Earlier this year, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which is charged with investigating attorney misconduct, announced that it could not pursue an investigation into the role of Justice lawyers in crafting the NSA warrantless wiretapping program because it was denied security clearance.

Previously, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would not explain why the security clearances had been denied, saying he did not want to “get into internal discussions.” But in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, Gonzales said President Bush personally blocked Justice Department lawyers from pursuing an investigation of the warrantless eavesdropping program. Watch it.

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“A top Israeli general said today that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon would last another few weeks, and he said that the use of large numbers of ground forces had not been ruled out.”

On Friday, House Energy Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) released an impressive-looking “report” attacking a 1998 study by Dr. Michael Mann which suggested that recent global warming is unprecedented over the last several centuries. The Energy Committee report was quickly seized on by the Wall Street Journal editorial page as proof that scientific consensus about global warming is “more like group-think.”

The House Energy Committee report isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Here’s why:

1. The report rehashes criticisms that have already been discredited. The House Energy Committee report, which it commissioned from Edward J. Wegman, is not original work. Rather, it seeks to “verify” the criticisms that Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (an energy consultant and an economist) made about the Mann study three years ago. These claims have been discredited in peer-reviewed journals. McIntyre and McKitrick’s criticisms were considered by a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences – the organization created by Congress to evaluate scientific research — which concluded that the Mann study is “supported by an array of evidence.”

2. The report did not involve any climate scientists. Wegman and his co-authors are statisticians with no apparent expertise in climate science.

3. The report was not peer-reviewed. In fact, Wegman attacks the concept of peer-review, claiming the Mann study had “too much reliance on peer review, which seemed not to be sufficiently independent.” Wegman has no basis to claim that the peer review of the Mann study was not independent because peer-reviewers are anonymous. Rigorous peer review is a core principle of legitimate scientific inquiry.

Even if the Energy Committee report were accurate, it wouldn’t impact our basic understanding about climate change. The National Academy of Sciences explained “large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the last 2,000 years are not the primary evidence for the widely accepted views that global warming is occurring, that human activities are contributing, at least in part, to this warming.”

House Energy Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow to discuss the wide-ranging implications of their report.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney has more.

In today’s column, Will slams Kristol’s latest war-mongering and answers Kristol’s question, “Why wait” to bomb Iran?: “Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq.” Steve Clemons has more.