QOTD: Do Ask Do Tell Edition

Richard Clark in this morning's Washington Post:

[T]he decisions that Bush officials made in the [post-9/11] 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.... [emphasis added]

The rest is history.

[Edited title.]

World War III Averted -- What Now?

Now that Bush and Cheney's favorite toy has been taken away, what will the White House do to occupy themselves during the rest of their (incredibly lame-duck) term?

These are my suggestions:

1. Help repair the Republican Party's future prospects by requiring the redesign of stalls in every Midwestern airport's men's rooms.

2. Purge the Supreme Court of those annoying judicial activists that don't pass the Bat Boy litmus test (teach the controversy!).
3. Bring federal resources to bear in the ongoing search for the real killer of Nicole Simpson.

4. Learn to correctly pronounce the names of any three Middle East heads of state.

5. Keep an eye on the twins by offering Ozzy and Rob Zombie the use of Air Force One on their U.S. tour, in exchange for backstage passes.

Yours?

[cross-posted at Blue Mass Group]

Today in Kathryn Jean Lopez

The editor of NRO is back at the matchmaking game:

If Reader Response Is Any Indication [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

the time has come:

Draft Cheney.

10/23 09:17 AM

If Cheney family history is any indication, she'd take a deferment.

Questions And More Questions

Jose Padilla. Good grief, where in America can you find twelve people dumber than Bush, with the memory of Gonzales and the soul of Cheney? Miami, as in Florida. Well that answers that question.

Can printing more money be far behind? It didn't take long for elation turned to panic, did it?

Why is everybody so surprised that Robert Mueller kept accurate notes? Every medical professional (even me) in the country knew that Ashcroft was definitely not "lucid". This story is old news and even worse, it's about a subject that most Americans like to ignore. Until it happens to them, by which time it is way too late.

From my place.

Dumbass du Jour

Yes, it's Jonah Goldberg again:

Why do I like Dick Cheney? Because at a time when everybody talks a big game about how they don't like people-pleasing politicians who live by the polls, Cheney is pretty much the only guy out there who walks the walk. He truly doesn't care what people think about him. I love that.

Right. Because not giving a shit what the people think is really important in a democratic state.

In particular, I like his stance toward the media. His view of the Fourth Estate is a bit like that of a bull elephant annoyed by varmints shnuffling around his feet: He's not bothered enough to squish 'em ... yet.

And Jonah will be right there applauding him when he does.

Jonah does, however, manage this tepid criticism:

Cheney's approach to government is ultimately counterproductive.

Ouch! That's gotta hurt.

But the contempt for the public? The exterminationist fantasies about the press (yes, that's Jonah's speculation, but we know he's right)?

Those are the things Jonah likes about Cheney.

Vice President Terminator

As the 'Draft Cheney' campaign swings into high gear, concerns about the Vice President's health are being raised. Pundits wonder if the Veep will be able to endure an arduous campaign...



...but today those concerns were laid to rest when the Vice President announced that he would move his brain to a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 hyper-alloy combat chassis.

Speculation is already brewing about a trip to Iraq to deal with the insurgents once and for all.

Quote of the Day - Unintentional Humor Edition

Dick Cheney, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer:

One of the most dangerous jobs in the world is to be number three in the al Qaeda organization, because a lot of them are now dead or in custody.

Heh. Indeed.

[That's all, folks]

Guile and Calculation

I caught this quote of the day via Think Progress:

"Few have ever risen so high with so little guile or calculation."
-- Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking about former president Gerald Ford.

It's a nice bit of eulogizing, eloquent and accurate...

Until you realize that Cheney is sort of saying that most of the people in his White House got there with guile. Nice one, Darth.

(A calculated cross-post)

[That's all, folks]

Wingnuts, Armitage, and Plamegate

Debra Saunders, who never met a Republican talking point she didn't like, jumps on the Plamegate-is-really-nothing-because-Armitage-was-the-leaker bandwagon:

WITH the disclosure that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the initial source for Robert Novak's July 2003 column that outed CIA operative Valerie Wilson -- also known as Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador and Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson -- it is now clear that all the hype about a Bush-inspired vendetta against the Wilsons is bunk.

The basic premise (for Saunders, and for all the other wingnuts repeating the party line) is that only the leak to Novak could possibly be considered wrong, and that any subsequent leak was perfectly okay.

To illustrate one reason why this is ridiculous, here's a little timeline:

• June, 2003: Armitage tells Woodward about Plame; Woodward sits on the information.


• June 23, 2003: Libby tells Judy Miller Wilson's wife might work for the CIA.


• July 8, 2003: Libby gives Miller more details about Plame's position. Armitage meets with Novak and tells him.


• July 11, 2003: Rove tells Marc Cooper.


• July 14, 2003: Novak column about Valerie Plame.

In other words, both Libby and Rove leaked the information before it was common knowledge. Miller testified that Libby was her original source, and Cooper testified that Rove was his.

And then there's the enormous leap of logic to the conclusion that "all the hype about a Bush-inspired vendetta against the Wilsons is bunk." To accept that, we would have to assume that Armitage's leak erases the actions of Rove and Libby--that because Armitage was apparently first, what Rove and Libby did not only wasn't wrong but didn't happen at all. But we know it happened. We know they did what they did. We know that both of them lied about it (although Rove ultimately skated on that charge). We also know that Cheney gave Libby a copy of the Wilson piece with notes that appear to be marching orders for the anti-Wilson pushback ("did his wife send him on a junket?").

I won't go so far that the case is proven...but, really now: we have the documents; we know who Cheney is, and how he operates; we know who Rove is, and how he operates; we know what the administration as a whole is, and how it operates; and it all adds up to circumstantial evidence strong enough for ordinary people (if not a Federal grand jury) to judge them guilty. The claim that the Armitage leak vindicates the White House--that it proves their innocence--is a sad and desperate attempt to deny the obvious.

Update: Via Atrios, I see that the WashPo editorial board are also drinking the Kool-Aid.

[That's all, folks]

Addington, Cheney, and Nixon

I've been reading the New Yorker profile on David Addington, the architect of executive infallibility, and I highly recommend it. Addington is the guy who argued for unlimited 'wartime' powers, and signing statements, and military tribunals, and sactioning torture...and so on. Addington's involvement in all of these makes Mayer's profile a pretty good summary of the administration's war on the Constitution.

It's also a reminder that this war has been going on for a very long time: it's Nixon's war, and Nixon's war never really ended; its partisans just went underground. The chief partisan was Representative Richard Cheney; Addington, just out of high school when Nixon resigned, was a sympathizer. Cheney and Addington hooked up in 1987, when Cheney commissioned the Minority Report on Iran-Contra--a whitewash that accused Congress of overstepping its bounds (“legislative hostage taking”) in exercising oversight of intelligence matters--and Addington helped research it. It was one more battle (kind of a draw, in the end) in the war for executive supremacy.

Throughout it all, Cheney and Addington have kept alive the Nixonian dream. Now they have achieved it. Somewhere below, the sneaky bastard is looking up and smiling.

[That's all, folks]

Another Bad News Cycle for Darth Cheney

It's almost comical how assiduously he strives to live up to his nickname. Everything evil that comes out of this White House (which is to say, very nearly everything that comes out of this White House, period) has his fingerprints on it.

Today we have two big stories about Cheney's involvement in two of the most egregiously criminal White House programs. First, there's a report from Fitz:

After former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV publicly criticized a key rationale for the war in Iraq, Vice President Cheney wrote a note on a newspaper clipping raising the possibility that the critique resulted from a CIA-sponsored "junket" arranged by Wilson's wife, covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, according to court documents filed late Friday.

The filing by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is the second that names Cheney as a key White House official who questioned the legitimacy of Wilson's examination of Iraqi nuclear ambitions. It further suggests that Cheney helped originate the idea in his office that Wilson's credibility was undermined by his link to Plame.

Fitzgerald's filing states that Cheney passed the annotated article by Wilson to his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who Fitzgerald says subsequently discussed Wilson's marriage to Plame in conversations with two reporters, despite the fact that Plame was a covert CIA officer and her name was not supposed to be revealed....

The new filing includes the precise annotations that Cheney wrote on a copy of Wilson's July 2003 article in the New York Times, titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

"Have they done this sort of thing before?" Cheney wrote. "Send an amb[assador] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

And of course it's purest coincidence that Libby passed on the exact talking points Cheney had written. Uh-huh.

Note to Libby: save your sorry ass. Give up Dick.

Also, you know that whole criminal electronic surveillance thing? It turns out Cheney wanted it to be even more criminal (hat tip: Kevin Drum):

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001....

By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans....

Addington, you may recall, is the guy who later replaced Libby as Cheney's chief of staff. Evil and eviler.

[That's all, folks]

Shorter Dick Cheney

It's all about me.

[That's all, folks]

Worse than You Know

The Operative: It's worse than you know.
Mal: It usually is.

This last week should be declared Worse than You Know Week. Yes, it usually is...but this week in particular stands out for the number and severity of its Worse than You Know moments.

First we learn about our mini-gulag archipelago, the network of secret detention facilities where the CIA practices interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions on prisoners who officially don't exist.

Then Colin Powell's aide, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, tells NPR that he found an audit trail establishing that Cheney himself authorized the relaxed policies on torture.

Now, via Kevin Drum, not only is it worse than we know but the ways in which it's worse than we know have begun to converge.

Today's New York Times reports that 'intelligence' the administration peddled as showing a link between Iraq and al Qaeda was known to be dubious well before they started peddling it:

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.

Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Kevin Drum points out that there was good reason for considering al-Libi's story dubious: al-Libi was a test case for Cheney's new torture policy. Initially cooperative when interrogated by the FBI, al-Libi was taken from them by the CIA for harsher treatment:

Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. "They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo" for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. "At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, 'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f--- her.' So we lost that fight."

In other words, the administration's monstrous policy on torture fed the fraudulent intelligence they used in their monstrous effort to drag us into a war of (their) choice.

When I read my friend Deborah's reaction to the budget bill, I felt a little bad that I wasn't angrier about it myself. Drastically cutting aid to poor people while matching every dollar cut with two in tax cuts for rich people: totally outrageous. And yet I can't summon any outrage about it, because as wrong as it is, that's at least within the realm of politics. I'm still stuck on the criminal, on the potentially impeachable, on the completely monstrous things these people do. Of which there appears to be an inexhaustible supply.

Worse than you know, indeed.

All the Way to the Top

Via Billmon: Lawrence Wilkerson has told NPR that Cheney ordered the relaxation of anti-torture standards (and that, in fact, Cheney was effectively running his own foreign policy shop). Wilkerson says he investigated at Powell's order, and established an audit trail leading all the way to Cheney.

Surprised? No. Shocked? Well...to the extent that I still have the capacity to be shocked at all anymore, yes.

Old Hands at Manipulating Intelligence

While we're waiting for the parents to get up so we can open our Fitzmas presents, today's Chronicle has an excellent background piece by Jeff Stein on past and present efforts to subvert or bypass the CIA.

In one case, the cast of characters is oddly familiar. During the 1970s,

Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to create a "Team B," which would have access to the CIA's data on the Soviets and issue its own conclusions. Cheney, as White House chief of staff, and Rumsfeld, as secretary of Defense, championed Team B, whose members included the young defense strategist Paul Wolfowitz, who a quarter-century later would be one of the chief architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq
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Team B's conclusion that the CIA was indeed soft on the Soviets was leaked to sympathetic journalists and generated public support for a new round of military spending, particularly on missiles. Team B's conclusions turned out, years later, to be false.

"In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat." [emphasis added]

None of this is news to readers of Josh Marshall or Sy Hersh, but the article does an excellent job of fitting the current atrocity into a pattern of intelligence manipulation by the same basic group:

The path to Plame's outing also led through Baghdad, this time via Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who had been abandoned by the CIA in the late 1990s as too troublesome, unreliable and corrupt.

Among Chalabi's key supporters were Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz. When the three came back into power in January 2001, the CIA and State Department still refused to back Chalabi.
*
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Over at the Pentagon, however, Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by creating his own intelligence shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Hussein's nuclear weapons, which later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House.

Read the whole thing--it's worth it.