Rejecting the Torture Legacy

"But Obama, whose first foreign trip as a US senator was to assess initiatives to lock down nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, believes the programs lack coordination, are underfunded, and need a top official supervising them, according to three advisers with knowledge of the transition team's deliberations."

Justice Watch

Carrie Johnson writes in The Washington Post: "A prosecutor who is investigating the dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys has been meeting with defense lawyers, dispatching subpoenas and seeking information about the events, according to legal sources familiar with the case.

"Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey appointed prosecutor Nora R. Dannehy two months ago, after the department's Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility reported that they had hit a roadblock in their lengthy probe into whether political interference prompted the dismissals. Internal investigators said they had been stymied by the refusal of key witnesses, including former presidential adviser Karl Rove and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, to cooperate. . . .

"The requests for documents could provoke another legal skirmish in a fight over the scope of executive power wielded by the Bush administration. In past cases, White House lawyers have asserted executive privilege in refusing to make available witnesses and information to Congress and interest groups."

So does this mean Dannehy has issued a subpoena for White House documents? Wouldn't that be something. As I noted in my September 29 column, one key bit of evidence would be the report of an internal White House investigation by associate White House counsel Michael Scudder, who interviewed Justice and White House personnel in early 2007. That report was provided to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and to then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales early last year -- but was nevertheless denied to the DOJ's internal investigators.

Accountability Watch (Treasury Edition)

Amit R. Paley writes in The Washington Post: "The Bush administration has failed to adequately oversee its $700 billion bailout program and must move rapidly to guarantee that banks are complying with the plan's limits on conflicts of interest and lavish executive compensation, congressional investigators said yesterday."

Legacy Tour Watch

Deb Riechmann writes for the Associated Press: "President George W. Bush, trying to emphasize the softer side of his policy record before leaving office, on Tuesday thanked volunteers who have served as mentors to children of prisoners.

"'These youngsters have ambitions and goals,' Bush said after a private discussion with a few children and their mentors in North Carolina. . . .

"Making a difference, Bush said, 'doesn't take much. All it takes is time. It takes a little bit of extra love.'

"The White House used the stop to emphasize Bush's efforts to support community groups as partners in solving problems. . . .

"Back in Washington, the president spent the evening at a reception honoring workers and hundreds of volunteers from the Office of Presidential Advance. The 'advance' workers handle the logistics for presidential events around the country and abroad, a task that involves preparation long before the president shows up and then coordination with media, security and other agencies on site to make sure Bush's appearances go smoothly."

Karl Rove Watch

Jon Ward writes in the Washington Times about Karl Rove's appearance at a debate in New York last night, arguing against the proposition "that his former boss is not the worst president of the past 50 years. . . .

"At the first mention of Mr. Rove's name, a member of the audience hissed at him, and more hisses followed as the bespectacled political strategist took the podium.

"But the setting was not entirely hostile to Mr. Rove and his fellow conservative, New York Times and Weekly Standard columnist William Kristol.

"New York financier Robert Rosenkranz, whose conservative-leaning foundation organized the event, opened the debate with a statement that President Carter was in fact 'a truly awful president' and credited Mr. Bush with preventing a second terrorist attack on U.S. soil after the Sept. 11 attacks."

Nevertheless, in a vote taken at the beginning of the debate, 65 percent of the audience agreed that Bush was the worst president of the past 50 years. At the end, that number had gone up to 68 percent.

Sam Stein writes for Huffingtonpost.com: "In what was a remarkable admission that contradicted - to a large extent - the past statements from his onetime boss, former Bush strategist Karl Rove said on Tuesday evening that had the President known Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the United States would not have gone to war.

"'In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses,' but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. 'Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s.'"

This is, indeed, emphatically not the position of his former boss. Although Bush this week said he regretted the intelligence failure in Iraq (see yesterday's column), he has repeatedly said he would have invaded Iraq even had he known the country possessed no weapons of mass destruction. And just last week he told troops at Fort Campbell, Kentucky: "Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision then -- and it is the right decision today."

Inspectors, Redux

Several readers e-mailed me yesterday to complain that I had allowed a key Bush assertion get by without rebuttal. In justifying the invasion of Iraq, Bush told ABC's Charlie Gibson that "Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld."

And indeed, this is a complete falsehood.

As Joe Conason wrote for Salon back in March 2006: "President Bush persists in blatantly falsifying the war's origins -- perhaps because, even now, he still gets away with it."

The first time Bush tried to rewrite history this way came in a July 2003 photo op. The following day, (in a story no longer online) Dana Priest and Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post: "The president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective."

But ever since then, as Conason noted, the "lazy and intimidated press corps" has let Bush get away with a bald-faced lie.

For the record: U.N. weapons inspectors worked in Iraq from November 27, 2002 until being pulled out for their own safety on March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion began. During that time, they conducted hundreds of inspections and found no signs that Iraq possessed chemical or biological weapons or had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

In fact, as Dafna Linzer wrote in The Washington Post in April 2005: "By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested -- and disproved -- by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president. . . .

"The work of the inspectors -- who had extraordinary access during their three months in Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003 -- was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and the intelligence community in the run-up to the war."

Bush as Hoover

Harold Meyerson writes in his Washington Post opinion column: "As he prepares to move back to Texas, our 43rd president is the beneficiary of Bush fatigue. The nation has long since repudiated him. Americans are looking ahead to the promise of Barack Obama.

"And it's lucky for George W. Bush that they are, because his handling of our plunging economy is Hooverian in both its substance and inadequacy. . . .

"So where's the outrage? Why aren't demonstrators besieging the White House? Where are the 'Welcome to Bushville' signs in those neighborhoods where abandoned homes outnumber the occupied ones?

"The answer, I suspect, is that you can only irreversibly give up on a president once."

Phasers on Stun

Debra J. Saunders writes in her San Francisco Chronicle opinion column: "I feel as if the country is passing the torch from the brash, rule-breaking Capt. James T. Kirk, whose Starship Enterprise boldly went where no man had gone before in the original sci-fi series, to the more cerebral governance of Capt. Jean Luc Picard."

Ornament Watch

Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger write in The Washington Post: "That controversial ornament calling for President Bush's impeachment? Won't hang in the White House after all.

"'Oh, dear,' said Seattle-based artist Deborah Lawrence, who created the red and white ornament that salutes Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) and his support for a resolution to impeach the president. 'This doesn't really surprise me. But it's disappointing that I won't get to see it on the tree.' . . .

"Sally McDonough, a spokeswoman for the first lady, confirmed the ornament would not be displayed. 'It's inappropriate and it's not being hung,' she said. She said that when asked about the issue yesterday, the White House tree decorations were not complete. 'We reviewed the ornament along with all the [other] ornaments, and Mrs. Bush deemed it inappropriate for the holiday tree.'"

Jeremy Olshan writes for Salon: "Lawrence was actually flummoxed when she first got the commission this summer. 'I had an immediate, convulsive reaction to the request,' she says. 'Why would I want to put a smiley face of tacit approval on an administration famous for lies, greed, warmongering and religious fundamentalism?'"

Live Online

I'm Live Online today at 1 p.m. ET. Come join the conversation!

Late Night Humor

Jay Leno, via U.S. News: "Well, President Bush opening up a little bit. He gave an interview to ABC News. Bush said he wished the intelligence on Iraq had been different. Hey, how many wish the intelligence in the White House had been different?"

Cartoon Watch

Mike Luckovich on Bush's regrets, Ed Stein on Bush's apology, David Horsey on tying up loose ends, Clay Bennett on helping Bush pack, Bruce Plante on a variety of viewpoints, and Tom Tomorrow on what might have been.