I was for confirming Judge Michael Mukasey as Attorney General before his stumbles and somersaults over defining what is and is not torture. The fact is that there are people in the administration — some still serving and some recently departed — who can answer the question on water-boarding far more directly than Mukasey did….

Congresswoman Jane Harman has been pushing a higher wall on FISA than most of her Democratic colleagues because she doesn’t trust the administration’s line on why it wants to wiretap without warrant massive numbers of Americans.

My colleague Howard Salter and I had a funny conversation a couple of weeks ago that evolved into this blog post of his, a lost scene of the Godfather acted out by various personalities in Vice President Cheney’s office.

I have just secured a private letter — not yet publicly released — from Senator Chuck Hagel to President Bush and copied to Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, and Stephen Hadley. I should add that I did not receive this letter from Senator Hagel but from other sources.

Steve Clemons will be on the Rachel Maddow Show this evening discussing Karen Hughes’s departure from the State Department. You can listen to it live here at 6:30 pm EST. Also, for those ocularcentric types who have moved on to television as the news medium of choice, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Ret.

I just got back from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee business meeting on the Law of the Sea. The final vote was 17-4 in favor of consideration by the full Senate.

(Senator Chuck Hagel, Steve Clemons, and International Peace Academy Chair Rita Hauser) Yesterday evening, I helped organize a private salon dinner with Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). I’ll be posting more on the event later today — along with some other interesting news.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes tomorrow on the Law of the Sea. The Committee is likely to approve the treaty, as it should. Frank Gaffney publishes a weekly column in the Washington Times. For the last three months or so, his column has targeted the Law of the Sea week in, week out.

We will have this program recorded digitally and posted as an update on this blog post, but for those of you in Washington, this will be an interesting meeting. It takes place from 1 pm – 2:30 pm today.

A loyal TWN reader informed me this morning that Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner now comes up as the “2nd image” when image googling the word “Weimaraner.” It’s just a proud family moment we wanted to share. — Steve Clemons Ed. Note: Thanks to David B.