(updated below - Update II)

The New York Times's David Barstow, whose excellent and aggressive journalism led to the uncovering last April of the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program involving network "military analysts," today returns to this topic with another lengthy front-page exposé.  Barstow focuses today on the numerous, undisclosed conflicts of interest of Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who continues to be featured frequently by NBC News as an objective analyst as he opines about war policies in which he has a substantial (and concealed) financial stake.

Some of the key facts which Barstow reports concerning the improper behavior of McCaffrey and NBC News were documented all the way back in April, 2003, in this excellent article from The Nation, which Barstow probably should have credited today.  That article -- entitled "TV's Conflicted Experts" -- detailed the numerous defense contractors to which McCaffrey had a substantial connection -- including Mitretek, Veritas and Integrated Defense Technologies, all featured by Barstow today -- and highlighted how the policies and viewpoints McCaffrey was advocating as a "military analyst" on NBC directly benefited those companies.   

Because those conflicts were brought to light by the anti-war Nation, and because that article was published in April, 2003, as the country was drowning in a war-crazed frenzy, NBC was able to blithely dismiss these concerns, unbelievably telling The Nation that its military analysts' business interests were "not their concern."  Unsurprisingly, the Nation article generated little attention and controversy. Few people were interested back then in challenging war-praising retired Generals and the networks which were glorifying the invasion.  NBC continued without objection to feature McCaffrey, and the similarly-conflicted retired Gen. Wayne Downing, as objective "military analysts."

Still, what was -- and remains -- most incredible about Barstow's April, 2008 exposé was that, to this day, the networks which featured these highly conflicted "analysts" have never uttered a word about the controversy over the Pentagon's program, despite the fact that it was the subject of an enormous front-page NYT story; members of Congress accused the Pentagon -- rightfully so -- of operating a potentially illegal propaganda operation and demanded information directly from the networks; both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spoke out against the Pentagon's program; and even the Pentagon felt compelled to terminate the program in the wake of the controversy.  None of that merited a mention by any of the networks, despite (more accurately: because of) the fact that their own reporting was so directly implicated by the controversy.

As I documented at length at the time, using the thousands of documents Barstow had obtained, the propaganda that the networks broadcast as a result of this "military analyst" program -- about Iraq, Guantanamo and a host of other related issues -- was very coordinated and, by design, implanted falsehoods in virtually every aspect of their "reporting".

The active suppression of this story by the networks -- their decision to conceal from their own viewers the fact that, for years, they presented as "independent" analysts individuals who were working in tandem on "message amplification" with the Pentagon and who had significant business interests in their analysis -- was so severe, so remarkable, that even establishment defenders such as Howie Kurtz and The Politico emphatically protested the networks' silence.  Clocks were even created to count the number of days the networks blackballed Barstow's story -- and it currently stands at 223 days, and counting. 

Last April, in the wake of Barstow's front-page story, I documented at length numerous other facts featured in today's Barstow article -- including the countless times McCaffrey went on NBC News shows to advocate war policies that directly benefited his undisclosed business interests, as well as the completely deceitful way NBC presented McCaffrey as an independent and objective analyst without ever mentioning any of his multiple activities that clearly called into question his objectivity as an "analyst."

A couple of weeks after Barstow's story was published in April, I noted that Brian Williams had taken the time on his blog to write about and mock multiple, trivial NYT stories from that week, yet had never once mentioned -- either on his network news show or even on his blog -- the extremely incriminating story in the NYT about his repeated reliance over the years on retired Generals -- such as McCaffrey and Downing -- who were active participants in the Pentagon's propaganda program and who were burdened with all sorts of economic ties that created clear though undisclosed conflicts of interests.

In response, Williams finally addressed Barstow's story on his blog (but not on his network news broadcast), yet did so only by ignoring all of the specific, substantive issues that were raised, instead offering a patronizing little lecture about how Williams himself had developed what he called "a close friendship" with both McCaffrey and Downing, and could therefore assure us that "these men are passionate patriots" who would never offer anything but the most honest and forthright assessments.  That was the full extent of NBC and Williams' response to this story.

Not only has NBC and Williams suppressed this story, but -- more amazingly still -- they continue to feature McCaffrey as an "analyst" on American war policies still without disclosing or even alluding to his participation in the Pentagon program and/or his still-extant business stakes in the policies he's being asked to assess.  Just this past Thursday night -- 3 days ago -- Williams featured McCaffrey on his NBC Nightly News program to opine about American policy in Afghanistan, and McCaffrey was identified only as a Retired General and NBC Military Analyst.

Earlier that same day, McCaffrey was on a different NBC News show to opine about our occupation of Iraq.  Williams also featured McCaffrey on September 6 to opine about Iraq, and on September 9, McCaffrey was featured on MSNBC as having just returned from Afghanistan, and was then asked to analyze American policy in both Afghanistan and Iraq while being identified only as an "NBC military analyst."

All of this took place after the publication of Barstow's April story on the military analysts program which featured McCaffrey, years after The Nation highlighted McCaffrey's numerous business conflicts, and after ample documentation -- including in this space -- of how McCaffrey used his NBC platform repeatedly over the years to advocate pro-war policies that advanced his undisclosed financial interests.  Brian Williams and NBC just ignored all of that.  Indeed, to Bartsow last April, NBC arrogantly "declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts," instead issuing this purposely vague -- and obviously false -- statement:

We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest

Even after that statement was issued, they continued to feature McCaffrey as an analyst to speak about exactly the wars in which -- as Barstow documents even more conclusively today -- he has an overwhelming financial stake.

Just as was true for the media's own complicity in the Bush administration's false pre-war claims (which no network television show, to date, has addressed), as well as for the direct involvement of numerous media stars in the Lewis Libby crimes (which they reported on while pretending that they had no involvement), here is yet another case where major media outlets simply suppress stories that severely indict the integrity of their own "journalism." 

Worse than mere suppression, NBC and Brian Williams have just outright ignored this scandal, continuing to use McCaffrey as an analyst without requiring that he sever -- or even disclose -- his numerous conflicts, allowing him to continue to use NBC News to propagandize for the military policies from which his affiliated companies benefit.  Now that Barstow has added substantially to the set of incriminating facts, it remains to be seen whether NBC will finally be forced to tell its viewers about what happened with its own involvement in the Pentagon's program and/or to take corrective action.

UPDATE:  As several commenters observe, and as I've noted before, there is an irony to this story:  namely, few companies benefit more from massive military spending and wars than NBC's own parent company, General Electric.  Still, the GE/NBC relationship is publicly known and, therefore, everyone can decide for themselves how reliable, if at all, NBC's reporting is on issues that directly affect the company which owns it.  By important contrast, the conflicts of McCaffrey (and other analysts) have been largely undisclosed, thus deceiving viewers when these networks present them as independent analysts of America's war policies.

UPDATE II:  Matt Yglesias:

Barstow published a piece on this back in April. None of the TV networks addressed the issue he raised in anything resembling a serious manner. And, again, we now have NBC News caught flat-out in the midst of corruption, deceiving their viewers. And NBC News isn’t sorry. They’re not apologizing. They’re not ashamed. Because they’re beyond shame. They never had a reputation for honor, so they don’t even see this sort of thing as damaging.

I really don't see how any of that can be denied.  Nonetheless, the damage they caused, and continue to cause, has been immense.

With a new administration ascending to power in a matter of weeks, witnessing Beltway denizens desperately scampering to re-write their role in the last eight years is nothing short of dizzying:

Tom Friedman, New York Times, today:

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Iraq to have relations with Israel anytime soon, but the fact that it may be developing an independent judiciary is good news. It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries.

Tom Friedman, The Charlie Rose Show, May 30, 2003 (as part of the #1 museum video exhibit illustrating America's political class during the Bush Era):

ROSE:  Now that the war is over, and there's some difficulty with the peace, was it worth doing?

FRIEDMAN:  I think it was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.  I think that, looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about . . . . What we needed to do was go over to that part of the world, I'm afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically, and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. . . .

And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: which part of this sentence do you understand?  You don't think we care about our open society? . . . .

Well, Suck. On. This.  That, Charlie, was what this war was about.  

We could have hit Saudi Arabia.  It was part of that bubble.  Could have hit Pakistan.  We hit Iraq because we could.  That's the real truth.

Tom Freidman, NPR's Talk of the Nation, September 23, 2003:

What we had to do, I believe at some point, was to go into the very heart of that world and burst that bubble. And the message was, "Ladies and gentlemen, which part of this sentence don't you understand?" . . . . And that's what I believe ultimately this war was about. And guess what? People there got the message, OK, in the neighborhood. This is a rough neighborhood, and sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message. But they got the message and the message was, "You will now be held accountable" . . . .

From the deranged desire to force Iraqi civilians from Basra to Baghdad to "suck on" his imaginary "very big stick" -- "pound them across the side of their heads" with his "2-by-4" -- to his magnanimous goal of "collaborating with them" to "build progressive politics," Freidman's justification for the invasion radically changes without notice or acknowledgment. 

Even as recently as May of this year, Friedman was arguing that the "real umbrella story in the Middle East today" is the "Cold War" between what he called -- with typical adolescent, banner-waving simplicity --"Team America" and Iran, and he confessed that everything we're doing in the Middle East is about our our "struggle for influence across the region."  In November of last year, Friedman was again beating his little chest while instructing Barack Obama that -- in order to deal with Iran -- he would need "Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird" and would require "a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat [another big stick] into his palm."  Yet today, Friedman seamlessly hauls out the self-glorifying claim that the "most important reason" for the invasion of Iraq is that we wanted to teach them the joys of Freedom.

In 2006 and 2007, our political class was openly flirting with involuntary regret -- and even admissions of wrongdoing -- for its almost unanimous support for the attack on Iraq.  That the war was a disaster was so undeniably clear that support for it was coming to be seen as a source of shame, and some of the most prominent supporters of the war were even resorting to outright falsehoods in order to pretend that they had opposed it from the start.

All of that is changing again.  Even as Americans still overwhelmingly view the war itself as a mistake, we're back to the conventional wisdom among our political class that the invasion was not only justified and wise, but also noble in spirit and motive.  The only problem was Bush's mismanagement of our benevolent quest to free the oppressed.  As Friedman puts it today:

In 2003, the United States, under President Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by Al Qaeda to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a different problem -- a maelstrom of violence for four years, with U.S. troops caught in the middle. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.

Freidman's ideological soulmate, The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt, similarly editorializes today that what destroyed Bush's presidency was not the war itself or the fact that it was launched based on purely false pretenses and was illegitimate and wrong, but instead, was merely Bush's "mismanagement of the war." 

The war itself was fine and right.  Only its execution was flawed.  We just need better war managers next time.  That's the consensus that has re-emerged.  And much of the palpable establishment excitement over the Obama administration is grounded not in the expectation that he will change this core mentality -- they clearly think, rightly or wrongly, that he won't -- but only that he'll execute and manage it more competently.

For a short while, it appeared that the one silver lining in the carnage and devastation wreaked by the U.S. attack on Iraq would be a palliative effect on the war-loving pathology among our political establishment.  As Vietnam did for some short period of time, Iraq could have re-taught both the evil and stupidity of commencing optional wars against countries that haven't attacked us and couldn't do so, and more generally, could have underscored the grave error in viewing the battle against Muslim extremism through the glorious prism of "War."  

But with this intense Friedmanesque revisionism well underway -- whereby war cheerleaders like Friedman were Right and Good all along and it was only the incompetent Bush and Rumsfeld who ruined everything with their "bumbling" -- it seems increasingly likely that the opposite lesson will be learned.  Attacking, invading and occupying other countries in order to change their governments to ones we prefer is the smart, wise and just thing to do.  Friedman's term for it today is "collaborating with them to build progressive politics."  Especially if there is another terrorist attack on U.S. soil -- but even if there isn't -- the only lesson being drawn from the Iraq debacle in these precincts is that from now on, we just need to plan and execute it better, so that the Good and Just people who cheer these wars on have their noble schemes vindicated a lot sooner and a lot more proficiently.

The New York Times Editorial Page, today, on poor U.S./Latin American relations:

[T]he Bush administration did enormous damage to American credibility throughout much of the region when it blessed what turned out to be a failed coup against Mr. Chávez.

Indeed it did.  But what the Times fails to mention, and is apparently eager to erase, is that "the Bush administration" was far from alone in blessing that coup attempt:

The New York Times Editorial Page, April 13, 2002 -- one day after the coup:

With yesterday's resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona. . . .

Early yesterday [Chávez] was compelled to resign by military commanders unwilling to order their troops to fire on fellow Venezuelans to keep him in power. He is being held at a military base and may face charges in Thursday's killings.

New presidential elections should be held this year, perhaps at the same time the new Congress is chosen. Some time is needed for plausible national leaders to emerge and parties to reorganize. But Venezuela urgently needs a leader with a strong democratic mandate to clean up the mess, encourage entrepreneurial freedom and slim down and professionalize the bureaucracy.

That was one of the most Orwellian editorials written in the last decade.  The Times -- in the very first line -- mimicked the claim of the Bush administration that Chavez "resigned," even though, several paragraphs later, they expressly acknowledged that Chavez "was compelled to resign by military commanders" (the definition of a "coup").  Further mimicking the administration, the Times perversely celebrated the coup as safeguarding "Venezuelan democracy" ("Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator"), even though the coup deposed someone whom the Times Editorial itself said "was elected president in 1998" and -- again using the Times' own language -- "handed power to" an unelected, pro-American "respected business leader, Pedro Carmona," who quickly proceeded to dissolve the democratically elected National Assembly, the Supreme Court and other key institutions.

Worse still, the Times Editorial mindlessly spouted the administration's claim that "Washington never publicly demonized Mr. Chávez" and "his removal was a purely Venezuelan affair."  Yet less than a week later, the Times itself was compelled to report that the Bush administration "acknowledged today that a senior administration official [Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich] was in contact with Mr. Chávez's successor on the very day he took over"' -- a disclosure which, as the Times put it with great understatement, "raised questions as to whether Reich or other officials were stage-managing the takeover by Mr. Carmona."  

Four days after its pro-coup Editorial, the Times -- once Chavez was returned to power in the wake of Carmona's anti-democratic moves -- returned to the topic of Venezuela, once again echoing the official line from Bush officials, who took to condemning the now-failed coup attempt.  The Times, while justifying pro-coup sentiments as understandable, proceeded to denounce that reaction without really apologizing for its own role in endorsing it:

In his three years in office, Mr. Chávez has been such a divisive and demagogic leader that his forced departure last week drew applause at home and in Washington. That reaction, which we shared, overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed. Forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader, no matter how badly he has performed, is never something to cheer.

Despite that, the Times still expressed optimism about the coup, righteously intoning in the first paragraph:  "we hope Mr. Chávez will act as a more responsible and moderate leader now that he seems to realize the anger he stirred."

And the Times was hardly alone.  As FAIR documented that week -- in a reported entitled "U.S. Papers Hail Venezuelan Coup as Pro-Democracy Move" -- "the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government's lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm."

* * * * *

It's nice that the Times -- with a disgraced George Bush on his way out the door -- has come to view the Venezuelan military coup as the destructive, anti-democratic event which, by definition, it was.  And it's also nice that the Times is now willing to assign blame for anti-U.S. sentiments in Latin America at least partially to the actions of the U.S. Government itself.  But it's important that the Times not be allowed to delete its own involvement in those events.  Just as was true for Joe Klein's very similar self-serving revisionism on Wednesday, the point here goes far beyond merely illustrating the dishonesty that lies at the heart of this re-writing of history.  

The Times' propagandistic cheer-leading for the military coup in Venezuela is an important illustrative event which should be regretted, but not erased.  There are vital lessons from the last eight years that get obscured when influential outlets such as the Times Editorial Page try to erase their own responsibility for events and heap all blame on "the Bush administration" -- which was able to do what it did only because it enjoyed the acquiescence, complicity and often blind support from so many of our leading political and media institutions.  

To this day, Chavez's hostility towards the U.S. Government (just as is true for the hostility of Iranian and Cuban leaders and many others) is depicted as proof of his dangerous extremism and irrationality -- even his mental instability -- as though American attempts to dictate who governs other countries will generate anger and resentment only among the Primitive, the Crazed, and the Evil.  More generally, discussions of our own role in spawning anti-American sentiment around the world is still more or less off limits in mainstream discourse, ludicrously demonized as "Blame America First" pathology from anti-American fringes on the radical Left and the isolationist Right.  And our political and media elite continue to bastardize language to justify whatever we do, with "democracy" meaning "a government that follows U.S. dictates regardless of how it gained and maintains power," and "dictatorship" meaning "a government not beholden to U.S. dictates even if they were democratically elected."

It wasn't just the Bush administraiton, but most of our media and political elite, which approved of the overthrow of Venezuela's democratically elected leader and overlooked our own role in it.  There is much to learn from that which the NYT Editorial Board shouldn't be able to suppress.

* * * * *

But just as importantly, that heinous though typical pro-coup, government-mimicking NYT Editorial was written in April, 2002 -- just months after the 9/11 attacks, when the extremism and mindless submission to Government authority that would grip this country for the next several years was still rumbling towards it peak.  The terrorist attacks in India this week serve as a critical reminder of how easily those forces are unleashed.

Any decent, civilized person watching scenes in Mumbai of extremists shooting indiscriminate machine gun fire and launching grenades into civilian crowds -- deliberately slaughtering innocent people by the dozens -- is going to feel disgust, fury, and a desire for vengeance against the perpetrators, regardless of what precipitated it.  The temptation is great even among the most rational to empower authority to do anything and everything -- without limits -- to punish those responsible and prevent repeat occurrences.  That's a natural, even understandable, response.  And it's the response that the attackers hope to provoke.

It's that temptation to which most Americans -- and our leading media institutions -- succumbed in the wake of 9/11, and it's exactly the reaction that's most self-destructive.  As documented by this superb Washington Post Op-Ed today from Dileep Padgaonkar, former editor of the Times of India, the Indian Government -- in response to prior terrorist attacks -- has been employing tactics all-too-familiar to Americans:  "terrorism suspects have been picked up at random and denied legal rights"; "allegations of torture by police are routine"; "suspects have been held for years as their court cases have dragged on. Convictions have been few and far between"; Muslims and Hindus are subjected to vastly disparate treatment; and much of the most consequential actions take place in secrecy, shielded from public view, debate or accountability.

As Padgaonkar details, many of these measures, particularly in the wake of new terrorist attacks, are emotionally satisfying, yet they do little other than exacerbate the problem, spawn further extremism and resentment, and massively increase the likelihood of further and more reckless attacks -- thereby fueling this cycle endlessly -- all while degrading the very institutions and values that are ostensibly being defended.  The greater one's physical or emotional proximity to the attacks, the greater is the danger that one will seek excessively to empower and submit to government authority and cheer for destructive counter-measures which allow few, if any, limits.

What happened in the U.S. over the last eight years is about much, much more than what "the Bush administration" did.  It begins there, but responsibility in the post 9/11-era is much more diffuse and collective than that.  Shoveling it all off on the administration that is leaving, while exonerating our culpable media and political institutions that remain, isn't merely historically inaccurate and unfair, though it is that.  Allowing that revisionism also ensures that the critical lessons that ought to be learned will instead be easily and quickly forgotten when similar episodes occur here in the future.

[updated below - Update II (Thursday)]

Yesterday, The New York Times' Mark Mazzetti, in reporting on John Brennan's withdrawal from consideration for a top intelligence post, wrote:

The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.

I quoted that paragraph yesterday to show how the establishment media is acknowledging the role blogs played in this episode, prompting Billmon to materialize in the comment section and make this point:

Glenn should have noted the sly way that asshole Mazzetti slides from "the CIA's secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base" -- because, of course, only those wacko lefties worry about war crimes -- to the completely bogus assertion that said concerns have made it "difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone . . . who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since 9/11" (emphasis mine).

So, according to the New Pravda (sometimes known as the New York Times) to criticize crimes against humanity is to oppose the entire campaign against the people responsible for 9/11. Dick Cheney couldn't have put it better.

Now THAT'S some sleazy journalism we can believe in.

Digby noted the same passage and made a similar point:  that to object to someone like Brennan -- who advocated and defended the Bush administration's rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- is hardly the same as objecting to anyone who "played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda."  And Andrew Sullivan made a related point about an AP article by Pamela Hess which contains this wretched sentence:  "Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over Web logs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, which critics call torture."  As Sullivan notes:  "no sane person with any knowledge of the subject disputes the fact that waterboarding is and always has been torture. So why cannot the AP tell the truth?"

All of this underscores a crucial fact:  a major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters.  Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's true) -- the media immediately depicted these objective facts as subject to reasonable dispute.

Hence:  "war crimes" were transformed into "policy disputes" between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals.  "Torture" became "enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture."  And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking -- doing X when the law says:  "X is a felony" -- became acting "pursuant to robust theories of executive power" or "expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties" or, at worst, "in circumvention of legal frameworks."

* * * * * 

All of that is what has created the warped Beltway consensus that Bush officials who broke the law, committed war crimes and other felonies, should be absolutely immunized from the consequences of their crimes.  That's because when government officials commit "crimes," they're not actually crimes -- they're mere "policy disputes among people in good faith."  Only "incendiary" liberals believe that government officials who break the law should be subject to accusations as shrill and extreme as: "they committed crimes."

Behold the excuses which former Bush DOJ lawyer and current Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith offers up today in The Washington Post on behalf of his former colleagues, as he argues not only that Bush's torture regime shouldn't be criminally prosecuted, but also that no new investigations of any kind -- including by Congress or an Executive branch truth-finding Commission -- should be pursued:

Yet another round of investigations during the Obama administration, even by a bipartisan commission, would exacerbate this problem. It would also bring little benefit. The people in government who made mistakes or who acted in ways that seemed reasonable at the time but now seem inappropriate have been held publicly accountable by severe criticism, suffering enormous reputational and, in some instances, financial losses. Little will be achieved by further retribution.

Walk into any criminal courtroom in the country where a convicted defendant is pleading for light or no punishment and that's exactly what you'll hear:  "I've already been punished enough, Your Honor.  My reputation has been ruined, my health is suffering, I lost my job.  What more do you want to do to me?"

But -- when it comes to common criminals -- our political class rejects those pleas, turns a resolutely deaf ear to them.  For those people, we continue to erect ever-harsher criminal sanctions, mandatory minimum sentencing schemes, and an increasingly merciless criminal justice system.  As a result, we imprison more of our population than any other country on the planet.  Even people who commit petty, harmless offenses -- corner drug dealing with other adults or even mere drug possession  -- have the full weight of the criminal justice system smashing down upon them, thanks to our "tough-on-crime" political class.  They go to prison, are separated from their families, are put into cages, permanently labeled "felons."

Yet the same political establishment that has created and continues to fuel this incomparably merciless justice system has made themselves exempt from the rule of law.  When they flagrantly violate even the most consequential criminal prohibitions -- laws criminalizing torture, spying on American citizens, obstruction of justice -- it's only the shrill rabble (the "incendiary Democratic base") who would possibly believe that they should be held accountable and investigated, let alone prosecuted and imprisoned.  All of the upstanding, responsible, Serious people understand that these aren't real "crimes."   These are merely acts which "critics call illegal" -- or what Goldsmith calls "mistakes" or "act[ions] that seemed reasonable at the time but now seem inappropriate."

And besides, even if you want to get all technical about it and say that they "broke the law," everyone Serious knows that "criminal prosecutions" weren't created for high government officials.  As Goldsmith so movingly points out, it's already bad enough that Good and Important People like John Yoo, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney and friends have suffered what Goldsmith describes as "severe criticism" and even "enormous reputational losses."  Criticism and reputational damage!  In the name of God, what more do you want to do to these people?

As Goldsmith pleads, these are people who have been so severely punished already.  They are banished to toil in shameful, humiliating labor conditions -- as, say, tenured Professor at Berkeley Law School or Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States, with unimaginably grim futures involving millions of dollars in fees for giving speeches and writing memoirs and living in retirement off Halliburton stock.  What kind of monster would want to heap still more punishment on these noble, suffering souls, just because they committed some so-called "war crimes" and other felonies?  Haven't they suffered enough?  Shame on those who want to keep harassing them, wringing what Goldsmith calls "further retribution" by holding them accountable under the law. 

* * * * * 

Goldsmith's principal point is that we will all suffer if further investigations are pursued against these high government officials, because government lawyers will "become excessively cautious in giving advice and will substitute predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment."  Actually, the reason we have criminal laws and punishment for violations is precisely because we want to deter lawbreaking and incentivize people to obey, not flout, the law.  Government lawyers should be cautious, not reckless, in advising what can be done.  In a country that lives under what we once adorably called "the rule of law," the solution -- if we want government agents to be more aggressive in their "counter-terrorism" behavior -- is to change the laws to allow that more aggressive action, not to create, as Goldsmith and so many others favor, a system of justice where Executive branch officials are literally free to break our laws with impunity.

There are controversial policies that were pursued after 9/11 whose legality is debatable, and as is true for many borderline crimes, there is a reasonable argument to be made that those crimes need not be prosecuted (though they should be fully investigated and disclosed). But there are many other acts ordered at the highest levels of our Government which were clearly illegal, which unquestionably constitute war crimes and felonies. 

The fact that the Government and the establishment media has changed our language to obscure those facts doesn't make that any less so.  And there simply is no way to argue that the criminals who committed those crimes should be immunized from investigation and prosecution other than by affirming that we have -- and should have -- a two-tiered justice system where our highest government officials reside above, rather than subject to, the rule of law.

UPDATE:  3 related items:

(1)  I've written a piece for the ACLU on Obama's past positions concerning Guantanamo, executive power and the rule of law, and outline what the key issues and priorities should be for the Obama administration to restore America's standing and core political values.

(2) Over the last week, Spencer Ackerman had been offering some mild defenses of John Brennan, but did so without addressing what was, in my view, the strongest evidence against Brennan.  I requested that Spencer re-visit his defense in light of that evidence and, to his credit, he has done so quite thoughtfully -- changing his mind on many (but not all) of the relevant issues, while concluding that Brennan's past statements should disqualify him from serving as CIA Director.

(3) Law Professor Jonathan Turley was on The Rachel Maddow Show last night to discuss the need for criminal investigations into Bush's interrogation and detention programs and, as usual when Turley is involved, it is highly worth watching.

UPDATE II (Thurdsday):  In light of the holiday, I'll note four related commentaries on this topic that are well worth reading; these are all highly recommended:

(1)  Numerous emailers complained about a truly vapid and ill-informed discussion on NPR Wednesday morning -- between Tom Gjelten and Steve Inskeep -- regarding John Brennan's withdrawal and the objections to Brennan.  Over at NPR Check, Mytwords details how fact-free and misleading NPR's discussion was.  They devoted a whole segment to the controversy without having the slightest idea what they were talking about.  As a result, they obfuscated and distorted the critical issues raised by Brennan's advocacy of some of the most abusive Bush "War on Terror" programs, and -- as NPR Check documents -- depicted those who objected to Brennan as being shrill left-wing hysterics, ranting over nothing.

(2) Slate's Dahlia Lithwick makes a characteristically thoughtful case for why investigations and, if warranted, prosecutions in our standard judicial system -- rather than mere truth commissions -- are urgently needed.

(3) In The New York Times this morning, Roger Cohen examines the administration's reliance on Orwellian language to justify its patently illegal human rights abuses, and observes:  "When governments veer onto the dark side, language always goes murky. Direct speech makes dirty deeds too clear."   Cohen cites some genuinely ugly bureaucratic language used by Bush officials to distort what they're actually doing, but that same method has also been used, all too frequently, by the newspaper in which Cohen is writing.

(4) Digby dissects Jack Goldsmith's plea for immunity for his former Bush colleagues and notes -- correctly -- that Goldsmith's warning that we will all suffer from insufficiently aggressive intelligence actions if we hold Bush officials accountable for their lawbreaking is nothing more noble than the standard form of government "blackmail" that has "justified" the whole panoply of Bush abuses: "Allow us to do whatever we want or the country gets it."  Her whole post is highly worth reading.

(updated below)

Joe Klein, this week's Time Magazine, on George Bush's legacy:

Bush has that forlorn what-the-hell-happened? expression on his face, the one that has marked his presidency at difficult times. You never want to see the President of the United States looking like that.

So I've been searching for valedictory encomiums. . . . I'd add the bracing moment of Bush with the bullhorn in the ruins of the World Trade Center, but that was neutered in my memory by his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the "Mission Accomplished" sign. The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure.

Joe Klein, Face the Nation, May 4, 2003, with Bob Schieffer -- 3 days after Bush's Mission Accomplished speech:

BOB SCHIEFFER: How does [the Democratic presidential primary debate] play off against the pictures we saw this week of President Bush landing on the aircraft -- aircraft carrier and appearing before these screaming, adoring groups of military people?  As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time. And if you're a political consultant, you can just see campaign commercial written all over the pictures of George Bush.

JOE KLEIN: Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came to mind for me. And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are going to have to climb. You compare that image, which everybody across the world saw, with this debate last night where you have nine people on a stage and it doesn't air until 11:30 at night, up against Saturday Night Live, and you see what a major, major struggle the Democrats are going to have to try and beat a popular incumbent president.

I'm glad that many people, including some journalists, seem to have learned some lessons from the Bush era now that he's almost certainly the single most unpopular President in modern American history.  People who regret their mistakes and learn from them should be welcomed and encouraged.  But a vital aspect of what happened over the last eight years is the role the media -- our leading media stars -- played in glorifying and venerating George Bush, and that can't be re-written or forgotten. 

Truly learning from one's mistakes -- as opposed to wet-finger-in-the-air abandoment of  previously revered leaders when they are revealed as failures and lose their power -- requires, at the very least, an acknowledgment of one's own role in what happened.   There have been very few mea culpas from establishment media journalists, many -- most -- of whom, to this day, think they did nothing wrong ("It was all Judy Miller!").  As bad as this absence of remorse is, it is simply intolerable to watch those who cheered on many of the worst excesses try now to pretend that they were skeptical, adversarial critics all along.  Journalists with influential platforms have responsibilities, the primary one of which is to be accountable for what they say and do.

UPDATE:  Tristam Shandy notes some other relevant highlight reels from Joe Klein.

(updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

This is really exceptional news on multiple levels -- the best political news I've heard since the election:

Brennan out of running for top intel post

John Brennan, President-elect Barack Obama's top adviser on intelligence, has taken his name out of the running for any intelligence position in the new administration.

Brennan wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to Obama that he did not want to be a distraction.  His potential appointment has raised a firestorm in liberal blogs who associate him with the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies.

"The fact that I was not involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored," he wrote, in a letter obtained by The Associated Press. . .

Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over online blogs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects, including waterboarding, which critics call torture.

Brennan's self-defense here is quite disingenuous.  Whether he "was involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies" is not and never was the issue.  Rather, as I documented at length when I first wrote about Brennan, he was an ardent supporter of those policies, including "enhanced interrogation techniques" and rendition, both of which he said he was intimately familiar with as a result of his CIA position.  As virtually everyone who opposed his nomination made clear -- Andrew Sullivan, Digby, Cenk Uygur, Big Tent Democrat and others -- that is why he was so unacceptable.

I think Obama is entitled to a lot of leeway on appointments and is entitled not to be condemned -- or praised -- other than for things he actually does.  And while I have found some of his appointments questionable, Brennan was the only prospective appointment that, speaking only for myself, was completely unacceptable.  Advocacy of Bush's interrogation and rendition programs should exclude anyone from consideration for any important position, let alone CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence.  

Reports had repeatedly indicated that Brennan -- who served all year as Obama's top adviser for intelligence matters -- was the leading candidate for either of those positions, especially CIA Director.  It's unclear if it was Obama or Brennan who was the catalyst for this decision, but either way, it's to be celebrated.  And as Big Tent Democrat wrote today:  "In case people were wondering, THIS is why you do not wait to express your 'concern' about issues and personnel."

This is an important victory.  It's absolutely vital that these bright lines be re-established.  Brennan's being denied a top intelligence positions due to his past advocacy of these abuses is a big step towards achieving that, particularly since it was due to pressure from those who insist that these political values not be de-prioritized or ignored.

UPDATE:  Andrew Sullivan has Brennan's withdrawal letter here, and Brennan's self-defense relies on pure strawmen.  Contrary to his protestations, it was noted from the start that Brennan opposed waterboarding (as I wrote:  "In fairness, Brennan, over the last couple of years, as he's become more attached to Obama's campaign, has several times said that waterboarding specifically is wrong").  Despite that, his lengthy, emphatic statements made clear that he defended "enhanced interrogation tactics" and rendition -- grounds enough for making him unacceptable for any top intelligence post -- to say nothing of his strident advocacy for warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty.   

In light of his clear record and statements, a high-level appointment for Brennan would have signaled ambivalence and ambiguity in exactly the areas where unequivocal clarity is most urgently needed.

UPDATE II:  I was invited to discuss Brennan's withdrawal on tonight's Rachel Maddow Show, but logistics made that impossible.  Instead, Jane Hamsher -- who I'm certain will do her typically excellent job -- will be on to talk about it.  Those interested should be certain to watch Rachel's show tonight.

UPDATE III:  It's certainly happened before that blogs have played a leading role in events like this -- the defeat of Bush's Social Security plan, the temporary defeat by the House of FISA and telecom immunity, the publicizing of the DOJ prosecutors scandal -- but it's very rare for the central role of blogs in such episodes to be so explicitly acknowledged by everyone, including the principal actors and the establishment media:

And from The New York Times' Mark Mazzetti:  

The letter came as a surprise to many intelligence experts and even some lawmakers, and some questioned whether Mr. Brennan had been forced to withdraw his name by senior members of Mr. Obama’s transition team who were concerned about Mr. Brennan’s association with Bush administration policies.

The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.

It's a good thing that "the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue" and that anyone associated with it -- let alone someone who defended it -- will have a difficult time being appointed to a position of high authority.  And, as a general proposition, it's always positive when those in the Washington establishment are influenced by citizens who aren't.

UPDATE IV:  For those who missed it, here is Jane Hamsher with Rachel Maddow last night, discussing Brennan's withdrawal, as well as the news that Robert Gates will remain as Defense Secretary for at least a year:

(updated below)

From most precincts, there is lavish praise being heaped on Obama's new economic team, particularly soon-to-be Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Counsel chief Larry Summers, who are being hailed as exactly the type of serious, deeply intelligent, pragmatic experts needed in this financial crisis.  Oddly, that praise is pouring forth despite what many economic experts say is the role -- perhaps critical roles -- that each of them played in enabling this crisis in the first place.

Writing in The Guardian today, economist Dean Baker argues that "the roots of the current crisis can be attributed to the course that Geithner and his colleagues followed in designing that bail-out"; that particularly with regard to "the suspension of regulatory oversight of the financial industry" -- which Baker identifies as a key cause of the crisis -- "Geithner was in the middle of all this, even if not a lead actor"; and that when Geithner testified in the Senate about the Bear Stearns collapse earlier this year, he "gave the classic 'who could have known' answer."  Concluded Baker:  "we really do need a Treasury secretary who can give answers, not just excuses."

The New York Times Editorial Page today says that both Geithner and Summers "have played central roles in policies that helped provoke today’s financial crisis" and that Geithner "also has helped shape the Bush administration’s erratic and often inscrutable responses to the current financial meltdown, up to and including this past weekend’s multibillion-dollar bailout of Citigroup."  And The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein today details the central role played by Robert Rubin both in the deregulation decisions that enabled this crisis and the downfall of Citigroup, and observes that "the ultimate irony is that just as Rubin & Co. were being bailed out at Citi by the Bush administration, President-elect Obama was announcing a new economic team drawn almost entirely from Rubin's acolytes."

I don't have the knowledge or expertise necessary to resolve these conflicting pictures or to form a meaningful opinion about these selections (even Baker, in the midst of his sharp criticisms, allows that the choices Obama made might be the best alternatives, as flawed as Baker believes them to be, and Nouriel Roubini praises the choices as "excellent").  But it is nonetheless noteworthy -- in general -- how much accountability-free praise, and how little critical scrutiny, is heaped on establishment figures as they ascend to power.

Consider this truly reverent -- and deeply misleading -- profile of Dick Cheney that appeared on the front page of The New York Times in July, 2000, once George Bush selected Cheney as his running mate.  This homage, written by Eric Schmitt, was cited yesterday by sysprog to illustrate how often we are told that past actions and ideology of new political leaders don't matter, that what matters is that they are serious, pragmatic establishment experts who can be trusted to do the right thing. I'm including a lengthy excerpt to convey its rancid flavor:

THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE RUNNING MATE; The Armchair General: Richard Bruce Cheney

The night allied warplanes began bombing Iraq in 1991, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney quietly flipped on CNN in his third-floor Pentagon office, ordered Chinese take-out and sat back to watch the Persian Gulf war unfold.

''Everyone was concerned about possible losses, but he was tremendously calm,'' a former top Cheney aide said. ''I asked him why he wasn't more nervous, and he basically said that he was confident that everything was done that needed to be done. Once the airplanes were in the air, we just had to wait.''

In choosing Mr. Cheney as his running mate, Gov. George W. Bush has turned to an unflappable Washington insider whose easygoing exterior masks a steely confidence, a man who, once he makes a tough decision, never looks back.

''He sort of chews on issues, and chews on them until he makes his mind up,'' said former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, ''then he goes on and he doesn't second-guess himself. He has very good judgment.''

Mr. Cheney, 59, who served 10 years in the House of Representatives and four as President George Bush's defense secretary, brings stature, decisiveness and decades of government experience to a campaign sometimes short on all three.

But the real secret to his success may be an ability to wrap a staunchly conservative ideology in a mantle of moderation and civility to get people to trust him and get things done.

It is not just Republicans who feel at ease with Mr. Cheney, who while in the House opposed abortion and gun control and supported aid to anti-Marxist rebels in Nicaragua and President Ronald Reagan's ''Star Wars'' anti-missile shield. Mr. Cheney has a knack for working with political rivals, colleagues say.

Leon E. Panetta, a former Democratic congressman and White House chief of staff, recalled that Mr. Cheney was one Republican with whom he could confide during sensitive Capitol Hill budget negotiations.

''There was never any question he had conservative views, but he was always someone you could deal with and talk to, and never one to demagogue the issues,'' Mr. Panetta said. ''I trusted that what I said would not be used against me in negotiations" . . . . 

And he abhors the scorched-earth politics that came to characterize House Republicans under Speaker Newt Gingrich.

''Dick does not bring political sex appeal to the ticket,'' said Bill Frenzel, a longtime friend and a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. ''What he brings is the competence and confidence that if anything happens to the president, the country will have a competent vice president to step in.''

It goes on and on like that, one paragraph after the next filled to the brim with respectful praise -- even hailing his "wry sense of humor" and "popular touch" -- with not a word of criticism or skepticism. 

No mention was made -- in this or virtually any other pre-election profile of Cheney -- of what The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage in 2006 described as Cheney's "revolutionary claims" about unlimited executive power, expressed in 1987 when Cheney refused to sign onto a bipartisan Congressional report condemning the Reagan administration for its "disdain for the law" as part of the Iran-contra scandal.  Foretelling what happened over the last eight years, Cheney back then argued that President Reagan had the power to ignore Congressional laws proscribing aid to Nicaraguan rebels.  Nor was it mentioned in the lengthy NYT profile that, as Savage put it, "Cheney bypassed acts of Congress as defense secretary in the first Bush administration." 

Indeed, it would be very difficult to find any mention of Cheney's ideological radicalism in the parade of establishment praise that poured forth before the election.  None of that mattered; he was a serious, sober establishment figure with great competence and expertise, and that was more important than ideology or past acts.

None of this, obviously, is to equate or even compare any of Obama's economic appointees with Dick Cheney.  But it does demonstrate that deep skepticism is warranted when we're told that The Serious Adults have entered the room and are in charge now.  And particular wariness is called for when we're told that the very people who have played such important roles in the broken system, who have contributed to rather than worked against the problems, are now the ones who are going to save us all from those problems.  

The establishment loves its own.  It's an accountability-free zone where members in good standing are deemed Serious and Trustworthy no matter what they do.  Media stars in particular swoon when in the presence of new power (see this amusing video discussion of that dynamic by The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur this week).   For those general reasons -- and because of the magnitude of what is at stake specifically in this financial crisis -- we need far more skepticism and scrutiny of these individuals than we need to be told how trustworthy and brilliant they are.

As but one example, here is what Robert Reich just wrote about the Citibank bailout, which Robert Rubin and his protégé Tim Geithner helped to engineer:

If you had any doubt at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street; the utter lack of transparency behind the biggest government giveaway in history to financial executives, and their shareholders, directors, and creditors; and the intimate connections the lie between Administrations -- both Republican and Democratic -- and the heavyweights on Wall Street, your doubts should be laid to rest. Today it was decided the government will guarantee more than $300 billion of troubled mortgages and other assets of Citigroup under a federal plan to stabilize the lender after its stock fell 60 percent last week. . . .

The senior executives of Citi, including those who have served at the highest levels in the US government, have done their jobs exceedingly well. The American public, including the media, have not the slightest clue what just happened.

Trillions of dollars flying around.  Deals being cut in the dark, with virtually no oversight, scrutiny or even public awareness until after the fact.  All sorts of overlapping relationships and influence-peddling at the heart of these transactions.  And people like Rubin, Geithner, and Summers have all long been a part of that system, and in many cases, important components of the key precipitating events. That is some rather substantial ground for concern.

It's certainly possible that they will do a superb job in managing the crisis.  I'm definitely not suggesting otherwise, and I assign substantial credibility to the assessments of trustworthy experts like Roubini and Baker.  But between too much trust and reverence on the one hand, and too much skepticism on the other, the last eight years should have taught -- but don't seem to have -- that the former is far more dangerous than the latter.

UPDATE:  About the Newsweek interview with Nouriel Roubini linked above -- in which Roubini praises both Gaithner and Summers -- Roubini, on his personal blog today, wrote:

I told the Newsweek reporter – as full disclosure – that I had worked for Tim Geithner and Larry Summers when they were both at Treasury: I was head of a Treasury Office and the Senior Advisor to Tim Geithner in 1999-2000 who was at that time the Under Secretary for International Affairs while Larry Summers was Treasury Secretary. So some may that [sic] my positive views of the two may be biased/tinted by my working for them; on the other hand I know first hand about them and I have the greatest respect for their skills, intelligence, expertise, commitment to sound public policy and policy wisdom even if I may not always agree with all of their views.

Make of that what you will.  Personal relationships between professionals of that sort do tend to increase the likelihood of a positive assessment (though it can also have the opposite impact).  It's something that Newsweek should have included in the interview.  Still, I personally find Roubini to be one of the most credible sources on all of these economic matters, so even with that caveat, his assessment, at least for me, carries substantial (though not decisive) weight.