Tonight's debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah "Main Street, Wasilla" Palin yielded few fireworks, but Biden did a good job of keeping the focus where it should be -- on John McCain, his miserable voting record and the fact that a McCain presidency would look a lot like the disaster we've seen from George Bush.

Biden: "Past is prologue, Gwen. The issue is how different is John McCain's policy going to be than George Bush's? I haven't heard anything yet. I haven't heard how his policy is going to be different on Iran than George Bush's. I haven't heard how his policy will be different with Israel than George Bush's, I haven't heard how his policy on Afghanistan will be different than George Bush's, I haven't heard how his policy in Pakistan will be different than George Bush's. It may be, but so far, it is the same as George Bush's, and you know where that policy has taken us. We will make significant change, so once again, we're the most respected nation in the world. That's what we're going to do."

    Former CIA third in command and indicted Cunningham bribery scandal co-conspirator Kyle "Dusty" Foggo is threatening to out agents, secret programs and Bush administration skeletons in an attempt to ward of a possible jail sentence on 30 counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.

Prosecutors say Foggo has threatened "to expose the cover of virtually every CIA employee with whom he interacted and to divulge to the world some of our country's most sensitive programs - even though this information has absolutely nothing to do with the charges he faces."

Prosecutors also allege his lawyers are seeking to introduce classified evidence to "portray Foggo as a hero engaged in actions necessary to protect the public from terrorist acts" to gain sympathy from jurors.

Foggo's efforts to disclose classified information are "a thinly disguised attempt to twist this straightforward case into a referendum on the global war on terror," wrote prosecutors Valerie Chu, Jason Forge and Phillip L.B. Halpern in a court motion filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.

The government wants U.S. District Judge James Cacheris to hold a closed hearing on whether the information is admissible at trial and if it is relevant to Foggo's case.

Desperate much? It's amusing to see the Bush administration panic on this one - especially after all their own thinly disguised attempts to make every issue they could think of a "a referendum on the global war on terror". "Dusty" knows where the bodies are buried on everything from Negroponte's South American death squads to Iraq procurement corruption and if he starts singing who knows where it could end.

But what's truly revealing is the way Foggo only believes in national security up until the point where its his own neck on the line. How Republican of him.

And not a peep in the mainstream media, with the exception of this story at CQ Politics.

It’s not easy for me to generate a lot of sympathy for a CIA man involved in a kidnapping, but I feel sorry for Bob Lady.

Lady, many readers will remember, was the CIA’s base chief in Milan, Italy, and nominally in charge of a February 2003 agency operation to snatch an al Qaeda suspect off the city’s streets.

Sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. It was only a few months after we’d been smacked, big time, by al Qaeda killers here.

But the snatch turned into a public relations nightmare two years later when Italian authorities announced they had eyewitnesses and indisputable evidence tying the CIA to the crime.

So last week 26 Americans, most of them CIA employees, went on trial in Milan for kidnapping, albeit in absentia and to little notice here. They are fugitives from justice, with international warrants issued for their arrests.

The central figure in the case has always been “Mr. Bob,” Robert Seldon Lady, a bear-like man with a pasha’s grin who spent a lifetime in the CIA.

He and his wife loved Italy so much they bought a house in the foothills of the Alps and retired there in 2004.

Months later an urgent call came, warning Lady to get out of Dodge — don’t even pack.

The cops were on their way.

Tipped off, the Ladys successfully fled the country. But they left behind a bonanza of evidence in their dream home, not the least of which was a CIA surveillance photo of the kidnap victim, Osama Mustafa Hasan Nasr, known as Abu Omar.

How dumb can you get? Sometimes it seems the CIA’s ineptitude knows no bounds. Read on...

You can't write stuff like this. The little guy stuck carrying out the operation (that he objected to) had to flee his home to avoid imprisonment, not to mention lost his wife, and all their property in Italy may go to Omar as restitution for his rendition. Don't get me wrong, he did the rendition, but the station chief who conceived of the plan got a minor "rap on the knuckles" and is now being groomed to take over the New York City office. And the CIA abandoned Lady, disowning him as an employee and refusing to assist him in any way.

So, as with Abu Ghraib, the accountability begins and ends with the least powerful and never makes it up to the top decision makers.

CIA Director Michael Hayden appeared on Meet The Press this morning and explained to Tim Russert that he has recently urged his CIA employees to buy liability insurance in order to protect them against any lawsuits that may challenge the legality of their legal acts. Got that? Yea, me neither.

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The Associated Press has more. It's pretty clear that the CIA just wants to cover it's ass once the DoJ comes to the conclusion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" really just means "illegal torture." It's a shame that the CIA, who really does (for better or worse) important work around the world, is put in such a precarious situation by this lawless administration.

CNN's Ed Henry talks about the Keane/Hamilton op-ed and Jeffrey Toobin discusses the new criminal probe of the destroyed CIA tapes led by John Durham.

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Toobin: It's a big deal because particularly when you assign one prosecutor to investigate one case, it takes a long time....but the Bush administration is certainly in for the remainder of its tenure dealing with subpoenas, grand jury testimony about a very difficult subject.

OK, who thinks David Addington has more to do with this than has been previously reported? I'm just saying that because he's been behind so much garbage as Cheney's right hand man....Here's a little more on Durham.

  CNN:

The CIA asked the Justice Department to investigate whether former operative John Kiriakou illegally disclosed classified information when he talked about the waterboarding of a terrorism suspect, government officials say.

That revelation has prompted new calls for investigations on Capitol Hill.

The Bush administration appeared in U.S. District Court on Friday to answer a judge's questions about the tapes' destruction.

Speaking to CNN last week, Kiriakou said that U.S. interrogators drew valuable information from al Qaeda captive Abu Zubayda by "waterboarding" him. But Kiriakou said the procedure amounts to torture and should be stopped. Read on...

Certainly took them long enough to come after Kiriakou.  Whenever others have come out with information that is damaging to the administration, the smears start almost immediately.   Larry Johnson points out that Kiriakou never actually witnessed waterboarding, but just a sweet face to make the idea that we've waterboarded palatable.  So as that useful tool for the Bush administration, I don't know that anything will come of this investigation.

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 Dan Abrams discusses the scrambling the Bush administration is now doing after a judge ordered a hearing on the destroyed CIA tapes and formerly reliable supporters like Rep. Pete Hoesktra have signaled that they may have gone too far this time and will have to face the music.  

On a side note, can I get a W00t! for Abrams' line up?  When was the last time you saw two smart, progressive pundits up against a single conservative?   

This token Christian has to say it...thank God for the ACLU. (Yes, I mean that, Bill-O.)

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a motion asking a federal judge to hold the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in contempt, charging that the agency flouted a court order when it destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the harsh interrogation of prisoners in its custody....

“The interrogation techniques employed by our government raise fundamental questions of human rights and decency,” said Arthur Eisenberg, New York Civil Liberties Union Legal Director. “The CIA cannot avoid those questions by simply destroying the evidence.” Read more...

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Where to begin? There's so much hackery in one four minute segment. But you do have to hand it to the FOXNews Sunday panel for their expertise in turning the news of the destroyed CIA tapes into a bipartisan scandal--note Brit Hume's insertion--absent any proof or confirmation--that it was Democratic members who wanted to know if the waterboarding was severe enough. But once again, it's William "The Bloody" Kristol who wins the hypocrite award, by just a few minutes earlier questioning the CIA's credibility and/or ability to gather intelligence on Iran's nuclear program saying and then declaring that we should just trust the CIA that destroying the tapes was in the interest of national security. Oy.

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Bob Schieffer's commentary on today's Face The Nation looks at the growing CIA torture tape scandal and notes Edward R. Murrow's belief that sometimes it's not our actions that do the most damage, it's the message we send when we act inappropriately that can truly do the most harm.

Schieffer: "Is THAT our message to the world? That we are a government of laws except when it is inconvenient? If so, then what was done in the name of security has greatly harmed security. Weapons keep our enemies at bay, but our real security risks are whether the rest of the world comes to share our values, or the values of those who oppose us."

Cenk from TYT wants to know if maybe the CIA destroyed them too.

Given the last seven years, expectations are already low for the administration that’s never seen justice it didn’t want to obstruct. But intentionally destroying evidence of a possible crime, in the midst of ongoing legal inquiries, suggests the Bush gang’s contempt for the rule of law can’t get much worse.

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said. [...]

The destruction of the tapes raises questions about whether agency officials withheld information from Congress, the courts and the Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program.

Indeed, it arguably does more than just “raise questions”; it may point to actual criminal wrongdoing, intended to cover up more criminal wrongdoing. As Sullivan put it, “What defines [a banana] republic? How about an executive that ignores the rule of law, commits war-crimes and then destroys the actual evidence? … We live in a country where the government can detain indefinitely, torture in secret, and then secretly destroy the tapes of torture sessions to protect its own staff.”

Time for the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation? Marcy Wheeler explains: "AG Mukasey has a mighty big headache on his hands, a clear case of obstruction of justice involving Goss and a bunch of other people. I guess we won't have long to wait to see whether he's willing to spike investigations for the Unitary Executive."

This clip from Tuesday's "Tucker" will get your blood boiling before he even finishes the setup. Tucker discusses the ACLU's recent lawsuit on behalf of three victims of the U.S. government's extraordinary rendition program with the Hill's A.B. Stoddard and L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks. The ever-whiny Carlson attempts to meld the ACLU with the Democrats and suggests that their lawsuit makes the left appear soft on terror, but Brooks shreds his talking points, one by one.  Tucker's ratings aren't as bad as Glenn Beck's, but it's still a mystery why MSNBC keeps him around.

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BBC:

Twenty-six Americans and six Italians are accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect and sending him to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured.The Americans - most believed to be CIA agents - will be tried in absentia. Italy has not announced if it will seek their extradition to the Milan trial.

US President George W Bush will arrive in Italy hours after the trial opens.[..]

Italy's government has asked the country's highest court to set aside the rendition trial, saying prosecution documents will break state secrecy laws and damage relations with the CIA.[..]

One of the surprise witnesses in the case will be Philip Morse - one of the minority owners of the US baseball team the Boston Red Sox, says the BBC's Christian Fraser in Rome.

It is alleged that his Gulfstream jet was used by the CIA to fly Abu Omar out of Italy, says our correspondent.

 I just cracked it open, but Jonathan Schwarz has been reading it and finds:

"Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. "Not much, if anything," Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book"

So why, then, would WINPAC report that Iraq had WMD? Here's the answer (p. 119):

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: "If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so." The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded...read on