And Speaking of Torture

In 1946, the United States prosecuted two Justice Department lawyers for a peculiar crime. They had written memoranda which, in disregard of international law, facilitated the torture and abuse of prisoners. They were sentenced to ten years in prison, less time served. That was in the days when the Justice Department lived up to its name. The case is called United States v. Altstoetter. It would be a good case for Michael Mukasey to read; his underlings could benefit from a reading, too, since the time is approaching when it’s going to have some direct impact in their own lives.

  Harper’s

At least the Senate Democrats did one thing right. Jim Webb went in over the Christmas holiday for 10 seconds to call to order an empty room. But that prevented a recess and a recess appointment by Bush of the man he wants to make permanent head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury. Bradbury is the guy who was installed as "acting" head to replace Daniel Levin when Gonzales took over. Daniel Levin, it seems, had begun to question waterboarding.

Too bad the Dems couldn't have found someone willing to keep recess at bay all the other many times Bush pulled that stunt.

....but hey, Clinton did it, too. (Score: Clinton, 139. Bush - in his first six years - 167.)

They Changed Their Minds

The Central Intelligence Agency has agreed to make documents related to the destruction of interrogation videotapes available to the House Intelligence Committee and to allow the agency’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, to testify about the matter, Congressional and intelligence officials said Wednesday.

[...]

“The Department of Justice has changed their minds, and today we have reason to believe that we will be getting the documents,” [House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre] Reyes told reporters on Wednesday.

  NYT

Changed their minds. Is it coincidental that the the NYT just reported that four White House lawyers were involved?

There may also be audio tapes.

I wondered what has become of the Italian attempt to bring to justice the CIA agents who kidnapped Abu Omar, so I poked around a bit. There is supposed to be a decision on January 29 on whether a state document can be revealed in public court (although it already appeared in the press).

The CIA agents charged, who can be arrested if they go back to Europe, are not likely to make an appearance in Italian court.

The conviction [in absentia] of the Americans is a virtual certainty, say legal observers.

[...]

Omar, now wanted in Milan on terrorist charges, would be eligible to collect damages from U.S. and Italian officials in the event of a guilty verdict.

  CQ Politics

And good luck collecting on that U.S. award.

His critics, [Italian prosecutor Armando] Spataro says, “see a trial in absentia of the Americans as an obstacle to fighting terrorism,” meaning that it wrongly targets the CIA, one of the very agencies leading the fight against the terrorists.

“But we,” he stresses, “see following the law as central to the fight against terrorism.”

How novel.

To the Core

It seems that the Justice Department delayed prosecution in the 2002 New Hampshire GOP phone jamming operation until after the 2004 election so as not to hurt the GOP cause. Could that be illegal in itself, hmmmm?

Department of Justice.

Let's Pretend

The Justice Department has reopened a long-dormant inquiry into the government's warrantless wiretapping program, a major policy shift only days into the tenure of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

The investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility was shut down after the previous attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, refused to grant security clearances to investigators.

"We recently received the necessary security clearances and are now able to proceed with our investigation," H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the OPR, wrote to New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey.

  TPM

Surprise! We Can Still Torture

It turns out the DoJ has some secret legal opinions on torture from 2005 and 2006. A House Panel has demanded the documents be turned over. Because Congress has been so very successful in the past in getting material from the administration. They can’t even get them to turn over subpoenaed material.

[S]oon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued [a secret opinion on torture,] according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics

[...]

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

  NYT

Of course he was giving them credit for having shame.

Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the [torture] opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.

Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront [Dick Cheney's counsel David] Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.

[...]

[I]n July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas.

And now I know how Patrick Fitzgerald got to be the special prosecutor in the Plame case: James Comey appointed him, further pissing off the Bush cabal, or, as the NY Times article puts it, “irreparably offending” the White House.

They were offended that a “good lawyer” might get involved.

....but, hey....do what you want, you will anyway.

New AG

It looks like Bush has changed his mind about temporary acting AG, changing to a selection that is calculated to make Congress speedily confirm his choice for AG. Josh Marshall has all the dope.

My first reaction was that the spiteful juvenile in Bush chose an idealogue to be the acting AG in retaliation for having been forced to choose an AG more palatable to everyone. Double bonus if it forced them to push through the confirmation quickly.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

More on Fredo's Legacy

Old Gonzo threw some good parties.

An internal Justice audit, released Friday, showed the department spent nearly $7 million to plan, host or send employees to 10 conferences over the last two years. This included paying $4 per meatball at one lavish dinner and spreading an average of $25 worth of snacks around to each participant at a movie-themed party.

There was plenty, too, for those needing to satisfy a sweet tooth.

More than $13,000 was spent on cookies and brownies for 1,542 people who attended a four-day "Weed and Seed" conference in August 2005, according to the audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. And a "networking" session replete with butterfly shrimp, coconut lobster skewers and Swedish meatballs at a Community Oriented Policing Services conference in July 2006 cost more than $60,000.

  TPM

Weed and Seed, huh? Well, that's why those brownies were so expensive.

The most expensive conference on the list was a $1.4 million meeting in Denver in May 2006, to discuss Project Safe Neighborhood. The program, which cracks down on guns, gangs and drugs, was a top priority for resigning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Planners spent $143,469 on microphones, video screens and other technical equipment; $108,866 on food and drinks; and $638,371 on travel costs to send employees to the conference, the audit showed.

If they only had used funds from their black ops budget they wouldn't have gotten caught. And what better way to spend drug money?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

And Who'll Challenge Them?

TPM Muckraker has a story that shouldn't surprise you.

We noted two weeks ago that the Bush administration had refused a Freedom of Information Act request for records concerning the loss of millions of White House emails. Justice Department lawyers argued that the office which maintained that information, the Office of Administration, was not subject to FOIA.

But sometimes the administration surprises even itself with its capacity for secrecy. And so it was here, since the White House website clearly stated that the Office of Administration was subject to FOIA. And the office had been busily fulfilling FOIA requests for years, even employing a FOIA officer (the Department lawyers explained in their filing that this wasn't a problem).

So, are they forking over the documents? Fat chance! They've simply updated their website to reflect their claim.

Hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

The Terror Presidency

No one was surprised when [Jack Goldsmith] was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.

Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned.

[...]

By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. “I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted.”

[...]

Now Goldsmith is speaking out. In a new book, “The Terror Presidency,” which will be published later this month, and in a series of conversations [with NY Times reporter Jeffrey Rosen] Goldsmith has recounted how, from his first weeks on the job, he fought vigorously against an expansive view of executive power.

[...]

Goldsmith was asked, four years ago, to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department [...] The Office of Legal Counsel interprets all laws that bear on the powers of the executive branch. The opinions of the head of the office are binding, except on the rare occasions when they are reversed by the attorney general or the president.

[...]

In the Bush administration, however, the most important legal-policy decisions in the war on terror before Goldsmith’s arrival were made not by the Office of Legal Counsel but by a self-styled “war council.” This group met periodically in Gonzales’s office at the White House or Haynes’s office at the Pentagon. The members included Gonzales, Addington, Haynes and Yoo.

[...]

Several hours after Goldsmith was sworn in, on Oct. 6, 2003, he recalls that he received a phone call from Gonzales: the White House needed to know as soon as possible whether the Fourth Geneva Convention, which describes protections that explicitly cover civilians in war zones like Iraq, also covered insurgents and terrorists. After several days of study, Goldsmith agreed with lawyers in several other federal agencies, who had concluded that the convention applied to all Iraqi civilians, including terrorists and insurgents.

[...]

When Goldsmith presented his analysis of the Geneva Conventions at the White House, Addington, according to Goldsmith, became livid. “The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. “You cannot question his decision.”

[...]

[...]

Goldsmith also witnessed perhaps the most well-known confrontation over the administration’s aggressive tactics: the scene at Ashcroft’s hospital bed on March 10, 2004, when Gonzales and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, visited the hospital to demand that the ailing Ashcroft approve, over Goldsmith and Comey’s objections, a secret program that was about to expire. (Goldsmith refuses to identify the program, but Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, has publicly indicated it was the terrorist surveillance program.) As he recalled it to me, Goldsmith received a call in the evening from his deputy, Philbin, telling him to go to the George Washington University Hospital immediately, since Gonzales and Card were on the way there. Goldsmith raced to the hospital, double-parked outside and walked into a dark room. Ashcroft lay with a bright light shining on him and tubes and wires coming out of his body.

Suddenly, Gonzales and Card came in the room and announced that they were there in connection with the classified program. “Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest,” Goldsmith recalls. “All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn’t appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn’t the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I’ve ever witnessed.”

After a bit of silence, Goldsmith told me, Gonzales thanked Ashcroft, and he and Card walked out of the room.

[...]

Goldsmith, Comey, Mueller and other Justice Department officials were prepared to resign en masse if the White House implemented the program over their objections. Two days later, Comey had a conversation at the White House with Bush in which the president told him to do whatever was necessary to make the program legal. And in the end, the entire controversy was arguably unnecessary since the program was eventually approved by Congress and brought, at least partially, under the supervision of the FISA Court, as it could have been from the beginning. “I was sure the government was going to melt down,” Goldsmith told me. “No one anticipated they were going to reverse themselves.”

  NY Times

So, again, I ask you: What good is Congress? In the end they always give this constitution-trashing administration what they want.

I suggest you read the whole article. It's very interesting and gives a lot more information about the people involved and the questions facing the Office of Legal Counsel under Mr. Bush, including the infamous "torture memos".

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Speaking Out

Current DoJ lawyer John Koppel (25 years of service) is looking down the barrel of a gun, and he knows it. He's published a letter in the Denver Post saying he's ashamed of the DoJ and the current administration, calling the politicizing of the DoJ a "national disgrace" committed by "extremely ruthless people."

The Siegelman Case

According to a Harper's Magazine article by Scott Horton last week, Bruce Fein, a Republican lawyer and legal scholar who was Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and analyst at the ultra conservative Heritage Foundation has stated, “We have a Justice Department that has substantially been turned into a political arm of the White House.”

And a study by two professors at the University of Minnesota found seven prosecutions of Democrats for every one Republican.

Sometimes the White House has intervened to shut down or obstruct prosecutions of Republicans – a process that started certainly by the spring of 2002, when Jack Abramoff, a protégé of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay, sought White House intervention to fire the U.S. Attorney in Guam. “I don’t care if they appoint bozo the clown, we need to get rid of Fred Black,” Abramoff wrote in March 2002..

[...]

And then, still more troubling, there is White House intervention to persecute their political opponents: the telltale sign of tyranny. Georgia Thompson was a state contracting officer in Wisconsin prosecuted for corruption when she awarded a bid to a contractor that had made campaign contributions to the state’s Democratic governor. The fact that the contractor was the low bidder was apparently considered irrelevant to the prosecutor. [...] The case resulted in a conviction. Then it came before an all-Republican panel from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which immediately ordered Thompson’s release and dismissed the whole conviction with a word: “preposterous.” [...] It’s a strong testimonial to the fact that in America today, a jury will readily accept that accusations of corruption against a political figure are true, even when there is no evidence, and no corruption.

[...]

But the Georgia Thompson case is not the worst. Far, far more troubling still is the conviction of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman in a prosecution in Montgomery.

[...]

I have no idea whether in the end of the day, Mr. Siegelman is guilty or innocent of corruption. But that the prosecution was corruptly conceived and pursued and that the court proceedings were corrupted, almost from the outset: that is already extremely clear. This is not a prosecution of a political figure for corruption. It is a political vendetta, conceived, developed and pursued for a corrupt purpose.

It seems our old friend Karl Rove is behind this prosecution. We learned about it from a Republican lawyer-turned whistle blower, Dana Jill Simpson, who previously worked on a campaign against Siegelman.

Her affidavit described William Canary, a legendary figure in the Alabama GOP, bragging that “his girls” would take care of Siegelman. Canary’s wife is Leura Canary, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama. Alice Martin, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama is a close confidante of Canary’s. He referred repeatedly to “Karl,” assuring that “Karl” had worked things out with the Justice Department in Washington to assure a criminal investigation and prosecution of Siegelman. Canary is a close friend of Karl Rove.

Of course the WH denied any involvement and set out to smear Ms. Simpson, calling her "crazy" and "disgruntled."

Actually, there was more than just a smear.

After her intention to speak became known, Simpson’s house was burned to the ground, and her car was driven off the road and totaled. Clearly, there are some very powerful people in Alabama who feel threatened. Her case starts to sound like a chapter out of John Grisham’s book The Pelican Brief. However, those who have dismissed Simpson are in for a very rude surprise. Her affidavit stands up on every point, and there is substantial evidence which will corroborate its details.

Contrary to claims by Gonzo and Bush, it looks like there's a little bit of evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the DoJ after all. Not to mention that good old double standard.

A lobbyist named Lanny Young secured a plea bargain deal by agreeing to give evidence against Siegelman. Young testified that he gave Siegelman specialty advertising items of some value, but he noted that he did exactly the same thing for Republican U.S. Senator Jefferson Sessions and Karl Rove’s protégé Bill Pryor. The federal attorney insisted that this information be suppressed, and the judge trying the case concurred.

Prosecutors in the Siegelman case originally brought the action before a judge in the Northern District of Alabama who dismissed it with prejudice. So the prosecutors found themselves another judge.

This week, former Governor Siegelman faces sentencing before Judge Fuller. The federal prosecutors handling the case have demanded a sentence of thirty years in prison – in a case which should have been dismissed in the first instance and in any event involves no personal gain of any sort by Siegelman.

Siegelman was sentenced Friday to 7 years. He will appeal. Or perhaps request his sentence be commuted.

Video at TPM.