I hate to rain on the all Libby all the time parade, but there’s something else you should know about, something which might be no less important.
In various posts over the last couple years I’ve pointed to the as-yet-too-little-investigated Pentagon dimension of the Duke Cunningham 
scandal. In brief, the Cunningham case appears to tie directly to efforts by top ranking Pentagon appointees, around and including Stephen Cambone, to set up their own domestic surveillance and spying operations. Key contracts for the CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity) program went to Cunningham’s bribers. And there is good reason to believe that politicals at the DOD choose to ignore Duke’s crimes in exchange for help running their programs outside of the safeguards in place in the rest of the intelligence community, and quite likely well outside the bounds of American law. In short, a big part of the scam may have been that Duke and his crooked pals got big bucks in exchange for helping Bush-appointees at the DOD spy on American citizens.
Now, one of these DOD programs was something called TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice), a program to collect information on Americans involved in anti-war protests. This evening I saw this post from Emptywheel which discusses the recently release Pentagon IG report on the program (released June 27th).
There’s quite a lot of interest contained in the report. But emptywheel immediately fixes on the key finding, or rather impediment to findings. In the report’s words, “all TALON reports were deleted from their database in June 2006 with no archives.”
In other words, right about the time the Cunningham prosecutors started seriously looking into this dimension of the case, and around the time information was starting to come out about the DOD’s domestic ‘surveillance’ operations, somehow the entire record of the TALON program, every report that had been collected, was scrubbed.
