With Justice For None

From CROOKS & LIARS:

From the moment he entered the White House, President Obama’s attitude towards the crime, corruption and politicization of the Bush Justice Department has been to “look forward and not backwards.” As we’ve seen for the third time in just the last several days, that’s working out just fine for the Bush lawyers.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Nora Dannehy [assigned by Gonzales’ successor Michael Mukasey]  announced she would bring no charges against Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, Monica Goodling or any of the key players behind the purge of 9 U.S. attorneys.

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Gonzogate: The Story That Never Dies

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Thousands of pages of internal e-mail and once-secret Congressional testimony showed Tuesday that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than was previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of United States attorneys.

Aides to former President George W. Bush have asserted that the Justice Department took the lead in the dismissals, which set off a political firestorm that lasted months. Mr. Rove played down his role in the firings in a recent interview and in closed testimony last month before Congressional investigators.

But the documents, released by the House Judiciary Committee after a protracted fight over access to White House records and testimony, offer a detailed portrait of a nearly two-year effort, from early 2005 to 2007, by senior White House officials, including Mr. Rove, to dismiss some prosecutors for what appear to be political reasons.

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Creepier by the Dozen

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — A coalition of left-wing advocacy groups filed legal ethics complaints on Monday against 12 former Bush administration lawyers, including three United States attorneys general, whom the groups accuse of helping to justify torture.

The coalition, called Velvet Revolution, asked the bar associations in four states and the District of Columbia to disbar the lawyers, saying their actions violated the rules of professional responsibility by approving interrogation methods, including waterboarding, that constituted illegal torture.

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Bye Bye Bybee

Jay Bybee has been a federal judge in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in  Las Vegas for 6 years.  He was little noticed until the release of a memo written by Bybee when he was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.  The memo gave protection to what the Bush administration called harsh interrogation and what others call torture.  Liberal groups have called for Bybee’s impeachment.

The techniques excused by Bybee included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, and confinement in small boxes. In 2002, Bybee advised the Central Intelligence Agendy that they could use the tactics against Abu Zubaydah, a leader of al-Qaida.  Bybee said that the techniques were not torture, because there was “no intent to cause severe pain or suffering.”

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I wish Deadeye Dick a room filled with ottomans

From The Raw Story (April 15, 2009):

Richard Armitage, who was second in command at the State Department during former President George W. Bush’s first term, believes waterboarding is torture and says he would have resigned had he known the CIA was torturing suspects.

…snip…

The statement makes him one of the highest ranking former Bush administration officials to label the former president’s policy torture.

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Cheney Gang

From MSNBC:

In an interview with MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell, Liz Cheney, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Bush administration, defended her father, saying that the harsh interrogation tactics yielded valuable intelligence and that the tactics didn’t amount to torture.

…snip…

Cheney added that the tactics outlined in the CIA memos are the same techniques are used on Americans for training purposes. “Everything that was done in this program, as has been laid out and described before, are tactics that our own people go through in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion) training,” she said adding, “We did not torture our own people.”

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(Videos available at link above)

Rotten to the Core

Senator Carl Levin:

Today we’re releasing the declassified report of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s investigation into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. […] In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse – such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan – to low ranking soldiers. Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a “few bad apples,” were simply false.

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With a name like Tucker, he’s got to be rude.

From Crooks & Liars:

Seriously, is there anyone more annoying than Tucker Carlson? The least self-aware pundit on TV, still nursing his own bruised ego from the thorough spanking he received at the hands of a comedian that took down his show, cried that Jon Stewart is nothing more than a partisan hack in “attacking” Jim Cramer. Mr. “I’m an ideologue, not a partisan” repeats the favorite GOP meme that Cramer was only attacked because he dared to criticize Obama’s budget. Hmm … repeating GOP talking points … but Carlson’s not speaking on behalf of his party, no sirree.

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