No time to obsess right now, but this was too much in the lies.com sweet spot for me to pass it up. From The Smoking Gun, a story about how imprisoned con-man James Sabatino apparently gamed the LA Times into reporting fabricated news: Big Phat Liar.

MARCH 26–Last week’s bombshell Los Angeles Times report claiming that the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio was carried out by associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand was based largely on fabricated FBI reports, The Smoking Gun has learned.

The Times appears to have been hoaxed by an imprisoned con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs’s trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.

In signing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2008 into law, President Bush issued a signing statement stating that he would not enforce four sections of the law, citing that they would “inhibit the president’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations”. These sections were:

• Forbidding use of taxpayer money to build permanent military bases in Iraq
• Strengthening protections for whistle-blowers within government contractors
• Requiring intelligence agencies respond to Congressional requests for information within 45 days
• Establishment of a “Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan” to investigate contractor wrong-doing

All four of these seem to me imminently reasonable — necessary even — things to put into law, and I find it outrageous that the President would refuse to execute them. But setting that aside, I’d like to look at the legality of this signing statement from a couple points of view.

First, some would argue that the division of war-related powers between Congress and the President are unclear, so it is within reason for the President to assert that these would unconstitutionally limit his powers. If you take that point of view however, the correct response would be for the President to either veto the bill, or sign it and challenge the sections he believes unconstitutional in court. Of course he won’t do this because he wants to sign the bill to get the bits he wants, and I suspect he refuses to take his challenge to court because he fears he would lose; I certainly believe he would, as the above provisions seem well within Congress’ funding and oversight powers to me. The President is essentially exercising powers reserved for the Supreme Court by making judgments on constitutionality, and it is this Congress’ responsibility to check him.

Second, some would argue that signing statements are an executive tool with a historical precedent, used when the President’s duty to the Constitution runs afoul of Congress’ wishes, and so it is reasonable for the President to use this tool. If you take this point of view however, then even as the President suspends execution of the law, I believe it is again his responsibility to immediately take his challenge to the courts to ensure he himself is acting constitutionally. Since he is not (again I believe for the same reasons stated above), then it falls to the Congress to check him.

Both arguments lead to one conclusion: when the Executive branch is actively avoiding legal rulings on policies being pursued (as they have repeatedly done — here, as well as in cases such as FISA), the only Constitutional recourse is impeachment, and I mean this is a very concrete legal sense, not an “impeach the bastard!” sense.

So to get back to the topic at hand, can anybody defend Bush refusing to execute sections of law that I believe most people would agree make sense, and supporting this refusal on very questionable legal grounds? I certainly can’t, and Congress should be ashamed for running out the clock rather than doing their job.

I still like Philosoraptor, even if he’s a bit too rah-rah about blowing things up for my taste sometimes. But I really enjoyed reading his take on the recent McGovern article calling for Bush to be impeached: McGovern: Impeach Bush.

It’s always struck me as peculiar that the very people who have the most pronounced tendency to wave the flag and extol the virtues of America also seem to have the least actual respect for the Constitution and the institutions of our government. That brand of patriotism–if patriotism it even is–is of a tribalistic, sophomoric variety. Actual patriotism, however, requires a commitment to the principles of the Consitution, and an ability to take an objective view of matters of this kind by transcending partisan commitments. There may be legal arguments that show that impeachment is not, in fact, called for, but if those arguments exist they have not been made public. From the perspective of the well-informed layperson, given the available evidence and arguments, impeachment must at least be seriously considered.

Bet I get some folks’ attention with that headline. But it turns out it’s not CIA videotaping, but police videotaping in Illinois, that the story refers to. Apparently Barack Obama was a key player in passing legislation requiring law enforcement in Illinois to videotape interrogations and confessions. At least in Charles Peters’ view, the story says something about Obama’s skills, and (by extension) how he might lead as President: Judge Him by His Laws.

A better-than-usual (which is saying a lot) Glenn Greenwald column that touches on what I believe to be a key part of the destroyed-torture-tapes story: The fact that the top legal advisors of the president and vice president were present at a meeting where an act of obstruction of justice was apparently discussed (an act that subsequently came to pass), and the public is being kept in the dark as to what action they advised: Oligarchical decay.

In case after case, our political establishment has adopted the “principle” that our most powerful actors are immune from the rule of law. And they’ve adopted the enabling supplemental “principle” that any information which our political leaders want to keep suppressed is — by definition, for that reason alone — information that is “classified” and should not be disclosed.

I think I’ll be making another one of my periodic calls to the office of my congressional representative, the otherwise-awesome Lois Capps, to encourage her to break with Nancy Pelosi on the subject of impeachment. Because loyalty to one’s party is one thing. But complicity with torture is the sort of thing that tends to look bad when reflects on it later in life.

I think I’m inclined to think that Larry Johnson knows what he’s talking about here: Who Obstructed Justice?

The key question surrounding torture tape gate is not who authorized the destruction of the tapes in 2005. Nope. The real priority is who in the Bush Administration knowingly lied to a Federal Judge in the spring of 2003. Either the CIA told DOJ the truth and DOJ lied or the CIA lied to DOJ or the White House directed DOJ to lie. It is that simple.

And it’s a felony. And it’s grounds for impeachment. Start the hearings already.

Dan Froomkin does a good job of summing up the last few days’ hijinks from White House press secretary Dana Perino regarding what the White House did, and didn’t, know and do back in the day regarding the CIA torture videos: The Tell-Tale Stall.

Perino’s currently stuck in trying-to-have-it-both-ways mode: She doesn’t want to talk about the subject (because talking about it threatens to reveal the truth, which is almost certainly that folks like Addington were up to their eyeballs in pushing the CIA to ignore judicial orders and destroy the evidence of the torture they’d been committing). But at the same time, she wants to push back against the New York Times reporting that in the first few days after the story broke, the White House was peddling (via anonymous leaks) that Harriet Miers had been telling the CIA that the agency should not destroy the tapes.

There’s a constitutional provision specifically designed for handling situations like this. It’s called impeachment. And Nancy Pelosi needs to get off her skinny ass and start that process.

In the meantime, here are the highlights of yesterday’s White House press briefing. I know she doesn’t know what the Bay of Pigs was. And she’s defending torturers. But I have to admit: I’ve kinda got a crush on Dana.

This makes me happy: ABC News: Gotcha! Teen’s MP3 Catches Cop in a Lie.

I note that the officer in question is one Detective Christopher Perino. Which makes me wonder: any relation?

I admit I found reference to this in a Glenn Greenwald post, but rather than link to that, I’ll link directly to the original speech Bush recently gave before the Federalist Society. Go read it in its un-spun, un-commented-on form, as I believe it speaks entirely for itself.

Lies.com Podcast 25 is the “fucking jail” edition, featuring:

• Bush on torture
• Dana Perino on torture
• more Dana Perino on torture
• Music: The Weepies - Suicide Blonde
• Dana Perino on Condoleezza Rice being called a war criminal by Code Pink
• A different recording of Rice being called a war criminal; this one from Rice’s microphone, so you can hear her reaction
• Sean Penn on how George Tenet et al. should be in fucking jail
• Lawyer Candace Gorman on Guantanamo
• Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith on Guantanamo
• Capt. Pat McCarthy, the U.S. government’s lead counsel in Guantanamo, responding to Smith’s charges
• Music: Godspeed You Black Emperor! - Dead Flag Blues
• Act V, Jack Hitt’s piece for This American Life on the production of Hamlet performed in 2002 by inmates at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center
• Music: Mute Math - Reset

In response to the feedback offered by Sven, I’ve cut back on the music (but the music I included is pretty badass). No Aly and AJ; I promise.

One (small) comfort while watching our collective descent into being a state sponsor of torture has been the notion that the evil is at least confined to the CIA and the Defense Department. But of course that’s not true; the evil extends throughout the government. And it turns out that you don’t have to actually engage in torture to slide down the slippery moral slope it creates. For example, check out this item from Steve Bergstein: A tale of two decisions (or, how the FBI gets you to confess).

This is a side to the foolishness of the Bush administration’s use of torture that doesn’t get enough attention from those who support it. It’s not just that it’s wrong. It’s stupid — because using coercive techniques simply guarantees that your victims will tell you whatever it is they think you want to hear, even if it’s not remotely close to the truth. And even if you don’t actually torture them directly, but merely threaten to give the names of their family members to the Egyptian police.

I’m with Sean Penn on this: The people engaging in this kind of thing, and writing legal opinions allowing it, and pushing others to use it, belong in fucking jail.

Glenn Greenwald, summing up quite succinctly why I fear for the future of my country: The latest revelations of lawbreaking, torture and extremism.

It has long been known that we are torturing, holding detainees in secret prisons beyond the reach of law and civilization, sending detainees to the worst human rights abusers to be tortured, and subjecting them ourselves to all sorts of treatment which both our own laws and the treaties to which we are a party plainly prohibit. None of this is new.

And we have decided, collectively as a country, to do nothing about that.

I still remember the visceral reaction I had to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. They were televised, and a lot of people watched them as the controversy over his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill was explored. And in watching the parade of people testifying for and against Thomas, in particular in watching Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas themselves testify, it became increasingly clear to me that she was telling the truth, and he was lying.

That was shocking enough. But then came the double-whammy: watching the senators on the judiciary committee close ranks behind Thomas, vilifying Hill and making speech after speech that (again, to my eyes and ears) was so out of touch with the reality I’d just watched as to leave me breathless.

I lost a lot of respect for elected officials generally, and those senators in particular, during those hearings. You young whippersnappers can relive those moments courtesy of this blog posting from Scout of First Draft: Anita Hill responds. Or you can go whole hog, and read the transcripts themselves: Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

As long as I’m annoying Janus with pinkyshow items, here’s another one that I really like.

This one makes me cranky: Papers Please: Arrested At Circuit City. It’s a near-carbon-copy of Hiro’s receipt-check story, except that in this case, the guy who knew his rights and stood up to the intimidation by a security guard (and then by a police officer) ended up getting arrested.

Can you say “wrongful arrest suit”? I knew that you could.

Larry Craig fails his accountability moment.

Embarrassing. Embarrassing. No wonder why we’re going down the tubes.

Thomas Nephew thinks out loud about the basis for impeachment. In light of the Bush team — with the Democratic Congress’s help — retroactively making some of its lawbreaking officially legal, what should the focus of impeachment proceedings be? Nephew concludes that it should be the fraudulent case for this war — and the next one.

You probably saw this video already. If not, it’s definitely worth taking a look at. The thing that gets me is the sheepish reaction of the undercover provocateurs when they’re accused of being cops. And then, of course, the odd response of the riot police when the agents flee behind their line: At first, they take the guys down, but then, almost instantly, the majority of the riot cops turn their attention back to the real protesters.

It really doesn’t feel like anything other than what the union protesters are claiming: These are undercover cops. And yeah, as it turns out, they were: Quebec police admit they went undercover at Montebello protest.

Police said the three were told to monitor protesters who were not peacefully demonstrating to prevent any violent incidents, but they were called out as undercover agents when they refused to throw objects.

Hm. Really? Granted, we don’t see what came before the footage shown in the YouTube video, but in the video the union organizer repeatedly demands that the cop holding the rock should put the rock down. I think the union version of what happened comes much closer to passing the smell test than the police version.

This is far, far from the worst of abuses inflicted by Americans on others in the name of security, but it hit home for me — perhaps because I’m very often in strange airports in other countries. Read the story of a British reporter caught in the new American security bureaucracy that shames our nation.

If for no other reason, I have to post this for the title:

Gonzales to Schumer: Blow Me

Josh Marshall posts the telling Ashcroft-hospital-visit-question video clip, and points out what’s really wrong with this picture. This isn’t a congressional witch-hunt, or political theater, it’s congress doing their job, and Gonzales demonstrating that he — the Attorney General of the United States — simply doesn’t give a damn about pesky checks and balances. I think the only reason he even shows up to these hearings is because refusal to appear would create enough drama for CNN to write a headline that might actually get the public’s attention.

Josh says:

It really requires stepping back in this case to take stock of this exchange. Testifying before Congress is like being called to testify in court. You have to answer every question. Every question. You can fudge and say you don’t remember something and see how far you get. Or you can invoke various privileges. And it’s up to the courts to decide if the invocations are valid. But it’s simply not permitted to refuse to answer a question. It is quite literally contempt of Congress

And what does the Constitution say that we do when the Executive Branch is in contempt of Congress, class?

Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!

Ahem. Greenwald spake thusly: Bush’s magical shield from criminal prosecution.

This latest assertion of power — to literally block U.S. Attorneys from prosecuting executive branch employees — is but another reflection of the lawlessness prevailing in our country, not a new revelation. We know the administration breaks laws with impunity and believes it can. That is no longer in question. The only real question is what, if anything, we are willing to do about that.

From the WaPo: Broader Privilege Claimed In Firings.

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

It’s really pretty remarkable, even for Bush. As Fein and Nichols would say, he’s asserting monarchical powers.

Impeachment has to go back on the table. Yes, I realize that the two-thirds majority of senators required to convict probably will not be findable. But Nancy Pelosi is wrong to view the process as a waste of time. It is her duty; as Patrick Leahy would say, her paramount duty. Nothing trumps preserving and defending the Constitution. If Bush and Cheney are not convicted, every senator voting to acquit who is up for re-election in 2008 will have to defend that vote.

If Lies.com Podcast 21 were a person, it would be old enough to buy alcohol.

• A Bush press conference, in which the first question went to Helen Thomas.

• Jon Stewart on Bill Moyers on Alberto Gonzales.
• Sara Taylor’s loyalty oath, and Sen. Patrick Leahy’s response.
• Clips from Bill Moyers’ “Tough Talk About Impeachment” episode, with Bruce Fein and John Nichols.
• Cindy Sheehan in Alabama, including taunting by self-professed Bush lover Chris Vucovich.
• Music: The Edge / Sinead O’Connor - Heroine theme from Captive
• Jack Hitt tells a story about his daughter, and Jesus, and Martin Luther King as part of the Kid Logic episode of This American Life.
• A story about a’lul’quoy, and bird watching.
• Music: Rachel’s - Rhine & Courtesan
• A Radio Lab clip about the first western zoo to house gorillas in a large, naturally landscaped enclosure: Zoos.
• Music: godspeed you black emperor! - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven.

This show is dedicated to my mom.

Thomas Nephew has written an excellent review of the even more excellent Tough talk on impeachment, from Bill Moyers.

Marcy Wheeler, writing in her commentisfree blog: Just another obstruction of justice.

There are many unanswered questions about the roles of the president, the vice president, and Libby in the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. Did Bush really ask Libby to take the lead on all this? Did the president declassify Plame’s identity so Libby could leak it to the press? Did Cheney learn - and tell Libby - that Plame was covert? Those questions all point squarely at Bush and Cheney personally. But because of Bush’s personal intervention, he has made sure that Scooter Libby won’t be answering those questions anytime soon.

I tired a while ago of the way Keith Olbermann does an impression of David Strathairn doing Edward R. Murrow; for me, Olbermann’s rants would be more powerful if he just did them straight, without all the sirs and Mr. Bushes and Mr. Cheneys. But with that quibble aside, this latest one, about Bush’s commutation of the Libby sentence, was pretty good: You ceased to be the President of the United States.

Judith Miller sat in jail for 85 doing what she felt was right: protecting the identity of a confidential source. She was released only after her source, Scooter Libby, finally consented to her letting him name him. Libby was subsequently found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements (under oath) and sentenced to 30 months for his crimes, but he won’t be spending one day in Jail, because President Bush commuted his sentence for being “excessive”

Where was Bush’s rubber stamp when Miller was in Jail? And if 30 months is too excessive for Libby’s crimes, how about serving 85 days he took away from Miller because he wasn’t man enough to step up and admit what he had done?

It’s kind of early for me to get into full-on campaign-lies mode, but I couldn’t pass up this story. From the Boston Globe: Romney aide is the focus of probe.

State Police are investigating one of Mitt Romney’s top campaign aides for allegedly impersonating a trooper by calling a Wilmington company and threatening to cite the driver of a company van for erratic driving, according to two law enforcement sources familiar with the probe.

Jay Garrity, who is director of operations on Romney’s presidential campaign and a constant presence at his side, became the primary target of the investigation, according to one of the sources, after authorities traced the cellphone used to make the call back to him. The investigation comes three years after Garrity, while working for Romney in the State House, was cited for having flashing lights and other police equipment in his car without proper permits.

So, not a campaign lie, technically speaking. But an interesting case of repeated lying by someone active in the campaign.

I agree wholeheartedly with Glenn Greenwald’s comments on the al-Marri decision:

Anyone who believes that the President should have the power to order individuals inside the U.S. imprisoned forever with no charges and no process is someone who, by definition, simply does not believe in the political system of the United States.

The thing that makes this country special, the highest, best virtue we inherited from the Founding Fathers, is our belief that there is such a thing as essential human rights, and that government is merely a means of securing those rights. Because of that, the state can’t (legitimately) argue that its own needs take priority over the rights of individual citizens. We fail to live up to that ideal on a fairly regular basis, but the ideal remains. It’s a target, a goal, something to guide our efforts and illuminate our dreams, if not always our waking reality.

Anyway, I think it’s important to think about what DNA testing has taught us in this area. Through an historical accident we’ve been given the opportunity to retroactively identify cases in which the state has made horrible mistakes, wrongly denying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to innocent people in the name of an expedient criminal justice system.

A couple of items floated by me recently that I thought were interesting. First, an op-ed piece from UMich law professor Samel R. Gross: Weeding out the innocents. If you’re feeling frisky (or if the LA Times is resistant to bugmenot-supplied login credentials), you can read Gross’s academic study on the same subject: Exonerations in the United States 1989 through 2003.

For a more-personal, less-statistical approach to the issue, I also recommend NPR’s reporting on a particular case and its aftermath: Larry Peterson: Beyond Exoneration.

As hosted by Norm at onegoodmove, Jon Stewart notes Tony Snow’s adroit flip-flop on the issue of whether the White House was (or wasn’t) involved in the firings at the Justice Department: Liar Liar.

From the conclusion of a remarkable opinion piece in the WaPo by a former commandant of the Marine Corps and a former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command: It’s Our Cage, Too.

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

This is not just a lesson for history. Right now, White House lawyers are working up new rules that will govern what CIA interrogators can do to prisoners in secret. Those rules will set the standard not only for the CIA but also for what kind of treatment captured American soldiers can expect from their captors, now and in future wars. Before the president once again approves a policy of official cruelty, he should reflect on that.

It is time for us to remember who we are and approach this enemy with energy, judgment and confidence that we will prevail. That is the path to security, and back to ourselves.

Jonathan Chait, writing an op-ed piece in today’s LA Times, does a good job of summing up some of the recent brouhaha over Bush’s politicization of the federal government’s law enforcement arm: Kremlin justice in the U.S.

It’s not about whether Gonzales and his minions lied to Congress and the public. (They did, repeatedly.) It’s not even about whether the Justice Department improperly fired federal prosecutors. (It did, of course.) It’s about whether the Bush administration sought to subvert democracy by turning the federal judicial system into a weapon of the ruling party.

Definitely worth reading, and thinking about.

Alberto Gonzales is due to testify on Thursday, postponed from tomorrow due to the Virginia Tech shootings. I was going to put together a big omnibus reader of all the various Alberto Gonzales items I’ve been consuming, but the invaluable Dan Froomkin at the WaPo has done it for me via his regular bloggy column: Gonzales likely to disappoint.

Judging from his prepared statement and his Washington Post op-ed, Gonzales will continue to insist that, while he doesn’t really know why he fired the attorneys, he simply cannot believe that he did so for improper reasons.

…which is both deliciously snarky and dryly accurate. There’s lots more good stuff in the Froomkin column, so check it out if you’re looking for the latest.

Another Gonzeles item, this one by Justin Rood, and posted at ABC News’ bloggy thingy The Blotter, was this: Is attorney general’s testimony a bad idea?

“It’s suicidal,” said Stanley Brand, one of the top ethics defense lawyers in Washington, D.C. Given the conflicting stories from Gonzales, his aides and top Justice Department officials about why eight U.S. attorneys were fired, and to what extent Gonzales was involved in the process, the attorney general puts himself in criminal jeopardy by testifying under oath, Brand said.

It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for the guy.

Almost.

Since every TV “news” organization is giving the Imus firing and the Duke lacrosse players’ exoneration wall-to-wall coverage, the least I can do is quote from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings with some actual wisdom on the subject: Sometimes, justice prevails:

What the Imus episode and the Duke lacrosse case have in common is that in both cases, people seem to have forgotten that they were dealing with actual human beings. Don Imus was just doing (what I gather is) his normal schtick. I don’t suppose he was actually thinking: here are a group of young women who have taken their team to the NCAA championships; I wonder how I can completely ruin what ought to be one of the greatest days of their lives? They probably just weren’t that real to him. Similarly, though much more damagingly, I don’t suppose that Mike Nifong said to himself: I wonder how I can do something truly awful to some Duke lacrosse players? He probably just got caught up in the politics of it, and forgot about justice. Likewise, there were altogether too many commenters — probably on both sides — for whom this case was just an occasion for a canned political rant, not one that involved actual human beings.

I think that getting so caught up in what you’re doing that you forget that you’re dealing with actual human beings is one of the most morally dangerous things there is. It’s easy to see how it happens; we’re all vulnerable to this. But forcing yourself to remember the human beings on the other side, especially when it’s tempting not to, is absolutely essential. And it’s equally essential to remember that however closely a story seems to fit your favorite preconceived narrative, you can’t know that it does fit without evidence. The world does not exist to reinforce our preconceptions.

From the Washington Post: My National Security Letter Gag Order.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case — including the mere fact that I received an NSL — from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The Bush administration is profoundly anti-democratic. It sounds like hyperbole, but when reading an article like this one, I find myself sincerely believing that Bush’s presidency represents a greater existential threat to our nation and our way of life than a hundred al Qaedas.

A famous truism from the world of open source software development is that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In other words, if you get a large enough pool of people examining a malfunctioning piece of code, there’s going to be someone for whom the solution is obvious.

A nice example of that was provided by Monday’s document dump from the Department of Justice. They released about 3,000 memos, ostensibly to show how the firings of eight US attorneys on December 7, 2007, were not improperly political in nature.

In the good old days, dumping 3,000 memos in the laps of your political opponents might have been a good way to buy some time. Your opponents would have had to read through the memos and figure out what they showed, and what was missing, and by the time they’d done all that the immediate crisis would have passed. You would have had a week or more during which you could have been out there in the media, talking to reporters and appearing on the Sunday chat shows, crowing about how you’d been so open and transparent, and the other guys would only have been able to sputter.

But these days, with folks like the good little muckrakers at Talking Points Memo on the case, it works a little differently. The documents were released late in the day on Monday. By 2:19 a.m. Tuesday, a commenter at TPM had pointed out something very interesting about the document dump: Of the 3,000 memos included, there are none from the 18 days between November 15 and December 4. In other words, during the period when we would have expected some of the most-intense discussion of the December 7 firings, there’s an 18-day gap in the memos.

D’oh!

More about this from Joshua Marshall at TPM: Shades of Rose Mary Woods? An 18 day gap?

Getting into the meat of what was released, some of the most interesting stuff concerns the brainstorming between various high-ranking Bush appointees at Justice over the reasons for the firings. Kevin Drum summarizes two key points about what the memos show:

• The discussion all seems to be taking place after the fact. If you really did fire these people for performance reasons, shouldn’t there be some documentation of your discussing those reasons before you fired them?

• There were eight US attorneys who were fired. In the case of Bogden, Iglesias, and Lam (and to a lesser extent Charlton and McKay), there seems to be very little substantive criticism of their performance in the after-the-fact discussion. The best they can come up with is vague stuff like “lack of energy” and “underperforming generally” (which contrasts pretty sharply with the glowing reviews these same US attorneys were getting before the firings). So why were these folks on the list? What were the actual reasons for their firing? Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but these are the same US attorneys who had been the strongest in pursuing political corruption cases — including against Republican lawmakers.

More at washingtonmonthly.com: Why were they fired?

In the face of all this, Bush tried to make a deal yesterday with Congress. He’d allow Gonzales, Rove, and others involved in the firings to talk to them. In return, Congress would have to agree to the following:

• The talks would take place out of site of the public, and off the record. There would be no reporters, no cameras, no transcripts.
• The officials would not testify under oath.
• They would only talk about internal communications at the Justice Department, or between Justice and the White House, or between Justice (or the White House) and Congress. They would not talk about internal communications at the White House.
• Congress would promise not to issue any subsequent subpoenas in the matter.

So, summing up, the deal was: No one else gets to know what we say, and we get to lie, and we don’t have to talk about the most important stuff, and you have to promise to leave us alone afterwards.

Allow me to propose the following response:

Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger… and you give me my phone call.

Or, more specifically, “I give you these subpoenas, and you give me your testimony.”

In a way, this US attorney firing story is small potatoes. I can understand the Bush people not giving it much of their attention until recently; it’s penny ante wrongdoing compared to some of the really bad stuff they’ve done.

I was listening to Elvis Mitchell interviewing Rory Kennedy yesterday. (Kennedy is the documentary filmmaker who made Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, which is currently showing on HBO.) And then I was listening to the This American Life episode By Proxy, in which Iraqi translator Basim talked about the impact that Abu Ghraib had on Iraqi attitudes toward Americans.

It brought home to me that we are going to need something like a truth commission to undue the damage of the Bush years. Leaving aside the practical matter of cleaning up all the messes that Bush’s policies have created, we’re going to have to deal with significant collective psychological damage as a result of all the lying that’s been done. I don’t want to go over the top in the comparison, but I honestly think we’re going to need something like what South Africa did after apartheid, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, just to try to heal some of the damage that this man’s horrible, horrible policies have done to our collective sense of what America is, and what it stands for.

The Bush administration is very badly broken code, and it’s going to take a lot of eyeballs to get the bugs out. Congress has started that job, but there’s a lot more work to do before we’re finished.

Update: Following up on the 18-day-gap thing, I found this weblog posting from Shakespeare’s Sister interesting: The hidden scandal within the prosecutor purge. It seems there’s a deliberate avoidance of using email at the highest levels of the White House, presumably to make oversight of the sort Congress is trying to do now harder to accomplish.

Later update: Joshua Marshall & Co. have now found two emails that actually appeared during the 18-day “gap”. So it’s not a complete gap, but rather just a very, very dry spell. My own sense at this point is that it might not be as sinister as their having actually held back emails from that time, but instead could simply be a reflection of the fact that, as noted above, the highest-ranking players routinely avoid the use of email, or at least of email sent through servers subject to presidential records retention policies. So things got really quiet then, at least according to the historical record, because the action had shifted to people who specifically avoid allowing their words to fall into the historical record.

Check out Doyle McManus’s article in the LA Times today about the risk Bush faces over the continued Congressional investigation into the US attorney firings: Gonzales’ plight puts Bush at risk. It’s fun mainly because of the large number of memorable quotes it contains.

“I want you to be clear here: Don’t go dropping it at the president’s door,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday when asked about Bush’s involvement.

I believe that’s what’s known in the trade as a “non-denial denial.” It musters the sense of outrage required to allow the faithful to sympathize with the unfairly maligned Bush (there are still Bush faithful, presumably), while not actually saying anything specific along the lines of “no, the president was not involved in discussions about whether to fire US attorneys for being unwilling to pervert the criminal justice system to benefit the Republican party.”

See, the problem for Tony Snow specifically, and for defenders of Bush generally, is that there are two separate stories they are trying to advance simultaneously, and the stories are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, they want to maintain that there was nothing wrong with Bush firing the eight US attorneys, because they “serve at the pleasure of the president,” so Bush has the authority to fire them at any time. While Gonzales and Bush have acknowledged that “mistakes were made,” they’ve tried to limit the applicability of those remarks to the misleading statements made by Gonzales in his sworn testimony before Congress. It wasn’t a mistake to fire the attorneys, this storyline goes; it was only a mistake for Gonzales to lie to Congress about the motivations for the firings afterward.

But the president’s supporters also want to make it seem like Bush wasn’t directly involved in the firings. They want to halt the spread of the scandal’s damage, so there’s an effort underway to build a cofferdam around the misdeeds, making them out to be all [former Gonzales Chief of Staff] Kyle Sampson’s fault. Or maybe, if they absolutely have to go that far, Alberto Gonzales’ and Harriet Miers’ fault. Or even, God forbid, Karl Rove’s fault. But absolutely not George Bush’s fault.

But that storyline conflicts with the first. If Bush wasn’t involved in the firings, then they don’t fall under the “serve at the pleasure of the president” language.

It’s all very vexing, I’m sure, for the people in the White House who want to make this story go away. And because those damn Democrats in Congress keep holding hearings, the darned reporters get to keep writing stories about it. Stories with fun quotes like these:

Gonzales and his aides initially told Congress that the prosecutors were fired because their performance was unsatisfactory. But documents released last week showed that officials also discussed whether the U.S. attorneys had been “loyal Bushies,” in the words of one Justice Department e-mail.

Loyalty over competence in the staffing decisions of the Bush administration — where have we heard about that before?

Early reports had indicated that the idea of the firings originated with Miers, but on Friday, Snow said that may not be the case. “At this juncture, people have hazy memories,” he said.

Oh, I’ll bet.

“This is one more chapter in the defense of Karl Rove,” said one leading GOP figure who insisted on anonymity because he was speaking ill of the president’s most powerful aide. “This isn’t accountability, it’s damage control, and it’s protection for Karl.”

But check out this fun quote:

“There’s no suggestion of illegality in anything [Rove] has done,” [former Reagan US attorney Joseph E.] DiGenova said. “He wasn’t the one making inaccurate representations on Capitol Hill. I would think that would trump any demand [from Congress] for testimony.”

Well, right. Karl wasn’t the one making inaccurate representations to Congress. Because Karl wasn’t the one talking to Congress. Now Congress is asking him for his version of events. If he goes before them and comes clean, and there’s no there there, great. Until he does that, though, claims that he’s above reproach because no one’s shown that he’s lied to Congress are kind of silly.

“The incompetence has been amazing,” DiGenova charged. “Managing crises, beginning with preventing crises, is what life in Washington is about…. But these guys didn’t have a plan ready to answer questions once the problem became public. They still don’t have their stories straight.

“There are too many Stepford husbands in this administration: young men who are perfectly coiffed and have great clothes, but very few of them have ever been in a courtroom,” he added.

Haha. “Stepford husbands.” It isn’t explicitly tied to Gonzales, but if there was ever an apt characterization of the guy, with his helmet hair and smarmy smile, and (especially) his slavish pursuit of the personal and political interests of George W. Bush, as distinct from the interests of the nation and the law that one would hope an attorney general would be giving his attention to, that’s it.