Via a Facebook update by Naomi Wolf comes the news that the ACLU uncovered a memo from the Bush era that warned the 9/11 Commission not to "cross a line" in its investigation and not to probe too deeply.

Leaked confidential documents have revealed that senior officials from the former US administration had warned a 9/11 investigation panel against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks.

In a letter obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the 9/11 Commission was refused permission to question terror suspects, with the Bush administration arguing that by doing so the panel would "cross" a "line" and obstruct the administration's efforts to protect the nation.

Wolf's link includes a reference to an OpEd News article by Sahil Kapur that offers this additional insight:

The 9/11 Commission, officially called the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was formed by President Bush in November of 2002 "to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks" and to offer recommendations for preventing future attacks.

"The Commission staff's proposed participation in questioning of detainees would cross that line," the letter continued. "As the officers of the United States responsible for the law enforcement, defense and intelligence functions of the Government, we urge your Commission not to further pursue the proposed request to participate in the questioning of detainees."

FireDogLake's Marcy Wheeler speculates that this was an attempt by the Bush administration to ensure that its torture of certain detainees, which has since been widely documented, remained secret.

"[W]hoever made these annotations appears to have been most worried that Commission staff members could make independent judgments about the detainees and the interrogations," Wheeler wrote on her blog. The official "didn't want anyone to independently evaluate the interrogations conducted in the torture program."

Eventually, the commission's co-chairs harshly criticized the administration for having purportedly "destroyed" tapes of its interrogations with terror suspects, as Raw Story reported last year.

Destruction of -- and loss of -- evidence seemed to be a hallmark of the Bush Administration's years in the White House. Story highlights from the CNN link about the missing emails from the US Attorney scandal:

Story Highlights

• NEW: White House spokeswoman says 5 million official e-mails may be missing

• White House admits it should have kept e-mails on private GOP system

• Chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee doubts e-mails are deleted

• Committee investigating whether U.S. attorneys' firings were politically motivated

At some point, hopefully before the Obama Administration gets too far along on its own path, someone will have the fortitude and wherewithall to send a huge cleaning van up to the White House to help mop up the mess left by the previous Administration, ideally in time to help ensure that the current Administration is given a much clearer mandate to work with, and ideally to help it stay within the bounds of Constitutional law and proper common ethical standards.

[Note: I've removed the original as being a bit too far over the edge, even for me. Below is CMan1's rather more rational irrationality-of-the-day. -rba]

How about this one from Raw Story:

Landrieu phone plot: Men arrested have links to intelligence community

Two of the three men arrested on Monday along with "ACORN pimp" James O'Keefe
for "maliciously tampering" with Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) phones in
her New Orleans office have ties to the United States intelligence
community.

The three accused by the FBI of "aiding and abetting"
O'Keefe are Stan Dai, Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel. O'Keefe is 25,
and the other three are 24.

Dai's links to the intelligence community appear to be particularly strong. He was a speaker at Georgetown University's Central Intelligence Agency summer school program in June 2009, and is also listed as an Assistant Director at the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C.

By Melvin A. Goodman 
Aug 26th, 2009

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius simply cannot get off the wheel he spins for the Central Intelligence Agency. Only two days after the release of the 2004 CIA study of the detention and interrogation program, which provides sordid and sadistic details of an illegal and immoral program, Ignatius still opposes any criminal review of the conduct of CIA officers and echoes the CIA line that it is “glad to be out” of the interrogation business.

He even cites deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, one of the key ideological drivers for the policy of detention and interrogation, as someone who “doesn’t want to have anything to do with interrogation.”

Ignatius strongly believes that it is time for the CIA to “get on with it,” which was the signature line of former CIA director Richard Helms, who Ignatius considers the “savviest spymaster this country has produced.” Let’s forget that Helms lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1973 on the overthrow of the elected government in Chile and that a grand jury was called to see if he should be indicted for perjury.

[cross-post submitted Jul 23rd, 2009: The Public Record ]

By Melvin A. Goodman

David Ignatius, the mainstream media’s leading apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency, has written another exculpatory brief for the CIA. In today’s Washington Post, Ignatius defends the CIA’s assassination program and implies that no investigation is needed since “nobody had been killed.”

A week ago, Ignatius argued that it was “just plain nuts” to have an investigation and that CIA operatives would refuse assignments in counterterrorism in the wake of any investigation. What Ignatius doesn’t do is discuss the legal and moral implications of a secret assassination program or the CIA’s tortured history in this field.

The CIA is no stranger to the field of assassination where they have contributed to numerous disasters. Revelations of assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam in the early 1960–at the direction of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations–led to a ban on CIA political assassinations in the mid-1970s. None of these assassination attempts helped U.S. national security interests, and all of them led to increased violence, even terrorism.

Explain the logic of why the GOP wants Pelosi to resign again...? Why not just engage a commission to investigate torture to find out exactly what happened, who knew what and when did they know it? Why aren't the GOP pundits and Congress-critters -- both current and former -- naming any of their own and demanding an investigation of everyone and the entire program?

I've seen screeching by insane, unbalanced right-wingers and headlines claiming that the GOP is loudly proclaiming that Pelosi could have objected to the process. That, of course, begs a pertinent question: Which (R) individuals objected? What were they told, and when? Where are calls for their resignations? Why is the GOP so silent on their own involvement and complicity? Why are their pundits and their rabid base of supporters not interested in a full and complete investigation?

And what's so objectionable about criticizing the CIA -- weren't they involved? Haven't they been involved in conspiracies and cover-ups before?

Originally posted 2009-04-29 22:38:30 -0500. Promoted by carol.

Those extra 2 docs that "justify the policies of the past", that Cheney is so interested in, looks like one of them was already released.

I didn't believe the "A to Z" Confessions of the the "9/11 Mastermind" then. I'm not inclined to believe them now.

But you be the judge.

Obtained: Cheney’s Request Form Detailing The Two CIA Torture Docs He Wants
The Plum LineGreg Sargent's blog

Looks like Cheney may be after a doc that supposedly details what top Al Qaeda official Khalid Muhammad revealed under torture.

 http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/torture/obtained-cheneys-request-detailing-the-two-cia-docs-he-wants/

Klalid M. wasn't he the dude, with the frumpy sleepware, and the wild hairdo?

Philippe Sands:

About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture.

If the prediction seemed improbable, the background of the book’s author was even more so. Philippe Sands is neither a journalist nor an American but a law professor and a certified Queen’s Counsel (the kind of barrister who on occasion wears a powdered horsehair wig) who works at the same law practice as Cherie Blair. Sands’s book, “Torture Team,” offers a scathing critique of officials in the Bush Administration, accusing them of complicity in acts of torture. When the book appeared, some scoffed. Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official, dismissed Sands as “a British lawyer” who “wrote an extremely dishonest book.”

Last week, Sands’s accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism suspects. Among those whom the court singled out was Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, along with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Sands, previously, was involved in prosecuting former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, as was the Spanish judge presiding over the Bush torture case.

Just some added info for your research purposes taken from a bunch of previous posts on this topic in my archives:

Feds Drop Case Against Accused Iraqi Agent

"the Government has determined that continued prosecution of this case as to LINDAUER would not be in the interests of justice."

Michael Collins
"Scoop" Independent News

(Jan. 16, Wash. DC) The Department of Justice entered a motion to drop all charges against Susan Lindauer yesterday morning, Jan. 15, 2009.  The filing at the federal district court in lower Manhattan ends the government's attempt to prosecute her for allegedly acting as an "unregistered agent" for Iraq.  Since her arrest in early 2004, she has repeatedly asked for a trial to present evidence that she had been a United States intelligence asset since the early 1990's.

By filing this order, the government surrendered forever its ability to prosecute Lindauer as an "Iraqi foreign agent" and for lesser charges contained in the indictment, including a one week trip to Baghdad in March, 2002.

Promoted. Originally posted 2009-01-12 14:19:46 -0500. -- GH

Morrison & Foerster Files Suit Against CIA, DoD, and U.S. Army on Behalf of Troops Exposed to Testing of Chemical and Biological Weapons at Edgewood Arsenal and Other Top Secret Sites

Press Release: 01/07/2009

What: Complaint Filed—Vietnam Veterans of America, et al. v. CIA, et al.

Where: United States District Court, Northern District of California

Some of you might remember a piece from November 17 of 2006 which appeared on the ePluribus Media Journal entitled The Manchurian Veterans by Jeff Huber. If not, you might want to bookmark it to go back for a read.

Why?

Well, because of a diary that just appeared on DailyKos:

Vermont State Hospital Implicated in CIA Mind Control Experiments by Valtin

Sometimes, the truth really is stranger than fiction.  And for every tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, there may be at least one grain of truth that hides something far worse -- or equally crazy -- as proposed by the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that further obscures and obfuscates any potential for meaningful investigation and discovery.

(That doesn't mean that there really might be "lizard people" running amok or that Elvis shot JFK from a UFO with a candlestick, tho.)

I'm going to steal a part of Peter Kornbluh's title, above, from his Huffington Post Report about this, also a cut from him:

I have known and served with many military intelligence officers. A handful of them were brilliant. The preponderance of them validated the adage that says military intelligence is to intelligence what military music is to music.

I have also known and worked with many Air Force officers, and every one of those bug lovers is dedicated to the Air Force's primary mission, which is to prevaricate its way into possession of the entire defense budget.

Since CIA director Michael V. Hayden is an Air Force intelligence officer and a Bush appointee to boot, anything he says tends to be standard issue effluvium, and what he's saying now about his agency's right to privacy stinks to high heaven.

_____

My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing...

____

What happens when the checks and balances of our government are compromised, and justice is undermined?

What happens when the most criminally corrupt group of criminals rule with nearly complete control of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government for nearly two full Administrations, and the media fails to oppose, to challenge and to expose them?

Criminal malfeasance. Negligence. Dereliction of duty. Failure -- multiple failures: failure to uphold the law, failure to act, failure to uphold the duty and responsibility of office.

Actively undermining the just due process of the law and Constitution. Actively interfering with the proper operation of government.

War crimes.

Eight years of crimes, unaccountable to anyone and protected by the entire Republican party -- and Joe Lieberman.

The scandal over the CIA torture tapes continues to spin. Over on DailyKos, several articles with good insights, particularly this one by gchaucer. Over here, clammyc's commentary and several by Jeff Huber lead the way, and emptywheel over at TheNextHurrah has some excellent stuff.

Here's a little more fuel for the fire -- an interview between an apparently defensive Bush and Matt Lauer.

Note how well Bush prevaricates, dissembles and obfuscates.

Just a little more after the jump.