No rundown of Bernard Kerik's ethical shortcomings could ever hope to be comprehensive, but we've done our best. So here, without any further ado, is our grand catalogue. Thanks to TPMm research hounds Adrianne Jeffries, Will Thomas and Peter Sheehy and TPMm readers for all the help.

In today's indictment:

-- Bribery. Accepted $255,000 worth of renovations to his apartment in an upscale section of the Bronx from a mob-connected construction company, Interstate Industrial Corporation, that sought his help in winning city contracts. Kerik was Commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections at the time. He already admitted to charges from city prosecutors that the payments constituted an illegal gift.

-- Tax fraud. Kerik failed to report $236,269 in rent for his Upper East Side apartment where he lived from December 2001 to December 2003 with his family. One of the city's biggest real estate developers, Steve Witkoff, paid the $9,650 in monthly rent. Kerik asked for Witkoff's help with the apartment while he was still police commissioner of NYC, and the real estate mogul made the payments because the two "anticipated doing business in the future."

-- More tax fraud. Kerik also failed to disclose $20,000 in consulting fees from a computer software company and $75,953 in royalties for writing his autobiography.

-- Even more tax fraud. Kerik failed to report wages paid to his nanny (more about that below), claimed $80,000 in phony charitable contributions, and falsely claimed a home office deduction for a home he had not moved into yet.

-- False statements. Lied on application for head of Department of Homeland Security about the nanny, payments from the construction company, and other things he preferred to keep quiet.

From before Kerik's time in city government:

-- Deported from Saudi Arabia. In 1982, Kerik was hired to provide security for a Saudi Arabian hospital. Nine former hospital employees have argued that Kerik acted as enforcer for his employer, Nizar Feteih, who used the security team to keep an eye on a handful of female hospital employees, as well as the men with whom they were in contact. Kerik is accused of inappropriate surveillance, including wiretapping staff members.

Kerik declared one doctor disliked by Feteih as drunk and had him arrested (and later deported) under Saudi law. The outrage prompted an investigation by the Ministry of Health, which determined that many allegations of security abuse against Kerik were accurate. Kerik was fired over the incident and deported.

Kerik's many, many ethical shortcomings while working first as New York City corrections commissioner and then police commissioner:

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Several readers lamented that yesterday's House Judiciary committee hearing on torture with former Navy instructor Malcolm Nance and Colonel Steve Kleinman wasn't on C-Span. Well, you didn't think that would stop TPM, did you?

Thanks to TPM's video ace, Ben Craw, we've distilled the extensive hearing into its dramatic, high-octane essence: Nance's intense opening statement, and a key exchange between Kleinman and Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ). Don't call him pro-torture!

Check it out:

Washington versus Cornwallis. Napoleon versus Wellington. 50 Cent versus Ja Rule. And now: DynCorp versus Blackwater!

The Raleigh News & Observer's Joseph Neff reports that on a recent conference call with investors, DynCorp CEO Herb Lanese had some not-particularly-nice words about his chief competitor in the security contracting world. Like:

But I do want you to know that in this narrow space in which we compete with Blackwater, we believe we are a very different company.

For example, we are highly selective in our hiring practices. We operate very, disciplined security teams. We enforce a strict, no-alcohol policy, strict no-alcohol -- not eight hours prior to going up on a work assignment, but no alcohol period.

And:

And we've developed our own rules for the use of force that are more detailed than those issued by the U.S. government. In fact, our rules for the use of force are based on the most conservative elements of the three sets of rules in effect in Iraq.

And:

We're not in the game of firing people after we hire them. We're in the game of being selective in hiring the right people upfront. That is a really important distinction.

Oh, snap! Who knew: it turns out Herb Lanese rolls straight gangsta. Erik Prince, are you just gonna take that?

Much remains unclear about Bernard Kerik's three-and-a-half months in Iraq running the Interior Ministry. But he was crystal clear about sending one message to his subordinates: he was the "eyes and ears of the Oval Office on the ground," recalls one of them.

Samuel Juett was one of 13 members of the Department of Justice's "first team" in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Juett, speaking from his Eau Claire, Wisconsin home, counts himself as an admirer of Kerik's -- "Oh, man, lay off my buddy Bernie," he said, laughing -- because Kerik was someone with little patience for bureaucracy or politics. As soon as Kerik arrived in Baghdad on May 18, 2003, he let it be known just from where his power derived.

"There could only be so many big dogs in the pen," Juett recalls. Kerik would drop hints of his proximity to the White House. "That was intimated in conversations with us," Juett says. For example, Kerik would tell his staff, "You know, when the President's office calls you on the phone at home at night, and tells you to get on the plane..." Or: "Two days ago, I was standing in the Oval Office, talking to the President. This is what he wants, and this is what we're gonna make happen." Juett doesn't know if that was true -- "but it was what he said."

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Here's one for the annals of not-so-subtle requests for bribes by public officials. The heart of the indictment against Bernard Kerik focuses on the fact that he accepted $255,000 worth of apartment renovations from Interstate Industrial Corporation (called XYZ in the indictment) while the company was seeking business from the city.

Interstate's problem was that they were suspected of ties to the Gambino crime family. City investigators were on the case, and if they discovered mob ties, game over: no city contracts. So Kerik, having asked Interstate if they could pay for renovations to his apartment (keep in mind, Kerik ran the city's department of corrections at the time), sat down with investigators to discuss Interstate.

He told them that no way was Interstate mobbed up. He added: "If I thought Interstate was mobbed up, do you think I'd let my brother work there?"

But in the indictment, prosecutors reveal an email that shows Kerik was just doing what he'd been paid to do. And having done his job so well "without question," he clearly thought he was owed more:

Shortly after attending this meeting, BERNARD B. KERIK sent [an Interstate employee] an email explaining that "I put my reputation and integrity on the line defending whatever [the Interstate employee] asked without question." (Emphasis in original). Later in that same email, KERIK complained that he felt like he was on "welfare" as compared to the life-style [the Interstate employee] lived. He explained that: "I'm walking on eggshells until this apartment is done. A bullshit $170,000., [sic] I had to beg, borrow and [expletive] for the down payment and I'm still [expletive] over the $5,000. [sic] I need for closing if it happens. Then the renovations."

Translation: I sold my integrity, but I'm still in the poor house. Give me more.

The fourteen count indictment adds up to a max of 142 years in prison and $4.75 million in fines. In addition to the "Theft of Honest Services" counts, which are basically bribery charges, the feds are after him for a whole lot of tax fraud (for which they've provided a handy chart here), and also making a number of false statements to the federal government when he was applying to head up the Department of Homeland Security. The infamous nanny, surely the least of Kerik's transgressions, are among the charged lies. Kerik has pleaded not guilty.

In a press conference today, federal agents and prosecutors laid out the case against Bernard Kerik:

FBI agent David Cardona, calling Kerik's betrayal of the public trust "repugnant," finished off with, "Teddy Roosevelt, the New York City police commissioner in the 1890’s, was an embodiment of rectitude, a man who held himself to a higher standard than he expected of others. A century apart, Kerik and Teddy Roosevelt held the same job. But there the similarity ends."

We'll have a rundown of the indictment shortly. Until then, you can see it here.

"And I read some of the articles about this, about Dr. Kay's report today, in my opinion, there was one weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, and it was Saddam Hussein. ... I watched a video of Saddam sitting in an office and allowing two Doberman Pinschers to eat alive a general, a military general because he did not trust his loyalty. There was one weapon of mass destruction -- he's no longer in power. And I think that's what counts today."

-- Bernard Kerik, during the same press conference. CIA special envoy David Kay found there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The president's argument for war had something to do with WMD and not altogether much about dogs eating generals.

"I understand, probably more than anyone, what a threat Iraq was and the people that threatened Iraq was. I was beneath the towers on September 11th when they fell. And I -- again, I just -- I want to thank the President for the honor in allowing me to go there, because I lost 23 people. I wear this -- this memorial band for the 23 I lost."

-- Bernard Kerik, October 3, 2003, standing next to President Bush at the White House South Lawn. Iraq, it turns out, never had anything to do with 9/11.

How corrupt is Bernard Kerik? Let us count the ways.

As we indicated in today's Must Read, it's really hard to keep straight all of the scandals, mini-scandals, and sub-scandals that make up Bernie Kerik's general aura of muck.

Yesterday's indictment just scratches the surface. And that leaves us unsatisfied. So we'd like to compile a general catalogue of Kerik's malfeasance to bask in the full glow of his aura. Won't you help us?

Affairs, wrongful termination suits, improper gifts, shifty stock deals.... Help us out in the comments. And then later in the day, we'll post the results.

The Senate confirmed Mike Mukasey as the next Attorney General by a vote of 53-40. That's the fewest votes for an AG since 1952. (Washington Post)

The headline says it all: "Justice Department Returns to Enforcing Voter Laws." For the first time since the U.S. Attorney scandal, the agency is showing signs that it will reclaim its legal responsibility to facilitate voter registration for minorities. Despite his tortured statements on interrogation, Attorney General Mike Mukasey has spoken strongly on the need for an independent Justice Department, which is crucial to this type of enforcement. Keep your eyes open. (McClatchy)

Yesterday, the government informed defense attorneys for Omar Khadr (the Canadian terrorism suspect who was shipped to Guantanamo at age fifteen) that they would like to share some evidence relevant to Khadr’s defense – an eyewitness who could exonerate Khadr. The government has known about the eyewitness since 2002 but had classified the witnesses testimony. Even if the testimony exonerates Khadr, experts say that the Pentagon will likely detain Khadr indefinitely as a threat to the U.S. (LA Times)

Hustler Magazine keeps up its holy quest to out hypocritical conservatives. The publication is set to publish a tell-all interview with a New Orleans prostitute who had a relationship with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA). (Huffington Post)

An internal inquiry into FEMA's "press conference" has determined that the press secretary planned the event, coached his employees and made sure to end the briefing on a final, scripted question. He has since resigned (or was that staged too?). (Washington Post)

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Bernie Kerik indicted!

Wait a minute, you say. Is this about the thing with his nanny? No. The thing where he conspired with Jeanine Pirro, Hillary Clinton's one-time Republican opponent for the Senate, to illegally spy on her own husband to catch him cheating? No again. So it's about the dozens of illegal gifts Kerik accepted from his friend, Lawrence Ray, while head of the New York Police Department and the city's Department of Corrections. Sort of.

Granted, it's hard to keep it all straight. But the indictment, expected to be unsealed today, reportedly concentrates on just two of Bernie Kerik's bad choices.

The first was to let Interstate Industrial Corporation, a construction company with alleged ties to the Gambino crime family, pay $165,000 to renovate his apartment. At the time, 1999, Kerik was New York City's corrections commissioner. Interstate also had Kerik's brother and the aforementioned Lawrence Ray, who was best man at Kerik's wedding, on the payroll. And coincidentally, Interstate was vying for business with the city. Although Interstate didn't end up getting that contract, Kerik did manage to vouch for the company to city investigators, telling them that Interstate was clean of mob ties. He failed to mention, however, that the company was paying for his apartment job.

The second bad decision was to accept $200,000 in rent from one of the city's biggest real estate developers, Steve Witkoff (who, by the way, owns my favorite NYC building, the Woolworth). Kerik let Witkoff pay the $9,000 in monthly rent for his Upper East Side digs around the time he left city government, but kept the whole thing off the books. (The feds apparently will not accuse Witkoff of wrongdoing.)

The rest of the charges in the indictment you can call fallout from those bad choices. He did not report either substantial sums of money when it came time to pay taxes. And he for some reason neglected to mention them on his 2004 application to run the Department of Homeland Security.

We'll get a copy of the indictment itself when it's available. For now, contemplate just how bad of a decision it was for Rudy Guiliani to recommend Kerik for the jobs of NYC's top cop, and then head of DHS.

Update/Correction: Actually, the nanny does appear to have made her way into the indictment.

On the heels of today's torture hearings in a House Judiciary subcommittee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the subcommittee chairman, and Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA) have introduced a bill to force all American interrogators to conform to the Geneva Conventions-compliant standards of the Army Field Manual on Interrogation (pdf). That would mean no waterboarding, no "cold cells," no stress positions -- none of that stuff that Malcolm Nance and Steve Kleinman testified doesn't work anyway.

Under current law -- Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) 2005 Detainee Treatment Act -- torture is (once again) prohibited, but the law's provisions don't apply outside the U.S. military. The CIA still, in principle, can employ "enhanced interrogation" techniques, waterboarding being among the most infamous. In September, CIA Director Mike Hayden resisted bringing CIA interrogations in line with the Army Field Manual, telling the Council on Foreign Relations, "I don't know of anyone who has looked at the Army Field Manual who could make the claim that what's contained in there exhausts the universe of lawful interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Convention." Michael Mukasey echoed that sentiment during his confirmation hearings.

The Nadler-Delahunt bill, called the American Anti-Torture Act of 2007, would indeed make the field manual exhaustive of that "universe of lawful interrogation techniques."

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Hans von Spakovsky, whose nomination for the Federal Election Commission is currently stalled in the Senate, may have left the Justice Department in 2005, but his influence remains. A prime example is in Florida, where the state legislature, evidently following von Spakovsky's advice, passed a law that could disenfranchise tens of thousands of legitimate voters. Now civil rights groups are trying to stop the law before it affects the 2008 elections.

The law, scheduled to go in effect in January, would require the state to reject voter registrations if the state cannot match the information on registration applications to driver's license or Social Security records. Because such records tend to be riddled with errors, tens of thousands of "perfectly eligible voters" will be knocked off the rolls, the NAACP and other groups charged in a lawsuit this September, resulting in "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy." Compounding the problem, the law shortened the number of days that rejected voters have to present evidence that they're a legitimate voter from three to two days.

Florida was just one of a number of states that adopted such a law after von Spakovsky, then a lawyer with the Civil Rights Division, issued a letter to Maryland's attorney general in 2003 advising that the Help American Vote Act required states to reject voter registrations that did not match databases.

Joe Rich, the 40-year veteran of the Civil Rights Division who was then the chief of the voting section, told me that von Spakovsky wrote the letter without consulting him. Rich called it a "very strict reading of the law" which would "disenfranchise a lot of people" and compared it to Florida's disastrous attempt to purge ex-felons from the voter rolls in 2000 (a purge that was also von Spakovsky's brain child.)

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Rep.Trent Franks (R-AZ) won't let it go. During today's House Judiciary Committee hearing on torture, he asked Colonel Steve Kleinman whether it would be irresponsible -- as Alan Dershowitz recently argued in an op-ed -- not to torture someone if all else fails in an interrogation. Kleinman replied that Dershowitz "clouds the issue" and his op-ed "reflects a lack of understanding of the intelligence process." But then he offered a brief explanation of that process that sheds light on why torture is counterproductive for a professional interrogator, leaving aside questions of morality and law.

It's not just what a subject says in an interrogation that an interrogator needs to watch for clues, Kleinman said. The way in which he expresses himself is significant: does the subject fidget? Does he shift in his seat? Does he gesture, or suddenly stop gesturing? All of these non-verbal clues -- "clusters, groupings of behaviors," Kleinman called them -- provide interrogators with valuable information to observe what a detainee is like when he's lying, when he's being uncooperative, and when he's being truthful, or a combination of the three.

But if a detainee has his hands tied, or if a detainee shivers because a room is chilled, then "I don't know whether he's shivering because the room is cold or because my questions are penetrating," Kleinman said. That degree of abuse "takes away a lot of my tools." It's one of the clearest explanations in the public record about what torture costs professional interrogators in terms of actionable intelligence, as the debate is so often set up as what a lack of torture ends up costing national security.

Franks didn't seem so satisfied, but told both Kleinman and Nance that he had the "deepest respect for your motivations, regardless of any disagreements with you." Looks like Nance's warnings yesterday were taken to heart. The hearing ended free of any swiftboating.

Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) asked during today's hearing whether even the impression that the U.S. tortures makes it more likely that an adversary in a future conflict -- he used the Iranians as an example -- would torture captured U.S. or allied troops.

Former Navy instructor Malcolm Nance said he considered it a "guarantee" that other nations now have "a legal standard to subject American soldiers to enhanced interrogations." U.S. Air Force Reserve Colonel Steve Kleinman said he "agree[s] entirely."

During today's hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), fresh off an intellectually stimulating comparison of torture to abortion (he questioned why the committee isn't concerned about abortion, even though some abortion techniques torture the woman), asked about the so-called "ticking" bomb case -- that is, an uncooperative detainee has surefire knowledge of an imminent attack. Should you torture him then? Franks himself said several times this morning that he's against torture, by the way.

Now, the ticking-bomb case -- depending on where you sit on the torture question -- is either the hardest test of someone's sense of balance between human rights and national security or a rhetorical trap designed to box opponents of torture into saying that it's better for Sheboygan to be nuked than someone be waterboarded. But the question was handled by U.S. Air Force Reserve Colonel Steve Kleinman, a longtime military interrogator and intelligence officer. He said that even in the ticking bomb case, torture would be the wrong call. "'I'd say it'd be unneccesary to conduct our affairs outside the boundaries," Kleinman replied. His experience "proves the legal and moral concerns to be almost immaterial, because what we'd need to do to be operationally effective" wouldn't involve torture.

Which makes sense, considering that U.S.'s SERE instructors teach their students that torture just "Produces Unreliable Information."

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There's an empty chair at Malcolm Nance's hearing before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on torture this morning. That chair was supposed to be occupied by Marine Lt. Colonel Stuart Couch. In 2004, Couch, a then a prosecutor, refused to bring charges against a 9/11-linked detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, after determining that the basis for the charges -- Slahi's confession -- were yielded by torture, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year.

The subcommittee wanted to hear about Couch's experiences. But the Pentagon refused to let him testify. The Journal:

Asked last week to appear before the panel, Col. Couch says he informed his superiors and that none had any objection.

Yesterday, however, he was advised by email that the Pentagon general counsel, William J. Haynes II, "has determined that as a sitting judge and former prosecutor, it is improper for you to testify about matters still pending in the military court system, and you are not to appear before the Committee to testify tomorrow." Mr. Haynes is a Bush appointee who has overseen the legal aspects of the Pentagon's detention and interrogation policies since Sept. 11, 2001. The email was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Subcommittee chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) commented, "He was never expected to testify on behalf of, or as a representative of, the Defense Department. Indeed, Mr. Couch has already spoken extensively about this issue publicly. It is outrageous that Congress is yet again having its oversight role undermined by being denied access to an individual that could give expert testimony on the critical issue of torture."

Here's what happened to Slehi that shocked Couch's conscience:

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Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy's (D-VT) correspondence with the White House tends to be something of a one-way affair. But he, at least, has been a faithful pen pal.

Today, again, he wrote White House counsel Fred Fielding to request documents relating to the administration's torture and interrogation policies (see below). He hasn't received a reply to the one he wrote two weeks ago, but he's since learned that the administration is hiding a third Justice Department memo outlining interrogation policies, and now he wants that, in addition to the other two he doesn't have. And Fielding, don't try that old trick of handing over already public documents as if they were actually something new. Fool me once....

Congratulations are in order: Leahy and the White House will soon celebrate the one year anniversary of Leahy's November 15, 2006, request for “any and all Department of Justice directives, memoranda, and/or guidance . . . regarding CIA detention and/or interrogation methods.” So a Happy Torture Policy Stonewalling Day to Pat and everyone in the Bush Administration!

Leahy's letter is below.

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Maybe Mark Klein will consider this a small victory. The Senate Judiciary Committee is still going to mark up the surveillance bill this morning -- its business meeting starts at 10 a.m. -- but it won't take up a vote on the full bill until next week.

Erica Chabot, a spokeswoman for Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), the committee chairman, says that the committee is going to consider the bill in two installments. Today it'll mark up and vote on Title I, which deals with warrant issues, the role of the FISA Court in authorizing surveillance, sunsetting provisions and more. But Titles II and III will be deferred until next week -- and that's the section of the bill that concerns retroactive legal immunity for telecommunications companies. No matter what happens today, the full bill won't be voted out of the committee; that'll be next week, assuming the committee passes the measure.

Chabot says Leahy made the decision "to make [the markup] more manageable." Compared to the other provisions of the bill, telecom immunity is "a much bigger debate."

Almost made it. Former New York police commissioner and best-Rudy-buddy Bernie Kerik is expecting an indictment today for tax fraud and corruption. The statute of limitations for the charges would have expired next week. (ABC's The Blotter)

Blackwater is facing a wrongful death suit in Florida from families of three serviceman who died in the crash of a Blackwater aircraft. The families claim that errors by Blackwater employees caused the crash; Blackwater disagrees. But one important party has not weighed into the debate: the U.S. government. Ordinarily, the government will make known its views on such an issue, but the Bush administration has been notably silent. And if you're Blackwater, that silence establishes a scary precedent. Erik Prince weighed in after the government missed its deadline to file, saying, "After the President has said that, as Commander-in-Chief, he is ultimately responsible for contractors on the battlefield it is disappointing that his Administration has been unwilling to make that interest clear before the courts." (Time)

Former Governor George Ryan (R-IL) reports to jail today. Ryan was found guilty of racketeering and fraud, and is headed to prison for six-and-a-half years. (NY Times)

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"It's really surprising that Blackwater is still out there killing people."

That's a quote from the director of Iraq's state-run television network, looking back in anger to an February shooting that prefigured the Nisour Square incident in September. In February, Blackwater guards on the roof of the Justice Ministry building in Baghdad's Salihiya neighborhood shot and killed three security guards at the nearby Iraqiya TV compound. There was no recompense to the victims' families. A cursory State Department investigation cleared Blackwater in full. And an Iraqi judge, citing CPA Order 17 --which gave U.S. contractors immunity from Iraqi prosecution -- rejected a court petition filed by the network.

The details remain subject to debate. Blackwater claims it was under attack, and the State Department backs up the company. Iraqis at the TV station and the Interior Ministry say the Blackwater guards opened fire without provocation. The story was first reported by Leila Fadel of McClatchy in September, and today Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post has an in-depth look at the incident.

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Earlier today we flagged that Mark Klein, who uncovered a secret surveillance room run by the NSA while employed as a San Francisco-based technician for AT&T, is in Washington to lobby against granting retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies. In an interview this afternoon, Klein explained why he traveled all the way from San Francisco to lobby Senators about the issue: if the immunity provision passes, Americans may never know how extensive the surveillance program was -- or how deeply their privacy may have been invaded.

"The president has not presented this truthfully," said Klein, a 62-year old retiree. "He said it was about a few people making calls to the Mideast. But I know this physical equipment. It copies everything. There's no selection of anything, at all -- the splitter copies entire data streams from the internet, phone conversations, e-mail, web-browsing. Everything."

What Klein unearthed -- you can read it here -- points to a nearly unbounded surveillance program. Its very location in San Francisco suggests that the program was "massively domestic" in its focus, he said. "If they really meant what they say about only wanting international stuff, you wouldn't want it in San Francisco or Atlanta. You'd want to be closer to the border where the lines come in from the ocean so you pick up international calls. You only do it in San Francisco if you want domestic stuff. The location of this stuff contradicts their story."

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After Pervez Musharraf declared martial law this weekend, Condoleezza Rice vowed to review U.S. assistance to Pakistan, one of the largest foreign recipients of American aid. Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse. But, perhaps unsure whether Musharraf's days might in fact be numbered, Rice contended that the explosion of money to Islamabad over the past seven years was "not to Musharraf, but to a Pakistan you could argue was making significant strides on a number of fronts."

In fact, however, a considerable amount of the money the U.S. gives to Pakistan is administered not through U.S. agencies or joint U.S.-Pakistani programs. Instead, the U.S. gives Musharraf's government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he'll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice's review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end.

About $10.58 billion has gone to Pakistan since 9/11. That puts Pakistan in an elite category of U.S. foreign-aid recipients: only Israel, Egypt and Jordan get more or comparable U.S. funding. (That's only in the unclassified budget: the covert-operations budget surely includes millions more, according to knowledgeable observers.) While Israel and Egypt get more money, Pakistan and Jordan are the only countries that get U.S. cash from four major funding streams: development assistance, security assistance, "budget support" and Coalition Support Funds. Pakistan, however, gets most of its U.S. assistance from Coalition Support Funds and from budget support. And it's those two funding streams that have minimal accountability at best.

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Considering the fallout from Monday's Brent Wilkes verdict, Josh wondered whether Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) might feel a bit unsettled. After all, no other lawmaker besides Duke Cunningham had a closer relationship to Wilkes than Lewis.

During the trial, Wilkes actually tried this tack as a self-defense, pointing to his relationship with Lewis, who for most of the relevant time period held the powerful position of chairman of the appropriations defense subcommittee, as far more important than his relationship with Cunningham. Sure, Cunningham was helpful, he said, but Lewis held the power. Lewis, of course, remains on the committee as its highest ranking Republican.

It was for that reason that Wilkes hired former GOP congressman Bill Lowery as a lobbyist. Lowery was old friends with Lewis and had set himself up as his "gatekeeper" after Lowery himself had left Congress. If you wanted Lewis to back your project, Lowery was the guy who made it happen (The San Diego Union-Tribune first laid out the extent of the entanglement in this excellent piece). So Wilkes paid Lowery up to $25,000 per month. And it was Lowery, unsurprisingly, who taught Wilkes the ropes in Washington back in the early 90's. Lowery's lobbying firm, Copeland Lowery (now called Innovative Federal Strategies), became a big player.

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Malcolm Nance, good-spirited though he is, is a pugnacious guy. Nearly 20 years' service in the Navy, including time instructing would-be Navy SEALs how to resist and survive torture if captured. Intelligence and counterterrorism expert. Several years in Iraq as a security contractor. So don't expect him to suffer in silence if his credibility is attacked during testimony to a House panel tomorrow about his personal experiences with waterboarding.

"God forbid if there's even the slightest hint about my credentials," Nance says over tea in a Washington coffee shop. "You will see a spectacle on C-Span. I'll impugn [my attacker's] credibility in public. Let's see him give 20 years in the military, give up his family life, and then he can come talk. If not, shut the hell up."

Nance has become newly controversial for writing on the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism blog Small Wars Journal about his experiences teaching waterboarding for the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program. He's been subjected to the procedure personally, and unequivocally called it torture in a much-discussed post. Subsequently, a House Judiciary subcommittee contacted him during a business trip in the Middle East and asked him to testify at a hearing on so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques that kicks off tomorrow morning.

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Remember Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons (R)? Friend of defense contractors and foe to cocktail waitresses?

Prosecutors convened a grand jury this spring in Washington, DC to investigate whether Gibbons had accepted bribes from defense contractor Warren Trepp. Things have been pretty quiet since then, but last week, The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that prosecutors had subpoenaed their first witness to testify to the grand jury.

The witness is Michael Flynn, the lawyer who used to represent Dennis Montgomery, Trepp's former business partner who has been the source of the accusations against Gibbons. In a lawsuit against Trepp and in an interview with NBC news, Montgomery laid it all out: he'd seen Trepp pass more than $100,000 in cash and poker chips to Gibbons. There was even an old fashioned briefcase full of cash in the mix. Trepp gave Gibbons the chips, Montgomery said, during a cruise (see picture below). He also produced an email from Trepp to his wife allegedly sent before the cruise, where he responded to his wife's request of "Please don't forget to bring the money you promised Jim and Dawn [Gibbons' wife]," with "Don't you ever send this kind of message to me! Erase this message from your computer right now!"

But it gets muckier. Flynn, who represented Montgomery on the copyright lawsuit against Trepp, says that Montgomery quit paying his bills this spring. So he withdrew from the case. And now he's suing Montgomery for the money -- and saying in a recent filing that his former client is a "pathological liar."

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Rudy Giuliani, businessman of mystery. The presidential candidate is still closely connected to his firm Giuliani Partners, while the identities of the firm's clients remain a secret. The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) takes a peek at one known client --the nation of Qatar-- which has a questionable record in counter-terrorism efforts. (WSJ)

Note to the Homeland Security Department (actually, this one kind of goes for everyone): blackface costumes should be avoided. Please don't wear them to office parties. If you are an administrator and you see an employee doing so, please speak to them. Please do not award them with the "Most Original Costume" award. (NY Times, Think Progress)

Just days after Senator Schumer (D-NY) equivocated on proposed legislation to raise taxes on hedge fund titans and firms, the DSCC received a $28,500 gift from a hedge fund manager who earned $1.7 billion last year. Schumer is now “off the fence” and championing keeping taxes low for his wealthy supporters. (Washington Post)

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Cliche as it may be to say: Mr. Klein goes to Washington.

Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will get its hands on the surveillance bill passed by the intelligence committee last month. The bill blesses warrantless surveillance of foreign-domestic communications related to gathering foreign intelligence, but its most infamous provision is the legal immunity it seeks to grant telecommunications companies that complied with the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program from 2001 until this January. Civil libertarians are enraged at the provision, which will invalidate a number of class-action lawsuits against the telecoms currently pending. Now they have a new lobbying ally: Mark Klein.

Klein is the retired AT&T technician who disclosed in late 2005 how his former employer had allowed the NSA to use Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco as a vacuum cleaner to capture untold millions of phone and e-mail communications. (You can read his first-hand account here, in a pdf.) His revelations formed the basis for a lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T, currently before a federal court. Now he's trying to convince Senators not to preempt the case, reports The Washington Post.

The plain-spoken, bespectacled Klein, 62, said he may be the only person in the country in a position to discuss firsthand knowledge of an important aspect of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. He is retired, so he isn't worried about losing his job. He did not have security clearance, and the documents in his possession were not classified, he said. He has no qualms about "turning in," as he put it, the company where he worked for 22 years until he retired in 2004.

"If they've done something massively illegal and unconstitutional -- well, they should suffer the consequences," Klein said. "It's not my place to feel bad for them. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. The ones who did [anything wrong], you can be sure, are high up in the company. Not the average Joes, who I enjoyed working with."

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We reported recently that the Center for Constitutional Rights is representing the families of the Iraqi victims of Blackwater's Nisour Square shootings in a lawsuit filed in U.S. court. That's one of only two lawsuits -- both filed by CCR, incidentally -- brought against U.S. contractors for potential crimes committed in Iraq. The other, brought against Titan Corporation and CACI in 2004 for their roles in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, has been held up for years over legal questions over whether the victims have the right to sue. CACI provided an interrogator to the facility at Abu Ghraib, Steven Stefanowicz -- who "clearly knew that his instructions equated to physical abuse," according to the Taguba report -- while Titan provided two translators, John Israel and Adel Nakhla.

Well, today, the dam broke. The CACI suit will advance. The judge dismissed the suit against Titan, however, "because the translators performed their duties under the direct command and under the exclusive operational control of military personnel."

Just in time for Michael Mukasey's impending Senate vote to become attorney general, the ACLU has discovered that one of his would-be underlings, Steven Bradbury of the Office of Legal Counsel, penned three memoranda in 2005 on the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA. The discovery raises the possibility that the Justice Department has penned other as-yet-unknown torture memos since 2005.

Two of those memoranda were first revealed by The New York Times in early October. That story struck the ACLU as outrageous -- not just on the substantive merits, but because on January 31, 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the OLC and other federal agencies demanding documentation on the treatment of detainees. Yet even though the ACLU had received documents from the government dated after the OLC memos described in the Times, it still had to read about material clearly relevant to its FOIA request in the paper.

ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer says Justice Department officials told him that the date the organization filed its FOIA request represented a cut-off date for material -- a bizarre argument, given that it's already received documentation dating after the January 31, 2005 filing -- and as a result, Jaffer asked Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District Court of New York to adjudicate late last month. And in response to the ACLU, the government revealed this piece of tantalizing information:

OLC has reviewed its opinions from that time frame and has determined that there were in fact three opinions issued to CIA relating to the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody … Two of the opinions were issued on May 10, 2005 … The third was issued on May 30, 2005 ... OLC has not located any legal opinions issued to CIA from January 31, 2005 through May 9, 2005 that relate to the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody.

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It's been awhile since we checked in on the plight of John Helgerson, the inspector-general of the CIA who's under "management review" by CIA Director Michael Hayden following Helgerson's investigation of CIA war-on-terror programs. Not much has happened in the case since Hayden defended his decision to investigate the straight-shooter IG to Charlie Rose late last month.

But today the House intelligence committee announced that the full panel is going to meet in closed session with Helgerson tomorrow at 2 p.m. Statutorily, the IG has a direct line to the congressional intelligence committees -- the better to investigate waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement -- but it's not clear how far that can go in protecting Helgerson's job. Stay tuned.

You're familiar with what the Bush Administration did to the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. After all, who could forget such muck luminaries as Bradley "Good Americans" Schlozman, voter suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky, and John "Minorities Die First" Tanner?

In today's Boston Globe, Charlie Savage reports on how the administration has stacked the Civil Rights Commission, a fifty year-old agency that is supposed to serve as a watchdog for civil rights infractions:

Democrats say the move to create a conservative majority on the eight-member panel violated the spirit of a law requiring that no more than half the commission be of one party. Critics say Bush in effect installed a fifth and sixth Republican on the panel in December 2004, after two commissioners, both Republicans when appointed, reregistered as independents.

Clever. The effect of the move has been predictable. Just as the Civil Rights Division has been effectively sidelined, the commission significantly diminished its activity on behalf of minorities:

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Well, Erik Prince won't like this.

A few weeks ago, the Blackwater CEO explained that he didn't like for his employees to be called "mercenaries," which he regards "a slanderous term, kind of an inflammatory word [used] to malign us." Unfortunately for Prince, the United Nations has just embraced that inflammatory word.

Private security companies operate without supervision or accountability in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and represent a new form of mercenary activity, a United Nations report said on Tuesday.

The United States' reliance on private contractors has fuelled a growing demand for former police and military personnel in developing countries to be recruited as "security guards" who in fact serve as private armed soldiers, it said.

These forces enjoy de facto impunity under national laws that grant immunity to private military and private security company personnel, according to the U.N. working group on the use of mercenaries. Its report will be presented to the General Assembly on Wednesday.

"The trend towards outsourcing and privatizing various military functions by a number of member states in the past 10 years has resulted in the mushrooming of private military and security companies," the report said.

Companies like Blackwater represent "new modalities of mercenarism," according to the report. No word yet as to which private security contractor will be the first to make that its new corporate motto.

You can't stop Brent Wilkes; you can only hope to imprison him.

OK, so twelve people didn't believe him during his turn on the stand. Or as the jury forewoman told reporters: “I really didn't believe anything he had to say.”

But not to worry, an appeal is in the works. Wilkes' attorney Mark Geragos (who was shocked by the verdict) said that he'll soon be arguing that media leaks before Wilkes' indictment prejudiced the jury. The judge, however, all but said that Geragos should save his energy, because such an appeal would have little chance. The sentencing is set for January 28th, and the judge said that Wilkes will likely go straight to jail.

Meanwhile, Wilkes has another trial to prepare for -- this time for his alleged bribes of CIA executive director Dusty Foggo. So stay tuned. Vindication is on its way.

For sheer audacity, nothing beats the sight of a spokesman for the Egyptian interior ministry describing someone else's experience of being kidnapped, blindfolded, taken to a far-away prison and tortured this way: "Some people love to attract the limelight to give themselves more importance than necessary." That display of official cynicism is just one of the treats Frontline has in store for tonight's exploration of the anti-terrorist kidnapping practice known as extraordinary rendition.

The rendition subject the Egyptian interior spokesman described is Abu Omar, a hardline Egyptian-born cleric who was kidnapped by the Italians in coordination with the CIA in 2003 before being rendered to Egypt and tortured. Abu Omar's rendition was superficially a success -- the snatch worked; and he was indeed tortured -- but Italian prosecutors were able to learn the identities of the CIA operatives behind the rendition and have put them on trial in absentia.

Interestingly, Abu Omar gives a kind of non-denial denial when asked by Frontline if he's a terrorist, which crystallizes the issue at its most complex: is it acceptable to torture people who intend to carry out atrocities?

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The vote at the Senate Judiciary Committee just occurred. The final tally: 11 yays and 8 nays.

As expected, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) joined the nine Republicans in voting yes. All other Democrats voted no.

Twenty-four intelligence officials are looking for a clarification of Mike Mukasey's definition of definition; they've asked that the Senate Judiciary Committee put a hold on the nomination until the nominee is given an a chance to be appropriately briefed on the classified program. Of course, it doesn't seem like Democrats will continue to take much of a stand on this issue. Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Diane Feinsten (D-CA) sat on their decisions to support Mukasey last week in order to try to avoid too much flack from supporters. (Think Progress, Huffington Post)

Still going nowhere. Hans A. von Spakovsky, Bush’s nominee for a Federal Election Commission post, continues his uphill battle for confirmation. His resume of voter suppression and politicization of the Justice Department made him a star candidate for a recess appointment, but is stalling his nomination. As one former Justice Department attorney said of von Spakovsky, “You can leave the swamp, but you can’t get the mud off you until you take a bath.” (Politico)

Pakistan's burgeoning dictatorship has done what every good failing state does when worried about America's response: it has targeted the lobbyists. With close to $900 million in foreign aid potentially under review, Pakistan wants to make sure that those pesky American lawmakers don't try to hold it accountable for it's recent hiatus from democracy. (Politico)

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Despite the surge, sectarian and other violence has forced over two million Iraqis to flee their homes for safer harbors inside Iraq, the Iraqi Red Crescent reports:

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has more than quadrupled since the U.S. troop buildup began in February, leaving 2.3 million Iraqis displaced and further dividing the country along sectarian lines, according to a new report from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society.

The figures, which measured the number of internally displaced people at the end of September, present a grim accounting of the humanitarian crisis unfolding as Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups drive civilians, usually from the opposite sect, out of their homes, neighborhoods and cities.

More than 83 percent of those displaced were women and children, and most children were younger than 12, the report found. Most lived in Baghdad. Many lack adequate health services, cannot transfer their children to new schools and cannot find jobs.

The Red Crescent explains how it's trying to help the displaced persons here.

So now that the country has undergone its collective tutorial on the torture technique waterboarding (see here, here, and here if you missed class), Congress is ready to begin voting on the nomination of Michael Mukasey for attorney general.

It's starts this morning with the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who both reason that the Bush Administration is not likely to offer a better nominee, are expected to provide the key swing votes to put him through.

And then it's on to the full Senate. As we've said before, that's always been a safer vote for Mukasey, because of the likely support of moderates. But that ease is by design, Roll Call reports (sub. req.), because Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) decided to play the nomination hands off. Reid himself made it easier on the troubled committee Dems but refraining from announcing his position on Mukasey (which he told The Washington Post was not "much of a secret"), and the circumstances of the vote will diminish any likely further controversy:

“He’s been encouraging people to have a full-throated debate, but ... he’s actually been discouraging people from filibustering or slowing down the nomination,” one knowledgeable Senate Democratic source said of Reid.

So it looks like there will be plenty of bluster aimed at satisfying civil liberties groups who are outraged that Mukasey won’t unequivocally say that he considers simulated drowning, or waterboarding, torture.

But in the end, a Democratic-led filibuster of the nominee is unlikely, given Reid’s hands-off approach to the nomination. Even if a few Democrats decided to erect a 60-vote threshold for Mukasey’s nomination, it’s not hard to imagine that 11 or more Democrats would vote with the chamber’s 49 Republicans to beat back the filibuster....

“With these kinds of nominations, it’s very hard to highlight a party position,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley said. He added, “This gets to the core of what the Senate is all about — the traditional role of advice and consent. ... In the end, it’s up to each individual Senator to decide how they’re going to vote on these nominees.”

But not to worry: there will be a kind of consolation prize for all those outraged civil liberties groups. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) will offer a bill that would specifically outlaw waterboarding -- so that even if we have an attorney general who hedges on whether it's torture, his hands would be tied.

A new bill introduced by Democrats in the Senate today would make Republican attempts to challenge voters' eligibility based on the time-tested technique of using returned mail illegal.

The voter suppression technique, which has come to be known as "caging," has been practiced by Republicans for decades, but received additional attention for its role in the U.S. attorney firings scandal. Timothy Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who replaced one of the fired prosecutors in Arkansas, was forced to defend his role in an alleged 2004 caging scheme when he worked for the Republican National Committee. (We ran down the evidence that Griffin was involved in a 2004 scheme to block African-Americans in Florida from voting in a story this June.) Those questions, along with the circumstances of Griffin's appointment, eventually led to his resignation.

The Caging Prohibition Act was co-sponsored by 12 Dem senators, including Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), John Kerry (D-MA), and presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Barack Obama (D-IL).

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There isn't much time before tomorrow's vote on attorney general-designee and torture agnostic Michael Mukasey. But lawyers from the only former CIA "ghost detainee" still in U.S. custody and with access to legal counsel want the Senate to know what the consequences of a torture regimen are before they give Mukasey their stamp of approval. In a letter written November 1st, they requested a meeting with key Senators, but the letter was only cleared today for release by U.S. authorities.

Two lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights, Gita Gutierrez and J. Wells Dixon, recently returned from a two-week meeting with their client, Majid Khan, at Guantanamo Bay, where he's been detained since last September. Before he was taken to Guantanamo, Khan spent three years in an off-the-books detention facility run by or in cooperation with the CIA. Neither the Red Cross nor anyone outside a select few U.S. national security officials knew Khan's whereabouts. Since President Bush's 2006 decision to transfer 14 so-called "black site" detainees to Guantanamo, Khan is the first ghost detainee to meet with an attorney.

Gutierrez and Dixon, however, are subject to tight restriction over what they can say publicly about their client. They want to call attention to Khan's treatment from 2003 to 2006 when, for at least some portion of that time, he and other detainees in CIA custody were -- according to the president -- subject to the "enhanced interrogation procedures" that the Bush administration approved in mid-March 2002. While it's not clear what interrogation methods Khan endured, among those "enhanced" techniques was waterboarding -- the inducement or simulation of drowning that Mukasey won't say is torture.

But all of the notes that Gutierrez and Dixon took from their conversations with Khan are under scrutiny by Justice Department and CIA officials to ensure that classified information isn't revealed. Any information related to Khan that might be released in court filings or anywhere else by CCR goes to a CIA information officer for review. Gutierrez and Dixon experienced difficulty even letting Senators know that they had information about Khan that they wanted to share with the Senate.

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Reports The San Diego Union-Tribune's News Blog:

A U.S. District Court jury has convicted Brent Wilkes on all 13 counts in his corruption trial. The Poway defense contractor had been accused by prosecutors of leveraging more than $600,000 in cash bribes and thousands more in gifts to ousted Rep. Randy Duke Cunningham in exchange for Cunningham's influence in securing more than $80 million in government contracts.

More soon.

Update: Wilkes faces up to 20 years for his conviction here, but keep in mind that this is just the first of two trials that Wilkes will face. The second deals with Wilkes' alleged bribes of former CIA executive director Dusty Foggo.

Later Update: Here's more from the AP. Wilkes was shocked!

His attorney, Mark Geragos, said he and Wilkes were shocked.

"I don't believe this case was proved beyond a reasonable doubt," Geragos said outside court. "Obviously I'm very disappointed. I think he shares the confidence that we'll get it reversed."

Despite years of denials, a secret planning document issued by the U.S. military's nuclear-weapons command in 2003 ordered preparations for nuclear strikes on countries seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including Iran, Saddam Hussein-era Iraq, Libya and Syria.

A briefing (pdf) on the document obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, showed that the document itself was created to flesh out a 2001 Bush administration revision of long-standing nuclear-weapons policy, known as the Nuclear Posture Review. That review was a Defense Department-led attempt to wean nuclear policy off a Cold-War focus on Russia and China, but the shift raised questions about what purpose nuclear forces would serve apart from deterring an attack. In March 2002, leaks indicated that the review would recommend preparations for nuclear attacks against WMD-aspirant states. Arms Control Today pointed out at the time that planning to attack non-nuclear states that were signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty reversed decades of U.S. nuclear policy.

The administration's response was to deny that the review moved the U.S. from deterrence to a first-strike posture. After the leaks, the Defense Department issued a statement in March 2002 saying cryptically, "This administration is fashioning a more diverse set of options for deterring the threat of WMD. ... A combination of offensive and defensive, and nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities is essential to meet the deterrence requirements of the 21st century." Speaking to CNN around the same time, General Richard Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Nuclear Posture Review was "not a plan, it's not an operational plan. It's a policy document. And it simply states our deterrence posture, of which nuclear weapons are a part." Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time that the notion that the review paved the way for "preemptive nuclear strikes" was "a bit over the top."

But that now looks to be an explanation too clever by half. Perhaps the review itself didn't contain operational plans. But guidance documents created to flesh it out did.

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The wheels are once again in motion towards the first court battle between the Democratic Congress and the White House. After a months-long lull, preparations are underway for a vote in the House to find White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress.

Today, House Judiciary Committee Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI) sent his final offer over to White House counsel Fred Fielding (see below). The letter lays out a process where Congressional investigators would get what they want -- documents and testimony concerning the U.S. attorney firings -- while bowing to some White House conditions. But there's a deal breaker in there. And that's Conyers' request for "on-the-record interviews" with current and former White House staffers. Ever since the spring, the White House has refused transcribed interviews, and there's no indication that having dragged out the struggle this long, the adminstration would accept that offer now.

So the Congressional wheels are turning. Today, in addition to the letter to Fielding, Conyers submitted the committee's contempt report to the full House, a prelude to a vote on a criminal contempt resolution. Both the Democratic and Republican leadership have already launched their struggle for votes, with a special concentration on moderate Dems.

As we've noted before, things will get interesting if that vote should pass, since the Justice Department has already signaled it's refusal to enforce the resolution. Some sort of court battle is likely to ensue. Attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey has already said he hopes he'll never have to deal with that, so if he's lucky, the Dems will hold the vote before he's confirmed. Otherwise, it might be his first test on the job.

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The jury storms into its fourth day of indecision today. Did Brent Wilkes give bribes? Or will they believe his story of a generous contractor who just had bad luck with investments? Stay tuned.

ABC’s “The Blotter” asserts that “only three have been waterboarded.” Make that four, if you include Daniel Levin, the acting assistant attorney general in 2004. Levin, tasked with reworking the administration’s legal position on torture, was so concerned about the use of waterboarding that he took the plunge himself. Levin, who was shocked by the controlled drowning, penned a new memo calling “torture abhorrent,” but stopped short of calling waterboarding either torture or illegal. And, well, the administration quickly replaced him. (ABC “The Blotter,” ABC News)

Having already built and deployed a private army, Blackwater USA is now building its own CIA. Under the guidance of former CIA associate director of operations Robert Richer and the former head of counterterrorism at CIA Cofer Black (think rendition and enhanced interrogation), Total Intelligence Solutions promises to “open doors” for clients around the world. (Washington Post)

A little late to the game. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) has decided to vote for Attorney General nominee Mike Mukasey, despite his concerns with Mukasey's answers. (Huffington Post)

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Everything you need to know about Pervez Musharraf's weekend declaration of martial law -- or, in his felicitous words, his placement of the Pakistani constitution in "abeyance"-- prominent journalist Ahmed Rashid tells you:

The other prime targets [of the declaration] were not the extremists terrorizing major swaths of northern Pakistan but the country's democratic, secular elite. Dozens of judges, lawyers and human rights workers have been arrested. Others have gone into hiding. Asma Jahangir, Pakistan's leading human rights activist, is under house arrest. She appealed yesterday for the Bush administration "to stop all support of the unstable dictator as his lust for power is bringing the country close to a worse form of civil strife."

So will the Bush administration listen to Jahangir, who's precisely the sort of person President Bush promised to support in his second inaugural? No, reports The New York Times.

Though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Central Command chief Adm. William Fallon implored Musharraf not to declare martial law, Islamabad sees itself as having a free hand now that it's defied the administration. Says Musharraf's mouthpiece Tariq Azim Khan, "They would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms — than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists. ... Given the choice, I know what our friends would choose."

Consider Rice's statement yesterday to a Fox News interviewer in Jerusalem:

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