---

There's Something Else About Mary
It seems that inventing absurd legal justifications for torture isn't the only item listed on Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker's resume under "current job accomplishments." It looks like it also includes covering the exposed heinies of senior Pentagon officials who might otherwise have been blamed for failing to control an epidemic of sexual assaults at the Air Force Academy.

This, at least, was the conclusion of a independent investigating panel commissioned by Congress to look into the scandal last year. The panel, headed by former Republican congresswoman Tillie Fowler, claimed a working group headed by Walker attempted to "shield Air Force headquarters from public criticism" by either downplaying or omitting evidence gathered by two previous probes of sexual misconduct at the academy, in 1996 and 2000.

Walker, of course, has already put in several appearances here at Whiskey Bar, thanks to her role in an earlier working group, which helped develop the legal doctrine that the various laws and treaties forbidding torture (including the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) essentially mean whatever the President of the United States says they mean - thus allowing President Bush to continue asserting his faithful obedience to those laws despite an accumulating mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Oddly, Ms. Walker neglected to mention her role with either the torture or the sexual assault working groups in her recent heart-to-heart chat with the Professional Women's Fellowship, which instead was devoted primarily to her deep and abiding faith in Jesus Christ, and to her thoughts on executive development - not necessarily in that order....

...I'm going to do the, well, Christian thing, and leave Ms. Walker to prepare for her great deposition in the sky. Becaue at the rate she's going, she's going to need a very good criminal defense.