Torture Showdown Coming?

Here's a chronology of the litigation.

Here's the latest government filing. The White House was told to answer several questions, among them: "To resolve any ambiguities once and for all, EOP [the Executive Office of the President] is ordered to inform the Court on or before May 5, 2008, whether all back-up tapes created between March 2003 and October 2003 have been preserved -- and, to the extent that they have not, to state the specific dates within that time period for which no back-up tapes exist."

The answer: "OA [the White House Office of Administration] is preserving 438 disaster recovery back-up tapes that were written to between March 1, 2003 and September 30, 2003. Of those 438 tapes, the earliest date on which data was written on any of the 438 tapes is May 23, 2003. The latest date that data was written is September 29, 2003. In total, OA is presently preserving approximately 60,000 disaster recovery back-up tapes, and that number is growing. . . . Moreover, by the very nature of the disaster recovery backup tapes used by OA during this relevant time period, email information predating even March 2003 should be contained on the existing library of approximately 60,000 disaster recovery back-up tapes. That is because disaster recovery back-up tapes capture the 'files saved on the server, such as, for example, email databases and/or email environment information.' . . . The purpose of the disaster recovery back-up tapes, therefore, is to create a snapshot that 'captures all email information present on the EOP Network in the journals, the .pst archives, and the customer mailboxes at the time the back-up is created.' . . . A full set of disaster recovery backup tapes created in October 2003, for instance, should contain email information present on the EOP network, including Exchange servers, at the time of the backup, whatever their creation date. Such a backup should also include email messages residing in a user's inbox, sent folder, trash box, folders saved in the mailbox, as well as email information in the journals and .pst files stores. Accordingly, the disaster recovery backup system in use by EOP is not designed to capture just that email information created during the 24 hours preceding a backup, or since the last full set of backup tapes were created, but should capture emails sent or received in March 2003, for example, still residing on the EOP network in October 2003."

To which the obvious response is: Baloney.

For background, see my Feb. 27 column, Congress to Bush: You've Lost Mail.

Special Counsel Watch

Carrie Johnson and Christopher Lee write in The Washington Post: "Nearly two dozen federal agents yesterday raided the Washington headquarters of the agency that protects government whistle-blowers, as part of an intensifying criminal investigation of its leader, who is fighting allegations of improper political bias and obstruction of justice. . . .

"Office of Special Counsel chief Scott J. Bloch . . . has long been a target of criticism, some of it by his agency's career officials, but the FBI's abrupt seizure of computers and records marked a substantial escalation of the executive branch's probe of his conduct. Retired FBI agents and former prosecutors called the raid an unusual, if not unprecedented, intrusion on the work of a federal agency."

As Alice Crites and Lucy Shackelford explain in The Washington Post, one of Bloch's most controversial actions was his announcement in early 2007 of "a probe of White House aide Karl Rove, after a scandal over the firings of U.S. attorneys and a series of White House briefings at which political appointees were told which Republicans were in tight election races."

But there's much more to Bloch than that.

Philip Shenon writes in the New York Times that the counsel's office "has been in turmoil during much of the four-year tenure of Mr. Bloch, who has repeatedly been accused of using it to promote conservative social causes."

Yesterday's raid "followed accusations that Mr. Bloch had destroyed evidence on government computers that might demonstrate wrongdoing."

Richard B. Schmitt and Tom Hamburger write in the Los Angeles Times: "'The Bush administration has been unable to make up its mind whether to ignore him or to act against him,' said Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blower advocacy group. 'Mr. Bloch is finally being held accountable for the same cover-ups that he is supposed to be policing. It is a very positive step.'"