DoJustice [was "The prosecutor purge"]

[skdadl]

I've started to read the first Rove interview -- gawd: once a jerk, always a jerk -- he sounds as chippy in print as he does on TV.

EW, who is actually hopping into a car to drive to Pittsburgh (she's on her way to Netroots), has already found stuff in Rove's interview, even as she was pulling on her slicker. He didn't say any such thing "that I can recall." Lines like that, about conversation reported by others. There is a good deal of testimony from others in the background of these interviews. By rights, they've got him, but then, given Obama and Holder, who knows.

[Toedancer]

Whistleblower’s Letter to Holder Reveals Corruption in Siegelman Prosecution

Jeeze anyone feel like this is just deja vu, a do-over of the Bush years?  :  Where's :

[skdadl]

I don't understand why Holder has not moved firmly on the Siegelman case, just don't understand it. The corruption in that Alabama district is plain -- Canary should have been gone on 20 January, and Siegelman is still fighting for justice.

[Croghan27]

Meandering thoughts on emptywheel.

This seems to be an appropriate place to post this .... things have moved beyond the prosecutor's firings, but have reflexed back a situation that was current at that time: Jay Bybee and his memos.

You may remember that Mr. Bybee's memos were used to justify and allow torturing by the CIA and the military. (The FBI, to its' eternal credit, refused to partake in any of that stuff.)

The whole subject is so filled with nuisance that you can spend an entire sunny afternoon, when you should be caring for your garden, just reading about justifications for not using even the word 'torture', and how the NY Times and WaPo kowtowed to Bush's (and Obama's) claim that they (the US) did not torture. 

emptywheel, in a posting on House Judiciary Committee interviewed Jay Bybee about the circumstances   that went into the Bybee Memos authorizing torture has said ..... (sorry for the tense change )

I’m going to read them in depth,

As a member of the cabal (Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Koestler et al) who's function was to obfuscate and confuse and search for hiding places within the language (Geneva Conventions are quaint) rather than admit the obvious, I can think of nothing more frightening.

She says she is going to read the testimony in depth .... then quotes:  (Transcript of May 26, 2010, Interview  of former Assistant Attorney   General Jay Bybee at 75-78, 80-81, 86-90,  98-99.) ..and she has not read them in debth????? 

This is the lady that reads, understands and digests thousand page documents and can connect the mendacity in chapter one with the discontinuity in chapter XXVI.

Be afraid boyz - be very afraid. 

[skdadl]

Heh. You're ahead of me too, Croggy, on those threads at EW's place.

One thing to remember: EW already has a lot of background in this chronology because she's been through the CIA IG's report and the DoJ investigation, in which Bybee also fairly recently had to respond to questions like this, so she knows what to look for (and she has her famous timelines).

That said, she definitely has an unusual mind. She not only remembers a lot but she seizes on significant detail faster than most, maybe because of how good her memory is. When I made an innocent comment naming Joshua Claus hours before the DoD banned the four reporters, EW caught that immediately -- the passage she'd quoted only named Interrogator 1, but I called him Joshua Claus -- right away, she flagged that, and then she has kept it flagged --  an ordinary Canuck peon knew without anyone publishing the name. I didn't even realize what that meant until she pointed it out.

Reading her is like that -- not every day, but often enough.

[Croghan27]

When I made an innocent comment naming Joshua Claus hours before the DoD   banned the four reporters, EW caught that immediately

So much for your all-expenses-paid trip to the resort in western Cuba.

Several times she has posted a site that she has looked at containing several documents.  To understand them with their plethora of dates, time lines (often very important), names and references to previous documents (just as convoluted) is more than I can do without intense study. She manages to grok them, with all their nuisances, immediately.

As you say, she not only reads the documents, as I or anyone else can, but she recalls and can manipulate the intelligence within - where I can say .... "Oh yes, I read that." she can connect it to a seemingly unrelated statement sometime before.

Perhaps that is why the "Marcia Wheeler Fundraiser" stands at about $122,000 and the Croghan27 Support and (beer) Fund is in deficit. 

[skdadl]

Ya -- I'm not gonna get accredited, eh?  *big grin*
 
Have you noticed, though, that everyone at EW's place types his name JOSHUA CLAUS now? lol. Rachel still hasn't said his name out loud on her show, although she's covered the story, but we type it freely, and in caps.
 
I think most of the regulars figure out eventually that they can't do what EW does. There are a lot of good people there, but very few are as weedy as she is, and really, we don't need to be. MadDog and EarlofHuntington and William Ockham and a few others read all the docs as well and find things for us, and Mary, of course, is a genius, but the rest of us mainly depend on them and EW. 
 
Every once in a while I read docs I'm especially interested in -- the Senate Armed Services report on GTMO, eg, is a gold mine, as was the DoJ IG's report on the FBI at GTMO. But the docs coming out now are often more bitty-piecey, so I leave those to the experts and just read their conclusions.
 
You know what is fascinating to watch? When the subject of the anthrax attacks resurfaces occasionally. People you don't normally see come out of the woodwork, real lab experts -- from that I really do stand back. I think they must lie in wait. They have managed to push the FBI back on that case -- not that Holder is willing to do anything about it.

[Croghan27]

Have you noticed, though, that everyone at EW's place types his name   JOSHUA CLAUS now? lol. Rachel still hasn't said his name out loud on her   show, although she's covered the story, but we type it freely, and in   caps.

Glad you brought up the subject of Rachael. I had been wondering if there was a place for it, or even if it is suitable.

The once acerbic critic of the obvious contradictions of the administration(s) has toned down and has become more of a supporter of America the Great than of America the Fallible.

She just did a series of broadcasts from Afghanistan, notably Kandahar - and the ra-ra was overwhelming: "more nuisanced reporting is needed".   (gimmy a break )

Petraeus is wonderful, just wait, you'll see,  and McChrystal was terrific, but mistaken.

She still maintains her wit with some things near to her heart - the DADT for instance, but overall, I find her depressingly mainstream now. 

[Alison]

In a closed-door interview with members of the House Judiciary Committee on May 26, Bybee said his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) did not allow the CIA to use diapering, water dousing, blackout goggles, extended solitary confinement, daily beatings, forcing a detainee to defecate on himself, hanging a detainee from ceiling hooks or subjecting prisoners to loud music or noise.

Bybee, who is now a federal appeals court judge in San Francisco, did sign off on a variety of other torture techniques, including the near-drowning experience of waterboarding. Prolonged diapering was included in a list of torture techniques that the OLC initially approved in 2002, but it was removed possibly because it might have resulted in a lengthy legal review.

Some of the techniques, including diapering, were permitted by CIA Director George Tenet and other senior agency officials despite the lack of clear OLC sign-off in 2002. Diapering and other abuses, such as water dousing, were cleared by the OLC later after Bybee left to become a federal judge.
 
In 2005 one of Bybee’s successors, Steven Bradbury, permitted several of the torture tactics to be used in combination. The application of the torture techniques alone and in various patterns appears to have amounted to a form of human experimentation

Truthout

[Toedancer]

The Secret Sharer Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?   by Jane Mayer
Justice Department OverReach Again!! To think Obama was a constitutional lawyer once and that Hayden is still free, I honest to gawd don't know how American NSA/CIA/Congress/Telecom co's, all of them sleep at night. After I finished reading the 10 pages I have to admit my first thought was; is this laying the ground work for JA/WL indictment. Reporters are becoming fair game, unless of course your Bob Woodward who gets a free pass.  I can't believe this is really about publication and NOT espionage! 

The hypocrisy is both mind numbing and explosive.

[skdadl]

Important article (everything Mayer writes is). Amazing that the news is not getting through when we know so much, but Obama clearly does not care about critics of his collapse on the constitution any more -- he likes being an emperor, and he is advancing that status for the presidency.

And yes, they are polishing up the Espionage Act for Manning and Assange. Fiendish thing to watch. Saddest of all that most USian journos are falling into line behind Obama. Could barely stand to watch Steve Croft's softballs lobbed at Obama on 60 Minutes. All militarized patriotism all the time. So much for the Republic.