The U.S. military official who ran Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison until 2004 told a Spanish paper she'd seen a document signed by outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld which authorized harsh treatment of detainees, Reuters reports. The memo doesn't appear to have covered the most shocking forms of abuse that have been revealed -- attack dogs, forced nudity, faked electrocutions:

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain's El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.

Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

"The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: "Make sure this is accomplished"," she told Saturday's El Pais.

"The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation ... playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably ... Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques."

The Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should suffer "no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion" to secure information.

Senate Democrats Revive Demand for Classified Data
"Seeking information about detention of terrorism suspects, abuse of detainees and government secrecy, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are reviving dozens of demands for classified documents that until now have been rebuffed or ignored by the Justice Department and other agencies....

"[Senate Judiciary Committee Soon-to-be Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT)], who has said little about his plans for the committee, expressed hope for greater cooperation from the Bush administration, which he described as having been 'obsessively secretive.' His aides have identified more than 65 requests he has made to the Justice Department or other agencies in recent years that have been rejected or permitted to languish without reply....

"Now that they are about to control Congress, what...Democrats regard as a record of unresponsiveness has energized their renewal of longstanding requests for information about some of the administration’s most hidden and fiercely debated operations. In addition, other such requests by committee members deal with subjects like voter fraud, immigration and background inquiries on Supreme Court nominees....

"With Democrats in control, it will be harder for executive branch agencies to sidestep requests for documents. Behind each request will be the possibility of Democrats’ voting to issue subpoenas that would compel documents or testimony, although Senate aides said they hoped to avoid conflict." (NY Times)

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Here's an extra serving of hypocrisy for your Thanksgiving dinner.

I think we're all familiar with the big, flashy show that the White House puts on every year when the president pardons his Thanksgiving turkey. In a forced public display of American "mercy," the administration trots out a big fat bird in front of a bunch of cameras, the president makes some funny remarks about democracy and Thanksgiving, and then the bird -- this is key -- doesn't get its head chopped off.

Right?

Think again. Last year, the president pardoned not one but two turkeys on Nov. 22. The next day he was served turkey as part of his Thanksgiving meal, according to White House documents obtained by TPMmuckraker.

That's right: the menu for the Bush Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 23, 2005, lists "Herbed Stuffed Roasted Free Range Turkey" as its main course.

So maybe "Marshmallow" and "Yam" -- the pardoned turkeys -- didn't get the axe. But some poor bastards did. Is that what we're calling mercy these days? The guilty go free (I assume they were guilty, or else why would they need pardoning), while innocent victims pay the price for their crimes?

It's not clear how long presidents have been pulling this morbid presidential ploy; the Bush White House's Web site appears to have been scrubbed of previous years' Thanksgiving menus. But it's probably safe to assume that it predates the Bush 43 years. I wouldn't be surprised if the two-faced tradition has been a dark shadow lurking behind presidential turkey pardonings since Harry Truman began the practice nearly 60 years ago.

If this is how they treat the turkeys when the country's distracted, one can only imagine what they're doing to the vegetables.

"Stay away from Kevin Gordon. He's hot. He is using your name in Hialeah."

If they consider the issue at all, Americans probably expect the person in charge of overseeing their nation's spies to be smart, insightful and thorough -- but above all else, he or she must be able to keep a secret. As the debate builds over who will next lead the House intelligence committee, at least one conservative publication has asked whether the Democrats' presumptive pick, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), has whispered secrets that ruined federal investigations.

When the House impeached federal judge Alcee Hastings in 1989, 16 of the 17 counts had to do with a bribery allegation dating to 1981, as we detailed yesterday. But one count was different, the National Review's Byron York noted a few days ago, and it cuts to the very core of whether Hastings is suitable to chair the House intelligence committee.

It was an accusation that in 1985, he leaked secret government information that ruined three FBI probes.

The House voted to impeach Hastings on that count, known as "Article XVI," but the Senate unanimously voted to acquit, blasting the House prosecutors for using "weak" evidence, leaving "gaping holes" in their proof and "fail[ing]. . . to identify any credible motive" for Hastings to leak the information.

What happened? Did Hastings leak a secret? Or was the case as weak as the senators said?

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As we've noted, the debate over Nancy Pelosi's likely candidate for House intelligence chairman, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), centers on corruption allegations dating back to 1981 -- allegations which Hastings has fought tooth and nail.

This Monday, Hastings sent a five-page letter out to all House Democrats detailing why the charges against him are false. In it, he rails against journalists and pundits who've covered the allegations against him as ill-informed and too keen to attribute the House's impeachment and Senate's conviction of him as proof enough. Above all, he points to the fact that he was acquitted of wrongdoing in a criminal trial, which he believes has been downplayed. "In a jury trial, the evidence is the only consideration," Hastings writes. "In an impeachment, politics is central."

Full text below the fold...

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There was already strong evidence that the worryingly high "undervote" in the congressional race in Florida's Sarasota County had skewed the results of the election there.

But The Orlando Sentinel actually went through nearly all of the roughly 18,000 ballots on electronic voting machines where voters had failed to register a vote in the congressional race, but had voted in the other races, and found that the voters were mostly Democrats.

From the Sentinel:

The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota's disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.

Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat -- agriculture-commissioner candidate Eric Copeland -- outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes....

Republican Vern Buchanan's 369-vote victory was certified by state officials Monday. His camp says that, although people may have skipped the race -- intentionally or not -- there is no evidence that votes went missing.

But the results of the Sentinel analysis, two experts said, warrant additional investigation.

"Wow," University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato said. "That's very suggestive -- I'd even say strongly suggestive -- that if there had been votes recorded, she [Jennings] would have won that House seat."...

The analysis of the so-called "undervotes" examined the races for U.S. Senate, governor, attorney general, chief financial officer and agriculture commissioner.

The results showed that the undervoted ballots skewed Democratic in all of those races, even in the three races in which the county as a whole went Republican.

Legal Fight in Florida's 13th Could Stretch Into 2007
"The number of Nov. 7 House general elections in which the winner has not been firmly established has dwindled to four. But at least one of these, the controversy-plagued contest for the open seat in Florida’s 13th District, is unlikely to be decided for weeks — and even has the potential to kick off the Democratic-controlled 110th Congress in January with a dispute over whether to seat the certified winner.

"That candidate is Republican Vern Buchanan: The Florida secretary of state’s office yesterday certified the wealthy car dealer as the victor, by a margin of 369 votes, over Democrat Christine Jennings, a former bank president.

"Jennings immediately filed a lawsuit in Leon County, which is well north of the 13th District but includes the state capital of Tallahassee. The crux of Jennings’ complaint — which demands that a new election be called — is that there were more than 18,000 “undervotes” in Sarasota County, the district’s largest jurisdiction and the source of Jennings’ greatest electoral strength." (CQ Politics)

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In my earlier post on Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), I mentioned a cryptic conversation between the onetime federal judge and his friend which authorities later claimed was a "coded" dialog.

I linked to a Nov. 1 article by Roger Shuy, an academic specialist in linguistics and code. In the piece, Shuy identifies himself as the expert Congress asked to review the FBI recording of Hastings' odd chat and determine if he was really talking in code or not.

Shuy determined that he was. Read the post; it's a good story, and the expert's reasoning is interesting to follow.

I just got off the phone with Shuy, who has since left Washington for the wide Western expanses which, he said, are ideal for writing books.

"I always liked Alcee Hastings," Shuy told me. "When they asked me to do this, I said, 'Okay, but I hope you're wrong.' But I don't think they were."

Activist groups have filed a second lawsuit contesting the election results in Florida's 13th, arguing that electronic voting machines may have robbed voters of their true choice.

The suit, filed by watchdog groups Voter Action, People For the American Way Foundation, the ACLU of Florida, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, follows swiftly on Christine Jennings contest filed yesterday. You can read Jennings' suit here, which includes a number of voter testimonials about problems on Election Day.

Elliot Mincberg, Legal Director for PAWF, said that he expected the judge to consolidate the two suits and have them proceed together.

The lawsuits, however, comrpise just one of the avenues by which the election's results will be challenged.

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He may not be a former spy, but he's got better cred on intelligence issues than the outgoing House intelligence committee chair, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI). (Hoekstra's off-kilter ramblings have included charging CIA employees are al Qaeda sympathizers, and insisting WMDs still exist in Iraq after the White House has dropped the cause.) Besides, despite having little background in the cloak-and-dagger world, Hastings is said to have boned up on the subject since joining the intelligence panel in 1999.

So why do people think Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) isn't fit to lead the House intelligence committee?

The answer lies all the way back in 1981 -- when James Watt became Secretary of the Interior, the Berlin Wall was still up, disco wasn't yet ironic, and Alcee Hastings was a federal judge in Florida.

That year, according to Congress, Hastings and a friend tried to shake down a defendant facing trial in Hastings' courtroom for $150,000. In exchange, the two promised a reduced jail sentence and the return of over $800,000 in confiscated property.

A jury acquitted Hastings of criminal charges stemming from the scandal, but in 1989 a team of lawmakers -- including Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), among others -- prosecuted Hastings in Congress, and the Senate voted to strip him of his judgeship.

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Didn't the Democrats promise us an end to muck?

Yet mucked-up politicians keep surfacing as the new House majority struggles to choose its leaders. Last week, questionable corporate cozier Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) beat out Rep. John "No bribes for me -- right now" Murtha (D-PA) to be House majority leader.

Now, a battle royale is brewing over who's going to lead the House intelligence committee, and it too is hardly muck-free: one of the leading contenders for the position is a former federal judge who was impeached by Congress, while the other is under FBI investigation for improper relations with a lobby organization sporting foreign ties.

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), with backing from the Congressional Black Caucus, may be the frontrunner for the position, if only because the would-be chair, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), is on the outs with the woman who gets to choose, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But Hastings has a past that seriously compromises his candidacy: In 1989, the Senate found Hastings guilty of soliciting a $150,000 bribe from defendants facing trial in his courtroom eight years earlier. Unlike some recent scandals, this was believed to have been a pretty simple scam: In exchange for the bribe, Hastings would throw the case.

Hastings' alleged accomplice, William Borders, was sent to prison for the scam. The evidence against Hastings himself was serious, but circumstantial -- a cryptic phone call, a fortuitous appearance at a restaurant on a certain date and time -- so he was acquitted of criminal charges. But a bipartisan congressional prosecution and impeachment removed him from the federal bench. (More on this later.)

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Here's your Defense Department's counterterrorism experts musing on the combustability of an antiwar protest in California:

Yup, "some type of vandalism is always a possibility."

A recent Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU uncovered a number of such reports from the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database, which is supposed to be used to monitor attack threats near military installations.

As an explanation, the chief of the counterintelligence field unit told The New York Times that "those operating the database had misinterpreted their mandate."

Democrats Plan Series of Votes on Ethics Reform
"Despite divisions among Democrats over how far to go in revising ethics rules, House leaders plan a major rollout of an ethics reform bill early next year to demonstrate concern about an issue that helped defeat the Republicans in the midterm elections.

"But they will do it with a twist: Instead of forwarding one big bill, Democrats will put together an ethics package on the House floor piece by piece, allowing incoming freshmen to take charge of high-profile issues and lengthening the time spent on the debate. The approach will ensure that each proposal -- including banning gifts, meals and travel from lobbyists as well as imposing new controls on the budget deficit -- is debated on its own and receives its own vote. That should garner far more media attention for the bill's components before a final vote on the entire package." (WaPo)

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Remember Larry Hanauer, the Democratic aide on the House Intelligence Committee whose clearance was yanked because he was suspected of leaking the Iraq NIE?

House Intel Chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) probably hopes you don't, because, as Roll Call reports (sub. req.), Hanauer's access to classified info has been quietly reinstated, "essentially clearing the aide of accusations that he leaked a sensitive report on the Iraq War to The New York Times."

Hoekstra had stripped Hanauer of his access based on remarkably thin evidence -- that Hanauer requested a copy of the Iraq National Intelligence Estimate shortly before the Times reported on the NIE's findings. Nevermind that the Times piece clearly stated that details of the report came from a number of intelligence professionals, with whom the reporters had been speaking for weeks. In fact, as Rep. Ray Lahood (R-IL) admitted, Hanauer was demoted as payback for the Democrats having released, over Hoekstra's objections, a report on Duke Cunningham's dirty doings.

Now Hanauer's been officially (and suddenly) cleared, it seems. Yet another sign that we're in a new era.

Update: A statement from Jonathan Turley, Hanauer's lawyer:

We are grateful that this long nightmare for Larry and his family is now over. It is regrettable that it took this long given the total absence of any evidence linking Larry to the New York Times articles. As we stated at the outset of this controversy, Larry was not and could not have been the source for the New York Times story.

As a result of his name and private telephone number being leaked to the media, Larry has now been the subject of horrible and reprehensible threats.

I hope that the total vindication of Larry will now restore his good name and standing as a professional staff member.

Now the fight really gets started. Democrat Christine Jennings has filed an official contest of the election results.

As we've noted many times here before, the central dispute concerns the "undervote" in one county, where about 13% of voters didn't select a candidate in the congressional race -- a rate far above those in the other counties. The Jennings campaign faults the electronic voting machines for the problem. Republican Vern Buchanan won the race by fewer than 400 votes, according to the official tally.

The complaint, filed today, notes that "The failure to include these votes constitutes a rejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to place in doubt, and likely change, the outcome of the election."

More soon.

Update: Press release from Jennings campaign follows.

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From the AP:

Tom Noe, a prominent coin dealer accused of taking at least $2 million, was convicted last week of theft, corrupt activity, money laundering, forgery and tampering with records.

Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Thomas Osowik, who described the crime as an "elaborate scheme of theft on a large scale," also fined Noe $120,000.

"You continued to spend the bureau's money at what I thought was a shockingly, alarmingly large rate, and done for one purpose: to present some type of a facade that you had a bottomless cup of wealth and luxury at your disposal, when in fact it was at the state's expense," Osowik said.

Foley Checks out of Rehab
"Sources tell us disgraced ex-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) ended his stay at a rehab facility in Arizona that treats alcohol addiction as well as sexual addiction and compulsion before he headed back to Florida to attend the funeral of his father.

"'It was more for that,' said one source, referring to sexual addiction." (Roll Call)

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A man named Warren Trepp surfaced in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, you may recall. The paper had investigated the Nevada defense contractor for his shady dealings with then-Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV).

Today's Las Vegas Sun puts Trepp's current flap in perspective. Apparently, the man has a history of attaching himself, Zelig-like, to no fewer than four disparate scandals in the past two decades:

Perhaps Warren Trepp is always just at the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of terrible and perpetual coincidence.

By his early 30s, he was chief trader for the notorious 1980s junk bond trader Michael Milken.

Then a friend helped him sell a bundle of stock in a collectibles business in 2002, and he wound up selling it to Tom Noe, a Republican bigwig in Ohio recently convicted on multiple counts of fraud and larceny and laundering money to the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign.

Trepp formed the software company eTreppid Technologies that later sought national security contracts with the government. A woman, Letitia White, who did lobbying work for the firm is said to be under investigation in connection with the widening federal bribery probe following the conviction of a former congressman.

Finally, his friendship with Nevada Gov.-elect Jim Gibbons landed him on the front page of The Wall Street Journal in an examination of contracts that eTreppid received with help from Gibbons, the Republican congressman from Reno.