It seems that Cheney was unable simply to replace that IG’s senior staff with more malleable personalities. Perhaps the pods don’t grow as well in McLean as they do in Foggy Bottom, or CIA’ers don’t sleep as much.

And those demmed elusive bureaucrats and their pesky rules about the “independence” of IG’s and about protecting employees from political retribution for doing their jobs. As if their job was to do anything but protect the Usurper-in-Chief’s short, ample backside as he waddles through government with a pitchfork. Little wonder that high on Cheney’s list, once forming DHS couldn’t be avoided, was to prohit its employees from being union members. Creative destruction without the “creative” part.

I’m going to have go do a conf. call (and I hope I get done before the Levin chat starts), but I’ve got a question about the Helgerson investigation. The timeline I’ve seen is that it was started in January 2003 and the draft finished by May 2004. However, I’ve analyzed the Vaughn index that the CIA produced for the ACLU’s FOIA request and the earliest document I can find that references the OIG investigation directly is dated 12/2/2003 (an interview report). There are only 4 documents listed that are clearly contemporaneous references to the OIG investigation that are dated before the draft’s release. There are many documents related to the OIG investigation after that date. Why is that?

I think I would haul Comey back in…to TALK…

Apparently Mayer says the report was described to her as being the size of two Manhatten phone books and she also says that Comey and Gonzales chit chatted on the torture programs (I wonder if that was before or after Clement made his representations to the Sup Ct that we do not torture?) and Gonzales admitted to Comey that the programs were torture but that they had to have them bc Cheney wanted them. I’m not even going to start with all the places that should have taken things, once upon a time in a world where the DOJ had not thoroughly propagandized the American public into acceptance of Executive depravity as not only necessary, but somehow honorable.

And everyone in the upper echelons was filled in, way back in 2002, that GITMO was home to a slew of Article 49 war crimes and to people who were not involved in any way with terrorism (and if GITMO was home to them, then all the other holding facilities and Pakistani tipoffs, etc. likely had their own shares) and that we were just torturing them all, anyway, and keeping them completely disappeared for years at GITMO, all to make Bush look good. They all knew it. We knew they did, but now finding out specifically that Dr. Nakhleh specifically passed on the info in 2002, just hits you in the face one more time.

Now put those Sup Ct appearances by Clement, and Comey’s Padilla press conf and Arar affidavits, and Gonzales and Ashcrofts protestations on torture, in their proper context.

Mayer touches on how Radack was forced out and victimized for outing the lies to the court and destruction of evidence that DOJ has now made SOP (and walks the files that ended up with missing info back to Alice Fisher). And Chertoff certainly managed to keep his presence on that torture field trip to GITMO where so many earned their BS badges, secret for a long time, but not so much now. And it sounds like Mayers sources put Chertoff directly in on some of the torture program discussions.

THe Canadian documents show Khadr was in the “Frequent Flyer” (moved every 3 hours, nonstop, for sleep deprivation) aka Operation Sandman, for THREE WEEKS, but just when you get your head around that, it now looks like Hamdan was in it for 50 days. All the people with no charges who aren’t having anyone get access to their files – who knows?

And the men and women who were supposed to lead have so completely and thoroughly destroyed our justice system that nothing will ever happen. It’s hard to know which hurts more, the fact that depraved sychophants have so much power in our government, or the fact that those who knew better and could have been leaders chose milquetoast as their breakfast of champions.