Good.

Via the AP:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration filed court papers Monday claiming a federal marriage law discriminates against gays, even as government lawyers continue to defend the law.

Justice Department lawyers are seeking to dismiss a suit brought by a gay California couple challenging the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The administration's response to the case has angered gay activists who see it as backtracking on campaign promises made by Barack Obama.

In the court papers, the administration urges the repeal of the law but says in the meantime, government lawyers will continue to defend it as a law on the books.

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No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Mark Danner's coverage of the International Committee of the Red Cross report on the CIA's treatment of detainees is maybe the most important addition to our body of knowledge on the Bush administration's torture program since The Dark Side. He goes through the problems torture creates in the pursuit of justice ("If the 'coercive' and 'abusive' interrogation of [twentieth 9/11 hijacker Mohammed al-]Qahtani makes trying him impossible, one may doubt that any of the fourteen 'high-value detainees' whose accounts are given in this report will ever be tried and sentenced in an internationally recognized and sanctioned legal proceeding"). He also documents the organized cruelty in sickening detail, once again elaborates the practical limitations of it, and draws a series of unflinching conclusions ("Beginning in the spring of 2002 the United States government began to torture prisoners...The most senior officers of the US government, President George W. Bush first among them, repeatedly and explicitly lied about this, both in reports to international institutions and directly to the public").

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

After September 11th George Bush authorized warrantless wiretapping called the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) and for several years it went on under (at best) arguably legal circumstances. On March 4th, 2004 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was briefed on a review of the program by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC); he indicated changes needed to be made. Six days later the dubious authorization expired, leaving not so much as a fig leaf of legal cover. Bush then reauthorized the TSP the next day without a DOJ certificate of legality, and it continued (pdf) "for a period of several weeks following March 11, 2004." Details are fuzzy - we do not know exactly when it was re-certified (as far as I know), but the key point is that as of then there was not even the flimsiest legal cover for warrantless wiretapping.

On that very day Wendell Belew, a Washington D.C. lawyer, was wiretapped by the government without a warrant. He represented a Saudi Arabian charity under federal suspicion and the government was listening in. Then, as Ryan Singel reported, in an epic bureaucratic failure the details the wiretapping were delivered to him. When it was discovered agents seized the documents back and basically told Belew he should forget he had ever seen anything. When he realized what it might have meant he sued.

For those of us already persuaded of the organized criminality of the Bush White House this represents a nearly miraculous confluence of events. The Bush OLC threw sand into the gears of justice by issuing memos known as "Golden Shields" because they can be used to claim innocence on anything they cover. Any charges against high ranking officials can be disputed by their pointing to the lawyers and saying they believed it was legal. Forget whether it is a legally valid strategy or whether it ultimately would prevail; all that matters is that it would be used to contest any charges and make the legal waters murky. This particular case, though, occurred when no Golden Shields were in effect and the TSP had not yet been reauthorized. It happened during that tiny window when the administration was completely legally exposed.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

In the last two weeks we have seen multiple examples of what civil liberties advocates have been warning about over and over again. The infrastructure of the police state, put together behind the scenes and with secret rooms and fusion centers, was put on display in a number of different places.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

I am slowly reading The Dark Side and so was especially struck by this from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers: "If there's any comfort to be found in Mayer's account, or in any of the stories coming out about this administration's overreach, it's in the stories of those who didn't go crazy." We are going through an extraordinarily trying time for our nation's ideals, and while I have focused almost exclusively on the authors of these trials there are some uplifting stories as well. Some individuals have been willing to resist the cruel and authoritarian "War on Terror" mindset when confronted (sometimes unexpectedly) by it, and they deserve our admiration. Here are some examples.

Of course, they're just Black People so it's not really that important. But I though you'd like to know, and Steven is wondering about a Second Civil Rights Movement.

Thousands of chanting demonstrators filled the streets of this little Louisiana town Thursday in support of six black teenagers initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate.

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At the end of a very long story about how the Bush administration has remade the Department of Justice, we get this extremely buried lead.

It looks like the loyal Bushes are giving Christianists bonuses just because they're Christianists. Hey, doing well by doing good, eh?

Several career lawyers said that some political appointees favored the religious-oriented employees, intervening to steer $1,000 to $4,000 annual merit bonuses to them.

Well, of course, that's only a few thousand, right?

Okay, at the last minute he was reminded that what he was doing was unconstitutional and added a sentence. But if Murray Waas is to be believed, there's something really, really fishy here.

Can't quote a lot out of the National Journal, and this is a moderately long piece. Really quite balanced--all relevant "Clinton did it too!" excuses are noted. But Abu Al basically delegated to Sampson and Goodling--who had maybe one actual prosecution between them as legal experience--authority to take dictation from the White House on hiring and firing decisions of all non-Civil Service Justice Department employees.

And hide it from Congress.

oopsie...Abu Al may have to come back and sit with the dunce Can't Recall cap on again for awhile longer.

Yeah it's over at the House of Orange but you have got to see The Charts. You've probably heard of them but if you haven't actually seen them you can't know just how powerful they are.

These have to be on the front page of every paper in the country tomorrow. They should lead off the evening news for at least as many nights as a tragic but isolated shooting incident did. It might even perversely seem to at least slightly exonerate Abu Al G's repeated "can't recalls" in his testimony the other day, because who COULD recall all the possible exchanges between the Bush White House and the Bush Justice Department. The contrast between this setup and the one of the previous administration should STFU any further whine of "But Clinton Did It Too!" that these people who hate Clinton so much leap to at every opportunity.

Go look. It'll take ten seconds. Then (those with graphics skill 'n' shit) copy them and start spreading them everywhere.

Clammyc says no. Some highlights:

However, that isn’t really why I am writing this – I am looking more at WHY they won’t testify as opposed to the underlying issues, documents, and possible crimes (I will say that the fired attorneys will most likely provide enough information regarding whether any "obstruction of justice" charges would be warranted with or without Rove and Miers).

It all obviously goes to the matter of Executive Privilege. And the question is – will Congress fight the Administration all the way to the Supreme Court (only to run out the clock and possibly lose in this case anyway), or will they focus on all other areas of this case and determine whether charges can be brought or if this will truly become yet another slimy but political matter. The upshot if it remaining political is that it will damage the republicans – the downside is that it pisses off the American public because Congress was spending too much time on this as opposed to getting us out of Iraq and promoting policies that are good for We the People.

Whether this technically should even fall under executive privilege is a question in and of itself – but will likely be resolved through negotiations or in court.

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It's pretty well out in the open now. The United States Government wants to know every single bit of information that goes in and out of your computer when it's connected to the Internet. Is that clear enough? Do you want that to happen? Can you be persuaded or browbeaten into believing that if they JUST use this information for some "good reason" like stopping kiddie porn, or preventing terrorism, that (a) well then that's okay; that good cause is so important it's worth giving up a little of my privacy for, and besides, I don't do kiddie porn or terrorism so what do I have to worry about? or that (b) they will in fact only use this information for that purpose?

If you persuade yourself to believe either of the above, you're an idiot. Go away, we do not want you as a reader. You are the enemy, you are one of Them. Fuck off, eat shit and die.

Michael Shaheen, who headed the OPR from its inception until 1997, said that his staff "never, ever was denied a clearance," and that OPR had conducted numerous investigations involving the activities of attorneys general. "No attorney general has ever said no to me," Shaheen said. He added that, over the past several years, the OPR's muscle has degraded, in part because it was stripped of its authority to pursue criminal investigations. But under the Bush administration, the weakening has been especially pronounced, Shaheen said. "I just think that the White House has so frightened everybody.... If I were still at OPR and was told I couldn't have security clearances, the first word out of my mouth ... would have been, 'Balderdash!' "