No wonder Obama has no problem pushing our Egyptian torturer, Omar Suleiman, to lead Egypt. It’s completely consistent with our own practice of promoting our own torturers.

Making these documents available is largely self-serving, but there is much to known about some previous unknowns.

Pretty crazy, isn’t it, imagining what it would be like to live in a country with a functioning rule of law … like Colombia?

Now Brennan’s role in negotiating with Stirling on the discrimination claims already provides one reason why Brennan might have a personal interest in seeing DOJ renew its pursuit of Stirling.

But there’s another: to go after Risen personally.

After all, whatever role Brennan had in Stirling’s discrimination suit, there’s no reason to believe it put Brennan at legal risk.

But Risen’s other big scoop in State of War did.

As I have shown, for at least a year, John Brennan was in charge of the process that picked who Dick Cheney would wiretap in his illegal domestic surveillance program.

The more likely possibility, given what Brennan, Napolitano, and Clapper have said is that the US–the entire government–was left out of the loop on this investigation. That’s certainly Britain’s prerogative. You never know when some Dick Cheney figure is going to sabotage a British investigation on them, after all.

Here I was, set to write a long post about the new Woodward book excerpts, when Gulliver distills my intended point in a tweet:

Does not compute: if we could “absorb” another 9/11, why are we wasting $70B/yr on war that won’t prevent it anyway?

Chuck Norris PROVES that Obama is trying to shoot white Christians who disapprove of the stimulus bill.

Would John Brennan be Obama’s Homeland Security Advisor right now if Americans knew the full extent of his role in targeting Americans for illegal wiretapping?

As Jason notes, David Axelrod has already taped a CSPAN response to Jane Mayer’s piece on Rahm’s spat about distractions like “the law” and “human rights” with Eric Holder and Greg Craig. In it, Axe appears to try to distance the White House from the decisions that have been attacked in the last few weeks, particularly the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York.

Can you say “conflict of interest”? Good. I knew you could.