On April 27, MSNBC's Dan Abrams interviewed former AG's John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales before a cheering rightwing audience at American Jewish University. Both Ashcroft and Gonzales continue to insist waterboarding was legal when authorized by DoJ lawyers under their supervision. (Full transcript.) Will their hyper-legal defenses keep them out of jail? Stay tuned...

Abrams: Judge Gonzales, I’m going to ask you a very direct question. And it relates to something you just said. Do you believe waterboarding is torture?

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

By Dave Lindorff

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a
year as a student at a boy’s gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the
cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the
distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany
(Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the
terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary
bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air
defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures). With
Germany still wreaking horrific damage on the Allied bomber fleet, this
made it an inviting target.

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have
long known: that the White House and in particular then White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them
the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to
make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report,
which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush
and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the
American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it
documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate
media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable
justification for launching a war.

By Dave Lindorff

A month before he takes office, it has become the conventional
wisdom in our conventional media that Barack “No Drama” Obama will not
seek or even allow any prosecution of Bush administration officials for
crimes committed over the past eight years—not even for authorizing and
promoting the illegal use of torture on captives of America’s wars on
Iraq, Afghanistan and “terror.”

Wow!! Breaking news from South Texas (h/t Faiz Shakir):

Vice President Cheney indicted by Willacy County grand jury
By Emma Perez-Trevino, The Brownsville Herald

A Willacy County grand jury under District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra returned multi-count indictments Monday against Vice President Dick Cheney, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, plus several other public officials.

So who threw Gonzo under the bus? Obviously it wasn't Bush, who was clearly furious when he delivered his extremely brief remarks - in strong contrast to his public display of affection for Karl Rove.

Rather, it looks like the dirty deed was done by White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and White House Counsel Fred Fielding, according to the NY Times.

The officials said he offered his resignation on Friday in a brief telephone conversation with Mr. Bush, who was at his ranch in Crawford, and that the president immediately accepted the resignation. On Sunday, Mr. Gonzales and his wife flew to the ranch for a consoling lunch where the resignation was confirmed.

NY Times has the scoop:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not announced immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.

Congressional representatives from Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have sponsored H. Res. 589, a bill to impeach Alberto Gonzales. Will they also sign on to H. Res. 333, to sponsor Dick Cheney's impeachment? Why not thank them for sponsoring H. Res. 589, and ask them to sponsor H. Res. 333? Is YOUR rep listed? See the list here!