Scott Horton says at his Harper's blog:

In fact Blumenthal is quoting remarks by a very senior Bush Administration official made at a recent off-the-record conference in response to my speech, “The Danger of Being Hated.”

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000328

Horton posted the speech on his blog on May 27, and the next day he says:

I just returned from a conference on counter-terrorism issues convened in Europe where the United States was represented by a delegation of very senior figures from the Department of Justice.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/05/hbc-90000163

It seems very likely to have been this conference in Turkey, given by the Marshall Center:

http://www.marshallcenter.org/site-graphic/lang-en/page-mc-index-1/xdocs/mc/news-newsbrief/07-11.htm

Unfortunately, they don't seem to release much information about their attendees.

But the main question is: who is still in the DOJ and "even now at the commanding heights of power" who was involved in formulating Bush's torture policy? Jay Bybee and John Yoo are gone. The Air Force's general counsel Mary Walker is a she, not a he.

The only one left in the DOJ is William James Haynes II, the DOD's general counsel. He was heavily involved in torture policy, but hasn't been as notorious as the others. There's an interesting New Yorker article about his conflict over torture policy with Navy general counsel Alberto Mora:

Haynes rarely discussed his alliance with Cheney’s office, but his colleagues, as one of them told me, noticed that “stuff moved back and forth fast” between the two power centers. Haynes was not considered to be a particularly ideological thinker, but he was seen as “pliant,” as one former Pentagon colleague put it, when it came to serving the agenda of Cheney and Addington. In October, 2002, almost three months before his meeting with Mora, Haynes gave a speech at the conservative Federalist Society, disparaging critics who accused the Pentagon of mistreating detainees. A year later, President Bush nominated him to the federal appeals court in Virginia. His nomination is one of several that have been put on hold by Senate Democrats.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fa_fact?currentPage=1

OK, so Haynes started as a torture advocate, but he's not particularly ideological. Now that he's stuck in a lame duck administration and in a dead-end job (he'll almost certainly never make it to the bench now), he's had the chance to rethink his views.

(There's probably an element of envy there too; Jay Bybee got confirmed to the 9th Circuit despite signing the infamous torture memo, but he snuck through under the Republican Senate; the Democratic Senate wouldn't confirm Haynes as dogcatcher.)

Congratulations, Jim Haynes. You're an idiot and a traitor to the American people, but I'm glad you're still aboard the Administration, if only because your replacement would probably be worse. And by the way: you owe it to the American people to speak up.

to have my expose of Blumenthal's source followed up by an idiot Republican troll with "suicide pact" talking points straight from Fox News.

"And for the support of this Declaration...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Recognize those words? As Barbara Ehrenreich has noted, the Declaration of Independence was actually a pact sealed by the lives of its signers, who were taking an enormous risk with their lives.

This is underscored by the popular (but largely erroneous) email forward "The Price they Paid".

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/pricepaid.asp

Of course, that won't stop the modern equivalent of cowardly Tory collaborators from repeating ad nauseum one judge's catchy truism about the Constitution.

But who cares what a bunch of dead enders think? It's nice to be in the company of the 74% of Americans who reject Bush's failed tyranny.

First, this isn't the usual conspiracy theory; all the documents are publicly available in the tobacco lawsuit archive.

In short, the tobacco industry had long been interested in attacking the World Health Organization, because they fear international regulation of their deadly product more than just about anything.

So in the late 1990s, Roger Bate, the founder of the astroturf (fake grassroots) group Salon quotes, "Africa Fighting Malaria", pitched his organization to the tobacco companies as a way of forcing the WHO to defend itself.

See the links from the article at:

http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/30/ddt-tobacco-and-the-parallel-universe/

Especially the blog "Deltoid" which has long had excellent coverage of this story.

It's all such a fraud. Rachel Carson didn't oppose DDT spraying for malaria control, she favored it. The idiots in the South African government (you know, the same one that thinks HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and opposes AIDS medication) were the ones responsible, not Carson.

Predictable contrarians like Crichton and Tierney are so hilarious, because they go around acting like they've caught on to some conspiracy, when they're swallowing (and regurgitating) bucketloads of tobacco and oil company disinformation.

The headline is enough for me to know that it offers nothing useful, and no new information.

This analysis isn't even clever or unconventional.

It's rehashing a standard trope of Maureen Dowd's columns, Washington pundit roundtables led by pasty-faced weirdos with masculinity issues, and right-wing talk radio.

...OK, I gave in and read the article. What a crock. Michael Scherer must really be angling to replace Maureen Dowd. Salon, stop publishing this crap.

So the iPhone workarounds and hacks, whether developed by Americans or others, will end up being hosted abroad, and credited to anonymous hackers. Then they'll be legally applied by Americans.

Stupid, yes, and a tiny bit inconvenient, but I don't see what the real problem is.