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Paul Kiel | April 30, 2008, 10:01AM

It's the Bush administration's special approach to accountability: stand staunchly beside an administration official as the allegations pile up and his or her credibility dwindles to nothing, and then months later -- long after the administration could derive any credit for the deed, and it is widely assumed that they are content to let the official fester in office for the duration -- the official abruptly and inexplicably resigns. So it was with Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales. And yesterday General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan stepped down.

But Doan, who gained mucky prominence for her clueless cronyism, wants everybody to know that she's not stepping down voluntarily. She was fired. And not only was she fired, but she was fired because she refused to cave to political pressure. Or something.

"I would rather get fired for something I believe in, and a cause I was willing to fight for, rather than to believe in nothing worth being fired for." That's what Doan told Government Executive in an email last night. It's far from clear precisely what this "something" she believes in is.

What we do know is that last June, the Office of Special Counsel recommended to the White House that Doan be fired for violating the Hatch Act. And that same month, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) told Doan to her face during a House oversight committee hearing that she should resign. And now, nearly a year later, the White House summons her for a meeting and asks for her resignation.

To refresh your memory on Doan's parade of horribles: her Golden-Duke-nomination-worthy testimony came in response to a meeting in early 2007, where Karl Rove's aide Scott Jennings came to brief GSA staff on the prospects for Republicans in the 2008 elections. The PowerPoint presentation detailed which seats were "House Targets" and which "Senate Targets", which states were "Republican Offense," and which "Republican Defense." For those who've never witnessed this proud moment in administration history, Doan's initial blubbering testimony on the topic is worth a watch:

After the presentation, Doan asked Jennings in front of everyone how GSA projects could be used to help "our candidates." Jennings replied that topic should be discussed "off-line," the witnesses said. Doan then replied, "Oh, good, at least as long as we are going to follow up." At least, that's the version given by "half a dozen witnesses" to The Washington Post and the Office of Special Counsel. Doan just couldn't remember saying anything like that.

And then there was Doan's alleged retaliation against employees who gave information to the Office of Special Counsel. Those were poor performers, she told investigators, and "[u]ntil extensive rehabilitation of their performance occurs, they will not be getting promoted and will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature." In another cringe-inducing turn before Waxman's committee, Doan tried to explain away that comment by saying she had been employing the "hortatory subjunctive" -- an explanation remarkable for not only failing to exculpate her, but also being grammatically incorrect.

We'll miss you, Lurita.

Update: Government Executive reports that the timing of Doan's resignation might have something to do with her ongoing feud with the GSA's inspector general.

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Paul Kiel | April 29, 2008, 10:06AM

Just another day at Guantanamo, I guess.

On the witness stand was the former chief prosecutor for the tribunals, Col. Morris Davis. Called to testify by defense lawyers, he told the court what he'd told the press -- that he'd quit after becoming convinced that the political appointees overseeing the system were about politics first and justice second, that he was told "we can't have acquittals," and that he was pushed to land indictments or plea deals before the election. He also said that his superiors saw no problem with using confessions obtained through torture, including waterboarding. Everything is "fair game," he says he was told, "let the judge sort it out."

And then there's Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the alleged driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan's lawyers say that interrogators beat him and sexually humiliated him, among other things, and are arguing that he's unfit to stand trial because he's essentially been driven crazy by spending 22 hours in solitary confinement for the past several years. His lawyers say "he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo 'boil his mind.'"

Nevertheless, Hamdan was there yesterday -- sort of:

But Hamdan, during the morning session, also appeared to show some evidence of mental deterioration, which his attorneys have ascribed to mistreatment and lengthy solitary confinement. He seemed in a daze as he was led into court in his khaki detention uniform.

He then engaged in a short, subdued rant to Allred about how he believes he is not being afforded human rights and would like to use the bathroom without soldiers watching him. He also tried at one point to get up from the defense table to leave the room. "I refuse participating in this, and I refuse all the lawyers operating on my behalf," Hamdan said. He returned for the afternoon session in traditional Yemeni garb and a sport coat and agreed to continue.

And just to complete the context for the scene, the Post notes, is the fact that the Supreme Court is nearing "a decision on whether the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that laid the legal foundation for these hearings violates the Constitution by barring any of the approximately 275 remaining Guantanamo Bay prisoners from forcing a civilian judicial review of their detention." In the meantime, the ugliness of Gitmo is on full display.

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Paul Kiel | April 28, 2008, 9:55AM

It's the same lesson from the administration over and over again: with torture, all things are relative.

Back in January, for instance, Attorney General Michael Mukasey patiently explained to Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) how relative that whole conscience shocking thing is. You have to "balance the value of doing something against the cost of doing it."

And this weekend, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) produced correspondence with the Justice Department showing a similar dance. From The New York Times:

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law....

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity," a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.

"The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act," said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public....

In one letter written Sept. 27, 2007, Mr. Benczkowski argued that "to rise to the level of an outrage" and thus be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, conduct "must be so deplorable that the reasonable observer would recognize it as something that should be universally condemned."

It's become cystal clear from Mukasey's testimony to Congress that despite the Supreme Court decisions and efforts by Congress to prohibit the use of torture, there is still plenty of ambiguity. The president's executive order last year explicitly ruled out the worst of the worst techniques, like murdering, raping or sexually humiliating detainees, but was silent on what is allowed.

And the administration has been successful in keeping things ambiguous for CIA interrogators. When Democrats tried to limit the CIA to using techniques approved by the Army Field Manual, legislation that would have specifically and unambiguously ruled out those "enhanced interrogation" techniques that fall in the gray area, key Republicans like John McCain helped keep things hazy.

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Paul Kiel | April 25, 2008, 10:17AM

Ooh, that must sting. For ringing up his state's U.S. attorney at bedtime to interrogate him about whether that high-profile corruption case against a prominent state Democrat will result in an indictment before the election, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) has been branded with the dreaded QA: that's right, qualified admonition.

The Senate ethics committee says it left no stone unturned in coming to this conclusion, including interviewing "current and former executive branch officials and attorneys," but that the "Committee finds no substantial evidence to determine that [Domenici] attempted to improperly influence an ongoing investigation." The key word there being "substantial."

The U.S. attorney, David Iglesias, who was of course fired a little more than a month after Domenici's call, testified that the call made him sick. And so the committee says that Domenici "should have known" better -- that such a call would create an "appearance of impropriety." But appearance of impropriety aside, maybe the good senator was just looking for an update. You know, just ringing up the local prosecutor at home to see how things are going.

The modesty of the punishment matches the modesty of the investigation. It wasn't the committee's job to investigate the U.S. attorney firings in general: "We do emphasize, however, that the Committee confined its inquiry to your October 2006 call to Mr. Iglesias, its context and consequences and related actions by you or your office."

Nevertheless, as Domenici serves out his last year in the Senate, it's worth reminding ourselves of the broader context.

Such as the fact that when the story first broke that two lawmakers had called Iglesias shortly before the 2006 election, the lawmakers were not identified, resulting in a media scramble to identify them. When all other members of the New Mexico delegation responded that they'd never done such a thing, Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) went to ground and refused to comment. Finally, cornered by an AP reporter, Domenici said "I don't have any comment. I have no idea what he's talking about."

But when it became apparent that Iglesias would be testifying to Congress about the call, Domenici eventually developed an idea and fessed up. He apologized, but said "I have never pressured him nor threatened him in any way." In their letter yesterday, the committee thanked Domenici for the "candor" of that statement.

Neither Domenici nor Wilson have admitted that it was Iglesias' failure to speedily dispatch with a couple high-profile corruption investigations into state Democrats that led to their dissatisfaction. Rather, they both hewed to the coded criticism that Iglesias had been slow to move cases -- when it's evident that they were really only talking about a few cases in particular.

We know that Domenici was also instrumental in Iglesias' firing, making calls not only to the Justice Department, but also to the White House. Of course, Iglesias had plenty of enemies, so it's certainly possible that other Republicans got him canned for, say, not jumping on the voter fraud bandwagon, and that's always been Domenici's best alibi.

But if you're looking to find out more about the context of Iglesias' firing, the Justice Department's forthcoming inspector general report will be much more informative.

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Paul Kiel | April 24, 2008, 10:17AM

Whatever fellow said "ask and you shall receive" never tried to get anything out of the Bush administration.

More than six years after the administration initiated its now infamous battery of policies to fight the global war on terror, there is still a pitched battle over whether certain details can be released. Just earlier this month, there were new revelations about the involvement of senior administration officials in crafting the CIA's interrogation program, and the release of John Yoo's 2003 memo authorizing the military's use of torture shocked even those who didn't think they could be shocked any more.

The latest: Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law teamed up to press in a lawsuit for the release of documents related to the administration's programs of secret detentions, renditions, and torture. Now the CIA has replied that it has 7,000 responsive documents that it won't be turning over. Among them:

Nineteen of those documents were withheld from disclosure specifically because the Bush administration decided they are covered by a "presidential communications privilege," according to the filings, made in federal court in Manhattan. Some were "authored or solicited and received by the President's senior advisors in connection with a decision, or potential decision, to be made by the president."

Although the precise content of the documents is unknown, the agency's statements illustrate the extent to which senior White House officials were involved in decision-making on CIA detentions, interrogations, and renditions, a term for forced transfers of prisoners.

Among the protected documents are "dozens" of communications between the CIA and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo's old shop, otherwise known as the place where a fellow can get himself an "advance pardon." The CIA refuses to turn those documents over, but it's candid about what they were all about:

"The CIA's purpose in requesting advice from OLC was the very likely prospect of criminal, civil, or administrative litigation against the CIA and CIA personnel who participate in the Program," said a declaration from Ralph S. DiMaio, information review officer for the CIA's clandestine service. He added that the CIA considered such proceedings "to be virtually inevitable."

You can see the few documents that the groups were able to get from the CIA here.

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Paul Kiel | April 23, 2008, 10:08AM

People have been giving Bob Schaffer, the Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado, a hard time about his advocacy on behalf of the Northern Mariana Islands. But Schaffer thinks it's about time to give credit where credit is due: after all, he braved an interminable flight to the end of the earth to investigate human rights abuses.

But the trip was organized by Jack Abramoff, you might say, and has been demonstrated to have been just another cog in Abramoff's lobbying strategy. Abramoff's goal was to keep the federal government from spoiling the Marianas' "perfect petri dish of capitalism," and a key tactic was to attack Clinton's Interior Department to distract from the human rights abuses on the islands. Schaffer was a more than willing participant.

Schaffer took to the airwaves earlier this week to air his grudges on a local conservative talk radio program. The Denver Post had done him wrong, he said, by covering the issue with such clear bias.

But more than anything, he's not getting credit for going where so few other lawmakers dared to go:

And by the way, I'll tell you there's 435 members of Congress, these reports had been in circulation throughout the 90s, and there weren't very many who went and investigated them the way I did. I don't owe anybody any ... any kind of remorse or regret for investigating these abuses firsthand....

This is a controversial issue, this island has been at the source of great political conflict for quite a long time, on a number of levels, not just these allegations of sweatshops and so on, but there's a big political controversy taking place there about the sovereignty and relative independence that this commonwealth has compared to other states, or even compared to other U.S. protectorates.

So, a lot of people in Congress would walk away from that and not even look into it because of the controversy. I frankly didn't care, and went and saw what I saw, and followed my own instincts and inclinations based on both favorable and unfavorable reports about the island.

Of course, this might carry more heft if Abramoff hadn't been constantly ferrying lawmakers, staffers, and their families over to the Marianas in the late nineties -- some 85 people in all by mid-2000. It turns out that it wasn't that hard to lure people over for a free trip to tropical islands.

Abramoff didn't sponsor all the trips. Like, say, the one taken by then-Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-AK), who returned outraged by the conditions there and spent the next several years trying to pass a bill to reform the labor and immigration laws on the Marianas (Abramoff was able to block it with the help of his House Republican friends). But somehow those who took the Abramoff organized trips didn't come back so angry.

Omitting the fact that documents show that he knew Abramoff's lobbying firm had made the travel arrangements for his trip, Schaffer says that nobody led him around by the nose while he was on the islands. It was five days of unfettered and unrelenting access, he says:

Nobody led me around there, nobody showed me a sanitized version of what they wanted me to see. My wife and I, and a staffer, and the two individuals from the Family Values Coalition led an investigation according to what I as the member of Congress thought was the best way to spend five days.

We worked around the clock by the way and conducted dozens and dozens of interviews, both on-site and off-site.

Ignore that picture of him parasailing with his wife during his visit there and it's an inspiring evocation.

You can read a full transcript of portions of the interview below. The audio is here.

Read more »

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Paul Kiel | April 22, 2008, 10:02AM

You know the story: after surviving the Keating Five scandal, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) vowed to be incorruptible. Sure, he surrounds himself with lobbyists, but that is only to test his vigilance.

The New York Times tests the limits of McCain's vigilance in a piece today about McCain's decades-old ties to a wealthy Arizonan developer named Donald Diamond.

The main thrust is this: on a number of key occasions, McCain played a key role in helping Diamond, a major campaign contributor, make deals that made him millions of dollars. The piece focuses on three deals in particular: two of those involved bills (in 1991 and 1994) co-sponsored by McCain that swapped public land for Diamond's land, and the other involved McCain doing a couple personal favors in order to help Diamond land an incredibly lucrative piece of land owned by the Army. In each of those cases, Diamond was able to secure the assistance of other members of the Arizona delegation, and it's crystal clear from the piece that Diamond knows how to work his lawmakers.

Part of what makes the piece so amusing is that while the McCain camp was obviously keen to minimize McCain's assistance -- pointing out, for example, that McCain refused a number of Diamond's requests -- Diamond doesn't seem to have much patience for pussyfooting. For example:

Mr. Diamond is close to most of Arizona's Congressional delegation and is candid about his expectations as a fund-raiser. "I want my money back, for Christ's sake. Do you know how many cocktail parties I have to go to?"

To raise money for Mr. McCain, Mr. Diamond invites local Republicans to make fund-raising calls from his Tucson office. Ray Carroll, a member of the council that controls zoning in Pima County, Ariz., said Mr. Diamond followed up on one fund-raising session with a thank-you note "on behalf of Mr. McCain," sending a copy to the senator.

"To reciprocate, if you need any zoning in the county, let me know," Mr. Diamond wrote. (Mr. Diamond said it was the kind of joke he often made.)

The most delicate of the three transactions for the McCain camp is undoubtedly the Army deal: an old base in Monterey County, California called Fort Ord. Helped along by a meeting with an Army official set up by a McCain aide, Diamond got the inside track on the land, which ultimately made him a $20 million profit. McCain had also written a letter to the city of Seaside, California, enthusiastically recommending Diamond, who was making a bid to buy Fort Ord's two golf courses that had been acquired by the city.

Sound like some pretty special treatment for a multi-millionaire campaign contributor? Not so, says the McCain camp. Any average Joe Arizonan making a bid for a luxury resort in another state would be sure to get the senator's assistance:

A spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, Jill Hazelbaker, said the senator, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, "had done nothing for Mr. Diamond that he would not do for any other Arizona citizen."...

For the California projects, the campaign said the McCain aide arranged the introduction to an Army official for Mr. Diamond's team as "a constituent matter." The campaign said it had no knowledge of the aide helping to expedite the sale.

In Mr. Diamond's other project at Ford Ord, the campaign initially said that the senator "would not have issued" the letter vouching for Mr. Diamond "if he knew at the time it would be used to favor any particular party in the course of a pending competition." Later, the campaign described the letter as "a character reference" and said it was included only at a "pre-competition" stage in the selection process. The campaign also noted that two other members of the Arizona Congressional delegation provided similar letters.

And Diamond, typically, doesn't see why there would be any fuss:

Mr. Diamond, for his part, said Mr. McCain had only done his job. "I think that is what Congress people are supposed to do for constituents," he said. "When you have a big, significant businessman like myself, why wouldn't you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation."

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Paul Kiel | April 21, 2008, 9:55AM

They've got the bark part down pat.

You heard about Freedom's Watch, the billionaire-backed, uber-connected attack group that was going to put a $250 million hurt on the Democratic nominee and a number of Congressional candidates to boot. Well, that hasn't turned out too well.

And now there seems to be no shortage of self-doubt amongst conservative insiders about their prospects for a good bite come the fall. The left has its act together, but a Swift Boat 2.0 has yet to emerge for the right.

From The Washington Post:

With Sen. John McCain facing the prospect of being dramatically outspent in the race for the White House, a collection of major Republican donors and party leaders that includes former Bush strategist Karl Rove is scrambling to catch up with the efforts of liberal groups aiming to influence the outcome in November....

This year, allies of President Bush such as Rove, billionaire T. Boone Pickens, New York financier Paul Singer and Florida developer Mel Sembler, who helped harness and direct millions of dollars to the 2004 campaign, are working to rekindle those efforts. But they are finding the 2008 landscape to be more challenging, according to Republican sources familiar with the ongoing talks....

"I hear rumblings," said Brad Freeman, a Bush donor in California. "People keep asking the question, 'What are we going to do this time?' "

Sembler, a big Bush donor and former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, confirmed that he and others are working to identify a group that could help shape the agenda for the presidential campaign and steer major donors to it. A motivating factor, he said, is the sense that Democrats are much further along in their efforts.

"They are very organized. They started a whole lot earlier," Sembler said. "We are not quite as organized. But our efforts are still going forward."

Now, maybe this is just a bunch of premature talk. After all, this is not a group that is just going to sit on its thumbs. But it does seem possible that rather than one prominent conservative attack group emerging this election, there will be a cluster who emerge at different times.

Another interesting dynamic this election will be whether Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) criticizes outside attack groups as he has in the past, and as he did speaking to Chris Matthews last week, and whether those groups respond. The Post's reporting suggests that McCain's criticism actually has had an impact, making conservative donors more skittish about taking the plunge. On the other hand, the McCain camp seems to be puzzled by the response:

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said Friday that he understands the cause and effect and is not bothered by it. He conceded that he has been surprised that no one group has emerged on the Republican side, in spite of the candidate's comments. "I would have thought by now someone would occupy that space," Davis said.

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Paul Kiel | April 18, 2008, 9:34AM

I suppose it was always the case that when top military professionals speak frankly about a war, it makes headlines. Still, given Gen. David Petraeus' famously obtuse presentation to Congress last week, this recent report (pdf) from the National Defense University by Joseph Collins, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations in the Pentagon until 2004, couldn't provide a starker contrast. It is titled "Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath," and it begins:

Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle. As of fall 2007, this conflict has cost the United States over 3,800 dead and over 28,000 wounded. Allied casualties accounted for another 300 dead. Iraqi civilian deaths--mostly at the hands of other Iraqis--may number as high as 82,000. Over 7,500 Iraqi soldiers and police officers have also been killed. Fifteen percent of the Iraqi population has become refugees or displaced persons. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the United States now spends over $10 billion per month on the war, and that the total, direct U.S. costs from March 2003 to July 2007 have exceeded $450 billion, all of which has been covered by deficit spending. No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on Service personnel and materiel.

The war's political impact also has been great. Globally, U.S. standing among friends and allies has fallen.2 Our status as a moral leader has been damaged by the war, the subsequent occupation of a Muslim nation, and various issues concerning the treatment of detainees. At the same time, operations in Iraq have had a negative impact on all other efforts in the war on terror, which must bow to the priority of Iraq when it comes to manpower, materiel, and the attention of decisionmakers. Our Armed Forces-- especially the Army and Marine Corps--have been severely strained by the war in Iraq. Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East.

As this case study is being written, despite impressive progress in security during the surge, the outcome of the war is in doubt. Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after the rapid withdrawal of that army.... No one has calculated the psychopolitical impact of a perceived defeat on the U.S. reputation for power or the future of the overall war on terror. For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a "must win," but for many others, despite the obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a "can't win."

Don Young

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Paul Kiel | April 17, 2008, 9:18AM

Relax, defenders of the Constitution! They were only fixing a mistake.

Since last August, we've been trying to figure out how Rep. Don Young (R-AK) managed to change the language in a bill after it cleared both houses of Congress. Now we've finally got a little bit of clarity -- Young's staff has finally fessed up to making the change. What remains unclear, however, is whether Young told them to do it.

It was no mystery that Young himself was responsible for the earmark, which provided $10 million to build an I-75 interchange at Coconut Road in Lee County, Florida. Local officials had sought money for a more general project to widen the highway, but real estate developer Daniel Aronoff knew the way to get things done. He held a $40,000 fundraiser for Young in Florida.

Why Young? He was the chairman of the House transportation committee back in 2005 and so the man to go to for an earmark that hadn't managed the support of local officials or lawmakers. It didn't really matter that Florida was about as far from Alaska in the United States that you can get.

So while it's been no mystery that Young was responsible for the earmark, just how he managed to buck the constitutional process for lawmaking hasn't been clear. Back in August, we plowed into the 800-page 2005 bill to see whether there had been any other substantial changes. We found that out of approximately 6,370 earmarks, Young's had been the only to undergo such a change.

But Young refused to discuss it. Taxpayers for Common Sense filed a complaint with the House ethics committee, and still he remained mum.

Finally, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) was successful in pushing for an investigation of the earmark. The Senate is likely to vote today and pass a measure by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) that will refer the matter to the Justice Department for investigation.

And today, after debate raged for hours in the Senate on the best way to investigate Don Young, he's finally fessing up - sort of.

Young himself didn't make the change, his staff tells The Washington Post:

Young's staff acknowledged yesterday that aides "corrected" the earmark just before it went to the White House for President Bush's signature, specifying that the money would go to a proposed highway interchange project on Interstate 75 near Naples, Fla. Young says the project was entirely worthy of an earmark and he welcomes any inquiry, a spokeswoman said....

Young's office accepted responsibility yesterday for the change, insisting that campaign contributions were not the motive. Rather, presentations made by Florida Gulf Coast University officials and the developers proved the case for the project, aides said.

[Meredith] Kenny, Young's spokeswoman, said the lawmaker always intended for the earmark to designate money to the interchange project, not generic highway improvements. So committee aides altered the bill to reflect that after the House and Senate had approved it.

"There was an error in the bill and so it was corrected," she said.

Now, in our pass through the earmark-laden transportation bill, we did find that plenty of "errors" in the bill had indeed been corrected -- by which I mean misplaced commas, typos, etc. But none of those "corrections" changed the projects themselves.

And of course this statement doesn't answer the big question: whether one of Young's staffers might have made such a change to the bill without asking the boss. Because (hopefully) it's not every day at the office that a staffer changes the language of legislation after it passes Congress.

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Paul Kiel | April 16, 2008, 10:14AM

Rep. Don Young (R-AK) has spent more than one million dollars on criminal defense lawyers. And for some reason, reporters won't stop asking him questions about it.

Are the feds investigating whether Young took bribes from the corrupt executives at Veco (as The Wall Street Journal has reported)? What about his ties to Jack Abramoff? Anything else?

This February, he practically leaped out of his seat at a journo who had the temerity to press for details. "It's not my prerogative to answer to people who have nothing to do with it. That's you," he said and claimed that his constituents weren't bothered with his support of the legal community -- only nosy muckrakers. When the reporter protested that he was a constituent, Young asked if the reporter had voted for him. "No, sir," the reporter replied, and that was that.

Now that Young has officially crossed the million dollar mark, reporters are badgering him again. And yesterday Young struck a different tone:

Young... said he wished he could speak his mind. He can't, he said in a statement released Tuesday, because "both the Department of Justice and my lawyers have asked that I not comment further on the investigation. I MUST honor this request," using capital letters for emphasis.

"Many people have been concerned about my legal fees and I do not take their concerns lightly... I have learned that the legal process is an expensive process, but I have nothing to hide. When it comes to my family and my character, the truth is priceless. That is exactly why I hired good legal counsel, and I have worked fully with the Department of Justice by answering their questions and providing them with anything they have requested."

Despite all the unjust scrutiny, Young has tried to make things right. Last year, his campaign committee tried to reimburse Bill Allen, formerly the CEO of Veco and now a full-time cooperator, for approximately $38,000 that Allen spent putting on Young's big annual pig roast fundraiser every year (see to the right).

Young's chief of staff explained to The Anchorage Daily News that the campaign was simply doing its due diligence and discovered the problem. Their caution might have also had something to do with the fact that a number of state lawmakers had had their offices raided by the FBI as part of the Veco investigation.

In any case, Allen was already cooperating with the feds by the time that Young tried to make amends. And Allen, not surprisingly, did not accept the cash. In its filing with the FEC this week, the campaign does not offer an explanation, only writing "Two checks paid to Bill Allen in the total amount of $37,626.00 in January 2007 for fundraiser costs were not cashed by Mr. Allen. These funds were later disgorged to the US Treasury in January 2008."

You know it's got to hurt Young, such an accomplished earmarker, to be giving perfectly good money up to the government.

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Paul Kiel | April 15, 2008, 10:10AM

Prepare to have your credulity tested.

Back in February, the AP broke the story that the White House had secretly modified a proposed rule to crack down on contract fraud. The rule, originally drafted by the Justice Department, was intended to force contractors to police themselves and report evidence of fraud or abuse. But the White House's version of the rule specifically exempted contractors working overseas on contracts that exceeded $5 million.

The Justice Department, which needs all the help it can get in busting corrupt contractors, was dismayed. But it made the major overseas contractors (like, say, Blackwater, KBR, CACI International, etc.), who had been opposing the rule, very happy.

When the AP asked why the White House had inserted the loophole, no answers were forthcoming. A spokeswoman from the Office of Management and Budget would only say that it was a "proposed rule," and that they were reviewing public comments.

And that was it. Over the ensuing months, members of Congress from both parties denounced the rule and vowed investigations. Even the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction publicly criticized the rule. But the White House otherwise stayed mum.

The first Congressional hearing was set for today. And the White House has let it be known that the loophole is gone -- and that it was all a big misunderstanding:

Reversing itself after months of criticism, the administration closed the loophole that was quietly slipped last year into a proposed Justice Department crackdown on government contract fraud....

Government policywriters said the original rule was drawn up quickly, and chided the Justice Department for not explicitly making sure that overseas contracts should be included in the crackdown. "It was only after publication of the proposed rule ... that DoJ and other respondents expressed concern about the overseas exemption," the draft states....

A Bush administration official on Monday called the loophole "a drafting error" that happened when policywriters merely cut and pasted a 20-year-old Defense Department regulation into the contracting crackdown.

Oh well. Mistakes do happen.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT), who had called for the hearing, seems not to take the White House's story at face value: "This investigation proves why oversight works.... The question is why it required a congressional investigation to prevent the Bush administration from giving overseas contractors a free pass to defraud taxpayers."

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Paul Kiel | April 14, 2008, 9:35AM

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), your prayers have been answered! The D.C. Madam's attorney tells the AP that he will not be calling her most famous former client as a witness.

Of course, Vitter's attorney made it as clear as he could that Vitter would not be a helpful witness for the former madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Palfrey's defense is that she was running a legitimate "fantasy sex" operation from her laundry room in California. Vitter's attorney said his client would plead the Fifth if called; not a helpful spectacle for the madam's case.

If Vitter and his escort didn't restrain themselves to fantasy, they weren't alone. The prosecution has called more than a dozen of Palfrey's former escorts to testify, and it hasn't been pretty. From The Washington Post:

The jurors have watched a procession of scared, mortified ex-prostitutes (13 so far) reluctantly take the witness stand, forced to reveal their secret former lives in intermittently graphic detail -- a past each clearly hoped was buried forever. Most testified that they grew weary of the business in less than a year and quit.

At $250 for 60 minutes or so, these weren't high-priced call girls, it turns out. They didn't measure up in appearance to the elites in the business. As the women tell it, Palfrey's niche was a middle-of-the-road, largely suburban clientele -- a long way up from the streetwalker trade, but well south of Emperors Club VIP, the four-figure-per-hour call girl outfit that last month proved the undoing of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer....

[T]he trial has been just a long, sad parade of former prostitutes, some in wigs provided by the government, a feeble disguise, a few dabbing tears on the witness stand.

The Post offers some snippets of testimony to convey the tone of things:

Prosecutor: "Of those 80 appointments, approximately how many times did you have sex?"

Ex-call girl: "Seventy-nine. . . . All except the gentleman who was a quadriplegic."

and:

Defense attorney: "Ma'am, you ultimately decided that this wasn't for you, right? . . . I believe you were tired of lying to your boyfriend, correct?"

Ex-call girl: "Yes."

Defense attorney: "And you're not particularly happy to be here, are you, ma'am?"

Ex-call girl: "Who would be?"

Amen to that, eh, Sen. Vitter?

Torture

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | April 11, 2008, 10:05AM

Thanks to ABC News and the AP's follow-up yesterday, we now have a very good idea of how the U.S. began to torture detainees in early 2002, even before the Justice Department had officially blessed the techniques by way of the infamous August, 2002 memo by John Yoo.

ABC reported earlier this week that certain brutal interrogation techniques were approved by the National Security Council's Principals Committee following Abu Zubaydah's capture in March, 2002. Among the members of that council were Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and it was chaired by Condoleezza Rice, then the National Security Advisor.

The question was what CIA interrogators could do to Zubaydah and by extension other high value detainees. (It's worth recalling what FBI agents say about what information Zubaydah ultimately provided.) The obvious background to all this is that the CIA interrogators did not want to later find themselves prosecuted for using torture. So everything got this high-level sign off, down to the smallest detail, according to the AP:

At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of "principals" fully understood what the al-Qaida detainees would undergo.

At the same time, John Yoo and colleagues at the Justice Department were busy working on a clear legal authorization for all of this.

He described the pressure of the situation last week to Esquire:

Yoo: The interrogation question came up, I think, in March, when Abu Zubaydah was captured. That’s what provoked that question....

Esquire: You weren’t under extraordinary time pressure?

Yoo: We were under time pressure.

Esquire: Days, weeks?

Yoo: The final version we didn’t get done till August. But we would show drafts before.

Esquire: They were taking action?

Yoo: They needed to have a sense before it was finalized what the basic outlines are.

Esquire: How long did it take to give an answer, go ahead do it?

Yoo: I don’t remember.

Esquire: Weeks, months?

Yoo: Probably weeks.

Esquire: So that’s a fair amount of time pressure, Zubaydah’s in custody.

Yoo: If you had the luxury of time, you’d spend years on this, without a doubt.

Esquire: What concerns came up, back and forth with the White House?

Yoo: There wasn’t a lot of back and forth -- people would say this is wrong, you need to delete this. I think that there was no pressure from any other agency from within the department that the opinion was going too far -- or that it wasn’t going far enough. It was very much hands off. That doesn’t surprise me considering how sensitive the issue was, people wanted the office I think to take the full responsibility.

The memo that emerged, the so-called Bybee memo, after the then-chief of the Office of Legal Counsel who signed off on it (even though Yoo, the deputy, actually authored it ), was just what the doctor ordered, the "Golden Shield," as it was called, for the CIA's interrogations. The Office of Legal Counsel, remember, has the power to effectively issue "advance pardons" for activity of dubious legality.

ABC quotes a source as saying that Ashcroft at one point asked aloud after one Principals meeting, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly." Nevertheless, Ashcroft did sign off on Yoo's "Golden Shield," a memo that was later withdrawn by Jack Goldsmith after he took over at OLC. Goldsmith has called that memo "slapdash" and deeply flawed.

But the "Golden Shield" did not end the Principals meetings. ABC reports that the CIA was still nervous and still returned again and again for approval from the Principals Committee for the OK for certain "enhanced interrogation" techniques even after Goldsmith had withdrawn the Bybee memo:

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."

Must Read

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Paul Kiel | April 10, 2008, 9:35AM

After all that talk, finally a decision. Behold, America, your new (sort of) way forward in Iraq:

President Bush plans to announce today that he will cut Army combat tours in Iraq from 15 months to 12 months, returning rotations to where they were before last year's troop buildup in an effort to alleviate the tremendous stress on the military, administration officials said.

The move is in response to intense pressure from service commanders who have expressed anxiety about the toll of long deployments on their soldiers and, more broadly, about the U.S. military's ability to confront unanticipated threats. Bush will announce the decision during a national speech, in which aides said he will also embrace Army Gen. David H. Petraeus's plan to indefinitely suspend a drawdown of forces.

The twin decisions may set the course for U.S. policy in Iraq through the fall and perhaps for the rest of Bush's presidency....

The bottom line seems to be that after pulling out the extra forces Bush sent last year, the United States will keep about 140,000 troops in Iraq at least through the November presidential election....

But Bush's decision will affect only those troops sent to Iraq as of Aug. 1 or later, meaning that those already there still have to complete 15-month tours. Bobby Muller, president of Veterans for America, an advocacy group, said that nearly half of the Army's active-duty frontline units are currently deployed for 15 months, and that Bush's decision leaves them out.

And how will you know whether things are going well, well enough to expect any troop withdrawals before the end of the year? As Gen. David Petraeus made abundantly clear this week, it's not clear. It's a lack of clarity shared at the highest levels of the administration:

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration had abandoned the benchmarks [Congress set for Iraq] as a strict standard of progress because establishing a secure Iraq would also depend on factors other than political and military progress.

Over two days of testimony, General Petraeus repeatedly was asked to explain the conditions that would allow further withdrawals, but he answered that they were not based on some easily defined measurements.

Asked for elaboration, the senior administration official said, "It's a very hard concept to explain publicly because it doesn't feature a sort of setting of the dial. It features what we call a running assessment."

Bush is set to speak at 11:30 this morning.

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Paul Kiel | April 9, 2008, 10:00AM

In the annals of public service, it was not a high point. Last Halloween, at a fundraising event for charitable organizations held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Headquarters Building, they held a costume contest. And the winner was a white lawyer dressed in dreadlocks and prison stripes.

When it came time to present himself to the judges, amng them Julie Myers, the chief of ICE, he said "I’m a Jamaican detainee from Krome — obviously, I’ve escaped.” Krome is an ICE Detention facility in Miami that is mostly filled with Jamaican, Haitian and Latin American detainees. The judges, Myers among them, laughed, according to a report (pdf) issued yesterday by the House Committee on Homeland Security. Later, Myers posed with the winner:

At some point later that day, Myers apparently realized that others might not appreciate the fun of the costume and ordered that the pictures be destroyed. In a letter to Congress in November of 2007 (after news of the costume broke), Myers explained that she "was not aware at the time of the contest that the employee disguised his skin color," but that she believed "that it was inappropriate for me to recognize any individual wearing an escaped prisoner costume.”

So on that same day, she ordered the pictures deleted, according to yesterday's report, as part of ""a coordinated effort to conceal the circumstances surrounding the party." Myers' nomination was still pending before the Senate at that time. The committee report is titled "The ICE Halloween Party: Trick, Treat, or Cover-up?" The committee appears to come down on the cover-up side of the question.

As for Myers, her spokesperson tells The New York Times that trying to curb the damage wasn't the same thing as a cover-up:

Kelly A. Nantel, an agency spokeswoman, confirmed Tuesday that Ms. Myers had ordered that the photographs be deleted, but said she had done so because she belatedly realized that the costume was inappropriate and that it would be offensive if the photos were included in any agency publications.

But Ms. Nantel said that Ms. Myers never tried to cover up that the event had occurred. In fact, Ms. Myers sent a message to all agency employees two days after the party acknowledging that “a few of the costumes were inappropriate.”

“To suggest she somehow coordinated a cover-up is absolutely false,” Ms. Nantel said.

Rather unfortunately for Myers, the pictures were not completely deleted and were restored. They were released to CNN in February as a result of a FOIA request.

In any case, the committee has used the occurrence to point out the lack of diversity at ICE and DHS more broadly, noting that ICE has zero African-American senior executives and 28 whites. It's a point that lawmakers were able to demonstrate when Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff last visited the committee:

Anger among some African American lawmakers about diversity in the Homeland Security Department led to a testy exchange with Chertoff during a March hearing. Lawmakers asked Chertoff's staff to stand. About 10 people stood.

Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) pointed out that all the staff members were white men. "Please reassure me that your staff is more diverse than that," he asked Chertoff, who seemed taken aback.

"That is definitely the case," Chertoff said, as other lawmakers looked visibly skeptical.

Hearings on diversity in the department are planned for next month.

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Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | April 8, 2008, 9:35AM

Do you remember that chart?

It was the most memorable of the briefing slides Gen. David Petraeus took with him to Capitol Hill last September. And then, as now, it's all about the question marks.

Today, Petraeus is expected to tell Congress that we ought to wait and see before further reducing troop levels. Petraeus will tout the success of the surge, while at the same time acknowledging failures that require a continued U.S. presence in Iraq. Sure, violence has dropped, but as The New York Times reports this morning, "[a]fter an overall decline in attacks against civilians and American and Iraqi security forces in Baghdad over the past several months, the number more than doubled in March from the previous month." But, on the other hand, that recent violence is all the more reason to delay further troop withdrawals, isn't it?

And The Washington Post is ready for a similar theme:

Petraeus is expected to cite Iranian assistance to Mahdi Army forces as another reason to carefully consider any further troop withdrawals. But U.S. intelligence officials have noted that Iran has also provided training and weapons to all Shiite militias, including those allied with Maliki. "One reality of Basra is that you have Iranian-influenced organizations fighting each other," said one intelligence official. "On multiple levels, Iran has its hooks" in all of them, the official added.

We'll be providing continuing updates on the hearings throughout the day.

Note: Here's one thing to watch for. You can be sure that this time around, Petraeus will have a better answer to this question.

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Paul Kiel | April 7, 2008, 9:56AM

After spending almost a year in prison, ex-Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL), released while his appeal to his conviction progresses, appeared on 60 Minutes last night to give his account of the key facts of his case and issue a challenge to Karl Rove. He also admitted, when asked if the prosecution had managed to destroy his political ambitions, "oh, they've accomplished that, I think."

In February, 60 Minutes reported on what has become known as the textbook example of a political prosecution by the Bush administration's Justice Department.

Nick Bailey, the prosecution's star witness in the case, 60 Minutes reported, had been coached to the point where he had to write his carefully recollected testimony over and over again to make sure he got it right. Bailey, a former Siegelman aide, testified at trial that Siegelman had told him that businessman Richard Scrushy had given him a $250,000 contribution to his state lottery campaign, and that all he wanted for it was an appointment on a state health board.

Last night, Siegelman gave his side -- that Scrushy, who had supported Siegelman's opponent, had given the money at Siegelman's request, that there had been no strings attached, and that Scrushy had not even wanted the spot on the board.

Seigelman also challenged Rove to testify to Congress. Rove has given blanket denials to playing any role in the Siegelman case and lately has taken to bashing 60 Minutes for reporting allegations by Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican Alabama lawyer who's testified to being involved in conversations where Rove's role in the prosecution was discussed. In his latest interview with GQ, Rove called CBS "a shoddy operation."

And there was also this memorable quote from the interview, where Siegelman describes watching February's broadcast of the 60 Minutes segment with his fellow inmates:

"Well immediately people were standing up, sayin', 'You got screwed.' And I'd say, 'Well, you know, I think there were a lot of ya'll that got screwed.' And then, one guy stood up and said, 'No, I was guilty. You got screwed.'"

Siegelman will also be appearing on Dan Abrams' show tonight on MSNBC.

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Paul Kiel | April 4, 2008, 10:04AM

No doubt that good news about Iraq has been hard to come by lately for the administration. The failure of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's offensive against the Shiite militia of Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra and Baghdad still stings, and the postmortems by The New York Times and Washington Post are not pretty. The Times also reports this morning that "more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen either refused to fight or simply abandoned their posts" during the fighting last week, a toll that features "dozens of officers, including at least two senior field commanders in the battle."

Earlier this week, just after the offensive went kablooey, intelligence officials delivered a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to Congress. It's a bit of tentative good news amid all the bad. If the administration has its way, however, you'll never see a declassified version of it. Director of National Intelligence Mike "public debate of intelligence issues kills Americans" McConnell will do what he can to ensure that. Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA) have begun a push for the administration to release a declassified version of the report, writing a letter earlier this week to McConnell earlier this week (see below).

The general conclusion of the report is evident from the headlines this morning. "Report: Security in Iraq is improving," says the AP. "U.S. Study Finds Progress in Iraq, but Fragile Security and Potential for Terror Attacks," says the Times. A senior administration official tells The Wall Street Journal, "The NIE update confirmed that the surge strategy the president announced in January of last year is working. There's more work to be done, but progress has obviously been made."

And that pretty much seems to be the scope of it. Democrats who have read it are mightily unimpressed and say that it's just part of the broader PR push which will culminate in next week's testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

As Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) puts it, "The stuff that was positive, they emphasized. The negative, they stated, but deemphasized." Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) complains that it doesn't cover most of the stuff you'd want it to cover: "It's much less insightful than other, recent products and focuses narrowly on counterterrorism efforts in Iraq and the progress of the Iraqi leadership."

And Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a member of the House intelligence committee, is mighty suspicious -- both of the report's content and its timing: "One might ask whether the timing of the release and the apparent departure from usual procedures means this is more of a political document than an intelligence document," he tells the Journal.

As the Journal points out, "intelligence reports are often delayed by major developments that could affect the assessments, such as the Sadr fighting." This report, however, was not delayed, and there is no mention of the failed offensive in the report. It has, however, come right in time for the Petraeus and Crocker hearings next week.

Read more »

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Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | April 3, 2008, 9:56AM

Months after Justice Department lawyer John Yoo carefully delineated for the Pentagon how U.S. personnel could torture detainees all they wanted, the abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred. Does this put a dent in the "few bad apples" theory?

The New York Times mulls it and comes back with: "Some legal experts and advocates said Wednesday that the document, written the month that the United States invaded Iraq, adds to evidence that the abuse of prisoners in military custody may have involved signals from higher officials and not just irresponsible actions by low-level personnel." So it's no smoking gun.

The memo was intended to deal with "'unlawful combatants,' a label that would not apply to the largely Iraqi population captured during the Iraq war." Still, the natural suspicion remains that Yoo's expansive parsing might have migrated over to Iraq. After all, Major General Geoffrey Miller, then the commanding officer at Guantanamo Bay, did travel to Iraq in August of 2003 to advise officials there on interrogating Iraqi detainees. Miller had been briefed on the Pentagon's guidelines for interrogation, which owed much to Yoo's green light.

Not so, says Yoo:

“The ‘culture of abuse’ theory has no reliable evidence to support it,” Mr. Yoo wrote. He noted that several military investigations had found that what he called “the appalling abuses” at Abu Ghraib were not authorized by any military policy.

“While each case of abuse is regrettable,” Mr. Yoo wrote, “it is not possible for a large organization charged with protecting the national security, under extraordinary pressure, to perform its mission error-free.”

Shit happens.

Torture

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | April 2, 2008, 10:07AM

More than five years after its composition, we finally see a copy of John Yoo's March 14, 2003 memo to William Haynes, then the Defense Department's general counsel. It was, as The New York Times and Washington Post report, a green light for military interrogators to use just about any technique the Pentagon deemed useful. Criminal statutes prohibiting torture stopped at the water's edge, because, Yoo wrote, "such criminal statutes, if they were misconstrued to apply to the interrogation of enemy combatants, would conflict with the Constitution's grant of Commander in Chief power solely to the President."

As Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, tells the Post, "it appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war." As Marty Lederman, a former lawyer at OLC writes, "it is, in effect, the blueprint that led to Abu Ghraib and the other abuses within the armed forces in 2003 and early 2004."

Despite the fact that Congress has been asking for the declassification of this memo, it appears to have only been released now as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The memo is 81 pages long (here's Part I and Part II). We've posted one of the more remarkable sections here.

In that section, Yoo explains how even if a particularly brutal interrogation might "arguably cross the line drawn" by the law, "certain justification defenses might be available." Those are "necessity" (the "choice of evils," the evils being torture and a terrorist attack) and "self-defense" ("If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.") Just about the only actions that were impermissible and indefensible in Yoo's eyes, it seems, were those motivated strictly by malice or sadism.

The memo was rescinded just nine months later by Jack Goldsmith, when he came in to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Yoo himself doesn't see what all the hubbub is about. From the Post:

Yoo... defended the memo in an e-mail yesterday, saying the Justice Department altered its opinions "for appearances' sake." He said his successors "ignored the Department's long tradition in defending the President's authority in wartime."

"Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution," Yoo wrote, "our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near boilerplate."

But as Marty explains, the legal reasoning of Yoo's memo is only half the scandal. The circumstances under which it was instituted constitute the other half. More on that in a bit.

Surveillance

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | April 1, 2008, 9:57AM

OK, things were said. Patriotism was impugned, fear was mongered, attack ads were run. But that doesn't mean we can't work something out, does it?

The administration is ready to talk turkey, reports The Wall Street Journal. But if the administration "has signaled to Democratic lawmakers it is open to negotiation" about the surveillance bill, it's not entirely clear just yet where the administration is willing to give.

The centerpiece of negotiations, of course, will be whether telecoms will receive retroactive immunity for their participation in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Though a number of Senate Dems crossed over to support that, the House has managed to hold firm, twice passing a bill without retroactive immunity. Some Dems are floating "a pared-back version of immunity," such as limiting immunity to certain aspects of the program or capping possible damages. Talks about other aspects of the legislation, for instance concerning judicial oversight of surveillance, might come more easily.

But the reason for the White House's new tack is pretty clear: they used every weapon at their disposal -- presidential statements and press conferences, alarming letters and public appearances by the director of national intelligence and attorney general, time pressures created by the lapsing of legislation or a Congressional recess -- and none of it worked. The House, after all that, still passed a bill a world away from what the administration was pushing for. It was, as the Journal points out, a strikingly different outcome from August, when the White House's squeeze play worked to perfection.

The difference? Well, a number of things. But one thing in particular is the fact that Dems no longer trust the administration's point man, DNI Mike McConnell. From today's Los Angeles Times:

On the eve of a House vote on controversial wiretapping legislation last month, the nation's intelligence director, J. Michael McConnell, convened a secret weekend meeting in northern Virginia with members of the House Intelligence Committee.

The two-day session was designed to promote a calmer atmosphere for discussing an array of intelligence issues, including the nation's eavesdropping laws. But participants said the event ended with a series of acrimonious exchanges.

Democrats accused McConnell of making exaggerated claims and of doing the bidding of the Bush administration, according to officials who attended the event. McConnell bristled at the Democrats' charges, and chastised members of the committee for failing to defend the intelligence community amid a barrage of bad press.

As a wise man once said, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."