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$17
By James Mann
$18.45
$22
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Wikimedia Commons / YooTube
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John Yoo’s Op-Ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, in which he says he helped save Barack Obama’s presidency by “winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe,” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then this is the dingbat who gave the legal thumbs up to torture.
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Wikimedia Commons / YooTube
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Officially closing the hotly contested chapter on how the Bush administration conducted its war on terror, the Justice Department has rejected calls for ethics investigations against the two lawyers who wrote and signed off on the memos justifying the waterboarding of detainees.
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Flickr / aresauburn™
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The Justice Department is reportedly looking into whether private security firm/mercenary agency Blackwater Worldwide attempted to buy off Iraqi officials following a shooting rampage in Baghdad. Blackwater employees have so far escaped criminal charges for the Nisour Square massacre that killed 17 Iraqis. (continued)
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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How exactly does an administration lose millions of e-mails? However it happened, 22 million Bush-era White House e-mails have been recovered, and more may be found. The content, however, probably won’t be made public for years.
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By Joe Conason — The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots, but when did fear-mongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?
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White House / Pete Souza
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Seven former heads of the CIA formally requested that President Obama halt an ongoing inquiry into suspect abuse (aka torture) by the agency, arguing that important CIA work would be hampered by such an investigation. Obama didn’t bite, claiming that “nobody’s above the law.” Except George W. Bush, it seems.
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theblacksentinel.wordpress.com
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Although President Obama and others who were privy to information about alleged prisoner abuse by CIA employees and contractors previously passed on the possibility of prosecution, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has taken a different tack after reviewing the cases. Updated
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AP / Ron Edmonds
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Internal e-mails released Tuesday show that Karl Rove and other senior Bush aides played an “earlier and more active role” in the 2006 U.S. attorney firing scandal than previously revealed. The messages detail a concerted, two-year effort by Rove and staff to dismiss attorneys for political reasons.
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Flickr / joewcampbell
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While George W. Bush’s torture policies stained the reputations of a number of administration lawyers, others have been lauded for their resistance to backing harsh interrogation. However, newly revealed communications show that there was broad consensus in the Justice Department—even among lawyers who opposed such practices—that torture was legal.
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What was behind The Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to give torture memo draftsman John Yoo a platform to air his views as a columnist? The paper’s publisher, Brian Tierney, endorses Yoo to WHYY’s “Radio Times” host Marty Moss-Coane, while fellow guest and Philadelphia Daily News journalist Will Bunch offers a different take on George W. Bush’s erstwhile legal adviser.
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On Wednesday, President Barack Obama went back on his administration’s previous plan to release photos reportedly showing prisoner abuse at American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Team Obama may also follow in the Bushies’ footsteps by detaining some prisoners “on U.S. soil” and “indefinitely and without trial,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
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theatlantic.com
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A Justice Department report suggests that the possibility of legal consequence for those who broke the law is steadily waning, as Bush administration lawyers who approved the torture-interrogation technique of waterboarding will likely escape prosecution.
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forward.com
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President Obama’s Justice Department has moved to drop all espionage charges against two former AIPAC lobbyists after they were accused of disseminating sensitive information to journalists and diplomats gleaned from conversations with senior Bush administration officials.
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theatlantic.com
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In their effort to build a “new paradigm” for dealing with enemy prisoners, senior Bush administration officials, according to a report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee, suppressed or ignored conflicting legal opinions to ensure that “aggressive interrogation techniques” (torture) would be available to interrogators.
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senate.gov by way of Wikimedia Commons
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Former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska probably lost his seat because he was convicted of corruption charges, but now his guilt may be in doubt. At the direction of Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department has asked a federal judge to set aside the verdict and dismiss the indictment because of prosecutorial shenanigans.
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AP photo / Kevin Wolf
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By Chris Hedges — The facts surrounding the trial and imprisonment of Dr. Sami Al-Arian have severely tarnished the integrity of the American judicial system and made the government’s vaunted campaign against terrorism look capricious, inept and overtly racist.
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nytimes.com
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Forgive that pun, but it is clear that Kirsten Gillibrand, junior senator from New York, played an important role in fending off the Justice Department as it sought internal research conducted by Philip Morris that proved a connection between cigarettes and cancer—a causation rebuked by tobacco executives in testimony before Congress in 1994.
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White House / Chris Greenberg
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President Bush’s memo fetish is well documented, but the Obama administration has just made public a series of memos that said the executive had extraordinary powers far beyond those traditionally considered legal. According to the crack legal minds of the Bush administration, the president could overrule the other branches of government.
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en.afrik.com
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On Monday, the U.S. Senate gave the nod to Eric Holder, President Barack Obama’s pick for attorney general, making Holder the first African-American put in charge of the Justice Department.
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inquisitr.com
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Attorney general nominee Eric H. Holder Jr. has announced a groundbreaking hypothesis on waterboarding: It’s torture. The position, which contradicts piles of Bush-era law literature defending the practice, is just one step in an avowed process to fix many of the problems riddling current Justice Department policy.
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Department of Justice
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An internal investigation has found that Bradley Schlozman, a former high-ranking Justice Department official, hired and promoted conservative “right-thinking Americans” while making it clear that “adherents of Mao’s little red book need not apply” to work in his wing of the Justice Department. He also transferred an employee for allegedly using “ebonics.”
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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According to multiple reports, Barack Obama has settled on Eric Holder as his attorney general. So who is he? Holder has been a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, a U.S. attorney, a judge, a prominent Washington lawyer and one of the advisers responsible for Obama’s VP vetting. He would be the first black attorney general and happens to rock a fairly impressive mustache.
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley, pool
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By Stanley Kutler — The U.S. government’s failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center for alleged terrorists continues to haunt and color our standing in the world.
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By Eugene Robinson — A new internal report confirms our fears about the politicization of the Justice Department. That same contempt for government can be found in the current financial crisis as well as the meteoric rise of the former mayor of Wasilla.
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fbi.gov
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The Justice Department was dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on Friday on a new set of rules designed to help FBI agents zero in on potential national security threats within the U.S., allowing them to gather information in public places—and even conduct interviews—without identifying themselves.
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Flickr / Mykl Roventine
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The Justice Department could be gearing up for an antitrust case against the world’s leading search and online advertising provider because of a deal with Yahoo that puts Google in control of the vast majority of online ads. Despite a pledge to not do evil, Google’s image has been tarnished in recent years, mainly over privacy concerns.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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It’s reassuring to know that when Alberto Gonzales was our nation’s attorney general, he schlepped highly classified documents to his home in Virginia in an unlocked briefcase. Oops! Also, once he’d toted them home, Gonzales didn’t put them in a safe for extra protection because he “couldn’t remember the combination.” Fiddlesticks!
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Investigative reporter Murray Waas has better Justice Department sources than just about anybody, so it’s no surprise he keeps breaking stories on the ongoing mess there. The latest: “The investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys has been extended to encompass allegations that senior White House officials played a role in providing false and misleading information to Congress.”
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AP photo / Lawrence Jackson
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Last year, something was declared rotten in the Department of Justice and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was sent packing amid a scandal over politicized hiring and firing practices within the DoJ. Now, an investigation has concluded that a top aide to Gonzales, Monica Goodling, was a key instrument of that abuse of power.
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AP
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Ah, good intentions, with which that famous path was paved: According to Justice Department documents obtained and released by the ACLU on Thursday—albeit heavily redacted—CIA interrogators were authorized to use waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” that they believed “in good faith” would not “have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering.”
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Karl Rove had been subpoenaed to testify Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee about the partisan politics that allegedly played a role in the U.S. attorney firing scandals that shook up the Justice Department during Rove’s time as a key White House adviser—but he didn’t show. Whoops!
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If new rule changes go through, the FBI will be allowed to open national security investigations without evidence of wrongdoing. Instead, the agency could pursue cases based on profiles of Americans it deems likelier to commit crimes such as terrorism. The policy would be in keeping with the Bush administration’s dragnet, fact-phobic approach to terrorism; the president himself has been critical of profiling.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of a 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture.
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AP photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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Bush administration officials Vice President Dick Cheney, current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft were among those who deliberated over, and eventually approved, the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” (which some would call torture) at meetings following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
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More shocking details are emerging from the 2003 81-page memo by former Justice Department senior lawyer John Yoo, who determined that the commander in chief can order poking out of eyes, slitting of body parts and throwing acid at prisoners, and none of that would constitute torture because it would not result in “death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions.”
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tkb.org
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By Chris Hedges — The Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Amin Al-Arian, imprisoned for five years despite a jury’s failure to return a single guilty verdict against him, has gone on a hunger strike in a Virginia jail.
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flickr.com
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So much for the “war on crime”: According to a new report from the Pew Center on the States, 1 in 100 American adults is now in jail. The report states that “current prison growth is not driven primarily by a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the population at large”; instead, “it flows principally from a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and ... keeping them there longer.”
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usnews.com
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Newly installed Attorney General Michael Mukasey swiftly shot down requests by House and Senate Judiciary Committee leaders, as well as other members of Congress, for information about the Justice Department’s investigation of the CIA tape destruction fiasco—because the department would seem “subject to political influence.” Oh.
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If you can’t say it any better than Ted Kennedy, why try? We certainly won’t. Here, the former Truthdigger of the Week speaks for us all as he lays out the case against Mukasey.
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nytimes.com
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Michael Mukasey has been sworn in as U.S. attorney general, a day after 53 senators decided that a man who doesn’t know what torture is should have the job. But the real blame—for anyone who objects to the confirmation, that is—should be reserved for Democrats Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, who made Bush’s day when they gave Mukasey the green light.
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Do we really need another attorney general who doesn’t know what torture is? The Senate Judiciary Committee just barely approved the nomination of Michael Mukasey on Tuesday. He is expected to breeze through the rest of the process. Remember some weeks from now, when the head of the Justice Department is a man who, despite fact and testimony and common sense, can’t call torture by its name, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer are responsible.
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House Democrats have threatened to push ahead with contempt-of-Congress citations against past and present Bush intimates Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolten and, possibly, Karl Rove. The White House appeared unimpressed, probably because the administration would ultimately oversee any prosecution, via the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
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Wouldn’t it have been chillingly fascinating to watch White House bigwigs in action sometime around 2003, while they played fast and loose with executive power and international law?
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By Amy Goodman — It was among the worst nightmares of U.S. history, and it sprang from the brutal thinking that Attorney General Gonzales trafficked in.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The GOP spin machine is revving up with the news of Alberto Gonzales’ departure. Some Republicans are suggesting that tracking down wrongdoing in Gonzales’ Justice Department would bring not peace but extreme disruption. In other words: Can’t we all be buddies and forget these trivialities?
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By Marie Cocco — With Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, the president has lost not only a buddy willing to humiliate himself before Congress but a loyal agent who, whether knowingly or not, helped co-opt the federal government.
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Not to kick a man when he’s down, but there’s something to be said for a resignation speech that at least mentions why the person is resigning, even if it’s the pitifully transparent “to spend more time with my family.” After Gonzales concluded his farewell remarks, at least one reporter shouted, “Why are you leaving?”
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In an apparent effort to keep the estimated 5 million missing White House e-mails missing, the Justice Department is claiming that the White House Office of Administration, which handles IT support for the executive branch, is not covered by freedom-of-information law. Press-freedom advocate Lucy Dalglish notices a trend: “When they don’t want to comply with the law, they just shamelessly argue they are not subject to the law.”
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AP Photo / Ron Edmonds, file
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Once again, it pays to be in the Bush administration’s tight inner circle (especially when the possibility of punishment for alleged wrongdoing looms): It now seems that Karl Rove may be protected by his loyal president and may not have to face the Senate Judiciary Committee about the U.S. attorney firings scandal.
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