Month: May 2009

And A Child Shall Lead Them

by dday

Don Rumsfeld never struck me as the religious type, and the assumption being made about this GQ article and his use of Bible quotes in intelligence briefings prepared for George Bush is that he played upon his boss’ evangelicism to present the war in Iraq in a language well-understood to the then-President, the way a father would appease a son by playing a game of peek-a-boo. In the article, Robert Draper assigns the impetus for these cover sheets as a Major General working in intelligence for Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers, and according to him “my seniors … appreciated the cover pages.”

That clever bureaucrat, Rummy, always winning the battles inside the corridors of power, or at least making appearances to that end. Except this desire to work the system to his advantage crashed on the rocks of his own obstinacy during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

“In many ways,” says one of Bush’s national-security advisers, “Rumsfeld was more interested in being perceived to be in charge than actually being in charge.” When I repeated this quote to an administration official privy to Rumsfeld’s war efforts, this person’s eyes lit up. “One of the most fateful, knock-down-drag-outs was over postwar reconstruction,” says this official. “It was the question of who’d take charge, State or DoD. Rumsfeld made a presentation about chain of command. ‘If State takes over here, are you saying Tommy Franks is going to report to a State official? Mr. President, that’s not in the Constitution!’ ” […]

A final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.” […]

The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”

“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”

The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”

And through this we learn who was the ACTUAL child in the White House. Bush may have been the boy king but at least he had a spark of recognition, if only about his own legacy, that kicked in four days late every once in a while. Rumsfeld simply had an insatiable desire not to control everything, but to make it appear like he controlled everything. He wanted to strut around as the main gatekeeper in the White House, and such gatekeeping mattered far more than. This report almost makes the turf wars sound like a game, like a child protecting his blocks at playtime in kindergarten. And this need for control, this petty outmaneuvering without regard for the real-world implications of the actions, permeates the entire neocon thought process, the entire way they relate to the world.

Rumsfeld comes off like the most insecure bastard that ever lived. And I came away learning far more than I expected about the ideological project with which he associates himself.

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Great Patriots Except When They’re Not

by digby

Last night I happened to catch a couple of minutes of Mike Huckabee on Fox and he had this clever little ditty for his audience, which he called “Fancy Nancy”

Here’s a story about a lady named Nancy
A ruthless politician, but dressed very fancy
Very ambitious, she got herself elected Speaker
But as for keeping secrets, she proved quite a “leaker.” She flies on government planes coast to coast
And doesn’t mind that our economy is toast
She makes the Air Force squire her in their military jets
There’s room for her family, her staff, and even her pets. Until now, she annoyed us, but her gaffes were mostly funny;
Even though it was painful to watch her waste our tax money.
But now her wacky comments are no laughing matter;
She’s either unwilling to tell the truth, or she’s mad as a hatter! She sat in briefings and knew about enhanced interrogation;
But claims she wasn’t there, and can’t give an explanation.
She disparages the CIA and says they are a bunch of liars;
Even the press aren’t buying it and they’re stoking their fires. I think Speaker Pelosi has done too much speaking;
And instead of her trashing our intelligence officials, it’s her nose that needs tweaking. If forced to believe whether the CIA and her colleagues in Congress are lying;
Or it’s Speaker Pelosi whose credibility and career is dying.
I believe in the integrity of the men and women who sacrifice to keep us safe;
Not the woman who has been caught flat-footed, lying to our face. I say it here and I say it rather clear —
It’s time for Nancy Pelosi to resign and get out of here.

The head of the Republican party called for her resignation last week. And Newt Gingrich said this:

Newt Gingrich continued his attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Saturday, saying she “defamed everyone” in the intelligence community and he can’t “see how she can serve as speaker if it turns out that she has lied about national security both to the House and to the rest of the country.”

You would think that the right believes any suggestion that the intelligence community is anything but upright and truthful is basically talking treason. Certainly Newt thinks that defaming the CIA means that the speaker can no longer serve. But that’s something of a change for our God-fearing, flag waving wingnuts. After all, it wasn’t long ago that they themselves were calling the CIA the worst epithet in the English language — liberals.

I wrote this three years ago:

Going back to the days when the it failed to back up the Committee For A Present Danger predictions that the Soviets were planning to kill all of us in our beds any day now, the CIA has been seen by the Cheney cabal as a determinedly cowardly bunch of liberal elites who refused to see the true dangers lurking in the world — a problem they were determined to finally fix by naming loyal GOP hack Porter “Brownie” Goss to purge the institution of all non-believers. (Never mind the fact that while the CIA was often wrong — the Cheney cabal and the neecons were never, ever right.)

“The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House,” said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. “Goss was given instructions … to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president’s agenda.”

Oh my.

The next day, I added:

Today, the National Review writes this:

Too often the agency has performed that job miserably, the greatest example being its gargantuan miscalculations about the Soviet Union. In retrospect, this is perhaps unsurprising. The CIA has always had a leftist bent, well represented in its upper echelons even under directors of staunchly anti-Communist and pro-national-security orientation.

And in a terrific rhetorical sleight of hand they then write this:

Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman who once served as an official in the CIA’s clandestine service, was named by President Bush to head up the agency 19 months ago. His primary task was to end its bare-knuckles insurrection and policy interference, and return it to the business of intelligence collection and analysis. His tenure was marked by non-stop turmoil and bickering, as he moved to root out the insurgents and they fought back with a vengeance.

Goss’s sudden ouster is, at best, ill timed. He had merely scratched the problem’s surface. Further, the lack of a clear explanation for his departure is extremely harmful. It is certain to be spun as a coup by the insurgents. Such a perception will only embolden them, laying the groundwork for more leaks—and more damage to national security.

The CIA “insurgents” were liberals, not terrorists (although the conservatives would probably have said there was no difference between the two.)

When Goss was forced out the conservative establishment was apoplectic. Here’s the Weekly Standard:

We hope the president will select a new CIA director who is willing–eager, even–to challenge CIA careerists, and who will continue the reforms of that dysfunctional bureaucracy that started under Goss. We hope the new director will be an independent thinker, someone who is not cowed by criticism from a vocal (and highly partisan) crew of recently retired intelligence officials, or worried by complaints from the New York Times editorial board, or influenced by sniffing from State Department bureaucrats.

In short, this person should retain a measure of independence from the man he’ll report to, John Negroponte. In his brief tenure as director of national intelligence, Negroponte has shown himself awfully accommodating of the intelligence establishment. For example, when that establishment fought efforts by this magazine and others to release documents captured in postwar Iraq, Negroponte fought alongside it. When calls for openness came from the chairmen of congressional intelligence committees, he sided with the bureaucracy. Only when President Bush made clear his desire to see those documents released to the world did Negroponte acquiesce.

[…]

The CIA is broken. It has been for years. There is too much anti-Bush leaking and not enough creative thinking. There are too many bureaucrats and not enough risk-takers. Goss tried to reform the agency and to enlist it in the good fight on behalf of the nation’s foreign policy. Will his successor?

I know, the irony abounds.

Let’s not allow the Republicans to stage a “betrayus” hissy fit over criticism of the CIA. Mr Google knows all and Republicans have been slandering the CIA as long as I can remember for allegedly being a bunch of liberal commies who don’t care about the looming threats that conservatives see under every dust bunny. They certainly will defend the CIAs violent and illegal covert actions to the end, as they are with torture, but when it comes to the agency’s primary responsibilities, intelligence gathering, the right has rarely had a good word to say about them.

Saying that Pelosi has to resign because she “defamed” the agency is about as absurd an argument as they’ve ever made. If that were the standard, there would hardly be a Republican left in Washington.

Update: This is a fairly typical argument circa 2006 around the Plame investigation:

One complaint often heard privately within law enforcement circles is that the Central Intelligence Agency over the years has morphed into a Liberal think tank rather than maintaining its role as a strategic and tactical intelligence agency. An even bigger concern is that the agency has become overly politicized and prone to leaking information to the mainstream news media in order to have an impact upon the political climate within the Beltway.

For instance, it was the CIA hierarchy who demanded a special prosecutor investigate the so-called Valerie Plame-CIA leak case. It’s widely accepted that the law regarding divulging a covert operative’s identity did not apply in the Plame case. Even the writers of the statute are quoted as saying such. Yet here we are in the midst of a far-reaching investigation into the alleged leak.

Update II: Sam Stein hits this too.

Update III: Representative Pete Hoekstra, who is no one of Pelosi’s biggest critics, wrote this back in 2006:

“I have learned of some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed,” Mr. Hoesktra wrote. “If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies.”He added: “The U.S. Congress simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution.”

And this (pdf)

There has been much public and private speculation about the politicization of the Agency. I am convinced that this politicization was underway well before Porter Goss became the Director. In fact, I have long been convinced that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plame events, as well as by the string of unauthorized disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets.

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CW Jello

by digby

Yglesias makes an intriguing argument today that pushing this Pelosi business makes it impossible for the Republicans to avoid the investigations they so clearly want to avoid.

Various conservative commentators have expressed their hope that gunning for Pelosi will blunt progressive calls for a “truth commission” to thoroughly investigate what really happened on Bush’s trip to the “dark side”. Fox’s Neil Cavuto said we might be in a “Mexican standoff” wherein Pelosi would agree to drop the idea of investigations to prevent herself from attracting scrutiny. Steven Hayes, Dick Cheney’s official biographer, said, “Democrats who have been so enthusiastic about truth commissions have to be stopping and saying, OK, wait a second.” What conservatives are missing here is that this is a fight they were winning before they started gunning for Pelosi. Their best ally in this fight was Barack Obama, whose desire to “move forward” rather than focusing on the past had been the subject of much consternation. Had conservatives simply reached out to grab the hand that was being extended to them, they could have gotten what they wanted. But in their zeal to score a tactical win, the right has made a truth commission more likely not less likely. Obama wanted to avoid a backward-looking focus on torture in part because it distracted from his legislative agenda. But if we’re going to be looking backward anyway, thanks to conservatives’ insistence on complaining about Pelosi, then the move forward strategy lacks a rationale. And far from forcing a standoff in which Pelosi will abandon her support for an investigation, the right has forced her into a corner from which she can’t give in to moderate Democrats’ opposition to such a move without looking like she’s cravenly attempting to save her own skin.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, and it’s very interesting, particularly the part about Pelosi now looking like she’s cravenly saving her own skin if she backs on the investigation which the Republicans insist will show her to be culpable. I don’t know if it would play out that way, but with the right messaging, it certainly could. If Pelosi has the guts to stand up to this, she could say she wants a commission to “clear her name.”
The Villagers are having none of it, however. Yglesias appeared on Norah O’Donnell earlier and spelled it all out, only to be greeted with Newt’s inane comments calling for Pelosi to resign. And then O’Donnell made this final dismissive comment:

I just don’t think there’s going to be an investigation, Matthew. I know that there’s not going to be an investigation. The Bush admin… I mean, the Obama administration is the one who would have to sign off on a commission and they show no willingness to do that. The other person that could make it happen is the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi who could set up one of her committees, and there’s no indication that that’s going to happen either.

So that’s that. Nobody wants an investiagation so why are we even talking about all this icky stuff?

The vilage consensus is that investigations are off the table because the Democrats don’t want them. Obama doesn’t want them because it interferes with his agenda and congressional Democrats don’t want them because they are frightened to death that the Republicans will gain the upper hand on national security. Here’s Chris Cillizza today:

Even as the debate over the treatment of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration continues to roil political Washington, a new poll conducted for Resurgent Republic suggests that the American people — including politically critical independent voters — by and large support the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on suspected al-Qaeda operatives. Asked whether such tactics were justified, 53 percent of the overall sample said they were and 34 percent said they were not. While Democrats strongly opposed the use of these controversial methods and Republicans strongly supported them, independent voters were slightly more divided than partisans of each side, with 51 percent expressing support for the tactics and 31 percent opposing them. On the question of whether such techniques have yielded information that has made the country safer, 52 percent of all respondents said they had while 39 percent said they had not. Independents’ views on the issue mirrored the overall sample, with 51 percent saying the tactics had made the country safer and 39 percent saying they had not. “In driving this debate, the political left is driving a sharp divide between Democrats on the one hand and Republicans and Independents on the other,” Resurgent Republic co-founders Ed Gillespie and Whit Ayres concluded in a memo detailing the poll’s findings. The group is made up of Republican strategists.

He does point out that these national security issues accrued to Republicans’ benefit earlier in the decade but that Iraq eroded peoples’ confidence in them on the issue. I’m not sure that Democrats have ever fully absorbed that last fact, because it does seem that they are running scared on this because of the polling. This poll, of course, is self-serving, but other polls have shown independents giving at least a slight majority in favor of torture, which has Democrats in a panic. But then they have been scared to death of the conesrvatives on national security going all the way back to Truman and “who lost China” through Johnson and Vietnam to Clinton and DADT to Iraq and now — torture. It’s a political pathology that’s so ingrained they can’t even take a stand against torture for fear the Republicans will make the American people believe they’re wimps.

But … let’s remember that village CW can change if there’s enough public pressure. After all, these same people told us that Democrats could never win another election and that Dick Cheney was a wise and wonderful “grown-up” whom we could trust. If you look back at Watergate, it never would have been pursued either without the dogged investigation by a couple of nobodies and some liberal cranks in the congress. (You’d better believe that the Nixon White House didn’t want to “sign off” of any investigations and the Democrats of that time were even more conservative than they are now. )

It can happen, but it won’t happen if we accept this CW. So, here’s hoping the blogosphere and good reporters out there will not give in to either the Villagers or the White House on this one. Make them do it.

Update: Here’s the youtube of O’Donnell and Yglesias

h/t to JT

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Norm!

by digby

This is funny:

The “Dollar A Day To Make Norm Go Away” campaign has raised nearly $100,000.00 for progressive candidates so far, which I find just astonishing.

Click here to sign up at NormDollar.com!

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Non-Denials And Blame-Shifting

by dday

Liz Cheney gave a classic non-denial denial on ABC yesterday to the body of evidence that her father directed torture to suspected detainees to get them to make false confessions about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

I think that it’s important for us to have all the facts out. And and, the first and most important fact is that the vice president has been absolutely clear that he supported this program, this was an important program, it saved American lives. Now, the way this policy worked internally was once the policy was determined and decided, the CIA, you know, made the judgments about how each individual detainee would be treated. And the Vice President would not substitute his own judgment for the professional judgment of the CIA.

Nobody seriously believes this idea that Fourthbranch, who made Langley his second home during the run-up to war, and outed covert CIA agents, and basically fought bureaucratic battles against the CIA during the entire Bush regime, was somehow solicitous of their concerns. But more important, there’s nothing even close to a denial there. And while Liz cites Walter Pincus’ carefully circumscribed report from anonymous intelligence sources that waterboarding (but not other forms of torture) wasn’t used on Abu Zubaydah or KSM (but not other suspects) for the purposes of finding the Iraq/Al Qaeda link (though they were both asked about it), she might want to also respond to this from McClatchy, which is fast becoming the industry leader on this story:

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn’t true.

Cheney’s 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration’s case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“I’m aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. “That was something they were tasked to look at.”

Look, it’s becoming quite clear that the Cheney Administration did this. Now, traditional media can retreat to safer ground and cover he said/she said stories involving Nancy Pelosi, but they are missing Jonathan Landay’s story of the century – and yes, intentionally misinforming the public through this misdirection.

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The Bush Crusades

by tristero

Genuinely sickening. It makes you realize that this remark from September ’01 was no idle slip of the tongue:

On Sunday, Bush warned Americans that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile.”

And also:

In the programmeElusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, which starts on Monday, the former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.”

We must never, ever forget: for eight long years, this country was run by delusional, paranoid idiots. Whenever they took a break from the hard work of lining the plush coffers of their already-wealthy pals, they thought they were on a mission from God.

Obama wants to move beyond the Bush horrors. So do I, so does everyone. And there is only one way to do that, and that is to confront it, to expose it, and when appropriate, prosecute the individuals implicated in criminal activity. Those 13 are hardly the only ones. UPDATE: Here are a few of the pics the government doesn’t want you to see. There are more at The Sydney Morning Herald

Note: Folks are now claiming that the Crusade Covers weren’t seen by many people and that it is preposterous to think that the famously flinty and non-religious Rumsfeld showed this crap to Bush in order to curry favor. Of course. I believe it. Why wouldn’t I? Besides lying about Iraq, lying about the torture, lying about social security, lying about Schiavo, lying about everything and anything even when there was no reason to lie, what reasons have the Bush administration and its apologists ever given not to trust even their most lame explanations?

Karma

by digby

Just to add to the Modo pile-on, I can’t help but point out that she was the one responsible for nearly destroying Joe Biden’s career back in 1988 with her revelation that he had lifted passages from Neal Kinnock’s TV ad for a speech he gave in Iowa. (And it was a nasty little piece of work, too.)

She didn’t find his explanations believable:

On this side of the Atlantic, many Presidential campaign strategists of both parties greatly admired the way it portrayed Mr. Kinnock, who subsequently lost to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as a man of character. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, a Democratic hopeful, was particularly taken with it.

So taken, in fact, that he lifted Mr. Kinnock’s closing speech with phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact for his own closing speech at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23 – without crediting Mr. Kinnock.

[…]

At various campaign appearances last month, the Senator talked admiringly about Mr. Kinnock’s themes and incorporated phrases and concepts after first crediting the Briton. But, in his closing remarks at the Iowa State Fair forum, he did not mention the Labor leader, nor did he some days later in an interview when he recounted the positive response. Biden Elated at Iowa Debate

”I feel real good about that Iowa debate,” he said. ”I could tell when I was doing my close – that whole audience was absolute dead hushed silence. You can tell when you have it all. And the reason it worked there was, I was the last one. And I decided, I have no close. I didn’t have a closing. I’m walking in and they’re saying, ‘You’re going to this debate,’ and I said, ‘I don’t like this stuff you’ve written for me.’ ”It fit to do that there.” Advisers to the candidate said that, when it was pointed out to him after the debate that he had followed the Kinnock speech very closely, he was surprised and said he had not been aware of it. They stressed that the Senator had been immersed in difficult preparation for the hearings on Judge Robert H. Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, an important test for Mr. Biden’s political future.

”He was not trying to put something over,” said one adviser. ”He’s under a huge amount of pressure. He didn’t even know what he said. He was just on automatic pilot.”

But Mr. Biden’s borrowing raises questions about how much a candidate can adapt someone else’s language and thoughts, whether he remembers to give credit or not.

Yes, and I would say Dowd’s borrowing raises questions about how much a columnist can borrow someone else’s language and thoughts, whether she remembers to give credit or not as well.

Personally, I think her explanation is completely absurd. The lift is exact, except for the substitution of the words “the Bush crowd” instead of “we.” It insults the intelligence that she was just using an idea a friend told her over the phone. If she’d blamed it on a research assistant or said it was an editing error, I could believe it. Her silly defense just makes her look guilty.

Update: I’d forgotten about Dowd’s other unusual representations in recent years.

h/t to tom joad

Update II: Sorry, TPM already there with the Biden case.

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Whoops

by dday

We all know that Maureen Dowd has been writing one story over and over again for the last decade – Democrats are feminized losers – so I suppose that her blatant plagiarism of Josh Marshall represents an attempt at being original.

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17dowd.html?_r=1

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/05/bubbling.php

I welcome her efforts to branch out (she actually calls for a full investigation of the torture regime in this op-ed). If she wrote it, we’d actually have a decent column here, aside from the Dowd-esque characterization of Nancy Pelosi as a “stammering child.” Anyway, if you’re going to steal, you could do worse than Josh Marshall. It would be fun to see Dowd behind a phalanx of flags answering questions about this incident, surely in the manner of a stammering child herself. But of course that would assume a certain level of media accountability.

…OK, so MoDo admitted this, but in the typical journalist “I don’t even read blogs” kind of way. She claims that a friend told her the line, somehow with exactly the same 42 words. Can I call her stories not credible and her pathetic attempts to explain herself akin to a “stammering child,” now?

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Caught In The Trap

by digby

This is one of the bravest articles I’ve ever read. But it’s important to read how an intelligent, successful person could get themselves caught in the maw of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. It wasn’t just a bunch of illegals lying on their mortgage applications. There was a whole industry devoted to seducing people into believing they could easily have things they couldn’t afford. After all, our whole society was screaming at the time that you were a sucker for not getting in on the game. And everyone has some capacity for believing what they want to believe. It was a perfect American scam.

I’m sure the right wing will go after this fellow with everything they have, screeching with shrill self-righteousness about “personal responsibility.” But I would have to guess that just as many people who voted for George W. Bush are in this pickle as voted for Gore or Kerry. Wanting things you can’t afford is as non-partisan as apple pie.

I admire him for having the guts to tell his personal story.

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Parsing For Dummies

by digby

Marcy Wheeler unpacks the absurd notion that Leon Panetta made a slam dunk with his statement on Friday, so thoroughly rebutting Nancy Pelosi that she might as well slink back to San Francisco and start selling Grateful Dead memorabilia online, she’s so over.

Here’s what Panetta said:

Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.

No, I don’t doubt that it is not the policy or practice to mislead Congress. I would imagine they have all kinds of rules against that, including the law of the United States which makes it a crime. That doesn’t mean that they’ve never done it.

Panetta is playing with language here in the same way that Bush and Obama both use the awkward locution “America doesn’t torture” when asked if anyone was ever tortured. There was a time when such things (“it depends on what the meaning of is, is”) made reporters and gasbags spend days parsing this language to prove that a politician was a slimy liar. But that was back when it really mattered.Now nobody wants to play the blame game.

I’ll let Marcy take the rest of this and get to the substance of Panetta’s statement:

Panetta is stating two things:

1. The contemporaneous records (that is, the CIA briefer’s own notes on the briefing) show that the briefers “briefed truthfully … describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed'” on Zubaydah.
2. It is up to Congress to evaluate this evidence and “reach its own conclusions about what happened.”

Now, first of all, Panetta is not saying (nor has anyone said, not even Porter Goss) that the briefers briefed Congress that these techniques had been used. I know this sounds weasely, but until someone says, in plain language, that the CIA told Congress those techniques had already been used on Abu Zubaydah, we should assume that’s not what the notes reflect, because if they did, you can be sure both the briefing list and the public statements would say so. But no one is saying that. And against that background, Panetta is reiterating the statement that Congress should determine what happened–a reiteration of the admission that CIA’s own briefing records are not the totality of the story.

The CIA briefing list records that the following people participated in the briefing: Nancy Pelosi, her staffer Michael Sheehy, Porter Goss, his staffer Tim Sample, briefers from the CounterTerrorism Center (CTC), and the Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA; elsewhere, we’ve been told four people, total, from CIA attended).

While CIA doesn’t say it, the chances are very good that the head of CTC was among the four CIA officials who attended that briefing–he probably led the briefing. On September 4, 2002, the head of CTC was Jose Rodriguez.

Jose Rodriguez, you’ll recall, is one of the key suspects in the torture tape destruction.

Read on, to get the full picture.

I will take the simple route here and just point out that if Panetta’s statement “ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened” isn’t weaselly, CYA language then nothing is. He doesn’t know what happened in those briefings and he knows very well that those notes aren’t reliable. After all, the most anal retentive politician in Senate history has already disputed these briefing memos by going back to his own infamously detailed notes.

My rule of thumb on this stuff is when politicians use awkward tenses and odd phrases instead of a simple declarative answer in response to a simple question, they are playing lawyer games. Sometimes it’s a legal necessity — they are trying to protect themselves. I would say that Bush and Clinton, as presidents defending their actions, probably fall into that category. Clinton was trying to explain lying in a civil case that had subsequently been dismissed. Bush was trying to explain that he didn’t commit war crimes. I’m sure both of them had lawyers telling them to use these awkward phrases to legally protect themselves. Panetta and Obama, on the other hand, are trying to cover up crimes of the previous administration, which is political rather than legal.

Whatever the motivations, when you have presidents and high government officials speaking as if English is their second language, it’s usually a fairly good sign that they aren’t being straightforward. (Granted, with Bush it was pretty much all the time…) We can’t expect the press to pursue this unless sex involved, but it’s something to keep in mind for your own understanding of events.

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