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.

They waterboarded KSM 183 times in a month, and he either never got asked about couriers guarding OBL, or he avoided answering the question honestly. Had KSM revealed that detail, Bush might have gotten OBL 8 years ago.

And just as importantly, the whole time KSM was shielding Abu Ahmed’s true identity while being waterboarded, KSM was also lying to the CIA about where OBL was.

Joan Rivers is one of the smartest, funniest comics imaginable, and her new “reality” show Joan Knows Best has some really bright, touching moments, like her scattering her friends ashes throughout Beverly Hills and ending up doing a routine in a West Hollywood bar, dancing with the guys. Or visiting her daughter’s childhood home.

But Episode 7, “Home Alone” (which featured the latter segment) also had a bit which I am still trying to parse.

It seems to me we’re never going to see that report until after the eight-year statute of limitations on torture expire for everything described in the report that clearly exceeded John Yoo’s expansive interpretation of what constitutes torture.

As bmaz has pointed out in language blunt enough that one presumes even the willfully obtuse Holder Justice Department might understand it, many of us are bearing witness to investigator John H. Durham intentionally allowing the statute of limitations to expire on Jose Rodriguez’s crime of destroying videotaped evidence of torture. Marcy Wheeler’s torture timeline links to the documentation that the tape destruction occurred on November 8, 2005. The five year statute of limitations on that charge will expire in just a few days. Further, my understanding of the timeline is that the last known waterboardings took place in March, 2003. Some aspects of the torture statutes carry an eight year statute of limitations, so that deadline for waterboarding prosecutions will expire in just a few months. However, with over a hundred deaths of prisoners during US interrogations, there are a number of potential murder charges that are not subject to a statute of limitations.

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.

Our crack 9th Circuit Judge Jay Bybee played word games so as to consider bottles of water left for migrants traversing the Arizona desert “litter” even if they weren’t “garbage.”

Mind you, when the issue was whether waterboarding someone constituted prolonged mental harm, Bybee was not really a stickler for precise meanings.

We knew that the briefing CIA gave Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi on Abu Zubaydah’s torture on September 4, 2002 was misleading in that CIA did not tell the House Intelligence leadership that it had already tortured Abu Zubaydah. CIA told Goss and Pelosi about waterboarding, but spoke of it as a technique that might hypothetically be used in the future, not something that had been used 83 times on one detainee the prior month. Today we learn that it was Jose Rodriguez who provided this misleading briefing.

The really telling bit about this news is that it puts the decision to waterboard KSM right there next to the decision to launch a war of choice rather than focus on beating the terrorists who attacked us. That is, it puts Bush’s decision to embrace torture right there next to what many consider one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in history.

[Welcome Malcolm Nance, and Host Matt Duss] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread.  - bev] An End to Al-Qaeda: Destroying Bin Laden’s Jihad and Restoring America’s Honor Few Americans can claim the knowledge of radical terrorist ideologies that Malcolm Nance can. [...]