Yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation, former Vice President Richard Cheney continued to reiterate the effectiveness of torture and criticized the Obama adminstration for witholding memos that supposedly prove that torture was effective.  But he also made some news when Bob Schieffer upped the ante:

SCHIEFFER: Would you go back and talk to the Congress?

CHENEY: Certainly. I’ve made it very clear that I feel very strongly that what we did here was exactly the right thing to do. And if I don’t speak out, then where do we find ourselves, Bob? Then the critics have free run, and there isn’t anybody there on the other side to tell the truth. So it’s important — it’s important that we…

Schieffer then interrupted and added some nuance to his original question:

SCHIEFFER: Senator Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was on this broadcast recently. And I said, do you intend to ask the former vice president to come up? And he said if he will testify under oath. Would you be willing to testify under oath?

CHENEY: I’d have to see what the circumstances are and what kind of precedent we were setting. But certainly I wouldn’t be out here today if I didn’t feel comfortable talking about what we’re doing publicly.

Full transcript here.

Earlier this evening, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley came on the Rachel Maddow Show to talk about today’s release of four OLC memos outlining and authorizing the use of specific interrogation techniques.  You can read our coverage of the memos here.  One of the authors Jay Bybee, Rachel reminds us, is now serving a life-tenure on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

You can watch Maddow’s summary of the memos and the Turley interview below:

The Freedom of Information Act has come in from the cold.

Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday issued new FOIA guidance to government agencies directing full compliance with requests for government documents. The guidance rescinds then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Oct. 12, 2001 memo essentially directing agencies to nit-pick FOIA requests to death by using legal technicalities to deny as many as possible.

The new FOIA guidance implements a policy articulated by President Obama on his second day in office: “The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, oppenness prevails.” What that means in practice: ”An agency should not withhold information simply because it may do so legally… [or] demonstrate, as a technical matter, that the records fall within the scope of a FOIA exemption,” Holder’s memo says. The Holder memo returns to the standards set by President Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, in 1993.

The memo continues:

FOIA professionals should be mindful of their obligation to work “in a spirit of cooperation” with FOIA requesters, as President Obama has directed. Unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles have no place in the “new era of open Government” that the President has proclaimed.

Agencies should work “pro-actively” to post information on-line before it’s requested, the memo says, and generally make better use of technology to speed up the notoriously long delays (ie: strategic foot-dragging) that have long plagued FOIA disclosure.

Holder also directed the DOJ to review pending FOIA litigation in light of the “substantial likelihood that application of the [new] guidance would result in a material disclosure of additional information.” Henceforth, the DOJ will defend government agencies only if it concludes their FOIA denials were truly (not just technically) prohibited by law. DOJ will also defend statuory exemptions protecting disclosures that would harm national security, law enforcement interests and personal privacy.

Open-government activists generally applauded. But David Sobel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation struck a cautionary note in this blog post:

[I]t remains to be seen if these proclamations from on high produce real results down in the bureaucratic trenches. We will soon learn in our pending lawsuits whether the new administration is truly prepared to reverse the pro-secrecy practices of the Bush administration.

The public interest group filed a lawsuit in 2006 seeking information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation about its Investigative Data Warehouse, a database used in counter-terrorism probes. On Jan. 23 — two days after Obama’s FOIA statement — the DOJ moved for summary judgment, asserting it had fully complied with EFF’s documents request. EFF asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to stay the proceedings. The FBI and DOJ should reconsider whether their previous disclosures during the Bush administration were adequate, given the new Obama policy of openness, EFF argued.

Former White House advisor Karl Rove will partially comply with the new subpoena (after a three week extension) issued by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) As per a recent post here on Main Justice:

Conyers wants Rove to testify about the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, his role in the Bush administration’s firing of U.S. Attorneys and general “politicization” of the Justice Department.

Initial news reports indicated Rove would refuse to appear before the committee based on President’s Bush’s invocation of executive privilege.  As it turns out, the situation is a little more nuanced.  A recent letter summarizing President Bush’s instructions to Rove that he ”should not appear before Congress” only asserts executive privilege on the issue of the U.S. Attorney firings.  The aforementioned quote from the letter has been thrown around all over the media to suggest that Rove will continue to refuse to testify before Congress, but the end of the sentence is left out: “in this matter.”  ”This matter,” was defined previously in the letter as “the subject of the U.S. Attorneys matter.”

Therefore, the letter does not cover the issue of Siegelman’s prosecution, on which Rove apparently will have to testify, and Rove’s lawyer admits it, reports Keith Perine at Congressional Quarterly:

In a Jan. 26 e-mail to the committee, Luskin pointed out that, because Bush had only reasserted executive privilege in the U.S. attorneys matter, Rove was free to answer questions about the Siegelman affair.

Upshot: Rove may end up testifying before the Judiciary about the Siegelman affair, at least, by Feb. 23.

From his remarks to senior staff today:

I will also hold myself as President to a new standard of openness. Going forward, anytime the American people want to know something that I or a former President wants to withhold, we will have to consult with the Attorney General and the White House Counsel, whose business it is to ensure compliance with the rule of law. Information will not be withheld just because I say so. It will be withheld because a separate authority believes my request is well grounded in the Constitution.

Also says he will restore FOIA:

The directives I am giving my administration today on how to interpret the Freedom of Information Act will do just that. For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city. The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed. That era is now over. Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known.

I wonder if Barack Obama isn’t playing a bit of bait-and-switch with his comments that he’s inclined to “look forward as opposing to looking backwards” on torture policy and other potential crimes committed by Bush administration officials. In that same interview, on last Sunday’s ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” he also said Eric Holder will be “making some calls” in the interests of the American people and the independence of the Justice Department.

OBAMA: “My general view when it comes to my attorney general is he is the people’s lawyer. Eric Holder’s been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he’s going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past.” (more…)