Slate is trying to get a handle on the plethora of criminality and corruption permeating the history of the last seven years, and even made a handy little interactive visual guide to keep track of who’s who among the usual suspects.
Predictably, since these things have a life of their own, no sooner did they publish this very nice project and even more evidence that we’ve got war criminals running things.
There are new torture memos between the CIA and the Justice Department where these fools explicitly authorize “the waterboard” as well as a very specific outline of what procedures were authorized as “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” which supposedly did not violate the torture statute and that all such interrogations had to be recorded. Of course, those tapes have been “disappeared.”
Jay Bybee signed one of the new memos which for the first time (as far as we know) said in effect, “sure, drown ‘em, just don’t kill ‘em, and roll some tape. It’s all legal.” That same day Bybee also signed the infamous “organ failure memo.”
Bybee now enjoys a lifetime appointment as a federal Court of Appeals judge. (Keep that in mind the next time McCain says he’ll appoint judges just like the ones Bush did.)
The torture “gate” scandal made it into Slate’s fancy Venn diagram, but surely to the disappointment of everyone at Firedoglake, “PlameGate” did not fit into the scandals covered. That means they aren’t looking at the guy just selected to head a new House Ethics Review Board made up of people not members of Congress — Porter Goss, who took over the CIA a week after one of those memos warned the directorless agency that their actions might be subject to “judicial review.” Goss tried to kill the Plame investigation in the House.
Of course If you diagrammed all the scandals Goss had his fingers in, it would reach back to the Bay of Pigs through Watergate and Iran/Contra right up to 9/11 when he was having breakfast with Senator Bob Graham and an alleged financial backer of the hjackers discussing (of all things) Osama bin Laden.