While Michael Steele has an op-ed today on the future of the Republican Party in which he says, “we’re not looking back,” and is giving a speech in which he said, “No more looking in the rearview mirror,” House Minority Leader Eric Cantor’s office confirms that Newt Gingrich is joining Cantor’s effort to remake the GOP.

Newt Gingrich sends cease and desist letter to pro-EFCA twitterer demanding that he stop using @newtgingrich in his twitters, which is just asking for a Twitter-based movement to use @newtgingrich in all twitters. Not that I’m advocating such a thing.

Becoming ever more clear why Leon Panetta wouldn’t vouch for the accuracy of those CIA records purporting to show who in Congress was briefed about torture. Now Rep. David Obey has sent a letter to Panetta complaining that a staffer identified in the documents as being briefed was in fact denied access to the briefing.

It gets better (or worse). A former intelligence professional who has participated in congressional briefings tells TPMmuckraker that the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” or EITs — which appears throughout those CIA documents about who in Congress was briefed starting in 2002 about which aspects of the Bush torture program — didn’t come in to use until later.*

It’s a crucial point, our Zack Roth reports:

That’s not just an issue of semantics. The former intel professional said that by using the term in the recently compiled document, the CIA was being “disingenuous,” trying to make it appear that the use of such techniques was part of a “formal and mechanical program.” In fact, said the former intel pro, it wasn’t until 2006 that — amid growing concerns about the program among some in the Bush administration — the EIT program was formalized, and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were properly defined and given a name.

Panetta has offered to make available to Congress the underlying memos on which the documents he released were based. Obviously, we need to see those. But there’s a whole lot more going on here. Nancy Pelosi is a collateral victim (although probably not an innocent one) of the CIA’s effort to cover its aft, an effort that commenced years ago, well before Bush left office.

*Correction: Zack has done some more digging, and it appears the CIA commenced the use of the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2004, not in 2006, as we originally reported. That’s still after the earliest references in the memo to briefings on EITs in 2002, but it’s important to be precise in these matters. We regret the error.

A gimmick on the RNC’s website — the “ObamaCard” — seems to be operating under the impression that Obama’s term ends in January 2012.

TPM Reader JR, on the senior Obama official’s remark to the NYT that the hearsay rule is not “rooted in American values”:

I suppose about 1,000 lawyers have already said this: Apparently the Obama administration doesn’t believe that the Bill of Rights is rooted in American values. The confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment states that an accused has the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him. That right includes the right to cross-examine them. You can’t cross-examine hearsay testimony because the witness isn’t there. That’s why it’s inadmissible. This isn’t some technicality. It’s the bedrock of the Anglo-American system of criminal justice. As the preeminent scholar of evidence, John Henry Wigmore, wrote 100 years ago, “cross-examination is the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”

Getting Into the Legal Weeds Update: TPM Reader JU:

Your commentator re: hearsay and the Sixth Amendment is blowing it out of his backside. The hearsay admissibility rule has virtually nothing to do with the Sixth Amendment — well, to be more precise, although the two are broadly based on the same concerns, they are completely independent of each other.

To make a long story short, hearsay is inadmissible because there generally is no way to probe the credibility of the speaker. If I hear someone say “so-and-so ran the red light,” I am not allowed to testify as to that fact because the trier-of-fact cannot examine the speaker’s motivations in saying it. Is he the best friend of one of the litigants who is attempting to plant “evidence” to help his buddy? We don’t know. Does he harbor a secret grudge against the defendant? Again, we don’t know. And without this information, there is no way to weigh his “evidence” against the other evidence in the case.

There are, however, many types of evidence that would otherwise be hearsay that are admissible because the circumstances and/or context point towards credibility. …

The Sixth Amendment, however, is more concerned with the notion that “secret evidence” could be fabricated by the government in the absence of direct confrontation by the accused. It’s more a matter of equity than of truthfulness.

Wishing I Hadn’t Opened This Can of Worms Update: TPM Reader PM:

With all due respect to your reader JU, his understanding of the relationship between hearsay and the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment is badly outdated.

Decided in 2004, Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), held that federal and state rules of evidence designed to admit reliable hearsay did not provide adequate Sixth Amendment protections. Crawford now requires courts to ask not only whether the hearsay was reliable, but whether an objective person in the declarant’s shoes would have expected his declaration to be used in a criminal investigation or prosecution. If the answer to the second question is yes, the Constitution requires cross-examination. That requirement is about to become clearer, and stronger, when the Supreme Court issues Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts later this summer.

From the sounds of it, the military tribunals would allow hearsay from other prisoners to be admissible against defendants. An objective person in the prisoners’ position would undoubtedly know that his or her statements were to be used in a proceeding against the defendant. That is precisely the sort of evidence that the Sixth Amendment protects against.

Greg Mitchell, an early and frequent author on the psychic toll of the war in Iraq on those who have fought it, laments how little attention the media have given the issue.

Sen. Harry Reid has announced that Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer is in remission and that Kennedy will be back in the Senate after Memorial Day.

I was out of the office and offline for most of the day at a graduation event. So I’m just coming on now. But for those of you following the Pelosi story, over at TPMmuckraker Zack Roth has a series of posts raising more and more questions about whether Nancy Pelosi was really told any of this stuff.

Almost too painful to contemplate. Barney Frank goes head to head with Michelle Bachmann over Acorn.