After the Osama bin Laden killing, Michael Mukasey rather shamelessly took the lead in claiming torture had some role in finding OBL. Unlike most of the other torture apologists, Mukasey was not complicit with the torture itself, but merely with the cover-up.

The most interesting aspect of Michael Mukasey’s retort to John McCain’s op-ed calling him a liar is not the content–that’s the same old trite sophism–but rather the publication details of it.

John McCain has, on balance, a good op-ed in the Washigton Post refuting Michael Mukasey’s embrace of torture. McCain’s larger point is that our approach to the Arab Spring will have a key role in our ability to defeat terrorists, which is a point not being made vociferously enough.

Things were going along pretty well for the Bush Administration Apologists Alumni Association. Sure, they were out of their old offices, but things were good. Obama adopted their wars as his own, the economy has sputtered along long enough to have become (in the public’s mind) at least as much Obama’s fault as theirs (thus the cries of “deficits! deficits! deficits!” from those who launched us into two wars), and most of the BAAAA have landed in cushy lucrative new digs.

Then Obama had to ruin it by getting bin Laden. Suddenly, all the old discussions are back — at least as far as torture goes — and this has at least some of them very worried, like Michael Mukasey.

He should worry. A lot.

The New York Times liberated the specific answer to a question that Russ Feingold asked in March 2009, but which the Department of Justice didn’t respond to until November 2010, when Feingold was a lame duck Senator. At issue were new investigative guidelines Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued in late 2008, on his way out the door, which allowed the FBI to investigate Americans for First Amendment reasons so long as that First Amendment reason was not the only reason they were being investigated.

Welcome to the next decade, when we finally get the report telling us what we knew back in 2007 when this investigation started, that Rove politicized the government.

It’s really time for either some consistency in the way the government pursues its war on terror violent extremism, or an admission that the war on terror has disintegrated into a war on those who oppose U.S. empire. The government is still investigating a bunch of peace activists for material support. And yet four prominent Republicans can offer the same kind of material support as the peace activists — but this time in service of war or U.S. hegemony or oil — with no similar consequences?

A bunch of former DOJ bigwigs just wrote a seemingly pointless letter to Pat Leahy to assure him that David Margolis does not have a partisan–and they mean Left-Right partisan–bias. (h/t Main Justice)

As I reported on Monday, DOJ lost not only John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s emails from the period when they were writing the Bybee Memos. It also lost at least 10 documents on torture, a number of them that went into the development of the torture memos.

Former USAG Mukasey pens a Terror-Terror-Terror-BE-VERY-AFRAID argument for abandoning our own laws and Constitution. But we should follow our own laws and our own Constitution because it is the right thing to do, not because we profit by it.