From The Plum Line:

At the private White House meeting today between Obama and Congressional leaders, the President and John Boehner got into a testy exchange, aides say, with Obama charging that the GOP is just out to kill all his initiatives.

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From an email send out this afternoon by Bellwether Consulting Group, which raises money for Republicans:

Subject: Canceled Events: Granger, Burr, Isakson & Griffin

Due to the inclement weather forecast, the following events have been canceled:

2/10 Rep. Granger Reception & Dinner @ Bobby Van’s Grill

2/11 Sen. Isakson Breakfast @ Patton Boggs

2/11 Sen. Burr Breakfast @ 1666 K Street, N.W

2/11 Tim Griffin Reception @ Capitol Hill Club

Writing for the majority in the Citizens United v. FEC case, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy stated: “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”

I wonder what the learned justice would have to say about this story today from Politico: [MORE . . .]

Few Washington developments in recent weeks establish the parameters of “change you can believe in” better than this: following the resignation of Phil Carter, the White House is reportedly prepared to tap William Lietzau as the new deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. Lietzau served as an aide to William J. Haynes II, the David Addington protégé who was Donald Rumsfeld’s lawyer at the Pentagon. In this role, he played a central role in creating a harsh new environment for prisoners taken in the war on terror, including the crafting of rules for a military commission that were subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.

Spencer Ackerman’s in-depth examination of the Lietzau appointment in the Washington Independent today focuses on the critical assessments of the Army’s and Navy’s Judge Advocates General during the time of his Pentagon service: [MORE . . .]

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, came out in support of allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. “No matter how I look at this issue,“ Mullen testified before Congress, ”I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.” ¹ The Reuters news service withdrew a report that President Barack Obama was “backdooring” the American middle class with hidden taxes,² White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel apologized to Sarah Palin for using the term “fucking retarded,” ³ U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan conceded that Hurricane Katrina was probably not “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,”⁴ and James Clyburn, the House majority whip, dismissed fiscal restraint as a viable national economic policy. “We're not going to save our way out of this recession,” he said. “We've got to spend.”⁵ Underwear Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab provided federal authorities with actionable intelligence without having been tortured and despite having been offered some of the basic protections of the American legal system.⁶ U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair warned that “malicious cyber activity” was menacing the nation,⁷ and the federal government was hoarding the genetic information of American newborns.⁸ In Afghanistan's Helmand Province, the Taliban were ambushing the American military using “ancient signaling techniques”; three people were killed and 17 wounded in a suicide-bomb attack in Kandahar, and a drone strike killed 29 presumed terrorists in northwestern Pakistan, where the Taliban were stalking American soldiers and their hired mercenaries. “We know the movement of U.S. Marines and Blackwater guys,” said a spokesman for the group. “We have prepared suicide bombers to go after them.”^{9 10 11 12} General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, insisted that the surge was making “significant progress.”¹³ Americans were drinking more cheap booze.¹⁴ [MORE . . .]

Andrew Sullivan addresses “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’” in the Sunday Times:

What really happened? I do not know. But it seems to me that these credible witnesses should have at least been interviewed by the NCIS; that the official story has gaping holes of logic; that the autopsies are beyond bizarre; and that the slightest possibility that something is amiss requires further investigation. If there is any chance that these prisoners were accidentally tortured to death and their deaths then covered up as suicide, this is the biggest story in the grim annals of the Bush-Cheney era since Abu Ghraib. And yet, other than to carry a brief synopsis from Associated Press, no main US newspaper has delved into the Harper’s cover-story.

And indeed, a year ago Hickman and his fellows went to Obama’s justice department to explain what they believed needed to be investigated further. The FBI interviewed other witnesses who backed Hickman up. Last November, after months of waiting for a response, Hickman’s lawyer got a call from the justice department. The case was closed. The NCIS report stood. When Hickman’s lawyer asked why, he was told that Hickman’s conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported. This is the change we were asked to believe in.

One of the great bugaboos of the Bush era was the notion of talking with the enemy. Once a group was defined as an enemy, even the mildest hint of a contact would meet with torrents of indignation. When the definition of the “enemy” went into soft focus, as various parties that might or might not have some ties to Al Qaeda were added, this approach was particularly troublesome. It made it difficult to divide and conquer—to peel off groups on the periphery in order to make the foe weaker and less stable. During the campaign, Barack Obama articulated this fairly obvious critique of Bush-era “War on Terror” policy, and his administration seemed set to pursue a more subtle approach. Talking with the enemy might be on the agenda.

But while his administration has sharply ramped up military and paramilitary operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it appears reluctant to engage the Taliban. Indeed, this has been a point of friction between the Obama Administration and Afghanistani President Hamid Karzai, who has aggressively pressed for direct talks and persuaded Saudi Arabia to act as an honest broker. A number of Taliban leaders traveled to Saudi Arabia in late 2009 in an effort to bring this about. The U.S. command has tried to downsize the Taliban by recruiting some of its less loyal lieutenants, but it has spurned direct dialogue. In the current New York Review of Books, Ahmed Rashid takes a hard look at this predicament, outlining the current sense of McChrystal’s command: [MORE . . .]

No wannabe totalitarian regime in the world is quite so ripe for ridicule as North Korea. I traveled there some years back and marveled over the Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-story monstrosity nicknamed the “hotel of doom.” Due to gross design and construction flaws, it’s sat unoccupied in downtown Pyongyang for two decades. It captures the regime perfectly: monolithic and impressive from a distance, laughable up close and fundamentally unhinged in concept, it teeters there awaiting the day when it is inevitably imploded to make space for something better attuned to reality.

Today the Washington Post brings us synopses of South Korean press accounts about the latest rumblings in the Kim family’s lair. [MORE . . .]

Jane Mayer’s feature on Attorney General Eric Holder is just up at the New Yorker website. She presents Holder as at the center of the controversy surrounding counterterrorism policy, under attack from Republicans close to Dick Cheney and relating with difficulty to a White House intent on appeasing Republican critics. Here’s a sample:

After the Christmas Day incident, conservative pundits lambasted the Justice Department’s handling of Abdulmutallab, who had concealed in his underwear a bomb that ignited but failed to explode. When the plane landed, Abdulmutallab was taken to a hospital for treatment; at Holder’s directive, he was arrested as a criminal suspect. (The F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Pentagon signed off on Holder’s decision.) F.B.I. agents questioned Abdulmutallab for some fifty minutes, under what is known as the “public-safety exception” to the right to remain silent. He divulged time-sensitive intelligence: he had been trained in Yemen, by affiliates of Al Qaeda, and had obtained explosives from them. After he received medical treatment, a Justice Department source said, he started to “act like a jihadi and recite the Koran.” He stopped coöperating and demanded a lawyer, at which point authorities read him his rights. On “Inside Washington,” Charles Krauthammer declared that it was “almost criminal” that Holder had allowed Abdulmutallab access to an attorney. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, appeared on ABC, saying, “Why in God’s name would you stop questioning a terrorist?”

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• DOD now asserts that NCIS reviewed all available video footage, and found nothing of evidentiary value. The record shows NCIS had a videotape of the events. Since either activity in the camp or lack of activity would be relevant to the conflicting claims, it is implausible that there is nothing of evidentiary value on the tape.

• DOD now asserts that the detainees hanged themselves while lights were dimmed. The Admiral concluded the detainees hanged themselves with the lights on. The DOD does not explain this discrepancy.

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Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York City, was host of the HBO series Autopsy and is the forensic science contributor to Fox News. I furnished Baden copies of the official autopsy reports for the three Guantánamo prisoners who died under mysterious circumstances in 2006, as well as information about secondary autopsies arranged by the families of the deceased.

Michael Baden (Courtesy of HBO)

1. When the U.S. government released its autopsy reports, it redacted the names of the pathologists and observers involved in preparing the report. It suggests that this was done to protect their privacy. Is this a normal practice?

Redacting the names of pathologists is not normal in either civilian or military practice. It is necessary to know the pathologists’ names to be able to evaluate their qualifications, certifications, and experience. This may also help the family assess whether a second autopsy should be done. Mistakes can be made. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a recent decision establishing a right to cross-examine forensic experts, wrote that “A forensic analyst responding to a request from a law enforcement official may feel pressure—or have an incentive—to alter the evidence in a manner favorable to the prosecution.” Science must remain independent of politics. It is necessary that names of the pathologists be known to the family for accountability purposes.

2. Do deaths in the context of confinement in prison raise any special concerns for a medical examiner conducting an autopsy? [MORE . . .]

I continue to think that Syria might yet offer a platform for some fairly modest foreign policy advances for the Obama Administration in the Middle East. But that’s far from certain. Seymour Hersh offers some fascinating snippets from a long conversation with Syrian President Bashar Assad, including this one:

Now the problem is that the United States is weaker, and the whole influential world is weak as well…. You always need power to do politics. Now nobody is doing politics…. So what you need is strong United States with good politics, not weaker United States. If you have weaker United States, it is not good for the balance of the world.

The senate is holding hearings and issuing a report today that shows how a number of corrupt African officials — and their American enablers — used the U.S. banking systems to launder vast amounts of money. A good chunk of the report builds on revelations made here last November about Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea.

Two American attorneys set up shell accounts for Obiang to help him buy a $30 million home in Malibu and a $38.5 million jet. All told, Obiang moved more than $110 million into the U.S. from 2004 to 2008. One of the shell companies was called Sweet Pink, named after the rapper Eve Jeffers, who was then Obiang’s girlfriend and the president of Sweet Pink. (Eve later dumped Obiang, reportedly after hearing rumors that his dictator father was a cannibal who ate his political opponents. The senate report neither confirms nor denies that Obiang Sr. is a flesh eater.) [MORE . . .]

From The Onion:

In a landmark decision that overturned decades of legal precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday to remove all restrictions that had previously barred corporations from holding public office. “This is an unfair, ill-advised, and tragic mistake,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said before boarding a flight to Arizona in response to primary poll numbers that show him trailing the Phoenix-based company PetSmart by a double-digit margin.

“Despite the deep discounts and exciting promotions that they may be able to offer, these huge, soulless entities are not capable of truly serving the American people’s—or their pet’s—needs.”

The American political landscape is heavily populated with fake debates—hot-button issues designed to rile people up, but which are not likely to have any real impact on policy. One of the best examples of this in modern times is the fake rage over trying terrorists in federal courts and the procedures that followed the arrest of the “panty-bomber” Abdulmutallab. The simple fact is that the policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations have been essentially indistinguishable, and the rhetorical war is little more than political demagoguery.

Attorney General Eric Holder has been remarkably staid in response to these attacks. On this score, he’s doing what his office requires of him: the attorney general shouldn’t take the bait and sink into partisan mudfights. But he has struck back with a closely reasoned, detailed letter to Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell that deserves to be scrutinized closely. The letter’s tone is even and patient, but it makes the essential points: [MORE . . .]