How did Bush-era torture policies affect our allies in the war on terror? Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former director of MI5, made stinging remarks yesterday suggesting that the torture dilemma in which British intelligence is now enmeshed is an American product. The Independent reports:

During a lecture given at a meeting in the House of Lords, Dame Eliza said the British government had made an official complaint to Washington over the abuse of detainees. But no futher details have emerged on either side of the Atlantic of when this complaint was made, or what form it took.

In her speech, highly critical of the US’s conduct during the war on terror, the former secret service chief implied that the leadership in Washington was inspired by watching the TV espionage thriller 24. She said: “Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld certainly watched 24″. Dame Eliza said: “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing.” She insisted that she had been unaware of what was going on until her retirement in 2007. One of her retrospective discoveries was the interrogation method used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. When she asked her subordinates why the senior al-Qa’ida member was offering so much information, they told her he was “very proud of his achievements when questioned”. She added: “It wasn’t actually until after I retired that I read that he had been water-boarded 160 times.”

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From the New York Times:

Previously undisclosed e-mail messages turned over to the F.B.I. and Senate ethics investigators provide new evidence about Senator John Ensign’s efforts to steer lobbying work to the embittered husband of his former mistress and could deepen his legal and political troubles.

Mr. Ensign, Republican of Nevada, suggested that a Las Vegas development firm hire the husband, Douglas Hampton, after it had sought the senator’s help on several energy projects in 2008, according to e-mail messages and interviews with company executives.

The messages are the first written records from Mr. Ensign documenting his efforts to find clients for Mr. Hampton, a top aide and close friend, after the senator had an affair with his wife, Cynthia Hampton.

Chief Justice John Roberts embodies the values of the Court he heads. And public opinion polling shows that those values don’t sit well with most Americans. In Roberts’s world, law and morality have little in common. “What is morally just and right—that’s not my job,” he said to a youthful audience in Moscow, Idaho, about a year ago. The sentiment is reflected in Roberts’s rulings. Consider Citizens United, in which he found that corporations have human rights (more, indeed, than most humans) or Caperton v. Massey, in which Roberts concluded (in the minority this time) that there was nothing objectionable about a Supreme Court justice taking millions from the head of a mining company to secure his election and then throwing the case to benefit the mining company and its shareholders.

While Roberts’s sense of justice gives him much flexibility, it evidently requires that others respect and pay deference to him as its corporeal manifestation. So at a talk in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he landed a blow against Barack Obama, the man to whom he misadministered the oath of office on January 20, in a dazzling display of judicial incompetence: “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according to the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.” The fact that Justice Alito chose not to heed those “requirements of protocol”—responding to the president’s remarks with a “not true”—of course merited no mention from the chief justice. But the President of the United States wielding political rhetoric in a speech before Congress and a nationwide television audience: shocking! [MORE . . .]

David Cole, reviewing the Department of Justice ethics reports on the torture lawyers, says that the almost exclusive focus on John Yoo and Jay Bybee is inappropriate. The report lets Yoo’s and Bybee’s successors off the hook, concluding that even though they approved pretty much the same torture techniques, they approved them in a manner consistent with the ethics standards applicable at the Department of Justice. (Both the OPR memo and the Margolis review have a lot of trouble identifying any ethics standards that are applicable at the Department of Justice, but that’s another matter.)

What is most disturbing about the torture memos is not that they employ strained reasoning or fail to cite this or that authority, but that they do so in the name of authorizing torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of human beings. Remarkably, neither the OPR nor Margolis directly considered the illegality of the conduct that was authorized by the memos. The OPR stated that it “did not attempt to determine and did not base our findings on whether…the Memos arrived at a correct result.” Margolis also did not address whether the conduct authorized was illegal. But surely that is the central issue.

Why, then, did the OPR and Margolis fail to take up the question of the legality of the brutality itself? Almost certainly because doing so would have implicated not only John Yoo and Jay Bybee, but all of the lawyers who approved these methods over the five-year course of their application, including, within the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, Daniel Levin, and [Steven] Bradbury, Bybee’s successors as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the two attorneys general, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. Notwithstanding their criticism of Yoo’s errors, all of these men concurred with the basic conclusion of the Yoo and Bybee memos that the tactics being used by the CIA were legitimate.

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From the New York Times:

Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is playing a crucial role in bipartisan negotiations over financial regulation, pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders, people involved in the talks said. The industry is politically influential in his home state and a significant contributor to his campaigns, records show.

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Frakt, a JAG defense counsel who has been representing Gitmo prisoners, having been outed by Liz Cheney, confesses at Salon that he’s working for Al Qaeda. “The chance to actually be a U.S. government-paid spokesperson for al-Qaida under the guise of ‘promoting fairness, justice and the rule of law,’” he says, “was just too delicious an opportunity to pass up. I figured the military commissions at Guantánamo would be the perfect soapbox for me to espouse my terrorist ideology.”

Q: Didn’t you also represent another client, a juvenile?

A: Yes, I did represent another young Afghan named Mohammed Jawad, but he was a big disappointment also.

Q: How so?

A: Well, as it turned out, he wasn’t a member of al-Qaida, or even the Taliban. In fact, he wasn’t a terrorist at all. He didn’t even know any terrorists! The only real consolation with Mohammed was that the United States had tortured him, so I was able to exploit that for substantial propaganda value, but otherwise, he was a dud.

It’s not surprising—indeed, it’s even somewhat admirable—that Karl Rove’s new book focuses on burnishing the reputation of his boss, George W. Bush. The 608-page book covers a lot of turf, including the 2000 primaries and election; Rove savors his hard-fought victories over John McCain and Al Gore. In Rove’s recounting, he’s innocent of any meaningful role in the South Carolina smears against McCain, and the cherished missiles launched against Gore (including his supposed claims to have invented the Internet and to be behind Love Story)—now long debunked—get a careful rehearsing. Rove shows a fairly casual regard for the truth—a sense, rather, that there is a new sort of political truth. The insider understands that these are political fibs in the service of a mission. If the larger audience is duped by them, well, that is the essence of politics.

Rove is remarkably candid in identifying the issue that historians are likely to focus on in the Bush presidency: did he lie to take the country to war in Iraq? It’s not unusual for leaders to stretch the facts in the lead-up to a war—there is a need to present the justness of a nation’s cause, to build morale and resolve. But the key question is whether the case made for war—the casus belli—was honest or a series of distortions. Several alternatives were presented, but the key casus belli was the claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, and a pre-emptive attack was essential as an act of self-defense. Rove recognizes this. He writes: [MORE . . .]

Former Bush Administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen used his space at the Washington Post to defend the McCarthyite smear campaign that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol have launched against a group of Justice Department lawyers who did Guantánamo-related pro bono work:

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would — and rightly so.

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At Salon, Mark Benjamin reviews a cache of internal CIA documents giving directions on how to waterboard prisoners:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking—and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session—and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session—a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding—the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

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From the Washington Post:

Dozens of former federal officials are playing leading roles in helping carmakers handle federal investigations of auto defects, including those for Toyota’s runaway-acceleration problems. A Washington Post analysis shows that as many as 33 former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration employees and Transportation Department appointees left those jobs in recent years and now work for automakers as lawyers, consultants and lobbyists and in other jobs that deal with government safety probes, recalls and regulations.

The reach of these former agency employees is broad. They are on staff rosters for every major automaker and every major automotive trade group, and they appear as expert witnesses and legal counsel for the industry in major class-action lawsuits over auto safety…

No law bans these officials from moving straight from government into industry. But critics of the revolving-door practice say that it has contributed to flaws in federal oversight and enforcement.

Amid hundreds of rocket and mortar explosions that killed dozens of people throughout the country, Iraq held parliamentary elections. Large numbers of Sunnis, who had boycotted previous elections, voted. “We have experienced three wars before,” quipped one voter, “so it was just the play of children that we heard.” Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's coalition failed to secure a majority of seats, leaving his political future uncertain; the U.S. military said its plans for withdrawal remained “on track.”¹ A memoir by Karl Rove said that the Bush Administration would not have started the Iraq war without the threat of weapons of mass destruction.² Rampaging Nigerian Muslims slaughtered 500 Christians with machetes,³ and a Nigerian member of the Vatican choir admitted to having procured male prostitutes for an Italian government official working as a papal usher.⁴ Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to Afghanistan to meet with President Hamid Karzai as U.S.-led forces prepared for an offensive in Kandahar. “There won't be a D-Day that is climactic,” Gates said. “It will be a rising tide of security as it comes.”⁵ Hamas banned male hairdressers from styling women's hair in Gaza.⁶ [MORE . . .]

Back in 2008, Michael Goldfarb and others on the right tried a typically McCarthyite tactic against candidate Barack Obama. Obama was assailed for a supposed relationship with Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, described in the National Review as “a former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat” and the “founder” of the Arab-American Action Network. Most of their essential claims about Khalidi were false. In fact, Khalidi is well known as a critic of human rights abuses within the Palestinian community; he had nothing to do with AAAN, an organization that provides English language lessons to immigrants and other social services to the indigent; and Khalidi was more closely tied to John McCain than to Obama. Under McCain’s guidance, the International Republican Institute supported Khalidi’s Palestinian Center, an operation geared to raising civil consciousness and engagement among West Bank Palestinians. In short, the effort blew up in their faces.

Cycle forward a year and a half, and we find Goldfarb with William Kristol providing the public relations “brains” for Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe. Last week they launched a new attack line, going after the “Gitmo 9”—a group of lawyers, now working for the Obama Administration, who “voluntarily represented terrorists.” This is another in a series of attacks against Eric Holder and the Justice Department, which in fact remains the main target of Keep America Safe. The technique, again, is typically McCarthyite. There are unknown people deep inside the government whose loyalty is suspect, it insinuates. They have infiltrated the Justice Department (which the ad calls “Department of Jihad”). “Whose values do they share?” it asks. [MORE . . .]

From ABC News:

When the White House announced last week it would be losing the services of Lewis A. Sachs, one of the president’s top economic advisers, the reason given for Sachs’s departure was that his work was largely complete. “He’s leaving now that markets have stabilized and Secretary [Timothy] Geithner has had time to set up a permanent team,” Treasury Department spokesman Andrew Williams said.

But Sachs’s quiet exit, reported in a blog entry on the New York Times web site, comes without any apparent next move for the Wall Street veteran, except for what he told the Times was his desire for time to “catch up on some sleep.”

Not factoring into the decision, Williams said, were recent reports suggesting Sachs’s old employer could be the subject of a federal probe. A December Times report said federal officials were then in the early stages of an investigation into companies that sold a complex breed of securities known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, and then made financial bets against them.

From the Washington Post:

House Appropriations defense subcommittee member James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) works hard at fundraising: Two to three times a week, he telephones contributors to ask for more. Yet, according to the account he supplied to the Office of Congressional Ethics last year, he is unaware of “who made donations” or how much they gave, and so that information plays no role in his earmarking — the systematic granting of public funds for mostly private purposes.

Fellow subcommittee member Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) similarly presides over fundraisers arranged by his staff for defense firms and lobbyists every three months or so, according to his office’s account. An aide in charge of Dicks’s earmarks attends the fundraising events. But Dicks and the aide told investigators they were unaware of the substantial overlap between defense industry contributions to Dicks and his earmarks to contributors.

From the Washington Post:

When financial reform legislation finally lands on the Senate floor, a provision that advocates call the single most important item for Main Street investors will probably have been banished from the ponderous bill.

That provision — a requirement for stock brokers and insurance agents to act in the best interest of their clients — was part of a 1,100-page draft bill unveiled by Senate banking committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) in November. Since then, industry and consumer groups have quietly lobbied members on the issue, even as much of the public debate has focused on oversight of big banks and the creation of a consumer protection agency.