Scritti Politti: May 7, 2009

Earlier this week, Rachel Maddow discussed the ongoing saga of the torture memos, and how the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility recommended "'disbarment, but not prosecution' for Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury, and John Yoo, as punishment for erecting the legal mechanisms that paved the way for the erection of the Bush administration's torture regime." Did you know that the OPR came to this conclusion after input from Bybee, Bradbury and Yoo, themselves? They were, and, as Daphne Eviatar reported, they were allowed to make comments, and the OPR was allowed to make revisions based upon their comments. And all of this is apparently SOP:

On Tuesday, Durbin and Whitehouse received assurances from the department that although the subjects of the report -- including former OLC head Steven Bradbury, who signed several of the recently released OLC memos authorizing waterboarding and other "extreme" techniques -- were allowed to review and comment on the draft, "this opportunity for review and comment was fair and reasonably correlates with the process usually applicable to OPR investigations relating to former employees. . . .Any revisions to the report thereafter will be based upon OPR's best judgments about the accuracy and fairness of the document." The comments from the report's subjects were due on Monday.

Eviatar's Washington Independent colleague, Spencer Ackerman, however, wonders why this same procedure doesn't seem to apply to everyone:

Tell it to Jesselyn Radack. Radack was an early casualty of the Bush Justice Department. In 2001, as a department lawyer in the Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, she advised the FBI that it couldn't interrogate John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban captured in Afghanistan, without affording him counsel. It happened anyway. Here's what happened next, according to Jane Mayer in the March 10, 2003 New Yorker:

[Radack] received a "blistering" performance review. It never mentioned her advice in the Lindh matter, but it severely questioned her legal judgment. She was advised to get a new job; otherwise, the performance review would be placed in her permanent file. Radack, who had received a merit bonus the year before, quickly found a job with a private law firm.

Worse, Radack learned that the department made an incomplete filing to the judge in the Lindh case, who had requested the department's full record of internal discussions on the interrogations. Radack's attempts to correct the record by providing the judge with the complete discussion ended up getting printed in Newsweek. Then Radack learned, as she recounted this morning in a Daily Kos diary, that OPR had opened a case file on her.

Far from allowing her a chance to contribute to OPR's investigation, the office didn't even solicit her perspective before sending a letter to the Maryland Bar informing it of "possible professional misconduct" on Radack's behalf.

More here.

Thought Exercise: What would happen, conversationally, if Wolf Blitzer and Chris Matthews were locked in a room together? And if you wrote down what they said to each other, in script form, how soon before the estate of Samuel Beckett sued you for plagiarism?

AIG Is Gonna Have The Same Problem: "Blackwater's rebranding doesn't seem to have helped them very much. Not only do they still manage to look as thoroughly dishonest and unethical as they used to before, but a 575-word AP story calls them Blackwater throughout except for one solitary reference to their new name in para 5. Some names -- and images -- just fit so well that they stick forever, and no amount of rebranding effort can give you a fresh start."

And What, Pray Tell, Does 'Late Night' Have To Do With Anything: What substance acts like one of those "squeezy desk toys," "very slowly un-dents itself" when poked, actively "tries to flatten itself," secretly "wants to be a liquid," and, from time to time, "emits little sighs?" You may not want to find out.

Labor Law Reform, Cartoon Style: It's hard out there for the working stick-figure!

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to [e-mail] -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]