Jane Harman will announce tomorrow that she will leave Congress to head up the Woodrow Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington formerly chaired by former Congressman Lee Hamilton. In a note to supporters, Harman says that she would “remain in Congress for some weeks,” but would have to resign her seat before long, triggering a special election.

This will call for some leadership. So far in the President’s two years, despite campaigning on renewing the assault weapons ban and closing the gun show loophole, the only gun legislation he’s signed expanded concealed carry rights to national parks.

Bush has admitted to approving torture in 2003. But that likely obfuscates his earlier approval for torture at a time when he had no legal cover for doing so.

In other news, the statute of limitations on the torture tape destruction expires in just three or four days. Yet we’ve got silence coming from John Durham.

It’s nice to see the New York Times catch up with the news we were discussing almost two weeks ago, the U.S. military’s plan to pump $1.2 billion dollars more of weapons, fighters and drones into Yemen, whether Yemen wants it or not.

Harman’s husband’s role in outsourcing intelligence was a conflict of interest when Jane Harman chaired the House Intelligence Committee (and she still chairs the Intelligence Subcommittee at the Committee on Homeland Security). But seeing as how we’ve got DiFi, another spouse of a big MIC contractor, currently running the Senate Intelligence Committee, I guess we should just write that off as par for the course, huh?

There is a great deal of evidence that Jose Rodriguez knew as early as September 6, 2002 that he needed to destroy evidence of the torturers exceeding the guidelines set in DC. According to anyone’s definition, that means Rodriguez knew years before he had the tapes destroyed he was destroying evidence of torture, even by Jay Bybee’s and possibly John Yoo’s measure.

Yet the AP — in their “most complete published account” — doesn’t even mention that torture?

Yesterday, I posted on a Harvard study showing that the press, after an established tradition of referring to waterboarding as torture, stopped doing so once it became clear the US engaged in the practice. Our press, in other words, refused to tell what they had previously presented as “the truth” (that is, that waterboarding was unquestionably torture) when it became politically contentious to do so.

As I mentioned in this post, I’ve been weeding through the documents released under FOIA to Judicial Watch last week. I think they suggest there’s a much closer relationship between the CIA misrepresentations on Congressional Briefings and the destruction of the torture tapes than we’ve known before.

Jane Harman is an eight-term member of Congress. Though she has faced primary challenges in the past, she’s fairly entrenched in the district. This year, against progressive anti-war activist Marcy Winograd, she has spent twice as much as her opponent (about 1/3 of her money has come from PACs) and has the name ID and backing from the local establishment that should signal a cruise to victory?

So why is she running negative ads and sending out negative mailers throughout the district?

California’s budget crisis is actually much less than they’re spending on the war in Afghanistan. $26 billion for the budget vs $38 billion for war. And what do they get for it? It’s not better to live in California thanks to the war. It’s actually getting much, much worse.