SJC has done this country tremendous damage in confirming Mukasey, Roberts, and Alito and it will never be reversed.

There is no government lawyer who can be trusted to undertake the Bush administration. If you have a penny ante person accused of a crime they will summon all kinds of resources to pile onand crush them whether they are innocent or not. You saw that happen with the Alabama fiasco of former Governor Don Siegelman. But Bush DOJ are the co-criminals and co-conspirators of every Bush WH and CIA crime.

It really amuses me to see very intelligent people wracking their brains to try to figure out and piece together documents to figure out the chronological or architectural sequence of when and whether DOJ was dealt in on the CIA tape destruction or anything else.

Let me just say–I enjoy your thoughts, analysis, and writing skills, and the links and documents/analysis you link to are much appreciated and I read them, but you really can’t be so foolish as to think that OLC and many other attorneys at DOJ weren’t consulted when it came to destruction of CIA tapes or any other thread that the EW or FDL branches of this site consider where Bush, Cheney, and Addington broke the law.

And I don’t think anyone swallows the Dana Perrino superficial bullshit/propaganda that Bush didn’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’ or that she doesn’t know. Dana’s no whiz kid, but she understands that a number of laws have been broken and there is criminal coverup a plenty. Bush was in the loop on every damn one of these coverups–anyone who thinks not is completely naieve.

Of course friggin DOJ was dealt in. Naming all the attorneys that were part of the crime is difficult even for ex-DOJers like LHP and Christy here, and possibly several others I don’t know about but I find it difficult to believe that anyone believes that DOJ was not privy to every move by the WH insiders–Cheney, Addington, Miers, Miers’ attorney staff and now Miers is replaced by Fred Fielding who is thoroughly enjoying the kind of brain wracking that goes on here as he constructs teflon bubble after teflon bubble for every destruction of documents and every illegal act. Put yourself in Fielding’s brain. Fielding has the chance after years to come back and construct what he’s always wanted to and he has able help in Addington. They have constructed a Unitary Executive or a Kingdom and they have taken a collective whiz if you will (to be elegant and classy) on Congress every time Congress burps a meek protest.

There are no heroes in Congress, but there are a ton of cowards, and besides the Republican sheep/lemmings the cowards are all Democrats with names like Hoyer and Pelosi. These self-congratulatory pigs are rejocing in ear marks and calculating their ability to stay in power riding the coat tails of their candidates for President in a goofey flawed system where the people who show up at the caucuses in Iowa are going to decide who is the next President

There might be many heroes here, but unfortunately no one here is in the Senate or the House or in a position to call their hand. DOJ as far as the ability to reign in an out of control Presidency and executive branch has never been in worse shape.

That’s the difference between an investigation the Administration has bought off on and a pesky different branch of govt.

I have less confidence in Fitzpatrick and Comey (and now Congressional Democrats). So far, all investigations undertaken during the Bush years have been non productive. Yes, many have been “caught” and sent to jail. But the Bush Administration has essentially remained untouched, unfettered, and uncontrolled. Either they’ve been able to whitewash events ,i.e. Sen. Roberts on the 9/11 commission to control the message to the American public, or the criminal element that is the Bush Administration has manipulated the “investigations” to temporarily pause true oversight while designing a new political/legal escape strategy. That is why I was particularly disheartened to hear Judge Kennedy differ to Bush lawyers Friday. We need some real heroes and heroic action.

Another intriguing thing is that in May 2004 the Commission specifically asked what information the CIA had about whether Abu Zubaydah had said anything about a Saudi prince in his interrogations. This was memorialized or embodied in “CIA Question for the Record No. 3″ dated May 20, 2004. The Commission apparently has no record of a CIA response. Now, the reason that is intriguing is because it was apparently in May 2004 that Muller was meeting with White House officials to talk about the destruction of the tapes. This has been contextualized in relation to the Abu Ghraib revelations. But I wonder either if it had something to do with the 9/11 Commission business (as well), or what the White House officials knew after that point and what contact they had with the 9/11 Commission after on this issue, if anything.

Bonehead me.

Kiriakou worked for Grenier.
Grenier got fired by Rodriguez.
Grenier helps convict Libby for Valerie Plame Wilson betrayal.
Rodriguez orders tapes destroyed.
Kiriakou meets openly with the MSM describing “torture”.

So the questions are: Who spilled the beans to the NYT? And why?

Any dots you’d like to connect?

This tactic may be familiar to you from your youth. I know when I was four or five, I used to parse parental requests very narrowly so as to rationalize behavior I knew to be wrong.

I would never have tried a whopper like this, and if I had, I sure as hell wouldn’t have gotten away with it. If I were a member of the “9/11 Commission”, this is the sort of stunt that would make me want to “get the band back together” and haul everyone in for some more “under oath” questioning.

…In the summer of 2002, after returning from a posting as the Counterterrorism Center chief in Pakistan, where he was involved in the questioning of Zubaida, Kiriakou served as the executive assistant to Robert Grenier, then the CIA’s Iraq mission manager. Grenier, a former station chief in Pakistan and director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, later was called as a witness at the trial of the vice president’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby—and his testimony proved damaging to Libby’s defense.

According to a declassified document filed with the court after the Libby trial and obtained by Mother Jones, Kiriakou authored a June 10, 2003 email sent to several CIA officials. The message apparently was written in response to intense efforts at that time by the vice president’s office to learn how Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been selected to go on a CIA-sponsored fact-finding mission to Niger. The email makes clear that senior CIA officials, including Kiriakou’s boss and the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, did not know who Valerie Wilson was at the time. Prodded by Cheney’s office, they were seeking information on her role at the agency prior to a scheduled conversation with Libby the next day.

Libby later would claim that he did not learn who Plame was until two days later, from the vice president (and that he then forgot about her CIA connection until he was reminded a month later by journalists)…

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive”