No this is not a hoax. The indictment was handed down by a South Texas grand jury in Willacy County, the scene of some recent bizarre federal prison projects which have been hounded by serious corruption allegations. AP reports:

A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County’s federal detention centers. The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra’s tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

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What do journalists do when they have no news to report? They focus on speculation about what might happen. Most of the speculation in transition time focuses on candidates in the inside-the-Beltway quadrennial personnel shuffle. And this is politics as usual: rivals usually connive to plant stories about one another, attempting to get a leg up in the competition. The media routinely floats their stories attributed to unnamed sources. But the latest entry in this series is peculiar. AP reports that two unnamed Obama advisors have stated that there will be no war crimes investigations or prosecutions relating to the Bush Administration’s torture policies.

To start with, the AP piece revolves around a question that is almost insulting in the way it is presented. What president would enter office pledging not to prosecute war criminals, or pledging to prosecute figures from the former administration? Any president who did such a thing would not be worthy of holding the nation’s highest office. Prosecutions should not begin or end on a signal transmitted from the White House. The criminal justice system is supposed to be administered in a fashion that stresses detachment from politics. One of the biggest complaints about the last eight years is that the veneer of political detachment has worn very thin. One thing the voters expect of Barack Obama is that he will rebuild the wall that separates the political side of the government from the law-enforcement side. [MORE . . .]

Doctors in Berlin announced that they had cured a man of AIDS by giving him transplanted blood stem cells from a donor naturally resistant to the virus; other researchers cautioned that the treatment was of little immediate use, and justified in this case only because the patient had leukemia. “Frankly,” said Dr. Robert C. Gallo of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, “I'd rather take the medicine.”¹ A German shoplifter with no arms stole a 24-inch television. “It's hard to believe,” said a police officer, “that the sight of an armless man walking along with a giant TV clamped to his body did not get anyone's attention.”² A man in a motorized wheelchair robbed a Space Coast Credit Union branch in Merritt Island, Florida, telling employees that he was rigged with explosives; police caught him ten minutes later and recovered the stolen money from his prosthetic leg.³ Huseyin Kalkan, the mayor of Batman, Turkey, said that the town would sue Warner Bros. for a portion of the royalties from the movie The Dark Knight .“ ”There is,“ said Kalkan, ”only one Batman."⁴ A sixth severed foot washed ashore in Canada,⁵ and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who is expected to sign a $7 million book deal, was asked if she planned to run for president in 2012. “I'm like, okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, Don't let me miss the open door,” she said. “I'll plow through that door.”⁶ The Secret Service assigned official code names to President-elect Barack Obama (“Renegade”), First Lady Michelle Obama (“Renaissance”), and their daughters Malia (“Radiance”) and Sasha (“Rosebud”).^{7 8} In Chicago, a relaxed-looking Obama, who gained 700,000 Facebook friends since his election, met with Senator John McCain, who has lost 1,000 Facebook friends,^{9 10} and astronomers in Canada and the United States, observing the constellations Piscis Austrinus and Pegasus, captured the first images of distant, dusty planets orbiting young, bright stars.¹¹ [MORE . . .]

A bold prediction from James Pethokoukis of U.S. News & World Report (a double major in Soviet politics and American history and 2002 Jeopardy! champion, according to his bio), in a column titled “Why Obama Looks Like a One Termer”:

That’s right, the “O” in “Obama” may stand for “One Term.” For starters, there’s a strong chance that when voters head to the polls on Nov. 2, 2010, they likely will still think the economy is awful. Not much debate about that. (Good chance the Democrats’ two-election winning streak comes to an end.) And while voters may be somewhat patient for two years, patient for four years? Really unlikely. If history is any guide at all, voters may still be terribly cranky about the economy when they cast their ballots on Nov. 6, 2012 and thus likely choose the 45th president of the United States — be it Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal or some other Republican without “Bush” for a last name. Once again a “change” election for an impatient America. The same bad economy that doomed John McCain in 2008 will have sunk Obama, as well.

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Here’s a great investigative story about someone you’ve never heard of, but should know about. From Laura Rozen at Mother Jones:

It’s the story of a man with a habit of popping up, Zelig-like, at the nexus of foreign policy and the kinds of businesses that thrive in times of war—security contracting, infrastructure development and postwar reconstruction, influence and intelligence brokering…The trajectory of Shlomi Michaels is testament not only to one man’s driven intensity, but also to the opportunities the war on terror has presented to those with the information, connections, and ambition to seize them.

Why does Michael B. Mukasey have a portrait of George Orwell hanging in his office? Today I read a document that suggests that the spirit of Orwell–or more precisely Orwell’s nightmare–is indeed alive at the Department of Justice. Last week a whistleblower leaked a series of highly incriminating documents about the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman. The documents showed that aggressive claims made by the U.S. Attorney who brought the case–and who is close to Karl Rove–were “less than candid.” Indeed, the documents may be more damaging than that.

These documents should have been turned over to Congress, which issued a subpoena requiring their production. But today we see that notwithstanding the damage done to its credibility by the leaks, the Bush Justice Department is intent on stonewalling Congress for every day of their two remaining months. The problem is that they have no legal basis for denying the subpoena. And this is where Orwell gets useful–and where the soulless bureaucrat that Orwell despised knows just what to do. Craft some senseless lines that sound good and principled but are actually devoid of meaning. In a letter responding to the subpoena, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Keith B. Nelson states: [MORE . . .]

“The frequent references to Max Brod, Prague, insomnia, headache, have not been included in the Index.” So runs the inadvertently hilarious advisory sentence to the index of I Am a Memory Come Alive, a gathering and sequencing of Kafka’s so-called “autobiographical writings” put out by Schocken in 1974. I like a list that takes a friend, a city, a condition, and a pain and, by eliding them, equalizes them. Taken together, the quartet conspires to a kind of story. Throw a conjunction or two in there and you have a thumbnail biography: Max Brod and Prague, but insomnia and headache. [MORE . . .]

Over the last week, the American press has been filled with drip after drip from smug, generally anonymous Bush Administration clones who promise that when Barack Obama is saddled with the responsibilities of government he will “get real” about the threats presented by terrorists at Guantánamo and will tack away from his promise to shut the infamous prison camp down. But in a remarkable interview with CBS’s Sixty Minutes last night, the president-elect made clear that his commitment to clear, affirmative action was unwavering:

I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.

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From the New York Times:

When Dan Rather filed suit against CBS 14 months ago — claiming, among other things, that his former employer had commissioned a politically biased investigation into his work on a “60 Minutes” segment about President Bush’s National Guard service — the network predicted the quick and favorable dismissal of the case, which it derided as “old news.”

So far, Mr. Rather has spent more than $2 million of his own money on the suit. And according to documents filed recently in court, he may be getting something for his money. Using tools unavailable to him as a reporter — including the power of subpoena and the threat of punishment against witnesses who lie under oath — he has unearthed evidence that would seem to support his assertion that CBS intended its investigation, at least in part, to quell Republican criticism of the network.

It looks like Barack Obama has offered Hillary Clinton the post of Secretary of State and she’s mulling over whether to take the job or not. Obama’s apparent offer makes him look magnanimous and delights Hillary Clinton’s former backers, so maybe it’s smart politics. But there are a number of good reasons why Clinton should not be secretary of state. Here are five:

1. Hillary Clinton will have her own agenda (as will her husband). She’s not a team player and will bring in a crew of cronies whose chief aim will be to promote the boss, not the administration. Obama may wake up one day and discover that Hillary has decreed a new “Clinton Doctrine” of foreign policy.

2. It would be impossible, politically, to fire Hillary. No matter what she says or does, or how insubordinate, Obama will be stuck with her as long as she wants to stay.

3. Her husband is a walking conflict of interest. Bill helps a Canadian businessman land a uranium contract in Kazakhstan, and soon afterwards the businessman contributes to the Clinton Foundation. Bill’s personal and business dealings are embarrassing enough without Hillary heading the State Department.

4. The Clinton style of management–for example, pitting one faction of staff against another–would be a disaster at the State Department. Just look at how well it worked on the campaign trail.

5. And the strongest strike of all against Hillary as secretary of state… look at who endorses her.

What makes a bad prosecutor? It’s simple: Does the prosecutor’s longing for the public limelight, his aspirations for public office, come to overwhelm his dedication to justice, to simply doing the right thing? It’s said that a famous chief prosecutor from Dallas, Henry Wade, summed up the thinking that goes into a really bad prosecutor like this: “any prosecutor could convict a guilty man, but… it takes a real pro to convict an innocent man.”

Each year Bob Bennett, a former federal prosecutor who now heads his own litigation firm in Houston, Texas, publishes an invaluable list of the “ten worst prosecutors in the United States.” In the era of Bush, the competition to make the list has grown fierce. Last year, Bennett’s list was a sort of Bush-justice rogues gallery, starting with the world’s worst prosecutor, the disgraced (but still not indicted) former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It’s worth a read. [MORE . . .]

“Michelle Obama’s visits to two private schools and her inquiries about Washington’s public schools have sparked the inevitable public vs. private debate,” the Post said in an editorial today. “We won’t be weighing in because we would never presume to tell any parents where to send their children to school.”

And also because it would be embarrassing to weigh in since so many top people at the Post send their kids to elite private schools like the ones the Obamas are looking at.

The Washington Post had two interesting pieces today about how Washington is responding to the election of Barack Obama. The first said that Obama’s election had “touched off a mini-boom on K Street” and that Democrats who supported him were the primary beneficiaries.

“[Jaime] Harrison helped mobilize voter turnout for Obama in South Carolina, and for the past two years he directed floor operations for House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) — credentials that made him a sought-after addition to firms looking for an edge in a new administration. “I built a lot of strong relationships with members, as well as their staff, and some of my very best friends worked on the campaign,” Harrison said. He will start with the Podesta Group next week.

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In September 2007, I posted “The Remarkable ‘Recusal’ of Leura Canary” reviewing one of the many strange aspects of the Siegelman case. The prosecutor who brought this case is the wife of the most important Republican political consultant in Alabama, Karl Rove’s long-time protege William Canary. As Leura Canary revved up the Siegelman case, William Canary was advising the campaign of Siegelman’s Republican rival. Maybe this is why Alabamans referred to them as the state’s ultimate “power couple.”

Called out on this conflict, Leura Canary recused herself from the case. Or did she? In September 2007, I reviewed the evidence suggesting that the recusal was a sham. And today in a piece by Adam Zagorin TIME magazine raises troubling accusations from one of Canary’s own staffers, who documents in a series of emails that after her “recusal,” Canary continued to manage the prosecution of her husband’s rival. The erstwhile member of the Siegelman prosecution team also documents improper communications by the prosecutors with jurors. All of this is information the Justice Department has known for at least a year and has kept tightly under wraps, suggesting certain questions of obstruction of justice. I offer a look deep inside the Justice Department here.

By one catastrophically limited measure, the best novel of the year is surely Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland—best in that it has generated the most intelligent critical disagreement this year on what a novel is. Add to that productively contumacious environment Zadie Smith’s current piece in the New York Review of Books, a dual review of the O’Neill and the novel Remainder by Tom McCarthy. One of Smith’s theses for the piece: “The two novels are antipodal—indeed one is the strong refusal of the other.” Anyone interested in novels as more than passing entertainments will find Smith’s piece a useful broadening of mind, one with which one can agreeably disagree.

Smith’s is a scrupulously aesthetic reading of the novel. She gives no quarter to content that isn’t about the novel’s novelness. After taxonomizing the book as a “post–September 11 novel,” Smith precises “a post-catastrophe novel but the catastrophe isn’t terror, it’s Realism.” This is a nice argumentative tack for the O’Neill, a book scrupulously aware of its effects, its engagement with what novels do and how–but perhaps not, as Smith argues, as in command of that engagement as that awareness might first suggest. “Everything must be made literary,” Smith argues of O’Neill’s style, one she finds false. For where a number of public readers have seen the novel as an anatomy of 21st century anomie and refined tedium, Smith suspects the highly-accomplished style as helplessly reflecting that corruption. She writes that O’Neill gives all he observes “the high lyrical treatment, in what feels, at its best, like a grim satire on the profound fatuity of twenty-first-century bourgeois existence.” [MORE . . .]

Gene Burns is one of the nation’s most popular talk radio hosts. For years he has dismissed accounts of torture; America, he has said, does not torture. But last night, after watching Torturing Democracy and realizing that he had not understood how important and serious an issue torture had become, Burns abruptly changed his tune. Here’s a transcript of his remarks.

I now believe that some international human rights organization ought to open an investigation of the Bush Administration, I think focused on Vice President Dick Cheney, and attempt to bring charges against Cheney in the international court of justice at The Hague, for war crimes. Based on the manner in which we have treated prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and the manner in which we have engaged in illegal rendition–that is, surreptitiously kidnapping prisoners and flying them to foreign countries where they could be tortured by foreign agents who do not follow the same civilized standards to which we subscribe.

I’ve always said that I’ve thought that even at Guantánamo Bay the United States was careful to stay on this side of torture. In fact, you may recall that on a couple of occasions we got into a spirited debate on this program about waterboarding, and whether waterboarding was torture. And I took the position that it was not torture, that it was simulated drowning, and that if that produced information which preserved our national security, I thought it was permissible.

And then I saw Torturing Democracy.

And I’m afraid, now that I have seen what I have seen, that I was wrong about that. It looks to me, based on this documentary, as if in fact we have engaged in behavior and practices at Guantánamo Bay, and in these illegal renditions, that are violations of the international human rights code.

And I believe that Dick Cheney is responsible. I believe that he was the agent of the United States government charged with developing the methodology used at Guantánamo Bay, supervising it for the administration, and indulging in practices which are in fact violations of human rights.

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The Washington Post reports that the “Obama transition team yesterday rolled out a new list of officials who will help guide the process, singling out the Treasury, Defense and State departments as its first three areas of focus.”

At the helm of the Treasury Department transition team are Josh Gotbaum, an adviser to investment funds who held various Senate-confirmed positions during the Clinton administration, and Michael Warren, chief operating officer of Stonebridge International LLC.

Heading the State team are two veterans of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, both intimately familiar with the people and machinery at Foggy Bottom. Both Thomas E. Donilon, a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, and Wendy R. Sherman, a business partner of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, had senior positions in the Clinton-era State Department.

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As Norm Coleman’s lead shrinks in the Minnesota Senate race (now down to 206 votes over Al Franken) his campaign’s claims of voter fraud have become more and more boisterous. But is there any truth behind the noise?

One story in the Wall Street Journal described how “Minneapolis’s director of elections [forgot] to count 32 absentee ballots in her car. The Coleman campaign scrambled to get a county judge to halt the counting of these absentees, since it was impossible to prove their integrity 72 hours after the polls closed. The judge refused on grounds that she lacked jurisdiction.” [MORE . . .]

The Washington Post ran an article yesterday full of breathless speculation about whom Barack Obama would name to head key intelligence agencies. “The nation’s top two intelligence officers expect to be replaced by President-elect Barack Obama early in his administration, according to senior intelligence officials,” the story said. “A number of influential congressional Democrats oppose keeping Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael V. Hayden in their posts because both have publicly supported controversial Bush Administration policies on interrogation and telephone surveillance. One Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee said there is a “consensus” view on the matter.”

However, said the story, some Democrats and many intelligence experts “give high marks to the current cadre of intelligence leaders, crediting them with restoring stability and professionalism to a community rocked by multiple scandals in recent years.” [MORE . . .]