As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."
Monday, September 28, 2009
Another Cheney, Another Kagan
Liz Cheney's father basically presided over the biggest mess of a Presidency in American history. So of course, she's lionized as a real up-and-comer in Republican politics. That's because she tells the crowd what they want to hear - for example, the glories of torture:
“Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake,” she said, “are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?”
By speech’s end, the crowd was standing, and the former vice president’s daughter was being mobbed for photos and hounded to run for office.
For this, she's called "one of the fresh faces of our movement" by one sycophant. It's somewhat appalling to see torture used as an applause line.
But that's the party out of power. I'm not really concerned how unmoored from reality they have become. It's far more disturbing that another neocon scion, in this case Fred Kagan, is personally advising the top general in Afghanistan during the Obama Administration.
It had been reported that Kagan and his wife, military historian Kimberly Kagan, were part of the group that advised McChrystal on the high-profile assessment that warns of "mission failure" if more troops are not sent. But it wasn't previously known that Kagan's work with McChrystal extended beyond the review.
It's striking that Kagan, who writes for the Weekly Standard, guest blogs at National Review, and advised the Bush Administration on Iraq, is now advising President Obama's top commander in Afghanistan.
A McChrystal spokesman said that the commander gets a lot of information, but his troop request for Afghanistan lines up PERFECTLY with Kagan's escalation numbers in a recent WaPo op-ed. And the truth is that the foreign policy establishment is littered with groupthink, and whether it's Brookings or AEI or CNAS or whatever other think tank, all of official Washington wants to send 40,000 or so more American men and women halfway around the world to fight.
As much as we get angry that a Liz Cheney can rise through the ranks in Washington, it's more the norm than anything out of the ordinary.
Liz Cheney must have learned the fine art of lying your tail off from dear old dad.
MITCHELL: Can you clarify at all a dispute some or among former Bush administration middle east experts and officials as to whether there was a secret promise or an agreement with Israel that Israel could proceed with settlement expansion to accommodate population growth?
CHENEY: It is a very complicated issue and the Road Map does talk about settlements. … But there’s the issue of, in existing settlements, if a family has a baby, are you allowed to build another room in the house? … I think there’s no question that this White House has gone much further in saying to the Israelis, “you must absolutely stop all of it.” And without, in my view, being as demanding of the Palestinians in terms of the security side of this equation.
Given that she was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in the Bush Administration, put there, many feel, to report back on the State Department to the Vice President, you'd think she'd know that.
However, Cheney did part ways with her father on the issue of the Iraq/Al Qaeda connection. She still thinks it exists, whereas Fourthbranch pretty much disavowed it earlier this week.
LIZ CHENEY: The issue is whether there's a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, which as he mentioned in that speech, George Tenet himself testified to, there's much evidence between the connection of Saddam and al Qaeda and Saddam and other terrorist organizations.
MITCHELL: Well, al Qaeda in Iraq, which was an offshoot, but didn't exist before the start of the war.
Apparently Dick Cheney is out hawking a book, which hopefully will include his younger years in the proto-punk scene at CBGB (look very closely at the bassist for Blondie and you'll see). This may lead some to believe that the media spectacle of Cheney popping up from the undisclosed location every five minutes into TV studios far and wide was a kind of pre-emptive book tour designed to raise his advance price. But actually, it seems that daughter Liz, who has been just as ubiquitous, let slip what perhaps could be the real reason for the press junket:
L. CHENEY: I don’t think he planned to be doing this, you know, when they left office in January. But I think, as it became clear that President Obama was not only going to be stopping some of these policies, that he was going to be doing things like releasing the — the techniques themselves, so that the terrorists could now train to them, that he was suggesting that perhaps we would even be prosecuting former members of the Bush administration.
Now, contrary to daughter Liz, the President has never suggested prosecution, in fact going out of his way to suggest the opposite on numerous occasions. So ol' Dick probably doesn't have much to worry about on that score. But he certainly did notice the growing outcry around these issues as the months went on, and knew somebody had to throw the media off the trail before all H-E-double hockey sticks broke loose and people started seeking the dreaded accountability. Fear has always been a powerful motivator for Cheney, and if there was a 1% chance of him going to jail for war crimes, he had to treat it like an inevitability, and waterboard the truth until it gave up.
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.
Liz Cheney ran interference for her dear old dad today on Morning Joe, pushing that "ticking time bomb" scenario talking point we've all come to know and love. Apparently she found somewhere in those memos the insistence that the torture techniques were only supposed to be used in the event of imminent attack, which to her dad, is all the time, so I don't get the distinction.
I'd like to introduce dear Liz to the technique of sleep deprivation, which was cited in the memos and which we used on multiple prisoners, which multiplied the abuse of the other techniques and which research scientists have concluded causes enough severe mental anguish to constitute torture. Interrogators would have their hands and feet shackled and stripped down to diapers, and kept awake for as much as 180 hours at a time.
Now, this isn't exactly an original thought, and I don't remember where I read it so I can't cite it. But a technique that takes 11 days to break a prisoner is most definitely NOT a technique used in reaction to an imminent plot, particularly not a ticking time bomb scenario. Maybe Liz can walk me through the thought process behind "Times Square's set to blow up in an hour, quick, grab the diaper and wait 11 days!" Somehow, I think it's sprinkled with bullshit.
(By the way, screw the LA Times for stealing an Obsidian Wings post and citing it by referring to "a separate online posting.")
Now, if there somehow is a ticking time bomb scenario that plays out over the course of two weeks, and if there is definitive evidence to that effect, then I would follow the lead of transparency advocate Dick Cheney and begin a full investigation into what specifically happened in our name. Of course, contra Richard Cohen, I don't think it matters whether or not torture "works," whatever "works" means, because once you put aside the law out of fear, the extension of the argument ends up being "If we murder every Australian male in the country, can we reduce obesity rates?" or "Will mass castration provide affordable health care?" or something. The moral relativism grows quickly absurd. And you give culpable monsters the ability to twist the truth. I have this crazy notion that a law remains the law no matter what day it is on the calendar.
The Obama administration agreed late Thursday to release dozens of photographs depicting alleged abuses at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush White House.
The decision will make public for the first time photos obtained in military investigations at facilities other than the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Forty-four photos that the American Civil Liberties Union was seeking in a court case, plus a "substantial number" of other images, will be released by May 28.
The photos, examined by Air Force and Army criminal investigators, are apparently not as shocking as those taken at Abu Ghraib, which became a symbol of U.S. mistakes in Iraq. But Defense Department officials nevertheless are concerned that the release could incite another backlash in the Middle East.
Some of the photos show U.S. service members intimidating or threatening detainees by pointing weapons at them, according to officials who have seen them. Military officers have been court-martialed for threatening detainees at gunpoint.
"This will constitute visual proof that, unlike the Bush administration's claim, the abuse was not confined to Abu Ghraib and was not aberrational," said Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the ACLU, which reached the agreement as part of a long-running legal battle for documents related to anti-terrorism policies under President George W. Bush.
If Abu Ghraib merely existed in documents, the impact would have been far less. Pictures, videos, just any images bring these abstract debates home in a more immediate way. And there will be even more disclosures to come from this ACLU lawsuit.
Other disclosures to be considered in the weeks ahead include transcripts of detainee interrogations, a CIA inspector general's report that has largely been kept secret, and background materials in a Justice Department investigation into prisoner abuse.
In each instance, Obama and his administration are being forced to decide whether to release the material entirely, disclose it with redactions, or follow the lead of the Bush administration and fight in court to keep it classified.
The OPR investigation, which is fully completed, will really put pressure on the DoJ lawyers who provided the legal justifications for torture.
Given all this, I just don't buy the official narrative about the White House blocking investigations and stalling accountability. Sure, they may be halting a rush to investigations for now, but they're methodically laying out a fact pattern, both by themselves and with the support of the Congress, that will make investigations impossible to ignore. I have no doubt that the President worries about his forward-looking agenda. But he made the tough decision to release the memos that kicked off this frenzy, and he's committing to releasing more. There's a difference between not wanting a commission and not wanting to be responsible for one. Of course, the best way to ensure that would be through a special prosecutor. After all, we now have senior Bush Administration officials definitively signing off on torture. A trickle of releases makes no sense without follow-up, investigation and some accountability. And surely Obama knows this.
(bumped because of the kind link by the great Meteor Blades. Welcome Kossacks!)
The third installment of the Washington Post's "Angler" series about Fourthbranch Cheney is a little milder than the first two, because the topic is the domestic and economic agenda, and other than being a standard-issue supply-sider I truly don't think he cares much about that, other than to ensure that his rich cronies get their not-so-fair share. On those points he does put the hammer down:
Air Force Two touched down at the Greenbrier Valley Airport in West Virginia on Feb. 6, 2003, carrying Vice President Cheney to the annual retreat of Republican House and Senate leaders. He had come to sell them on the economic centerpiece of President Bush's first term: a $674 billion tax cut [...]
The president had accepted Cheney's diagnosis that the sluggish economy needed a jolt, overruling senior economic advisers who forecast dangerous budget deficits. But Bush rejected one of Cheney's remedies: deep reductions in the capital gains tax on investments.
The vice president "was just hot on that," said Cesar Conda, then Cheney's domestic policy adviser. "It goes to show you: He wins and he loses, and he lost on that one."
Not for long.
His allies in the House ended up inserting the capital gains tax cut, which really only impacts the wealthy, into the bill, at the expense of one of Bush's priorities. You tell me who's more powerful.
On other elements of domestic policy, like NCLB or the prescription drug benefit, Fourthbranch DIDN'T get what he wanted, at least not according to the article. It plays out more like a typical scenario, with the Vice President one among several powerful interests pushing their agendas. Except that the entire budget gets routed through him before it goes out.
In Bush, Cheney found the perfect partner. The president's willingness to delegate left plenty of room for his more detail-oriented vice president.
"My impression is that the president thinks that the Reagan style of leadership is best -- guiding the ship of state from high up on the mast," said former White House lawyer Bradford A. Berenson. "It seems to me that the vice president is more willing to get down in the wheelhouse below the decks."
The vice president chairs a budget review board, a panel the Bush administration created to set spending priorities and serve as arbiter when Cabinet members appeal decisions by White House budget officials. The White House has portrayed the board as a device to keep Bush from wasting time on petty disagreements, but previous administrations have seldom seen Cabinet-level disputes in that light. Cheney's leadership of the panel gives him direct and indirect power over the federal budget -- and over those who must live within it.
This is another element of why Fourthbranch seems to win all these internecine battles. He selected a lot of the Cabinet and top officials, so he knows how to countermand them and roll them. In addition, he appears to hold their purse strings, and can cut them at any moment. If you depend on the Vice President for your budget money, it's even less likely that you would cross him. That's why you end up with meek milquetoast advisers like this:
When Edward P. Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, broached the idea of limiting the popular mortgage tax deduction, he said he quickly dropped it after Cheney told him it would never fly with Congress. "He's a big timesaver for us in that he takes off the table a lot of things he knows aren't going to go anywhere," Lazear said.
Lazear, who is otherwise known as a fierce advocate for his views, said that he may argue a point with Cheney "for 10 minutes or so" but that in the end he is always convinced. "I can't think of a time when I have thought I was right and the vice president was wrong."
That's crazy. It's almost like Fourthbranch is turning Mr. Hydes back into Dr. Jekylls. He's not a "big timesaver," he's a walking veto pen.
In other Fourthbranch news, Rahm Emanuel appears serious about bringing an amendment to the floor to cut off funding for Cheney's executive office, estimated at $4.75 million. As long as he's not in the executive branch, he shouldn't be funded through it. Here's Emanuel discussing the plan on Hardball.
Either Wednesday or Thursday my amendment will be on the floor, because the funding for the executive branch is on the floor. And I’ll strike the money for the Vice President’s Office. He can live off the Senate presidency budget that funds him up here. And that’s fine. But if he’s going to be funded in the executive branch, he complies with the rules that apply to everybody. He is not above the rules of the executive branch.
I do have to hand it to Hardball, they led with Fourthbranch yesterday, and they spent most of the first 40 minutes on him as well.
Emanuel loves this issue because there's no political downside into going after Mr. 13%. However, when asked the inevitable "What happens when Cheney doesn't agree and just does what he wants," a legitimate question since that's what he's been doing for the last six years, Emanuel won't go near impeachment and stammers and says "he will be held accountable" without explaining how. It was ultimately a soft-as-tissue-paper performance.
Meanwhile, Dana Perino is in way over her head trying to explain the whole "I'm sometimes executive, sometimes legislative, so really I'm neither!" construction:
The explanatory task fell to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, whose skin reddened around her neck and collar as she pleaded ignorance during the daily briefing: "I'm not a legal scholar. . . . I'm not opining on his argument that his office is making. . . . I don't know why he made the arguments that he did."
"It's a little surreal," remarked Keith Koffler of Congress Daily.
"You're telling me," Perino agreed.
"You can't give an opinion about whether the vice president is part of the executive branch or not?" Koffler pressed. "It's a little bit like somebody saying, 'I don't know if this is my wife or not.' "
Turns out that Perino did manage to lie about Fourthbranch's compliance with other rules regarding classified material. The White House has been ignoring security breaches and blocking security officers from inspecting the West Wing.
And finally, Sally Quinn, head of the DC cocktail circuit, writes that Republican wags want to dump Cheney, but that means almost nothing. It ends up being a paid political announcement for Fred Thompson (that's who Quinn sees as a replacement) and little more. This is the Washington establishment trying to give their guy a push forward. Remember when they all got their backs up and claimed that Clinton "trashed the place, and it's not his place?" Well, Fourthbranch REALLY trashed the joint. Did a Led Zeppelin on it. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it. In fact, you enabled it.
UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler beat me to this. Yes, Sally Quinn is pushing to replace Fourthbranch with that nice independent Mr. Thompson, when his top foreign policy advisor is Liz Cheney. Na ga happen. Also, Fred ain't that independent:
Thompson, who likes to cast himself as a political outsider, earned more than $1 million lobbying the federal government for more than 20 years. He lobbied for a savings-and-loan deregulation bill that helped hasten the industry's collapse and a failed nuclear energy project that cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars.
He also was a lobbyist for deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was widely criticized for endorsing "necklacing," the gruesome practice of execution where gasoline-soaked tires are thrown over a person's neck and set ablaze.
In September 1991, Aristide said: "The burning tire, what a beautiful tool! ... It smells good. And wherever you go, you want to smell it." (This is a slander of Aristide without much of a factual basis, so I'm disassociating from it)
Fred Thompson went on Jay Leno last night and yukked it up, but in the papers, it's starting to trickle out that he's not a lifelong actor, but a lifelong lobbyist. Apparently, this was also a line of attack in his 1994 Senate campaign against Jim Cooper, but Thompson showed off his red pickup truck and laughed it off, and the Tennessee media enabled him. The fact that these stories are coming out (and 17 months before the fact, no less) suggest that the national media may not give the same free hand:
By all accounts, Fred D. Thompson will soon be running for president, portraying himself as a Washington outsider on the campaign trail. But over the past three years he showed up every two weeks or so at a lobbying and law firm in downtown D.C. to plot how best to persuade Congress to help a British company.
His main assignment: to use his connections to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to extract information about goings-on inside Congress and use it to benefit his multibillion-dollar client.
In exchange for this insider wisdom he was paid a cool $760,000.
The right has been extremely successful in the past couple election cycles making a mockery out of their Presidential opponent. There's a difference between being ANGRY, like the right is with Hillary, for example, and making a mockery. The left has laid the seeds for making a buffoon out of Rudy and McCain and Romney, and I think this is the makings of what to do in the event of Thompson. There's also the fact that he just bagged a Cheney:
FRED THOMPSON IS adding more big-name policy talent as his testing-the-waters committee continues to grow into a real presidential campaign. Among the new additions: Mark Esper, national security adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist; Joel Shin, a top policy staffer on Bush-Cheney 2000; and Elizabeth Cheney, a former top official in the State Department's Near East and South Asia department.
"Change vs. More Of The Same" is a very inviting target in 2008. Thompson is stepping right into that trap with these hirings. By the way, team Thompson now includes Rove oppo research guy and caging expert Tim Griffin, former Nixon spy Kenneth Reitz, a tobacco industry exec from Phillip Morris, and Liz Cheney. Quite a rogue's gallery.
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