I have mixed feelings about this. When someone like Don Blankenship is the face of Massey Energy (it's not every day that people are calling for your CEO's arrest on homicide charges), people pay a lot more attention to what they're doing. I'd hope they're not just going to look for a kinder, gentler version of the same management style. Via Huffington Post:

The calls to oust Massey Energy Company Chairman and CEO Don Blankenship began in earnest Monday, with members of both the private and public sectors getting involved.

The CtW Investment Group sent a letter to Massey's board of directors Monday afternoon demanding Blankenship's resignation in the wake of the disastrous explosion at the company's Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.

CtW had previously warned the board that its minimal oversight over Blankenship's regime exposed Massey and its shareholders to "unnecessary legal, regulatory, and reputational risks" -- apparently vindicated in that judgment, the investment group deems the Upper Big Branch disaster a "tragic consequence" of Blankenship's "confrontational approach to regulatory compliance."

He's not fond of investigative reporters, either. (Check out his reaction to an ABC News camera crew at about the one-minute mark in the above video.)

Earlier Monday, New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli likewise called for Blankenship's resignation. And DiNapoli is no idle politico: As the sole trustee of New York's Common Retirement Fund, he has direct control over some 303,550 shares of Massey stock, valued at $14.1 million.

"Massey's cavalier attitude toward risk and callous disregard for the safety of its employees has exacted a horrible cost on dozens of hard-working miners and their loved ones," DiNapoli said in a statement. "This tragedy was a failure both of risk management and effective board oversight. Blankenship must step down and make room for more responsible leadership at Massey."

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[Editor's note: Please welcome D-Day to the Crooks and Liars team. Most of you are no doubt familiar with him through his always-impressive work at Digby's Hullabaloo, where he'll continue to contribute; you'll just get to read more of him here. D-Day also helped fill in a few weeks back while I was on vacation. John's trying to swim against the tide of blogs pulling, so he's hired D-Day to write several posts a week for us. We're lucky to have him. -- DN]

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

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

• Threats of execution, using semi-automatic handguns and power drills

• Threats to kill detainee and his children

• Threats to rape detainee's wife and children in front of him

• Restricting the detainee's carotid artery

• Hitting detainee with the butt end of a rifle

• Blowing smoke in detainee's face for five minutes

• Multiple instances of waterboarding detainees, of the type we prosecuted Japanese war criminals for using:

• Hanging detainee by their arms until interrogators thought their shoulders might be dislocated

• stepping on detainee's ankle shackles to cause severe bruising and pain

• choking detainee until they pass out

• dousing detainee with water on cold concrete floors in cold temperatures to induce hypothermia

• killing detainees through torture techniques, whether accidental or not

• putting detainee in a diaper for days at a time to live in their own filth

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

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It makes sense, doesn't it? John Brennan was a defender of the Bush torture/interrogation regime that used Power Drills, Guns, Threats Against Children and other various goodies to try and get information out of suspects, and I heard on Countdown that he may now get to oversee the new Interrogation Force.

I guess it takes a man versed in torture to know how to keep everybody in line that uses interrogation tactics these days. We can't have a rookie over there, now can we?

UPDATE: As Leon Panetta threatened to quit the CIA...

Glenn Greenwald says:

GOP Congressman Peter King -- the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee -- had this rancid outburst today in Politico regarding Eric Holder's decision to investigate whether laws were broken by the Bush administration's torture:

"It’s bullshit. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on. [It's' a] declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense. . . . When Holder was talking about being 'shocked' [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys' fingers off or something -- or that they actually used the power drill. . . "

Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn't think the Geneva Convention "applies to terrorists."

Never mind that the Supreme Court in Hamdan ruled exactly the opposite: that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all detainees, including accused Terrorists. Never mind that the War Crimes Act makes it a felony to inflict "prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering. . . ." and that these acts are therefore criminal whether or not King likes them.

Never mind that scores of people have died -- not merely been threatened with death -- in American custody as a result of "interrogation tactics." Never mind that Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture which compels the U.S. to prosecute anyone authorizing torture; that the Treaty proclaims that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture"; and that Reagan himself said the Treaty "will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today." And most of all, never mind that King has no idea whether these people are actually "terrorists" because the people we tortured were never given trials, never proven to have done anything wrong, and in many cases were -- as federal courts have repeatedly found and as the CIA IG Report itself recognized -- completely innocent...read on

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The BBC has a remarkable interview with the mother of Neda Agha Soltan, the 27-year-old Iranian woman whose death June 20 was captured on video, and who became an important symbol of the growing resistance to the mullahs' regime.

The conclusion of the interview is deeply bittersweet:

I don't want people to forget her. People - Iranians - have all been very supportive. They come to me and congratulate me for having had such a brave daughter.

And now I want you to do something for me. I want you, on my behalf, to thank everyone around the world, Iranians and non Iranians, people from every country and culture, people who in their own way, their own tradition, have mourned my child… everyone who lit a candle for her - every musician, who wrote songs for her, who wrote poems about her… you know, Neda loved the arts and music. I want to thank all of them.

I want to thank politicians and leaders, from every country, at all levels, who remembered my child.

Her death has been so painful - words can never describe my true feelings. But knowing that the world cried for her… that has comforted me.

I am proud of her. The world sees her as a symbol, and that makes me happy.

Neda has become a symbol not just of the struggle in Iran, I think, but of the sacrifices being made by young people around the world working for justice. It may be a small consolation, but her daughter's spirit is with us all.

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It wasn't just Karl Rove and the Bush White House crew that was freaking yesterday over President Obama's statement yesterday leaving the door open for prosecutions of the architects of Bush's torture regime -- indicating he'd leave the decision up to the Attorney General. (There was also growing speculation that AG Eric Holder might appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter.)

No, it seemed the entire Village was in an uproar. Especially over at Fox, where the dismay was universal. Especially funny on Fox's All Star Panel yesterday afternoon was Morton Kondracke, the Faux Designated Liberal, who blamed it all on MoveOn.org and the liberal bloggers.

Oh, and NBC and the New York Times, too.

Wait. Can we blame it on the French somehow too, while we're at it?

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Karl was positively freaking out yesterday afternoon over the prospect that some of his ex-colleagues at the White House might wind up being prosecuted -- or held responsible publicly -- for helping George W. Bush install a torture regime during his tenure, after President Obama's statement earlier in the day indicating he'd leave the decision up to the Attorney General.

Rove, appearing on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, was particularly frantic -- and when Rove gets frantic, he gets nasty:

Rove: Sure, as long as they've released the limits to which America will go to extract this information, let's share the information that was extracted, and saved America from further attacks. We know, for example -- it's already a part of the public record -- that the interrogation of these high-value targets kept them from being able to attack Los Angeles by flying airplanes into the Liberty tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles, which was one of their plans.

But look, let's step back for a minute. What the Obama administration has done in the last several days is very dangerous. What they've essentially said is, If we have policy disagreements with our predecessors, what we're going to do is we're going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run colonels in mirrored sunglasses. And what we're going to do is prosecute, systematically, the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences.

Is that what we've come to in this country? That if we have a change in administration from one party to another, that we then use the tools of the government to go systematically after the policy disagreements that we have with the previous administration? Now that may be fine in some little Latin American country that's run by, you know, the latest junta. It may be the way that they do things in Chicago. But that's not the way we do things here in America.

Hmmmm. Last I looked, Chicago was here in America.

But more to the point: Karl's sounding like someone who's already looking over his shoulder at congressional subpoenas.

And even more to the point: Sorry, Karl, but working for the White House is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. If you broke the law -- and particularly if you and your pals are war criminals according to American law for having not merely permitted but avidly constructed a torture regime -- the appropriate justice needs meting out.

Of course, we keep hearing about how Torture Saved Us From Terrorists -- notably the overhyped

Funny thing about that -- back in 2006, it was Wiretapping Saved Us From Terrorists.

Yes, the same overhyped "plot."

Rove will have to do better than that if he wants to stay ahead of those rapidly gaining footsteps.

Pacific Views: What do the military junta in Myanmar and the Bush/Cheney regime have in common?

Discourse.net: US accused of operating secret, floating prisons.

U.S. Diplomacy: 111 countries sign a cluster bomb ban...but not the United States.

Consortiumblog: Among the many lobbyists McCain won't fire.

Intrepid Liberal Journal: Chronicling the uprising: An interview with David Sirota

Boing Boing: Screengrab from donut sleeper cell training video surfaces

Usually when a tragedy strikes like a cyclone or a hurricane, one would think that Laura Bush would flash the face of being compassionate to all the suffering people instead of an attack dog politician. Wouldn't there have been a better time to criticize the government?

Froomkin:

When a country run by a despotic and isolationist regime is laid low by a massive natural disaster, the diplomatic thing to do is to respond with a show of compassion. Not kick 'em when they're down.

More than 22,000 people have died in the staggering devastation caused by this weekend's cyclone in Burma. But when First Lady Laura Bush made her first-ever visit to the White House briefing room yesterday, to talk about what's going on in that country, it was not to deliver a message of goodwill.

Rather than announce the launch of a massive relief effort that could take advantage of a rare diplomatic opening, the first lady instead tossed insults at Burma's leaders, blamed them for the high death toll, and lashed out at their decision to move forward with a constitutional referendum scheduled for this Saturday.

The traditionally issue-averse first lady's concerns about the Burmese junta and its abuses of human rights date back several years, and she's been particularly outspoken since last fall.

But why respond to a catastrophe with such hostility? The awkward timing, as it turns out, may have had something to do with an event entirely unrelated to the cyclone.

"I'm going to leave tomorrow for Crawford, for Jenna's wedding, and I wanted to be able to make a statement about Burma before I left," the first lady told reporters.

In an apparent attempt at cuteness, the NYT’s Thomas Friedman wrote a column written as if it were an “Iranian National Intelligence Estimate of America” to Ahmadinejad from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence

It included this bizarre assertion:

True, thanks to Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Congress decided to increase the miles per gallon required of U.S. car fleets by the year 2020 — which took us by surprise — but we nevertheless “strongly believe” this will not lead to any definitive breaking of America’s oil addiction, since none of the leading presidential candidates has offered an energy policy that would include a tax on oil or carbon that could trigger a truly transformational shift in America away from fossil fuels.

Therefore, it is “very likely” that Iran’s current level of high oil revenues will last for decades and insulate our regime from any decisive pressures from abroad or from our own people.

Except, as Kevin Drum explained, Friedman has it backwards.

All three of the leading Democratic candidates have proposed cap-and-trade plans that auction 100% of their CO2 permits. This is, economically speaking, the same thing as a carbon tax.

If Friedman is aware of this, he should say so. If he’s not, he should get his facts straight.

  Shortly before the 2004 presidential election, the Rev. George F. Regas, the former rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, told his congregation about his perspective on the president and the war in Iraq. Regas imagined Jesus participating in a political debate with Bush and Kerry and said that “good people of profound faith” could vote for either man.

He added, however, that he imagined Jesus telling Bush, “Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster.” The comments prompted the IRS to launch an aggressive investigation into the church’s alleged partisan conduct.

Last week, the investigation ended — and All Saints is in the clear.

The Internal Revenue Service has told a prominent Pasadena church that it has ended its lengthy investigation into a 2004 antiwar sermon, church leaders said Sunday.

The next question is whether the IRS went after the progressive church out of some kind of partisan vendetta.