Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) of the Senate Intelligence committee has just released a declassified narrative (pdf) of the OLC's development of its opinions on torture.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder has already picked out a key excerpt, that sheds some light on just who in the Bush administration helped devise and approve the torture policies:

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Jonathan Turley, the media-friendly George Washington Law School professor, who's an outspoken advocate of curbing executive power, gave a bravura performance on MSNBC's Countdown last night, on the subject of possible torture prosecutions.

Arguing that investigations aren't just necessary but long overdue, Turley made two important points that have been getting a bit lost in the rapid-fire debate lately.

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Buried in a New York Times story today about the fallout for several former Bush lawyers who crafted the administration's war on terror policies, is the following gratifying nugget:

David S. Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was a forceful voice in internal legal debates, is also said to still be looking for work.

As far as we know, Addington has not yet described himself as a "casualty of the war on terror", as Alberto Gonzales did recently in explaining his own failure to find a job.

Over at TPM, Josh and David have been mulling the significance of the executive order, issued today by President Obama, concerning the Presidential Records Act. Could it apply retroactively to previous administrations, making it easier to pry loose records that the Bush White House has fought to keep secret?

According to Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the tentative answer is yes.

As David notes, the order says:

Going forward, anytime the American people want to know something that I or a former President wants to withhold, we will have to consult with the Attorney General and the White House Counsel, whose business it is to ensure compliance with the rule of law.

As a result, Weismann told TPMmuckraker, the order could affect any case in which the White House has claimed executive privilege over presidential (or, to be clear, vice presidential) records. Most important, it would subject those claims to review by the Justice Department. "It does have the potential to impact ongoing litigation," she said.

Weismann specifically cited the ongoing legal fight between the House Judiciary committee and the Bush White House, over documents relating to the US Attorney firings. Among other documents, Congress has been seeking a key memo written by a White House counsel, which might shed light on White House involvement in the firings.

Weismann told TPMmuckraker that that the order likely would not affect a lawsuit she had been working on, on behalf of CREW, which sought to compel Dick Cheney's office to hand over all his records to the National Archives. On Monday a judge declined to order Cheney to do so. Weismann said that case turned on an interpretation of the Presidential Records Act itself, rather than on a claim of executive privilege.

Still, it certainly seems possible that on his first full day in office, the new president has dealt significant a blow to the Bush administration's efforts to permanently keep information from the public. But a lot more questions than answers remain, and we've got calls out to some experts in executive privilege who might be able to shed further light on what Obama's order does and doesn't do.

Dick Cheney may be in a wheel-chair -- but did he get away with pulling a fast one as he left office?

Yesterday we noted that a court had declined to compel Cheney's office to hand over all of its records to the National Archives -- instead taking the word of a low-ranking vice-presidential aide that she would do so.

As we said, the plaintiffs -- a group of historical and non-profit organizations -- are still concerned that key documents are missing. And after speaking to them, it's easy to see why.

"There's all kinds of wiggle room" within the pledge by Cheney's aide, Claire O'Donnell, that might have allowed the veep to withhold key material, Stanley Kutler, a historian and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and one of the plaintiffs in the case, told TPMmuckraker.

He added: "Why is [Cheney] fighting so much if he didn't have the intention of absconding with the stuff?"

Kutler called O'Donnell's deposition in the case "a triumph of obfuscation." But the bigger issue may be that O'Donnell, as an aide in charge of record-keeping, was almost certainly out of the loop for many of the key decisions Cheney made. So even if she were to make good on her pledge to turn over all the records in her possession, it's doubtful, say the plaintiffs, that that would cover everything of interest to historians and the public.

According to Anne Weismann, a lawyer for CREW, another plaintiff, O'Donnell admitted in her deposition that she had no firsthand knowledge of what the veep did. "She absolutely didn't have access to all the records," said Weismann.

Kutler said he expects that when the National Archives are opened, likely in 12 years as the law states, we'll find that we've got only "perfunctory stuff" from Cheney's office.

The plaintiffs explained that the judge had limited their ability to conduct discovery to just two witnesses -- O'Donnell and a staffer at the National Archives. They were denied the ability to depose David Addington, the lawyer in Cheney's office who formulated many of the opinions which the vice president used as justification for his efforts to expand the power of his office. Without Addington's testimony, the plaintiffs were unable to offer positive evidence of the existence of further records, beyond what O'Donnell handles, that might be withheld. But it still appears more than likely that such material exists.

The good news is this approach to transparency looks like it's on the way out. At a ceremony for the new White House staff today, President Obama declared: "There's been too much secrecy in this city."

Referring to the Freedom of Information Act, he added:

The mere fact that you have the legal power to keep something secret does not mean you should always use it. I expect members of this administration not simply to live up to the letter, but also the spirit, of this law.

Unfortunately, that change of attitude may come too late to help us get a look at the full range of Cheney's records.

Late Update: In fact, the new administration is already acting to avoid a future repeat of Cheney's effort to claim expansive power. Among several executive orders issued by President Obama today dealing with transparency and secrecy issues, was the following:

Finally the Executive Order on Presidential Records brings those principles [of openness and transparency] to presidential records by giving the American people greater access to these historic documents. This order ends the practice of having others besides the President assert executive privilege for records after an administration ends. Now, only the President will have that power, limiting its potential for abuse. And the order also requires the Attorney General and the White House Counsel to review claims of executive privilege about covered records to make sure those claims are fully warranted by the Constitution.

So in other words, the vice president can no longer claim executive privilege to keep records from the public. It really is a new day.

Dick Cheney may now be the former vice president, but a court ruling handed down yesterday, his last full day in office, could make it less likely that we'll ever get a full account of his role in crucial Bush administration decisions.

The Washington Post reports that a federal judge decided that a pledge from Cheney's office that it will turn over key records to the National Archives, as required by law, is good enough. A coalition of historical and nonprofit groups, alleging that Cheney planned to discard or destroy the records, had sued to require that they be preserved.

Claire O'Donnell, a Cheney aide who handles record-keeping, had said in a sworn deposition that the material would be preserved, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said she expects that the VP's office "will, in good faith, comply with" that pledge.

But the plaintiffs are concerned that it won't. Stanley Kutler, an emeritus professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and the author of two books on Watergate, told the Post he's afraid that "when the Archives goes to open Cheney's papers, they are going to find empty boxes."

Kutler added that Cheney "spent most of his time making sure he left no footprints. Why did he fight this order so much if he did not have the intent to leave with these papers? I'm guessing that a lot of it will not be there."

Still, on most of the more far-reaching issues in play, the government lost. The court rejected the government's arguments that the plaintiffs lacked standing, and that no court could review the administration's compliance with the Presidential Records Act, under which the case was brought. It also rejected the strange-sounding claim that that act gave the vice president complete discretion to decide how to comply with it. Judge Kollar-Kotelly rapped DOJ for making "constantly shifting arguments."

But on the immediate -- and crucial -- question of the how much of the ex-veep's records are made available to those writing the history of the Bush administration, we may have to trust Dick Cheney. And that hasn't tended to work out too well in the past.

George Bush and Dick Cheney are continuing to insist we haven't committed torture. But that's now been contradicted by the Bush administration official whose job is to decide whether to bring Guantanamo detainees to trial.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-] Qahtani," the convening authority of military commissions, Susan Crawford, told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" (for prosecution).

Al-Qahtani is a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the 9/11 attacks.

According to the Post, the techniques used included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, which left al-Qahtani in a "life-threatening condition."

Crawford told Woodward:

The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge (to call it torture).

The Post adds:

[Crawford] is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

Democrats from the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees last week sent a letter to the White House demanding that it preserve all records produced by the Bush administration. The letter expressed particular concern that the office of Vice President Cheney would not comply with the law.

The letter, sent by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Sen. John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, asks White House counsel Fred Fielding to detail steps being taken to preserve White House documents and hand them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

And it asks whether Fielding has investigated a Washington Post report that the White House has kept some presidential orders off it records, in a safe in the office of the vice president's lawyer.

Cheney's office is separately involved in a lawsuit brought by the watchdog group CREW, which is seeking to ensure that all vice presidential records are made available to the public.

The Democrats' letter cites that litigation, noting, "the declarations filed in that case by the Office of the Vice President raise serious concerns about its interpretations of the (Presidential Records Act)."

The law requires all presidential and vice presidential records to be transferred to the National Archives as soon as the president leaves office.

From FoxNews.com:

The White House dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney to Capitol Hill Tuesday morning to help shore up support for the financial bailout of Wall Street.

. . . House conservatives are seething about the "big government" approach that they say President Bush is taking in the financial crisis. They don't like how much power it cedes to the Treasury or the price tag.

"[Cheney] is going to walk into a firing squad. I hope he brought his hunting rifle," an aide to one House conservative told FOX News.

We learned over the weekend, via Newsweek, that there's a Dick Cheney connection to the Ted Stevens case. But are federal prosecutors looking the other way?

In a phone conversation recorded by the FBI and included in a court filing by prosecutors, Sen. Stevens (R-AK) told oil-services executive Bill Allen that he would try to get some "bigwigs" from Washington to weigh in on a bill pending in the Alaska legislature, that would have given the go-ahead to a pipeline Allen wanted. Two days later, Newsweek notes, Cheney sent a letter to Alaska lawmakers urging them to pass the bill. Stevens told Newsweek that Cheney's letter had been sent at his urging.

But we were curious about one thing. Why didn't prosecutors mention Cheney's letter in their filing? Although technically Stevens is being prosecuted for giving false statements on disclosure forms, demonstrating that Stevens took action on Allen's behalf is still at the heart of the case.

And in citing another example of Stevens using his influence on Allen's behalf, prosecutors did include chapter and verse on the results Stevens got. Consider this passage from the filing:

Stevens added: "I'm going to try and see if I can get . . . the Secretary of Energy and also the head of, of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [("FERC")] up there to explain why it's necessary that they act before we act."

On July 7, 2006, Senator Stevens traveled to Alaska and addressed the Alaska Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, urging it to cease infighting and pass the pipeline legislation before liquified natural gas monopolizes the marketplace. Three days later, on July 10, 2006, the FERC issued a report similar to the message delivered by Stevens.

But when it comes to Stevens calling on Cheney, the prosecutors -- who are from the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section, and the U.S. attorney's office in Alaska -- go strangely silent.

One former government prosecutor we spoke to said he could see little reason why the link to Cheney wouldn't have been mentioned. The most charitable explanation, the ex-prosecutor said, is that the government thought that bringing in Cheney would unnecessarily bog the case down. The least charitable is that they were "trying to protect Cheney."

Another former federal corruption prosecutor agreed, writing in an email to TPMMuckraker:

"If the government has the evidence that Stevens asked Cheney's office to intervene/write a letter, I can see no strategic or tactical reason not to have cited that evidence in their motion. They specifically argue for the admission at trial of evidence regarding Stevens' attempts to influence the executive branch on behalf of VECO. Citing the Cheney evidence could only bolster that argument and help educate the judge on the extraordinary lengths Stevens was going to help out VECO, which just happened to be providing him with undisclosed personal benefits at the time.

The source cautioned, however, that prosecutors may not have had evidence that Stevens was behind Cheney's letter, before Stevens confirmed it to Newsweek.

A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately return a call for comment.

The corruption case against Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is already yielding some interesting fruit.

Newsweek reported Saturday that, in a 2006 conversation secretly recorded by the FBI, Stevens and Bill Allen -- the oil-services executive who allegedly provided Stevens with $250,000 in financial gifts -- discussed how to get a pipeline bill through the Alaska legislature.

Stevens told Allen: "I'm gonna try to see if I can get some bigwigs from back here and say, 'Look ... you gotta get this done'." Two days later, Vice President Cheney took the unusual step of contacting Alaska lawmakers directly, urging them in a letter to "promptly enact" the legislation. Stevens confirmed to Newsweek that he had indeed asked Cheney to write the letter.

Newsweek notes that the former executive director of Cheney's energy task force had gone on to work as a lobbyist for BP, which would have built the pipeline. The magazine doesn't name the task force director, but it appears to be Andrew Lundquist. And it's worth pointing out that Lundquist -- who had worked as the Bush-Cheney campaign's energy expert in 2000, earning the nickname "Lightbulb" from the president -- has also worked as a top aide to Stevens.

Newsweek also reports that DOJ prosecutors did not include Cheney's letter in their motion and did not respond when the magazine asked why.

F. Chase Hutto III, a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney with a long history of promoting anti-environmental regulation policy, is a top choice for a post at the Energy Department, the Washington Post reports today.

Hutto, who is being considered for the position of assistant secretary for policy and international affairs, has been a contact within the administration for the oil and gas industry on energy and environmental issues.

The administration's controversial decision to delay action on regulating greenhouse gas emissions was shaped in part by Hutto.

From a July 11 article in the Washington Post:

Hutto, a former Cato Institute intern and Bush campaign volunteer during the Florida vote recount in 2000, whose grandfather patented at least seven piston inventions for the Ford Motor Company, has "an anti-regulatory philosophy and concern about what regulation means for the American way of life. He would talk, for example, about not wanting greenhouse gas controls to do away with the large American automobile," said the meeting participant.

Vice President Dick Cheney's office apparently worked to cut swaths of the Center for Disease Control's congressional testimony on the effects of greenhouse gases.

The information was revealed in a letter from recently-resigned associate deputy EPA administrator, Jason Burnett, obtained by the AP, to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA):

"The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change," Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

. . . The letter by Burnett for the first time suggests that Cheney's office was deeply involved in downplaying the impacts of climate change as related to public health and welfare, Senate investigators believe.

Cheney's office also objected last January over congressional testimony by Administrator Johnson that "greenhouse gas emissions harm the environment."

An official in Cheney's office "called to tell me that his office wanted the language changed" with references to climate change harming the environment deleted, Burnett said. Nevertheless, the phrase was left in Johnson's testimony.

As we've reported, the Senate and House have been trying for months to check communications and other documents on the role of political influence in the EPAs work.

Burnett left the EPA in June after disagreements over the "agency's response to climate change":

The White House, at the urging of Cheney's office, "requested that I work with CDC to remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change," wrote Burnett.

"CEQ contacted me to argue that I could best keep options open for the (EPA) administrator (on regulating carbon dioxide) if I would convince CDC to delete particular sections of their testimony," Burnett said in the letter to Boxer.

But he said he refused to press CDC on the deletions because he believed the CDC's draft testimony was "fundamentally accurate."

[Late update]: To view the letter from Burnett to Boxer, click here.

We've been trying to find the original source for that mysterious meme about China drilling for oil off the coast of Cuba and Florida.

It's flat out wrong. The AP debunked it a few days ago after Vice President Dick Cheney tried to pass it off in remarks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about high energy prices.

But it lives on. GOP operative Mary Matalin repeated it on CNN just last night.

We've traced the evolution of the non-fact and found it emerged a few months ago with an inexplicable spate of letters to the editor at small and regional daily newspapers. Within weeks it was popping up as a talking point among many Republican lawmakers and getting traction from conservative pundits.

In most instances, the Republicans point to the (fake) story as reason to suspend the current moratoriums on offshore drilling that are largely based on environmental concerns. It may also serve to gin up opposition to the Cuban regime, a sentiment that has been vital to GOP support in Florida.

It is true that Sinopec, the Chinese oil company, along with a half dozen other foreign firms, signed an agreement with the Cuban government to possibly explore for drilling opportunities offshore. The Sinopec deal was forged back in 2005, and any actual drilling has been delayed until at least 2009.

A 1977 agreement between Cuba and the United States set the maritime boundary at the halfway mark along the 90-mile stretch from Key West to the Cuban coast. Cuban drilling about 50 miles off the coast of Florida could begin next year.

Cheney said he got the misinformation from a George Will column published on June 5.

By then, it was already a common talking point for GOP lawmakers. Also on June 5, Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) spoke on the House floor and said: "The Chinese are drilling off the coast of Florida with their new energy partner, Cuba."

On May 23, David Gay, a Republican Congressional candidate from New York, said: "I think it is appalling that we allow Cuba and China to drill in the Florida Straits, meanwhile forbidding our own selves from seeking the common good, in this case, a way to lower the price of gasoline."

No doubt the notion was helped along by Weekly Standard writer Fred Barnes, who cited it unsourced in a column widely distributed by Yahoo.

A few weeks before that, our old friend Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) cited the alleged Chinese drilling in a May 1 press release.

Our Nexis search also found a reference to Chinese drilling from Rep. Thelma Drake (R-VA) in an April 12 op-ed in the Daily Press of Newport news.

It was in late March that the whole thing initially picked up steam. As though on cue, letter-to-the-editor writers nationwide began complaining about China's alleged drilling in the Gulf and fired off missives to their local papers.

On March 29. Jerry Lightsey in Texas wrote the Austin American-Statesmen, saying:

"China is drilling offshore from Cuba in waters where we should be."

Then a few days later on April 2 a man named Don Code of Reno wrote the Reno Gazette-Journal.

"As I write this letter, China is drilling oil in our own back yard, in the Gulf of Mexico for Cuba. They are drilling in the exact same spots we would be drilling in, but the tree huggers won't let us."

On April 6, from the letters to the editor page of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, Edward Wolfe of Kirkwood, who described himself as a retired physician, wrote:

"China is drilling off the coast of Cuba only 90 miles from the U.S., some of it being done laterally into our ocean spaces."

April 8 Letter to the editor to the Leaf-Chronicle in Clarksville, Tenn. Jim Weague wrote:

"We cannot drill in the Gulf of Mexico, although China and Cuba are drilling there right now."

Before late March, we could find only trace evidence of this story, in obscure places online like this one here. What triggered this sudden, widespread and misinformed outrage? Was there some sort of email blast that went out?

Maybe the March 17 news story from McClathy planted the seed. The story didn't say that China was drilling, but it raised the spector:

HAVANA, Cuba -- Imagine oil rigs drilling in deep waters just 45 miles off the coast of South Florida. Refineries process the oil in Cuba and sell it across the Caribbean and beyond. Canadian and Mexican companies supply billions of dollars in equipment and services.

This could happen, as Havana invites foreign companies to explore its probable oil and natural-gas reserves while Washington's embargo against the communist-led island keeps U.S. companies locked out.

South Florida is watching closely, amid debate over drilling near its shores and concerns about U.S. energy policy. Oil companies increasingly seek to tap Cuba's deep-water reserves, now that oil prices are soaring and profits are more likely.

But all those letters all at once seems like an awful big coincidence.

At first Rep. Henry Waxman asked politely.

But today the chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee issued subpoenas for the FBI's paperwork stemming from interviews of Vice President Cheney and President Bush regarding the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

What are the odds Attorney General Michael Mukasey turns them over?

Meanwhile, we can expect former White House press secretary Scott McClellan to be on Capital Hill testifying about the same matter on Friday.

From the AP:

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is trying to resurrect a lawsuit against those in the Bush administration she says illegally disclosed her identity.

A federal judge dismissed Plame's lawsuit last year, saying there was no basis to bring a case. Plame's lawyers asked a federal appeals court Friday to send the case back before the judge and force him to consider its merits....

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the case, saying the law requires Plame's complaints be raised under the Privacy Act. Plame's attorneys say that law is insufficient. They asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to send the case back to Bates for reconsideration.

Details about the suit here, which was originally filed way back in July of 2006.

Mark your calendar: June 26th, Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington will testify to the House Judiciary Committee about the administration's interrogation policy. Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) made it official in a subpoena issued to Addington today. Addington has indicated that he will show up, but I'll believe it when I see him in the witness chair.

The next step in the House Judiciary Committee's attempts to hear from the architects of the administration's interrogation policy: the panel just voted to authorize a subpoena for David Addington. Last week, Addington indicated that he might appear to testify if the committee subpoenaed him. It's not clear yet when that hearing might be.

The committee also is seeking to hear from John Yoo, John Ashcroft, Doug Feith, former CIA Director George Tenet, and former lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel Daniel Levin. The committee continues to negotiate with all of those possible witnesses about appearing in the future, according to a press release yesterday. During the vote just now, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said that "most" of the witnesses the committee wanted to hear from had agreed to appear.

Can it really be true? Will the high priest of executive privilege actually submit to a Congressional subpoena?

When House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI) invited a slate of current and former administration officials to testify about the authorization of torture, I was skeptical that he would meet much cooperation. But when it came to David Addington, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and longtime consigliere, the idea seemed downright ludicrous. If Addington has spoken publicly or even given an interview in the last eight years, I'm unaware of it.

But in a letter (pdf) to the committee yesterday, the vice president's counsel Kathryn Wheelbarger signaled a willingness to cooperate. It was, for sure, a long way from the original reply, which I summarized at the time as, "You're asking the wrong person, but even if you were asking the right person, you couldn't make him show up, and even if he did show up, he wouldn't say anything."

Yesterday's letter is a change of tone. Because the committee has signaled that it will limit the range of its inquiries (this is Addington only speaking for himself, he can't speak about communications with the Vice President or President, he has the right to invoke "applicable legal privileges), Addington seems to be leaning towards showing up.

That doesn't mean that the vice president's office has changed their mind about whether he has to show up, mind you. The courts would agree that Addington is "immune from compulsion," Wheelbarger writes. But Addington might show up out of the goodness of his heart, "as a matter of comity," as the letter puts it.

The letter falls short of saying that Addington will definitely show up to Tuesday's hearing, but Wheelbarger does write that "the Chief of Staff to the Vice President is prepared to accept timely service of a Committee subpoena for testimony for a hearing on May 6, 2008." When the Politico asked Cheney's spokeswoman whether this meant that Addington would comply, she said "Since he hasn't been issued a subpoena, it would be a little premature to comment on whether he would comply." He is a coy one, that Addington.

The latest contribution to good government from Vice President Dick Cheney: preventing the implementation of rules to protect the endangered right whale.

This comes from a letter House sleuth Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent to the White House today, requesting that the administration quit delaying the rules, which would restrict the speed of ships near American ports. Faster moving ships hit the whales, causing injury or death, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say.

But not so, says Cheney's office and other White House officials, who have delayed approving the NOAA's submitted rules. One exchange Waxman obtained is typical, he says (pdf):

Another internal document shows that the officials working for the Vice President also raised spurious objections to the science. According to this document, the Vice President's staff "contends that we have no evidence (i.e., hard data) that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference. NOAA rejected these objections, writing that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. In its response to the objections from the Vice President's staff, NOAA reported that there is "no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales.

In his conclusion, Waxman wonders why Cheney's office seems so invested in the topic:

While I appreciate the value of vigorous scientific debate, I question why White House economic advisors are apparently conducting their own research on right whales and why the Vice President's staff is challenging the conclusions of the government's scientific experts. The appearance is that the White House rejects the conclusions of its own scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies because it does not like the policy implications of the data. This is not how the review process is supposed to work.

In his letter, Waxman requests copies of White House communications about the rule and that the White House allow the rule to go forward.

With all the scandals to choose from in 2007, it's hard to pick a favorite. But here's one that qualifies: remember when Dick Cheney tried to evade oversight of his procedures for handling classified material by claiming that the vice presidency is outside the executive branch? And remember when the head of the classification-security office for the National Archives, a fellow named J. William Leonard, arched an eyebrow? And how that just made the vice president's men attempt to abolish Leonard's job?

Leonard certainly does. And now that he's retiring, he recounted the whole sorry story to Newsweek's Mike Isikoff.

So how did matters escalate? The challenge arose last year when the Chicago Tribune was looking at [ISOO's annual report] and saw the asterisk [reporting that it contained no information from OVP] and decided to follow up. And that's when the spokesperson from the OVP made public this idea that because they have both legislative and executive functions, that requirement doesn't apply to them.…They were saying the basic rules didn't apply to them. I thought that was a rather remarkable position. So I wrote my letter to the Attorney General [asking for a ruling that Cheney's office had to comply.] Then it was shortly after that there were [email] recommendations [from OVP to a National Security Council task force] to change the executive order that would effectively abolish [my] office.

Who wrote the emails?
It was David Addington.

No explanation was offered?
No. It was strike this, strike that. Anyplace you saw the words, "the director of ISOO" or "ISOO" it was struck.

What was your reaction?
I was disappointed that rather than engage on the substance of an issue, some people would resort to that…

A long, twilight struggle between Dick Cheney and the forces of evil is the subject of an impressive new Frontline documentary, "Cheney's Law," airing tomorrow on PBS. In the balance? The nation's legal traditions over interrogations, detentions, surveillance and every other liberty-security tradeoff made since the Cold War.

Here's a sneak preview:

Readers of Barton Gellman and Jo Becker's Cheney series, "Angler," will be familiar with a lot of this material. The battles fought by Cheney and his longtime legal counsel, David Addington, to expand unilateral executive authority over warmaking functions is the principal thrust of the narrative. But seeing many of the participants tell their stories on camera makes for compelling and vivid journalism. In particular, the documentary devotes a lot of time to Jack Goldsmith, the former Office of Legal Counsel chief who clashed sharply with Addington over interrogations and surveillance. Seeing Goldsmith's frustration, seriousness and occasional anguish adds a layer of complexity to the story that print can't often capture. It's a shame that neither Cheney nor Addington consented to interviews.

But that's not to say that Frontline doesn't advance the story.

Read more »

We'd be remiss if we didn't link over to fellow muckraker Charlie Savage's stay at TPMCafe this week to discuss his new book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.

It's long been apparent that the administration has sought to expand executive power whenever possible. But Savage's book documents the extent to which this was a conscious and controlling priority, especially for Dick Cheney -- so much so that Savage calls it "The Cheney Project." Go check it out.

A particularly telling excerpt from the book is below.

Read more »