*** Special to The BRAD BLOG's D.C. Correspondent, Margie Burns

Washington, D.C. -- U.S. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy held a hearing this morning on a motion filed by attorneys representing detainees being held in Guantanamo. Following reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post that CIA videotapes of ‘harsh interrogations’ of detainees had been destroyed, apparently by the CIA, possibly under administration approval, attorneys David Remes and Marc Falkoff filed an Emergency Motion [PDF] for inquiry into the preservation of documents relating to prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay.

Before Judge Kennedy and a courtroom packed with journalists,

• Lawyers for the detainees are asking the court to schedule a hearing for inquiry into whether the government is preserving evidence relating to detainees. Attorney David Remes expressed concern that the destruction of the two videotapes, as reported, may not be the full extent of the evidence destroyed...

By law, the U.S. government is barred from propagandizing within the country. While that hasn't necessarily stopped them before, the Bush Administration has raised the art to a science. As well, they've reportedly been doing so out of Gitmo, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that the practice is illegal under U.S. law, but hey, they're not in the U.S. when they do it from there, right? At least, that's what their legal department has long maintained in support of suspension of habeas corpus, human rights and long-held treaty agreements in relation to the detention of whoever they damn-well wish to hold without charges down there.

So they've been "vandalizing Wikipedia" and news sites across the web, according to a recent report at Wikileaks, which also offers the evidence...

Anybody doubt these same guys are working to post their propaganda in comments at websites like...oh, The BRAD BLOG for example? We're sure the Bush DoJ will get right on it.

Never been prouder of our country.

(Hat-tip RAW STORY)

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Michael Mukasey, George Bush's new attorney general --- same as the old attorney general --- has yet to order federal employees to preserve evidence related to the CIA's destruction of tapes of its torture sessions with terror suspects.

Even without Mukasey's order, however, the CIA appears to have violated a court order in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in 2004 to enforce a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding information on the treatment and interrogation of prisoners:

The ACLU brief and related legal documents are available online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia.

Joseph Cannon's spy-dar is beeping. He's dubious about the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes, and explains why in a post yesterday which opens with this classic line: "When the CIA tells you that a piece of evidence has been destroyed, you should react as skeptically as you would to the death of a Marvel supervillain."

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Within hours, if not minutes, after the CIA announced it destroyed two videos made in 2002 of its agents torturing al Qaida suspects, Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey should have ordered the CIA and all federal agencies to preserve any evidence related to the filming of torture sessions involving terror suspects.

Over the weekend, the urgent need for this order was underscored by the development that other videos of other torture sessions may exist:

The CIA's announcement that the videos had been destroyed brought to mind the revelation by the White House last spring that as many as 5 million inter-office emails had been "lost." It is likely that emails contained evidence that top Bush officials, including especially Karl Rove, engaged in a conspiracy to leak, and then cover up the leak, of the secret identity of Valerie Wilson, a CIA specialist in the black market for terror weapons.

Anyone who is familiar with the fundamentals of data storage can attest that it takes a concerted effort to "lose" data stored on hard drives. This is especially so for emails, which are stored on hard drives of both the sender and the receiver as well as on outgoing and incoming email servers.

The videos, like the emails, were presumably in digital format rather than old-fashioned videotape. If so, it is more than likely that multiple backup copies were created, which increases the chance that additional copies could still exist on a disk somewhere.

Of course, the CIA has had plenty of time to track down and obliterate backup copies of the torture videos, just as White House officials have had more than sufficient time now --- eight months at least --- to scour and wipe clean the hard drives on which the 5 million emails were stored.

This returns us to the main question: Where is Mukasey? His silence and inaction on the preservation of evidence in this unfolding scandal suggests what many suspected --- that Michael Mukasey, like his predecessor Alberto Gonzales, is more concerned with the political preservation of his boss than he is with the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

In August, the U.S. government intelligence agencies sent word up the chain that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons programs back in 2003. And yet, about two months later, on Oct. 17, 2007, George W. Bush issued a dire warning about Iran's nukes to the American people:

At Bush's news conference today, amid his tired, cringe-inducing towel-snaps at the White House press corps, he denied knowing the Iranian program was suspended in October when he suggested that the apocalypse was nigh:

And:

Normal U.S. presidents don't generally suggest, especially off-handedly, that the planet is on the brink of World War III. Is it really possible that Bush could have been so woefully uninformed about his own government's intelligence findings that he could make such a world-class blunder?

Yes, she was covert until being outed by the White House.

Yes, she was monitoring nuclear weapons and other WMD going into and coming out of Iraq and Iran, as RAW STORY's Larisa Alexandrovna correctly and originally and exclusively reported in February of 2006.

Yes, her outing led to a still-classified CIA damage assessment and "serious" consequences" to other members of her CIA intelligence network.

No, despite Bush's promise, no one has ever been held accountable for leaking her identity in the first such outing of a covert CIA operative by agents of the U.S. Government itself.

No, Bush "is not a man of his word," as Valerie Plame Wilson told 60 Minutes tonight in her first broadcast network interview. Here's the video in two parts...

Some of what Plame is still not allowed to say, including details about "being taken hostage and subjected to torture for two days," is covered by her former CIA colleague, Larry Johnson, right here...

And in another posting today, Johnson gives us some details from Plame's new book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, in which it's disclosed that "In 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were en route to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame."

So what did the White House do about it? Johnson tells us...

Amazing.

While folks may have heard about the New York Times report last week concerning the secret DoJ memos created to give legal cover to the Administration to continue their policies of torturing prisoners of war, we suspect that most have not read the full, detailed 5-page investigative report.

But it's an important one, and it details the lengths to which the Bush team went to keep their pro-torture policies in place, even in the face of a DoJ rebellion, Congressional legislation, and even Supreme Court decisions. It was alarming to learn --- though we should hardly be alarmed at such things by now --- that when Bush signed the Detainee Treatment Act in December 2005, meant to ban the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world, he already knew, even if Congress didn't, that his Dept. of Justice had previously created secret legal documents declaring their ongoing torturous interrogation techniques as not "cruel, inhuman or degrading."

In other words, he knew he'd be able to continue with torture as usual, since new AG Alberto Gonzales oversaw the crushing of an internal DoJ rebellion finding the practices to be both illegal and in violation of the Geneva Convention.

Also alarming (but also, shouldn't be by now), is the lackluster way in which Congress has reacted to this stunning news which --- like so many other things --- might have led to immediate Impeachment talk for almost any other administration.

For those with short-attention spans, however (like the aforementioned Congress members!), the NYTimes story included an excellent sidebar graphic summarizing the timeline and main beats in the "Interrogation Wars" from DoJ to the White House to Congress to the Supreme Court.

Since the graphic is too wide to easily run on most blogs, we've recreated the short, easy to read timeline in text format below. We'd strongly suggest, if nothing else, you familiarize yourself with it so you understand, in simple terms, the con game that has been played out here by this Administration.

As a bonus, below that, is a video from last Thursday Daily Show with John Stewart in which he interviews Jack Goldsmith, once the head of the DoJ's Office of Legal Counsel, and the man who fought back, along with Dep. AG James Comey, against the policies. Though successful in their efforts, for a time, and to an extent, both men were eventually pushed out of the DoJ, as Gonzales was dispatched to quell the rebellion as AG.

One very short and very amusing anecdote, if we may, before both of those, buried on page 5 of the Times report....

And speaking of credit where it's due, the New York Times and several other outlets today confirm the story of secret US prisons in Poland and Romania which our friend and courageous investigative journalist, Larisa Alexandrovna, reported exclusively long ago with former Polish intelligence officer David Dastych over at the news site RAW STORY.

As usual, the Times, Washington Post, AP, and the Guardian all failed to acknowledge or recognize RAW in any way, despite that the fact that RAW "provided each of the four news organizations with the" report that they are today reporting on.

It's a continuing pattern, for which those outlets always have some form of excuse ("we verified it independently, we didn't know about the 'Internet reporting' on it previously, we don't credit 'blogs'," etc.) Meanwhile, RAW, ourselves, and virtually every other Internet reporting outlet routinely credit such MSM sources when we follow up on their reporting.

Anyway, none of them credited RAW, so we won't bother linking to any of them. Here's RAW STORY's coverage --- the ones who had the story and had it right in the first place --- instead.

In an open letter calling on former CIA Director, George Tenet to return his Medal of Freedom and donate royalties from his new book, six former intelligence officers excoriate the former Director of Central Intelligence for his complicity in overseeing the Bush Administration's misuse of intelligence to send America into an unnecessary war where more than 3,300 troops have so far been killed.

The complete letter, which pulls no punches is posted at Larry Johnson's website. Johnson is a former CIA agent and one of the letter's signatories. A PDF version of the 4-page letter is here.

Just a very few excerpts follow...

*** Blogged by BRAD BLOG D.C. Correspondent Margie Burns

On Tuesday, April 3, 2007 the Washington Post finally got around to publishing a front-page article, “How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War,” on the bogus Niger/uranium/Iraq story underlying those infamous “16 words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech.

The Post subtitle is “Intelligence Failures Surrounded Inquiry on Iraq-Niger Uranium Claim.” A more accurate subtitle would have read, “Intelligence Community Caved to Bush-Cheney Pressure.”

{Ed Note: We might suggest "Mainstream Media Failure to do Job, Scrutinize Admin's Iraq-Niger Claim, Led to Endless War" - BF}

I, among others, am familiar with the chronology because I wrote about it almost a full three years ago...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Video in Streaming Flash format...
Video in Windows Media format...

The Special Prosecutor investigating the outing of CIA officer, Valerie Plame-Wilson, has indicated in a court filing that Vice President Cheney is likely to be a witness in the Libby trial.

The New York Times quotes Fitzgerald writing, "Contrary to defendant's assertion, the government has not represented that it does not intend to call the vice president as a witness at trial." (see: Muckraker). Cheney's testimony is expected to reflect the state of mind in the Office of the Vice President during the organized attack on Joe Wilson's credibility and the outing of Plame-Wilson. The testimony will likely show that Libby had motive to leak selective information to reporters to smear Wilson and bolster the Administration's justification for war on Iraq.

Fingering Cheney as a possible witness may lead to questions about a conspiracy secret illegal scheme planned and executed within the Vice President's office.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Video in Streaming Flash format...
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Yesterday, The New York Daily News reported that two top CIA officials discussed Valerie plame with Cheney's former Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. If true, the CIA officials' testimony will show that Libby knew of Valerie Plame's status at the CIA at least a month prior to Robert Novak's column which first publicly exposed Valerie Plame's undercover status. The testimony of the two top CIA officials is expected to bolster the charge of perjury against Libby. Libby has previously testified that he first learned about Plame from a reporter.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann takes notice that this story had been originally reported 2 months earlier by Jason Leopold, an internet journalist writing for Truthout. On May 13th, Leopold reported that Karl Rove, like Libby, had been served with an indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice. This report has not been confirmed by other media sources, triggering a fierce debate on the internet about the accuracy Leopold's report that Rove has been served with an indictment. Truthout editor, Marc Ash, is defending the accuracy of the report.

New pre-trial filings by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the Scooter Libby perjury trial related to the outting of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, seem to draw Dick Cheney still closer to the center of the scandal, MSNBC's David Schuster is now reporting.

In the newly released documents, defendant Libby denies having seen Cheney's handwritten notes on the margins of a 2003 NY Times op/ed, in which Cheney raises questions about Plame's involvement in former Ambassador Joe Wilson's fact-finding trip to Niger. In the op/ed, Wilson exposes what he didn't find on that trip --- evidence that Saddam was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger.

(See BRAD BLOG's report, as filed last week by David Edwards, with video and other details as the NY Times marginalia was disclosed.)

From Schuster's report this evening:

RAW STORY has the text transcript and reports that Rove's legal team expects a decision on his indictment "at any time".

Here's the video, just out from MSNBC's Hardball, including the new details as reported by Schuster...

Video in Streaming Flash format...
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Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Audio in MP3 format...

CNN's Lou Dobbs interviews former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern on Lt. General Hayden's nomination to be CIA Director. McGovern insist that Hayden's circumvented the FISA law and the U.S. Constitution when he followed Bush's order to listen to domestic phone calls without a warrant.

In the past, Hayden has shown to be a person who strictly followed the rule that the NSA and the CIA do not spy on Americans. Hayden has been known to push back against orders that breech the threshold of domestic spying. Since September 11th, Hayden gave way to Administration pressure to do domestic spying.

Hayden eventually created and defended the most publicly known program of warrantless domestic eavesdropping. In this case, one end of the call originates in the U.S. and the other end of the call is a foreign location. The FISA law and the Fourth Amendment require a warrant to listen to any domestic source (regardless of who is on the other end of the call.)

From the CNN transcript: