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Man jailed for urinating on woman

BBC NEWS
A man who urinated on a woman as she lay dying and shouted "this is YouTube material" has been sentenced to three years in prison.

Anthony Anderson also covered Christine Lakinski with shaving foam after she collapsed in a Hartlepool street.

The 50-year-old, who suffered from a number of medical conditions, was later pronounced dead at the scene.

Anderson, 27, and from Raby Road in the Teesside town, had earlier admitted outraging public decency.

The court heard how, on 27 July, Miss Lakinski was making her way home with a box of laminate flooring when she fell ill and stumbled into a doorway.

Totally shocked

Anderson, a former soldier, had smoked a cannabis joint and been drinking when he and two friends spotted her.

He tried to rouse her by throwing a bucket of water over her, before urinating on her and covering her with shaving foam.

A crowd had gathered around, watching and laughing, and the incident was filmed on a mobile phone.

She was later declared dead at the scene, the cause of death being given as pancreatic failure.

Magistrates in Hartlepool had referred the case to Teesside Crown Court so a longer jail term could be handed out.

Judge Peter Fox, the recorder of Middlesbrough sitting at Teesside Crown Court, said: "You violated this woman in an incredible way, and the shocking nature of your acts over a prolonged period of time must mean that a prison sentence of greater length is appropriate in this case."

Outside court, Miss Lakinski's family said in a statement: "We remain totally shocked that anyone could behave in such an appalling way.

"The fact that Christine was dying makes this man's actions even more sick and inhumane.

"However, those who stood by and did nothing to stop Anderson are also guilty in our eyes.

More on this...

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
The Free Press

Friday 19 October 2007

With record low approval ratings for the Bush/Cheney regime and the albatross of an unpopular war hanging from the GOP's neck, do you think that a Democratic presidential candidate will win the White House, get us out of Iraq, and end our long national nightmare?

Think again - the mighty election theft machine Karl Rove used to steal the US presidency in 2000 and 2004 may be under attack, but it is still in place for the upcoming 2008 election.

With his usual devious mastery, Rove has seized upon the national outrage sparked by his electoral larceny and used it as smokescreen while he makes the American electoral system even MORE unfair, and even EASIER to rig. Thus the administration has fired federal attorneys when they would not participate in a nationwide campaign to deny minorities and the poor their access to the polls. It has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to install electronic voting machines that can be "flipped" with a few keystrokes. And under the guise of "reforming" our busted electoral system, it is setting us up for another presidential theft in 2008.

Thus it should come as no surprise that our exclusive investigations into the firings of eight federal prosecutors who refused to execute Rove’s plans for massive disenfranchisement of Democratic voters reveal a pattern of illegalities and fraud aimed at reducing the number of minority, poor and young voters at the core of Democratic support. In the wake of major news breaks, two felony convictions have come from the rigging of the illegal Ohio 2004 vote count and recount that gave George W. Bush a second illegitimate term. Stunning new admissions from county election boards that illegally destroyed voter records will almost certainly lead to new convictions. And the multi-million-dollar electronic voting machine scam that made possible the biggest electoral frauds in US history is under massive new attack, with key states moving to scrap the machines altogether in a desperate attempt to restore American democracy - but with the job far from done.

Rove, Ney and the Undead

Indeed, the Rovian theft engine is far from dead. The media groundwork has already been laid out for the Republicans to claim that hordes of illegal aliens have registered to vote. The Bush administration has been caught ordering public agencies - possibly in violation of the law - to cease registering voters. In an April 2006 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, Rove openly alluded to the strategy of demanding photo ID and purging voter roles of poor, minority voters just as had been done in 2000 and 2004. And, as always with Bush/Rove, there is much more beneath the surface.

All that has happened to challenge the GOP death grip on the American vote count has been reported in the pages of Hustler and on the Internet at freepress.org, bradblog and elsewhere, and is being seized upon by a national grassroots movement determined to restore American democracy next year.

Nowhere has that movement been more in evidence than with the high profile firestorm surrounding Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of eight federal prosecutors without legitimate cause.

Evidence continues to surface from throughout the United States about this blatant Bush abuse of executive power. But we have traced the roots of the firings to an obscure congressional hearing held at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, on March 21, 2005, and to a shadowy GOP operative named Mark F. "Thor" Hearne.

The hearing was conducted by none other than former US Rep. Bob Ney (R-18th OH). The once-powerful Ohio congressman (who is now behind bars) was the godfather of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the national boondoggle that mandated electronic voting machines for the American electoral process.

That the machines would cost taxpayers billions was a big plus for Ney. They would come from Diebold and other companies that poured money into Republican coffers. Thanks largely to the manipulations of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, these e-voting machine companies would help guarantee the GOP’s ability to steal elections.

Ney’s hearing featured a marquee appearance by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio secretary of state responsible for delivering Ohio’s decisive 2004 electoral votes to Bush. Blackwell was a key operative for the Bush election campaign in Florida in 2000 and co-chaired the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign in Ohio.

"Haul Butt!"

Congressional protocol required that Ney allow Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Cleveland) to question Blackwell. Soon Blackwell and Jones were yelling at each other in a legendary exchange that ended with Jones telling Blackwell to "haul butt" out of the chamber.

Not quite so high profile was the ensuing testimony by Hearne, who identified himself as the head of the American Center for Voting Rights. Hearne is a long-time GOP dirty trickster, with a Rovian rap sheet dating to the 1970s. He did not explain that the ACVR had a post box in a Dallas mall, but no office, few staff, a board stacked with GOP operatives, no grassroots mailing list or much else to confirm the functioning of a real organization. Nor did Ney clarify that Hearne had served as election counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and had founded ACVR the previous month, at the urging of Karl Rove.

While the press corps rushed to report the Jones-Blackwell dust-up, Hearne laid out for Ney and the few of us left listening the essential template for the new GOP strategy for disenfranchising millions of suspected Democrats from voting in future elections. In classic Rovian terms, Hearne bemoaned a litany of "voter fraud" abuses allegedly committed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Association for Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN) and other multi-racial coalitions working to register millions of new voters across the United States.

Among other things, Hearne told Ney the voter registration campaigns were using "crack cocaine" as an "incentive" for registering new voters. Adding the AFL-CIO and ACT-Ohio to his list of evildoers, Hearne warned that millions of "fraudulent" ballots would be cast in future elections unless something was done to curb the ability of ordinary citizens to vote without extensive identification papers.

Hearne’s testimony drew little press. But it has led directly to the national Bush/Rove push for new laws requiring voters to show picture IDs at the polls and other methods of mass disenfranchisement - and the firing of eight US prosecutors who apparently refused to go along.

The Cover-Up

References to Hearne’s ACVR have now mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. But the McClatchy Newspapers have reported that Hearne’s ACVR and the Republican Lawyers Association have actively campaigned - with a war chest of at least $1.5 million - in at least nine battleground states. They stump for voter ID laws and rigid registration restrictions and other tactics aimed at radically reducing the ability of Democrat-leaning organizations to register new voters.

The ACVR agenda embraces the administration’s illegal demand that public agencies stop registering new, mostly poor voters. And the pressure to rid our democracy of such voters has carried over to the offices of the nation’s federal prosecutors, even in the face of widespread investigations showing the numbers of people illegally trying to register and vote have been miniscule.

Emblematic of the firings is the case of David Iglesias of New Mexico. Iglesias has testified to Congress that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him to prosecute alleged vote fraud perpetrators. When he resisted, Iglesias was fired by Gonzales.

Rogers is listed as "secretary" of Thor Hearne’s American Center for Voting Rights, as well as a former general counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Bush Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed its mandate by fighting to narrow rather than broaden the voting rights of minorities, and to prosecute voter registration operations without just cause. An ACVR director, Cameron Quinn, is now the division’s voting counsel.

A key target has been Project Vote, which registered 1.5 million voters in 2004 and 2006. Five days before the 2006 election, Bush’s interim US attorney in Kansas City issued indictments against four ACORN workers under contract with Project Vote. Prosecutions that close to election day have traditionally been discouraged by the Justice Department. Acorn officials had notified the federal officials when they noticed the doctored forms. But ACVR’s "job was to confuse the public about voter fraud and offer bogus solutions to the problem," said Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, they used "deception and faulty research" to help Rove’s GOP.

The common denominator in the firings of the federal attorneys has been an unwillingness to pursue prosecutions on the basis of such research. Iglesias, for example, told Newsweek magazine he "had been repeatedly pushed by New Mexico GOP officials to prosecute workers for ACORN" who were registering voters.

Media Missed It Again

The media have missed what DID happen when the attorneys complied with the Bush/Rove game plan. Just four days prior to the 2004 vote, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta, the civil rights chief of the Bush Justice Department asked, a federal judge in Ohio to sign off on policies that would disenfranchise thousands of black voters. The move almost certainly had a significant impact on Bush’s subsequent victory in the Electoral College. Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section, has called the Ohio scheme "vote caging," which is illegal.

The case arose when Republicans allegedly sent "caging" letters to thousands of registered voters in inner city districts. The letters had "do not forward" stamped on them, with a return receipt requested. When some 23,000 came back as undeliverable, GOP operatives demanded the right to get the names removed from voter rolls. Acosta argued in his letter that restricting such challenges would "undermine" the electoral process.

But an exclusive investigation by freepress.org found that at least 25 percent of the people being removed from the voter rolls were in fact still living at their registered address. Greg Palast has reported that the GOP deliberately targeted black soldiers fighting in Iraq.

Acosta says his letter endorsed the GOP challenges as "permissible" as long as they were not racially motivated, and that anyone whose eligibility was challenged could still get a provisional ballot.

But due to the actions of former Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell, more than 16,000 provisional ballots from the 2004 election remain uncounted. Independent observers have testified that thousands more may have been discarded right at the polling stations. (Bush’s official margin of victory in Ohio was less than 119,000 votes.) Read more

    By Norman Solomon
    Common Dreams

    Tuesday 16 October 2007

    Blackwater scandal has gotten plenty of media coverage, and it deserves a lot more. Taxpayer subsidies for private mercenaries are antithetical to democracy, and Blackwater’s actions in Iraq have often been murderous. But the scandal is unfolding in a U.S. media context that routinely turns criticisms of the war into demands for a better war.

    Many politicians are aiding this alchemy. Rhetoric from a House committee early this month audibly yearned for a better war at a highly publicized hearing that featured Erik Prince, the odious CEO of Blackwater USA.

    A congressman from New Hampshire, Paul Hodes, insisted on the importance of knowing "whether failures to hold Blackwater personnel accountable for misconduct undermine our efforts in Iraq." Another Democrat on the panel, Carolyn Maloney of New York, told Blackwater’s top exec that "your actions may be undermining our mission in Iraq and really hurting the relationship and trust between the Iraqi people and the American military."

    But the problem with Blackwater’s activities is not that they "undermine" the U.S. military’s "efforts" and "mission" in Iraq. The efforts and the mission shouldn’t exist.

    A real hazard of preoccupations with Blackwater is that it will become a scapegoat for what is profoundly and fundamentally wrong with the U.S. effort and mission. Condemnation of Blackwater, however justified, can easily be syphoned into a political whirlpool that demands a cleanup of the U.S. war effort — as though a relentless war of occupation based on lies could be redeemed by better management — as if the occupying troops in Army and Marine uniforms are incarnations of restraint and accountability.

    Midway through this month, the Associated Press reported that "U.S. and Iraqi officials are negotiating Baghdad’s demand that security company Blackwater USA be expelled from the country within six months, and American diplomats appear to be working on how to fill the security gap if the company is phased out." We can expect many such stories in the months ahead.

    Meanwhile, we get extremely selective U.S. media coverage of key Pentagon operations. Bombs explode in remote areas, launched from high-tech U.S. weaponry, and few who scour the American news pages and broadcasts are any the wiser about the human toll.

    With all the media attention to sectarian violence in Iraq, the favorite motif of coverage is the suicide bombing that underscores the conflagration as Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. American reporters and commentators rarely touch on the U.S. occupation as perpetrator and catalyst of the carnage.

    One of the most unusual aspects of the current Blackwater scandal is that it places recent killings of Iraqi civilians front-and-center even though the killers were Americans. This angle is outside the customary media frame that focuses on what Iraqis are doing to each other and presents Americans — whether in military uniform or in contractor mode — as well-meaning heroes who sometimes become victims of dire circumstances.

    Many members of Congress, like quite a few journalists, have hopped on the anti-Blackwater bandwagon with rhetoric that bemoans how the company is making it more difficult for the U.S. government to succeed in Iraq. But the American war effort has continued to deepen the horrors inside that country. And Washington’s priorities have clearly placed the value of oil way above the value of human life. So why should we want the U.S. government to succeed in Iraq?

    Unless the deadly arrogance of Blackwater and its financiers in the U.S. government is placed in a broader perspective on the U.S. war effort as a whole, the vilification of the firm could distract from challenging the overall presence of American forces in Iraq and the air war that continues to escalate outside the American media’s viewfinder.

    The current Blackwater scandal should help us to understand the dynamics that routinely set in when occupiers — whether privatized mercenaries or uniformed soldiers — rely on massive violence against the population they claim to be helping.

    Terrible as Blackwater has been and continues to be, that profiteering corporation should not be made a lightning rod for opposition to the war. New legislation that demands accountability from private security forces can’t make a war that’s wrong any more right. Finding better poster boys who can be touted as humanitarians rather than mercenaries won’t change the basic roles of gun-toting Americans in a country that they have no right to occupy.

    Thursday 11 October 2007

    Paul Minor is the son of Bill Minor, a legendary Mississippi journalist and chronicler of the civil rights movement. He is also a wealthy trial lawyer and a mainstay of Mississippi's embattled Democratic Party. Mr. Minor has contributed $500,000 to Democrats over the years, including more than $100,000 to John Edwards, a fellow trial lawyer. He fought hard to stop the Mississippi Supreme Court from being taken over by pro-business Republicans.

    Mr. Minor's political activity may have cost him dearly. He is serving an 11-year sentence, convicted of a crime that does not look much like a crime at all. The case is one of several new ones coming to light that suggest that the department's use of criminal prosecutions to help Republicans win elections may go farther than anyone realizes.

    The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold hearings shortly on whether the Justice Department engaged in selective prosecution in two other cases: when it went after Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who is serving more than seven years in prison on dubious charges, and Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin civil servant who was freed after serving four months on baseless corruption charges.

    Mr. Minor, whose firm made more than $70 million in fees in his state's tobacco settlement, suspects it was his role in the 2000 Mississippi Supreme Court elections that put a target on his back. The United States Chamber of Commerce spent heavily to secure a Republican, pro-business majority, while Mr. Minor contributed heavily to the other side.

    The chamber was especially eager to unseat Justice Oliver Diaz Jr., a former trial lawyer. He was re-elected after a hard-fought, high-spending campaign. Then the prosecutions came from the politicized Bush Justice Department.

    Mississippi's loose campaign finance laws allow lawyers and companies to contribute heavily to the judges they appear before. That is terrible for justice, since the courts are teeming with perfectly legal conflicts of interest. It also creates an ideal climate for partisan selective prosecution. Since everyone is making contributions and nurturing friendships that look questionable, a prosecutor can haul any lawyer and judge he doesn't like before a grand jury and charge corruption.

    The Justice Department indicted Justice Diaz and Mr. Minor on an array of unconvincing bribery and fraud charges. Justice Diaz was acquitted of all of them. The federal prosecutors then brought tax evasion charges against him. Justice Diaz was acquitted again and still sits on the Mississippi Supreme Court.

    Mr. Minor was not as lucky. He beat many of the charges in the first trial, but the jury failed to reach a verdict on others. Federal prosecutors went after him again, and this time Mr. Minor was convicted on vague allegations of trying to get "an unfair advantage" from judges - the very thing Mississippi's lax campaign finance laws are set up to allow.

    The case fits a familiar pattern. The corruption Mr. Minor was charged with was disturbingly vague, as it was with Ms. Thompson, whose only "crime" was awarding a contract to the lowest bidder, and Mr. Siegelman, who was convicted for fairly routine political behavior.

    Mr. Minor's prosecution, like the others in this scandal, gave a big boost to the Republican Party. The case intimidated trial lawyers into stopping their political activity. "The disappearance of the trial-lawyer money all but wiped out the Democratic Party in Mississippi," Stephanie Mencimer reports in her book, "Blocking the Courthouse Door."

    There also appears to have been pro-Republican favoritism. Mr. Minor's lawyers say prosecutors were not interested in going after similar activity by trial lawyers who contributed to Republicans. Read more...

    Tuesday 09 October 2007

Firm says Administration's handling of video ruined its spying efforts.

    A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

    Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

    The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

    "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

    The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

    While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

    But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

    The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.

    Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.

    SITE - an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities - was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company's Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest.

    "We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda's hidden world," Katz said. Her company's income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.

    Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release...the plot thickens.Read more.

    By Louise France
    The Observer UK

    Sunday 07 October 2007

Five judges in the American Supreme Court have taken what may be the first step towards outlawing abortion in the US. Could it happen here?

    In their long, black cloaks, the eight men and one woman look like crows on a telegraph wire. In reality they are the most powerful judges in America and, on 18 April 2007, they made a decision which opponents fear brings the end of legal abortion in the United States one step closer.

    The legal wrangling in the case known as Gonzales v Carhart had gone on for four years. Behind thick walnut doors there was division and anguish. But the outcome was final. By a vote of five to four the American Supreme Court decided to uphold a federal law that allows states to criminalise a certain form of second-trimester termination. It was the first time judges have agreed that a specific abortion procedure could be banned and the first time that they have approved an abortion restriction that does not contain an exception for the health of the woman (although there is an exception to save the woman's life).

    Justice Anthony M Kennedy announced the decision before a hushed chamber. While it did not overturn the landmark Roe v Wade legislation which effectively made abortion legal in America in 1973, the ruling marked an unmistakable shift in favour of the rights of the unborn foetus over the rights of the woman. For America's vocal and powerful pro-life movement it was a moment for celebration. For the beleaguered pro-choice contingent this was yet another example of how the rights of women to access safe abortion in America are being whittled away.

    One member of the Supreme Court was particularly incensed. The only woman on the bench, 74-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg was so angry she was driven to speak out. A deceptively frail-looking woman, she was simmering with rage and steely reason.

    'The court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety,' she retaliated. 'The protection of reproductive rights is about a woman's autonomy to decide for herself her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature ... This way of protecting women recalls ancient notions about women's place in society.... ideas that have long been discredited.'

    Trenchant words from a lawyer who has spent her life campaigning for equal rights for women under the law and who once hid one of her own pregnancies under loose legal clothes for fear of damaging her career. Words, however, that could do nothing to overturn the judgment.

    While the arguments may differ across America, one fact is clear: women's access to abortion in the United States is diminishing. Last month a storage company in New York - one of the few pro-choice states left in the country - even made a bleakly comic joke out of it. A new billboard campaign on the corner of 44th Street and Twelfth Avenue shows a picture of a coat hanger next to the words 'Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose'.

    For the last 10 years the pro-life lobby has been winning over the cultural and political establishment. She may still be essentially pro-choice but writing in the New Republic the feminist Naomi Wolf surprised many by her use of language when she suggested 'the abortion-rights movement [must be] willing publicly to mourn the evil - necessary evil though it might be - that is abortion'. Campaigners have lamented that this year's blockbuster comedy Knocked Up about a woman who gets pregnant on a one-night stand barely mentions abortion as an option and in the one scene that it is referred to it is euphemistically called the 'A' word. Even Democrats are nervous about speaking out in favour. Last year Hillary Clinton called abortion a 'sad, even tragic choice'.

    Gloria Feldt has spent most of her career battling for the pro-choice side, a position which has meant pickets outside her house and death threats from the opposition. The former chair of Planned Parenthood, she describes 'the Gonzales v Carhart decision like a bungee snapping me back to 1950s west Texas where, as a girl, I absorbed the culture's non-aspirations for women'.

    She tells me: 'Gonzales v Carhart marks a seismic shift and one that has not been well recognised. It is basically saying that a woman's health is no longer relevant. For the first time it gives more rights to the foetus than to the woman.'

    Most states now allow abortion only up to 13 weeks. Some have imposed mandatory 'cooling-off' periods before the termination can take place, some have laws that require women under 18 to have parental consent. In some areas women are required to undergo an information session during which they will be warned about the possible psychological damage they could suffer, or told the foetus might suffer pain. Should a woman decide to go ahead she must pay around $400 for the procedure.

    'These incremental changes to the abortion law have played games with people's minds,' says Feldt. 'You can see people thinking "One more little objection. What can it hurt? Women can still get abortions." The problem is that each restriction on access doesn't seem to impact on the lives of real human beings - until it's you.'

    A few months ago Feldt received a call from a Catholic priest. He was anxious to talk to her about better sex education. Two parents in his parish had recently come to visit him. Unbeknown to them, their 14-year-old daughter had got pregnant and had been told by the legal authorities that she must tell her parents if she wanted to go ahead with an abortion. Instead she had found someone who could do the procedure illegally. She died.  Read on...

    Thursday 04 October 2007

    Washington - When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

    But soon after Alberto Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

    The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

    Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on "combined effects" over the objections of James Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion's overreaching legal reasoning, Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be "ashamed" when the world eventually learned of it.

    Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the CIA interrogation methods violated that standard.

    The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President George W. Bush's second term and Gonzales's tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

    Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

    A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Fratto added, "We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law" and international agreements.

    More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the CIA detention operations they govern.

    When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was "a place of inspiration" that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

    Associates at the Justice Department said Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David Addington, Cheney's counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department's independence.

    The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and detention policies at congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office's tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

    Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government's most authoritative interpreter of the law. "In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out," he said in an interview. "The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn't like the advice being given."

    The debate over how terrorism suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

    The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Gonzales and Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

    After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, Bush for the first time acknowledged the CIA's secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guant‡namo Bay, Cuba. The CIA halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner's cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

    But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls "enhanced" interrogation techniques - the details remain secret - and officials say the CIA again is holding prisoners in "black sites" overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Read More...