The WaPo is scouring the business world looking for the perfect talent to lead the failing company. Today, they announced they’ve hired the guy who drovem GM into the ditch to its board.

Rick Wagoner, who was fired as chief executive of General Motors by the White House, has been elected to The Washington Post Co.’s board of directors, increasing the board to 11 members, the education and media company said today.

The Post Co.’s release says that Wagoner “retired from General Motors Corporation in August 2009,” but the White House acknowledged that it forced Wagoner to step down two months before the struggling automaker was forced to declare bankruptcy, following a $51 billion government bailout. As part of the bankruptcy, the federal government took a 61 percent stake in GM, which it still holds. GM plans an IPO in coming months to pay back the taxpayer money.

Because just about the only people with more expertise in dying industries than news executives are automotive ones.

Teddy wants to know, though, whether this makes Newsweek Pontiac.

The lawyers for the plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial had a conference call to preview what they will say in next week’s closing arguments (which Teddy, bmaz, and I will cover from the courthouse).

The most interesting response from the legal team came in response to questions about the defendants’ complaints about having a trial and their efforts to withdraw almost all of their “expert” witness testimony.

In response to that question, David Boies engaged in a bit of trash-talk, noting how much of their witnesses’ testimony either contradicted itself or ended up endorsing key claims made by the plaintiffs.

Boycotting a trial almost never a winning strategy. They identified 8 experts. What happened is that their experts broke down, either at deposition or at trial. They tried to come up with the evidence, they knew they were required to come up with evidence. They tried to build that trial record and they simply failed. They didn’t fail because they’re bad lawyers, they failed because there isn’t any evidence to support the argument they’re advocating.

Ted Olson answered the question, first of all, noting that the defendants’ witnesses couldn’t hold up under Boies’ cross-examination. But he also emphasized the audacity of spending tens of millions of dollars to convince Californians to deprive a class of people of a fundamental right, but then saying they didn’t want to defend the same arguments in an independent court of law.

With respect to their complaints about the trial, I find it ironic that people that spent $40 million dollars to pass Prop 8 suddenly didn’t want to defend it when David Boies was going to challenge their witnesses. … Trials are pursuits of justice. That is how we resolve things in this country, particularly when there’s a constitutional matter. So for the proponents of Prop 8 who convinced millions of Californians, to take away rights of portion of Californians. To say, “We don’t want to defend what we did in trial of independent American judiciary” is audacious, is the best thing I can say about it.

But the discussion was perhaps presented most simply when Boies explained the value of getting the defendants’ witnesses to agree with key aspects of the plaintiffs’ arguments over the course of the trial. Boies noted that the trial record demonstrates as “a matter of fact” that there is no harm to heterosexual marriage from permitting gay men and lesbians to marry.

As you’ve likely heard, the Chamber of Commerce has officially endorsed government welfare to limit corporate risk. (Again.)

The head of the United States Chamber of Commerce said Friday that his group is not yet lobbying against legislative efforts to raise BP’s liability cap, viewing the issue as not yet “ripe.”

He signaled, however, that his group would figure out a way to get the government to share in the cost of cleaning up the Gulf Coast.

“It is generally not the practice of this country to change the laws after the game,” said Tom Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “. . . Everybody is going to contribute to this clean up. We are all going to have to do it.  We are going to have to get the money from the government and from the companies and we will figure out a way to do that.” [my emphasis]

And like an obedient orange puppy, John Boehner has embraced the Chamber’s call for government welfare for corporations.

I do agree with Steve Benen that the Republican (and Mary Landrieu) embrace of big oil ahead of taxpayers ought to be a game changer.

But I’d also like to note how, um, opportunistic the Chamber is with its insistence that “it is generally not the practice of this country to change the laws after the game.” This is what the Chamber wrote to pressure the House to support a FISA amendment that invalidated a law holding telecoms liable for illegal wiretapping of private citizens.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation representing more than three million businesses and organizations of every size, sector, and region, strongly supports S. 2248, the “FISA Amendments Act of 2007,” as passed by the Senate on February 12, 2008. The Chamber believes that this bill, in its current form, provides necessary, appropriate, and targeted relief commensurate with the threat to national security that arose in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

The Chamber represents companies across various industries which own or operate vital components of the nation’s critical physical, virtual, and economic infrastructures. The federal government continually depends upon such industries for cooperation and assistance in national security matters, including homeland security programs and activities. The government also turns to these companies in times of crisis, when the speed, agility, and creativity of the private sector can be critical to averting a terrorist attack.

Therefore, the Chamber urges the House to consider S. 2248 and pass this bipartisan compromise legislation. The Chamber firmly believes that the immunity provisions in S. 2248 are imperative to preserving the self-sustaining “public-private partnership” that both Congress and the Executive Branch have sought to protect the United States in the post-September 11 world. [my emphasis]

Of course, the Chamber is being utterly consistent on one point. That’s in lobbying to make sure big corporations never pay for the negative consequences–be they legal or financial–of their actions.

I’m going to have more to say about James Clapper’s nomination to be Director of National Intelligence. But for now I want to point out similarities between how the Administration’s treated that nomination and its involvement in primaries.

Two things make James Clapper’s nomination anything but a done deal.

Most important to us little people is Clapper’s certainty in 2003 that we hadn’t found Iraqi WMD because Saddam managed to move all of them to Syria before US troops secured them.

The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq’s illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ”unquestionably” had been moved out of Iraq.

”I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse,” General Clapper, who leads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said at a breakfast with reporters.

Obama wants a man with a history of not questioning his own assumptions to take on a position invented, at least partly, to make sure the intelligence community questions its assumptions to prevent failures like 9/11 and the Iraq War.

The more important problem to the Senate Intelligence Committee–that is, to those with a vote on the matter–is that Clapper has a history of advocating for continued strong military control over intelligence functions, a view that puts him at odds with Dianne Feinstein and Kit Bond and others on SSCI. As Josh Rogin reports,

Yesterday, we reported that the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee were resisting the nomination of James Clapper to become the next director of national intelligence because he had argued in an April 28 memo against strengthening that very position.

Today, we have obtained a copy of the memo (pdf), which is entitled, “Discussion Draft: Provisions for FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Act that would expand DNI authorities over leadership and management of DOD’s intelligence components.”

The paper, written by Clapper’s staff, but not signed by Clapper himself, spells out 17 concerns that the Pentagon apparently had with the intelligence policy bill making its way through Congress. It’s clearly an attempt to defend the secretary of defense’s authority over defense intelligence agencies against what the memo’s writers see as encroachment by the Office of the DNI.

[snip]

The administration sees Feinstein’s and Bond’s objections as part of their overall push for greater committee jurisdiction over defense department assets. For their part, Hill sources lament that Clapper’s memo seemed to be criticizing a bill that they thought had already been negotiated with the administration.

Regardless, Feinstein said she won’t move the nomination until her bill gets passed and her concerns are addressed. She meets with Clapper this week.

Read the whole Rogin post–and his earlier post on it–to understand why this is not just about a difference of opinion on the role of DNI and DOD in intelligence, but also about the Administration’s ongoing reluctance to allow Congress to exercise full oversight of the intelligence community.

The point is, the folks who need to approve Clapper’s nomination are none too thrilled about him and it will be very easy to spin a narrative about why he’s the wrong person for the job.

Clapper, having learned the lesson of Dawn Johnsen, refused to agree to the Administration’s request that he resign from his current position before being nominated.

The White House asked Director of Defense Intelligence James Clapper to step down from his job before nominating him as DNI, in order to help allay concerns about his military background. But Clapper politely refused. He does not want to be out of a job if his confirmation hearing doesn’t go well.

Clapper may have once believed in the tooth fairy and Iraqi WMDs in Syria, but he also may have a more realistic view of his chances than the Administration.

All of which is to say that the Administration picked a guy for a Senate-confirmed position while ignoring the strong possibility that the Senate really didn’t want to confirm him. Ambinder explains why the Administration settled on Clapper in spite of SSCI’s dislike for him as a candidate.

Not only was SecDef Robert Gates happy with Clapper’s appointment, he recommended Clapper after Obama’s preferred candidates, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel, passed on the job.

That is, Obama picked Clapper because no one else–the better candidates–would do the job.

But let’s recall how we got here. Clapper got nominated to be DNI because Obama ousted Dennis Blair some weeks back. There were definitely tensions between Blair and the Administration. But just as importantly, Blair served as a scapegoat for what was billed (rightly or wrongly) as an intelligence failure to prevent the Christmas Day undie-bomber attack. But remember–Blair wasn’t even the most appropriate person to pay for that failure; National Counterintelligence Center Director Michael Leiter was.

Now, several people–like Marc Ambinder and Jeff Stein–seem to think National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter should be the one canned over this report (and that’s even before you consider that Leiter went on vacation right after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempted attack).

But Obama apparently wanted a big scapegoat, and rather than fix some inherent problems with the DNI position first, he decided to just get rid of Blair in hopes that a new, better DNI could fix those inherent problems.

Problem was, the Administration didn’t do the work of finding an acceptable replacement before chasing Blair out. It hadn’t, apparently, gotten agreement from the better candidates to take the job, and it clearly hadn’t gotten buy-in from even DiFi–Chair of the Committee that will handle the nomination–before picking a candidate she didn’t like.

That’s sort of like spiking the ball in the endzone to celebrate Blanche Lincoln’s runoff win (in spite of her crappy general election poll numbers), while ignoring all the money wasted on Ed Case’s and Arlen Specter’s electoral campaigns. Or, closer to my home, it’s like chasing John Cherry out of the primary to be Governor of MI, without first making sure we had a top-tier candidate to replace him (yeah, I’m increasingly worried that MI will elect Governor Crazy Pete this year).

Obama’s pick of James Clapper to be DNI is yet another example of the Administration assuming–without listening to the people on the ground, without talking to people with real equity and experience on the matter–that it knows best. Add in the fact that the Clapper nomination is also being rolled into the dispute between the Administration and Congress on real oversight of the intelligence community.

That’s not a surprise, mind you. Perhaps the biggest single weakness of the Obama Administration is that its members are just as certain of their own correctness as James Clapper was once certain that Iraq’s WMD were in Syria. So they’re none too good at doing things like arranging for a Plan B or consulting with those who know best before launching a plan.

But I did think it worthwhile to point out that they’re doing this both at the electoral level and with their nominations.

Anyone want to bet that Rahm Emanuel will be more incensed that AT&T made his Gmail address vulnerable than about the illegal wiretapping the telecom did for Dick Cheney?

Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the wireless-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s information was compromised.

And you think the generals and NYT’s overpaid CEO are gonna be a little miffed by the possibility that their data was compromised?

Thing is, AT&T is a shitty company. They’re a shitty company when they don’t take precautions to protect customer data. And they’re a shitty company when they agree to continue a lucrative wiretap program without even demanding proof that the Attorney General approved the program.

I just hope this stupid data compromise makes the MOTUs with their 3G iPads think a little bit about all the ways AT&T sucks.

I’m not in the least surprised by the LAT report that Obama is trying to come up with a compromise plan that would allow it to use Bagram as its terrorist prison even after it hands over the prison to the Afghans.

The Obama administration wants to retain the ability to hold terrorism suspects from other countries at its largest prison in Afghanistan, even after it hands control of the facility to the Afghan government next year, according to U.S. officials.

If Afghan officials agree, it would give the administration a place to interrogate terrorism suspects captured in countries such as Somalia or Yemen. President Obama made a high-profile pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after taking office last year. But that would leave the administration without a lockup for those suspected of plotting attacks against the United States.

It’s how story describes the thought process by which existing options cannot be used.

Despite the insistence that no final decision has been made on Bagram, officials note that other options for holding terrorism suspects are being cut off.

The current version of the Defense authorization bill, a spending plan that has been approved by the House of Representatives and is being debated by the Senate, restricts the Obama administration from renovating a state prison in Illinois to hold detainees from Guantanamo.

Although primarily intended to hold such detainees, the prison in Thomson, Ill., also could have been used to hold other non-American terrorism suspects.

[snip]

Senior Defense officials have expressed frustration that the U.S. lacks an overseas prison where new terrorism suspects can be held. Some Defense officials believe the U.S. is often pushed into trying to kill militants, instead of attempting to capture and question them. Some detainees can be held by friendly governments in the countries in which they are captured. But in such situations, American interrogators do not have control of the suspects.

Note all the assumptions here: that the US needs a “special” prison, distinct from the prisons where the US is already holding and questioning terrorist detainees like the undie-bomber and Faisal Shahzad. That, in turn, suggests both that they envision questioning people who might not meet US standards for arrest and that they may not want to give these detainees any rights.

Also according to the article, the Administration also believes it needs to hold these detainees in custody themselves, rather than have allies hold them. In cases like Egypt and Jordan, where detention by allies may amount to torture, I’m fine with the distinction. But the need to hold detainees directly also suggests a need for total control of detainees.

And so, as a result, we’re actually entertaining a granting Afghanistan a false sovereignty, where we give them their prisons back, but still use them as the US prison colony.

I’m sure doing so wouldn’t contribute at all to discrediting the Karzai government and/or inflaming Islamic extremism in the country. Really.

A bunch of hippie members of Congress noticed the same thing about Obama’s BP Commission that I noticed: it lacks subpoena power.

So Lois Capps and Ed Markey in the House and Jeanne Shaheen and several of her colleagues are pushing legislation to give the Commission subpoena power.

U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), along with nine Senate colleagues, today introduced legislation to grant subpoena power to the bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, which President Obama created by executive order on May 22.  Congress has previously granted subpoena power to presidential commissions investigating national crises, including the Warren Commission and the Three Mile Island Commission.  Joining Shaheen on this legislation are Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Patty Murray (D-WA), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Bob Casey (D-PA),  Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Begich (D-AK), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The Senators strongly believe that the BP Commission must have subpoena power to ensure access to all the evidence it needs to undertake a complete investigation on the causes of the spill and make meaningful recommendations on how to prevent similar disasters. Today, Representatives Lois Capps (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) plan to introduce similar legislation in the House.

Here’s the House version of the bill.

Now, I’ve actually been told that Obama, by himself, couldn’t give the commission subpoena power–I’m trying to clarify that.

I’m still not entirely convinced this won’t be a whitewash designed to enable future drilling in any case. But subpoena power sure would help.

Twenty-some years after one of the biggest industrial disasters in history, seven former Union Carbide executives have been sentenced to a few years in jail.

A court in central India ruled Monday that seven top executives and the company they worked for are guilty for their role in the 1984 industrial disaster that killed thousands in Bhopal, India.The leaking of poisonous gas from Union Carbide India Limited — the now-defunct local subsidiary of the American chemical company — was one of the world’s worst industrial disasters. Plaintiffs had waited more than two decades for the verdict.

The convicted former employees have been sentenced to the maximum punishment allowed in the case. The judge imposed a two-year prison term and a fine of about $2,000 each after convicting the men of negligence causing death, endangering public life and causing hurt.

While I’m happy that a handful of people will finally pay, however inadequate a price, I’m more interested in this because of the timing.

After Bhopal and a smaller–but still devastating–Union Carbide accident in West Virginia, the US passed regulations on similar volatile processes. During the 1990s, paper mills and chemical plants and oil refineries implemented new processes to make their plants safer for workers. But it didn’t take long for OHSA to back off of big fines. So by the time BP’s Texas City refinery disaster, some oil companies were already calculating that accidents would be less onerous than complying with the regulations passed in response to the Bhopal disaster.

The regulations passed in response to Bhopal specifically exempted drilling activities; those weren’t the regulations BP took lightly in the lead-up to the disaster.

But the treatment of BP’s violation of them at Texas City did contribute to the disaster. As bmaz has written, BP was already a corporate convict because of its past indifference to safety and regulations. Yet that didn’t prevent BP from having the opportunity to gamble with the entire ecosystem of the Gulf so it could profit.

I’m glad Union Carbide execs will finally see some prison time. But it’s not enough to hold executives accountable 26 years after huge disasters. We need to get more serious about holding corporations–and corporate executives–accountable for their crimes.

Oil and gas may be leaking from the seabed surrounding the BP Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida told Andrea Mitchell today on MSNBC. Nelson, one of the most informed and diligent Congressmen on the BP gulf oil spill issue, has received reports of leaks in the well, located in the Mississippi Canyon sector. This is potentially huge and devastating news.

If Nelson is correct in that assertion, and he is smart enough to not make such assertions lightly, so I think they must be taken at face value, it means the well casing and well bore are compromised and the gig is up on containment pending a completely effective attempt to seal the well from the bottom via successful “relief wells”. In fact, I have confirmed with Senator Nelson’s office that they are fully aware of the breaking news and significance of what the Senator said to Andrea Mitchell.

Furthermore, contrary to the happy talk propounded by BP, the Obama Administration and the press, the likely success of the “relief well” effort on the first try in August is nowhere near a certainty; and certainly nowhere near the certainty it is being painted as.

About five days ago, I responded to someone in comments with the following:

Yeah, but I am absolutely convinced there is such a lack of integrity, from pretty much top to bottom, of the well that totally plugging it at the top just creates the blowout of whatever remaining seal they have with the cement at the wellhead. I believe they have a total clusterfuck in about every regard and are just not admitting it:

1) BP used, if not substandard, then very close to it, casing that under the circumstances was inappropriate. It is fragile.

2) They did not install somehow or another at least one major casing segment seal, and the remaining seals are now either completely blown out or on their way to it and as a result oil and gas flow is not only coming up the inside of the casing, but the outside of the casing between the casing and well bore walls in the rock.

3) BP specified a light and fluffy cement and, additionally, there may be significant breaches and voids making the cement job weak and disintegrating.

4) Even at best, the cement is in the upper depths of the well bore where the natural geologic rock structure is the loosest, weakest, most porous and fragile (hell some of it may effectively be silt). The oil and gas, which has a natural well pressure of 12,000 or so psi is going to erode and corrode through and around the cement and the porous well bore rock.

5) Being attached to the Deepwater Horizon rig by the riser, and perhaps drill string too, when all hell broke loose and it exploded, shifted and sank, it put various pressures and forces through attachment to the BOP in turn attached on the well casing head. This action may have kind of reamed out and loosened that whole situation making it even looser and more susceptible to 2 and 4 above.

6) The BOP, to the extent it had restrictions present initially, has now been eroded and reamed out by the long term flow of gas and oil upwards and then the caustic flow of drilling mud the other direction from the attempted Top Kill. It is totally fucked way worse than it even was initially.

7) The reservoir of oil in Macondo is way larger than most anybody realizes and certainly bigger than BP will admit. It is a huge mother lode. Could flow forever.

8) Did I mention that the natural well pressure may be as high as 12,000 psi??

The Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf States and all of us are totally fucked.

As Sir Richard Mottram famously said:

We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole [thing] is fucked. It’s the biggest cock-up ever. We’re all completely fucked.

I may have been uncomfortably close to the mark. And the quote from Sir Richard Mottram was dead on the money; if Senator Nelson is correct about the breach of fundamental well integrity, the game is close to over for the Gulf of Mexico. We shall see where this goes from Nelson’s initial comment. But make no mistake, Nelson is a careful guy not prone to overt hyperbole, and he clearly understood the ramifications of what he was saying.

It also means, of course, that BP and the Obama Administrations continue to give the American public short shrift in the truth and honesty departments. How surprising.

As MadDog noted, Judicial Watch just got some new documents detailing briefings Congress received. Or rather, they got new documents providing further proof that CIA has no fucking clue what it said to Congress during some key briefings (this batch shows, for example, that the fall 2003 briefings were never finalized into a Memo for the Record, just as earlier ones weren’t, and PDF 48 shows that many key briefings weren’t recorded).

But in what I’ve reviewed so far, the new documents reveal one important new detail. Page 44 of this PDF provides a mostly redacted record of the briefing CIA gave Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi on Abu Zubaydah’s torture on September 4, 2002. We know–because both Goss and Pelosi have described this detail the same way–that CIA did not tell the House Intelligence leadership that it had already tortured Abu Zubaydah. CIA told Goss and Pelosi about waterboarding, but spoke of it as a technique that might hypothetically be used in the future, not something that had been used 83 times on one detainee the prior month.

But we haven’t known who gave that badly deceptive briefing. Mind you, I had my suspicions. I thought it likely that Jose Rodriguez, then head of Counterterrorism Center, and the guy who ordered the torture tapes destroyed three years later, was a likely candidate to have done that briefing. But there was no proof.

Until today.

Assuming CIA’s own documentation is accurate (always a big assumption, given the CIA), then Jose Rodriguez–listed as D/CTC–is the one who gave Goss and Pelosi that deceptive briefing.

Jose Rodriguez went on to participate in destroying evidence of torture that should have been briefed to Congress. And these documents prove (again, presuming CIA’s documents are accurate) that Jose Rodriguez was deceiving Congress about torture right from the start.