Atrios has the latest of President Bush's contradictory statements about Chalabi:

George W. Bush last Feburary, on Meet The Press (emphasis added):

Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?
President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion.

George W. Bush yesterday , Rose Garden press conference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi leader that's fallen out of favor within your administration. I'm wondering if you feel that he provided any false information, or are you particularly --
THE PRESIDENT: ....My meetings with him were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him. ...

Q I guess I'm asking, do you feel like he misled your administration, in terms of what the expectations were going to be going into Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: I don't remember anybody walking into my office saying, Chalabi says this is the way it's going to be in Iraq.

Capitol Hill Blue is reporting that witnesses have told the grand jury that President Bush knew in advance of plans to leak Valerie Plame's identity and did nothing to stop it. The article says this is the reason Bush is seeking outside legal advice?

Their damning testimony has prompted Bush to contact an outside lawyer for legal advice because evidence increasingly points to his involvement in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The move suggests the president anticipates being questioned by prosecutors. Sources say grand jury witnesses have implicated the President and his top advisor, Karl Rove.

The White House says Bush's talks with attorney Jim Sharp are just "routine precaution."

[link via Poor Man.]

CIA Director George Tenet resigned today "for personal reasons."

Tenet had been under fire for months in connection with intelligence failures related to the U.S.-led war against Iraq, specifically assertions the United States made about Saddam Hussein's purported possession of weapons of mass destruction, and with respect to the threat from the al-Qaida terrorist network.

During his seven years at the CIA, speculation at times has swirled around whether Tenet would retire or be forced out, peaking after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and surging again after the flawed intelligence estimates about Iraq's fighting capability.

"Personal reasons"? What do you think?

The Pentagon has begun polygraph testing of employees in an attempt to find out who leaked information to Chalabi about Iran.

The polygraph examinations, which are being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are focused initially on a small number of Pentagon employees who had access to the information that was compromised. American intelligence officials have said that Mr. Chalabi informed Iran that the United States had broken the secret codes used by Iranian intelligence to transmit confidential messages to posts around the world.

Chalabi, through his lawyers, has denied that he leaked info to Iran.

They sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft and F.B.I. Director Robert S. Mueller III repeating Mr. Chalabi's denials and demanding that the Justice Department investigate the disclosure of the accusations against Mr. Chalabi.

Don't miss The Logic of Torture in the New York Review of Books. It's actually part 2 of a series by Mark Danner , Part 1, Torture and the Truth is here.

Danner includes the text of some sworn affidavits of Abu Ghraib prisoners made available by the Washington Post back in January. Chilling. Especially this one.

Also, from Jason Vest in the Phoenix Sun, On-the-ground-reality TV "Shocking footage of US military conduct in Iraq is available through major news services, yet the American public seldom sees what reporters see."

What happened here?

Nabil al-Marabh was No. 27 on the FBI's list of terror suspects after Sept. 11. He trained in Afghanistan's militant camps, sent money to a roommate convicted in a foiled plot to bomb a hotel and boasted to an informant about plans to blow up a fuel truck inside a New York tunnel, FBI documents allege. The Bush administration set him free - to Syria - even though prosecutors had sought to bring criminal cases against him and judges openly expressed concerns about possible terrorist ties.

....Even the judge who accepted al-Marabh's plea agreement on minor immigration charges in 2002 balked. "Something about this case just makes me feel uncomfortable," Judge Richard Arcara said in court. The Justice Department assured the judge that al-Marabh did not have terrorist ties.

Here's the Administration's explanation:

President Bush has sought independent legal advice from Washington lawyer Jim Sharp in connection with the grand jury investigation investigating the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame--and may retain him.

There was no indication that Bush was a target of the leak investigation, but the president's move suggested he anticipates being questioned about what he knows....White House press secretary Scott McClellan confirmed that Bush had contacted Washington attorney Jim Sharp. "In the event the president needs his advice, I expect he probably would retain him," McClellan said.

The Democrats were quick to criticize the President:

Democrats seized on the news to criticize the president. "It speaks for itself that the president initially claimed he wanted to get to the bottom of this, but now he's suddenly retained a lawyer," said Jano Cabrera, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. "Bush shouldn't drag the country through grand juries and legal maneuvering. President Bush should come forward with what he knows and come clean with the American people."

The ACLU and the Center for Consitutional Right, along with medical and veterans' groups have filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit charging that the Department of Defense and other government agencies illegally withheld records concerning the abuse of detainees in American military custody. Details and background are here.

An ACLU feature on the FOIA request, including a timeline that describes events that occurred during the time covered by its request is available here. You can read the complaint here (pdf).

"The government's ongoing refusal to release these records is absolutely unacceptable, particularly in light of the severity of the abuses we know to have occurred," said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU staff attorney. "The public has a right to know what the government's policies were, why these abuses were allowed to take place, and who was ultimately responsible."

The withholding of documents, the lawsuit says, violates the government's obligation to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the ACLU, CCR, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. Filed more than six months ago, the FOIA request was directed to the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice, as well as the CIA. The request expressed concern - now validated by the Abu Ghraib photographs - that detainees in U.S. custody were being subjected to abuse and even torture. The FOIA request also cited reports that detainees were being turned over or "rendered" to foreign countries with poor human rights records, as a way to sidestep domestic and international laws prohibiting torture.

by TChris

New information about the possible misdeeds of Ahmad Chalabi comes on the heels of an earlier report that Chalabi told officials in Iran that the U.S. had broken the secret communications code used by Iran's intelligence service. Newsweek reports that Chalabi "is suspected of leaking confidential information about U.S. war plans for Iraq to the government of Iran before last year’s invasion to oust Saddam Hussein."

There was never any reason to trust the self-interested Chalabi, but that didn't stop the Bush administration from paying him to lie -- payments that stopped only after Bush and Cheney learned that Chalabi had compromised U.S. codebreaking. The administration never should have trusted Chalabi, but now the question is: who in our government is so untrustworthy as to pass along sensitive information to him?

U.S. political activists close to Chalabi have told reporters in recent days that Chalabi learned about the codebreaking in Baghdad from a drunken U.S. official.

That doesn't narrow the field much, so the investigation continues.

Law-enforcement sources indicated that the American investigation will likely focus on whether sensitive information might have been leaked to Chalabi by officials in either the Pentagon or the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

The investigation may ask whether "Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them." So who did Chalabi intend to blackmail?

Not surprisingly, the administration is distancing itself from its old friend Chalabi, with Condoleezza Rice remarking that "it’s no secret that the relationship with Ahmad Chalabi has been somewhat strained of late" -- yeah, no secret there -- and the President saying that "he had only met the Iraqi very briefly a few times." Hey, he hardly knew the guy. At least that what Bush hopes voters will believe by November.

by TChris

The Eighth Amendment provides: "Excessive bail shall not be required ..." That doesn't stop judges from setting bail in amounts that poor and moderate income defendants can never hope to raise. The amount of bail deemed "excessive" is often in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder is usually the judge who sets (or denies) bail.

Unless the bail is $3 billion (yes, billion with a B), a laughable amount that even New York real estate heir Robert Durst can't afford. A Texas jury found Durst not guilty of murdering his neighbor, but Durst still faces less serious charges of bail jumping and evidence tampering.

Durst's attorneys appealed the bond amounts to the 14th Court of Appeals in Houston, which said in a ruling Tuesday it could not find a case where bail was set, let alone upheld, at even 1 percent of any of the amounts against the millionaire, "regardless of the underlying offense, wealth of the defendant, or any other circumstance."

"Considering the unprecedented enormity of the bail amounts and that any flight risk has been abundantly addressed by other bond conditions, we can find no conceivable justification for bail amounts remotely approaching the order of magnitude of those imposed in this case," the appeals court ruled.

The court suggested other ways to assure that Durst doesn't flee, including taking his passport and making him pay for his own 24-hour guard.

Congrats to South Dakota's new Congresswoman , Democrat Stephanie Herseth, who has won the special election for former Congressman Bill Janklow's seat. Daily Kos has the details.

The story of Ahmed Chalabi and his possible provision of U.S. secrets to Iran is growing. It's now alleged that he gave an important, specific secret to Iran:

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials.

The New York Times says it was asked by the Bush Administration to sit on the details. Then, the information began getting out, and the request was withdrawn.

Billmon at Whisky Bar has a thorough recap and analysis.