No alien unprivileged enemy belligerent subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a basis for a private right of action."
See: here.

This discussion becomes quickly complex with legal passages as a debate over whether the military tribunals should take KSM or if the federal court system has adequate jurisdiction. But it's just so interesting how Republican politicians adroitly jump back and forth as to the question of the detainees' status to how it best fits their argument of the day - are we talking about Geneva convention rights, or are we talking about the process of legal courts?

And because I want to give credit to the interesting comments over at TPM, I will close with the following observations by the commenters:

"I guess when the Right/GOP can say, print (Palin's myth filled book), promote anything without any accountability by the Beltway Press, the GOP has no need for intellectually honest consistency in their claims."

"When did Sessions stop playing the banjo?"

UPDATE: Clarified the guilt point.

I wasn't planning to write about this today, but reading this really got to me. Despite the fact that this country was founded on the idea of freedom of religion, there's a substantial bloc of citizens who seem to believe their religious beliefs trump everyone else's, even to the inclusion of institutionalized terror tactics.

I wonder when our constitutional-law president is going to use the extensive anti-terror powers at his command to protect women's legal rights?

For a nation that claims to cherish its freedoms, America is pretty damned complacent about the harassment that goes on outside abortion clinics. Imagine this circus outside of dentist's offices instead. Imagine what it would feel like, having to endure being called a whore and a killer on your way in to have a bad tooth pulled. Maybe they'd throw little plastic teeth at you; maybe they'd even take your photograph on the way in. People wouldn't stand for it: I have the right to choose my own dental care, they'd say. Who do these people think they are? And even if I were the smallest bit unsure about the choice I'd made, even if some part of me wanted to be talked into a filling and not an extraction--why in god's name would some hostile, red-faced, screaming stranger get a vote?

Maybe there's an element of trolling to that analogy. I could write the outraged top-text for an email forward of this blog myself. "Can you believe it! A LIVING, ALMOST-BREATHING CHILD who will PROBABLY CURE CANCER SOMDAY is nothing more than a ROTTED MOLAR to this BARREN GODLESS WHORE!!!"

Feel free to copy/paste--but if you do, you're missing the point. Bullying never won any hearts or minds, and harassment or intimidation of private citizens going about their private lives is never, never, never a tool for good. There is no place for such tactics of fear in civil discourse, and no one who employs them can be truly called a warrior for good, no matter what they tell themselves while they're packing their bullhorn and their gore posters into the car every morning.

I can't make the protesters who camp out in front of my clinic in the mornings go away. I can't even make them behave like rational, responsible citizens. But I can make sure that the women (and men, and children) who walk into my clinic don't have to run that obstacle course alone, and I believe I can assuage some of their fear. I can shield them physically from shouts and eyes and cameras. I can assure by my presence as a witness that the protesters don't "forget" where the property line is. And I can be one voice of supportive reason, quiet but strong, in opposition to the shouting about the blastocyst deep conditioning cabal:

"I'm a volunteer with the clinic. We have some protesters out front who will try to shout at you. They don't know why you're here, but they're going to shout at you anyway. You don't have to listen to them. I can just walk alongside and keep myself between them and you. I'm sorry you have to deal with this today."

Their fear is why I escort. Their gratitude is why I keep coming back.

This has been long overdue. From Murray Waas:

In an appointment that senior Justice Department officials say demonstrates the Obama administration’s commitment to reversing the Bush administration’s politicization of the Department, a U.S. attorney fired by President Bush was reappointed to his old job on Friday.

Daniel Bogden, who was fired in the fall of 2006 by the Bush administration as the U.S. attorney in Nevada, was offered his old job back by President Obama, and was formally nominated on Friday.

Bogden’s confirmation by the Senate is all but assured: He has spent his entire adult life in government service, and as a former U.S. attorney was confirmed by the Senate previously. He was also thoroughly vetted for his new position by the White House Counsel’s office prior to his most recent nomination, even though he was vetted during his first appointment as U.S. attorney by the Bush administration. Moreover, he has the backing of both his home-state senators: Harry Reid, a Democrat, and John Ensign, a Republican. That Reid is a Senate Majority Leader, and that Reid personally suggested to the President that Bogden get his old job back probably, won’t hurt matters.

Ironically, Bogden’s formal reappointment as U.S. attorney comes exactly one day after former Bush political adviser Karl Rove gave sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the firings of Bogden and eight other U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration. A federal grand jury is currently investigating whether Bush administration officials and members of Congress obstructed justice in pressing for one or more of the firings, and also, whether they misled Congress as to why the prosecutors were fired.

Bogden’s firing in the fall of 2006 is referred to by many in the Justice Department as the firing that came about as a result of some sort of Immaculate Conception: For two years, the Justice Department’s two watchdog agencies, its Inspector General and Office of Responsibility, spent 18 months investigating the firings of the nine U.S. attorneys. When it came to Bogden, however, the investigators were not only unable to determine why he was fired, but even who ordered his firing. Every single Justice Department official and Bush administration official interviewed by investigators disclaimed responsibility for his firing. Isn't that typical Bush/Cheney dealings?

Bogden’s appointment to his old job by Obama appears to a historical first: He will be the first U.S. attorney to be appointed and fired by the same President, only to be appointed U.S. attorney again by another President. How strange it all is and I believe as time goes by we'll see a lot more of these "irregularities" pop up, don't you think?
(co-written by David Neiwert)

Belfast Times:

German prosecutors have formally charged a suspected Nazi death camp guard with 27,900 counts of being an accessory to murder.

Eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk was extradited from the US in May.[..]

Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who spent the war as a Nazi prisoner and never hurt anyone.

Demjanjuk had originally been deported to Israel in 1986, accused by Holocaust survivors of being "Ivan the Terrible", a particularly brutal guard at the Treblinka camp. His conviction was overturned based on evidence that suggested reasonable doubt that he was not that guard. In April of this year, he was deported to Germany to face charges of being an accessory to the murder for being a guard at another death camp.

But there's one American that thinks that Demjanjuk got a raw deal: none other than MSNBC's resident racist (and now alleged Nazi apologist) Patrick J. Buchanan. (link goes to VDare)

John Demanjuk And The True Haters

On Good Friday, John Demjanjuk, 89 and gravely ill, was ordered deported to Germany to stand trial as an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews—at Sobibor camp in Poland.

Sound familiar? It should. It is a re-enactment of the 1986 extradition of John Demjanjuk to Israel to be tried for the murder of 870,000 Jews—at Treblinka camp in Poland.

How many men in the history of this country have been so relentlessly pursued and remorselessly persecuted?

But wait...it gets better. Buchanan actually likens Demjanjuk to Christ in his persecution:

But if Germans wish to prosecute participants in the Holocaust, why not round up some old big-time Nazis, instead of a Ukrainian POW.

Answer: They cannot. Because the Germans voted an amnesty for themselves in 1969. So now they must find a Slav soldier they captured—and Heinrich Himmler's SS conscripted and made a camp guard, if he ever was a camp guard—to punish in expiation for Germany's sins.

The spirit behind this un-American persecution has never been that of justice tempered by mercy. It is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.

All I can say is "Wow".

"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.

Continue reading »

As the latest from the Wall Street Journal and Politico reveal, the apologists for George W. Bush's regime of detainee torture are circling the wagons. While one anonymous Bush official claimed the Obama's release of the torture memos "laid it all out for our enemies," former Attorney General Michael Mukasey in an op-ed written with his CIA counterpart Michael Hayden proclaimed, "The President has tied his own hand on terror." Of course, in his 1700 word screed, Mukasey never acknowledges the possibility that the brutal tactics he defends might be illegal and require prosecution. And that comes as no surprise; back in 2007, Michael Mukasey derided such questions as "hypothetical."

To be sure, Hayden and Mukasey trot out all of the usual Republican talking points. Obama, they charged, not only disclosed "successful" CIA interrogators' "secret sauce" to terrorists, but ensured the agency would return to its timid ways:

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite revelations as recently as three weeks ago that "not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions," Mukasey continued to insist that Abu Zubaida was "coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh" and by extension, 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

But while Mukasey today brushed off any notion that the Bush administration's so-called enhanced interrogation techniques "disgraced us before the world," during his confirmation hearings he hedged his bets.

Following in the footsteps of Alberto Gonzales, who during his own February 2005 confirmation hearings deemed Senators' questions on presidential authorization for torture as a "hypothetical situation," Mukasey tried to skirt the issue of the legality of the practices in question. As ThinkProgress recounted, Judge Mukasey in a written response to Democratic Senators in October 2007 took the same line as his predecessor:

In the four-page letter, Mukasey called the interrogation technique "over the line" and "repugnant" on "a personal basis," but added that he would need the "actual facts and circumstances"" to strike a "legal opinion":

"Hypotheticals are different from real life and in any legal opinion the actual facts and circumstances are critical."

But during the hearings themselves, Mukasey made clear he was already familiar with at last some of the facts, including at least one of the memos released yesterday:

"The Bybee memo, to paraphrase a French diplomat, was worse than a sin, it was a mistake. It was unnecessary."

And like Gonzales, Mukasey refused to disavow specific "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding.

Continue reading »

"'I said he was important,' Bush said to Tenet at one of their daily meetings. 'You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?'

Dan Froomkin has written a comprehensive piece making the case there was simply no logical reason for the Bush administration to torture suspects. He thinks it was about retribution for the World Trade Center attacks.

I figured out a few decades ago that when there's no logical reason for an action, there's usually a subconscious, compulsive one. Froomkin reminds us there were simply no intelligence gains to be had, yet the Bush administration was very, very focused on torturing prisoners, anyway. It seems obvious to me that the question is the answer: George W. Bush.

What do you know about his character that makes you think he would be something other than vindictive and vicious? I mean, the only job at which he was ever really successful was running the dirty tricks operation for his father's campaign. Why wouldn't he authorize torture? It made him feel presidential.

And if we've learned anything in the past eight years, it's that it's all about George:

Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture.

That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.

Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."

Continue reading »

We can't allow the CIA to hold the country hostage. We just can't. Too many horrors in the last eight years to let it go, and Panetta better make it clear to his employees. I do feel for the people who were caught in the middle of the White House and their jobs, but it doesn't excuse torture:

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee is completing plans to begin a review of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program, another sign that lawmakers are determined to have a public accounting of controversial Bush administration programs despite White House concerns about the impact of unearthing the past.

The review, Congressional officials said, will focus in part on whether harsh interrogation procedures authorized by President George W. Bush actually succeeded in extracting important intelligence, as Mr. Bush and his advisers have asserted. The full scope of the inquiry is still being debated on the panel, but it is expected to address broader questions of whether the steps taken by the Central Intelligence Agency to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects were properly authorized.

The Obama administration has been cool to proposals by Democrats to investigate the previous administration, fearing that any protracted inquiry could alienate some within the C.I.A. and have a chilling effect on operations at the spy agency. On Wednesday, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, said he opposed a blanket investigation into the C.I.A. program, saying agency operatives had been carrying out orders and acting with approvals from the Justice Department.

Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill have given little evidence that they will heed White House concerns.

Murray Waas reports that Rove is apparently being cooperative with investigators in both the U.S. attorneys case and the Gov. Don Siegalman case:

Karl Rove will cooperate with a federal criminal inquiry underway into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys and has already spoken to investigators in a separate, internal DOJ investigation into the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, his attorney said in an interview.

Rove previously refused to cooperate with an earlier Justice Department inquiry into the firings. The Justice Department's Inspector General and its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) said in a report released last September detailing their earlier probe of the firings of the U.S. attorneys that their investigation was severely "hindered" by the refusal by Rove and other senior Bush administration officials to cooperate with the probe.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said that Rove, however, will cooperate with a federal criminal probe of the firings being led by Nora Dannehy, the Acting U.S. Attorney for Connecticut who was selected by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey to lead the investigation. Dannehy has recently empaneled a federal grand jury to hear evidence in the matter.

Luskin told me that Rove had earlier not cooperated with the Inspector General and OPR probe into the firings because "it was not his call... it was not up to us decide." Luskin said that Rove was directed by the Bush White House counsel's office not to cooperate with the Inspector General and OPR.

Murray has more here.

DOWNLOAD (78)

PLAY (78)

That subpoena from John Conyers seems to be making Karl Rove a little more ... clenched these days. Appearing with the ever-friendly Bill O'Reilly last night, he dismissed the possibility he would even consider appearing for the legal summons:

Rove: I have been directed, again on January 16, by the outgoing president's legal counsel, not to respond to a subpoena, exerting privilege on behalf of the former president and his close aides.

O'Reilly: So you're not even going to show?

Rove: No, and --

O'Reilly: What if they hold you in contempt of Congress?

Rove: Look, this issue is -- let's step back for a minute. This issue of whether or not I should show up -- I've never exerted any personal privilege, I've never said I have a personal right not to show up.

O'Reilly: No, but you're a counselor to the president, it's executive -- I got all that. But let's go beyond the argument. I know your argument. Say Conyers says Mr. Rove is in contempt of Congress. What happens then?

Rove: Well, look, this issue is before the United States Circuit Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. Rep. Conyers could have waited until they resolved the issue one way or the other, gave guidance to him and gave guidance to the former president and to the current president. But instead, he decided to go forward with this -- I don't know if I want to call it a witch hunt, I don't think of myself as a witch, but I'm certain -- this is a guy who went to the cloak room and said, 'Somebody has to get his --' and then filled in a crude way to describe my posterior. He's sort of like Captain Ahab and I'm the whale.

Well, we know President Obama isn't keen on Conyers proceeding, but this indeed isn't just about petty revenge, as O'Reilly and Rove want to pretend. There are in fact much bigger issues at stake here:

PLEASE NOTE: C&L realizes that Karl Rove is not well-liked here for a great many reasons. Remember that wishing physical harm on anyone when you leave a comment here is against the commenting policy and will be deleted. You folks know better. - Sitemonitor

Continue reading »

Unbelievable. Someone whose job was to further the interests of the U.S. in Algeria really did a number on us instead:

The CIA's station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

Officials say the 41-year old CIA officer, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.

The discovery of more than a dozen videotapes showing the CIA officer engaged in sex acts with other women has led the Justice Department to broaden its investigation to include at least one other Arab country, Egypt, where the CIA officer had been posted earlier in his career, according to law enforcement officials.

PLEASE NOTE: C&L realizes that all of its readers wish to see justice in this and every situation involving wrongdoing. Remember that wishing physical harm on anyone when you leave a comment here is against the commenting policy and will be deleted. You folks know better. - Sitemonitor

Yeah, what he said. Krugman:

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” — their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.

[...] Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

[H/t The Indigenous Chicano]

The above video is of a mother of two children getting caught up in one of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's racial-profiling "sweeps" of suspected illegal immigrants. The woman was pulled over for outstanding parking tickets but was taken away by deputies when she couldn't produce proof of citizenship. Her two children, meanwhile, were left behind in their car.

Scenes like this alone should be a signal to everyone that our nation's immigration laws are misbegotten and in dire need of reform. But even more significant is what happens to our ability to deal with real criminals when we make enforcing them the focus of our law-enforcement agencies.

In Sheriff Arpaio's case, it has proved disastrous for the residents of Maricopa County, who now not only face a severe labor shortage, but also are dealing with a sheriff's department that no longer effectively controls real crime: "under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions."

The same, it seems, is true on the federal level as well, as detailed in a recent New York Times report:

Federal prosecutions of immigration crimes nearly doubled in the last fiscal year, reaching more than 70,000 immigration cases in the 2008 fiscal year, according to federal data compiled by a Syracuse University research group. The emphasis, many federal judges and prosecutors say, has siphoned resources from other crimes, eroded morale among federal lawyers and overloaded the federal court system. Many of those other crimes, including gun trafficking, organized crime and the increasingly violent drug trade, are now routinely referred to state and county officials, who say they often lack the finances or authority to prosecute them effectively.

Bush administration officials say the government’s focus on immigration crimes is an outgrowth of its counterterrorism strategy and vigorous pursuit of immigrants with criminal records.

Immigration prosecutions have steeply risen over the last five years, while white-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18 percent, weapons prosecutions have dropped by 19 percent, organized crime prosecutions are down by 20 percent and public corruption prosecutions have dropped by 14 percent, according to the Syracuse group’s statistics. Drug prosecutions — the enforcement priority of the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations — have declined by 20 percent since 2003.

“I have seen a national abdication by the Justice Department,” said Attorney General Terry Goddard of Arizona.

Likewise, these raids have produced a series of real travesties of justice. The most prominent case of this involved the raids in Iowa last summer which resulted in a perversion of the American justice system as immigrants faced coercive tactics -- workers were charged improperly with a crime of which they were innocent as the means of forcing them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, for which they then accepted five-month prison sentence -- from prosecutors who lined them up for en masse convictions.

Immigration raids, in fact, have been nudging us inexorably toward a police state. Of course, for the right-wing ideologues who have been pushing these policies, that's probably just fine with them. For the rest of us, not so much.

In a Newsweek exclusive three week ago, former Justice Department official Thomas Tamm revealed his role in helping the New York Times make public President Bush's program of illegal domestic surveillance. Now Salon's Glenn Greenwald has details on the DOJ's efforts to punish the whistleblower. And as it turns out (and as I suggested back in 2007), the Bush administration's ultimate target may be the New York Times itself.

As Greenwald spells out today, the Justice Department investigation is not pursuing the White House cabal behind the violation of FISA's prohibitions on warrantless eavesdropping of American citizens, but instead those who revealed it. Tamm, whose life has been turned upside-down since the FBI raided his home in August 2007, will likely be subpoenaed to testify what he knows about James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, the Times reporters who broke the story in December 2005.

That's the message in a letter sent to Tamm's attorney Paul Kemp by Steve Tyrrell of the DOJ's fraud section. As Greenwald described it:

The letter begins by announcing that the DOJ and FBI are "presently investigating the unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding the Presidentially-authorized NSA program…(hereinafter, 'The Terrorist Surveillance Program')." It then references the Newsweek article and "ask[s] whether [Tamm] is willing to reconsider his prior refusal to speak with agents of the FBI and/or to testify before the Grand Jury regarding his knowledge of and/or participation in the disclosure of TSP-related information to [James] Risen, Mr. Lichtblau and others." It demands an answer from Tamm by January 9 -- 11 days before Obama is to be inaugurated -- and then threateningly warns: "if I do not hear from you by that date, I will assume that Mr. Tamm is not interested in submitting to a voluntary interview or testifying before the Grand Jury": an obvious threat that he may be subpoenaed and compelled to do so.

The implication - that Lichtblau and Risen are in the Justice Department's crosshairs - would represent a conservative dream come true. Many in the Bush administration and its amen corner have been clamoring for the prosecution of the New York Times ever since the President's lawbreaking came to light. (For more background, Perrspectives has the details.)

During April 2007 Senate testimony about his role in the purge of U.S. attorneys, Alberto Gonzales famously explained, "that I don't recall remembering." Now comes word that the former Attorney General is writing a tell-nothing memoir designed to salvage his irreparably damaged reputation. Judging from his interview today in the Wall Street Journal, Gonzales has rediscovered his memory, if not the truth.

Gonzales' self-serving historical revisionism when it comes to rubber-stamping President Bush's illegal NSA domestic surveillance, authorizing the torture of terror detainees and sacking of prosecutors for political purposes begins in jaw-dropping fashion. Complaining to the Journal about the scorn and derision heaped upon him, Gonzales whined:

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?"

"For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

Continue reading »