I missed it. I'll be you did too.

Keith Olbermann continued to top himself last night with another special comment on how, in light of the news that a Deputy Attorney General who was fired after allowing himself to be waterboarded and determining that yes, the practice is torture, it means that the Administration's entire purpose has become keeping George W. Bush out of jail:

The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity;

All the invocations of World War Three, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists…

All of it is now — after one revelation last week — transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the re-focusing of our entire nation, towards keeping this mock president, and this unstable vice president, and this departed wildly self-over-rating Attorney General — and the others — from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

Crooks and Liars has the video here.

How the hell did I miss this story? Perhaps it's because only one American mainstream news outlet covered it. This from the ABC News web site:

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.

The administration at the time was reeling from an August 2002 memo by Jay Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, which laid out possible justifications for torture. In June 2004, Levin's predecessor at the office, Jack Goldsmith, officially withdrew the Bybee memo, finding it deeply flawed.

When Levin took over from Goldsmith, he went to work on a memo that would effectively replace the Bybee memo as the administration's legal position on torture. It was during this time that he underwent waterboarding.

In December 2004, Levin released the new memo. He said, "Torture is abhorrent" but he went on to say in a footnote that the memo was not declaring the administration's previous opinions illegal. The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.

But Levin never finished a second memo imposing tighter controls on the specific interrogation techniques. Sources said he was forced out of the Justice Department when Gonzales became attorney general.

Now whether this story actually made it onto ABC's World News Tonight I do not know. But it sure as hell didn't penetrate the rest of the media. If you do a search on "Daniel Levin" on Google News, the only major news organization you'll find is this ABC News story. The closest the Newspaper of Record, the New York Times, got to it is this passage buried deeply in an October 4 article about how torture became OK after Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General:

If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president’s prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith’s dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.

Not even MSNBC, Olbermann's own network, is covering the story as news. Apparently it isn't newsworthy that anyone who doesn't let this man who used to shove M-80's up the asses of frogs because he enjoyed watching them explode and branding fraternity pledges with a hot iron use his power to escalate his torture rush by using techniques acknowledged as torture as far back as the Inquisition (hardly surprising given his affinity for religious fanatics like Erik Prince) gets fired. Instead, we have a lead on the mudslide in Mexico (which at least is a reasonably significant international event instead of what Britney Spears is up to), and ironically, a #2 story titled "Anti-Bush activists irate, but lack recourse."

Just in case you were tempted to think that what we found out last night thanks to Keith Olbermann was going to in any way make one iota of difference.

This president and his entire Administration are criminals -- and no one in Congress, that so-called bastion of checks and balances, is going to lift a finger to do anything about it. No, Chuck Schumer is going to vote to send Michael Mukasey, who either also hasn't heard about what Daniel Levin put himself through in what may be the most extraordinary gesture of being conscientious about his job in recorded history, or doesn't give a shit -- because after all, Mukasey is his boy. And Dianne Feinstein is going to vote to send the nomination through for reasons only she (and I suspect, George W. Bush) knows. Not even Russ Feingold is willing to filibuster this nomination. And so another Bush toady, whether out of deeply-held belief or because the Administration's wiretapping program has been less about monitoring the rest of us and more about getting dirt on recalcitrant Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter *cough* Lindsey Graham *cough*), will become the chief architect of law enforcement in the United States -- a country in which "law enforcement" has degenerated into a concept designed to protect ONLY the president and his vice-president -- and no one else. Not even American citizens.

People like me have been saying that the Republic fell on December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court decided that to count the votes in Florida would hurt the guy they wanted in the White House. It turns out that we were right. And not one thing this bunch has done since then has proven us wrong.