A scary anecdote from Iran. A trusted colleague - who is married to an Iranian-American and would thus prefer to stay anonymous - has told me of a very disturbing episode that happened to her friend, another Iranian-American, as she was flying to Iran last week. On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said "no", the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.

This is very disturbing. For once, it means that the Iranian authorities are paying very close attention to what's going on Facebook and Twitter (which, in my opinion, also explains why they decided not to take those web-sites down entirely - they are useful tools of intelligence gathering).

Social networking can empower political opposition and dissidents. But it can also help security forces track them. During the red scare witch hunts in the United States, suspected communists were asked to name the names of friends and relatives in the party. These days, the authorities could just check out your Facebook or MySpace pages.

Speaking of excessive security activity, I was on NPR's Diane Rehm Show this morning to discuss the recent news reports about a possible torture probe at the Justice Department, the CIA withholding information from Congress regarding a super-secret assassination program that targeted al Qaeda leaders, and Dick Cheney's role in all of this.

One point I hammered: the House and Senate intelligence committees can and should investigate why the CIA did not brief Congress about this assassination program, focusing on the reports that Cheney ordered the spies not to tell the nation's elected representatives about this operation (which may not have become operational). Cheney's been mum about this. (What, no big speech at AEI?) But the public has a right to know if the vice president blocked an intelligence agency from meeting its obligations to inform Congress about its actions. Such an investigation could be conducted quickly and without blowing details of the program at issue. All you have to do is examine any emails or memos related to this and call in a few intelligence officials, a couple ofaides in Cheney's office, and Cheney himself, and ask them what happened. What are they going to do? Take the Fifth? That would be within their rights, but it would speak volumes about their fidelity to republican-style government. 

I've been on the run today. But I've also been busy myth-busting.

In recent days, there has been a round of Ronald Reagan praising that's come from...Democrats. Yes, Democrats--including President Barack Obama. So I thought a remedial lesson was necessary. Here it is.

Also, yesterday Lt. General Stanley McChrystal, whom Obama has picked to head US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, appeared before the Senate armed services committee for a confirmation hearing. For years, he was in charge of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, which in 2006 found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda in Iraq leader. And McChrystal comes across as a bright and confident commander. He seems competent. He has been widely praised. At the hearing, he frankly acknowledged that two key problems in Afghanistan have been civilian casualties caused by US troops and rampant corruption.

But McChrystal has some baggage. He ran JSOC when one of its units in Iraq was involved in abusive treatment of detainees at a secret base outside Baghdad called Camp Nama. (See here and here for graphic details.) Senator Carl Levin, the committee chair, did ask McChrystal about abusive treatment of prisoners, and McChrystal declared that he did not condone it. But neither Levin nor any of the other committee members asked McChrystal specifically about Camp Nama and reports that McChrystal visited the site.

This was a stunning omission. Clearly, the hearing had been orchestrated--so McChrystal would have the chance to condemn abusive treatment but not have to answer any tough questions about actual acts of abuse that happened under his command. Levin and the other senators wanted him confirmed without a fuss (perhaps because Gen. David Petraeus, whom everyone on Capitol Hill adores, wants McChrystal in this post). In any event, it was a low moment in confirmation hearings. The senators should have vigorously questioned McChrystal about Camp Nama. Instead, they gave him a pass. And dark questions remain.

I was able to complain about this later that day on PBS's Newshour. Transcript here; video here.

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Ex-veep Dick Cheney has claimed that there are two classified documents showing that the enhanced interrogation techniques (a.k.a. torture) used on US-held detainees were effective and helped his administration prevent terrorist attacks. Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chair of the Senate armed services committee, this past week said these documents do not support Cheney's argument. On Hardball, conservative commentator Terry Jeffrey and I try to sort it out. Guess whose side Jeffrey was on. Guest host David Shuster was on fire, going after Jeffrey on the use of torture. But we did find consensus on a critical point: President Obama should declassify those two documents--and other material--so that the public can determine if Cheney is telling the truth or not.

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My favorite passage from Dick Cheney's I-saved-America speech:

For all the partisan anger that still lingers, our administration will stand up well in history -- not despite our actions after 9/11, but because of them. And when I think about all that was to come during our administration and afterward -- the recriminations, the second-guessing, the charges of "hubris" -- my mind always goes back to that moment. To put things in perspective, suppose that on the evening of 9/11, President Bush and I had promised that for as long as we held office -- which was to be another 2,689 days -- there would never be another terrorist attack inside this country. Talk about hubris - it would have seemed a rash and irresponsible thing to say.

That's my emphasis, for Michael Isikoff and I wrote a book called, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Cheney, of course, is a major character in the book. I don't know if he read it, but a while back we were told by a reliable source that David Addington, who was Cheney's top legal adviser in the veep office, was spotted at a children's soccer game reading the book.

I have a more substantial review of Cheney's speech and a comparison of it to Barack Obama's same-day national security address here. What disappointed me about the Cheney event was that he did not take questions. Usually, there is a Q&A following speeches at the American Enterprise Institute (a.k.a. Neocon HQ), and it can often be a feisty session. An AEI official told me that Cheney's office had informed AEI that he would field queries after his address. Instead, he quickly trotted out of the room. The AEI people were left with no explanation of his sudden departure.

But it sure would have been appropriate if a co-author of Hubris had been allowed to question the ex-veep. At least, I think so. And I had several questions ready. One went something like this:

I'm trying to keep track of all the Bush-era news today: what to do with the military commissions, what the CIA did or didn't tell Congress about waterboarding, how to handle those photos of abused detainees. The so-called war on terrorism was rather messy on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's watch. And the cleanup job isn't easy. Below is a look at just one of the many subplots that I posted elsewhere today:

Here's a good example of what's been wrong with congressional oversight of the intelligence agencies for decades: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the CIA did not tell her at a September 2002 briefing (when she was the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee) that it had used waterboarding on a captured al Qaeda operative; the CIA says it did. And this dispute apparently cannot be settled. From The Washington Post:

Government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified briefings, suggested that the record might never be clear as to what Pelosi and [Republican Rep. Porter] Goss were told. One official familiar with the congressional briefings acknowledged the difficulty of establishing exactly what lawmakers were told. Internal CIA memos about the briefings were "not designed to be stenography" but were based on recollections after the fact, the official said. There were no recordings or precise transcripts, he said.

It's not often that reading a government memo makes you want to cheer. But two memos related to the use of torture released on Tuesday at a congressional hearing were rather heartening. They offered evidence that there were dissidents inside the Bush administration when it came to using waterboarding and other excessive interrogation techniques on detainees. Written in 2005 by three senior officials at the State Department and Pentagon, the memos are a reminder that even within the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, debate sometimes ensued. Still, the dissenters lost.

It's quasi-encouraging that someone was making the case for decency and rule of law. The first memo--written in 2005 by Philip Zelikow, then a senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; John Bellinger, Rice's legal adviser at the time; and Gordon England, then a deputy defense secretary--argued that the United States should "choose--as a matter of policy--to treat...captives...as if they were civilian detainees under the rule of law," in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. And their point was not that international law dictated such treatment--though it might--but that this made the most sense for the United States. As they wrote in all-caps:

WE ARE NOT SAYING THAT THESE DETAINEES ARE NECESSARILY ENTITLED TO THIS STATUS. TO BE CLEAR; WE ARE GIVING THEM A TEMPORARY STATUS THEY DO NOT DESERVE. BUT WE ARE NOT DOING THIS FOR THEM. WE ARE DOING IT FOR US.

Such an approach, they maintained, would be "one that Americans and the world are more likely to understand and accept as reasonable."

They conceded that human treatment of detainees could in some cases produce less, rather than more, intelligence. But they recommended being grown-up about the cost-benefit trade-off:

A few days ago, Nick Baumann and I posted a piece reporting that Philip Zelikow, a former top aide to Condoleezza RIce at the Bush State Department, had suspected Vice President Dick Cheney's office of having tried to destroy--yes, destroy--a memo he had written in 2005 disputing the Bush Justice Department's legal rationale for warterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods (a.k.a. torture).

On Wednesday morning, Zelikow is scheduled to testify before the Senate subcommittee on administrative oversight and the courts--which is chaired by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). The topic: "What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration."

It's unclear as of this writing whether the subcommittee or other congressional Democrats have yet unearthed a copy of the Zelikow memo, which Zelikow doesn't have. (When you leave government service, you're not allowed to take your files--unless, of course, you're Henry Kissinger, but that's another story.)

At the White House press briefing on Monday, CNN's Ed Henry asked a question that I had tried to put to Obama's press team on Friday, after press secretary Robert Gibbs had declined to call on me: Where are those torture documents Dick Cheney wants?

The ex-veep-who-won't-go-away has been saying in interviews that he's requested the release of two classified CIA documents that supposedly outline all the essential intelligence that was produced by torture-assisted interrogations. (He, of course, does not call it torture.)

In response to Henry, Gibbs had no information to share. "I'll check on where that is," he said.

This was first posted at MotherJones.com....

During the White House press conference Wednesday night marking the hundredth day of his historic presidency, Barack Obama was asked not one question about the Afghanistan war or the multiple-trillion-dollar federal bailout of the financial system. He managed to tout his many achievements--passing the $800 billion stimulus package, winning congressional approval of budget that devotes record amounts to health care and clean energy, initiating the withdrawal of troops in Iraq, signing legislation to boost the number of children covered by health insurance, banning the use of torture--without having to explain or justify perhaps the two most controversial (and perhaps problematic) big-ticket items of his high-wire presidency. Was that just good luck?

These one hundred days have been something a blur--or, at least a policy blur. There is too much to keep track off, too much to juggle.

The questions put to Obama covered a wide range of substantial matters. (Nothing on the Air Force One fly-over of New York or the dog, though Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times did ask what about the presidency has "enchanted" Obama.)

There's been a lot of calls on the left for a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's use of torture (or enhanced interrogation techniques, if you're Dick Cheney). While a special prosecutor might be necessary to determine if any crimes were committed, the appointment of a Patrick Fitzgerald-like investigator would in no way guarantee that the public will learn the full truth about this affair. As I write for Mother Jones:

The other day I ran into a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, and this person noted that he fancied the idea of appointing a special prosecutor to probe the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation tactics, a.k.a. torture. He noted that he even thought there was a chance that Attorney General Eric Holder might do so.

"That's not necessarily a good idea," I said. His eyes widened, and he asked why.

"Patrick Fitzgerald," I replied.

I go on to explain:

I've been reading the torture memos released yesterday by the Obama administration, which has also signaled it will not be chasing any past government employee for possible torture-related charges. I noted Thursday the tortured legal reasoning that led the Bush Justice Department in a 2002 memo to tell the CIA that it was just fine to use "the waterboard." (For a gander at what an old-fashioned waterboard looks like, click here. In 2006, I was the first blogger/journalist to post pictures of traditional waterboards used in torture sessions by the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia.) That memo also provided rules for CIA interrogators who wanted to place a terrorist suspect in a "confinement box" with insects. FYI: this memo was signed by Jay Bybee, then the assistant attorney general, now a federal appellate court judge.

Reading the memos is a dispiriting exercise. It shows how government lawyers applied their smarts to turn black into white. The Bush Justice Department breaks down the coercive interrogation techniques the CIA was using into mind-numbingly small details in order to approve them within an ultra-narrow legalistic framework. Waterboarding is not really painful, for instance, because it only provides a brief sensation of suffocation, lasting no more than a few dozen seconds. In other words, detainees, get over it!

But if you step back and look at these practices as a whole, they do seem to fit a reasonable person's conception of torture. For example, a detainee, according to the memos, could be handcuffed and shackled--with the handcuffs attached to a chain from the ceiling--and forced to stand naked (except for an adult diaper) for 180 hours in order to deprive him of sleep (not, mind you, to induce pain). Then this person could be thrown against a "flexible false wall" a few times. He could be slapped in the face and abdomen. He could be placed in a cramped space. He could be doused with water as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit. And then waterboarded. Throughout all this, the detainee, according to the memos, would be carefully monitored by CIA medical personnel to make sure he is not truly harmed. And the rules discussed in the Justice Department memos do indicate the CIA med teams were supposed to be fastidious and prudent. (If the detainee suffered swelling in his legs or feet because of being forced to stand for too long, he would be shackled in a sitting or horizontal position in which he could not sleep.)

But if you ponder that scenario in total, it sure seems like torture--or, at least, something close enough to torture that it should not be employed. Yes, none of this is the equivalent of whacking a guy in the genitals with a tennis racket. (See Casino Royale.) But it's certainly not the type of activity a high-minded nation ought to sanction at the highest levels of its government--and lawyer so slyly.

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I was on Hardball again with uber-hawk Frank Gaffney Jr., a onetime Reagan Pentagon official. The subject tonight: the possible prosecution in Spain of six past Bush officials--including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith, former Justice Department official John Yoo, and David Addington, onetime counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney--for devising the legal justification for torture conducted at Guantanamo. Gaffney, of course, decried the Spanish action as an attack on US sovereignty. If I heard him right, he essentially argued that the United States need not abide by any international rules (or treaties) if they lead to any undue infringement of national sovereignty. And who gets to judge what makes for such an infringement? I think Gaffney would like that job.

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Should the new Obama Administration dig through all the dark ugliness of the Bush-Cheney years--torture, renditions, the destruction of evidence, etc.--and start prosecuting former Bush officials, including the veep? I appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with hawk-of-all-hawks Frank Gaffney Jr. to discuss the matter.

By the way, if you haven't seen Stephen Hayes piece in which Cheney grouses about Bush not pardoning Scooter Libby, check it out. The article is a hoot. I encourage Hayes, Cheney's sympathetic chronicler-in-chief, to fuel more feuding between this out-of-power couple.

I attended Robert Gibbs' first (and very crowded) White House briefing as press secretary and asked whether President Obama--when he earlier signed an executive order banning torture--had not used the phrase "war on terror" purposefully. (Instead, the new president had referred to the "ongoing struggle" against violence and terrorism.) To find out what Gibbs said, click here.

Many of the queries at the briefing were about that executive orders and another one setting a one-year deadline for closing Gitmo. Gibbs made no news explaining and defending those orders. There were several questions about Wall Street Bailout II, and Gibbs patiently repeated the Obama claim--which seems credible--that he will handle and disburse the bailout funds in a more effective and more transparent manner than the Bush crowd did last year.

There was only one question on Iraq, and nothing on Afghanistan. (Ann Compton of ABC News asked if the military commanders with whom Obama spoke the day before had expressed any "reservations or concerns" about his plan to pull out combat troops within 16 months. Gibbs essentially--and unsurprisingly--said no.) The most buzzy topic was the second swearing-in conducted at the White House the previous night. The press corps dwelled on that a bit much. And then every journo in the room started scribbling furiously when Gibbs disclosed that Obama will keep his BlackBerry, while only using it for limited communications with a limited n umber of senior--make that, very senior--aides. Thinking of those possible millions of missing Bush White House emails, I threw in a follow-up: will Obama's BlackBerry messages be preserved and archived in accordance with the laws governing presidential records. Yup, Gibbs said.

One of the more intriguing questions of the sessions concerned a standard White House procedure: background briefings. This happens when administration officials talk to a group of reporters about a particular issue, and the reporters can use the information provided, but only by citing unnamed White House aides. They cannot ID these officials. The practice is useful for reporters. They get more information. And it's often no big secret in Washington who the unnamed officials are, given that a bunch of journalists know. But in a White House led by a man who has pledged greater transparency, should background briefings be continued? One reporter asked:

Barack Obama, as I've noted before, will be the source of much emotional back and forth for progressives in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. He taps Rick Warren to deliver an invocation at his inauguration. Ugh. Then he adds Gene Robinson, a gay Episcopal bishop, to the lineup. Yay. He dines with conservative and neocon columnists who have helped run the country off the rails. Boo. Then he has breakfast with Rachel Maddow and E.J. Dionne. Hooray. His press secretary, Robert Gibbs, says Obama will end "don't ask, don't tell" and allow gays to serve openly in the military. Wow. Then Gibb says that changing the policy must wait. Well, okay.

One natural response is: this is life. But it does seem that Obama will keep all of us on our toes.

Black and white may not come so easy in the Obama era. Yesterday, I noted that Eric Holder, Obama's choice for attorney general, had some heavy baggage from his days as a corporate lawyer. And I happen to think that his role in the Marc Rich pardon scandal should practically disqualify him from further government service.

But it was hard not to cheer when Holder, at his confirmation hearing on Thursday morning, gave a clear statement: "Waterboarding is torture." And he noted that it was illegal. This is a real and profound switch. The last two attorney generals could not make this statement. And George Bush and Dick Cheney have repeatedly insisted that the U.S. has not tortured anyone--even though waterboarding has been used by the CIA. (In a front-page interview with Bob Woodward published on Wednesday, Susan Crawford, the top Bush administration in charge of bringing Gitmo detainees to trial, said that in the case of one detainee the U.S. has committed torture: "We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani.")

With one hand, he giveth, with the other....

By tapping Leon Panetta to be CIA chief, Barack Obama sent a clear signal: no to torture. A year ago, Panetta wrote an article declaring, "We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances." And he included waterboarding--which the CIA has used---as torture. In fact, Obama's reported first choice for the CIA job, John Brennan, a career CIA official, had had his chances scuttled after bloggers and others griped that he had been soft, if not supportive, when it came to torture and CIA renditions. A New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer identified him as a "supporter" of so-called enhanced interrogation methods. And in a 2006 PBS interview, Brennan said, "we do have to take off the gloves in some areas" but without going so far as to "forever tarnish the image of the United States abroad." He added that the "dark side has its limits."

Well, Brennan didn't get the top post at Langley. But Obama has selected him to be his chief counterterrorism adviser in the White House. The job requires no Senate confirmation. So Brennan will not be inconvenienced by questions regarding any past involvement with CIA renditions and waterboarding. (Brennan has reportedly told Obama he had no direct role in CIA's abusive interrogation policies and even internally expressed reservations.)

Is this another sign of the Big O's pragmatism? Brennan, no doubt, knows plenty on the subject of counterterrorism. And he has called for breaking with the Bush policy on Iran and the Middle East. For instance, he has criticized Bush and his aides for unduly bashing Iran. But tapping him does partially negate the message conveyed by the Panetta pick.

I think people are going to have to get used to this sort of Obama give-and-take. Critics certainly don't have to accept it. But they should expect more of these sorts of episodes. I assume there will be plenty of other instances when Obama will exasperate and hearten his supporters simultaneously. (And don't forget about Rick Warren.) In this particular case, Obama supporters can only hope that Brennan will now use whatever experience he collected on "the dark side" for the forces of good.

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Yesterday, I posted a piece noting that Leon Panetta, Barack Obama's choice as CIA director, could draw opposition from CIA insiders and vets because he has been a fierce foe of waterboarding (a torture tactic used by the CIA), has advocated greater congressional oversight of CIA covert operations, and in the 1990s, as President Clinton's budget chief, pushed for cuts in the CIA's budget. Yet the first important blasts came from Democrats. Both Senator Dianne Feinstein, the incoming chair of the Senate intelligence committee, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the outgoing chair of the committee, huffed that Panetta was no intelligence professional.

Their knee-jerk response--which seemed to contain a resentful dose of no-one-in-the-Obama-camp-asked-me-about-this--could give cover to those who object to Panetta on policy grounds and to CIA people who don't want an outsider taking control of a troubled agency that screwed the pooch on 9/11 and Iraq WMDs. Remember Curveball?

My CQ blogger colleague Jeff Stein raises a good point: