A 390-page report by the Inspector General is only a small step for mankind in bringing Karl Rove to justice for what he did to the Justice Department in the firing of the nine US attorneys, but it’s a start.
The internal investigation finds political pressure drove the 2006 dismissals but that refusal of major players at the White House and the department to cooperate in the year-long inquiry has left significant “gaps” in understanding what happened.
Investigators’ doubts have led Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint Acting United States Attorney in Connecticut Nora Dannehy, who led the conviction of a former governor for corruption, to continue the probe and decide if anyone should be prosecuted.
The “anyone” list starts with Bush’s White House toadies, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, and goes on to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales…
John Edwards has a problem. Michael Mukasey has a solution.
There is the possibility that funds from the campaign of the presidential wannabe pretty boy went to Rielle Hunter, the object of his affections in a long suspected and now-admitted affair. This would be a violation of federal law.
But Edwards need not worry.
Just yesterday the attorney general said that prosecutions would not be pursued against Monica Goodling and other now resigned Just Ice Department officials who broke federal law in screening job applicants based on their ideological purity because their resignations were punishment enough.
Got that, John Boy? The nation’s top lawyer is giving you the all clear because in the Age of Bush not every crime is a crime.
When George Bush heads back to his Texas ranch to search among the scrub brush for his squandered legacy, he will leave behind a Justice Department that resembles a Superfund site and the legacy of two attorneys general who willingly relinquished the office’s most precious asset — independence — in the service of partisan politics and helping enable the president’s historic power grab.
So inured have we become to Bush administration scandal that the latest of a long-running series of revelations this week by no less than Justice’s own Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility that the department was an adjunct of the Executive Branch and Republican National Committee barely caused a ripple.
To no one’s surprise, the IG and OPE concluded that Monica Goodling, a rabid Regent University soldier of God was a partisan whore who violated federal law by screening job applicants for career positions based on their political and ideological affiliations.
Jonathan Turley calls Goodling “a perfect political commissar.” If job applicants were not Republican enough, conservative enough and enamored enough of the president and his policies, as well as red-blood heterosexuals, they were shown the door.
In yet another instance of the mockery that Justice has made of its role in the so-called Global War on Terror, Goodling put the kibosh on hiring an experienced career terrorism prosecutor because of his wife’s politically incorrect affiliations. The job defaulted to a much more junior attorney who lacked any experience in counterterrorism and was not qualified for the position.
Perhaps the greatest barometer of the toxicity that has coursed through the halls of Justice is that nearly one year after he resigned, Goodling’s gigolo finds that he has something in common with many Americans: He can’t find a job.
Monica Goodling and D. Kyle Sampson, key aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, violated federal law and departmental policy by considering political affiliation and other improper factors in Justice Department hiring decisions, according to another devastating report from DOJ’s Inspector General and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, issued this morning.
The Justice Department’s inspector general is releasing the results of a lengthy investigation in four parts, and this is the second. The first was released about a month ago, and documented six years of illegal hiring practices relating to the Justice Department recruiting new attorneys (those with “liberal-sounding resumes” for barred from employment). Today’s report documents the allegedly illegal conduct from Goodling and Sampson (among others). Still to come are reports on hiring problems in the civil rights division and the dubious purge of nine U.S. attorneys.
Think Progress has video of current Attorney General Michael Mukasey refusing to say whether Gonzales politicized the Department of Justice during a Senate hearing earlier this month and quotes House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers on the new report:
After some crowing (w/links!) Kagro X at Daily Kos suggests we check out The Gavel, “where other Capitol Hill staffers have pulled out all the best parts for you.”
One of the underreported and unappreciated aspects of the Age of Bush is that despite the appearance of unanimity some administration officials, typically careerists and not political appointees, were horrified at the embrace of torture and other extralegal actions and spoke up. They were silenced and in some case were fired, demoted or resigned.
When an official whose loyalty to the rule of law ran deeper than their loyalty to the administration tried to fight back, they usually were met by a human chain saw by the name of David Addington. After the president and vice president, the chief of staff and former legal counsel to Dick Cheney has been the most powerful if relatively unknown man in Washington over the past seven-plus years.
History is filled with people like Addington who believed absolutely that they were doing right for god and republic but whose actions were so awful that what they saw as patriotism was in fact traitorous.
By that calculus, the foul deeds of Benedict Arnold, Alger Hiss and Aldrich Ames pale in comparison to Addington’s actions.
* * * * *
Indeed, Addington is in a class of his own. Before the fires at the World Trade Center and Pentagon had even been extinguished, Addington asserted himself as the indispensable man even though his legal, political and military bona fides were overshadowed by his far right-wing views, as well as a paranoia that extended to keeping his office locked at all times and a ruthless mastery of the art of confronting outright or backstabbing anyone who got in his way.
There were career lawyers in the Justice Department who had substantial experience with terrorism, but few in or out of the White House were conversant in presidential powers. Neither was Addington, but he was quick to fill this vacuum with his extreme opinions as the chief lawyer for another paranoiac, the vice president.
Although Condoleezza Rice was nominally President Bush’s national security advisor, it was Cheney who ran the national security show. Unfortunately for the victims of 9/11 and the nation as a whole, like Rice he still had a Cold War mindset, did not have the foresight to see the threat Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda represented and blew off the confidential papers and briefings that warned of this imminent danger with his trademark arrogance.
From the outset, Addington pushed what came to be known as “The New Paradigm,” a absolutist doctrine at the fringes of even conservative legal thinking that the president had the authority to disregard virtually all legal boundaries, including the Constitution, if national security required it.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to recent torture-related posts.
In keeping with the myriad outrages that it has perpetrated in fighting the so-called Global War on Terror, the Bush administration has not lacked for cojones.
Congress was a mere handmaiden or not consulted at all when the White House decided to establish a parallel court system to try terror suspects, when it tossed the Geneva Conventions into the Potomac and embraced the use of torture, when it established a plan to secretly rendition suspects to the Rumsfeld Gulag, and when it twice refused to heed the Supreme Court’s warnings that these suspects could not be stripped of all constitutional rights.
But when the top court ruled in June that a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that denied Guantánamo Bay detainees the right to file habeas petitions with civilian courts for determinations as to whether they were being held illegally, the Justice Department found itself painted into a tight corner entirely of its own making.
How to handle the tricky matter of making available civilian courts to Gitmo detainees, some of whom are seriously nasty people?
What should be done with Gitmo detainees now that the whole reason for the prison for so-called enemy combatants has been undermined by the Supremes?
And pray tell what would happen if detainees whose home countries will not accept their return are released inside the U.S.?
Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who has shown that his own cojones are even bigger than predecessors John Ashcroft and Albert Gonzalez in telling Congress to buzz off while the Justice Department did the White House’s bidding, suddenly has had a change of heart. Or so it would seem.
Being Israel and protecting the values on which it was founded is one helluva tough job, but a funny thing happened on the way to the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state: It has subsumed some of those values for political convenience and is kissing George Bush’s ass when it comes to torture.
This has great pertinence because Israel apparently is one of the relatively few countries that would roll out the welcome mat for administration officials who approved of and participated in the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the Rumsfeld Gulag in violation of international law. As a consequence, they might risk arrest as war criminals in, say, France, Germany or Italy.
Said Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff of those officials — all practicing attorneys — in a pointed public statement:
“Haynes, Feith Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and — at the apex — Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.”
It should be noted that Wilkerson can be outspoken to the point of intemperance, and he is no friend of the conservatives who run Israel.
It is no surprise that he would mention Saudia Arabia, a safe country for sure for those administration lawyers given its own religious and cultural embrace of torture. But Israel? A nation that emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s embrace of the very torture techniques that the CIA and other U.S. operatives have used?
How terribly sad.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to previous torture-related posts.
Photo illustration for Vanity Fair by Chris Mueller
CHENEY ONLY PRETENDED TO BE SLEEPING; MAYER WAS WIDE AWAKE
While it had been widely assumed that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the War on Terror began at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Bush administration long hid behind that “trickle up” explanation, it is now apparent that the origins of this dark chapter in American history — and the single most defining and insidious aspect of the Age of Bush — can be traced to Vice President Cheney.
Nevertheless, there has not been a satisfactory answer to the question of why in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the vice president and his cronies did not want to work within existing laws and systems with Congress and the courts, stubbornly objected to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and created an American gulag and rump court system that ignored constitutionally mandated niceties like habeas corpus.
Like the Watergate scandal of four decades earlier, the answer is that it was all about covering up, in this instance Cheney spearheading a not vast right-wing conspiracy that was predicated on scaring the crap out of Americans, hence the oft repeated mantra that “everything has changed” because of 9/11, and the use of that rationale for a descent into morally repugnant methods and actions unprecedented in modern American history.
The purpose was to cover up the administration’s failure to act on repeated warnings that Al Qaeda planned a major attack on the homeland, an attack that it now appears could have been prevented had the White House not been so caught up in its own arrogant sense of infallibility. (In Cheney’s case, this hubris is all the more amazing because he was obsessed with doomsday scenarios and had participated in many drills in previous years that simulated attacks that might destabilize the government.)
This descent included extracting false confessions through torture that became an underpinning of the bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection and WMD threat that led directly to a war now in its sixth year, and even to satisfy grievances that Mayer says the vice president had been harboring for decades.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for a new revelation concerning former Attorney General John Ashcroft, and here for an index with links to previous Bush torture regime-related posts.
After his disgraceful tenure as U.S. Attorney General and his humiliating resignation, I did not expect to hear from Alberto Gonzales for at least the number of years John McCain says we will be in Iraq.
But, lo-and-behold, on July 2, Alberto Gonzales published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. That alone is surprising. But what is even more remarkable is the subject of his piece.
In “What Latinos want from their president,” the disgraced former Attorney General, a Latino, has the audacity to purport to speak for the Latino community in the U.S. and to offer advice to the presidential candidates on how to court, attract and capture the Latino vote.
In his piece, Gonzales says
Pew’s numbers now show that Latino voters are heading back into the Democratic fold, but the message in these voting patterns and in the demographic projections is that neither party can afford to take the Latino vote for granted.
What a condescending piece of advice from a person who took the American people, the Constitution, the law, etc., for granted, and worse.
When discussing the issues that “resonate” with Latinos, Gonzales says:
Among them, of course, is immigration. Latino support will swing to the political party that has the courage and fortitude to put forward a specific immigration solution that is effective and efficient in securing our borders, that supports the economic interests of the nation and that is compassionate in a way that is consistent with the character of a nation of immigrants.
What did you do, Mr. Gonzales, to put forward or champion a “specific immigration solution” during your tenure?
And
…although we know that America strives to be a fair country, the harsh reality is we are not one nation with liberty and justice for all. And yet equal opportunity — to a job, to capital and to credit — is a cornerstone of American success. The promise of equal opportunity is what drew our parents and grandparents and what still draws immigrants to the U.S., and it is what firmly knits them into the country once they are citizens.
“The harsh reality is we are not one nation with liberty and justice for all.”? As the people’s lawyer, this is one area you could have really helped improve, Mr. Gonzales. Instead we got illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens and other horrors.
“…equal opportunity — to a job”? How about the eight fired U.S. attorneys, including one of your own, David Iglesias.
Now, some may call this “reverse stereotyping,” but it is Mr. Gonzales himself who puts his Latino heritage at play when he says, “We must also consider the divide between the majority from another group, one that I happen to belong to: Latinos.” By the way, I am a Latino, too.
A letter to the editor writer in today’s LA Times, Julio Zamarripa, perhaps says it best:
I was certainly hoping never to hear from Gonzales again; however, since he decided to appoint himself as some kind of a spokesman for the Latino community, I feel the former attorney general needs help on his convenient lack of recollection about some important issues that were intrinsic to his duties as the highest law enforcement official in the land.
He writes that Latinos share the common prayer, “Just give me a chance to succeed.” Does he not remember that his actions and reckless disregard for the law denied countless people the “chance to succeed”?
During his watch, the scandal of the political firing of 11 U.S. attorneys reached all the way to Congress, where Gonzales demonstrated contempt for the very laws he had taken an oath to uphold. He became an embarrassment to the entire nation. His lack of integrity hardly gives him moral authority to speak on behalf of any racial, political or religious group.
It seemed like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales barely had two brain cells to rub together on the best of days, so his defense of the Bush torture regime was simple: Na-na-na-na-na! The president can do whatever he wants.
Michael Mukasey, who prepped for the job in the federal judiciary while Gonzales was the president’s lapdog, is a rocket scientist by comparison.
After hoodwinking the Senate into confirming him because he promised that he’d have to look into this torture stuff, Mukasey has gone to great lengths to defend its use while approving an “independent” investigation into the darkest of all the dark aspects of the Bush administration that is anything but.
The crux of Mukasey’s defense is that timid lawyering as a consequence of congressional investigations and reforms that grew out of the Iran-Contra affair and other intelligence scandals in the 1970s and 80s lulled the U.S. intelligence community into a state of somnambulence that contributed to the 9/11 terror attacks. And that criticizing John Yoo, David Addington and, yes, that Gonzo for throwing down the gauntlet is to ignore that the U.S. is more secure as a result.
Speaking at the Boston University Law School commencement, Mukasey declared that . . .
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to other posts on torture.
Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly. — JOHN ASHCROFT
With the drip drip of revelations that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the so-called War on Terror began not with commanders and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but at the highest levels of the Bush administration, arguments that these insiders should and could be tried as war criminals have become more credible.
Just not tried in the U.S., of course.
As if we needed to be reminded that the White House has worked as hard to prevent these insiders from facing the consequences of their dirty deeds as they worked to rationalize the use of Nazi-like torture techniques, there is a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that would immunize them against prosecution.
But only in the U.S., of course.
Overseas is another matter, and any Geneva Conventions signatory nation has the right — indeed, the responsibility — to detain someone suspected or accused of violating Article 3 of the conventions.
Indeed, courts in Italy and Germany have issued warrants demanding the arrest of CIA operatives for kidnapping and torturing citizens and residents of their nations, although the warrants have not been executed for diplomatic reasons.
And an effort to prosecute former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in France for the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the flagship accommodation in the Rumsfeld Gulag, has foundered because no court was willing to take on this hot potato.
But with every new revelation comes a flurry of articles suggesting that Bush administration big shots, present and former, might want to think twice before jetting off to Europe this summer for some sightseeing.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, and here for an index of torture-related stories and links.
It is now well known that when the White House needed justification for its endorsement of Nazi-like torture techniques, it turned to John Yoo.
The young attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of memos that he believed gave the Bush administration the legal fig leaf it needed to use torture and deny enemy combatants protection under the Geneva Conventions.
Yoo was a foot soldier in a national tragedy starring Vice President Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft and his successor, Alberto Gonzalez, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleeza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet. And, of course, The Decider himself.
The administration’s embrace of torture is the most atrocious aspect of a presidency that has determinedly turned the separation of powers, due process and the Rule of Law on its collective ear.
All in service of the specious claim that the president should have unlimited powers in the post-9/11 world even if it means defecating on the very constitutionally enshrined rights that we are fighting the so-called Global War on Terror to protect.
Public reaction to this dark interlude has been underwhelming.
This is because news coverage has sucked — and can you imagine it being any other way considering the spectacle of last night’s presidential “debate”? I also suspect that many people are okay with torture so long as it isn’t their son or daughter who is being waterboarded.
Meanwhile, there has been loud flailing by those who want to punish Yoo now.
Any alleged terror plot has to be taken seriously, but the Justice Department is amassing a pretty lousy record when it comes to separating the amateurs from the pros.
So it is no surprise that the second trial of the Liberty City Six, formerly the Liberty City Seven, whom the government alleged were planning to take a bus from Miami to Chicago and blow up the Sears Tower ended yesterday with another mistrial.
The Justice Department made a collective fool of itself because Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (remember him?) pulled out all of the public-relations stops and equated these nimrods from the dirt poor Liberty City neighborhood of Miami with the foulest of the Al Qaeda foul.
Gonzo had asserted that the group represented a “new brand of terrorism” created by “the convergence of globalization and technology,” but these lads were clearly buffoons who didn’t even have the money to buy bus tickets to get to Chicago.
No matter, the government retried the six mistrial defendants (a seventh was acquitted) in the hopes that if it threw everything up against the wall something would stick. Alas, nothing did and the jury was excused after 13 days of deliberations.
Next up is the Fort Dix Six, a bunch of hard-drinking blue-collar bozos who asked cops for maps of military installations, had trouble finding lethal weapons, practiced jihadist attacks by playing paintball in the Pocono Mountains, went to a Kinko’s to have a videotape of their training sessions made into a DVD, and were infiltrated by not one but two informants, include a brainiac who knew the wide open New Jersey Army base “like the back of his hand” because he once delivered pizzas there for his family’s restaurant.
A modest prediction: The informants will bomb on the stand and the Fort Dix Six will walk.
April 13th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Once he was the nation’s Attorney General, appointed — and constantly protected and defended by — President George Bush. But he is considered by some to have been one of the worst Attorney Generals in recent history — and now Alberto Gonzales is having a hard time finding a job at a law firm.
Maybe not yet — but the New York Times reports that Gonzales is finding the response to his resume has not been enthusiastic:
Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.
He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales’s case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government’s chief lawyer, are typically highly sought.
A longtime loyalist to George W. Bush dating to their years together in Texas, Mr. Gonzales was once widely viewed as a strong candidate to be the first Hispanic-American nominated one day to the Supreme Court. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he carried an impressive personal story as the child of poor Mexican immigrants.
Despite those credentials, he left office last August with a frayed reputation over his role in the dismissal of several federal prosecutors and the truthfulness of his testimony about a secret eavesdropping program. He has had no full-time job since his resignation, and his principal income has come from giving a handful of talks at colleges and before private business groups.
“Frayed,” indeed. Any prospective employer from Mars who did not know who Gonzales is could do a Google search about his legacy and not be impressed by this,this,this, this,this,this or this.
But has there been a new development that won’t improve his legacy but will perhaps end even the remaining half-ounce of doubt about his role in “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the phrase used for “torture” by those defending the administration who apparently also like the phrase “pre-owned cars” instead of “used cars.”) and why he played the role.
While the Bush administration’s stewardship of the economy and that pesky war, among other areas of vital concern to the national interest, have been seriously lacking, its ability to make significant policy changes without bothering to tell anyone — let alone come clean about their implications – has been nothing short of masterful.
In one of the more insidious examples of this, the Justice (sic) Department, in the service of an administration allergic to regulating the corporate fat cats who bankroll Republican causes (and Democratic, too), is no longer regularly threatening wrongdoers with criminal charges and penalties and instead is offering settlements.
At first blush, this might not seem like such a big deal.
Not every case of corporate crime should result in a CEO or CFO frog-walking to the nearest federal penitentiary for a turn in the laundry room and a few rounds of tennis. But removing that threat and substituting it with a cash settlement also removes a pretty big disincentive to not behave badly if the consequence of doing so is no more than a wrist slap in the form of a one-time accounting charge.
During the last three years, the department headed by the sycophantically corrupt Alberto Gonzales and now by the despicable Michael Mukasey has deferred on the prosecutions of more than 50 corporations on charges ranging from bribery to fraud. Instead, these corporations have been invited to enter into what are euphemistically called “deferred prosecution agreements” and “nonprosecution agreements.”
It has taken no time at all to understand that in his own way Attorney General Michael Mukasey is even worse than Alberto Gonzalez. That is because he is more clever than Gonzo in doing the White House’s bidding, which is to say suborning the law at every opportunity.
Law school prof Jonathan Turley has reached a not dissimilar conclusion in writing in a Los Angeles Timesop-ed piece that:
“The recent decisions of . . . Mukasey to block any prosecution of Bush administration officials for contempt and to block any criminal investigation of torture led to a chorus of criticism. Many view the decisions as raw examples of political manipulation of the legal process and overt cronyism. I must confess that I was one of those crying foul until I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey’s action.
“In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey’s Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president — and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.”
It is worth noting for the umpteenth time that none of this mischief might have transpired had feckless Democratic leaders like Senator Charles Schumer drawn the line at Mukasey’s nomination hearing when he bobbed and weaved on what constituted torture and blew them off by saying that he’d get back to them after he was sworn in.
As Turley also notes, that is the ultimate paradox.
Meanwhile, there is the reason that Mukasey was nominated in the first place: Gonzalez couldn’t keep his stories straight about why nine U.S. attorneys had been sacked, eventually had to resign and is now lawyering up for coming legal fireworks.
Although the answer is something of an open secret, Congress wants to know where the orders to purge the attorneys came from.
This prompted contempt citations against, Joshua Bolten, President Bush’s chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, the prez’s former counsel and failed Supreme Court wannabe, after the White House claimed executive privilege and refused to let them testify. Mukasey has dutifully said he will not refer the contempt citations to a federal grand jury.
House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who like other Democratic bigs seems to show up for work with a spine on some days but not on others, has responded that she will give the House Judiciary Committee the authority to file a civil lawsuit against Bolten and Miers in federal court.
February 28th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
If the next president is a Democrat (and that is by no means a foregone conclusion) what if any investigations of Bush administration criminality and other misdeeds should be persued?
Or, should the Democratic president and Congress, in the spirit of a new era and an appeal to bipartisanship, wipe the slate clean?
The criminality and misdeeds include:
* The refusal of Alberto Gonzalez, Harriet Miers and other key adminstration officials to answer subpoenas in connection with the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys.
* The refusal to hand over to congressional investigators certain testimony from Vice President Cheney and other key administration officials in connection with the Wilson-Plame leak scandal.
* The official embrace of torture in contravention of the Constitution, treaties and conventions and common decency.
* The Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
* Pre-9/11 CIA and other intelligence failures.
* The willful destruction of millions of White House emails sought by congressional investigators.
* Voter supression efforts directed by the Justice Department.
* A full accounting of the costs of the Iraq war.
* No-bid contracts given Halliburton and other firms working in Iraq and Afghanistan with close administration ties.
* The consequences of the multiple Bush signing statements.
* Government and government-funded scientific research and studies skewed for political reasons.
* Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s legal conflicts of interest.
February 19th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
The George Polk Award inevitably plays second fiddle to the Pulitzer Prize, but it commands just as much respect from journalists.
This makes the award of a Polk this morning to Josh Marshall and his staff at Talking Points Memo — the first time that a blog has been honored — so sweet and well deserved.
Josh started TPM back in 2000 as a bit of a lark, but it has grown into a full-time enterprise and a model for what blogs are capable of doing above and beyond the mainstream media.
TPM’s Polk is for its dogged coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration, a story that the MSM at first pooh-poohed and then had to play catch-up on. Josh and co-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood did most of the muckraking, but were assisted by readers who helped them analyze important documents.
More than anything or anyone else, we have TPM to thank for the fact that Alberto Gonzales is back in Texas lawyering-up.
So inured have we become to Bush administration scandal that 
When an official whose loyalty to the rule of law ran deeper than their loyalty to the administration tried to fight back, they usually were met by a human chain saw by the name of David Addington. After the president and vice president, the chief of staff and former legal counsel to Dick Cheney has been the most powerful if relatively unknown man in Washington over the past seven-plus years.
Nevertheless, there has not been a satisfactory answer to the question of why in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the vice president and his cronies did not want to work within existing laws and systems with Congress and the courts, stubbornly objected to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and created an American gulag and rump court system that ignored constitutionally mandated niceties like habeas corpus.
It seemed like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales barely had two brain cells to rub together on the best of days, so his defense of the Bush torture regime was simple: Na-na-na-na-na! The president can do whatever he wants.
The George Polk Award inevitably plays second fiddle to the Pulitzer Prize, but it commands just as much respect from journalists.
