Everyone is walking back the cat on this issue. Waterboarding yielded nothing related to the courier who ultimately led to bin Laden’s Pakistan compound. That doesn’t prove torture was useless from an intelligence standpoint, but Abu Ghraib and Gitmo certainly didn’t produce “actionable intelligence” on bin Laden’s location, or else W and company could have tracked him down many years ago.

As I’ve noted earlier, it’s “hard to believe that for nearly a decade after 9-11, the United States was still not been able to find a 7-foot Arab in Pakistan hooked up to a dialysis machine!”

John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who twisted the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions into an unrecognizable mess to excuse torture, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the killing of Bin Laden proved that waterboarding and other abuses were proper. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, said at first that no coerced evidence played a role in tracking down Bin Laden, but by Tuesday he was reciting the talking points about the virtues of prisoner abuse.

The chair of the U.S. Senate’s intelligence committee countered that “enhanced interrogation” did not help the bin Laden operation in any way.

More and more evidence suggests a key piece of intelligence — the first link in the chain of information that led U.S. intelligence officials to Osama bin Laden — wasn’t tortured out of its source. And, indeed, that torture actually failed to produce it.

Senate Intel Chair: Torture Did Not Lead To Bin Laden In Any Way | TPMDC.

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Nothing wrong with this at all. Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries [NYTimes.com]. You can’t have public orders for special operations, certainly not against a foe as determined and resourceful as Al Qaeda. Now if only W and the neo-cons could actually have gotten something done. Hard to believe that more than seven years after 9-11 the United States has still not been able to find a 7-foot Arab in Pakistan hooked up to a dialysis machine!

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Now this is a creative response to the current “global credit crunch.” All the more remarkable because it is proposed by a Republican administration and flies in the face of Republican economic orthodoxy. U.S. May Take Ownership Stake in Banks [New York Times]. Are they thinking out of the box or just out of their minds? Today’s fall in the stock market to below 9,000 suggests the latter, but I still believe this is just a symptom of herd mentality run amok. Or at least I hope so.

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Last week’s prime time speech by Pres. Bush was hardly reassuring. He was scared, shrill and stiff, almost the opposite of FDR as he spoke gloomily of the economic risks arising from the subprime mortgage crisis. If the point is to provide comfort and stability to investors and financial markets — and what else can the government really do? — it failed wildly.

Bob Herbert writes in When Madmen Reign [NYTimes.com] that

[w]hen President Bush went on television last week to drum up support for the bailout package, he looked almost dazed, like someone who’d just climbed out of an auto wreck.

But that’s only half the story. By proposing to buy up failed mortgage assets (defaulted loans on real estate properties worth less than the oustanding loan balances) rather than inject capital and liquidity into the market, the government was offering simply to rescue these lenders from their own financial miscalculations. The comfort needed was reassuring depositors that their insured savings are safe and reasuring credit-seeking businesses that the Federal Reserve would ease up on the money supply to support the availability of lending capital.

So instead of reassurance and leadership, we got fear-mongering coupled with a straight-forward bailout, which spooked conservatives into limbo. Coming on the heels of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros. and AIG, all now defunct and brokered firesales by the US government, investors saw a collapsing house of cards, while market professionals saw a financial policy bereft of new ideas and paralyzed by indecision.

I don’t think the question to be asked in light of yesterday’s Wall Street stock plunge is who caused the bailout plan to fail in the House of Representatives. Instead, it’s why a bailout plan was being peddled in the first place and why no one focused on the psychology of investors and markets. In the 1930s, FDR closed all banks temporarily — a “bank holiday” he called it — to prevent a nationwide run and announced that fear itself was the only risk. Now our leaders cannot even “throw money at the problem,” something legislators have been great at for decades.

There’s a propular cable television series called Madmen on AMC. Reality is even better (worse)!!

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So the consequence of making absurd investment decisions in real estate is that, if you are a banker, the government spends $$ trillions to bail you out. Bernanke Reiterates Need to Act Quickly, Clarifies Comments on Valuing Assets [WSJ.com]. Worse, the Bush Administration is advocating immediate passage and unreviewable discretion in what the Treasury Department does with all that money. As I see it, since depositors are insured, who cares how many banks fail due to poor real estate investment decisions? That’s why we call it a market economy. If the risk of failure does not exist, there will be absolutely nothing enforcing financial discipline on the bankiong sector in the future. That’s bad for the economy and bad for consumers. We should let the subprime bankers twist slowly in the wind for awhile. Enough with the bailouts already!

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It’s chairman was a crook, its investments were stupid, nothing it does affects consumers and it has absolutely terrible TV advertisements. So what the heck justifies US$85 billion for AIG? Did We Say No More Bailouts? [Forbes.com]. Forbes opines that this “prov[es] that pragmatism trumps conviction in the historic financial crisis sweeping through the world’s financial markets.” Not at all. It is simply white shoe, country club brothers helping each other out, with free (i.e., taxpayer) money. Read carefully:

Federal officials worried not about AIG’s ability to insure its ordinary customers — those assets are kept in myriad subsidiary units of the company, all closely regulated by state governments in the United States, as well as Europe and elsewhere. The major concern was AIG’s massive exposure to credit default swaps, essentially insurance products for corporate debt.

Meaning that the Wall Street gamblers who experimented with exotic financial instruments face absolutely no market discipline and have no cost of failure. This sort of permissiveness in the face of naked greed and business malfeasance has a price, which we are already paying. G.M. and Ford Officials Seeking U.S. Loans to Meet Fuel Goal [NYTimes.com]. None of this would have even been thinkable 30 years ago, let alone if the Reagan Revolution was something Republicans like George W. actually believed in. Who stepped up with a bailout when the dot.coms and telecom firms all collapsed in 2000? For a nation that has led the world in promoting open, competitive markets, shielding large financial institutions from the price of their own mistakes is backwards. Depositors and investors are insured. Those guys should be in jail, not on bail!

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So the Department of Justice has concluded that its hiring practices under President Bush broke civil service laws in favoring applicants with political connections and conservative political credentials. But they refuse to do anything about it. Justice Dept. Issues a Callback [washingtonpost.com].

“Where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute,” the attorney general said. “But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”

Wow, what a concept. If a government official breaks the law governing his or her core official functions, how can that NOT be a crime?

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Thirty years ago the U.S. Department of Justice, and it’s Honors Program for law school graduates, attracted some of the best-credentialed, smartest and most talented young lawyers around. It made DOJ a plum position for aspiring litigators, where one could "learn by doing" instead of watching others and — despite obvious financial sacrifices — allowed the federal government to recruit from the top law schools in the nation.

But now it seems the Bush Administration has totally politicized the Justice Department. As if firing U.S. Attorneys for political reasons — not being "loyal Bushies" according to internal emails — is not bad enough, now the DOJ Inspector general reports that senior political appointees at Justice have for six years been "using ideological reasons to scuttle the candidacy of lawyers who applied to the elite honors and summer intern programs."  So members of the conservative Federalist Society got a free pass, without the resume to warrant a position, while members of the Nature Conservancy were nixed without consideration at all for being too liberal.

That’s revolting.  It’s truly a sad end to a once impressive agency where I was proud to have stared my own legal career in 1982 after a judicial clerkship.

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It’s late, I’m tired and I just finished watching an incredibly well done and riveting documentary on al Qaeda and 9/11 by National Geographic. And then I read this:

Invoking the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Bush on Tuesday cast the war in Iraq as the modern-day moral equivalent of the struggle against Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism in World War II, arguing that the United States cannot retreat without disastrous consequences.

Bush Calls Iraq War Moral Equivalent Of Allies’ WWII Fight Against the Axis. Of all the gall. Comparing the bunch of rag-tag guerillas that has the U.S. paralyzed in Iraq to the fascists and authoritarians of 1940s Germany, Japan and Italy is sophistry. “The Greatest Generation” knew what they were fighting for and knew it was right. Today, we don’t know who we are fighting and we are “right” only in that we are acting as a pseudo-benevolent occupation force.

Remember that Bush vowed on 9/11 that he would hunt down those responsible and kill them. Osama bin Laden is still out there, and since 9/11 we’ve witnessed Madrid, London and scores of other major al Qaeda terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, Afghanistan is growing more opium than ever before and Iraq has become a new rallying call for Islamic jihad against Western “infidels.”

If Bush had any real courage, he would have nuked Islamabad when he had the chance. But then, throughout American history, it’s been Democrats who fight wars, and Republicans who talk but don’t walk. Get real, George; you cannot make history by wishing this were World War II. It’s a different time, and a different war. The problem is, Iraq is the wrong war. We should be fighting terrorists, but instead we are just sowing the seeds for inevitably more terrorism against all of Western civilization.

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So the President is getting his act together on Social Security (in a manner of speaking) and taking it on the road in a 60-day, 60-stop barnstorming tour. His advisors say they want to get Dubya in front of real people, outside the Beltway, to talk up private savings accounts. Apparently, however, real people do not include folks who don’t meet the White House profile. At Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, there were no general public tickets distributed for the Bush visit.

This, IMHO, is the ultimate hypocrisy. We all know that campaign events are exquisitely stage-managed to produce the sound bites and photo ops the political operatives want to be the message of the day. And it was somewhat disconcerting when the Bush-Cheney Campaign prevented non-supporters — those who had not contributed or volunteered — from attending campaign rallies. (The Republican National Committee even required event-attendees to sign endorsement forms that pledged their support for the re-election of President Bush.) But now, we are talking about the President of the United States, who is supposed to represent all Americans. It is just wrong to limit the audience to sychophants, but apparently only hard-core Republican Domers get to see Dubya at old Notre Dame.

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