What the new Jim Comey torture emails actually reveal Bush's Determination to Torture

What the new Jim Comey torture emails actually reveal Bush's Determination to Torture
The New York Times was provided 3 extremely important internal Justice Department emails from April, 2005 (.pdf) -- all written by then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey -- which highlight how the Bush administration's torture techniques became legally authorized by Bush lawyers. As Marcy Wheeler documents, the leak to the NYT was clearly from someone eager to defend Bush officials by suggesting that Comey's emails prove that all DOJ lawyers --- even those opposed to torture on policy grounds -- agreed these techniques were legal, and the NYT reporters, Scott Shane and David Johnston, dutifully do the leakers' bidding by misleadingly depicting the Comey emails as vindication for Bush/Cheney (Headline: "U.S. Lawyers Agreed on the Legality of Brutal Tactic"; First Paragraph: "When Justice Department lawyers engaged in a sharp internal debate in 2005 over brutal interrogation techniques, even some who believed that using tough tactics was a serious mistake agreed on a basic point: the methods themselves were legal").

I defy anyone to read Comey's 3 emails and walk away with that conclusion. Marcy has detailed many of the reasons the NYT article is so misleading, so I want to focus on what the Comey emails actually demonstrate about what these DOJ torture memos really are. The primary argument against prosecutions for Bush officials who ordered torture is that DOJ lawyers told the White House that these tactics were legal, and White House officials therefore had the right to rely on those legal opinions. The premise is that White House officials inquired in good faith with the DOJ about what they could and could not do under the law, and only ordered those tactics which the DOJ lawyers told them were legal. As these Comey emails prove, that simply is not what happened.

The DOJ torture-authorizing memos are perfectly analogous to the CIA's pre-war intelligence reports about Iraq's WMDs. Bush officials justify their pre-war statements about WMDs by pointing to the CIA's reports -- as though those reports just magically appeared on their desks from the CIA -- when, as is well documented, Dick Cheney and friends were continuously pressuring and cajoling the CIA to give them those threat reports in order to supply bureaucratic justification for the attack on Iraq. That is exactly how the DOJ torture-authorizing memos came to be: Dick Cheney, David Addington and George Bush himself continuously exerted extreme pressure on DOJ lawyers to produce memos authorizing them to do what they wanted to do -- not because they were interested in knowing in good faith what the law did and did not allow, but because they wanted DOJ memos as cover -- legal immunity -- for the torture they had already ordered and were continuing to order. Though one won't find this in the NYT article, that is, far and away, the most important revelation from the Comey emails.

* * * * *

Just read the Comey emails for yourself -- they're not long -- and you'll see exactly how these DOJ torture memos were actually produced. The key excerpts tell the story as clearly as can be. Comey was vehemently opposed to a draft memo written by Acting OLC Chief Steven Bradbury -- ultimately dated May 10, 2005 (.pdf) -- that legally authorized the simultaneous, combined use of numerous "enhanced interrogation techniques" on detainees. This "combined techniques" memo was crucial because these were the tactics that had already been used on detainees, and -- after the prior OLC memos authorizing those tactics were withdrawn -- the White House was desperate for legal approval for what they had already done and what they wanted to do in the future.
**********more at link.

Race-baiting lowlights from Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, two of the pundits who say Sonia Sotomayor is racist

Race-baiting lowlights from Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, two of the pundits who say Sonia Sotomayor is racist. By Joe Conason

Whores and politicians become respectable if they stick around long enough, as someone once observed, and the same is plainly true of media personalities – especially in a culture that never pauses long enough to remember anything. Where amnesia is the rule, there can be no accountability for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Patrick Buchanan and the rest of the broadcast mob denouncing the "racism" of Sonia Sotomayor. If anyone remembers who they are and what they have said over the years, their complaints about the Latina Supreme Court nominee will only elicit raucous laughter.

Who are these guys – with their long and sordid histories of encouraging white paranoia and ethnic division – to call her a racist?

In Washington media circles, Pat Buchanan is a well-liked and avuncular figure, presumably owing to his personal qualities rather than his crank politics, but for him to be encouraged to pontificate endlessly on the subject of race on television is worse than ludicrous. The late William F. Buckley Jr. expelled Buchanan from the pages of the National Review many years ago for his crudely anti-Semitic rants, which included a very unattractive tinge of admiration for Hitler. (Prejudice against Jews, unlike some other forms of bigotry, is anathema to most conservatives.) So obnoxious was Pat's blustering bully-boy attitude that he became intolerable even to the intolerant.

As for racism, where to begin with him? Discussing Sotomayor on MSNBC, Buchanan accused her of adopting the same attitudes that had kept blacks down in old Dixie. "Her entire career is based on advancing people of color, which is done at the expense of white people," he cried in that familiar high-pitched whine. "That was what was done in the South. They're doing it now to white males now…"

Except that Pat didn't mind so much when "they" were doing it to black folks in the South. He explicitly supported the race-based "Southern strategy" of his old boss Richard Nixon, whom he advised to avoid meeting with Coretta King one year after the murder of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr. In April 1969, he warned Nixon in a White House memo that visiting Mrs. King would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse ... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history."

Did Pat's views toward blacks and other minorities mellow over the decades? More than 20 years later, he was still supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa, noting that there was nothing in our own Constitution that would preclude a white minority ruling a black majority. (Such is the color-blind jurisprudence that he would no doubt like to see on the high court. Of course, he also told Nixon to burn the Watergate tapes, a key indication of his deep respect for law and justice.)

In his memoir, "Right From the Start," he suggested that the segregated District of Columbia of his boyhood had worked just fine:

There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The "negroes" of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours.

The story is much the same with Limbaugh and Beck, although neither of them is old enough to have developed Pat's warm youthful memories of Joe McCarthy, Francisco Franco and Jim Crow. As Limbaugh lambastes Sotomayor for her supposed racism, Republican senators cower, believing that he is a credible critic whose opinion must be considered. His views must therefore be granted credence in the mainstream media.

But doesn't anybody remember that Limbaugh's overt hostility to black athletes got him kicked off the ESPN airwaves as a sports commentator? He exists to stir racial division and fury among whites, even as he complains bitterly about the "anger" he claims to perceive among those scary people of color. He built his audience with racial coding and commentary, as when he suggested that the NAACP, which has consistently advocated nonviolence for nearly 100 years, promoted rioting. "The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies." He used to play the "Movin' On Up" theme from the old "Jeffersons" TV show whenever he mentioned Carol Moseley Braun, the Illinois Democrat who was the first black woman to sit in the U.S. Senate. He used to do bits in black dialect (and maybe he still does).

But to Rush, the threat of the Sotomayor nomination is clear. Not only is she a racist, but as he said on June 4, her ascent means that all minorities will be on the warpath against white men. No longer should it be argued that minorities cannot be racist because they have no power, because America has a black president and "we're talking now about a Supreme Court justice. The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry, And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That's what Obama is all about."

"Them"? "They"? Such generalizations and ominous warnings about an ethnic group – or "minorities," in the knuckleheaded locution – are the essence of racist discourse. Obviously Limbaugh is blind to his own abiding prejudice and fear, but why should the rest of us have to pretend that he is anything but a bigot?

There are other minor actors on the same stage, including Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, whose antics over the Sotomayor nomination have exposed their prejudice or hypocrisy. Beck, whose penchant for racial "humor" concerning Hispanics is notorious, is among those whining constantly about the "racist" nominee. Carlson, who used to despise anyone who used that term in debate, now uses it to describe her. Then again, he once said critics of Limbaugh should "lighten up." So what if Rush once told an African-American listener to "take that bone out of your nose"? After all, Rush was only "telling jokes" that were "pretty amusing."

The campaign against Sotomayor will not relent nor will the distortions of her words and views cease. But the sources of malicious nonsense ought to be assessed for who and what they are, in historical context – and dismissed as relics of a past that America at long last left behind on Election Day 2008.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) America's Most Insane Politician

Inhofe Rips Obama As ‘Un-American,’ Suggests He’s On The Side Of Terrorists
Reacting to President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) decried the president’s speech as “un-American” and even suggested Obama might be on the side of terrorists:

Sen. Jim Inhofe said today that President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo was “un-American” because he referred to the war in Iraq as “a war of choice” and didn’t criticize Iran for developing a nuclear program.

Inhofe, R-Tulsa, also criticized the president for suggesting that torture was conducted at the military prison in Guantanamo, saying, “There has never been a documented case of torture at Guantanamo.”

“I just don’t know whose side he’s on,” Inhofe said of the president.

Unsurprisingly, actual Iraqis and Iranians — a couple of the key audiences for Obama’s speech — viewed it far more favorably than Inhofe. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the speech reflected greater understanding of Mideast culture and “reduces the chance of growth of extremist ideas that are trying to tarnish the image of Islam in the world.” “Obama’s speech was extraordinary. I loved it,” said 24-year old Iranian Morteza Sinaie. “I wish every Iranian would hear it. I think it would dramatically change their opinion about Obama and the United Sates.”

Reporting from Iraq, NPR correspondent JJ Sutherland noted one family said they wished Obama’s words “to be real. We wish what he’s saying to be real.” Reporting from Iran, Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Peterson wrote, “Mr. Obama’s pledge that America was ‘ready to move forward’ with ‘courage, rectitude, and resolve’ will be welcome in Tehran.”

One of the important goals of Obama’s speech was to stop creating an “us versus them” mentality with the Muslim world, the very approach that Inhofe is still espousing. In his speech, Obama tried to end language that suggests the Muslim world and the U.S. are on competing sides:

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

The Wall Street Journal reports, “Muslims in the Middle East and beyond praised U.S. President Barack Obama for the tone of his speech Thursday.” Al-Jazeera, the Arab world’s leading satellite channel, celebrated the speech as “an attempt at forging a new relationship between Washington and the Muslim world.” If the Muslim world is on America’s side, whose side is Inhofe on?

Fox News The seedy underbelly of Rupert Murdoch's evil empire

Fox News The seedy underbelly of Rupert Murdoch's evil empire
He's called former Vice President Al Gore an "evil enabler" for speaking at Netroots Nation -- an annual conference that draws thousands of progressive blog enthusiasts. He's likened Markos Moulitsas, founder of the progressive blog powerhouse Daily Kos, to white supremacist David Duke. He's even accused The Huffington Post of using the "same exact tactics that the Nazis used."

To say that Fox News golden boy Bill O'Reilly is no fan of progressive blogs is an understatement akin to claiming the Hatfields and McCoys were mildly displeased with each other.

In fact, just last week, O'Reilly hosted a panel of lawyers who attempted, in vain, to explain that the conservative host's "rights" aren't violated by private criticism.

Back in March, while promoting its newly launched website TheFoxNation.com, Fox News ran advertisements telling viewers that it was "time to say 'no' to biased media and 'yes' to fair play and free speech."

In short, Fox News was jumping headfirst into the blogging world with just the snake oil necessary to cure what ailed O'Reilly -- a fair, honest, bias-free version of what he sees the left serving up.

It didn't take long for The Fox Nation to prove those fancy Fox News promos demonstrably inaccurate -- instead, it seems to have said "yes" to biased media and "no" to "fair play" from Day One.

In its first 24 hours, the website labeled Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) a "[d]angerous duo," linking to an Agence France-Presse article that simply reported that Dodd and Frank "promised President Barack Obama on Monday they would work with the White House to enact a sweeping overhaul of US financial regulatory structures by year's end."

Visitors to The Fox Nation were no doubt confused when they clicked on the link provided by the website to the AFP article in question only to find that it in no way characterized Dodd or Frank as "[d]angerous."

That was Day One. In the two months that followed the website's launch, The Fox Nation has displayed an uncanny ability to mislead readers, twist the truth, spread wild conspiracy theories, and misrepresent the reporting of legitimate journalists and media outlets.

At times, the website has been downright frightening. In early May, it ran a photo of a rifle pointed in the direction of a photo of Obama's head. The headline associated with the rifle image asked: "Why Are Gun Sales Surging?" One can only imagine what O'Reilly and his ilk would have said if a progressive blog -- or a legitimate news outlet, as Fox purports to be, for that matter -- had done the same thing to President Bush.

Debunked conspiracy theories are also finding new life on the website. A headline in late May asked: "Should Obama Release Birth Certificate? Or Is This Old News?" But contrary to the question, the Obama campaign released a copy of Obama's birth certificate, posting it on the campaign's website last year. It also reportedly provided the original document to FactCheck.org, whose staff concluded in an August 2008 post that it "meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship."

About the use of questions like the one just highlighted: In what appears to be an attempt to ward off criticism, The Fox Nation, like the on-screen text on Fox News, often employs the use of questions for its headlines rather than straightforward assertions. It's as if they are pre-emptively saying, "We made no such statement. We simply asked a question."

What has the website asked its readers? Of same-sex marriage, it wondered, "Are 'Triad' Marriages Next?" Following the reported suicide of a Freddie Mac executive, one headline asked, "Was It Suicide?" After the Department of Homeland Security declassified an April report detailing potential increases in right-wing extremism, the website queried, "Is Homeland Security Targeting Tea Parties?" Of course, these are the very same tea parties that Fox News and The Fox Nation went to great lengths promoting.

George Tiller and Countering Anti-Choice Terrorism

George Tiller and Countering Anti-Choice Terrorism

I believe the murder of George Tiller was an act of domestic terrorism whose aim was not only to assassinate a single man, but also to frighten a generation of doctors and to shame and terrify women and families who are making difficult choices. While the murderous rage of Tiller's assassin is not representative of the broader anti-choice movement, I believe that the anti-choice community operates with a totalitarian impulse that generates a culture of terror rather than a culture of life.

Hannah Arendt suggested that totalitarians generate terror in part by cultivating profound loneliness among their targets. Loneliness locks human beings in isolation and hampers discourse, connection, and shared experience. When we believe we are alone and misunderstood we cannot form the bonds necessary to organize and resist. There are few experiences more lonely and isolating than facing an unintended pregnancy or facing the need to terminate a desired pregnancy in order to protect maternal health. The anti-choice discourse labels the women and families who chose abortion "baby killers." It is a strategy that dehumanizes these women and the doctors who care for them.

The strategy is effective because abortion still carries tremendous social shame in addition to its personal psychological burden. Activists for reproductive rights have a hard time convincing women and families who have terminated to be part of a movement that protects the right to terminate. Many understandably prefer not to be publicly associated with the stigma and potential violence that comes with standing up for choice.

It also works because abortion, like all American healthcare, is profoundly shaped by structures of privilege and access. Wealthy women in urban areas with private insurance who have long term relationships with physicians have more access to privacy and to termination services than do other women. Poor women, teenagers, rural women, women suffering with domestic violence, and uninsured women are much more likely to have to risk some level of public scrutiny of their decision to seek an abortion. They cannot request a D&C from their private provider, they must seek out a clinic. Even during the dark years of back alley abortions when all women seeking abortion were at risk, it was the most vulnerable women who carried the heaviest burden of infection, illness, and death.

Because women of privilege can keep their termination choices private while vulnerable women are exposed to public shaming, it becomes easier to believe that only those "other" women and "bad" women choose abortion. Telling our stories is part of counteracting the terrorism that seeks to divide, shame, and even murder to impose its own worldview. Nurturing a sense of commonality and shared experience reduces the power of terror. Women need realistic understandings of how many women grapple with these choices and the different ways they come to make a decision. Such information is shockingly difficult to access. Often women must wade through disgusting, painful, and misleading "information" about abortion just to get basic medical advice. While there are political, judicial, and structural aspects to this issue, I want to also make an appeal for the power of our personal narratives to fight back against anti-choice terrorism.

Forty years ago my mother was part of the movement of individuals who helped desperate women find safe ways to terminate their pregnancies. This network provided safe houses, transportation, and follow-up support for women who had to cross state lines to obtain abortions. She was willing to risk her life and livelihood to protect women's reproductive choices.

Nearly twenty years ago my older sister was diagnosed with cancer during the second trimester of her pregnancy. Her religious commitments led her to refuse her doctor's advice to terminate. She risked her life to ensure that she would not have an abortion. She and my niece are both healthy.

When we were 14-year-old, high school freshmen my friend decided to have the baby of a boy she'd had sex with only once. It changed her life forever, but she graduated from school and made a life for herself and daughter. In my twenties I stood by dear friends who simply could not afford emotionally or financially to carry their pregnancies to term. Their decisions to seek abortions were difficult and painful, but they faced them courageously.

I'm a 35-year-old, educated, black, divorced mother. Like so many other women my age I have faced my own tough reproductive choices. I've had a child, an abortion, and hysterectomy. I love and respect women who have chosen many different paths. Their stories and my own are part of the reason that I am a committed supporter of reproductive rights.

The murder of George Tiller is personal to me. It is not just a matter of politics or policy. I am an aunt to three teenage girls and the mother to a daughter. It is critical to me that their health, safety, and choices are protected.

The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse for Bush administration

Cheney and Rice Remember 9/11. I Do, Too.
The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.

On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.

Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.

Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.

Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.

Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is the author of "Against All Enemies" and "Your Government Failed You."

Even in Crisis, Banks Dig In for Fight Against Rules

Even in Crisis, Banks Dig In for Fight Against Rules

Atop the agenda during their calls: how to counter an expected attempt to rein in credit-default swaps and other derivatives — the sophisticated and profitable financial instruments that were intended to limit risk but instead had helped take the economy to the brink of disaster.

The nine biggest participants in the derivatives market — including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America — created a lobbying organization, the CDS Dealers Consortium, on Nov. 13, a month after five of its members accepted federal bailout money.

To oversee the consortium’s push, lobbying records show, the banks hired a longtime Washington power broker who previously helped fend off derivatives regulation: Edward J. Rosen, a partner at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. A confidential memo Mr. Rosen drafted and shared with the Treasury Department and leaders on Capitol Hill has, politicians and market participants say, played a pivotal role in shaping the debate over derivatives regulation.

Today, just as the bankers anticipated, a battle over derivatives has been joined, in what promises to be a replay of a confrontation in Washington that Wall Street won a decade ago. Since then, derivatives trading has become one of the most profitable businesses for the nation’s big banks.

The looming fight over regulation is the beginning of a broader debate over the future of the financial industry. At the center of the argument: What is the right amount of regulation?

Those who favor more regulation say it would offer early warning signals when companies take on too much risk and would help avert catastrophic surprises like the huge derivatives losses at the giant insurer the American International Group, which has so far received more than $170 billion in taxpayer commitments. The banks say too much regulation will stifle financial innovation and economic growth.

The debate about where derivatives will trade speaks to core concerns about the products: transparency and disclosure.

There are two distinct camps in this argument. One camp, which includes legislative leaders, is pushing for trading on an open exchange — much like stocks — where value and structure are visible and easily determined. Another camp, led by the banks, prefers that some of the products be traded in privately managed clearinghouses, with less disclosure.

The Obama administration agrees that more regulation is needed. A proposal unveiled recently by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner won plaudits for trying to make derivatives trading less freewheeling and more accountable — a plan that hinges in part on using clearinghouses for the trades.

Critics in both the financial world and Congress say relying on clearinghouses would be problematic. They also say Mr. Geithner’s plan contains a major loophole, because little disclosure would be required for more complicated derivatives, like the type of customized, credit-default swaps that helped bring down A.I.G. A.I.G. sold insurance related to mortgage securities, essentially making a big bet that those mortgages would not default.

Mr. Rosen and other bank lobbyists have pushed on Capitol Hill to keep so-called customized swaps from being traded more openly. These are contracts written for the specific needs of a customer, whose one-of-a-kind nature makes them very hard to value or trade. Mr. Rosen has also argued that dealers should be able to trade through venues closely affiliated with banks rather than through more independent platforms like exchanges.

Mr. Rosen’s confidential memo, dated Feb. 10 and obtained by The New York Times, recommended that the biggest participants in the derivatives market should continue to be overseen by the Federal Reserve Board. Critics say the Fed has been an overly friendly regulator, which is why big banks favor it.

Mr. Rosen’s proposal for change was similar to the Treasury Department’s recently announced plan to increase oversight. Treasury officials say that their proposal was arrived at independently and that they sought input from dozens of sources.

Even so, market participants, analysts and members of Congress who have proposed stricter reforms worry that the Treasury proposal does not go far enough to close several important regulatory gaps that allowed derivatives to play such a destructive role in the current financial crisis.

But increased transparency of derivatives trades would cut into banks’ profits — hence the banks’ opposition. Customers who trade derivatives would pay less if they knew what the prevailing market prices were.

“The banks want to go back to business as usual — and then some. And they have a lot of audacity now that everyone has bailed them out,” said Yra Harris, an independent commodities trader who was involved in an effort to regulate derivatives nine years ago. “But we have to begin with the premise that Wall Street doesn’t want transparency, because more transparency means less immediate profits.”