In a conference call focused closely on the possibility of moving health care through reconciliation, Arlen Specter invoked Justice Jackson’s comment to justify his support for putting health care through the reconciliation process. He said Jackson’s comment–that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact”–would be considered applicable to stale-mated government. He later said he’d like [...]

Jim Lentz is testifying before the House Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee as we speak. Waxman just played a statement saying Lentz made saying they were confident they had solved the unintended accleration problem. He then asked Lentz if he still stood by his statement. Lentz said yes, as he defines sudden unintended acceleration. But [...]

My last post called Jay Bybee’s response to the OPR Draft, written by Maureen Mahoney, “funny” (as in, stinky) because neither the response nor Tim Flanigan’s declaration included in the response provided any details of the key July 16, 2002 meeting described in the OPR report. But there’s something about Mahoney’s response which is even [...]

The most important ethical failure described in the OPR report pertains to how the Bybee One memo became a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. On July 16, 2002, John Yoo went into a meeting at the White House having been told by Michael Chertoff that he couldn’t write a “Get Out of Jail Free” [...]

Happy Sunday. Here are the HJC copies of all these documents: Memorandum for the Attorney General OPR Final Report OPR 1st Draft Report OPR 2nd Draft Report Yoo Response to OPR 2nd Draft Yoo Response to OPR Final Draft Bybee Response to OPR 2nd Draft Bybee Response to OPR Final Draft Mukasey and Filip Responsem [...]

And all resolved using civilian law enforcement. From the DOJ press release: The Justice Department announced that Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty today in the Eastern District of New York to a three-count superseding information charging him with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction (explosive bombs) against persons or property in the United States, conspiracy [...]

Okay, it’s been a busy day. But I thought I’d throw out this little tidbit just to lighten your afternoon. On page 86 of this FOIA packet, a CIA MFR from a May 6, 2004 briefing on the Abu Ghriab scandal records Duke Cunningham’s outrage that DOD had not informed the House Intelligence Committee of [...]

The Ghost Detainee FOIA (for more background see here, here, and here) also has a Memorandum for the Record from CIA’s briefing for Porter Goss and Jane Harman on the CIA’s IG Report on July 13, 2004. The MFR is interesting for the details it gives of how Harman and Goss responded to news of [...]

Last week I promised I would come back and explain why the report Toyota had produced, purportedly claiming that they had shown they don’t have a software/electronic problem with their electronic throttle controls, did no such thing. I never got around to doing that, but I was going to show that the report only tested [...]

The AP is reporting that Najibullah Zazi, who was arrested last September as he was preparing to deploy bombs made out of beauty supply derived TATP, will plead guilty later today. Which means that less than a year after a person allegedly trained in Pakistani al Qaeda-affiliated training camps tried to attack in the US, [...]