Former Bush Administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen used his space at the Washington Post to defend the McCarthyite smear campaign that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol have launched against a group of Justice Department lawyers who did Guantánamo-related pro bono work:

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would — and rightly so.

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At Salon, Mark Benjamin reviews a cache of internal CIA documents giving directions on how to waterboard prisoners:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking—and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session—and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session—a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding—the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

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From the Washington Post:

Dozens of former federal officials are playing leading roles in helping carmakers handle federal investigations of auto defects, including those for Toyota’s runaway-acceleration problems. A Washington Post analysis shows that as many as 33 former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration employees and Transportation Department appointees left those jobs in recent years and now work for automakers as lawyers, consultants and lobbyists and in other jobs that deal with government safety probes, recalls and regulations.

The reach of these former agency employees is broad. They are on staff rosters for every major automaker and every major automotive trade group, and they appear as expert witnesses and legal counsel for the industry in major class-action lawsuits over auto safety…

No law bans these officials from moving straight from government into industry. But critics of the revolving-door practice say that it has contributed to flaws in federal oversight and enforcement.

Amid hundreds of rocket and mortar explosions that killed dozens of people throughout the country, Iraq held parliamentary elections. Large numbers of Sunnis, who had boycotted previous elections, voted. “We have experienced three wars before,” quipped one voter, “so it was just the play of children that we heard.” Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's coalition failed to secure a majority of seats, leaving his political future uncertain; the U.S. military said its plans for withdrawal remained “on track.”¹ A memoir by Karl Rove said that the Bush Administration would not have started the Iraq war without the threat of weapons of mass destruction.² Rampaging Nigerian Muslims slaughtered 500 Christians with machetes,³ and a Nigerian member of the Vatican choir admitted to having procured male prostitutes for an Italian government official working as a papal usher.⁴ Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to Afghanistan to meet with President Hamid Karzai as U.S.-led forces prepared for an offensive in Kandahar. “There won't be a D-Day that is climactic,” Gates said. “It will be a rising tide of security as it comes.”⁵ Hamas banned male hairdressers from styling women's hair in Gaza.⁶ [MORE . . .]

Back in 2008, Michael Goldfarb and others on the right tried a typically McCarthyite tactic against candidate Barack Obama. Obama was assailed for a supposed relationship with Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, described in the National Review as “a former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat” and the “founder” of the Arab-American Action Network. Most of their essential claims about Khalidi were false. In fact, Khalidi is well known as a critic of human rights abuses within the Palestinian community; he had nothing to do with AAAN, an organization that provides English language lessons to immigrants and other social services to the indigent; and Khalidi was more closely tied to John McCain than to Obama. Under McCain’s guidance, the International Republican Institute supported Khalidi’s Palestinian Center, an operation geared to raising civil consciousness and engagement among West Bank Palestinians. In short, the effort blew up in their faces.

Cycle forward a year and a half, and we find Goldfarb with William Kristol providing the public relations “brains” for Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe. Last week they launched a new attack line, going after the “Gitmo 9”—a group of lawyers, now working for the Obama Administration, who “voluntarily represented terrorists.” This is another in a series of attacks against Eric Holder and the Justice Department, which in fact remains the main target of Keep America Safe. The technique, again, is typically McCarthyite. There are unknown people deep inside the government whose loyalty is suspect, it insinuates. They have infiltrated the Justice Department (which the ad calls “Department of Jihad”). “Whose values do they share?” it asks. [MORE . . .]

From ABC News:

When the White House announced last week it would be losing the services of Lewis A. Sachs, one of the president’s top economic advisers, the reason given for Sachs’s departure was that his work was largely complete. “He’s leaving now that markets have stabilized and Secretary [Timothy] Geithner has had time to set up a permanent team,” Treasury Department spokesman Andrew Williams said.

But Sachs’s quiet exit, reported in a blog entry on the New York Times web site, comes without any apparent next move for the Wall Street veteran, except for what he told the Times was his desire for time to “catch up on some sleep.”

Not factoring into the decision, Williams said, were recent reports suggesting Sachs’s old employer could be the subject of a federal probe. A December Times report said federal officials were then in the early stages of an investigation into companies that sold a complex breed of securities known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, and then made financial bets against them.

From the Washington Post:

House Appropriations defense subcommittee member James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) works hard at fundraising: Two to three times a week, he telephones contributors to ask for more. Yet, according to the account he supplied to the Office of Congressional Ethics last year, he is unaware of “who made donations” or how much they gave, and so that information plays no role in his earmarking — the systematic granting of public funds for mostly private purposes.

Fellow subcommittee member Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) similarly presides over fundraisers arranged by his staff for defense firms and lobbyists every three months or so, according to his office’s account. An aide in charge of Dicks’s earmarks attends the fundraising events. But Dicks and the aide told investigators they were unaware of the substantial overlap between defense industry contributions to Dicks and his earmarks to contributors.

From the Washington Post:

When financial reform legislation finally lands on the Senate floor, a provision that advocates call the single most important item for Main Street investors will probably have been banished from the ponderous bill.

That provision — a requirement for stock brokers and insurance agents to act in the best interest of their clients — was part of a 1,100-page draft bill unveiled by Senate banking committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) in November. Since then, industry and consumer groups have quietly lobbied members on the issue, even as much of the public debate has focused on oversight of big banks and the creation of a consumer protection agency.

From Taxpayers for Common Sense:

The Senate is working on a compliment to the recently passed $15 billion jobs bill. This nearly $150 billion package is supposed to help the nation’s unemployed by extending unemployment benefits and other provisions through the end of the year.

Oh, and it also extends giveaways to the coal industry, subsidies for rum distillers that should make Captain Morgan blush, NASCAR track aid, and is a blockbuster for film makers. These provisions and their other “tax extender” brethren have routinely caught a ride on legislation pulling out of Capitol Hill station.

Meet Barack Obama’s new attorney general: Rahm Emanuel. The Associated Press reports:

In a potential reversal, White House advisers are close to recommending that President Barack Obama opt for military tribunals for self-professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four of his alleged henchman, senior officials said. The review of where and how to hold a Sept. 11 trial is not over, so no recommendation is yet before the president and Obama has not made a determination of his own, officials said. The review is not likely to be finished this week. Officials spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss private deliberations.

Attorney General Eric Holder decided in November to transfer Mohammed and the four other accused terrorists from the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to New York City for civilian trials. That was initially supported by city officials, but was later opposed because of costs, security and logistical concerns. When opposition ballooned further into Congress and an attempted Christmas airline bombing brought massive scrutiny to Obama’s terrorism policies, the administration said it would review Holder’s trial decision and consider all options for a new location. In addition to local opposition to a trial, the administration faces pressure on its goal of closing Guantanamo on another front. Republicans in Congress have proposed barring prosecutions of terrorism defendants in federal courts or in reformed military commissions located in the United States.

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Nice story in the Washington Post:

Even by the standards of a city that celebrates extravagance, it was a spectacular shopping spree: In just two weeks early last year, an 11-year-old boy from Azerbaijan became the owner of nine waterfront mansions.

The total price tag: about $44 million — or roughly 10,000 years’ worth of salary for the average citizen of Azerbaijan. But the preteen who owns a big chunk of some of Dubai’s priciest real estate seems to be anything but average.

His name, according to Dubai Land Department records, is Heydar Aliyev, which just happens to be the same name as that of the son of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev. The owner’s date of birth, listed in property records, is also the same as that of the president’s son.

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TPM ran an item yesterday in which American Bar Association President Carolyn Lamm made an emotional plea on behalf of the principle of legal representation for all. In response “to the Liz Cheney Web ad that questions the loyalty of lawyers who have represented Guantanamo detainees,” Lamm, reported TPM, said that lawyers have an ethical obligation to “provide representation to people who otherwise would stand alone against the power and resources of the government–even to those accused of heinous crimes against this nation in the name of causes that evoke our contempt.”

Of course, Lamm also strongly believes in the principle of providing legal representation to governments who have committed well-documented heinous crimes against people who stand alone against state power — as long as they pay cash. [MORE . . .]

James Palmer, a British writer who lives in Beijing and has a fascination for all things Mongolian, has produced a captivating biography of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic nobleman who fought in the service of the Russian tsar in World War I. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Ungern led a ragtag White army to capture Mongolia, where he styled himself the human manifestation of a Buddhist god of war. Mongolia would never be the same again. I put six questions to James Palmer.

1. Is it fair to say that Mongolia today is a sovereign and genuinely independent state because of Baron Ungern-Sternberg—because his machinations resulted in the country moving from the Chinese to the Soviet side of the Inner Asian spheres of influence, therefore allowing it to gain real independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union? [MORE . . .]

From Wired:

In Israel, the military had to call off an entire operation after a trooper posted the time and place of an upcoming raid in the West Bank on his Facebook page. D’oh! According to Associated Press, the soldier boasted that his unit was planning on “cleaning up” the village.

It’s the kind of scenario that keeps military planners up at night: A meticulously planned operation goes dangerously awry because some dolt couldn’t resist telling every one of their Facebook friends or Twitter peeps about it. In this case, the Israelis moved swiftly to respond.

“Fellow soldiers reported the leak to military authorities, who called off the raid fearing that the information may have reached hostile groups,” the AP noted. “The soldier was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 days in prison.”

I noted here recently that two former Pentagon officials had pitched their services to the government of Guinea, which is accused of the massacre of over 100 civilians last September. The pitch from the two ex-officials — David Crane and Alan White, key figures in the 2003 indictment of former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor — included a Powerpoint presentation on “how to convert a repressive military force into a defender of the people that obeys the laws of armed conflict.”

The Foreign Policy story about the proposal (viewable at the link above) is titled “The Ultimate Idiot’s Guide to Being an African Junta.” Check out the Powerpoint and see why.