Rachel Maddow talks to Jeremy Scahill about the latest revelations that private military contractors are being used for security services in Haiti and will likely end up getting contracts for reconstruction as well.

MADDOW: A CIA-linked private security contractor called Evergreen Defense and Security Services E-mailed Oregon County elections director offering to provide private for-profit security at every county election office on voting day tomorrow.

Quote, “EDSS proposes to post sentries at each voting center on November 4th to assure that disputes among citizens do not get out of control. All guards will be unarmed but capable of stopping any violence that may occur and detaining troublemakers until law enforcement arrives.”

Do you guys know that Oregon‘s the only vote-by-mail state, right?

You‘re going to post a guard at every mailbox?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

That was last election eve. Today, that same company, Evergreen, is making news again. “Aviation Week” reporting that they are flying a surveillance drone over Haiti. “Wired.com” followed up on that. They were told by the company that it did not, in fact, have any drones in Haiti.

So then, we followed up with the company and they split the difference telling us that the drone was on its way there today and that the drone‘s battery is expected to arrive tomorrow. These are not armed drones or anything. There‘s nothing wrong with this type of equipment being used in surveying and planning relief efforts.

But since Evergreen rang the cookie contractor bell big time with its offer to detain troublemakers on Election Day in a state where people vote by mail, it got us wondering, who else in the contracting world is in Haiti.

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Jeremy Scahill talks to Thom Hartmann about his latest article at The Nation--Blackwater and the Khost Bombing: Is the CIA Deceiving Congress?:

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. "The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence," said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. "Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?"

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And Blackwater's problems in Germany--Germany Launches Probe Into Blackwater/CIA Assassination Plot:

German prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into allegations that a Blackwater-led CIA team conducted a clandestine operation in Hamburg, Germany after 9/11 ultimately aimed at assassinating a German citizen with suspected ties to al Qaeda. The alleged assassination operation was revealed last month in a Vanity Fair profile of Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince.

The magazine reported that after 9/11, the CIA used one of Prince’s homes in Virginia as a covert training facility for hit teams that would hunt al Qaeda suspects globally. Their job was find, fix, and finish: “Find the designated target, fix the person’s routine, and, if necessary, finish him off.”

According to Vanity Fair, one of the team’s targets was Mamoun Darkazanli, a naturalized German citizen originally from Syria. Darkazanli has been accused by Spain of being an al Qaeda supporter with close ties to the alleged 9/11 plotters who lived in Hamburg. The Blackwater/C.I.A. team “supposedly went in ‘dark,’ meaning they did not notify their own station—much less the German government—of their presence,” according to Vanity Fair. “[T]hey then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down.” Authorities in Washington, however, “chose not to pull the trigger.”

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From Democracy Now--“Blackwatergate”–Private Military Firm in Firestorm of Controversy over Involvements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany:

Blackwater is all over the news. In the last seventy-two hours, a series of breaking developments involving the notorious private military firm have come to light, ranging from their involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even Germany, as well as legal cases here at home. We speak with investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, who is launching an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Blackwater is all over the news. In the last seventy-two hours, a series of breaking developments involving the notorious private military firm have come to light, ranging from their involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even Germany, as well as legal cases here at home.

In the latest news, two former Blackwater operatives were arrested yesterday on murder charges stemming from their alleged involvement in the shooting deaths of two Afghan civilians in Kabul in May.

The news broke just hours after it was revealed Blackwater had reached a settlement with Iraqi victims of a string of shootings, including the Nisoor Square massacre, who had sued the company for what they called “senseless slaughter.” Blackwater is reportedly paying $100,000 for each of the Iraqis killed by its forces and between $20,000 to $30,000 to each Iraqi wounded. News of the settlement came a week after a federal judge dismissed manslaughter charges against five Blackwater operatives involved in the Nisoor Square massacre that killed seventeen Iraqi civilians.

Then, on Wednesday, prosecutors in Germany announced they had launched a preliminary investigation into a report that the CIA and Blackwater had planned a secret operation in 2004 to assassinate a German citizen in Hamburg with suspected ties to al-Qaeda.

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Rachel Maddow talks to Jeremy Scahill about what role Blackwater a.k.a. Xe is still performing for our government after the recent revelations that there were Blackwater contractors present during the recent bombing attack on the C.I.A in Afghanistan.

Jeremy Scahill has more in his article at The Nation--Blackwater and the Khost Bombing: Is the CIA Deceiving Congress?:

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. "The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence," said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. "Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?"

In December, the CIA announced that the agency had canceled its contract with Blackwater to work on the agency's drone bombing campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan and said Director Leon Panetta ordered a review of all existing CIA contracts with Blackwater. "At this time, Blackwater is not involved in any CIA operations other than in a security or support role," CIA spokesman George Little said December 11.

But Schakowsky said the fact that two Blackwater personnel were in such close proximity to the December 30 suicide bomber--an alleged double agent, who was reportedly meeting with CIA agents including the agency's second-ranking officer in Afghanistan when he blew himself up--shows how "deeply enmeshed" Blackwater remains in sensitive CIA operations, including those CIA officials claim it no longer participates in, such as intelligence gathering and briefings with valuable agency assets. The two Blackwater men were reportedly in the room for the expected briefing by the double agent, Humam Khalil Muhammed Abu Mulal al-Balawi, who claimed to have recently met with Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri.

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Jeremy Scahill joined Ed Schultz to discuss the recent column in the New York Times--Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids:

WASHINGTON — Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

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Schultz asked Scahill if we had any idea of what kind of resources Blackwater had committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Scahill: Ed, this company was a plausible deniability machine. Erik Prince the owner of that company built a parallel infrastructure to the U.S. military. He had an air force with his own aircraft. He had a maritime division. He had Blackwater Select which was providing special operations guys. They were guarding and still do guard U.S. diplomats and ambassadors, including the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan right now.

Ed I also understand that Blackwater, because it’s owned by such an incredibly wealthy individual did some operations for free. That’s the ultimate deniability under the Bush administration. There were arrangements with Cheney, the C.I.A. and Special Forces where Blackwater’s guys were essentially working for free in operations funded by the owner of that company Erik Prince.

The story here though Ed that everyone seems to be missing is that Blackwater wasn’t just working for the C.I.A. They were working for the Joint Special Operations Command—the U.S. military and we talked about this on your show recently, including in Pakistan where Blackwater simultaneously worked for the C.I.A. and for JSOC. That story is a scandal that needs to be investigated much more thoroughly Ed.

Schultz: Is this relationship between Blackwater and the C.I.A. and the use of Blackwater still in existence under the Obama administration.

Scahill: It certainly is. In fact news breaking as I came on tonight that Leon Panetta the C.I.A. Director is trying to cancel Blackwater’s participation in the C.I.A. drone bombing campaign which has put its operatives on the ground not only in Pakistan but in Afghanistan as well. And so my understanding from both within Blackwater and from outside is that Blackwater remains very active with both U.S. Special Forces and the C.I.A.

Scahill tweeted this before going on Ed's show: #Blackwater is leaking the CIA ops for a reason. It also distracts from ongoing ops that are not CIA.

He also noted that ABC News confirmed his report tonight-Mercenaries? CIA Says Expanded Role for Contractors Legitimate.

You can find more from Scahill at his blog Rebel Reports.

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I had noted that Rachel ought to have Jeremy Scahill on if she wanted to get to the bottom of what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and lo and behold she did, not that I think I had anything to do with it. I was just glad to see her have Jeremy Scahill on to talk about just what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the President's decision to escalate our presence in Afghanistan and the recent revelation that Erik Prince was acting not only as a military contractor, but a CIA asset as well. You can read Scahill's recent article at The Nation The Secret US War in Pakistan.

Transcript via Nexis Lexis.

MADDOW: By the time President Obama`s new plan for Afghanistan is implemented, there will be 100,000 U.S. troops there -- which means that President Obama will have roughly triple the number of U.S. troops that were in Afghanistan when he took office. That`s the most talked about, but the second most sobering set of numbers of the whole new Afghanistan policy.

The most sobering and perhaps overlooked is that as we look to get up to 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, turns out we`ve already got more than 100,000 contractors there. Yes. U.S. Central Command is telling "Talking Points Memo" that the number of contractors in Afghanistan is 104,000 now. And that number has grown by 30,000 just in the past six months. And the number of contractors is only expected to grow further along with the new troop increase.

The last time we paid a lot of attention to contractors in Afghanistan, some of them were doing vodka shots in places -- yes. Embarrassing the country and themselves and making us wonder all over again why it is that we pay people like this to go to our embassy instead of our own troops.

Here`s a new reason to wonder. Some pretty stunning revelations about the most notorious defense contractor of them all, Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince.

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On CNN's new show in Dobbs' old time slot, Erica Hill brought on Jeremy Scahill, Michael Ware and Peter Blaber to discuss the President's decision to escalate our presence in Afghanistan. It's nice to see Scahill getting some more air time in the MSM. And I think Scahill was spot on with this statement:

SCAHILL: We need to have a sober discussion in this country on this question, is our continued occupation there, as Michael says, ultimately harming our national security? Are we creating fresh enemies that will blow back to us later? That to me should be one of the crucial questions.

Transcript via CNN.

HILL: For more now on the president's plan and its chances for success, I'm joined by Peter Blaber, former delta force mission unit commander. He's also the author of "Mission, The Men and Me." Here in New York, Jeremy Scahill, the author of "Blackwater, the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army and also an investigative journalist for the "Nation." His story in the current issue is on the "Secret U.S. War." Michael Ware is also with us in the studio, CNN's international correspondent who of course has reported extensively from Iraq and Afghanistan. Good to have all of you here.

Michael, I want to start with you because I know it was something that you mentioned last night. You spent so much time there. You said last night, the key to this, really, is winning over the warlords. The average American sitting back, you hear that, you think, why on earth would the U.S. want to deal with warlords in Afghanistan?

MICHAEL WARE, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, sadly, it's an unavoidable trait that the fundamental building blocks of the Afghan society are the warlords or the tribal chiefs, depending on what you want to call them. It's a very feudal society. If you're up in some remote mountain valley, Kabul can exercise absolutely no authority over you or your village. So if you got a land dispute or any kind of problem, you go to the local big chief. That big chief will have another big chief. They're the people that America needs to be reaching out to. At night, in the villages, that's when the Taliban comes in. That's when the Taliban runs. That's when they have control. It's these people that can counter the Taliban at night and when America is not there. But only if we finally put it in their interest to do so.

HILL: So, Jeremy, how do you put it in their interests? How do you make it enticing to them to work with U.S. forces?

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From Democracy Now, Amy Goodman talks to The Nation's Jeremy Scahill about his recent column Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan.

AMY GOODMAN: Writing in The Nation Magazine, journalist Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent has revealed Blackwater is secretly operating in Pakistan under a covert program that includes planning the assassination and kidnapping of Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects. Blackwater is also said to be involved in a previously undisclosed U.S. military drone campaign that has killed scores of people inside Pakistan. Blackwater operatives have been working under a covert program run by the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s top covert operations force. The previously undisclosed JSOC operations would mark the first known confirmation of U.S. military activity inside Pakistan.

A military intelligence source said Blackwater operatives are effectively running the drone bombings for both JSOC and the CIA. The CIA drone program is already public knowledge. But the military source says some of the deadliest drone attacks in attributed to the CIA were actually carried out by JSOC. The article also reveals Blackwater operatives have taken part in ground operations with Pakistani forces under a subcontract with a local security firm. The operations have included house raids and border interdictions in northwest Pakistan and other areas.

Blackwater has also been given responsibility for planning JSOC operations in Uzbekistan. The Nation reports the program has become so secretive the top Obama administration and military officials have likely been unaware of its existence. Independent journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill broke the story for The Nation Magazine. He joins us in our New York studio for its first television interview since the article’s publication last night. Jeremy, welcome to “Democracy Now!” Lay out what you have learned so far.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well Amy, just by way of background, we do know that beginning in 2006, the Bush administration struck a deal with the Pakistani government that would allow U.S. Special Operations forces from the Joint Special Operations Command to enter Pakistan with the understanding that there were, "Following the target, " the target being Osama bin Laden and his top deputies. As part of that agreement, the Pakistani government insisted they have the right to A, deny that the United States had permission to enter the country and B, be able to condemn U.S. actions in their country as a sort of a violation of their sovereignty. But the understanding was struck in 2006. What I understand now from the military intelligence source and another U.S. military source that confirmed what I was initially told by the military intelligence source, is that in fact there are active covert operations on an ongoing basis that are not just about targeting Osama bin Laden.

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From Lou Dobbs Tonight, the Face Off Segment with The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, the Council on Foreign Relations’ neoconservative Max Boot and the World Policy Institute’s Patrica DeGennaro. The topic was our troop levels in Afghanistan. Scahill did a great job when he was allowed to talk, which Dobbs made sure to keep to a minimum.

DOBBS: President Obama today congratulated Afghanistan's President Karzai on his election victory. The president, President Obama, is still weighing his choices for forces in Afghanistan. The strategy for those forces. That is the subject of our face-off debate.

Joining me now is Jeremy Scahill. He's journalist and fellow at the Nation Institute. Good to have you with us. Patricia Degennaro, senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. Good to have you with us. Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you for being with us. Good to see you again.

Let's turn to, first, what happened here? Last week, there was going to be a delay as we had a -- all of that nasty fraud in the election. There had to be a runoff on the 7th of November. Suddenly, now, in the 2nd of November, the president sort of blesses Karzai and says we're done just because his opponent withdrew.

MAX BOOT: I think Abdullah Abdullah realized he would lose the runoff election, just as he had lost the initial election. And the reality is, there was fraud. There was a lot of fraud. Hamid Karzai's still the most popular politician in Afghanistan. He still has a lot of legitimacy, especially amongst the Pashtuns where the insurgency is based. And I think we've been focusing too much on the election because the people I spoke to in Afghanistan when I was just there were more concerned about what their government is delivering for them, rather than how it was selected. I think there's still a good opportunity to work with Hamid Karzai, work with the governors, to increase the kind of governing capacity that Afghanistan has to defeat the Taliban --

DOBBS: You're not saying corruption be damned, give the people what they want and they'll be fine?

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From Democracy Now--Judge Rejects Blackwater Attempt to Dismiss Cases Filed by Iraqi Victims:

A federal judge has rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince. We speak to award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about Sudan in a minute, but right now we turn to a major decision here in the United States. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, a federal judge has rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince. At the same time, the judge ruled that lawyers for the Iraqi plaintiffs need to amend and re-file their cases to provide more specific details on the alleged crimes before a decision can be made on whether the lawsuits will proceed.

Susan Burke, the lead attorney for the Iraqi victims, told The Nation magazine she was “very pleased with the ruling.” While Blackwater’s spokesperson, Stacy DeLuke said, quote, “We are confident that [the plaintiffs] will not be able to meet the high standard specified in [the judge’s] opinion.”

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Democracy Now! video stream by award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His article on the ruling is available online at TheNation.com.

Jeremy, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s being played by the mainstream media as a huge defeat for those who are taking on Blackwater, but you have a very different take. Explain.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, when I got up yesterday morning and saw all these headlines from the Associated Press and other media outlets saying that a federal judge had tossed out all of the lawsuits against Blackwater, I was actually quite stunned. I mean, that would have been a devastating development for the Iraqi victims of the company.

But then I actually got the fifty-six-page ruling from Judge T.S. Ellis, who, by the way, is a Reagan appointee, and I read it. And actually, what you see in this document is that it’s a very well-thought-out legal argument by Judge Ellis, where he’s essentially saying to Blackwater, “Your argument that you can’t be sued as a private company under the Alien Tort Statute is false. Your argument that private individuals or companies cannot commit war crimes is false.”

AMY GOODMAN: Whoops. Looks like we just lost Jeremy. Jeremy is speaking to us by video stream. We’re going to try to get him back on, and we’ll try to get him on the phone. But right now—we’ll do that for the end of the show—we will turn to our next guest. That, consider just a tease for the rest of that subject.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: We go back right now to Jeremy Scahill to try to complete that conversation on the issue of a federal judge rejecting a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater, who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince.

Jeremy, we’ve got you back on the Democracy Now! video stream. Very quickly, explain the significance of the case.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, basically, these are five cases brought by Iraqi civilians that were allegedly wounded by Blackwater and the families of Iraqis that were killed by Blackwater. These are very high-stakes cases. Blackwater is fighting passionately to have them thrown out. They’ve made arguments that they, as a company, can’t be sued, that it would violate the rights of the President of United States to make battlefield decisions, and if Blackwater was prosecuted, that would infringe upon the President’s rights. They’ve said that they, as a company, can’t be sued for war crimes, because war crimes can only be committed by state actors or nations. And what we saw here is that this conservative Judge Ellis said to Blackwater, “No, none of that is valid.”

What he did do, though, is he referenced a Supreme Court decision in May, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which really reversed decades of case law and made it very, very difficult, more difficult, for plaintiffs to have their cases moved to the trial phase. In other words, the bar was set much higher to proceed to trial. So what the judge said to Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the lawyers representing these Iraqis, “You need to re-file your cases with more evidence, and then we’ll take it from there.”

So, while it’s being portrayed by the corporate media as a judge tossing out these cases, that quite clearly is not the case. This was actually a pretty significant defeat for Blackwater and a victory not only for the Iraqis in this case, but also for those lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights that have spent decades trying to apply US laws to crimes committed abroad.

Blackwater remains in very, very hot water, not only because of this case, but also the US Justice Department is going to begin its prosecution of five Blackwater operatives for manslaughter charges relating to the Nisoor Square massacre in September of ’07. This is very high-stakes stuff, and the corporate media got it basically absolutely wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, we’ll leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist.

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Rachel Maddow with the second half of her report on the political witch hunt of ACORN and the problems that the De-Fund ACORN Act is going to bring for private war contractors if it actually passes.

As Rachel notes the De-Fund ACORN Act has a bill of attainder problem. The Constitution prohibits the legislature from enacting bills of attainder, which means the De-Fund ACORN Act must also include "any company that's ever been indicted for breaking campaign finance laws, or that's ever filed fraudulent paperwork with any federal agency". That means a good deal of our military contractors are going to be swept up under the law as well and it cannot only be enforced against ACORN.

Rachel reads off a list of all of the military contractors that would have their funding cut off and goes into the list of other crimes like murder, prostitution and contract fraud that they have committed as well which pale in comparison to what ACORN has been accused of.

Jeremy Scahill is asked whether the war contractors are worried about this law touching them. His answer. "Hell no." It's all about politics and too many in Congress are bought and sold by our military industries. And as he notes, ACORN got pennies when compared the massive sums of money these private contractors received.

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Rep. Mike Pence has been on the forefront of pushing this Van Jones scandal created by Glenn Beck (good to see he gets his walking papers from such an impeccable source, isn't it?), calling for his resignation and saying that Jones' "extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this Administration or the public debate."

But as Jeremy Scahill points out, Pence isn't bothered by the extremist views of Erik Prince of Blackwater/Xe, who has contributed thousands of dollars to Pence:

On Friday, Pence, who describes himself as “Christian, Conservative, Republican, in that order,” said Jones’s “extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.” Beyond the obvious here (the hate-filled rhetoric we see every day from racist, right-wing wackos, including those in public office), it is an interesting comment considering that Pence is an extremist right-wing evangelical Christian who has taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Blackwater’s owner, Erik Prince. Prince has also donated to Pence’s Political Action Committee “Principles Exalt a Nation.” In December 2007, three months after Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, Pence and his Republican Study Committee, which serves “the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives,” organized a gathering to welcome Prince to Washington. “Not only has Mr. Prince personally been targeted by partisan warfare repeatedly over the past months, but the use of contracting throughout the government has been under attack by this Congress,” Pence’s committee’s statement said. Should Pence resign for cavorting with and accepting campaign cash from a man who allegedly “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” in the words of a former employee?

I think it's time for the majority party to start acting like one. If Republican-controlled Congress could set aside time to debate condemning MoveOn.org for their Gen. "Betray Us" ad, then the Democratic-controlled Congress ought to be making sure that the double standard of IOKIYAR no longer stands.

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Jeremy Scahill weighs in on Dick Cheney's softball interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace and why there needs to be prosecutions of everyone from top to bottom. And that means anyone who broke the law and ordered the torture of prisoners, from the top Bush administration officials to those that carried it out. Scahill also takes the media to task for their coverage of this issue and not making sure Americans are actually aware of what's been done in their name.

Thom Hartmann talks to Jeremy Scahill about his run in with Chuck Todd on Real Time with Bill Maher this past Friday.

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It appears Chuck Todd didn't take too kindly to Jeremy Scahill's drubbing he received on Real Time the other night. From Glenn Greenwald:

According to Scahill (via email), Todd approached him after the Maher show and the following occurred:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me "that was a cheap shot." I said "what are you talking about?" and he said "you know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "that's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

Media stars are so unaccustomed to being held accountable for the impact of their behavior -- especially when they're on television -- that they consider it a grievous assault on their entitlement when it happens.

Check out the entire post where Glenn's got much more on some similar events going on lately besides just his own dust up with Chuck Todd. Joe Klein got into it with Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog who happens to be I.F. Stone's granddaughter. Glenn and Marcy Wheeler had an ongoing feud with Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. And now we've got Scahill and Todd's back and forth on Real Time.

Glenn summed all of this up much better than I could ever hope to:

Todd's condescending responses illustrate the same point as the above episodes with Klein and Ambinder: in the eyes of Beltway mavens, those who warned about and worked against the radicalism and lawbreaking of the Bush administration are the fringe, crazed, out-of-touch radicals. While Todd was fiddling around with pretty colored maps and fun polling games, Scahill was courageously investigating one of the most corrupt, dangerous and lethal private corporations in the world, yet it's Todd who understands and must solemnly explain the hardened realities of politics to Scahill, the confused and silly Leftist.

There's little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era -- and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible -- both in politics and the establishment media -- not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one's culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

In fairness to Chuck Todd, he was not one of the ones out there cheerleading for the war and I really liked him when I'd see him on C-SPAN's Washington Journal about every morning when he was working for The Hotline. He's a numbers guy. He was one of the best in the business at reading and sorting through the numbers on how our elections were going to turn out. I don't think coming to MSNBC however, has been good for Chuck Todd.

And now he's on there with the rest of them repeating the narrative of how terrible for the Democrats it would be if any investigations are allowed to happen, and if anyone from the Bush administration is held accountable. It's all politics to Chuck.

Here are my thoughts on that. One of the reasons it would be turned into a game of politics is because Chuck Todd and the rest of the beltway media would report it as such, instead of a legal matter. What Chuck Todd is relaying is what the Republican Party would like to see happen if the Democrats or this Department of Justice goes after the law breaking. It would be the choice of those in the media to validate the Republicans' sniping, which would inevitably follow (and already has for that matter), or to dismiss them as playing partisan politics in order to cover up law breaking for political gain.

Of course since the media was part and parcel in allowing the atrocities of the last eight or nine years, that's never going to happen.