Mary has already linked to this article on how and why Greg Craig got thrown out in comments. But I wanted to make sure everyone read it. The short version of the timeline it describes is:

April 16: Obama releases the torture memos

April 17: Greg Craig moves to release Uighurs in US

April 20: Dick Cheney says mean things about Obama

Late April: A drop in Obama’s ratings on national security

April 23: Administration says it will release torture photos

April 24: Someone (!) leaks Craig’s plan on Uighurs to Congress

May 8: Obama flip-flops on torture photos

Mid-May: Obama flip-flops on military commissions and release of Uighurs

May 21: Obama’s Archive speech marks completion of national security flip-flop

In other words, after having made the right decision on the torture memos, the Obama Administration let Cheney beat them up over doing so. They did not respond publicly. Rather, they simply caved.

Precisely what Cheney wanted them to do.

I guess Dick Cheney is right–Obama can’t stand up to terrorists. Terrorists like Dick Cheney.

It seems that the Brett Favre-Green Bay Packers saga is such a worldwide phenomenon that it’s being used by detainees in American military camps.

According to a military official, detainees at a Wisconsin National Guard camp in Iraq are using Brett Favre as a manner of getting at the guard troops there.

“They know Favre by name,” said First Lieutenant Tim Boehnen, who is from New Richmond, Wis.

“One of the big words they know now is shenanigan. They’ll constantly talk about ‘Favre shenanigans,’ ‘He’s so good for the Vikings,’ and ‘The Packers have got to really feel bad about that one.’ ”

According to Boehnen, it started when troops there started decorating their camp in Packers colors.

Heh. I wonder how you say Ted Thompson is a big fat arrogant idiot in Arabic. And I wonder how the Cheeseheads respond; it’s not like there is much they can say back to the creative and pesky detainees in light of the ass whuppin Favre and the Vikes have laid on them twice. Even on the hallowed Frozen Tundra of Lambeau. Ouch.

In other tangential football news, Obama has been chucking the pigskin on the White House lawn with Drew Fookin Brees (thus today’s musical selection “They Call Me The Breeze”). From USA Today:

President Obama is exercising executive privilege to get youngsters off their butts, and to urge all Americans to volunteer for community service.
In a TV spot set to run on Thanksgiving Day, viewers will see New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees zinging a pass to an unseen player. As we look closer, we realize the receiver is actually President Obama. The playing field is the White House lawn. The defender is Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu.

The 90-second public service announcement is a joint effort between the NFL’s Play 60 campaign to fight childhood obesity and the president’s United We Serve public-service effort.

Pretty cool, and a worthy cause too. Football on the lawn at 1600 Pennsylvania; somewhere JFK, RFK

Note: EFF has added one more set of documents–from the Civil Division. So if you think you’re done, you might not be, yet.

This will be another working thread on the EFF FOIA Documents–I’ll be focusing on the Office of Legal Counsel documents. Here was the first working thread (National Security Division documents) and the second working thread (Office of Information Policy documents).

The two sets of documents are:

• Draft legislation to amend FISA
• Correspondence about amending FISA

And here’s the Vaughn Indices DOJ earlier submitted on these documents to help you figure out what they said they had.

For more on what’s in the EFF docs, MadDog and Jim White have a bunch of comments on the documents in this thread.

FISC Orders from 2007, 2006, and 2004

Shortly after the Bush Administration worked out a way to do its surveillance program through FISC, House Intelligence Committee staffer started working with Steven Bradbury to get permission for the committee to see the “recent FISA order.” During the negotiations for that, Bash noted that the committee should have been able to see the other FISA orders.

Ben Powell had indicated to me that were supposed to have been granted access to the previous orders/applications (’04 and ‘06).

This tells us the program was already working with some FISC approval–presumably solicited after the hospital confrontation in 2004 and after the exposure of the program in 2005.

Steven Bradbury’s NSA email?

I’m not sure, but the email address on page 55 appears to indicate that Steven Bradbury had his own NSA email address.

Bradbury’s Emergency

On March 13, 2007, Steven Bradbury sent a telecom (page 12) a description of the emergency that precipitated Bush’s illegal wiretapping (he doesn’t call it that of course). It starts like this: