Last June, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and 55 other congressional Democrats signed a letter to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey demanding a special prosecutor to investigate the growing body of evidence that Bush administration officials had sanctioned torture, which had been documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Not unexpectedly, Mukasey — a staunch defender of Bush’s theories about expansive presidential powers — ignored the letter. Now, however, despite even more evidence of torture and a Democratic administration in place, the calls for a special prosecutor have grown muted.

Aides to several Democratic lawmakers who signed the June 2008 letter told me that the focus has shifted to the economy and that pressure for a special prosecutor to bring criminal charges over the Bush administration’s past actions could become a distraction to that focus.

They added that the most that now can be expected is either a “blue ribbon” investigative panel such as Conyers proposed earlier this year or a similar “truth and reconciliation commission” as advocated by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. Not a single signer of last year’s letter has stepped forward to renew the demand for a special prosecutor to the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder.

The loss of Democratic interest in a special prosecutor suggests that the signers made the recommendation last year knowing that Mukasey would ignore it but thinking that the letter would appease the Democratic “base,” which was calling for accountability on Bush’s war crimes.

This readiness of Democrats to put the pursuit of bipartisanship over the pursuit of justice — after a victorious election – parallels their actions 16 years ago when President Bill Clinton and a Democratic-controlled Congress swept under the rug investigations of the Reagan-Bush-41 era, such as the Iran-Contra scandal and Iraqgate support for Saddam Hussein. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

However, this time, Bush-43’s apparent violations of international laws prohibiting torture are forcing global demands for action, if the United States fails to live up to its obligations to enforce its own commitment to anti-torture laws and treaties.

Torture is a war crime that carries universal enforcement, which means that prosecutors of other nations can bring charges if the nation directly implicated doesn’t act. In that regard, Spanish investigative judge Baltasar Garzon took the initial steps last week to investigate whether six high-level Bush officials, including key lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, violated laws against torture.

Torture Results

Also, over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the waterboarding — or simulated drowning — of “war on terror” suspect Abu Zabaida induced him to provide a host of new leads about al-Qaeda plots, but that his torture-induced claims turned out to be time-consuming dead-ends.

“Not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations,” the Post reported.

“Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.” [Washington Post, March 29, 2009]

Two weeks ago, other evidence about Bush’s torture policy surfaced when journalist Mark Danner published chilling details from a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that concluded that the abuse of 14 “high-value” detainees at CIA secret prisons “constituted torture.”

“In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” according to the ICRC report cited by Danner. Since the ICRC’s responsibilities involve ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war, the organization’s findings have legal consequence.

The June 2008 letter from Conyers apparently was prompted by the same or similar ICRC findings, citing “several instances of acts of torture against detainees, including soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and lighting it on fire, subjecting a prisoner to sexual abuse and forcing a prisoner to eat a baseball.”

Conyers and the other Democrats told Mukasey then that the ICRC findings alone warranted action but were buttressed by other information that senior Bush administration officials met in the White House to approve the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced techniques” and that “President Bush was aware of, and approved of the meetings taking place.”

The letter added: “This information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law.

“We believe that these serious and significant revelations warrant an immediate investigation to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and other U.S. and international laws.

“Despite the seriousness of the evidence, the Justice Department has brought prosecution against only one civilian for an interrogation-related crime. Given that record, we believe it is necessary to appoint a special counsel in order to ensure that a thorough and impartial investigation occurs.”

Still Waiting

Nearly nine months have passed since Conyers and the other Democratic lawmakers sent the letter to Mukasey. Since then, more evidence has piled up implicating at least a dozen senior Bush administration officials in sanctioning a policy of torture.

For instance, in January, Susan Crawford, the retired judge who heads military commissions at Guantanamo, became the highest ranking U.S. official who said the interrogation of at least one detainee at Guantanamo met the legal definition of torture and as a result she would not allow a war crimes tribunal against him to proceed.

Last week, Vijay Padmanabhan, the State Department’s chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation, told the Associated Press that the Bush administration overreacted after 9/11 and set up a policy of torture at the facility.

“I think Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration,” Padmanabhan told the AP. He criticized other “overreactions” such as extraordinary renditions, waterboarding at secret CIA prisons and “other enhanced interrogation techniques that would constitute torture.”

Meanwhile, other Bush administration veterans, including Vice President Dick Cheney, have spoken openly about their support for and approval of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods, although they continued to insist that the tactics did not constitute torture.

During a speech at the University of Texas at Austin recently, former Attorney General John Ashcroft said, “there are things that you can call waterboarding that I am thoroughly convinced are not torture. There are things that you can call waterboarding that might be torture. …

“The point that ought to be understood is that throwing a term around recklessly for its emotional content doesn’t really get you anywhere.”

In waterboarding, a person is strapped to a board with his head tilted downward and a cloth covering his face. Water is then poured over the cloth forcing the panicked gag reflex associated with drowning. It has been condemned as torture since the days of the Spanish Inquisition and its use has resulted in past criminal prosecutions under U.S. law.

Before leaving office, Vice President Cheney said he approved waterboarding on at least three “high value” detainees and the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 other prisoners. President Bush made a somewhat vaguer acknowledgement of authorizing these techniques.

Admissions of Crimes

Civil rights groups said Bush and Cheney’s comments amounted to an admission of war crimes. The ACLU called on Attorney General Holder two weeks ago to appoint a special prosecutor to launch a probe into the Bush administration’s torture practices.

“The fact that such crimes have been committed can no longer be doubted or debated, nor can the need for an independent prosecutor be ignored by a new Justice Department committed to restoring the rule of law,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said.

“Given the increasing evidence of deliberate and widespread use of torture and abuse, and that such conduct was the predictable result of policy changes made at the highest levels of government, an independent prosecutor is clearly in the public interest,” Romero said.

Holder has not responded to the ACLU’s request. Over the next several weeks, however, the evidence of torture should continue to mount.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to release a voluminous report on the treatment of alleged terrorist detainees held in U.S. custody and the brutal interrogation techniques they were subjected to, according to Defense Department and intelligence sources.

The declassified version of the report is 200 pages, contains 2,000 footnotes, and will reveal a wealth of new information about the genesis of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, according to these sources. The investigation relied upon the testimony of 70 people, generated 38,000 pages of documents, and took 18 months to complete.

The Justice Department also is expected to release a declassified version of a critical report prepared by its Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigated legal work by former attorneys at the Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the White House on the limits of presidential authority.

The report concluded that three key attorneys — John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury — blurred the lines between an attorney charged with providing independent legal advice to the White House and a policy advocate who was working to advance the administration’s goals, which included a legal justification for torture, said the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the contents of the report are still classified.

On April 2, the Justice Department also is expected to release three still-classified legal opinions that Bradbury wrote in May 2005, reaffirming Bush’s claimed authority to subject “war on terror” prisoners to harsh interrogations.

I often bemoan how the the media’s policy of sanitizing combat images and its failure to report what the true face of war looks like have caused the public to be detached from the carnage wrought by the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

For nearly a decade, both wars have largely been reported by the media and explained to the public by lawmakers in statistical terms; thousands of U.S. soldiers killed in combat, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, and three-quarters of a million veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress

Perhaps the media is not entirely at fault for failing to provide deeper insight into the psychological impact the wars have had on more than one million U.S. veterans and their families.

Until recently, the press has been prohibited from photographing veterans returning from combat in flag-draped coffins, and funerals for the fallen were likewise off-limits.

But by relying heavily on numbers and press releases as a way of covering both conflicts, the public has been rendered incapable of experiencing or feeling any dramatic element associated with the devastation. It’s a sad truth that the average person is unable to accurately say how many U.S soldiers have been killed and wounded since the wars began (4,257 dead, more than 31,000 wounded, 320,000 diagnosed with brain injuries).

That’s how far removed from reality our society has become in the eight years since the fighting first began. We know the U.S. is currently engaged in two wars; we just have no idea what impact those wars have had on the soldiers and veterans who have bravely served our country.

These are the conclusions I arrived at after reading Marine Capt. Tyler E. Boudreau’s first-person exposé of the time he spent in Iraq and the struggles he and his comrades faced in the aftermath of their deployment.

If Boudreau’s brutally honest, devastatingly accurate, hard-hitting memoir, Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine, were read by the powers that be in Washington, D.C. and by the journalists assigned to cover both military conflicts, there is absolutely no way in hell the plight of our nation’s veterans would take a backseat to the issues currently dominating the evening news coverage or the topics of conversations at dinner tables throughout the country.

Boudreau’s book is so powerful and so superbly written that I found myself reading whole chapters twice just so I could study his writing style and ensure that the graphic imagery he describes is forever seared into my consciousness.

What makes Boudreau’s account such a page-turner is the descriptive nature of his prose. Reading it made me feel like I was embedded with the Marine Corps veteran. There were many instances in which I felt my heart beat faster, my eyes well up with tears, my adrenaline pump through my veins.

Describing an oncoming vehicle that may or may not be a suicide bomber, Boudreau writes:

Pulses jumped and our voices grew sharp and edgy. I leaned out the window and aimed my rifle at the truck. We struggled to see inside it, to spot some kind of clue that might tell us with any certainty whether or not the driver was a suicide bomber. My heart was racing. I was breathing hard as it drew closer and closer. Fire? Don’t fire? It was so difficult to know what to do. Will we live? Will we die? This could be it. And the truck drew closer still. And still we couldn’t seem to come up with a decision. There was no one to ask. There was no manual to reference. There was no time to think it over. There was only now, the moment, and we had to decide. In the end we resolved to hold our fire, and I was glad we did. The truck floated quietly past us without exploding into a million bits of fragmentation in our faces. We stared, agog, at the passengers, a family of four or maybe five crammed into the cab staring back at us, all agog as well.

You know that Boudreau was forced to relive his harrowing experience in Iraq in order to write a book as disturbing and heartwrenching as Packing Inferno.

The “story of Packing Inferno was conceived under fire,” exactly five years ago this month, Boudreau writes in the preface to his book. He eloquently describes how before he was sent to Iraq he had packed dozens of books into his “sea-bag,” one of which was Dante’s Inferno, which he said he didn’t recall taking, but nonetheless gave him a title for his memoir.

I began writing it in Iraq with the war raging around me. When I got home, I found the war was still raging, but it was not outside me anymore, not to touch, or to see, or to hear, or to smell. It was within me. I was no longer packing inferno in my sea-bag, but in my head.

My wife will sometimes catch a shift in my eyes, while we’re talking about groceries, or the kids’ school, or the weather, and she’ll ask me, “What are you thinking about?” She can see I’ve drifted off. But she doesn’t need me to answer, because she knows, and because the answer is always the same.

And therein lies one of the central themes of Boudreau’s 222-page book: the images of the war he has heroically fought have been implanted inside of his mind and are on a permanent loop.

“To say I was duped is not sufficient to lighten the load,” he writes.

The post-traumatic stress of the war in Iraq will forever be a part of Boudreau’s identity and it will be a lifelong battle to keep it in check. For some soldiers, post-traumatic stress is the precursor to suicide, for others it leads to a life of drug abuse, alcoholism, or crime.

Although the word “disorder” usually follows post-traumatic stress, Boudreau objects to the verbiage, calling it an “antiquated” term.

“While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) still uses this term, it is widely rejected by those who work in the field of mental health,” Boudreau wrote in an Author’s Note to his book. “I reject it too… I do not consider the psychological struggle of returning veterans a ‘disorder’ and so I will only refer to this injury as ‘combat stress’ or post-traumatic stress.”

Removing the word “disorder” has helped to eliminate the stigma some veterans say persists when they are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress or the ridicule they endure after seeking help for their deteriorating mental state.

When I spoke with Boudreau recently he told me that part of the stigma has to do with the fact that Marines are supposed to be “tough” and saying that “you feel all broken up because you shot a guy” could make a soldier’s situation worse.

Boudreau said “the smallest action or phrase from a commander can influence Marines and other soldiers not to seek help.”

“I knew the day I left that I would eventually have to return in nine months and manpower is always a struggle,” Boudreau said. “My boss won’t say to deny treatment. But his outlook of me will be negative ” if most of the unit has been discharged due to post-traumatic stress.

Boudreau expanded upon this notion in a recent op-ed published in the Boston Globe.

The pressure to prepare ourselves quickly was intense. When the first Marine came to my office and asked to see the psychiatrist about some troubling issues from our time in Iraq, I was sympathetic. I said, “No problem.” When another half dozen or so Marines approached me with the same request, I was only somewhat concerned.

But when all of them and several more returned from their appointments with recommendations for discharge, I’ll admit I was alarmed. Suddenly I was not as concerned about their mental health as I was about my company’s troop strength.

As all those Marines in my company began filtering out, some from essential positions, I started to worry about the welfare of those remaining. I worried, quite naturally, that if the exodus continued, we might not have enough to accomplish our mission or to survive on the battlefield. My sympathies for those individuals claiming post-traumatic stress began to wane. A commander cannot serve in earnest both the mission and the psychologically wounded.

This underscores a larger issue, one that the U.S. government was totally unprepared to deal with as it planned for the Iraq war.

Prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, documents released by the Department of Veterans Affairs said it expected a maximum of 8,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, according to a study released last year by the RAND Corporation, there are more than 320,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffering from major depression, PTSD and/or traumatic brain injury. The report found that the VA has been and continues to be ill-equipped to deal with these cases when soldiers return from combat, especially after multiple tours.

An Army task force last year also found major flaws in the way the VA treated and cared for veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries.

Boudreau said the treatment of post-traumatic stress is antithetical to the mantra of “Mission Accomplished.”

“The mission will always supersede treatment,” Boudreau said. “And because of that the treatment will always be dubious.”

And all the talk from bureaucrats about putting an end to multiple deployments, which has been blamed on the skyrocketing cases of post-traumatic stress and suicides, is inconceivable,” Boudreau said.

“I’ve heard the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say ‘we have to change this ethic,’” Boudreau said. “But it’s not going to happen. Why? Because the military cannot afford a 20 percent reduction in its force.”

Since writing Packing Inferno, Boudreau has become an outspoken advocate for veterans.

Over the past four months, he has penned op-eds on veterans issues that have been published in the New York Times, Boston Globe and The Progressive.

In a New York Times op-ed, Boudreau argued that the decision not to award Purple Hearts to veterans is wrong and feeds into the cultural stigma the military has for veterans who bear the psychological wounds of war.

“Why, for instance, if a veteran has been given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress and awarded benefits, should he not also be awarded a Purple Heart?

“Perhaps a new decoration, a new medal, could be established specifically for those suffering from post-traumatic stress. It would be awarded to those whose minds and souls have been sundered by war.

“I suggest we call this medal the Black Heart. Certainly the hearts of these soldiers are black, with the terrible things they saw and did on the battlefield. Certainly the country should see these Black Hearts pinned on their chests.”

In addition to his work on behalf of veterans, Boudreau has taken on the Iraqi refugee crisis and recently traveled to Jordan to call attention to the matter. Last year, he and his colleagues formed the nonprofit organization Iraq Veterans’ Refugee Aid Association (IVRAA) in response to inadequate measures by the U.S. government to effectively deal with the crisis, he said.

This summer, Boudreau is undertaking a cross-country bicycle tour with other veterans to search for “what’s on ‘the other side’ of the battlefield.

“It is very much about veterans who have found themselves hurled suddenly to the other side of a catastrophic injury, or Post-Traumatic Stress [sic], or an inexplicably dysfunctional life in the aftermath of war. But it is also about the nature of warfare itself. There is a great mythology associated with battle. We seek ‘the other side’ of that mythology. We seek the other side of ourselves. We travel to ‘the other side’ of the country to find it,” Boudreau explains on his website.

Three years ago, Boudreau, who spent much of his entire adult life in the military, resigned his Marine Corps commission.

“In 2005, after 12 years of active service in the Marine Corps and with growing reservations about the war, I relinquished command of my rifle company and resigned my commission,” Boudreau writes in Packing Inferno. “It struck me that, in our headlong pursuit to deliver freedom and democracy and to expel an oppressive regime and combat terrorism, we had inadvertently lost sight of the very people we’d been deployed to help.”

Packing Inferno is one of the most important historical documents to come out of the Iraq war if for no other reason than it shows what the true face of the Iraq war looks like. It’s a remarkable achievement in war reportage and it deserves to be shelved next to the Great War Books and should be required reading for every lawmaker and students of American history.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney may continue to say, as he did on Sunday, that the interrogation of “war on terror” suspects was “done legally; it was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles.” But those assurances ring hollow.

The true story is coming into ever-sharper focus: high-ranking U.S. officials turning to what Cheney called “the dark side” after the 9/11 attacks and ordering the CIA to create a network of secret prisons. Determined to extract information from suspected terrorists, the White House then collaborated with Justice Department lawyers to find ways around anti-torture laws and American traditions.

Though the outlines of this story have been sketched out over several years, many chilling details are now getting filled in, including an article by author Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books about an ICRC report concluding that the abuse of 14 “high-value” detainees “constituted torture.”

“In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” according to the ICRC report cited by Danner. Since the ICRC’s responsibilities involve ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war, the organization’s findings carry legal weight.

The ICRC report also found that there was a consistency in many details from the detainees who were interviewed separately and that the first “high-value” detainee to be captured, Abu Zubaydah, appeared to have been used as something of a test case by his interrogators. According to various accounts, he was transferred to a secret prison in Thailand and possibly elsewhere to be brutally questioned.

According to Zubaydah’s account to the ICRC:

Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area [3 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet by 6 1/2 feet high]. The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 1/2 feet] in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face….

I was then put into the tall black box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe.

When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.

Zubaydah told the ICRC that CIA interrogators told him he was the first prisoner to be tortured in this way, “so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

Zubaydah also told the ICRC representatives that he was subjected to the drowning sensation of waterboarding, a practice that has been considered torture since the Inquisition. Zubaydah and other detainees added that they were kept naked, placed in frigid rooms and forced to spend long hours in painful “stress” positions.

Danner said the chapter headings of the ICRC report listed some of the torture techniques reported by the detainees to ICRC personnel: “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box.”

Some of these techniques, such as the use of waterboarding on three detainees, have been acknowledged by senior Bush administration officials, including Cheney who has said he approved of specific harsh tactics applied during the interrogations.

Legal Debate

The abuse of Zubaydah paralleled an internal debate at senior levels of the Bush administration over how to provide legal justification for the brutal interrogations. Zubaydah was captured in a raid on a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, that left him badly wounded from three gunshots.

In July 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his legal counsel, William Haynes, solicited input from military psychologists about developing harsh methods that interrogators could use against detainees, according to a report released last year by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Mr. Haynes was not the only senior official considering new interrogation techniques for use against detainees,” the report said. “Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials attended meetings in the White House where specific interrogation techniques were discussed.”

President George W. Bush became obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about terrorist plots against the United States, according to Ron Suskind’s book, The One Percent Doctrine.

“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote, adding that Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

Meanwhile, senior Bush aides were meeting with deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo and other Justice Department lawyers from the powerful Office of Legal Counsel to discuss how anti-torture and other laws applied to interrogation of prisoners in the “war on terror.”

Yoo developed novel theories that defined torture narrowly, permitting acts short of pain associated with “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” In devising this standard, Yoo relied on an obscure 2000 health benefits statute.

A report prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility determined that Yoo blurred the lines between an attorney charged with providing independent legal advice to the White House and a policy advocate who was working to advance the administration’s goals, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the contents of the report are still classified.

As evidence of Bush’s torture policies began to build — especially after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004 — Bush and Cheney built a line of defense, insisting that they had not committed war crimes because they were operating under legal guidance from the Justice Department.

However, that argument could collapse if it were determined that the lawyers were colluding with administration officials in setting policy, rather than providing professional legal advice. Already, extensive evidence exists, including Yoo’s own writings, showing that he participated in high-level administration meetings to discuss and set policy.

Other evidence on the public record suggests that the Bush administration’s intent to use brutal interrogations pre-dated the legal discussions with Yoo.

Cheney helped set the administration on a lawless course only days after the 9/11 attacks. On Sept. 16, 2001, he told NBC’s Tim Russert that “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.

“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

The next day, Sept. 17. 2001, President Bush signed a “memorandum of understanding” that authorized the CIA to establish a “hidden global internment network” for the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists, Danner reported in his article.

On Monday, CIA Director Leon Panetta enlisted the help of former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire to assist him with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the agency’s Bush-era interrogation and detention practices, Panetta’s office said

Rudman will work as Panetta’s “special adviser” assisting the CIA in dealing with inquiries from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, announced earlier this month that her committee will conduct a year-long secret investigation into the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” and detention practices and whether the methods resulted in actionable intelligence.

Panetta said he does not support any inquiry that would lead to the prosecution of CIA personnel who carried out the interrogations, such as those used against Zubaydah.

While it’s unclear whether the investigations will lead to recommendations that individuals under scrutiny be prosecuted, the OPR investigation into a torture memo drafted by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is likely to recommend that the memo’s authors, Jay Bybee and John Yoo, be rebuked for the way in which they interpreted a law that formed the basis of the memo, said people involved in the probe, which is being conducted by the agency’s director H. Marshall Jarrett.

Peter Carr, the acting director of the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs said in an e-mail the OPR “investigation is ongoing.”

Bybee was the assistant attorney general at the OLC. He is now a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Yoo was Bybee’s deputy. He is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Yoo was the principal author of the Aug. 1, 2002 memo and Bybee signed it. It was addressed to Alberto Gonzales, who was the White House counsel at the time.

The OPR investigation into the Aug. 1, 2002 torture memo was launched in late 2004 after the Abu Ghraib prison abuses were documented. Under Gonzales, the OPR has met some resistance in its attempt to obtain documents and interview officials, people familiar with the probe said, in explaining why the investigation is now in its fourth year.

In a letter released in February to Sen. Dick Durbin, who inquired about the probe, Jarrett said, “Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.”

The probe has centered on Yoo’s use of an obscure health benefits statute from 2000 in defining torture. That statue became the basis for authorizing enhanced interrogation methods, the OPR official said.

Yoo and Bybee’s legal opinion stated that unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee results in injury “such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions” than the interrogation technique could not be defined as torture.

OPR investigators, who interviewed Bybee and Yoo, are said to have already concluded that Yoo and Bybee provided the White House with “poor legal advice.” The question that remains for agency investigators is recommendations to make for DOJ officials in a report and whether Yoo and Bybee should be held accountable beyond criticizing their legal analysis.

Neither Yoo nor Bybee responded to e-mails or phone calls seeking comment.

OPR has interviewed dozens of current and former DOJ and Bush administration officials, including Gonzales, who were involved in discussions that led to the drafting of the August 2002 memo, but several administration officials have refused to cooperate, people knowledgeable about the probe said.

OPR investigators have also spoken with Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the OLC, who upon arriving at the agency in October 2003 quickly determined that the Aug. 1, 2002 memo was “sloppily written” and “legally flawed” and withdrew the memo.

Goldsmith, who did not respond to calls or e-mails for comment, wrote a book about his tenure at the OLC, The Terror Presidency, which described in great detail how Yoo believed the health benefits statute could be used as the basis to authorize long-outlawed interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. Goldsmith, who has long referred to Yoo as a “friend,” has said that his former colleague did not provide the White House with sound legal advice.

“That statute defined an ‘emergency medical condition’ that warranted certain health benefits as a condition ‘manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain)’ such that the absence of immediate medical care might reasonably be thought to result in death, organ failure, or impairment of bodily function,” Goldsmith wrote in his book, The Terror Presidency.

“The health benefits statute’s use of ’severe pain’ had no relationship whatsoever to the torture statute. And even if it did, the health benefit statute did not define ’severe pain.’ Rather it used the term ’severe pain’ as a sign of an emergency medical condition that, if not treated, might cause organ failure and the like…. OLC’s clumsily definitional arbitrage didn’t seem even in the ballpark.”

Goldsmith said that even though, “ironically,” Yoo relied on a health benefits statute to write his legal opinion, these and “other questionable statutory interpretations, taken alone, were not enough to cause me to withdraw and replace the interrogation opinions.”

“OLC has a powerful tradition of adhering to its past opinions, even when a head of the office concludes they are wrong,” he wrote in his book.

Still, Goldsmith “decided in December 2003 that opinions written nine and sixteen months earlier by my Bush administration predecessors must be withdrawn, corrected, and replaced,” Goldsmith wrote in his book.

“I reached this decision, and had begun to act on it, before I knew anything about interrogation abuses. I did so because the opinions’ errors of statutory interpretation combined with many other elements to make them unusually worrisome.”

OPR’s report into the August 2002 torture memo will be “lengthy,” one person familiar with the probe said, but is not expected to be released until after Obama is sworn in.

“The Bush Administration’s approach to power is, at its core, little more than a restatement of Mr. Nixon’s famous rationalization of presidential misdeeds: ‘When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal,’” Conyers said in a foreword to a 487-page report entitled “Reining in the Imperial Presidency: Lessons and Recommendations Relating to the Presidency of George W. Bush.”

“Under this view, laws that forbid torturing or degrading prisoners cannot constrain the President because, if the President ordered such acts as Commander in Chief, ‘that means it’s not illegal.’” Conyers continued. “Under this view, it is not the courts that decide the reach of the law — it is the President — and neither the Judiciary nor Congress can constrain him.”

Conyers also seemed to acknowledge what many Bush critics had long suspected, that the Michigan Democrat evaded an impeachment battle the past two years out of concern that the political repercussions might have kept the Democrats from winning larger congressional majorities and the White House in Election 2008.

Noting that “some ardent advocates of impeachment have labeled me a traitor — or worse — for declining to begin a formal impeachment inquiry in the House Judiciary Committee,” Conyers said he disagreed with some of their political judgments but concurred with their assessments of the seriousness of Bush-Cheney misconduct.

“Many think these acts rise to the level of impeachable conduct. I agree,” Conyers said. “I have never wavered in my belief that this President and Vice-President are among the most impeachable officials in our Nation’s history, and the more we learn the truer that becomes”

Conyers also praised the many citizens who petitioned him for action on impeaching Bush and Cheney.

“I want to make clear how much I respect those who have given so much time and energy to the cause of fighting for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney,” Conyers said. “While we may not agree on the best path forward, I know they are acting on the basis of our shared love of this country. These citizens are not fringe radicals. …

“They are individuals who care deeply about our Constitution and our Nation, and who have stood up to fight for the democracy they love, often at great personal cost. However, as I have said, while President Bush and Vice President Cheney have earned the dishonorable eligibility to be impeached, I do not believe that would have been the appropriate step at this time in our history.”

Documenting Abuses

The 487-page report, released Tuesday, documents what Conyers called Bush’s excessive claims of executive power and illegal acts. It is the clearest sign yet that the 111th Congress plans to probe the depths of the Bush administration’s most controversial policies.

The report contains 47 separate recommendations, including calls for a blue-ribbon commission and independent criminal probes. Conyers said the recommendations are not intended as political “payback or revenge,” rather the goal is to “restore the traditional checks and balances of our constitutional system … and to set an appropriate baseline of conduct for future administrations.”

Conyers noted that earlier investigations failed to get to the bottom of many “questions left in the wake of Bush’s Imperial Presidency,” including allegations of torture, “extraordinary rendition” (shipping prisoners to countries known to torture), warrantless domestic surveillance, leaking the CIA identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, and the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys.

Last week, Conyers proposed legislation to create a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe the “broad range” of policies pursued by the Bush administration “under claims of unreviewable war powers,” including torture and warrantless wiretaps.

Tuesday’s report sought to arm lawmakers with the documentary evidence to support action on the bill, which currently has 10 sponsors

Last year, Conyers called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether the Bush administration committed war crimes, a proposal that Mukasey rebuffed.

Conyers came under criticism from impeachment advocates last year when he refused to allow his committee to vote on articles of impeachment against Bush proposed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Instead, Conyers’ committee held an impeachment substitute of sorts; a one-day hearing devoted to testimony by Bush’s critics about the administration’s alleged abuses of power.

The new report suggests that Conyers is not inclined to immediately “move forward” now that Barack Obama has been elected President. In fact, Conyers said he firmly rejects “the notion that we should move on from these matters simply because a new administration is set to take office.”

On Sunday, Obama signaled in an interview on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous,” that he will not likely recommend that his Justice Department launch a criminal probe into the Bush administration’s past practices, particularly policies that authorized torture.

Obama told Stephanopolous that he held “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backward.” But Obama added that “obviously we’re going to look at past practices. And I don’t believe that anybody is above the law.”

He said his “general view when it comes to my attorney general is that he’s the people’s lawyer. Eric Holder’s been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people. Not be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So ultimately, he’s going to be making some calls. But my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.”

Also, on Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that the Bush administration must turn over to President-elect Obama’s staff documents Bush has been withholding from Congress related to the White House’s role in the firing of the nine U.S. Attorneys.

Conyers’s committee has been pursuing testimony and documents from White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers about their involvement in the decision to fire the federal prosecutors, a move that a senior Justice Department official said was designed to remove U.S. Attorneys who were deemed not “loyal Bushies.”

President Bush has asserted executive privilege in blocking Bolten and Miers from testifying before Congress. Last week, a new set of House rules was passed reviving subpoenas issued during the 110th Congress. In addition to Miers, Conyers’s committee subpoenaed former White House political adviser Karl Rove.

Conyers also said he wants to find out “to what extent were President Bush and Vice President Cheney involved in the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson and its aftermath.”

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in the Plame case, but his prison sentence was commuted by Bush. “There is considerable evidence that culpability for the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson and subsequent obstruction goes above and beyond Scooter Libby,” Conyers said.

Conyers subpoenaed documents last year related to the Plame leak, including closed-door testimony that Bush and Cheney gave to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. But the Justice Department refused to turn over the materials

“Given that so many significant questions remain unanswered relating to these core constitutional and legal matters, many of which implicate basic premises of our national honor, it seems clear that our country cannot simply move on,” Conyers said.

“As easy or convenient as it would be to turn the page, our Nation’s respect for the rule of law and its role as a moral leader in the world demand that we finally and without obstruction conduct and complete these inquiries. This can and should be done without rancor or partisanship.”

Last month, trying to change the emerging historical consensus about a failed presidency, the White House published two lengthy reports, “Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush,” and “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record.”

One of the surprising claims that stood out among the combined 90 pages of so-called accomplishments was the White House’s glowing assessment of Bush’s record on veterans’ issues. Bush claims he “provided unprecedented resources for veterans” over the past eight years and provided “the highest level of support for veterans in American history.”

“The President also increased the benefits available to those who have served our Nation and transformed the veterans health care system to better serve those who have sacrificed for our freedom,” both reports claim, adding that he “instituted reforms for the care of wounded warriors . . . and dramatically expanded resources for mental health services.”

The White House made these claims in the face of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might have called a “known known” — that the treatment of veterans returning from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a national disgrace, highlighted most dramatically by the neglect and substandard care given wounded troops at Walter Reed and other military hospitals.

The budget increases that have occurred mostly were enacted over Bush’s opposition or related to the fact that injuries from the Iraq War far exceeded the administration’s rosy projections in early 2003. The Bush team especially underestimated how many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder to anticipate as well as the number of brain injuries, which have been endemic to the Iraq War where insurgents made effective use of “improvised explosive devices,” or IEDs.

Before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, documents released by the Department of Veterans Affairs said it expected a maximum of 8,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, according to a study released last year by the RAND Institute, there are more than 320,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars suffering from major depression, PTSD and/or traumatic brain injury. The report found that the VA has been and continues to be ill equipped to deal with these cases when soldiers return from combat, especially after multiple tours.

An Army task force last year also found major flaws in the way the VA treated and cared for veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries.

Bush’s Record on VA Funding

For his part, Bush stacked the VA with political cronies, such as former Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson, who as VA Secretary defended a budget measure that sought major cuts in staffing for health care and at the Board of Veterans Appeals; slashed funding for nursing home care; and blocked four legislative measures aimed at streamlining the backlog of veterans benefits claims.

Of the 84,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by VA, only half, about 42,000, had their disability claim approved by VA. Instead of expediting PTSD claims, Bush’s political appointees at VA actively fought against mental health claims.

Bush’s appointees also obstructed scientific research into the causes of Gulf War illnesses dating back 18 years to Operation Desert Storm and opposed medical research on treatment for 210,000 of those veterans.

As for funding, Bush proposed a 0.5 percent budget increase for the VA for fiscal year 2006, which amounted to a “cruel mockery” of Bush’s promises to do everything to support veterans and soldiers, Rep. Lane Evans, D-Illinois, said at the time.

Evans called Bush’s proposed budget increase for the VA “grossly inadequate,” saying it would force the VA to “ration” health care to veterans.

VA officials had testified in 2005 that the agency needed at least a 13 percent increase to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of war veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and others who needed long-term mental health care.

In early 2007, the Washington Post put a spotlight on the human consequences resulting from the combination of Bush’s wars and the budget squeeze

The Post published a series of articles documenting the substandard conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which is located only 4.7 miles from the White House. Wounded vets were housed in rooms with moldy walls, leaky plumage and an infestation of vermin, underscoring how out of touch Bush had become regarding the nation’s veterans.

In response to complaints that some veterans under VA care were being neglected, Nicholson said in March 2007 that such cases were “anecdotal exceptions.”

“When you are treating so many people there is always going to be a linen towel left somewhere,” he said.

In May 2007, the AP revealed that while Nicholson was pinching pennies on treatment costs and coping with a $1.3 billion budget shortfall, he awarded “$3.8 million in bonuses to top executives in fiscal 2006″ — many as much as $33,000.

Simultaneously, Bush was resisting congressional efforts to beef up the VA’s budget. In May 2007, Bush threatened to veto legislation that sought a 10 percent — $3.2 billion — increase, calling it too expensive. Bush proposed a 2 percent increase, far below what lawmakers and VA officials said was needed to treat a dramatic increase in traumatic brain injury and PTSD cases.

After Congress passed the legislation with the higher VA spending, Bush backed down on his veto threat but that was largely due to the fact that every Republican in the Senate with the exception of Jim DeMint of South Carolina, supported the measure.

Amid the growing scandals about substandard VA treatment and inept management, Nicholson resigned in July 2007.

Suicide Epidemic

Even after Nicholson’s resignation, the Department of Veterans Affairs continued to be buffeted by scandals, including a cover-up in an epidemic of veterans’ suicides and attempted suicides.

Last year, internal VA e-mails surfaced that showed how top agency officials tried to conceal the information from the public about the sudden increase in suicides and attempted suicides among veterans that were treated or sought help at VA hospitals around the country.

And last November, internal watchdogs discovered 500 benefits claims in shredding bins at the 41 of the 57 regional VA offices around the country.

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a veterans’ advocacy group that sued the VA in federal court, said attempts by the White House to portray Bush as an advocate for veterans is beyond shameful.

“Bush is the worst failure for our veterans since Hoover,” Sullivan said, expressing shock that the President “would shamefully continue his legacy of lies to the American people as he and his political cronies are forced to leave office on Jan. 20.”

Sullivan disputed some of Bush’s claims as misleading, such as the assertion that he doubled funding for the VA. “However, President Bush failed to disclose that the number of veterans seeking VA health care doubled, from 2.7 million to 5.5 million, and that rising health care inflation actually resulted in a net decrease in spending per veteran by VA during the past eight years,” he said.

“If not for the intervention of Congress to substantially increase VA funding beyond Bush’s inadequate budget requests, especially in the past two years, the situation would have deteriorated from a serious crisis to a catastrophe at VA.”

Sullivan, who worked at the VA for five years as a project manager, said Bush failed to the implement the VA’s proposed Mental Health Strategic Plan, a program aimed at identifying and quickly treating veterans suffering from major depression and were on the verge of suicide.

“Without implementation, funding, and oversight of the plan, several suicidal Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were illegally refused emergency medical care by VA,” Sullivan said. “Veterans for Common Sense brought this issue to the attention of VA, and VA refused to act.

“Therefore, VCS sued VA for turning away suicidal veterans. After we filed our lawsuit, and only after we filed our lawsuit, the VA began a suicide prevention hotline. In the first 15 months of operation, the hotline received 85,000 calls and rescued more than 2,100 suicidal veterans.”

As of September 2008, 330,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have filed disability claims to the VA, according to the agency. Yet, 54,000 are still waiting for the VA to confirm their claims were received. The average wait for a disability claim is more than six months.

Additionally, according to VA’s Inspector General, 25 percent of the VA’s 55 million patients have to wait more than 30 days for a doctor’s appointment.

As costly as the treatment of Iraq and Afghan war veterans already has become, Bush is leaving an even greater budget hole for his successors.

In the book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, authors Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes wrote that future treatment of veterans would continue adding to the total cost of Bush’s conflicts and would put extraordinary stresses on the VA.

“Even in 2000, before the war,” they wrote, the VA was the subject of numerous Government Accountability Office studies that “identified long-standing problems, including large backlogs of pending claims, lengthy processing time for initial claims, high rates of error in processing claims, and inconsistency across regional offices.”

But the problems only have grown worse. “In a 2005 study,” Stiglitz and Blimes wrote, “the GAO found that the time to complete a veteran’s claim varied from 99 days at the Salt Lake City Office to 237 days in Honolulu. In a 2006 study, GAO found that 12 percent of claims were inaccurate.”

Homeless Veterans

The White House reports on Bush’s so-called accomplishments also claimed that Bush “reduced the number of homeless veterans by nearly 40 percent from 2001 to 2007. Established VA homeless-specific programs, which constitute one of the largest integrated networks of homeless treatment and assistance services in the country.”

That statement rankled Aaron Glantz, a journalist, author and the Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism at the Carter Center.

“What kind of President pats himself on the back with 200,000 veterans sleeping homeless on the street every night?” Glantz said in an interview. “What kind of administration puts out self-congratulatory press releases while over 6,000 veterans commit suicide every year?

“We can only hope that President elect Barack Obama takes a very different course once he’s in office. Otherwise, our government will repeat the shameful disgrace that was its treatment of wounded veterans returning home from Vietnam.”

Glantz spent three years in Iraq reporting on the war and recently published The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle against America’s Veterans, which documents the heart-wrenching stories of homeless Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and the plight of other veterans who, upon returning home, have been neglected by the country they served.

Last week, Glantz published a report, “Did You Know 200,000 Vets Are Sleeping on the Streets?,” that contradicts the Bush self-congratulations about veterans’ homelessness.

On his transition Web site, change.gov, Obama said he intends to “Fix the Benefits Bureaucracy: Hire additional claims workers, and improve training and accountability so that VA benefit decisions are rated fairly and consistently. Transform the paper benefit claims process to an electronic one to reduce errors and improve timeliness.”

To meet that challenge, Obama tapped retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, a Vietnam War veteran who sustained combat-related injuries, to lead the VA. Shinseki made headlines back in February 2003 when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and predicted that several hundred thousand soldiers would likely be needed to maintain order in post-invasion Iraq.

After facing public criticism from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, Shinseki was forced into early retirement. His judgment has since been vindicated, both in regard to likely ethnic strife in Iraq and on the costliness of the war.

Yet, Bush’s White House is now hoping that its last-minute propaganda barrage will, if nothing else, cloud some of the memories about its failures and misjudgments. Bush’s critics, however, are not willing to so easily forget.

“Contrary to his Administration’s latest spin, George W. Bush’s legacy on veterans is one of shameful neglect,” author Glantz said. “Rather than care for the tens of thousands of American service members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush Administration has thrown up a series of barriers to prevent veterans from getting the care they need.”

Simply put — White House propaganda aside — veterans’ health care has become worse, not better, under Bush’s leadership.

Vice President Dick Cheney, in another stunning admission during his campaign to burnish the Bush administration’s legacy, said he personally authorized the “enhanced interrogations” of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.

“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said about the waterboarding, a practice of simulated drowning done by strapping a person to a board, covering the face with a cloth and then pouring water over it, a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition. The victim feels as if he is drowning.

Cheney identified the three waterboarded detainees as al-Qaeda figures Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al Nashiri. “That’s it, those three guys,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times.

Other detainees at secret CIA prisons and at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to harsh treatment, including being stripped naked, forced into painful stress positions, placed in extremes of heat or cold and prevented from sleeping – actions that international human rights organizations, and previously the U.S. government, have denounced as torture and illegal abuse.

“I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Cheney said of what he called the “enhanced interrogation” of the detainees. “I thought the [administration’s] legal opinions that were rendered [endorsing the harsh treatment] were sound. I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they [the CIA interrogators] were asking to be able to do. And I think it produced the desired result.”

Cheney also took issue with the notion that waterboarding was torture.

“Was it torture? I don’t believe it was torture,” Cheney said. “The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately. They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration, about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.”

Other experts, including some military and intelligence interrogators, have disputed Cheney’s claims of success in extracting reliable information through waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Much of the confessed information turned out to be dubious or incorrect.

The First Case

Zubaydah was the first “war on terror” detainee to be subjected to the Bush administration’s waterboarding, according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.

However, according to author Ron Suskind who interviewed CIA and other insiders, Abu Zubaydah was not the “high-value detainee” that the Bush administration had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine.

Nevertheless, Suskind said President George W. Bush became obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.

“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

Abu Zubaydah’s captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind wrote.

But Bush did not want to “lose face” because he had stated Zubaydah’s importance publicly, according to Suskind.

Zubaydah was strapped to a waterboard and, fearing imminent death, he spoke about a wide range of plots against a number of U.S. targets, such as shopping malls, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. Yet, Suskind wrote, Zubaydah’s information under duress was judged not credible.

Still, that did not stop “thousands of uniformed men and women [who] raced in a panic to each … target,” Suskind wrote. “The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

Cheney Unapologetic

Last week, in an interview with ABC News, Cheney was unapologetic about the waterboarding and other harsh techniques used against the detainees. But Cheney’s matter-of-fact response to the Washington Times‘ questions on Monday provided the most detailed look yet at the administration’s highly classified interrogation program.

In the interview, Cheney defended the interrogation program by claiming the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) drafted legal memorandums stating Bush had the authority to suspend the Geneva Convention and order harsh interrogations of prisoners in the “war on terror.”

But the memos were written after Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other high-ranking Cabinet officials known as the Principals Committee met in July 2002 to discuss specific interrogation techniques — including the outlawed technique of waterboarding — to be used against “war on terror” detainees.

The OLC attorneys fashioned the legal arguments that then gave legal cover for the interrogation strategies that the White House wanted to carry out.

The Aug. 1, 2002, opinion, widely referred to as the “Torture Memo,” was written by Jay Bybee, an assistant attorney general at the OLC, and John Yoo, Bybee’s deputy. It was addressed to Gonzales and stated that unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee during an interrogation results in injury “such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions” than the technique could not be defined as torture.

Additionally, the memo said CIA interrogators would not be prosecuted for violating anti-torture laws as long as they acted in “good faith” while using brutal techniques to obtain information from suspected terrorists.

“To validate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering,” the memo said. “Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture.”

The memo was drafted the same month Abu Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding.

Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Bybee as head of the OLC in October 2003, quickly determined that the Aug. 1, 2002, memo was “sloppily written” and “legally flawed” and withdrew it.

Administration critics also have noted that actions are not made legal simply by having friendly lawyers give favorable opinions.

“You can’t just suddenly change something that is illegal into something that is legal by having a lawyer write an opinion that saying it’s legal,” said Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee whose panel spent two years investigating the Bush administration’s interrogation policies.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, said Cheney used the Justice Department to “twist” the law “and in some cases ignored it altogether, in order to permit interrogators to use barbaric methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes.”

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “there must be consequences for [these] illegal activities.” He added, “A special prosecutor should be appointed. To do otherwise is to send a message of impunity that will only embolden future administrations to again engage in serious violations of the law.”

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is close to wrapping up a formal investigation to determine whether agency attorneys, including Yoo and Bybee, provided the White House with poor legal advice when they drafted the legal opinions.

The waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, Al Nashiri and Kalid Sheikh Mohammed was videotaped, but those records were destroyed in November 2005 after the Washington Post published a story that exposed the CIA’s use of so-called “black site” prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects.

John Durham, an assistant attorney general in Connecticut, was appointed special counsel earlier this year to investigate the destruction of that videotape as well as destroyed film on other interrogations.

Despite the torture criticism, Cheney said he has no regrets about the interrogation methods that he signed off on, claiming they were “directly responsible for the fact that we’ve been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for seven and a half years.”

Cheney added, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do. If I was faced with those circumstances again, I’d do exactly the same thing.”

Cheney’s remarks to the Washington Times were part of a two-week media blitz that has sought to highlight the Bush administration’s “accomplishments.”

The White House has published two lengthy reports, “Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush,” and “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record” in an attempt to change the emerging historical consensus about a failed presidency.

However, Cheney’s blasé responses to questions about torture have instead fed growing demands for a criminal investigation against Cheney and other Bush administration officials.

In an interview with ABC News, Cheney was matter-of-fact and unapologetic about the harsh techniques used against the detainees — including waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning considered torture since the days of the Inquisition.

“I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the [Central Intelligence] Agency, in effect, came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do,” Cheney said. “And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.”

Cheney made his comment in response to a question about whether he personally approved the harsh tactics used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

“There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al-Qaeda came from that one source,” Cheney said. “So, it’s been a remarkably successful effort; I think the results speak for themselves.”

Cheney’s nonchalant response to the questions about torture was reminiscent of his casual comment to a conservative radio host in October 2006 when Cheney said the decision to waterboard suspected terrorists was a “no-brainer.”

Thousands of pages of documents released publicly since that interview would appear to show that methods used against detainees constituted cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment in violation of anti-torture statutes and international treaties signed and ratified by the United States.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, has said “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

In another interview Monday with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, Cheney said the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “has been very well run.”

“I think if you look at it from the perspective of the requirements we had, once you go out and capture a bunch of terrorists, as we did in Afghanistan and elsewhere, then you’ve got to have some place to put them,” Cheney said.

Defending the Iraq War

In the ABC interview, Cheney also defended the decision to invade Iraq, arguing that even though Iraq lacked the WMD stockpiles that Cheney and other administration officials had claimed it had, the invasion was justified by Iraq’s potential to build such weapons in the future.

“I think –as I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq – what they got wrong was that there weren’t any stockpiles,” Cheney said. “What we found in the after-action reports, after the intelligence report was done and then various special groups went and looked at the intelligence and what its validity was. What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stocks. They also found that he had every intention of resuming production once the international sanctions were lifted. …

“This was a bad actor and the country’s better off, the world’s better off, with Saddam gone, and I think we made the right decision, in spite of the fact that the original NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] was off in some of its major judgments.”

However, an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Bush and Cheney didn’t simply buy into faulty intelligence but knowingly misled Congress and the public about the threat that Iraq posed to the United States in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion.

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” said committee chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-West Virginia, who released a report on prewar Iraq intelligence last June.

The Senate report was the first U.S. government document to state that Bush and Cheney knowingly made false allegations about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator who was overthrown in April 2003 and executed in December 2006.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate,” Rockefeller said.

The Senate report singled out erroneous statements that Cheney made during the run-up to war that the Vice President knew were not supported by the available intelligence, such as allegations that Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001.

In essence, the Senate report confirmed British intelligence assertions, which surfaced in a document widely known as the Downing Street Memo, that the facts about the threat posed by Iraq were being “fixed” around the Bush administration’s desire to invade Iraq.

Principals Committee

Cheney’s unapologetic comments to ABC News were made less than a week after a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report found that the Vice President was part of a group – also including President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – responsible for the abuse of detainees that took place at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

As part of that investigation, Rice admitted that – beginning in 2002 as Bush’s national security adviser – she led high-level discussions with other senior Bush administration officials about subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists to the harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Torture Trail Seen Starting with Bush.”]

Those meetings were first confirmed last April when President Bush told an ABC News reporter that he approved meetings of the NSC’s Principals Committee to discuss specific interrogation techniques the CIA could use against detainees. The Principals Committee included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft as well as Cheney and Rice.

Earlier this year, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requesting he appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether Bush and senior members of his Cabinet committed war crimes by authorizing CIA and military interrogators to use harsh tactics against detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq.

That request followed an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross into interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay, which “documented several instances of acts of torture against detainees, including soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and lighting it on fire, subjecting a prisoner to sexual abuse and forcing a prisoner to eat a baseball.”

But Cheney continues to dismiss such criticism, still insisting that the United States doesn’t torture and that the administration broke no other laws in conducting the “war on terror.”

“I think those who allege that we’ve been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don’t know what they’re talking about,” Cheney told ABC News.

Mukasey has refused to open a war-crimes investigation, although a special counsel – Connecticut’s assistant attorney general John Durham, is investigating the CIA’s destruction of videotapes taken of the waterboarding of Mohammad and other detainees.

How President-elect Barack Obama handles evidence of the Bush administration’s use of torture will represent one of the first tests of his administration.

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose organization has represented Guantanamo detainees, said last week it is imperative that Obama authorize his Attorney General to launch a criminal investigation into Cheney and others in the White House.

“One of Barack Obama’s first acts as President should be to instruct his Attorney General to appoint an independent prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation of former Bush administration officials who gave the green light to torture,” Ratner said in a column published in the magazine The Progressive.

Ratner said anything less than a full-scale criminal investigation – a substitute like a Truth Commission assigned simply to ascertain the facts – would be unacceptable.

“If Obama and [Attorney General-designate Eric] Holder want to adhere to our Constitution and uphold our highest values, they must pursue those in the Bush administration who violated that Constitution, broke our laws, and tarnished our values,” Ratner wrote. “To simply let those officials walk off the stage sends a message of impunity that will only encourage future law breaking. The message that we need to send is that they will be held accountable.

“This is not Latin America; this is not South Africa. We are not trying to end a civil war, heal a wounded country and reconcile warring factions We are a democracy trying to hold accountable officials that led our country down the road to torture. And in a democracy, it is the job of a prosecutor and not the pundits to determine whether crimes were committed.”

VA is now treating more than 350,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and with the war in Iraq guaranteed to continue for at least another three years, and with the possibility of more troops being sent to fight in Afghanistan, tens of thousands of those veterans will likely seek medical care and benefits from the VA for combat related injuries.

But the VA is still unprepared to meet these challenges.

In recent months, as benefits claims have piled up at the VA, some of the agency’s 250,000 employees have apparently become so overwhelmed with their work load that they were prepared to shred hundreds of benefits claims in order to avoid processing the forms, thereby denying veterans the benefits they have come to depend upon to survive.

Last month, internal watchdogs discovered 500 benefits claims in shredding bins at the 41 of the 57 regional VA offices around the country.

The incident resulted in hastily arranged roundtable discussion last week led by House Veterans Affairs Chairman Bob Filner who excoriated the VA for creating a “culture of dishonesty” that he said has become so pervasive over the years that it has completely shattered the confidence of war veterans who feel they can no longer depend on the agency for help when they return from combat.

“This episode has further strengthened my belief that VA desperately needs new leadership, and it needs new leadership today,” Filner, D-CA, said. “These incidents and “mistakes,” all occurring to the detriment of our veterans and never to their benefit, remind me more of the Keystone Cops rather than a supportive organization dedicated to taking care of our veterans.

“First, I am not convinced that only 500 documents were saved from the shredding bin. This is merely a snapshot in time. The VA was unable to convince me that more documents have not been shredded in the past and I honestly do not know how many records have been destroyed and how many files lost over the past decades.”

Two days before the Nov. 19 meeting, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. James B. Peake responded to the controversy stating that he was “deeply concerned that improper actions by a few VA employees could have caused any veterans to receive less than their full entitlement to benefits earned by their service to our nation.”

“In rectifying this unacceptable lapse, VA will be guided by two principles – full accountability for VA staff and ensuring veterans receive the benefit of the doubt if receipt of a document by VA is in question,” Peake said.

The VA extended the deadline to Nov. 19, 2009 for veterans to re-submit benefits claims filed between April 14, 2007 and Oct. 14, 2008 may have ended up in one of the 47 shredding bins. Additionally, the agency said shredding equipment at regional offices is now under the control of the facility records management officer. The VA said all bins that contain documents for shredding are subject to review and two people and the facility records management officer must approve benefits claims that are shredded.

Peake said the VA’s inspector general is continuing to investigate cases “where inappropriate shredding may be traceable to a specific employee” and the agency will initiate “legal and disciplinary action…to hold accountable any employee who has acted improperly.”

Admiral Patrick Dunne, the Under Secretary for Benefits for the VA, who attended last week’s roundtable discussion with Filner, said benefits claims slated for the shredder underscores the VA’s need to address poor document handling procedures. It doesn’t mean the VA trying to prevent veterans from obtaining benefits.

Dunne suggested the VA move to an electronic filing system to safeguard benefits claims.

But Filner said he doesn’t trust the VA and does not believe, under Peake, that the agency can get its act together.

“We have heard promises from the VA before,” Filner said. “We have heard that the claims process will go paperless. Training will be improved. VA’s latest promise is that veterans can submit statements containing information that will be used in the adjudication process in lieu of documents missing from their files. While this is an important step forward, I am skeptical that this new step will become part of the claims process

“Additionally, the VA’s outreach has been limited to a reliance on media reports and a message on the VA website. The VA did not report a systematic way of reaching out to veterans to alert them of new policies that may have huge implications in their claims going forward. Congress must hold the VA accountable for a job not well done. A complete paradigm shift is necessary and I look forward to working with new leadership to correct the problems plaguing the benefits claims system.”

The VA has been the subject of numerous lawsuits related to the backlog of benefits claims that in some cases can take as long as a six month to process and as long as four years to appeal if they are rejected.

In the book The Three Trillion Dollar War by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, the authors wrote that “even in 2000, before the war” the VA was the subject of numerous Government Accountability Office studies that “identified long-standing problems, including large backlogs of pending claims, lengthy processing time for initial claims, high rates of error in processing claims, and inconsistency across regional offices.”

“In a 2005 study,” Stiglitz and Blimes wrote, “the GAO found that the time to complete a veteran’s claim varied from 99 days at the Salt Lake City Office to 237 days in Honolulu. In a 2006 study, GAO found that 12 percent of claims were inaccurate.”

The authors estimate that the VA will spend hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare and disability benefits over several decades and the process for approving benefits claims could average one year. Last March, the VA was sued in federal court by two veterans groups who sought a preliminary injunction to force the VA to immediately treat veterans who show signs of post traumatic stress disorder and are at risk of suicide and to overhaul internal system that handles benefits claims.

The federal judge who presided over the case, ruled last June that he lacked the legal authority to force the VA to immediately treat war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and could not order the VA to overhaul its internal systems that handle benefits claims and medical services. However, in an 82-page ruling U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti said that it is “clear to the court” that “the VA may not be meeting all of the needs of the nation’s veterans.”

During a trip to Alaska in May to meet with a Vietnam veteran, Peake, the Secretary of the VA, said concerns about PTSD were “overblown” and likened some cases “to what anyone who played football in their youth might have suffered.”

He said veterans who suffer from the disease just “need a little counseling” and don’t “need the PTSD label their whole lives.”

Peake’s comments were made just a couple of weeks after the RAND Corporation released a study that said about 300,000 U.S. troops sent to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from major depression or PTSD, and 320,000 received traumatic brain injuries largely due to multiple deployments.

“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Terri Tanielian, a researcher at RAND who worked on the study.

“Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation. Unfortunately, we found there are many barriers preventing them from getting the high-quality treatment they need.”

On July 25, the veterans advocacy groups who filed the lawsuit against the VA, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, appealed the judge’s ruling at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. They are still waiting to hear if the appeals court will hear the case.

Now the VA is the subject of a similar lawsuit filed by two other veterans advocacy groups who claim that the VA’s failure to process benefits claims in a timely manner has caused severe economic hardships for hundreds of thousands of veterans.

“The VA’s failure to provide timely benefits decisions often leads to financial crises, homelessness, addiction and suicide,” says the lawsuit filed two weeks ago in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by Vietnam Veterans for America and Veterans of Modern Warfare.

The lawsuit demands the VA provide veterans with interim benefits while they wait for their claims to be processed.

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said the VA has a full-blown crisis on its hands. In a letter sent to President-elect Barack Obama recently, Sullivan said the VA needs “an immediate overhaul to avert a perfect storm of problems threatening to overwhelm” the agency.

“The economic recession is forcing more veterans who have lost their jobs and medical care into VA,” Sullivan said. The VA “faces a tsunami of up to one million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans flooding into VA. And…VA faces a surge of hundreds of thousands of additional Vietnam War veterans seeking care for mental health conditions as well as medical conditions linked to Agent Orange poisoning.

“Our vision is that whenever a veteran comes to any VA facility, his or her medical and benefit needs should be quickly and completely addressed, without red tape, delay, stigma, or discrimination. For too many veterans this vision is a fantasy, however, because recent VA leadership has failed to put our veterans first and has inadequately funded vital services and programs.”

On his transition website, change.gov, Obama said he intends to “Fix the Benefits Bureaucracy: Hire additional claims workers, and improve training and accountability so that VA benefit decisions are rated fairly and consistently. Transform the paper benefit claims process to an electronic one to reduce errors and improve timeliness.”

According to Sullivan’s organization, less than half of the veterans diagnosed with PTSD by VA receive disability compensation. Out of 83,436 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans diagnosed with PTSD by VA, only 38,448 (or 46 percent) were granted service connection for PTSD by VA.

Sullivan places much, if not all, of the blame for such falls squarely on President George W. Bush’s shoulders.

“Additional funding and new laws pushed through by Congress in 2007 should have some impact next year,” Sullivan said in an interview. “But “until VA’s failed leadership is removed, until VA’s policies are streamlined, and until VA’s budget is significantly increased and stabilized, then the legacy of President Bush’s failures may last for generations.”

Filner agreed with Sullivan’s assessment and said the VA is now at a “critical juncture.”

The VA “is on the verge of completely losing the trust and confidence of the people that it is supposed to represent…the very same people it has been entrusted to care for,” he said. These [benefits claims] are matters of life and death for some of these veterans.”

Another sign that Obama may be close to retaining Gates has been the lack of chatter from transition officials about alternative candidates – beyond cursory references to names like former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel and Democratic Sen. Jack Reed.

It was Danzig, chief of the Navy under President Bill Clinton and a senior Obama adviser, who prominently praised Gates during the campaign. He said Gates “is a very good Secretary of Defense and would be an even better one in an Obama administration.”

In citing reasons for keeping Gates, Danzig noted that Gates’s desire to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan was in line with Obama’s campaign statements, but Danzig brushed past Gates’s opposition to Obama’s call for a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

Ivo Daalder, a Brookings Institution fellow and another foreign policy adviser to Obama, echoed Danzig’s pro-Gates comments, calling Gates “one of the best Defense secretaries we have had in a long time and it makes a lot of sense to keep him.”

Besides Danzig and Daalder, another Gates promoter inside Obama’s camp is former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who worked with Gates on the Iraq Study Group before Gates stepped down to become George W. Bush’s new Defense Secretary in late 2006, replacing the controversial Donald Rumsfeld.

Because of Rumsfeld’s unpopularity with Congress, Gates – a career CIA bureaucrat and former CIA director – got an easy ride through his confirmation hearing on Dec. 5, 2006. At the time, there also was a widespread belief that Gates was a “realist” who would persuade Bush to wind down the Iraq War.

Instead, Gates emerged as Bush’s personable front man for increasing U.S. troop levels in Iraq, the so-called “surge” of some 30,000 more soldiers. Gates then benefited from the conventional wisdom in Washington that the “surge” quelled the violence in Iraq.

Many military experts dispute the claim of the “successful surge,” citing other more important factors in reducing violence, such as the pre-surge decision by Sunni tribal leaders to stop their insurgency and the unilateral cease-fire by Shiite radical Moqtada al-Sadr.

In his new book, The War Within, Bob Woodward talked to military sources who also credited new classified programs for identifying and killing Iraqi insurgent leaders. Nevertheless, as Woodward writes, “In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked.”

Gates now stands as possibly the greatest beneficiary of that conventional wisdom, if Obama decides to reappoint him as Defense Secretary.

Dismayed Obama Backers

Beyond keeping Gates, Obama appears headed toward staffing much of his foreign policy team with people tied to the Clinton administration, including many who were strong supporters of the Iraq War, most notably Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

That trend has raised concerns among Obama supporters who had hoped Obama meant what he said when he declared during the campaign that “I don’t want to just end the [Iraq] war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”

“Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

But the prospect of keeping Gates has raised the strongest doubts about Obama’s commitment to real change. Even some of Gates’s former CIA colleagues have spoken up against the opportunism that has defined Gates’s career.

When Gates was appointed CIA director by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, there was an unprecedented revolt by former CIA colleagues who described Gates’s role in the 1980s as the Reagan administration’s henchman for destroying the CIA’s analytical division’s commitment to objectivity, the so-called “politicization” of intelligence reporting.

In Oct. 1, 1991, testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Harold P. Ford, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, described an aspect of Gates’s personality that mirrors many of the top officials in the Bush administration today.

“Bob Gates has often depended too much on his own individual analytic judgments and has ignored or scorned the views of others whose assessments did not accord with his own. This would be okay if he were uniquely all-seeing. He has not been,” Ford said.

At the hearing, other CIA analysts said Gates forced them to twist intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by the Soviet Union, thus justifying the Reagan administration’s policy decisions.

Jennifer Glaudemans, a former CIA analyst, said she and her colleagues at the CIA believed “Mr. Gates and his influence have led to a prostitution of [Soviet] analysis.”

The Iran-Contra Mess

Analysts also alleged that a report approved by Gates overstated Soviet influence in Iran, paving the way for President Ronald Reagan’s actions in the Iran-Contra scandal.

During the hearings, senators learned about a Dec. 2, 1986, 10-page classified memo written by Thomas Barksdale, the CIA analyst for Iran. The memo claimed that covert arms sales to the country demonstrated “a perversion of the intelligence process” that is staggering in its proportions.

Barksdale said he and other Iran analysts “were never consulted or asked to provide an intelligence input to the covert actions and secret contacts that have occurred.”

Barksdale added that Gates was the pipeline for providing “exclusive reports to the White House,” intelligence that was “at odds with the overwhelming bulk of intelligence reporting, both from U.S. sources and foreign intelligence services.”

At the 1991 hearings, Melvin Goodman, who had been one of the CIA’s top Soviet analysts, said that under Gates, the CIA was “trying to provide the intelligence analysis … that would support the operational decision to sell arms to Iran.”

Gates’s critics note how eerily reminiscent Gates’s behavior in the 1980s was to the way that Vice President Dick Cheney treated CIA analysts during the run-up to the Iraq War six years ago when they faced pressure to hype the threat from Iraq.

At his October 1991 confirmation hearings, Gates testified that he was aware the United States was selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. But he denied knowing that Oliver North, a National Security Council aide inside Reagan’s White House, was diverting money from Iranian arms sales to secretly fund the Nicaraguan contra rebels.

White House memos released at the time showed that North and National Security Adviser John Poindexter engaged in classified briefings with Gates on numerous occasions about Iran-Contra-related operations.

Poindexter said he discussed the situation with Gates, but Gates said he had “no recollection” about those conversations.

Alan Fiers, who headed the CIA’s Central America task force in the mid-1980s, testified at Gates’s confirmation hearings that he had filled Gates in about the extraordinary covert operation supporting the contras.

“Bob Gates understood the universe, understood the structure, understood that there was an operational – that there was a support operation being run out of the White House,” and “that Ollie North was the quarterback,” Fiers said. “I had no reason to think he had great detail, but I do think there was a baseline knowledge there.”

Helping Saddam

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, also raised questions about Gates’s role in helping Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

“I also have doubts and questions about Mr. Gates’s role in the secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq,” Harkin said. “Robert Gates … helped develop options in dealing with the Iran-Iraq War, which eventually evolved into a secret intelligence liaison relationship with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

“Gates was in charge of the directorate that prepared the intelligence information that was passed on to Iraq. He testified that he was also an active participant in the operation during 1986.

“The secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq was not only a highly questionable and possibly illegal operation, but also may have jeopardized American lives and our national interests. The photo reconnaissance, highly sensitive electronic eavesdropping, and narrative texts provided to Saddam may not only have helped him in Iraq’s war against Iran, but also in the recent Gulf War.”

Despite the concerns about Gates’s role in politicizing U.S. intelligence and engaging in questionable operations, he was confirmed as CIA director with the help of his friend, Sen. David Boren, D-Oklahoma, who was then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is now another Obama adviser.

“David took it as a personal challenge to get me confirmed,” Gates wrote in his memoir, From the Shadows.

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Gates had hoped that his tenure at the CIA would be extended, but it wasn’t. Gates went into a period of political exile from Washington, eventually landing a job as president of Texas A&M with the help of former President George H.W. Bush.

But Gates continued to build his network of friends and admirers in the Washington insider community. He also jumped when he had a chance to get back on the Washington stage, first as a member of the Iraq Study Group in 2006 and then as Bush’s new Defense Secretary.

Gates now has high hopes that his many influential friends will assure him a place in the new Obama administration.

The DOJ’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility, according to Conyers, are probing the leak.

Conyers disclosed the two separate probes in a letter he sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey to inquire about another leak to the AP: that Sen. Barack Obama’s aunt has been living in the United States illegally and had made a donation to this presidential campaign. Federal election law prohibits foreigners from making political donations.

“I was startled to read in today’s Associated Press that a ‘federal law enforcement official’ has leaked information about an immigration case involving a relative of Senator Obama,” Conyers wrote. “Even more troubling, the AP reports that it ‘could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved,’ a very disturbing suggesting (sic) indeed. This leak is deplorable and I urge you to take immediate action to investigate and discipline those responsible.”

“I note that this is not the first leak of law enforcement information apparently designed to influence the coming Presidential election — in recent weeks law enforcement sources leaked information about an alleged investigation of a community services organization, a leak that the Department of Justice informs me is now under investigation by the Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Professional Responsibility.”

The AP, citing law enforcement officials, reported two weeks ago that the FBI launched a probe into ACORN to examine evidence that the organization committed voter registration fraud around the country.

The reported FBI probe followed a clamor from the right-wing news media and Republican operatives over ACORN’s voter registrations, making a campaign issue out of voter-registration forms with fake names like “Mickey Mouse.”

For its part, ACORN has insisted that its own quality control flagged many of the suspicious registration forms before they were submitted to state officials and that state laws often require outside registration groups to submit all forms regardless of obvious problems.

Conyers complained to Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller about the leak to the AP in a letter he sent to them earlier this month.

“As an initial matter, it is simply unacceptable that such information would be leaked during the very peak of the election season,” Conyers said.

“I know it has become a right-wing cottage industry to cry wolf over alleged ‘voter fraud’ during an election season (only to have such claims evaporate after the election has concluded).

“One would hope the Justice Department and FBI would more skeptically examine such sensational accusations than some cable news outlets. And this is particularly true where the allegations, even given their fullest reading, simply do not support such alarmist and unreasonable claims.”

Federal investigative guidelines strongly discourage election-related probes before ballots are cast because of the likelihood that the inquiries will become politicized and might influence the election outcomes.

“In most cases, voters should not be interviewed, or other voter-related investigation done, until after the election is over,” according to the Justice Department’s guidelines for election offenses as revised in May 2007 during Gonzales’s tenure as Attorney General.

Even though those May 2007 guidelines watered down even stricter language in previous editions, the Gonzales-era rules still cautioned:

“Overt investigative steps may chill legitimate voting activities. They are also likely to be perceived by voters and candidates as an intrusion into the election. Indeed, the fact of a federal criminal investigation may itself become an issue in the election.”

The investigations launched against ACORN have raised concerns that Republicans are flogging this issue in an effort to stir up anger, to revive McCain’s campaign, and to intimidate new voters.

Trying to salvage his campaign, John McCain has jumped into the ACORN case, too, citing it at the third presidential debate. He declared ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

The McCain campaign’s attempt to politicize the ACORN investigation in the closing days of Campaign 2008 has striking parallels to the Bush administration’s use of the same issue in 2004 and 2006.

In October 2004, Marc Racicot, chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign, called on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry to demand that ACORN and other voter registration groups stop engaging in voter registration fraud.

Racicot said these registration efforts would “ultimately paralyze the effective ability of Americans to be able to vote in the next election.”

Two weeks before the 2004 presidential election, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett announced the formation of a media campaign to counter what they claimed was voter registration fraud in nine Ohio counties.

“The reports of voter fraud in Ohio are some of the most alarming in the nation,” Gillespie said on Oct. 20, 2004.

Ohio was one of the battleground states in the 2004 election where tens of thousands of voters were purged from the registration rolls and where there were widespread reports that votes intended for Kerry went to Bush.

In Florida, another battleground state in the 2004 presidential election, where President Bush’s brother Jeb was governor, the state’s Department of Law launched a statewide probe into voter registration fraud just two weeks before the presidential election.

A press release issued by the Department of Law cited ACORN, which registered more than 212,000 new voters in the state.

In the two weeks before Election 2004, GOP officials raised similar concerns in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

Documents have since surfaced showing how GOP operatives recognized the value of this strategy.

An e-mail, dated Sept. 30, 2004, and sent to a dozen or so staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC, under the subject line “voter reg fraud strategy conference call,” describes how campaign staffers planned to challenge the veracity of votes in a handful of battleground states, such as Ohio, in the event of a Democratic victory.

E-mails – among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan; Coddy Johnson, then national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign; and Rove associate Timothy Griffin – reveal the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results.

Johnson referred to the documents as a “goldmine.” The documents were lists of registered voters who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections.

David Iglesias, the former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, was fired in 2006 after he refused to prosecute what turned out to be unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud leveled against ACORN.

In an interview, Iglesias said he was surprised that the FBI would have agreed to investigate ACORN now and that the inquiry must have received a green light from high levels of the Justice Department.

Iglesias said that in September 2004, when he set up an election fraud task force, he met professional resistance from the FBI.

“The FBI in [New Mexico] was skittish when I raised the voter fraud task force that I formed back in 2004 because the SAC [Special Agent in Charge] said the FBI General Counsel said such investigations were discouraged due to the appearance of being too ‘political,’” Iglesias said.

“I had to twist their arms for them to get involved and only after I assured them that no prosecutions would be filed before the election. … I wonder why the FBI went from being skittish back in 2004 to being forward leaning now. Who is pressuring them and why?”

Iglesias said Bush’s Justice Department issued a directive to all U.S Attorneys to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004 and 2006, even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent.

In his book, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration, Iglesias said in late summer 2002 he received an e-mail from the Justice Department suggesting “in no uncertain terms” that U.S. Attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials “to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases.”

When Iglesias faced similar pressure again in 2006 – and refused to bring cases he considered inappropriate – he found himself on a list of U.S. Attorney’s targeted for dismissal.

According to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, “Patrick Rogers, the former general counsel to the New Mexico state Republican Party and a party activist, continued [before the 2006 election] to complain about voter fraud issues in New Mexico.

“In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to [Craig] Donsanto in the [Justice Department's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, ‘I have calls in, to the USA [U.S. Attorney] and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”

Donsanto was the author of the updated May 2007 Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses manual that softened the warnings about investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases before an election.

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias’s Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an e-mail:

“The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. … The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!”

John Wertheim was then chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party.

Iglesias said he now believes GOP claims of voter fraud have been “unique to the Bush administration.”

The DOJ’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility released a lengthy report last month that concluded Iglesias was fired because he did not pursue voter fraud cases.

The allegations took on a new sense of urgency Tuesday when law enforcement authorities in Nevada raided the offices of The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an organization that advocates voter registration and participation among low-income people and minorities.

ACORN members denied any wrongdoing and claimed the probe is politically motivated by Republicans to suppress voter turnout for Barack Obama.

“Today’s raid by the Secretary of State’s Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls,” said Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s interim chief organizer.

No concrete evidence of systemic voter fraud in the United States has ever surfaced. Many election integrity experts believe claims of voter fraud are a ploy by Republicans to suppress minorities and poor people from voting.

Historically, those groups tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Raising red flags about the integrity of the ballots, experts believe, is an attempt by GOP operatives to swing elections to their candidates as well as an attempt to use the fear of criminal prosecution to discourage individuals from voting in future races.

In March, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration held a hearing and heard testimony from election integrity experts who said voter fraud is a “myth” and voter identification laws actually disenfranchise legitimate voters.

Indeed, in a column published in the Washington Post last year, Justin Levitt, an attorney and expert on voting issues who teaches at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and Jeff Milyo, a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia department of economics, said “the notion of widespread voter fraud… is itself a fraud. Evidence of actual fraud by individual voters is painfully skimpy.”

ACORN has long been a target of Republican Party operatives dating as far back as the 2004 presidential election. But the accusations of malfeasance have never been supported by evidence.

Last weekend, investigative reporter Brad Friedman and former Justice Department official and GOP operative Hans Von Spakovsky engaged in a heated debate over voter fraud in a segment on the Tavis Smiley radio show. [Full disclosure: Friedman is a contributor to The Public Record].

Von Spakovsky, Friedman wrote on his blog Wednesday, “was…instrumental in bringing phony “voter fraud” charges, such as those against ACORN workers in Missouri, filed just days before the razor-thin 2006 Senate election, in violation of the DoJ’s own written rules against bringing such indictments just prior to elections where they are likely to affect the race.”

ACORN and U.S. Attorney Firings

In fact, two of the nine U.S. Attorneys who were fired in 2006 were targeted because they refused to bring criminal charges against individuals affiliated with ACORN, according to interviews and a Justice Department report issued last week on the circumstances behind the federal prosecutor firings. The firing of another U.S. Attorney was due, in large part, to his refusal to convene a grand jury and secure an indictment against individuals for voter fraud.

But it’s the firing of former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and the accusations of voter fraud leveled against ACORN by GOP operatives in that state that appeared to be the most egregious case of partisan politics, according to the DOJ report.

Even President George W. Bush said he was concerned about widespread voter fraud, despite the fact that evidence of such crimes was virtually non-existent. Bush, according to the DOJ report, “spoke with Attorney General Gonzales in October 2006 about their concerns over voter fraud in three cities, one of which was Albuquerque, New Mexico.”

In the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election, Bernalillo County in New Mexico had been the target of a massive grassroots effort by ACORN to register voters.

The effort apparently paid off as registration rolls in the county increased by about 65,000 newly registered voters.

But Sheriff Darren White, who was New Mexico chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, intended to challenge the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls. Mary Herrera, the Bernalillo County clerk, told White that there were about 3,000 or so forms that were either incomplete or incorrectly filled out.

White seized upon the registration forms as evidence that ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms and held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.

In testimony before the Senate committee earlier this year, former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias said he formed an election fraud task force in September 2004 to probe claims of widespread voter fraud.

In an interview, Iglesias said he fully expected to uncover instances of voter fraud based on numerous stories that appeared in New Mexico media that said minors received voter registration forms and that “a large number” of voter registration forms turned up during the course of a drug raid.

“Due to the high volume of suspected criminal activity, I believed there to be a strong likelihood of uncovering prosecutable cases,” Iglesias said. “I also reviewed the hard copy file from the last voter fraud case my office had prosecuted which dated back to 1992.

“My intention was to file prosecutions in order to send a message that voter fraud or election fraud would not be tolerated in the District of New Mexico.”

“My announcement of a dedicated task force notwithstanding, the firebrands were still not placated,” Iglesias, wrote. “I got an angry e-mail from Mickey Barnett, an attorney, who, like me, had worked on the Bush-Cheney campaign and who berated me for ‘appointing a task force to investigate voter fraud instead of bringing charges against suspects.’”

In his testimony before the Senate committee, Iglesias said the task force received about 108 complaints of alleged voter fraud through a hotline over the course of about eight weeks.

“Most of the complaints made to the hotline were clearly not prosecutable — citizens would complain of their yard signs being removed from their property and de minimis matters like that,” Iglesias testified before the Senate committee.

“Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote. The law, 42 USC 1973 had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.

“After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution.

“I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the” election fraud task force.

Iglesias said that Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes.

He recalled that the Justice Department issued a directive to every U.S. Attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent.

In his recently published book, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration, Iglesias said in late summer 2002 he received an email from the Department of Justice suggesting “in no uncertain terms” that U.S. attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials “to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases.”

“The e-mail imperatives came again in 2004 and 2006, by which time I had learned that far from being standard operating procedure for the Justice Department, the emphasis on voter irregularities was unique to the Bush administration,” Iglesias said.

The DOJ report said “Iglesias said he wanted to get the message out to his fellow Republicans that he would prosecute “provable” voter fraud cases but would not bring a case unless it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In a further attempt to defuse the situation, Iglesias called state Republican Party Chairman Weh, and the two met briefly for coffee near Weh’s home on May 6, 2005. Iglesias said he tried to explain to Weh that he wanted to prosecute provable voter fraud cases but could not go forward without sufficient evidence.”

As the 2006 elections approached, “Patrick Rogers, the former general counsel to the New Mexico state Republican Party and a party activist, continued to complain about voter fraud issues in New Mexico,” according to the report. “In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to Donsanto in the [DOJ's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, “I have calls in, to the USA and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias’s Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an email:

The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. … The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!

“Carpe Diem” was a reference to the Chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party at the time, John Wertheim.

Missouri Prosecutor’s Firing

In Missouri, U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was another federal prosecutor who fell into disfavor with the Bush administration because of alleged inaction on voter fraud issues.

Graves would not file criminal charges of voter fraud against four employees of ACORN, according to documents later released by the Justice Department in connection with the fired-prosecutors probe.

Graves also resisted pressure from Justice Department official Bradley Scholzman to file a civil suit against Robin Carnahan, Missouri’s Democratic Secretary of State, on charges that Carnahan failed to take action on cases of voter fraud, Graves testified last year before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Graves was forced to resign in March 2006 and was replaced by Schlozman, whom as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division’s voting-rights section had clashed with Graves.

Schlozman filed the civil suit against Carnahan, which was later dismissed by a federal court judge who ruled, “The United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States. Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred.”

Schlozman filed federal criminal charges of voter fraud against members of ACORN only days before the November 2006 mid-term elections. The case was later dismissed and Schlozman came under criticism for breaking with longstanding Justice Department policy against bringing voter fraud charges close to an election.

Schlozman testified before a Senate committee last year that he received approval to file the voter fraud charges from a Justice Department official who was instrumental in drafting the guidelines urging that U.S. Attorneys avoid filing charges claiming voter fraud at the height of an election.

McKay’s Firing

John McKay, the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, was fired in large part, according to the DOJ report, because Republicans were angry that he did not convene a federal grand jury to pursue allegations of voter fraud related to the 2004 governor’s election in the state, in which Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi by a margin of 129 votes.

In an interview, McKay said there were some Republicans in his district with close ties to the White House who demanded he launch an investigation into the election and bring charges against individuals–Democrats–for vote-rigging. He believes his refusal to haul “innocent people before a grand jury” was the reason he was not selected for a federal judgeship by local Republicans in Washington state in 2006.

McKay said that, at the time, he felt he was not being treated fairly, and requested a meeting with then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers to discuss the issue, as well as his application for US district judge in his home state

“I asked for a meeting with Harriet Miers, whom I had known since work I had been involved in with the American Bar Association, and she immediately agreed to see me in August of 2006,” McKay said. He added that when he met with Miers and her deputy William Kelley at the White House, the first thing they asked him was, “Why would Republicans in the state of Washington be angry with you?”

That was “a clear reference to the 2004 governor’s election,” McKay said in characterizing Miers and her deputy’s comments. “Some believed I should convene a federal grand jury and bring innocent people before the grand jury.”

“All of my actions as United States attorney had been coordinated with the Department of Justice,” McKay told me. He said he explained that to Miers and Kelley, and informed them that there was no evidence of voter fraud to support launching a federal inquiry into the election.

McKay said he believes the meeting he had with Miers and Kelley directly led to his name being placed on a list of US attorneys selected for dismissal in December 2006.

ACORN Offices Raided

Bob Walsh, the spokesman for Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller, a Democrat, said ACORN is accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with false and duplicate names, accusations similar to ones leveled in New Mexico that turned out to be baseless.

The raid comes two months after state and federal authorities formed a task force to pursue election-fraud allegations in Nevada, a crucial swing state in November’s presidential election.
Walsh said there have been ongoing complaints that ACORN has submitted voter registration forms rife with erroneous information. But it’s unknown how many of bogus forms were submitted.
Friedman, the investigative reporter and an expert on election integrity issues, said Tuesday’s raid of ACORN’s Nevada offices was orchestrated by the GOP to scare people away from the polls.

“With prospects looking bleak for the Republicans this November, pulling out the old ACORN lie — in hopes of scaring people away from the polls, causing chaos in November by challenging voters when they show up to vote, and putting in place baseless grounds to contest close results later on (when the GOP become “sore losers”) — is just about all they have left at this point,” Friedman wrote on his blog.

“Doubtless you’ve heard the smears by now: that ACORN is committing “voter fraud”, on behalf of Obama, in hotly contested swing states,” Friedman wrote. “The media has been all too happy to pass that garbage on, without bothering to note that, in fact, the organization attempts to authenticate every registration form their workers submit and by law they must turn in every form to election officials — even if they find a registration to be fraudulent when they call the phone number submitted on the form, or if the forms are otherwise suspect or incomplete.”

The 390-page report is the culmination of an 18-month joint investigation by the Inspector General Glenn Fine and the head of the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility H. Marshall Jarrett. Their report, concluded that Iglesias’s firing was the most “controversial” and that his dismissal was “engineered” by New Mexico GOP lawmakers Sen. Pete Domenici, Congresswoman Heather Wilson and former White House political adviser Karl Rove over complaints about Iglesias’s refusal to secure indictments in voter fraud cases and in a public corruption case.

Many election integrity experts believe claims of voter fraud are a ploy by Republicans to suppress minorities and poor people from voting. Historically, those groups tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Raising red flags about the integrity of the ballots, experts believe, is an attempt by GOP operatives to swing elections to their candidates as well as an attempt to use the fear of criminal prosecution to discourage individuals from voting in future races.

The report said Bush and Rove “spoke with Attorney General Gonzales in October 2006 about their concerns over voter fraud in three cities, one of which was Albuquerque, New Mexico” and concerns Domenici had about Iglesias’s job performance.

“There is conflicting evidence about exactly what was communicated to Gonzales, and what the Department’s response was to these concerns,” according to the report. “Gonzales testified that he recalled mentioning his conversation with Rove to [his former Chief of Staff Kyle] Sampson and asking him to look into the matter. Sampson told congressional investigators that he recalled that after the removals became public, Gonzales told him that he recalled the President telling him in October [2006] that Domenici had concerns about Iglesias.”

“On March 13, 2007, in response to reporters’ questions about the removals of U.S. Attorneys, White House spokesman Dan Bartlett stated that the President had told Gonzales in late 2006 that he had been hearing about election fraud concerns from members of Congress regarding three cities: Albuquerque, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee,” the report says.

In the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election, Bernalillo County in New Mexico had been the target of a massive grassroots effort by the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to register voters. That led New Mexico GOP to challenge the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls.

Iglesias established an election fraud task force in September 2004 and spent more than two months probing claims of widespread voter fraud in his state. He said he fully expected to uncover instances of voter fraud based on numerous stories that appeared in New Mexico media that said minors received voter registration forms and that “a large number” of voter registration forms turned up during the course of a drug raid.

“Due to the high volume of suspected criminal activity, I believed there to be a strong likelihood of uncovering prosecutable cases,” Iglesias said. “I also reviewed the hard copy file from the last voter fraud case my office had prosecuted which dated back to 1992.

“My intention was to file prosecutions in order to send a message that voter fraud or election fraud would not be tolerated in the District of New Mexico.”

“After examining the evidence, and in conjunction with the Justice Department Election Crimes Unit and the FBI, I could not find any cases I could prosecute beyond a reasonable doubt,” Iglesias said in an interview. “Accordingly, I did not authorize any voter fraud related prosecutions.”

GOP ‘Intent on Suppressing Votes’

In several interviews, Iglesias said that Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes.

He recalled that the Justice Department issued a directive to every U.S. Attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent.

In his recently published book, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration, Iglesias said in late summer 2002 he received an email from the Department of Justice suggesting “in no uncertain terms” that U.S. attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials “to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases.”

“The e-mail imperatives came again in 2004 and 2006, by which time I had learned that far from being standard operating procedure for the Justice Department, the emphasis on voter irregularities was unique to the Bush administration,” Iglesias said.

“But there was a more sinister reading to such urgent calls for reform, not to mention the Justice Department’s strident insistence on harvesting a bumper crop of voter fraud prosecutions. That implication is summed up in a single word: ‘caging.’

“Not only did the [Bush] administration stoop to such seamy expedients to press its agenda in 2004,” Iglesias wrote. “It had the full might and authority of the federal government and its prosecutorial powers to accomplish its ends.”

Vote caging is an illegal tactic to suppress minorities from voting by having their names purged from voter rolls when they fail to respond to registered mail sent to their homes.

The Republican National Committee signed a consent decree in 1986 stating it would not engage in the practice after it was caught suppressing votes in 1981 and 1986.

In July 2007, in a letter to then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, and Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, said, “caging is a reprehensible voter suppression tactic, and it may also violate federal law and the terms of applicable judicially enforceable consent decrees.”

Documents released last year showed that Republican operatives engaged in a widespread effort to “cage” votes during the 2004 presidential election in battleground states, such as New Mexico, Nevada, Florida, and Ohio, where George W. Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry.

The efforts to purge voters from registration rolls were spearheaded by Tim Griffin.

Coddy Johnson was another Republican operative involved in the effort to cage votes during the 2004 presidential election. Johnson worked as the national field director of Bush’s 2004 campaign and spent time in the White House as an associate director of political affairs, working under Karl Rove. Johnson’s father was Bush’s college roommate at Yale.

Iglesias said Republicans in New Mexico expected him to put loyalty to the Republican Party above the law.

“Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote. The law, 42 USC 1973 had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.

“After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution.

I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the” election fraud task force.

Complaints Begin in 2005

Steve Bell, Domenici’s chief of staff, “began complaining about Iglesias to the White House sometime in 2005.”

Bell lodged his complaints with Scott Jennings, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Political Affairs. Jennings told the IG and OPR investigators that “that shortly after joining the White House in early 2005, he received criticism of Iglesias’s erformance as U.S. Attorney from Bell.”

“Jennings said Bell told him on a periodic basis that he was unhappy with Iglesias’s response to complaints about voter fraud, among other issues, and that the White House should replace him. Jennings said he passed that information along to his immediate superiors at the time, [White House Director of Political Affairs Sara] Taylor and [Tim] Griffin.”

Taylor reported directly to Rove. Griffin was a former Republican National Committee opposition researcher and close friend of Karl Rove.

Bud Cummins, the former U.S. Attorney for Little Rock, Arkansas, was fired and Griffin was given his job. Griffin resigned from his post as interim U.S Attorney last year when details of his role in vote suppression during the 2004 election was reported.

Monday’s report by the Justice Department’s IG and OPR said, “After Cummins was instructed to resign and Griffin was announced as his replacement, senior Department leaders made a series of conflicting and misleading statements about Cummins’s removal.”

Jennings told IG and OPR investigators that “sometime in 2006 Bell told him that Senator Domenici was going to call the White House Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten, about Iglesias.

“Jennings notified Taylor and Rove so that Bolten could be given a heads-up. We do not know whether this call was made, and if so what was discussed,” the report says.

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten last year to testify about the role the White House played in the decision to fire nine U.S. attorneys in late 2006. Additionally, the committee sought documents from Bolten and Miers related to the attorney purge.

Bolten and Miers were instructed by President George W. Bush to ignore the subpoenas and advised not to appear before the committee. Bush claimed Bolten and Miers were immune to congressional subpoenas and any information they may have related to the firings was protected by executive privilege. The House voted to hold Bolten and Miers in contempt of Congress. It was the first time in 25 years a full chamber of Congress voted on contempt of Congress citation.

Additionally, New Mexico Republican party chairman Allen Weh also complained to Jennings about Iglesias’s refusal to pursue voter fraud cases.

“Weh said he complained about Iglesias to Scott Jennings in the White House sometime in 2005, and told Jennings that Iglesias should be replaced,” the report says. “E-mail records we obtained from the White House confirm that Weh wrote to Jennings about Iglesias on August 9, 2005. His message to Jennings, which was copied to Karl Rove, Sara Taylor, Tim Griffin, and Steve Bell, stated:

We discussed the need to replace the US Atty in NM several months ago. The brief on Voter Fraud at the RNC meeting last week reminded me of how important this post is to this issue, and prompted this follow up. As you are aware the incumbent, David Iglesias, has failed miserably in his duty to prosecute voter fraud. To be perfectly candid, he was ‘missing in action’ during the last election, just as he was in the 2002 election cycle. I am advised his term expires, or is renewed, in October. It is respectfully requested that strong consideration be given to replacing him at this point …. If we can get a new US Atty that takes voter fraud seriously, combined with these other initiatives we’ll make some real progress in cleaning up a state notorious for crooked elections.

Just a few months earlier, Iglesias had reached out to Weh after hearing from a friend that the New Mexico Republican Party was unhappy with his handling of voter fraud cases.

“Iglesias said he wanted to get the message out to his fellow Republicans that he would prosecute “provable” voter fraud cases but would not bring a case unless it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” according to the report. “In a further attempt to defuse the situation, Iglesias called state Republican Party Chairman Weh, and the two met briefly for coffee near Weh’s home on May 6, 2005. Iglesias said he tried to explain to Weh that he wanted to prosecute provable voter fraud cases but could not go forward without sufficient evidence.”

Weh told IG/OPR investigators that “Iglesias began the meeting by asking if he was ‘in trouble’ with the Republican Party, and that he tried to blame the lack of prosecutions on the FBI’s failure to commit resources. Weh also said he told Iglesias that Iglesias needed to do something about voter fraud and that he should have already done something about it.”

“Weh said that although his meeting with Iglesias was cordial, he remained unconvinced by Iglesias’s explanation,” the report says. “Weh told us that he also thought Iglesias was unqualified for his position as U.S. Attorney, and Weh said he had concluded by then that Iglesias had failed to adequately investigate and prosecute voter fraud crimes. Weh added that his opinion of Iglesias was widely shared by New Mexico Republicans, and that he made his views known to many people.”

As the 2006 elections approached, “Patrick Rogers, the former general counsel to the New Mexico state Republican Party and a party activist, continued to complain about voter fraud issues in New Mexico,” according to the report. “In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to Donsanto in the [DOJ's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, “I have calls in, to the USA and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias’s Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an email:

The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. … The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!

“Carpe Diem” was a reference to the Chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party at the time, John Wertheim.

“In June 2006, [GOP activist] Mickey Barnett said he asked… Jennings to set up a meeting for Barnett and Rogers at the Department of Justice to discuss Iglesias’s performance,” the report says. “According to Barnett, he had complained to Jennings about Iglesias approximately 5 to 10 times by that point.”

On Oct. 2, 2006, Rove received an email from Mickey Barnett, an attorney who worked on Bush-Cheney’s reelection campaign. Barnett complained about the slow pace of the results of a task force Iglesias set up to investigate allegations of voter fraud. The email to Rove had not been disclosed prior to the publication of the DOJ’s report.

“We still await the results of the task force Iglesias convened about this time two years ago on the clear Acorn fraudulent voter registrations,” Barnett wrote Rove. “We were told it would look to [sic] “political” to indict anyone that close to the election. Then we never heard anything else.”

On Nov. 7, 2006, the day of the midterm elections, Bell emailed Rove about problems with ballots at a precinct in New Mexico and said “we worry about the [U.S. Attorney] here.”

Rove responded to Bell’s Nov. 7, 2006 email by saying that Domenici should “call the Attorney General about this.”

According to the report, Iglesias’s name was placed on a termination list around this time.

“It appears that Sampson put Iglesias on the remova list sometime after October 17 [2006] based largely on complaints about Iglesias’s handling of certain voter fraud and public corruption investigations in New Mexico,” according to the report. “Sampson said he knew that New Mexico Republican Senator Pete Domenici had called Attorney General Gonzales on three separate occasions in 2005 and 2006 to register complaints about Iglesias’s performance.”

“The White House would not provide us any internal documents and e-mails relating to the removals of Iglesias or the other U.S. Attorneys,” according to the report. “Our investigation was also hindered by the refusal of Senator Domenici and his Chief of Staff to agree to an interview by us. In addition, we were not able to interview [former DOJ White House liaison] Monica Goodling, who also declined to cooperate with our investigation “As a result, important gaps remain in the facts regarding Iglesias’s removal as U.S. Attorney.”

Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed Nora Dannehy, a federal prosecutor from Connecticut, to continue the investigation. DOJ IG Glen Fine and OPR’s H. Marshall Jarrett, the principal authors of the report, said they were unable to fully investigate the firings of the nine U.S. attorneys “because of the refusal by several former key White House officials, including Harriet Miers and Karl Rove, to cooperate with our investigation.”

Palin’s new position was summed up in a Sept. 9 letter from Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg to the state legislature, which has authorized an independent counsel probe into whether Palin and her staff illegally accessed confidential personnel records of her ex-brother-in-law, state trooper Mike Wooten.

The probe also focuses on Palin’s firing of state Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan in July after he refused to fire Wooten.

Colberg’s argument is that Palin can access confidential files of any state employee she chooses and thus the allegation that she got unauthorized access to Wooten’s personnel records – by whatever means — is moot.

“It does not violate the State Personnel Act for Department of Administration Staff to provide confidential personnel information to the governor or her staff — or for the governor or her staff to receive that information — in the course and scope of their official duties,” the attorney general wrote.

“The governor or her staff may, in the course and scope of their official duties, review a confidential personnel file to ensure, for example, that an employee is adequately supervised, appropriately evaluated, and appropriately disciplined. In appropriate cases, the governor may also direct the termination of a state employee.”

This legal analysis appears to be an attempt to provide Palin and her staffers with legal cover for allegedly disseminating confidential information about Wooten in a campaign to get him fired.

However, John Cyr, executive director of the Public Safety Employees Association which represents Alaska State Troopers, disputes the notion of that Palin can have unlimited access to all state employee records.

“It is illegal to access employee medical and personnel files unless it’s on a ‘need to know basis,’” Cyr said about Palin’s assertion of this unlimited authority. “This is outrageous.”

Palin’s new defense line became necessary when it turned out that an earlier claim that Wooten’s personnel file was public record through his divorce/custody case with Palin’s sister turned out to be untrue.

Palin, her private attorney Thomas Van Flein and McCain campaign officials had said Wooten released his confidential medical and employment records as part of those proceedings. Palin’s office even posted Wooten’s Feb. 7 agreement to release those records as part of the case discovery.

Learned Derogatory Information

Palin and her husband, Todd, presumably learned some derogatory information about Wooten from her sister, Molly McCann, who received the information via the discovery process.

However, the Palins appear to have been mistaken that Wooten’s personnel record had been released into the official court record where it would become public information.

Wooten’s personnel file was never introduced as evidence in the divorce/custody case because he entered into a settlement agreement with his ex-wife over custody of their young children, according to Palin’s sister’s attorney, Roberta Erwin.

“It doesn’t become part of the court record unless you file exhibits; we never got that far,” Erwin said in an interview.

The clerk at the courthouse in Anchorage confirmed that the contents of the Wooten/McCann divorce/custody case contain none of Wooten’s personnel, medical or financial records.

However, three weeks after Wooten signed that Feb. 7 release form for the discovery — even though the information was not in the public record — Palin’s director of state boards and commissions, Frank Bailey, telephoned police Lt. Rodney Dial and wanted to know why Wooten hadn’t been fired.

Bailey outlined disparaging details about Wooten’s finances and personal behavior that appear to have come from his personnel file. Bailey said he had gotten the information from Todd Palin, the governor’s husband.

Gov. Palin’s handling of the Wooten matter and her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Monegan are under investigation by independent counsel Steve Branchflower, who was appointed by Alaska’s Legislative Council.

While the probe centers on whether Palin abused her power in firing Monegan in July, the investigation also involves claims that the governor’s office peeked at Wooten’s personnel records illegally.

In July, Gov. Palin vowed to cooperate with the probe. However, since her surprise selection as the Republican vice presidential nominee, she — as well as her husband and senior staff aides – have balked at giving depositions.

On Sept. 2, just a day before she accepted the GOP nomination, Palin also took the unusual step of filing an ethics complaint against herself — to move the investigation to the state personnel board whose three members are appointed by the governor – and to make the argument that Branchflower should stop his investigation.

Subpoenas Approved

On Friday, Branchflower was forced to seek — and received on a 3-2 vote — the power to subpoena Todd Palin and 13 other witnesses, although not Gov. Palin herself. Lawyers for some of Palin’s aides have indicated they will seek to quash the subpoenas.

Attorney General Colberg’s letter represented another front in Palin’s drive to kill Branchflower’s probe. By insisting that the governor has unlimited authority to examine any state personnel records she wants, the Palin administration is trying to close down out one key investigative avenue.

Attorney Erwin, who represented Palin’s sister in the divorce/custody case, said Wooten’s release form was posted at the governor’s Web site in July as a reaction to some initial allegations that Palin “inappropriately accessed Wooten’s files.”

The information about Wooten “did not come from the governor’s office,” the lawyer said. “I tried at the onset to put that rumor to rest.”

Erwin said she did not share any information in Wooten’s files with Palin or the governor’s aides. However, Erwin said she is sure Palin’s sister disclosed the information to her family and perhaps Gov. Palin decided to act on it.

In July, Palin also issued a statement suggesting that she had obtained information about Wooten’s personnel file through the discovery process related to the divorce/custody battle with her sister.

“Any information regarding personnel records came from the trooper himself,” Palin said.

This past week, Palin’s office removed Wooten’s release form from her official Web site without explanation. The governor’s office has refused to comment.

However, the removal roughly coincided with the attorney general’s letter, suggesting that the Palin administration may have realized that Wooten’s records were never part of the public record in the divorce/custody case, leaving the governor and her husband with some legal exposure.

Attorney General Colberg then issued his opinion that the source of Palin’s knowledge about Wooten’s personnel record was irrelevant because she had the right to look into anything she wanted with regards to a state employee.

The documents: a release signed by Wooten in February giving his ex-wife’s attorney access to his “entire employment file including but not limited to any and all disciplinary action(s) and complaints, and personnel records,” and a letter from her attorney addressed “To whom it may concern,” stating that any records obtained were done through proper channels.

“The governor’s office, and particularly Governor Sarah Palin, has at no time had any involvement in this litigation. All records relevant to the litigation were obtained through the standard discovery process involved in every court case, as governed by the Alaska Rules of the Court,” the attorney’s letter said.

On Thursday afternoon, Palin’s office removed the two documents from the governor’s official website following a news report that the law enforcement union representing her ex-brother, Mike Wooten, filed a formal complaint alleging the documents were accessed illegally and leaked. (PDF files of those documents can be found here and here).

Wooten was married to Palin’s younger sister, Molly McCann. The couple, who divorced in January, have been engaged in a bitter child custody dispute. Palin filed several formal complaints against her ex-brother-in-law over the course of three years alleging he engaged in illegal behavior while on duty. But her complaints relied heavily on second-hand information, some of which was later determined to be suspect and unverifiable.

Alaska law enforcement officials investigated all of Palin’s accusations and concluded that 11 of Palin’s 36 allegations against her brother-in-law did violate department policy, including an admission by Wooten that he tasered his stepson, Payton, and drank beer while on duty. The department suspended Wooten for 10 days, which the union negotiated down to five.

A spokesperson for Palin, Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, refused to say why the two documents were scrubbed from the website.

The documents were posted in response to a news conference held the same day by John Cyr, Palin’s union representative, who released 482 pages of documents that detailed the extent of Palin’s complaints against Wooten.

“Officer Wooten has asked that we release the records around that investigation so that the press can take an open and honest look at what happened and you may draw your own conclusions,” Cyr said.

After Cyr released the information, Palin released a strongly worded statement:

“To allege that I, or any member of my family, requested, received or released confidential personnel information on an Alaska State Trooper, or directed disciplinary action be taken against any employee of the Department of Public Safety, is, quite simply, outrageous.

“Any information regarding personnel records came from the trooper himself. I question the timing of these false allegations. It is unfortunate, as we seek to address a growing energy crisis in this state, that this matter has been raised now,” she said.

The same day, in response to news reports that alleged Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was fired because he resisted Palin’s calls to fire Wooten, Palin told the local CBS affiliate in Alaska that the timing of the allegation was suspicious and an attempt by her critics to interfere with her plans to build a natural gas pipeline.

However, Palin then veered off into another diatribe about Wooten.

“So suspect of the timing,” Palin told CBS. “Will come to find out it was on Sunday that Trooper Wooten refused to obey a court order after visitation with his children, he doesn’t have full custody of the kids He had visitation. He refused to turn the kids over.

“One of his sergeants had to call him and tell him, ‘Trooper Wooten you have to follow the court order. You have to give the kids back.’ He did that with this threat. He said, ‘Get ready for the show. I’m going to bring you down.’ Here he’s talking to his ex-wife. The mother of these children.

“And ‘I’m going to bring your family down.’ And now what is it three days later, four days later? Starts to show. So it makes sense to me now, why he riled people up. Riled the union up, and they came forward today. Because we know, I know without a doubt the dismissal of Walt Monegan, the replacement of him as commissioner of Department of Public Safety has absolutely nothing to do with Trooper Wooten.”

But the 44-year-old first-term Alaska governor is a favorite of right-wing Christian groups and was hailed Friday by one organization as “a true Christian” who is “pro-life and pro-marriage.” She also has favored the teaching of creationism in Alaska’s schools.

After the surprise announcement Friday, the McCain campaign tried to frame Palin as a reformer who has taken on corruption in Alaska. However, an examination of her career as a small-town mayor and inexperienced governor reveals an official prone to petty squabbles and personal retaliation.

In 1996, after winning the election to be mayor of Wasilla, then a town with a population of 5,000, Palin sought to oust six department heads because they had signed a letter supporting the previous mayor, their old boss.

Palin ultimately fired two of them, the police chief and the museum director, and pushed two others into quitting.

In 1997, some residents considered her actions so high-handed that they tried to initiate a recall election.

“Four months of turmoil have followed in which almost every move by Palin has been questioned,” the Associated Press reported in a Feb. 11, 1997 dispatch. “Critics argue the [Palin] decisions are politically motivated.”

Wasilla’s ousted police chief, Irl Stambaugh, sued Palin that year for alleged contract violation, wrongful termination and gender discrimination The police chief claimed Palin fired him not for cause but for being disloyal and because he was a man whose size – 6 feet and 200 pounds – intimidated her.

However, the recall election never got off the ground, and a federal judge rejected Stambaugh’s lawsuit.

Now, as Alaska’s governor, Palin is under investigation for allegedly ousting Alaska public safety commissioner Walt Monegan because he refused to fire a state trooper entangled in a divorce and custody battle with Palin’s sister.

That probe also is examining whether Palin’s extended family, including her husband, and members of her staff tried to pressure Monegan to fire state trooper Mike Wooten because of the divorce.

Monegan told the Anchorage Daily News that the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, showed him the work of a private investigator, who had been hired by the family to dig into Wooten’s life and who was accusing the trooper of various misdeeds, such as drunk driving and child abuse.

In early August 2008, the state legislature agreed to investigate the circumstances surrounding Gov. Palin’s firing of Monegan. She initially welcomed the probe and denied that she had put pressure on Monegan.

Later, however, Palin acknowledged that there had been more than two dozen inquiries from her staff to the public safety department regarding trooper Wooten, though Palin still insisted she had no role in them.

Gov. Palin also released an audio recording of her director of state boards and commissions, Frank Bailey, pressing police Lt. Rodney Dial in February 2008 about why no action had been taken against Wooten.

Experience

Besides the prospect of more embarrassing disclosures about Palin’s thin government record, McCain’s VP choice also undercuts his campaign’s theme that Barack Obama lacks the foreign-policy experience to be Commander in Chief, since Palin is a virtual unknown on the international stage.

However, as the first woman on a Republican national ticket, she potentially appeals to angry Hillary Clinton supporters and to so-called values voters who pushed McCain to choose a running mate who is against abortion and gay marriage.

“John McCain is to be commended on his choice of Sarah Palin, a true Christian for Vice President,” said Dr. Gary Cass, Chairman and CEO of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission.

“Palin, an evangelical who is pro-life and pro-marriage, meets all the criterion that CADC set forth for a VP pick. Unfortunately, Obama chose Joe Biden, a liberal Catholic, who is not in compliance with Christian moral teaching on abortion or homosexuality.”

Cass was particularly relieved that McCain did not tap former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Mormon, or Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Jew.

“Will [McCain] pick a pro-choice Republican or perhaps a moderate Mormon or a liberal Jew?” Cass said in an earlier statement of concern that was echoed by other conservative Christian organizations nationwide.

“Unless McCain picks a true Christian for Vice President, real conservative Christians are being disenfranchised from this presidential election,” Cass warned. “Obama missed a great chance to reach out to Christians. Now we will see if McCain will let conservative Christians have someone we can vote for, not just vote against.”

On Friday, other conservative Christian groups also celebrated Palin’s selection.

“The country now has a clear choice,” said Darla St. Martin, Co-Executive Director of the National Right to Life Committee, “between an avowed pro-abortion ticket that would continue to push for unrestricted abortion on demand, and a strongly pro-life ticket that will bring us closer to a society that embraces the value and dignity of human life.”

Palin is staunchly opposed to both same-sex marriage and granting benefits to same-sex partners. When a state court ruled last year that civil unions are to be permitted for same-sex couples, Palin balked, and called for the state constitution to be amended to in an attempt to upend the ruling.

She also has favored the teaching of creationism in schools along with evolution. “Teach both,” Palin said in 2006. “Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

Vendettas

Still, many political observers wondered if Palin’s limited — and checkered — career as an official in a lightly populated state like Alaska might prove to be a liability for McCain.

Following her two terms as mayor of Wasilla, Palin made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican lieutenant governor nomination in 2002.

Then, as chairwoman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she fell into a public spat with fellow commissioner Randy Ruedrich, the state’s GOP chairman.

In 2003, she reported Ruedrich to Gov. Frank Murkowski’s administration, saying she suspected him of an ethics breach in conducting work for the state GOP on government time.

To obtain evidence of Ruedrich’s alleged malfeasance, Palin hacked into his computer, an ethical lapse in its own right. She resigned from the commission in January 2004.

But Palin’s ethics complaint against Ruedrich gave her a reputation as an anti-establishment reformer at a time when the Alaskan Republican hierarchy was coming under scrutiny for corruption.

For two years, she stayed out of politics, acquiring a business license for a marketing and consulting company named Rogue Cou, “a classy way of saying redneck,” Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in a June 2005 interview.

Palin also faced questions about hypocrisy in the vendetta that she waged against Ruedrich when it turned out that, as mayor of Wasilla, she had used her office computer for political purposes.

“We wondered how her using a city computer to run for lieutenant governor in 2002 was different than Republican Party chief Randy Ruedrich using Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission computers for party business, for which he was fined and resigned under pressure. She said it was different,” the Anchorage Daily News wrote in a July 14, 2006, editorial.

“In a release [Palin] fired off to everyone she could think of after the questions, she huffed about a ‘smear’ campaign organized by her ‘enemies — powerful enemies.’ Later, there were references on various radio talk shows to whispering campaigns and other craziness, but we wrote that off as the vapors and a touch of paranoia.”

The editorial continued: “She characterized as ‘innocuous’ her political e-mails sent on a city computer to the Alaska Outdoor Council and another complaining about the Right to Life folks not choosing her as their candidate in the 2002 race.

“That was bad enough, indicating she just does not get it, but then she had this to say: ‘We’ve had lots of people come forward with dirt on (gubernatorial candidate John) Binkley . . . as well as dirt on (Gov. Frank) Murkowski. We’ve told them to bury it. I’m not running that type of campaign.’

“Apparently, that is exactly the kind of vicious campaign the former two-term Wasilla mayor is running. In our view, that kind of backdoor character assassination is the most scurrilous type of attack.” the Anchorage Daily News wrote. “Oh, I have dirt, Palin says smugly, yes, indeedy; but I’ll not give the details because that would be wrong. She is right. It is very wrong. It is very much the hallmark of lightweight politicians in over their heads.”

Now, however, John McCain has proposed putting Palin in a position within a proverbial heartbeat of the presidency.

The administration had asserted a blanket claim of executive privilege in the face of congressional subpoenas, but U.S. District Judge John Bates rejected that claim as unprecedented and, on Tuesday, denied the Justice Department’s request for a stay pending an appeal.

Under the ruling, Miers and Bolten now must appear before the House Judiciary Committee to testify about the White House role in the firings and produce documents sought by the committee.

“The Court will deny the Executive’s request for a stay,” Bates ruled Tuesday. “Hence, the Executive should respond to the document aspect of the subpoenas by producing non-privileged material and identifying more specifically the materials it is withholding on a claim of executive privilege.

“It is on Ms. Miers’s appearance that the dispute principally focuses This decision should not, however, foreclose the parties’ continuing attempts to reach a negotiated solution. Both sides indicated that discussions regarding an accommodation have resumed.”

Bates’s ruling said the White House “has failed to demonstrate that it has a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of the absolute immunity issue or that it has even raised a question “so serious, substantial, difficult and doubtful,” as to warrant suspending the effect of the July 31st Order pending appeal.”

“The Executive’s argument boils down to a claim that a stay is appropriate because the underlying issue is important,” Bates wrote. “But that is beside the point and does not demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits. Simply calling an issue important — primarily because it involves the relationship of the political branches — does not transform the Executive’s weak arguments into a likelihood of success or a substantial appellate issue. Hence, the Court concludes that this prong of the stay pending appeal analysis cuts strongly in favor of the Committee.”

Three weeks ago, White House Counsel Fred Fielding sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers requesting a meeting to negotiate Miers and Bolten’s congressional testimony in light of Bates’s ruling.

In his letter to Conyers following Bates’s ruling, Fielding said the White House was interested in working “cooperatively to resolve these issues.”

Toward that end, and hopefully as a prelude to meaningful discussions between us, I propose that members of our respective staffs meet as early as next week to re-commence discussing possibilities for reaching an accommodation between the Branches in this matter,” Fielding wrote Friday in his letter to Conyers.

As I know you appreciate, this litigation is very important in determining constitutional contours governing certain relations between the Executive and Legislative Branches in the Congressional oversight setting,” Fielding wrote. “Accordingly, the Department of Justice has now filed an appeal in this matter, and is also seeking a stay of the decision pending review by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

That course of action will provide appellate consideration of the novel questions at stake in this matter and will enable the parties to obtain, if it should prove necessary, a final decision in this important matter…However, the fact that the Executive has notice an appeal in this matter does not signify that we think further litigation is the exclusive path forward.

But while the White House negotiated with Conyers, DOJ lawyers were hopeful that Bates would grant the administration a stay, which would have likely delayed the matter until the end of Bush’s term at which time the subpoenas for Bolten and Miers will expire.

The DOJ rejected that argument, and told Bates last week that a stay “represents the best hope of promoting an accommodation between the two branches.”

However, House counsel Irv Nathan said negotiations have been “completely useless.”

“We have not found willing partners on the other side of the table,” Nathan said in court Wednesday, telling Bates that “we’re being dunced around here.”

Bates, a Bush appointee, agreed. He said he didn’t believe that the White House was serious about entering into a good faith agreement with Congress in exchange for Miers testimony.

“Had the litigants indicated that a negotiated solution was foreseeable in the near future, the Court may have stayed its hand in the hope that further intervention in this dispute by the Article III branch would not be necessary,” Bates wrote. “As it stands, however, the Court must decide the questions presented to it. But there is still ample time for the parties to reach an accommodation. The Court’s July 31, 2008 Order does not compel Ms. Miers to appear at any particular date.

Conyers lauded Bates’s ruling Tuesday, and said he intends to call Miers to testify before his committee on Sept 11. Conyers gave the White House until Sept. 4 to produce documents relevant to the attorney firings.

“Today’s ruling clearly rejects the White House’s efforts to run out the clock on the Committee’s investigation of DOJ politicization this Congress,” Conyers said Tuesday. “I am heartened that Judge Bates recognized that the public interest in this matter is best served by the furtherance of the Committee’s investigation. The Committee intends to promptly schedule a hearing with Ms. Miers and stands ready as always to consider any reasonable offer of accommodation with the White House.”

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Miers and Bolten last year, but the officials were instructed by President George W. Bush to ignore the subpoenas. Bush claimed Bolten and Miers were immune to congressional subpoenas and any information they may have related to the firings was protected by executive privilege. The House voted to hold Bolten and Miers in contempt of Congress. It was the first time in 25 years a full chamber of Congress voted on contempt of Congress citation.

Bates said in a July 31 order that the White House’s legal argument of executive privilege was “entirely unsupported by existing case law.” Bates said Miers could invoke executive privilege on a question-by-question basis. But he said Miers must comply with the congressional subpoena to exercise that right.

… The Executive cannot identify a single judicial opinion that recognizes absolute immunity for senior presidential advisors in this or any other context,” Bates wrote in a 93-page opinion. “In fact, there is Supreme Court authority that is all but conclusive on this question and that powerfully suggests that such advisors do not enjoy absolute immunity. The Court therefore rejects the Executive’s claim of absolute immunity for senior presidential aides.

The aspect of this lawsuit that is unprecedented is the notion that Ms. Miers is absolutely immune from compelled congressional process. The Supreme Court has reserved absolute immunity for very narrow circumstances, involving the President’s personal exposure to suits for money damages based on his official conduct or concerning matters of national security or foreign affairs. The Executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law.

Documents released by the Department of Justice last year show that Miers was briefed by DOJ officials about the decision to purge the U.S. attorneys and was aware that the DOJ would cook up a bogus story to explain the reason behind the dismissals.

Indeed. In February 2005, Miers suggested to Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, that perhaps all 93 U.S. attorneys should be fired.

That idea was rejected, but Sampson spent nearly two years working on a list of U.S. attorneys to purge on the basis that they were disloyal. All 93 federal prosecutors were ranked by “loyalty to the President and Attorney General.”

Sampson, who was singled out in a report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General two weeks ago for violating civil service laws by using a political litmus test to guide his hiring decisions at the agency, wrote to Miers suggesting “a limited number of U.S. Attorneys could be targeted for removal and replacement.”

In sending the interview requests Wednesday, Conyers is following up on a disputed story in journalist Ron Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, which includes an account of how the mysterious letter originated.

The book cites statements from former CIA associate deputy director of operations Rob Richer and John Maguire, the former chief of the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group/Near East Division, as indicating that the White House ordered the CIA to produce the bogus letter to retroactively justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Richer and Maguire gave Suskind on-the-record interviews, which the author recorded, discussing the reasons the letter was created and saying that it likely emanated from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. Both men have since recanted their statements.

Conyers, who has held periodic hearings on abuses of power by George W. Bush’s administration, sent letters to former CIA Director George Tenet; the CIA’s former executive director A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, Cheney’s former chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and John Hannah, another Cheney assistant — as well as to Richer and Maguire.

“I am writing to follow up on recent serious allegations regarding the creation of a false letter from Tahir Jalil Habbush, Saddam Hussein’s former Chief of Intelligence, to Saddam Hussein,” Conyers said.

“The letter, which was allegedly backdated to July 1, 2001, attempted to establish an operational link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in the period before the 9/11 attacks by specifically stating that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had received training in Iraq.

“At the time of the alleged decision in 2003 to concoct the false letter, the Vice President’s Office had been reportedly pressuring the CIA to prove this connection as a justification to invade Iraq. The letter also falsely noted that Iraq had received a ‘shipment’ (presumably uranium) from Niger with the assistance of al-Qaeda.

“Upon careful review of the allegations concerning this matter, I have become very concerned with the possibility that this administration may have violated federal law by using the resources of our intelligence agencies to influence domestic policy processes or opinion.

“The law specifically provides that ‘no covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media.’”

Suskind wrote in his book that such a violation might constitute an “impeachable offense.”

“It is not the sort of offense, such as assault or burglary, that carries specific penalties, for example, a fine or jail time,” Suskind wrote. “It is much broader than that. It pertains to the White House’s knowingly misusing an arm of government, the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings.”

Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, in a recent column published on Findlaw.com, agreed. But Conyers’ office was unwilling to make that same characterization. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has long since taken Bush’s possible impeachment “off the table.”

Investigative Reluctance

Conyers was not interested in reviewing the claims contained in Suskind’s book until his office was bombarded with phone calls and e-mails from citizens who favor impeaching President Bush, according to a senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.

Finally, after Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, sent a letter to Conyers on Aug. 8 requesting a formal review, Conyers agreed to look into the matter.

Many of the allegations in Suskind’s book — about how pre-war Iraq intelligence was cooked at the highest levels of the U.S. government — echo articles of impeachment that Kucinich has filed in the Congress.

“I asked Chairman Conyers to investigate these claims because, if true, the administration fabricated evidence and used it to lead the country into an unprovoked war,” Kucinich said.

It’s unknown what Conyers would do with the information if he determines the White House violated federal law. Moreover, given the White House’s broad claims of executive privilege, it’s unclear whether the intelligence officials will even cooperate.

A spokesman for Tenet would not comment, and the CIA’s Congressional Affairs office said it was reviewing the request. Libby and Hannah did not return phone calls or e-mails for comment.

Libby was convicted of four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice related to the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, leading to a sentence of 30 months in jail. However, Bush commuted the sentence to eliminate jail time and left open the possibility that Libby might get a full pardon before Bush leaves office.

Tenet’s Denials

Tenet has vehemently denied Suskind’s claims, going so far as to attack the author’s journalistic integrity.

“There was no such order from the White House to me nor, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from CIA ever involved in any such effort,” Tenet said in a statement issued earlier this month.

“It is well established that, at my direction, CIA resisted efforts on the part of some in the administration to paint a picture of Iraqi-Al Qa’ida connections that went beyond the evidence. The notion that I would suddenly reverse our stance and have created and planted false evidence that was contrary to our own beliefs is ridiculous.”

Tenet and Suskind have clashed before. In an earlier book, The One Percent Doctrine, Suskind wrote that a high-level detainee named Abu Zubaydah, whom the CIA characterized as a top al-Qaeda operative, was actually a low-level driver who was mentally unstable.

In Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm, he called Suskind’s allegations “baloney.”

In The Way of the World, Suskind alleges that the Bush administration knew that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not an immediate threat to the United States, despite spreading propaganda to the contrary to justify the invasion.

Suskind claims Habbush, Hussein’s director of the Iraqi intelligence service, had been turned by the U.S. government before the war and informed the White House “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

However, the Bush administration chose to ignore the information from Habbush and other Iraqi government sources — which was buttressed by the failure of UN weapons inspectors to find WMD at suspected sites. Instead, Bush proceeded with the war in March 2003.

By summer and fall of 2003, as U.S. weapons inspectors on the ground were confirming the absence of WMD, the Bush administration began to worry about the possible consequences of having waged a war under false pretenses, according to Suskind’s book.

That was when the forged letter from Habbush to Hussein surfaced supposedly confirming some of the administration’s key pre-war assertions, linking Hussein to al-Qaeda and suggesting that Iraq recently had sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.

CIA’s Role

The central dispute over Suskind’s book revolves around whether he got the story right regarding the CIA’s role in generating the bogus document.

Richer, the CIA’s former associate deputy director of operations, rebutted some of the charges attributed to him in the book and responded to an edited interview transcript that Suskind posted on his Web site on Aug. 8.

According to the transcript, Richer said he was part of a small group who was briefed on the preparation of the forged letter claiming a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

The forged letter “probably passed through five or six people. George [Tenet] probably showed it to me, but then passed it probably to Jim Pavitt, [the CIA's deputy director of operations], who then passed it down to his chief of staff who passed it to me. ‘Cause that’s how — you know, so I saw the original. I got a copy of it,” Richer told Suskind, according to the transcript.

Despite the transcript, Richer said he stood by “my absolute belief that the charges outlined in Mr. Suskind’s book regarding Agency involvement in forging documents are not true.”

Richer added: “During my time as a senior officer, I saw many documents from various offices of the White House regarding many topics. … I was asked to respond to documents regarding the potential use of Habbush upon his defection and during the difficult fall of 2003 when we were wrestling with a developing Iraqi insurgency and ways to combat it.

“I was also involved in many queries from elements of the administration trying to document an Al-Qa’ida and Saddam government link; proof of which was never found. Many of such queries did originate from the staff of the Office of the Vice President. None of this, however, substantiates Mr. Suskind’s explosive allegation. …

“It is important to note, however, in the transcript just released, I make no mention of having received an order to fabricate the letter as claimed by Mr. Suskind in his book. I do speak to discussions regarding using Habbush, which were frequent during that period, but what I was talking about was the possibility of using him to tamp down the insurgency — not to influence Western public opinion.”

Richer noted that in the edited transcripts, he had referred to the Habbush letter as “a non-event.” Richer added, “The fabrication of a letter as claimed by Mr. Suskind would have been much more than a ‘non-event.’ …

“An order such as the one outlined by Mr. Suskind would have been a huge event — and in my opinion illegal. An order to fabricate such a document would have been rejected out of hand and it is improbable to believe anyone would write such a request.”

Pentagon Link

In an Aug. 8 article in the American Conservative magazine, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi said the bulk of Suskind’s claim — that a forged letter was produced linking Iraq to al-Qaeda — is correct but a “number of details are wrong,” including the CIA’s role.

Giraldi said “an extremely reliable and well placed source” told him that Richer and Maguire were not involved.

“The Suskind account states that two senior CIA officers Robert Richer and John Maguire supervised the preparation of the document under direct orders coming from Director George Tenet. Not so, says my source,” Giraldi wrote.

Giraldi added that “Tenet is for once telling the truth when he states that he would not have undermined himself by preparing such a document while at the same time insisting publicly that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

“Richer and Maguire have both denied that they were involved with the forgery and it should also be noted that preparation of such a document to mislead the media is illegal and they could have wound up in jail.”

Giraldi claimed the letter was prepared by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who operated a top-secret shop inside the Pentagon known as the Office of Special Plans that exaggerated the Iraqi threat and provided the White House with bogus information about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

The shop, operating out of the Pentagon, was set up by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the goal of laying the groundwork for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq.

In his article, Giraldi said Vice President Cheney, “who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment.”

“The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen,” Giraldi wrote.

“It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.”

In early 2007, the Pentagon’s Inspector General issued a report on pre-war intelligence that concluded Feith’s Office of Special Plans “was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community.”

That installment is expected to address the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006 and could set the stage for criminal charges against Gonzales and his former deputy, Paul McNulty, according to Iglesias, the former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico who was one of those fired in the purge.

In an interview, Iglesias said he believes Inspector General Glenn Fine will recommend that Attorney General Michael Mukasey appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Gonzales, McNulty and others for perjury, obstruction of justice and possibly other crimes related to the firings.

However, given Mukasey’s unwillingness to pursue past crimes that implicate the Bush administration, Iglesias said accountability for Gonzales and others may have to wait until a new President takes office.

For nearly a year, Fine’s IG office has been investigating whether the prosecutor firings were improper, what role Gonzales played in the firings, and if he tried to influence the congressional testimony of one of his aides.

Fine testified before Congress on Wednesday that his investigation into the hiring practices at the Justice Department discovered that senior officials used illegal political litmus tests in the hiring of professional prosecutors and judges, but Fine’s report did not implicate Gonzales.

Iglesias said, however, that doesn’t mean Gonzales is home free on his alleged role in a separate issue, the firing of the nine federal prosecutors when some resisted pressure to bring politically timed prosecutions that would undermine Democrats and help Republican in elections.

“Here’s how I think that will go down,” Iglesias said in an interview with The Public Record. “The IG will find enough evidence to refer the matter to a special prosecutor. There will be more than enough evidence to make that recommendation. Mukasey will then decide whether or not to accept that recommendation. He will have to do so in consultation with the White House. That’s where the road block will be. ”

Iglesias added that he also suspects that an upcoming IG report about the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division will be highly critical.

“I believe that when the rest of the report drops it will show the Civil Rights section was compromised in terms of their core historic mission, which is representing minorities,” Iglesias said. “I am hearing preliminarily those class of cases were not prosecuted, which if true is a remarkable turn of events.”

Law Review Article

John McKay, the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington who was another one of the fired prosecutors, argued in a law review article earlier this year that if Fine determines federal laws were broken a special prosecutor should be appointed.

McKay wrote that Gonzales may have obstructed justice and that McNulty may have lied to Congress. McKay said the situation around Iglesias’s firing could lead to “criminal charges” against Gonzales and McNulty “for impeding justice” because of alleged political pressure placed on Iglesias to bring criminal charges.

In congressional testimony, Iglesias said he received telephone calls from New Mexico’s Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson before the 2006 elections inquiring about the timing of a possible corruption indictment against a Democratic official in the state.

Iglesias told Domenici and Wilson that he could not discuss the issue of indictments with them. A couple of weeks later, Iglesias’s name was added to a list of U.S. Attorneys selected for termination.

McKay wrote that when Gonzales testified before Congress about Iglesias he said “he took multiple phone calls from Domenici concerning [Iglesias], urging that he be replaced, and has admitted that [President George W. Bush] spoke with him about the ‘problems’ with Iglesias.”

“Gonzales has even admitted that one of the reasons that Iglesias was fired was because Sen. Domenici had ‘lost confidence’ in Iglesias,” McKay wrote. “While these allegations are troubling under any analysis, a thorough and independent investigation is necessary to determine whether criminal laws have been violated. …

“Under the broad language of [the federal statute regarding obstruction of justice], it would be hard to imagine that ‘corruptly influence’ would not extend to firing of the United States Attorney in the middle of a public corruption case because he ‘lost confidence’ of a senator who sought to manipulate the indictments for crass political advantage.”

McKay added that “McNulty also may have sought to conceal an important phone call from Sen. Domenici regarding U.S. Attorney Iglesias, instructing [then Justice Department liaison to the White House] Monica Goodling to delete reference to that call from his Senate testimony.”

McKay said the firing of Carol Lam, the U.S Attorney for the Southern District of California, is just as troubling because it took place while Lam was “supervising the highest profile public corruption prosecution in America,” that of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Republican congressman from San Diego.

Cunningham pleaded guilty in March 2006 to mail and wire fraud and conspiracy to commit bribery and is serving an eight-year federal prison term. At the time of Cunningham’s sentencing, Lam said the investigation was continuing “with respect to other co-conspirators.”

Those co-conspirators included Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, executive director of the CIA who resigned in early May 2006 a few days before search warrants were executed on his residence.

McKay suggested that Lam’s dogged pursuit of Cunningham’s co-conspirators in the spring of 2006, a year in which Republicans faced tough reelection campaigns, may have led to her firing.

“Lam alerted the Justice Department that FBI agents would, at her direction, search Foggo’s home in connection with the Duke Cunningham case, and the following day [former Gonzales Chief of Staff] Kyle Sampson e-mailed the White House from the Attorney General’s office that ‘we have a real problem with Carol Lam’ and urged that she be dismissed at the conclusion of her term,” McKay wrote.

“Given the wide publicity of the Cunningham political corruption case .. it is reasonable to conclude that Gonzales, McNulty, Sampson and other senior Justice Department officials were aware of the underlying judicial proceeding being handled by Carol Lam.”

Loyalist Mukasey

Despite the evidence, Iglesias said he believes it’s highly unlikely the White House will let Mukasey appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Gonzales, one of Bush’s closest allies. In his half year in office – after replacing Gonzales – Mukasey has proven himself to be a Bush loyalist.

Mukasey’s “got five months left,” Iglesias said. “There is no way he is going to right this ship that’s sinking in five months.”

The only way Gonzales and McNulty will be held accountable is if a new President decides to pursue the matter, Iglesias said, a move that Democrat Barack Obama has indicated he might do.

In testimony before Congress last year, Sampson and Goodling said McNulty and Gonzales did not testify forthrightly before Congress about their prior knowledge of the U.S. Attorney firings and the reasons behind the purge.

McNulty testified in February 2006 that the firings were “performance related” and the decision to terminate the federal prosecutors was made solely by the Justice Department.

McNulty also said Goodling and Sampson withheld key information from him before he spoke to investigators and testified before Congress.

But Goodling disputed McNulty’s assertions, saying he was well aware the White House was involved in the decision to fire the U.S. Attorneys.

“I believe the deputy was not fully candid,” Goodling said in testimony before Congress in May 2007. “The allegation is false, … I didn’t withhold information from the deputy.”

Goodling also told lawmakers she believed Gonzales tried to coach her before she testified by reviewing his recollection of the events that transpired around the time of the attorney firings.

Gonzales “proceeded to say, ‘Let me tell you what I can remember,’ and he laid out for me his general recollection … of some of the process” of the firings, Goodling said.

When Gonzales finished, “he asked me if I had any reaction to his iteration,” she added.

Goodling said the conversation made her feel uncomfortable because she knew she and Gonzales would be compelled to testify about the matter.

In April 2007, Gonzales had testified that he could not recall certain details related to the firings and that he was steering clear of witnesses such as Goodling so as not to influence their testimony.

“I haven’t talked to witnesses because of the fact that I haven’t wanted to interfere with this investigation and department investigations,” Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sampson also disputed a Gonzales statement at a March 13, 2007, news conference in which the Attorney General attempted to explain the firings by saying his chief of staff [Sampson] failed to brief him or his deputy, McNulty.

“I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,” Gonzales said.

However, Sampson testified that Gonzales’s statement was “not accurate.”

Documents released by the Justice Department last year showed that Gonzales and McNulty participated in an hour-long meeting with Sampson and three other officials on Nov. 27, 2006 — about two weeks before the U.S. Attorneys were fired — to review the plan to fire them.

Investigative Doubts

Iglesias said he did not have confidence at first that the joint investigation by the Justice Department IG and Office of Professional Responsibility was going to be conducted thoroughly.

“I had to get talked into doing it,” said Iglesias, who published a book on the firings, In-Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked The Bush Administration. “I felt nothing was going to happen. But I was told that the people who work in those offices are professional career people. They are not politicos.”

Iglesias said the next administration should form an internal Justice Department task force to make sure that the recommendations in Fine’s reports – rejecting politicization in hiring practices and legal decisions – are acted upon.

“They can’t ignore this,” Iglesias said. “This is not going away with a new president. The fact that the Justice Department is the agency that enforces individual rights and they were violating those rights is just a really awful situation. What do you do when the watchdog isn’t watching but is in fact violating the rights?”

McCain’s endorsement of the “surge” in January 2007 also represented a repudiation of his previous support for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s concept of using a light force of mobile U.S. troops, backed by technology and air power, to win the war.

McCain now presents himself as a persistent and tough critic of Rumsfeld’s war plan, but that doesn’t square with his earlier statements backing the Defense Secretary’s approach.

“I don’t think you’re going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw, nor the length of the buildup, obviously, that we had back in 1991,” McCain told Larry King in a pre-invasion interview on Dec. 9, 2002, that compared Rumsfeld’s plan for a relatively light invasion army to the overwhelming force deployed in the first Persian Gulf War.

On March 5, 2003, just two weeks before the Iraq invasion, McCain told the Hartford Courant that he had “no qualms about our strategic plans,” noting that a similar approach had been “very successful in Afghanistan.”

Part of McCain’s overconfidence seemed to derive from his belief that U.S. forces would encounter little resistance. As the invasion began, McCain told NBC’s Today show that Iraqis “will greet us as liberators.”

His enthusiasm for Rumsfeld’s war plan was still strong more than a year later. “I believe [Rumsfeld] has done a good job in the early stages of the war,” McCain told Fox News’s The Big Story on May 4, 2004.

McCain continued to defend the Bush administration’s Iraq policies well into 2006, until public support for the war sank and Democratic prospects for winning control of Congress soared.

In that latter half of 2006, neoconservatives were faced with major reversals in the Middle East, too. Sectarian violence was spiraling out of control in Iraq, and the Israelis failed to rout Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.

If the neocon vision of a powerful and permanent U.S. military presence in the Muslim world were to survive, aggressive action — and more American troops — were needed. That’s when neoconservative strategist Frederick Kagan took the lead in shaping a plan to send thousands of additional U.S. troops to Iraq.

In doing that, he built on a proposal that he drafted in January 2005, along with his brother, Robert Kagan, and William Kristol, a founder of the neocon Project for the New American Century and editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard magazine.

That plan urged the U.S. government to deploy an additional 25,000 U.S. troops to Iraq, not so much to quell the violence inside Iraq, but to intimidate Iraq’s neighbors in the Middle East.

Rumsfeld’s Ouster

At the time, the Bush administration stuck with Rumsfeld’s strategy of keeping the U.S. military “footprint” in Iraq relatively small However, as U.S. casualties in Iraq continued to mount and sectarian violence spread, President George W. Bush grew impatient with Rumsfeld’s strategy.

The policy dispute reached a crisis point in early November 2006 as it became clear the Democrats were headed toward major gains in Congress and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by Bush family lawyer James Baker, was preparing recommendations for a troop drawdown.

On Nov. 6, 2006, a day before the elections, Rumsfeld sent Bush a memo suggesting a “major adjustment” in Iraq War policy that would include “an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases” from 55 to five by July 2007 with remaining U.S. forces only committed to Iraqi areas that request them.

“Unless they [the local Iraqi governments] cooperate fully, U.S. forces would leave their province,” Rumsfeld wrote.

Then, proposing an option similar to a plan enunciated by Democratic Rep. John Murtha, Rumsfeld suggested that the commanders “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions — cities, patrolling, etc. — and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance”

And in what could be read as an implicit criticism of Bush’s lofty rhetoric about transforming Iraq and the Middle East, Rumsfeld said the administration should “recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) – go minimalist.” [NYT, Dec. 3, 2006]

Though many Americans viewed Rumsfeld as the personification of Bush’s “tough-guy” strategy in the Middle East, the Defense Secretary’s downfall may have been caused by his going wobbly on the war.

Two days later, on Nov. 8, after Democrats had won majorities in both the House and Senate, Rumsfeld was out at the Pentagon and former CIA Director Robert Gates was in.

Initially, Official Washington interpreted the switch as a sign the “realists” who advocated disengagement from Iraq had won out and the neocons had lost. But the reality was the opposite: Gates would be the fresh face who would buy time for an escalation of U.S. troops, not manage a difficult withdrawal.

Bush signaled this point during a Nov. 30, 2006, trip to Amman, Jordan, where he mocked the drawdown recommendations from the Iraq Study Group. The President said U.S. forces would “stay in Iraq to get the job done,” adding “this business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Gates Hearing Has New Urgency."]

Kagan’s Plan

In early December 2006, Frederick Kagan and his troop-escalation plan resurfaced with a column in The Weekly Standard, “We Can Put More Forces in Iraq.”

Vice President Dick Cheney and senior members of Bush’s Cabinet soon entered into a dialogue with Kagan to draft a new plan for dealing with the Iraq conflict and to counter the political momentum behind the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations for a gradual withdrawal.

When the Iraq Study Group issued its formal report on Dec. 6, 2006, Bush gave it a cool reception. Then, during a classified briefing at the Pentagon, Bush reportedly made clear to the brass that he had no interest in finding a way out of Iraq.

Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commandant, described Bush’s message as: “What I want to hear from you is how we’re going to win, not how we’re going to leave.”

Working with retired Gen. Jack Keane, Kagan quickly hammered together a report entitled, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” which was issued by the American Enterprise Institute where Kagan worked.

Some key points of the AEI white paper were:

* Change the focus from training Iraqi soldiers to securing the Iraqi population and containing the rising violence.

* Send seven more Army brigades and Marine regiments into Iraq, and especially into Baghdad, to support this security operation.

* Clear critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad and leave U.S. forces and Iraqi troops behind to maintain security.

* After security is established, use reconstruction aid to improve daily life and strengthen Iraqi local government.

McCain Climbs Aboard

As this “surge” strategy began to take shape, John McCain and his neoconservative Senate ally, Joseph Lieberman, clambered onboard. They endorsed Kagan’s plan during an appearance at AEI on Jan. 5, 2007.

“I’d like to especially commend General Keane and Fred Kagan for the outstanding work they’ve done, not only on this issue but on transformation of the military and many other national security issues,” McCain said, as anti-war protesters marched outside of AEI’s Washington offices.

“There are two keys to any surge of U.S. troops,” McCain said. “To be of value the surge must be substantial and it must be sustained . . . We will need a large number of troops.

“During our recent trip [to Iraq] commanders on the ground spoke of a surge of three to five additional brigades in Baghdad and at least an additional brigade in Anbar province. I believe these numbers are the minimum that’s required — a minimum.”

On Jan. 10, 2007, Bush formally announced his approval of the “surge” strategy, committing more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq.

As part of the new plan, Bush ousted the commanders on the ground, Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, who were associated with Rumsfeld’s “small-footprint” approach. Bush installed a more gung-ho commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

Ultimately about 30,000 additional U.S. troops were dispatched to Iraq — and the levels of violence did decline, although various analysts have different interpretations for the reasons.

Supporters of Bush and McCain — along with much of the U.S. news media — simply assert that the “surge” was a success.

But other analysts point to developments that preceded the “surge,” such as the brutal ethnic cleansing of mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods which left fewer targets for deaths squads; Sunni tribal rejection of al-Qaeda extremists, the so-called Anbar Awakening; cease-fires declared by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; and the cumulative war-weariness among Iraqis after years of horrific bloodshed.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, issued a mixed progress report on the “surge.”

The GAO found that violence in Iraq had fallen over the past year, but that other “surge” goals had not been met. The GAO said training of Iraqi security forces still lags, Sunni insurgents have not been defeated, cease-fires with Shiite militias are fragile, and political reconciliation has not been achieved.

Nevertheless, in recent weeks, virtually every TV interview with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has started with a barrage of questions demanding that he admit he was wrong to oppose the “surge” in 2007.

Meanwhile, Frederick Kagan has written numerous columns over the past several months praising McCain for backing the “surge.” And brother, Robert Kagan, is an “unofficial” foreign policy adviser to McCain’s campaign.

The end of the “surge” will soon see U.S. troop levels recede to about 130,000, where they were when the “surge” began.

A final evaluation of the “surge” may not be possible for several more months, after the troop levels are back down — and when it becomes clear whether any lasting improvement was achieved.