Reading some of the latest headlines, one might think that Spanish investigations and possible indictments of six former Bush officials for alleged involvement in torture were dead in the water.  As the Associated Press banner put it (4/17/09): "Spain: No Torture Probe of U.S. Officials," while the Los Angeles Times headlined a news brief (4/17/09), “Spain; Prosecutors Reject Trying Bush Officials."

On the prosecutors' announcement, the AP story reported:

While their ruling is not binding, the announcement all but dooms prospects for the case against the men going forward. On Thursday, Spain's top law-enforcement official Candido Conde-Pumpido said he would not support an investigation against the officials--including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

So perhaps Bill O'Reilly is be excused for celebrating the news last night (O'Reilly Factor, 4/16/09), though the Fox host may have gone too far when he claimed credit for Spain's reported change of heart: "I don't know if the Factor was a factor in this decision, but I am taking full credit for it," said O'Reilly, who went on to suggest that it was his recently threatened boycott that forced Spain's hand: "We were going to boycott Spain,' said O'Reilly, "and they folded pretty darn fast."

But according to Harper's legal blogger Scott Horton, the reports, and the O'Reilly boasts they seem to have prompted, are, at least, premature. Appearing on Democracy Now! on Friday, Horton criticized AP's reporting, pointing out that in the Spanish system, investigating judges make the call on indictments, not prosecutors.

Well, the Associated Press is giving you extremely faulty legal analysis, because a decision as to whether the case will go forward rests entirely with the investigating judge. The Spanish system is not like the American system, where prosecutors decide who and when to bring cases and who to prosecute.

And Horton explained that the investigating judge in this case, Baltazar Garzon, is not known for  acceding to advice from Spanish prosecutors:

In the Spanish system, the prosecution is managed by an investigating judge. In this case, it’s Baltasar Garzon. And you may recall he handled the case involving Augusto Pinochet, and he did that against the stern opposition of Spanish prosecutors, I think which shows you the weight that that recommendation may hold with him in his court.

Horton underlined another important fact, a point that was reported in some news media (e.g., New York Times, 4/17/09), but missed by others, including by O'Reilly: The Spanish prosecutor thinks the U.S. should prosecute the Bush officials:

But there's a different consideration to weigh in here, as well, and that is that this is a statement that was announced by the prosecutors at the Audencia Nacional in Madrid, and we know, in fact, that those prosecutors who have made this recommendation not to go forward in fact concluded that the case should be prosecuted.

They prepared a 37-page memorandum--and I've discussed, I've talked with several people in Madrid who have read it--that laid out the case, showed how it could fairly easily be brought, how it involved a joint criminal enterprise, how it could be sustained on the basis of documents, including some of those that were released yesterday. And that decision by the career prosecutors was overridden in a political act by Spain's attorney general, who's a political figure. He was a member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Jose Zapatero.

And Horton reports a story that to our knowledge has not been reported in U.S. corporate media thus far, that the top Spanish prosecutor's decision to oppose indictments was prompted by politics--high-level communications between the U.S. and Spanish governments. Because of this, according to Horton, the prosecutors objections were likely to be taken less seriously when and if indictments are considered:

Moreover, the attorney general's decision, which was announced yesterday morning in Madrid, came after several days of high-level discussions between Washington and the Zapatero government, during the course of which, I've been told, the Obama administration suggested very strongly that the pendency of this case was inconvenient and that it would be viewed as a great favor by Washington if Zapatero's government could do what was within its power to shut this down. And I think what we see here is an accommodating nod from Jose Zapatero.

So it has really nothing to do with justice, and it has nothing to do with the merits of the case. It's a political act. And it's certain to be understood by the judges of the Audencia Nacional as a political act, which means I don't think it really forms much of a barrier to the prosecution going forward.

A New York Post feature headlined "A Day in the Life of Bill O'Reilly" offers this insight into life working for the Fox host:

"The staff of 15 meets 7:30 every morning. Working for me, you've got to be a Navy SEAL. No mistakes. I need facts, or it'll get rammed down my throat."

Huh. When did this "no mistakes" policy start?

Of course, some former employees of O'Reilly recall a slightly different workplace experience....

Last night (3/23/08) Bill O'Reilly aired the results of his stalking expedition against Think Progress blogger Amanda Terkel, who had dared to question (3/1/09) the appropriateness of O'Reilly speaking at a fundraiser for a foundation for rape survivors in light of his suggestion (Radio Factor, 8/2/06) that a "moronic" rape/murder victim had invited assault by her drinking and the way she was dressed.

In the segment, O'Reilly presents the controversy sparked by his speaking a dinner for the Alexa Foundation as a conspiracy masterminded by "elements at NBC News" led by NBC president Jeff Zucker, whom O'Reilly refers to with more than a whiff of paranoia as "the man behind the curtain." But the person O'Reilly went after directly was Terkel, who the segment referred to as a "a villain" and "just dishonest" and accused of producing "perhaps the worst garbage" about O'Reilly's suitability as an anti-rape advocate.

O'Reilly's chief stalker, Jesse Watters, apparently followed a vacationing Terkel for two hours before badgering her to explain "the Mel Gibson component to Bill's analysis"--the context that O'Reilly's remarks about "moronic" murder victim Jennifer Moore had supposedly been yanked from. The blogger did not immediately recall this aspect of the three-year-old broadcast, but when she subsequently looked it up, she discovered the connection that O'Reilly drew between the actor's anti-Semitic tirade and the murder victim's death (Think Progress, 3/24/09):

I think it's safe to say that if Mel Gibson didn't get drunk, he wouldn't be in this terrible situation he finds himself in. And if a young woman, 18-year-old Jennifer Moore of Harrington Park, N.J., didn’t get drunk, she’d be alive today.

Hateful as O'Reilly's blame-the-victim rhetoric about Moore was, O'Reilly has stooped even lower, suggesting that an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped and molested over a four-year period didn't escape his abductor because he enjoyed his captivity (O'Reilly Factor, 1/15/07):

And the question is, why didn't [Shawn Hornbeck] escape when he could have?... The Stockholm syndrome thing, I don't buy it.... The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents. He didn't have to go to school. He could run around and do whatever he wanted...I think when it all comes down, what's going to happen is, there was an element here that this kid liked about his circumstances.

Women invite assault by the way they dress; kids like to be raped. To quote Bill O'Reilly out of context: "It doesn't get much more evil than that."

It takes a special kind of person to send stalkers out after a woman because she wrote a blog post criticizing you for blaming a victim of rape and murder for wearing the wrong sort of clothing.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly tries to nail Obama on a "no more earmarks" flip-flop in his "talking points" commentary (3/4/09):

O'REILLY: We begin with this:

BARACK OBAMA: We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review.

O'REILLY: That's President Obama pledging last January to end earmarks in federal spending. But now the House has passed a new spending bill full of earmark pork, and if the Senate OKs the $400+ billion spending bonanza this week, Mr. Obama is expected to sign it into law.

Actually, that was Obama talking about the stimulus package--which is not the same as the budget, which is what passed the House and is currently tied up in the Senate. And the stimulus bill didn't (technically at least) have "earmarks."

Bill O'Reilly explains the diversity of viewpoints available on the Fox News Channel (2/27/09):

The Fox News Channel features a variety of opinions. We parade in scores of guests each week with all kinds of views. Glenn Beck believes the nation is in crisis. Alan Colmes believes Obama could be the next FDR. Sean Hannity believes the Republican Party has the right formula. And I believe both parties need an overhaul. They need to start looking out for the folks. So you get a wide range of views, while our hard news people deliver solid facts.

Huh. Three right-wingers and Alan Colmes--who lost his show on Fox two months ago.

Sean Hannity is a great American. You can hear it every day on his national radio show, where the standard caller greeting to the host is, "Sean, you’re a great American!" The catchphrase is so well-known, it's been commercialized!

And who is more patriotic than Hannity, who uses his daily radio and Fox News Channel shows to maintain a vigilant watch over the slightest hint of anti-Americanism or subversion? Who warned you more often or at more earsplitting volume about how Barack Obama's life was littered with anti-American friends and associates advocating for the violent overthrow of the United States government? Who sounded the alarm (Hannity's America, 4/13/08) over Bill Ayers and his leadership role in the 1960s Weather Underground group, "whose mission was the overthrow of the United States government"? And who keeps you current on who’s who among the anti-Americans: the U.N. (Hannity & Colmes, 9/23/08), the Rev. Jeremiah (Hannity & Colmes, 8/5/08), the Air America radio network (Hannity & Colmes, 6/25/07), Michael Moore and his film Sicko (Hannity & Colmes, 6/17/07)?

That's why we were truly shocked to learn that Hannity's website is hosting a discussion where his fans can vote on the best way to violently overthrow the U.S. government:

"There's a lot of talk on this board about armed revolt," writes the Hannity.com regular centerscroll (who's posted more than 1,700 times on the site). So he started an online poll (2/23/09) to find out "what form of such a revolt the revolutionaries would prefer"--listing as choices a "military coup," in which "the military deposes the government and declares itself in charge"; an "armed rebellion," where "the fed-up civilian population attacks their enemies forcibly...to ultimately depose the government and install one that follows their own ideals"; or "war for secession," meaning "individual states try to secede and perhaps ultimately must arm to do it."

centerscroll did not provide any options for those who saw no need to overthrow the Obama administration, or who preferred to resist the government through nonviolent means.  As of 4 p.m. on February 27, 76 Hannity.com participants had voted, with 18 choosing the coup option, 31 picking armed rebellion and 27 opting for a war of secession.

Hannity better hope his Fox News colleague Bill O'Reilly doesn't see this poll. When some Huffington Post readers celebrated a report about Nancy Reagan having an injury--in an online thread that was deleted by the blog--O'Reilly likened the blog's founder Arianna Huffington to the Nazis and the KKK (Media Matters, 2/28/08):

Arianna Huffington is the editor of this. She knows it comes in, puts it up, along with a lot of other vile stuff. I mean, the whole thing is a sewer....  And don't you think Americans should start holding people like Arianna Huffington accountable for this?...  She's allowing that stuff to go on.

Do you suppose O'Reilly would hold his colleague Sean Hannity to the same standard?

Jon Stewart has a Daily Show bit (2/9/09) replaying Bill O'Reilly's staunch declarations that "we hate those paparazzi, we think they're the scum of the earth" because "the right to privacy is a basic constitutional tenet." That sounds like quite a principled stand; the only trouble comes when Stewart then shows O'Reilly Factor clips of its own camera crews ambushing journalists out with their families, in front of their own homes and even commuting on a city bus to quiz them about why they said or wrote certain things.

Stewart then embarks on "a great experiment," showing O'Reilly listing "the people that [he] believes deserve protection"--"Cruise and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie"--and wondering what happens if "they were to offend O'Reilly in some way." The rich payoff is video of a Factor reporter who, in Stewart's words "must really want that story to sit around with all the 'scum'" paparazzi waiting to ask Jolie why she would allegedly "ban Fox News from your premiere last night?" Stewart names the real "governing principle" here as "ignore the privacy rights of anyone who disagrees with Bill O'Reilly."

After President Obama's press conference last night, Fox host Bill O'Reilly saw one to score points against the White House--by mocking Obama for relying on a list of pre-approved journalists when he took questions.

Unfortunately for O'Reilly, his guest at the time was former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who had to point out that this was... well, exactly the way Bush did things.

O'REILLY: Look, he had those guys listed, written down, who he was going to call. Now, in other press conferences, they just look around, and they go, "Oh, right, right, right!" And they go, "This one, that one, this one." Correct?

FLEISCHER: Well, George Bush never did that. I don't know how Bill Clinton did it, but it's a bad idea to reward the guy with the loudest voice.

O'REILLY: OK. So....

FLEISCHER: Writing it down gives the president what to call (ph).

O'REILLY: George Bush came in with a list of guys he was going to call on?

FLEISCHER: Yes, I used to prepare it for him. I would give him a grid, show him where every reporter is seated. And there are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They're screened.

O'REILLY: Like the Huffington Post.

FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it Siberia. And I told the president, "Don't call on Siberia. Just stay right here and call on these people on the grid in front of you."

Like O'Reilly, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz also seemed to think the breakthrough question asked by Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein was a little weird. Where O'Reilly suggested Stein was an "oddball," Kurtz wrote that he asked a question about a "a cause popular on the left"--by which he means the same thing.

Also like O'Reilly, Kurtz got the history of press conference protocol wrong, writing:

Some journalists are miffed that Obama decides the day before news conferences whom he is going to call on -- the fortunate ones are notified in advance--reducing the other reporters to the role of mere extras. Past presidents have generally worked their way around the room, starting with the wire services, networks and major newspapers.

Too bad Kurtz didn't have Fleischer with him to let him know that such an open-ended press conference system would be a "bad idea."

In a top-of-the-show rant about the dangers of the Guantanamo detainees, Fox's Bill O'Reilly declared (1/25/09):

Just hours after President Obama announced he was going to shut down Guantanamo Bay, the feds confirmed that a released Gitmo inmate, 35-year-old Sahid al-Shahiri, had resumed terrorist activities in Yemen.

Now if this isn't a warning, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what is. Obama tells the world no more Gitmo, and a guy the Bush administration let go in 2007 is now a major Al-Qaeda terrorist again. So we can add this guy to a list of 61 former Gitmo detainees who have returned to being terrorists after they've been released, that according to the Defense Department. That's 11 percent of those let go returning to the terror world.

First of all, that 61 number is totally misleading. That total includes those the Pentagon thinks may have "returned" to the "battlefield." They say they only know for sure about 18 of them. And even those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.

Seton Hall professor Mark Denbeaux has pointed out (on MSNBC and elsewhere; Washington Independent, 1/23/09) that there are serious problems with the Pentagon's accounting:

They've failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DoD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo--much less were they released from there. They have counted people as "returning to the fight" for their having written an op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DoD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning--except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.

Of course, O'Reilly's bloviating has a deeper problems: If these people were terrorists, then the Bush administration should have had no trouble keeping them in prison. If they weren't terrorists, but became terrorists after being imprisoned for years, then Guantanamo's the problem and not the solution, isn't it?

Commenting yesterday on the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly declared that "this horrendous story points out how difficult it is to deal with some Muslims":

Many Americans are simply fed up with these displays in the Arab world: unchecked violence, irrational thinking.

One could say that many people are fed up with displays of unchecked violence. Actually, as Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi was hurling his shoes at Bush, he explicitly cited the largest recent case of "unchecked violence in the Arab world"--the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

If Americans are fed up with violence and irrational thinking, that'll be bad news for O'Reilly's ratings. The Fox host, who was recently named as one of the nation's top purveyors of anti-Muslim smears in FAIR's report, Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation, responded to the attacks of September 11 by calling for the bombing of Iraq (among other countries):

Their infrastructure must be destroyed and the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain.

New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg tells (12/5/08) of being targeted by Fox's Bill O'Reilly for connecting Newt Gingrich to "anti-gay bigotry." O'Reilly's grievance against Hertzberg sparks from this passage in the writer's December 1 New Yorker piece:

Like a polluted swamp, anti-gay bigotry is likely to get thicker and more toxic as it dries up. Viciousness meets viciousness. "Look," Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, said the other day (on the air, to Bill O’Reilly), "I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence.... I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact."

O'Reilly cried foul:

What Hertzberg did not tell New Yorker readers is that that conversation with Speaker Gingrich was about gay violence against a Christian missionary in San Francisco. It had nothing to do with the gay marriage vote, only militant reaction to it. Hertzberg does this kind of dishonest stuff all the time, because he knows many of his readers never watch the Factor, and Gingrich and I are easy targets for his distortions.

Maybe you won't be surprised to learn that O'Reilly wasn't giving the whole story. Here's what O'Reilly actually said just before the Gingrich quote:

OK, now the culture war, I know you've been flying around the country and doing stuff. In the last three or four days, really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper. We’re going to show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We’re going to show you the video on Monday of that. We have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We have boycotts called on restaurants. I mean, it is getting out of control very few days after the election. How do you assess that?

So the "nasty stuff" O'Reilly referred to really ranged from a cross-smashing (which actually sounds considerably less fascistic when you learn more about it) to boycotts of businesses--the latter being the sort of thing that O'Reilly routinely encourages his viewers to participate in. From this sort of predictable distortion, O'Reilly moved on to what Hertzberg described as "simply a lie":

O'Reilly said last night that I "refused to come on the Factor," as he calls his program.... Neither he nor any of his staff asked me to appear on his program, either directly or through anyone else at the New Yorker. I'm puzzled that O'Reilly said otherwise, since he has to know that we know he was lying. I guess he just doesn't care. He's got his base.

Hertzberg might be a little less puzzled had he read FAIR's book-length exposé of such loathsome behavior: The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, by Peter Hart.

The New York Times' Jonathan Hicks (11/17/08), writing about newly elected Staten Island Rep. Michael McMahon:

Mr. McMahon...stresses his working-class roots, telling voters of his Irish father’s lifelong job as an insurance underwriter.

That must be the same working class that Bill O'Reilly comes from.

There's been a fair amount of speculation about what Fox News Channel will do in the new political climate. The online teaser for tonight's edition of the O'Reilly Factor gives us some sense of the, uhh, future:

Monday, November 10:
• The Factor confronts Rev. Jeremiah Wright! You won't want to miss it!

Fresh off his suggestion that his success was proof of the existence of God, Bill O'Reilly draws a new parallel-- one that really doesn't merit a response (at least a verbal one):

O'Reilly says his views have made him a target.

"My life is dangerous now," he said. "You know, I have bodyguards and security. I can't go many places. I can't be in certain crowd situations. When I do a book signing, I gotta have a phalanx of state troopers there, because there are crazy people. And then there're the websites and all of that, which are just totally out of control.

"They encourage these nuts. You know, I was thinking about John Lennon, you know, and John Lennon was tryin' to be a nice guy, signing the guy's thing, and [Chapman] pops him. So, that is the worst part of the whole Factor experience. The best part is I get to look out for the folks. And the folks know it. They know it. I've been doing this for more than 12 years."