Most of the things that you could get your teeth into seemed to be not within the parameters of what they would be looking at and I don’t think they were going to be going outside the Dept (to Congress) for the report. That’s why I think it would be good to have some push on the string, even though it is a string. Bc when that report comes out (and especially with the MSM having set the expectation that it won’t *be recommending criminal charges* as if that’s what it would have been for, which it is not) I think there’s going to be a HUGE push all around to say, “all done now – you may not have liked their advice, but all done now”

When instead there needs to be a really wide ranging investigation into how DOJ has been interacting with the courts and Congress throughout the GWOT with respect to obstruction; lapses in candor to the tribunals; wanton and/or willful failure to preserve evidence; wanton and/or willful failure to provide evidence or even evidence summaries under claim of privilege to the courts and Congress; wanton and/or willful failure to have clients preserve despite knowledge of likely litigation (dating from Gonzales’ Jan 2002 memo where he states the likelihood of future litigation or at least through the Padilla, Moussaoui and GITMO habeas cases, whichever hit first); wanton and/or willful failure to provide exculpatory information; conspiracies to mislead Congress and to affirmatively use state secrets and classification to obstruct Congress and the courts so as to not produce evidence of Executive branch crimes; misrepresentations in open court, including at oral argument in the Supreme Court with such misrepresetations ongoing and continuing with a failure to correct the record; etc.

These are the kinds of things that won’t even begin to be within the OPR review and yet they don’t involve touchy feely standards of who thinks advice is so bad as to be culpable. You can’t look at the culpability of the advice (IMO) without considering the overall context of how it was deliberately designed to be kept from court and Congressional review (there are a number of times the memos recite that things are ok only as long as a US court doesn’t claim jurisdiction and I have a hard time believing that this was also “briefed” to Congress, that the OLC was saying things were legal as long as the Executive branch of gove was never subjected to the judicial branch of gov.

Right now, I think the OPR is not going to be nearly what it could and should be before the door is shut and I think the door WILL be shut after it is out. So IMO now is the time to push for more areas of inquiry (just wth was happening in McNulty’s ED VA that he had lawyers responding to Brinkema that there were no tapes while other lawyers in his office were reading about and presumably – if they were doing their job – reviewing tapes and there is no way McNulty and the tape reviwers didn’t know that those tapes were the subject of production orders in not just the Moussaoui case but others. The attempts to save the torturers from litigation by referencing the criminal referrals in ED VA have more and more tied down, in the public record, who the actors on a lot of the stages were or where they were – things we have kind of known from stories here and there for a long time, but things that are now much more openly and publically being reported so as to form the basis of a request to investigate.

How could Clement be telling the Sup Ct in late April of 2004 that we don’t torture or do things “like” torture when an IG report was almost done and ready to come out the next month on CIA interrogation deaths and yet the DOJ felt it could take the “no torture” position in front of the SUp Ct without consequence? And when the GITMO pictures came out the next day and the “few bad military apples” was cooked up, where was the OLC and AG and CIA Gen COunsel and others, including any lawyers involved with the CIA IG report, but esp OLC – where was OLC vis a vis correcting the record to the Sup Ct on whether or not the US did have a policy of “a little bit of” torture, since the interrogation related deaths were toture under even the OLC definition.

When has that record to the Sup Ct EVER been corrected formally – despite the ad infinitum of lawyers with a duty to do just that? Instead, the Sup Ct and nation were given the Padilla press conf in June if 04, discussing all kinds of “investigaiton” and the joint efforts of all kinds of deparments (and coming after both the IG report and the Thiessen which found Geneva Conventions violations at the So Carolina brig) and never mentioning torture, never mentioning repeated drownings of sources, etc – and that press conf was conducted by the man who led the charge in Padilla’s original detention – Comey – and who also knew damn well and good of the issues of coercion that had been made in that case and which were now being proved out in the pages of the IG report, and yet which were still being buried from the courts by DOJ.

Lord there’s a lot more for OPR to investigate and determine ripeness for obstruction and other matters, but those things have never been referred to it – again, if it is an honest actor, which seems much in doubt right now.

FWIW, the OPR report is–at least according to multiple reports–done. It was the new OPR head’s recommendation that was used to give cover to Holder for taking up the investigation.

But they may include this discrepancy. Graham was aware they were lying about his briefing back in 2004. Jello Jay was aware that they were lying about his breing in 2004, too, or at least I assume from the IG Report which claims he was briefed when he wasn’t. And Jello Jay and Mukasey were fighting about the report tracking their briefings going back to last summer.

That doesn’t mean it’s in the OPR report, but it might be.

While I’m not happy that Dianne Feinstein doesn’t listen to me on the AFM, I’m certainly not surprised. (Imagine ironic emoticon here.) I presume that she listens to her advisers on military matters, and they assure her that people like me are full of hot air. Furthermore, if she looked at the AFM herself, she’d see lots of assurances that it was Geneva-compliant. The advisers would soothe her, as they’ve tried to convince me that “proper safeguards” are in place around the more dicey parts.

This is not to alibi Feinstein, but I’ve long maintained (though toned it down) that the real problem in getting the AFM story out started with a lack of any interest in reporting anything but the government line in the mainstream press, and even blogosphere (present company excepted). Even Amnesty did not come out on the AFM issue until earlier this year. Only PHR, as an organization, was out front on this from day one. PHR also, btw, just released a “white paper” today — Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report.

It is axiomatic that if you truly believe in the soundness of your argument, you do not begin its defense by lying. For if you are caught in a lie, it undermines your credibility and your argument. Cheney was lying. Cheney is lying.

There’s no reason OPR can’t investigate attorney misconduct on the affair just bc the SSCI is also investigating torture – I don’t understand what you mean by it won’t work. And the SSCI standards for their investigation, well, I don’t know what they would be vis a vis OLC contacts with the Senate outside of statutory and regulatory duties, but OPR can definitely go into the non-statutory, non-regulatory, professional conduct standards and duties of due diligence.

I don’t think SSCI can do that very well, and if OPR were an honest actor (which I’ll only believe when I see anyway, so this is probably all moot) it went into its investigation without information like Feingold’s letter or information like Congress disputing factual representations Bradbury is making in his memo (and basing on Congressional briefings). It may not, as a DOJ wing, have had any independent info on that kind of a matter or the ability to get facts on that kind of a matter. What it does have is the right to investigate whether due diligence standards were met IF it has now become clear that Congress or members thereof dispute what Bradbury is saying. It always had far too narrow a mandate to do what it needed, so every aspect like that one would add to getting something more worthwhile generated, especially since once the OPR report (which is probably going to do nada much) is out, people are going to have a tendency to say it’s all over IMO.

In any event, the SSCI investigaition shouldn’t have any impact on widening the mandate on the OPR investigation to include lapses in duties of prof conduct that are fleshed out by something like Feingold’s disputes and evidentiary letter to back him up.

“According to a newly released Rasmussen poll, though satisfaction with legislators has improved to a small degree since the presidential election, 57 percent of Americans would vote to reboot the U.S. Congress by replacing every single lawmaker and “starting over.”

When are we going to see the poll showing how many Americans want to see the Cram In Asshole abolished?