Afghan Official Accused of Pecking With Impunity

A Kabul newspaper asks whether a condemned student's actions were worse than this. (By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)
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There will be "winners and losers" from the pending "cap and trade" proposals, the firm tells us, and "legislators and regulators, not the invisible hand of the market," will decide.

Remember, the newsletter says, "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

Yikes!

Maybe Because of the Muckraking?

You don't call, you don't write . . .

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey wanders up tomorrow to his favorite venue, the House Judiciary Committee, to chat. To speed things along, Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) sent him a note Friday reminding him to get his testimony to the committee "no later than the close of business" today and to respond to seven different letters going back to May, including four last month.

Conyers said the committee is still concerned about politicization of the Justice Department, waterboarding and torture, selective prosecution, the investigation into the destruction of the CIA tapes, and civil rights.

But he also wants to know why the Web site TPMMuckraker, "which played an important role in providing information" about the "U.S. attorney scandal," says it has "been removed from the department's press release e-mail distribution list."

Conyers said he'd like to know "who made this decision and why."

Hey! It's not everyone who gets removed from the list. Congrats.

No Treaty, No Law, No Problem

Speaking of torture, the committee will no doubt keep pounding on Mukasey about whether waterboarding is torture. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell recently mused to the New Yorker that "whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture."

McConnell said the legal test for torture should be "pretty simple: Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?"

Now, waterboarding is one thing, but it could be worse. We recall this great exchange two years ago between Notre Dame law professor Douglass Cassel and Berkeley law professor John Yoo, a former Justice Department official and author of the famous torture memo.