UPDATED X2: Scroll down for latest updates from Reuters and New York Times.

Daniel Froomkin of the Washington Post just published a special report that takes off on today's AP story by Pamela Hess on the publication by Physicians for Human Rights of a juggernaut report on medical evidence of US torture and its lasting impact (which MeteorBlades prominently covered on the Daily Kos homepage).

The story is blowing up, since AP published its story at midnight Eastern last night, and our own MeteorBlades became the first blogger to cover the breaking news. PHR's report was briefly featured as the top story on CNN's homepage this morning. CNN's "Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer" aired additional coverage from Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr tonight during the 5:00 p.m. Eastern time slot.

Dan Froomkin is one of my favorite columnists in the MSM - in fact, it sometimes seems inappropriate to lump him in with the vast majority of his colleagues.  In today's White House Watch, he speaks with something resembling satisfaction that McClellan's contribution to the NYT's best seller list has resulted in confirming virtually everything he (and most of us) have asserted for years.

I am going to make an unusual request.  Last Friday, the President of the United States admitted that he knew and approved of his National Security Committee holding 'Principals Meetings' where various forms of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were choreographed and authorized.  A 'Principals Meeting' of the National Security Council is the highest level meeting in the U.S. Government.  They are chaired by the National Security Adviser (in this case, Condoleeza Rice, but in prior administrations people like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, and Sandy Berger).  Other attendees usually include the vice-president, the secretaries of State and Defense, the Attorney General, and the CIA Director.  

I don't even know where to begin with this one.  Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post has an article up which contains, in one place, more damning information about Bush and Cheney and the administration's illegal shenanigans immediately following 9/11, including warrantless wiretapping, torture, and lying about, well, just about everything.  There's a far more readable version of it here at Truthout.org.  I'll just start here:

It's a case study in how the Bush administration intimidated the press after 9/11.

The publication of a new book by Eric Lichtblau, one of the two New York Times reporters who in late 2005 broke the story of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program, is calling attention to how the White House successfully persuaded the Times to suppress its expose in the fall of 2004 - when it might have had a profound effect on President Bush's reelection hopes.

That's just the set-up.  It gets better, much better.  

Back on the tird of this month, Froomkin reported that Waxman's committee had been seeking interviews that Fitzgerald and his team had conducted with major White House players when he was investigating the Plame-Wilson outing.
With certain exceptions which the committee agreed to, Fitzgerald agreed to turn those documents over. The exceptions involved Grand-Jury secrecy. Then the Bush League stepped in. The White House, with the connivance of the Department of "Justice," blocked the release of those documnets. They included interviews with Cheney and Bush by FBI agents.
That fact was blogged here when Waxman revealed it and Froomkin printed the story. Froomkin reports that the big news shops have ignored the story. His paper, WaPo, printed a story two days after his original blog and a day after he'd blogged about the inaction.
My Googling (Warning: I'm not so hot at searches) supports that. Has anyone seen the story outside the blogosphere?

So when did Bush know about the NIE?  That's the Big Question right now.  (Okay, it's about the 100th Big Question about this maladministration, but it's the newest, anyway.)  Dan Froomkin has a nice analysis today of recent Bush quotes on Iran that appears to show he knew about it roughly in August.

We see a change of linguistics at about that time that suggests Bush was clued in that something had changed, and that he had better change his language accordingly.

I won't excerpt the whole thing, for the sake of fair use, but I'll just put up some representative statements, and you can go read the whole thing yourself.

When president bush nominated Michael Mukasey to fill the AG vacancy left by the resignation of Alberto Gonzales, the immediate question was, “Will Mukasey pledge to protect the U.S. Constitution, or like Gonzales, blindly defend the administration's deconstruction of the Constitution, claims of new Executive powers, secrecy and torture. “  Now, a looming confrontation between Congress and the administration will put that question to an immediate test.

Many, myself included, have been dubious that president would appoint a true Constitutional defender to the post, given how much he relied on gonzales to blindly defend his administration on tortured legal grounds.  Indeed, during his hearing, Mukasey steadfastly refused to identify waterboarding as torture, signaling that he knew the risks to his potential boss in doing so.

Despite the concerns and questions,  Mukasey won confirmation, in part with the help of Democratic Senators Charles Schumer and Diane Feinstein.  And now Henry Waxman’s House Oversight Committee is about to give him his first real test of where his loyalties truly lie.…..More on the issues involved and what’s at stake below the fold:

Now George W. Bush faces a situation much like Richard Nixon's  predicament during the Watergate Scandal when a Special Prosecutor was demanding the Nixon White House hand over those infamous Oval Office audio tapes. Yesterday a Federal Judge ordered the Bush White House to preserve copys of ALL it's e-mails, sdomething White House lawyers fought tooth and nail.

Judge to White House: Hold E-Mails

The organizations allege the disappearance of 5 million White House e-mails. The court order issued by Kennedy, an appointee of President Clinton, is directed at maintaining backup tapes which contain copies of White House e-mails.

Those computer tapes from the Bush White House are analogous to Nixon's audio tapes of the Oval Office during Watergate.

Will the Bush Crime Family be able destroy or edit it's vast and no doubt incriminating email record? Lets just hope the Federal Courts haven't been packed with too many clones of Justice Ropberts .

Dan Froomkin's latest collumn looks at the Bush White House's frantic efforts to cover it's digital tracks. There's an excerpt from his column below the jump.

You know about the torture.  You know about the extraordinary rendition.  And you know about the faulty case for war in Iraq.

Today we had it all wrapped up in a concise package in a way I had not seen it before.  We see here how torture isn't just something that hypothetically might lead to a shaky conclusion here and a faulty piece of intelligence there.  No, it is directly responsible for specific intelligence that was used to justify the Iraq war.  Colin Powell cited evidence in his little UN PowerPoint presentation that is confirmed to have been not only completely fabricated, but obtained as a direct result of the administration's torture policy.

Dan Froomkin summed it up today in his excellent blog.  If you take nothing else away from this diary (but I think you'll take more), just remember that you should read Froomkin front to back every single day.

In today's column/blog, Dan Froomkin offers an amazing statistic: Since the Iraq war started, Bush has been in Iraq for a total of just 15 HOURS.

Over the course of 5 years, that is 15 HOURS - total -  in-country.

How much time has he spent in Crawford since the war started?  At Camp David?  Riding his mountain bike?  Going to parties?  More than 15 hours?  

Froomkin has the backup:

I saw a diary here recently calling reporter Michael Ware a water carrier, or some sort of bullshit.   The comments were somewhat supportive but there were a few who called bullshit.... and rightfully so.

Thank you, Dan Froomkin

On CNN, Anderson Cooper asked Iraq correspondent Michael Ware for his overall impressions of the speech.

Ware: "Well, Anderson, my first impression is, wow.I mean, it's one thing to return to the status quo, to the situation we had nine months ago, with 130,000 U.S. troops stuck here for the foreseeable future. It's another thing to perpetuate the myth.

It's not often I watch TV "news," if only because I can't stand the advertisements.  I mean, first someone comes on to sell me toothpaste, and then there's this chick who looks like she needs a cheeseburger worse that Bush needs $50 billion, trying to sell me more of Bush's miserable failure.  There's no news on the news, just one lousy product after another.  

But, just to make sure that I'm still wrong about Iran (and, happily, I am), I turned on a TV that was actually connected to the outside world.  And it was very entertaining.  I especially enjoyed watching Mike "rapists go free!" Huckabee, Rudy "Someone blew up my town!" Giuliani, and the rest of the Choc Full 'o Shit Dancing Girls at the Copra Cabana trying to pretend that Bush hadn't just humiliated himself, even by the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations Standards that the spoiled-brat-in-chief has set for himself (standards so low that if you and I joined hands and stepped over them, we'd be married, but only in a small antebellum African-American shanty town on Tee-Vee).  

Dan Froomkin has a must-read article over at the Washington Post today in which he takes the cowardly Dems to task for their appalling failure to stand up to Mr. 25% in passing the so-called "Protect America Act".  His intro is brutally appropriate:

We won't have President Bush to kick around anymore in about 18 months. But until then, Bush has someone he can still kick around: the Democratic Congress. At least when it comes to terror issues.

Despite his 65 percent job-disapproval rating, Bush was able to cow congressional Democrats over the weekend into granting him unprecedented authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

In today's Washington Post, Dan Froomkin has an item in his White House Watch column about the Denver Three (who were thrown out of a 2004 Bush campaign event in Denver because of their anti-Bush bumper sticker).  The item includes a link, courtesy the ACLU, to the White House's official "Presidential Advance Manual."  This is the document that lays out all the steps in preparing for a presidential visit.  The manual became available through a deposition in a separate court case in West Virginia.

Dan Froomkin asks in yesterday's column, "How did such casual lawbreaking come to be so widespread? And why was it tolerated? Those are among the questions the White House has yet to answer satisfactorily."

dKos was filled with disappointment over Monica Goodling's testimony. Those comments downplayed her major admission. She oversaw a political litmus test for Civil-Service assistant US attorneys. (Froomkin noticed. Page down to "Monica Speaks.")
The policy of politicizing the entire government was probably not a surprise to anyone here, but the admission was new.
This is an example of the "unitary executive" principle as originally articulated.
Details after the jump.

If you haven't already, check out this tantalizing column from Dan Froomkin today:

Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has made it clearer than ever that he was hot on the trail of a coordinated campaign to out CIA agent Valerie Plame until that line of investigation was cut off by the repeated lies from Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Dana Milbank didn't entirely mean to do it, but I think today he introduced a new and rather brilliant way to expose absurdity in official statements without having to call it absurdity.