… and a funny, pure and potent voice for liberty. Molly Ivin’s lost her long battle with breast cancer, today, following her friend and fellow Texan, Gov. Ann Richards, a little over a year later. She was 61.
Just at the beginning of this month, she had declared jihad on Bush’s war, ill as she was. This was her third pass at chemo, bless her.
It’s funny how close some of these people we read become, isn’t it? I’m writing this now with wet cheeks and a lump in my throat. We knew Molly’s heart … and she was connected to ours. Did you suspect “the internets” could do this thing, splice hearts together so completely? Amazing, isn’t it?
In tribute, I repost her last two articles — she said what needed saying, as always … and what we need to remember. We will miss her … we already have, these last weeks. I would expect to see some articles around from those who love her like we do — I’ll collect them.
Happy Trails, Miss Molly — you made the Goddess smile … and me, too.
Jude
Stand up against the surge
It’s up to us to make it stop
Molly Ivins
01.11.07
The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.
It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. “You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically,” he said.
His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.
Bush’s call for a “surge” or “escalation” also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.
About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: “The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own — impose its rule throughout the country. … By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed.”
But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.
A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country — we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls. We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.
Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy’s proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration’s idiotic “plans” and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.
Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” It’s like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?
As The Washington Post’s review notes, Chandrasekaran’s book “methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq’s fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis.”
We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!”
We let them do it
New Congress must be forced to end Iraq nightmare
Molly Ivins
01.04.07
The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck — so it’s up to us. You and me, Bubba.
I don’t know why Bush is just standing there like a frozen rabbit, but it’s time we found out. The fact is WE have to do something about it. This country is being torn apart by an evil and unnecessary war, and it has to be stopped NOW.
This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it’s doubly wrong for him to send 20,0000 more soldiers into this hellhole, as he reportedly will announce next week.
What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn’t supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?
It’s a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people with what they are charged if they’re arrested. This administration has done away with rights first enshrined in the Magna Carta nearly 800 years ago, and we’ve let them do it.
This will be a regular feature of mine, like an old-fashioned newspaper campaign. Every column, I’ll write about this war until we find some way to end it. STOP IT NOW. BAM! Every day, we will review some factor we should have gotten right.
So let’s take a step back and note, for example, that before the war one of the architects of the entire policy, Paul Wolfowitz, testified to Congress that Iraq had no history of ethnic strife. Sectarian and ethnic strife is a part of the region. And the region is full of examples of Western colonial powers trying to occupy countries, take their resources and take over the administration of their people — and failing.
The sectarian bloodbath we see daily completely refutes Wolfowitz. And now Bush has given him the World Bank to run. Wonder what he’ll do there.
And let’s keep in mind that when the Army arrived in Baghdad, we, the television viewers, watched footage of a bunch of enraged and joyous Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein, their repulsive dictator, in Firdos Square. Only one thing was wrong. The event was staged. Taking down the statue was instigated by a Marine colonel, and a PSYOP (psychological operations) unit made it appear to be a spontaneous show of Iraqi joy.
When we later saw the whole square where the statue was located, only 30 to 40 people were there (U.S. soldiers, press and some Iraqis — and one of several U.S. tanks present pulled the statue down with a cable). We, the television viewers, saw the square being presented as though the people of Iraq had gone into a frenzy, mobbed the square and spontaneously pulled down the statue. Fake images and claims have been a part of this fiasco from the beginning.
We need to cut through all this smoke and mirrors and come up with an exit strategy, forthwith. The Democrats have yet to offer a cohesive plan to get us out of this mess. Of course, it’s not their fault — but the fact is we need leaders who are grown-ups and who are willing to try to fix it. Bush has ignored the actual grown-ups from the Iraq Study Group and the generals and all other experts who are nearly unanimous in the opinion that more troops will not help.
So, like I said, it’s up to you and me, Bubba. We need to make sure that the new Congress curbs executive power, which has been so misused, and asserts its own power to make this situation change. Now.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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January 31st, 2007
Note: we got confirmation that Cheney’s personal notes implicate our Decider Dearest in this tacky and ILLEGAL Valerie Plame situation — go here to read the joyful news.
Dear Uncle Dick –
Yesterday was your 66th birthday, and although we’ve all noted that you seem to be short a six, we want to keep you where we can see your hands, on this special occasion … so this post’s for you.
In honor of your rolling the dice with doubles, we’ll bake you a cake full of the very merriest of critiques, sweet with sarcasm and plump insults … we’ll throw in a cup of damning history and a pinch of outrage … toss in a dash of inky-dark dour, much like you, yourself — it will bake into an expose fit for a Vice of your vast experience. We’ve asked Maureen Dowd into our kitchen, she being an expert with cutlery and all, to put the cherry on top … and if that first bite tastes of stinging humor at your expense, well — you’ve assured us, regarding your forty years in politics, that these things don’t bother you.
So here’s your cake with a slew of candles, Uncle Dick. Blow ‘em out, Yer Royal Darkness, before the walls of the cave get all sooty. And please keep yer hands where we can see ‘em.
A glorious and satisfying Cheney-bash collection, below … starting with an exquisite Telnaes cartoon; she’s a real ar-teest.
Jude
Ann Telnaes ‘toon
The Ba-Da-Boom Crew
Eugene Robinson, WaPo
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
If you’ve been following the Lewis “Scooter” Libby perjury trial, I can understand how you might confuse Dick Cheney with Tony Soprano. Cheney’s office is beginning to sound a lot like the Bada Bing, minus the dancers.
Court has been in session for only a week, and already we’ve heard about characters being set up (Libby, allegedly, to save political wizard Karl Rove), strung along (media bigwigs, who were to be played like patsies), buried in mud (former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the raison d’etre of the Iraq war) and ratted out (the famously leak-averse Cheney, revealed to be willing to leak like a washerless faucet when it suits his purposes).
Cheney’s no Tony, though. For one thing, Tony would never let one of his top henchmen go by a preppy-sounding handle such as “Scooter.” For another, this kind of all-in-the-family mess would send Tony moping to his long-suffering shrink, whereas Cheney shows no inclination to deal with uncomfortable issues or face harsh realities.
Increasingly, the vice president is sounding as if he lives in a la-la land of his own imagining, a place beyond truth.
In Cheney’s world, the Iraq war is an enormous success. The idea that anyone would think otherwise is hogwash. The midterm election doesn’t seem to have happened yet — some sort of time warp may be involved. Polls that show overwhelming public opposition to the war do not even merit a nod of acknowledgment.
And it’s “out of line,” as Wolf Blitzer learned, to ask Cheney about a glaring personal contradiction — the administration he serves wants to ban gay marriage, and meanwhile his lesbian daughter and her life partner are having a baby. Cheney acts as if he’s willing to go to any lengths to keep people from learning that on the subject of homosexuality, he’s probably pretty enlightened.
Let’s hope that Cheney isn’t really out to lunch, that he’s just playing politics. A conservative friend reminded me the other day that all the White House has left, in terms of public support, is the hard-line Republican right. Let’s hope Cheney is just tossing out red meat to keep these stalwarts on the team.
But, yes, he is coming across as a little crazy. I’m glad he’s not the Decider — excuse me, now it’s the Decision Maker.
Cheney’s weirdness is almost enough to summon nostalgia for the days being revisited in the Libby trial, a time when Cheney and his minions at least were rational in their machinations. Forget the byzantine, eye-glazing details of the case and look instead at how the vice president’s office operated.
The primary stated reason for the war — Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear weapons program — had already been discredited, and now this guy Wilson was claiming that the White House knew beforehand that some of the most damning evidence of a nuclear program was bogus. Cheney convened a war council, organized an effort to counter Wilson’s claims and then sent Libby out to leak anything that would make Wilson look less credible. In other words, they went after the messenger rather than the message.
One problem was that Cheney’s office had been so taciturn that reporters rarely bothered to call, knowing that all they were likely to get was a cold shoulder. Cheney’s former press aide testified that at one point there was a frantic search for a phone number for someone, anyone, at Newsweek. That leak finally had to be attempted via voice mail.
Flash forward to the point when it became clear that someone in this supposedly tight-lipped administration had leaked the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. Amid much finger-pointing, the White House issued a statement that categorically absolved Rove of this potentially criminal leak — but that didn’t mention Libby.
You get the sense of Cheney and his crew as a semi-independent power center, a family within the larger family. You see them hunkered down in their office suite, much like Tony and crew in the back room of the Bada Bing, plotting ways to cover their behinds and do in their rivals — whether those rivals are found in Baghdad, Tehran or the West Wing.
Scooter worried he was being thrown to the wolves, according to his attorney. A note scribbled by Cheney, the lawyer says, revealed that he had smelled a plan to “sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder.”
Now that really sounds like something you’d expect to happen in Tony’s world. ++
Dick Cheney: The New ‘Baghdad Bob’
Is the former Iraqi propaganda minister inhabiting the soul of our vice president? It sure seemed this way during Cheney’s highly delusional interview with Wolf Blitzer this week.
January 27, 2007
Greg Mitchell
Is it just me, or is Vice President Cheney, in his latest statements, starting once again to sound like another balding, rose-colored-glasses wearing war spokesman, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, better known as “Baghdad Bob”?
For that matter, has anyone seen “Bob” lately? Perhaps, as a trained propagandist, he is in the bunker with Dick, writing his material.
By now you have read excerpts from Cheney’s interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN this week, filled with delusional statements — reminiscent of his “last throes” claims — about things going so well in Iraq and refusing to admit any mistakes (beyond counting on the American public to strongly support the war forever).
Asked, for example, if there is still a deadly mess to clean up in Iraq, Cheney replied, “No there is not. There is not. There’s problems - ongoing problems - but we have in fact accomplished our objectives.”
In a later Newsweek interview he said that the president’s State of the Union address had “shored up” his public standing — even though every major poll shows that it actually sank.
Is it time to start calling Cheney “Beltway Bob”? Or ” D.C. Dick”? Or perhaps “Bunker Bob”?
Baghdad Bob, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s minister of information, later immortalized on t-shirts, Web sites, and even a DVD for his optimistic, if fanciful, statements about Iraq’s triumph over the American infidels, right up to the point his boss left the building.
Baghdad Bob somehow survived and later worked as an Arab TV commentator, sans trademark beret (although he now seems to have inhabited our vice president’s body).
Here are a few Baghdad Bob classics from the spring of 2003 (courtesy of several Web shrines, including We Love the Iraqi Information Minister).
See if you can imagine them coming out of the mouth of our vice president speaking to the press today.
“Be assured: Baghdad is safe, protected.”
“They think that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win.”
“We are in control, they are not in control of anything, they don’t even control themselves!”
“The battle is very fierce and God will make us victorious.”
“Those are not Iraqis at all. Where did they bring them from?”
“No, I am not scared, and neither should you be.”
“I blame Al-Jazeera.”
“I would like to clarify a simple fact here: How can you lay siege to a whole country? Who is really under siege now?”
“We’re giving them a real lesson today. Heavy doesn’t accurately describe the level of casualties we have inflicted.”
“The American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies, and more lies!”
“I can assure you that those villains will recognize in the future how they are pretending things which have never taken place.”
“They are becoming hysterical. This is the result of frustration.”
“I speak better English than Bush.”
“Just look carefully, I only want you to look carefully. Do not repeat the lies of liars. Do not become like them.”
“The United Nations … it is all their fault.”
“This is unbiased: They are retreating on all fronts. Their effort is a subject of laughter throughout the world.”
“The force that was near the airport, this force was destroyed.”
“They are achieving nothing. Our estimates are that none of them will come out alive unless they surrender to us quickly.”
“They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion.”
“My information came from authentic sources. Many authentic sources.”
“Once again, I blame al-Jazeera. Please, make sure of what you say and do not play such a role.”
“I will only answer reasonable questions.”
“These cowards have no morals. They have no shame about lying.”
“You can go and visit those places. Everything is okay. They are not in Najaf. They are nowhere. They are on the moon.”
“My feelings - as usual - we will slaughter them all.”
“We are in control. They are in a state of hysteria. Losers, they think that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those bastards.”
“Rumsfeld, he needs to be hit on the head.” ++
Daffy Does Doom
Maureen Dowd, NYT
Friday, January 26, 2007
Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as “delusional.”
It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.
Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.
Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions destroying America’s reputation in the world, exhausting the U.S. military, failing to catch Osama, enhancing Iran’s power in the Middle East and sending American kids to train and arm Iraqi forces so they can work against American interests.
Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the guise of exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.
You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of the way, to remain in complete denial about Iraq’s civil war, to have a total misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to the American mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.
In a democracy, when you run a campaign that panders to homophobia by attacking gay marriage and then your lesbian daughter writes a book about politics and decides to have a baby with her partner, you cannot tell Wolf Blitzer he’s “out of line” when he gingerly raises the hypocrisy of your position.
Mr. Cheney acts more like a member of the James gang than the Jefferson gang. Asked by Wolf what would happen if the Senate passed a resolution critical of The Surge, Scary Cheney rumbled, “It won’t stop us.”
Such an exercise in democracy, he noted, would be “detrimental from the standpoint of the troops.”
Americans learned an important lesson from Vietnam about supporting the troops even when they did not support the war. From media organizations to Hollywood celebrities and lawmakers on both sides, everyone backs our troops.
It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably because they worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway around the world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture or the inevitable insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of their fumbling management of Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to criticizing the troops. Quel demagoguery.
“Bottom line,” Vice told Wolf, “is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes.” The biggest threat, he said, is that Americans may not “have the stomach for the fight.”
He should stop casting aspersions on the American stomach. We’ve had the stomach for more than 3,000 American deaths in a war sold as a cakewalk.
If W. were not so obsessed with being seen as tough, Mr. Cheney could not influence him with such tripe.
They are perpetually guided by the wrong part of the body. They are consumed by the fear of looking as if they don’t have guts, when they should be compelled by the desire to look as if they have brains.
After offering Congress an olive branch in the State of the Union, the president resumed mindless swaggering. Asked yesterday why he was ratcheting up despite the resolutions, W. replied, “In that I’m the decision maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded disaster.” (Or preordained it.)
The reality of Iraq, as The Times’s brilliant John Burns described it to Charlie Rose this week, is that a messy endgame could be far worse than Vietnam, leading to “a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we’re seeing now,” and a “wider conflagration, with all kinds of implications for the world’s flow of oil, for the state of Israel. What happens to King Abdullah in Jordan if there’s complete chaos in the region?”
Mr. Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.
He assumes that the more people think he’s crazy, the saner he must be. In Dr. No’s nutty world-view, anti-Americanism is a compliment. The proof that America is right is that everyone thinks it isn’t.
He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone in the wilderness must be a prophet.
To borrow one of his many dismissive words, it’s hogwash. ++
In Veep’s world, we’re safer now than before Iraq
CARL HIAASEN
Sun, Jan. 28, 2007
The wacky, upside-down world of Dick Cheney keeps getting weirder.
Last week he went on CNN and defiantly declared that the situation in Iraq is not so terrible.
This must have been surprising to the families of the 88 Iraqi civilians who were slaughtered the day before by car bombers at a busy Baghdad market.
Surprising to the loved ones and comrades of the 27 American troops who died last weekend, one of the costliest for coalition forces since the occupation.
Surprising to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, soon to be commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who two days earlier had informed a Senate panel that the situation there was “dire.”
Surprising to Sen. John Warner and other top Republicans who have warned that Iraq is sliding into chaos, and have publicly questioned the decision to send more troops.
Surprising to Cheney’s own boss, President Bush, who in a recent interview conceded that the administration’s original game plan for Iraq was heading toward “slow failure.”
Yet in his interview with Wolf Blitzer, Cheney brushed away as ”hogwash” any suggestion that the war has been mishandled.
”Bottom line is that we’ve had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes,” he said.
There are several possible explanations for the vice president’s bizarre performance:
. He’s crazy as a loon.
. He’s a compulsive liar.
. He’s gotten his prescriptions mixed up with Rush Limbaugh’s.
Whatever the clinical reason might be, Cheney continues to float blissfully through a smug and surreal fog.
”The pressure is from some quarters to get out of Iraq,” he said. ‘If we were to do that, we simply validate the terrorists’ strategy that says the Americans will not stay to complete the task, that we don’t have the stomach for the fight.”
Oddly, Cheney’s stout appetite for battle never manifested itself when he was of draft age, during the Vietnam War. Five times he declined his country’s call to serve there.
Now, as the last cheerleader for the fiasco in Iraq, Cheney revels in the self-imagined role of Tough Guy. In fact, he is simply The Guy Who’s Never Been Right.
Before, during and after the invasion, it was Cheney who most strenuously promoted the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. It was Cheney who insisted there was a link between Hussein and al Qaeda’s 9/11 conspirators, long after U.S. intelligence agencies had discredited the idea.
It was also Cheney who predicted that American soldiers would be welcomed as ”liberators” on the streets where they are now being blown up. And it was he who in 2005 confidently asserted that the insurgency was in its “last throes.”
On the topic of Iraq, the vice president has been uncannily wrong about everything, yet he seldom bypasses an opportunity to play the pompous stooge.
Here are some true statements that you will never hear from Cheney’s lips:
The war has so far cost American taxpayers at least $500 billion, or 10 times more than the administration’s initial estimate.
The combat toll on our military now exceeds 3,065 dead and more than 22,000 wounded, many permanently disabled.
No one is sure how many Iraqi civilians have perished since the invasion, but at least 34,000 are known to have died in 2006. About two million Iraqis have fled the country to escape the continuing violence.
Osama bin Laden, the man who green-lighted the 9/11 attacks, is still alive and free — and he’s not hiding in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Taliban fighters who harbored Osama and his cohorts in Afghanistan are resurging with a vengeance.
And the next murderous generation of al Qaeda fanatics has a new outpost of operations, a place where they were unwelcomed for years. It’s called Iraq.
This is the truth that the vice president would prefer not be reported, much less discussed openly.
Naturally he blames the media for turning the public against the war, a trick borrowed from the old Vietnam hard-liners.
Hey, what about all those markets in Baghdad that weren’t car-bombed last week? How come you guys don’t write about them?
Without cracking a smile, Cheney told Blitzer that ”the world is much safer today” because Bush took military action against Iraq.
That the invasion has galvanized Islamic extremists worldwide seems not to concern the vice president even slightly. We’re all safer than we were before — that’s what the man said.
If Hussein were still in power, Cheney added somberly, ”we’d have a terrible situation” in Iraq.
In contrast to the peaceful, safe and stable situation that exists now.
Only in the daffy, disconnected mind of Dick Cheney. ++
Cheney: Half Full
Dan Froomkin reports on Bush’s chat with NPR’s Juan Williams
Washington Post
[...]
And consider this extraordinary exchange
“MR. WILLIAMS: Well, another question about Vice President Cheney — he said last week that — here I’m quoting — ‘we’ve encountered enormous successes and we continue to have enormous successes in Iraq.’ Two weeks ago you said, quote, ‘there hadn’t been enough success in Iraq.’ So it sounds like there’s a conflicting message there.
“PRESIDENT BUSH: Oh, I don’t think so. I think that the vice president is a person reflecting a half-glass-full mentality, and that is he’s been able to look at — as have I, and I hope other Americans have — the fact that the tyrant was removed, 12 million people voted, there is an Iraqi constitution in place that is a model for — and unique for the Middle East.”
What is Cheney’s glass half full of? Who knows. ++
Cheney To The Stand
John Prados, TomPaine
January 30, 2007
Every day, more of the sordid tale of Vice President Dick Cheney’s no-holds-barred effort to get his way on the Iraq war is coming out.
Months ago, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, blasted the Bush administration for its resort to a “cabal” led by Cheney. Now we are getting chapter and verse from the prosecution of another chief of staff, I. Lewis (”Scooter”) Libby, Cheney’s front man until he was indicted for obstruction of justice.
Testimony at Libby’s trial in U.S. District Court shows exactly how the cabal operated, in this case attempting to smear Iraq war critic Ambassador Joseph Wilson by blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, until then an undercover officer for the CIA.
When the conspiracy to discredit Wilson began to fray, Cheney took the lead in trying to shore it up. Whatever it took, Cheney was ready to give. This is becoming crystal clear at the trial, where a parade of Bush administration and CIA officials are testifying. News stories have referred to Cheney, sometimes even attributing a leading role to him, but they hardly do justice to the record revealed by trial testimony.
The story begins with Wilson, who blew the whistle on the administration’s phony Niger uranium claim a couple of months after Bush’s invasion of Iraq. At first Wilson spoke to officials about getting the record corrected. When that didn’t work, he gave material to a columnist for a piece that appeared in The New York Times in early May. Libby assistant Eric Edelman drew attention to the column but no one in the OVP-the Office of the Vice-President-much cared because, according to the testimony of Cheney’s then-public affairs aide Cathie Martin, Times columnists write stuff like that all the time. Wilson upped the ante, giving more material to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus for a story that paper printed on June 12, 2003. From that moment the former diplomat was never out of Cheney’s crosshairs.
Both Martin and former CIA officers show that the OVP had advance knowledge of the Pincus story and began moving to identify Wilson the day before it appeared. Libby demanded the information from CIA’s Iraq point man, Robert Grenier, and actually called him out of a meeting with agency director George Tenet to get it. His first question was whether it would be alright to put this out in public. Grenier got agency PR chief Bill Harlow on the phone, and Libby handed off his end to Martin. At that point she learned Ambassador Wilson’s identity and that Wilson’s wife worked at CIA. When Martin entered Cheney’s office to give this information to the vice-president, Libby already knew it.
In the days after this exchange the “Sixteen Words” Iraq deception in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address became a hot issue, while Wilson’s account of his futile Niger trip stood without contradiction. On June 23, Libby began openly counterattacking, calling in Times reporter Judith Miller to complain of “highly distorted” and selective leaking from the CIA, bringing up Wilson as well. Libby also mentioned Mrs. Wilson’s CIA connection. According to Miller’s personal account of this episode in The New York Times (October 16, 2005), Libby claimed: that Cheney did not know Joe Wilson; that the vice-president had no idea what Wilson had done; and that the CIA did not report it to him. These statements correspond exactly to the talking points that the OVP developed when Wilson went public on July 6, revealed in a trial exhibit.
These were emailed to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer for use in countering Wilson.
On his copy of Wilson’s July 6 New York Times op-ed, Cheney scribbled questions to raise. The most leading of these suggested that Valerie Plame had sent Wilson “on a junket.” Libby then had breakfast with Judith Miller on July 8. He treated Miller to a lengthy diatribe on Wilson, offering more information on Valerie Plame, plus details that could only have come from mining the record and pressuring the CIA for information. Libby claimed that Wilson’s reporting cable “barely made it out of the bowels of the CIA.” And, he told Miller, charges of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq contained in the still-classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) were even stronger than what appeared in the sanitized version the administration had released previously.
That summer day was critical to this entire enterprise. OVP counsel David Addington, by his own testimony, advised Libby that the president can use his constitutional powers as commander in chief (that again) to declassify even if statutes exist that govern this very action. Libby then closeted himself with Mr. Cheney and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and decided to declassify portions of the NIE, which brings us to Libby Trial Exhibit no. 523, a fresh set of talking points dictated by Cheney himself during a break between Capitol Hill events on July 8. The talking points included reference to the NIE. Note that the president was out of the country, on a trip to Africa - this act was unilateral by Cheney. The CIA was not informed of the NIE declassification for nine days. Cheney told Libby to call reporters, effectively taking his own press aide out of the loop.
Meanwhile Hadley assistant Robert Joseph also claimed, again deceptively, that CIA had accepted the phony charge for the Bush speech. Security adviser Condi Rice promptly went over the cliff, telling reporters the language had only been in the Bush speech because of the CIA.
Again it was Cheney, Libby and Hadley who worked into the night to concoct George Tenet’s statement in which the CIA took the blame for the deceptive “sixteen words.” Cheney then dictated more talking points to guide Fleischer in his interactions with the press. He also gave Libby, instead of his press aides, the action with reporters and planned the press conference where White House communications director Dan Bartlett would release the NIE and attempt to explain the phony charges in the State of the Union address, previewing the show for conservative columnists at a luncheon at his own official residence. George Bush, stuck in darkest Africa by Condi Rice’s gaffes, went along meekly.
There can be no question that Cheney was the puppeteer in this entire production. This is not the same role as previous vice presidents, even activist ones like Al Gore or Walter Mondale-indeed Mondale said recently that had he taken such liberties, President Jimmy Carter would have made him resign. At a minimum it is clear Cheney believes he can substitute his judgment for the president’s. Cheney not only reinforces Bush’s worst traits, he sandbags the president into even more extreme positions. Where this will lead when it comes to Iran or North Korea should send shudders up the spine.
Cheney has gone out of his way to make sure no one got to the bottom of this affair. Sen. John D. Rockefeller, D-W. Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, related new key details of this in an interview with McClatchy newspapers last week. During the previous Congress, the committee attempted to conduct a “Phase II” investigation of how the Iraq intelligence was manipulated to bring on the war, but was stymied at every turn by obstacles thrown up by the Republican majority, led by then-chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. Rockefeller told reporters that Cheney’s interference with committee business “was just constant” and that it was “not hearsay” that Cheney had induced Roberts to drag out the inquiry.
Cheney himself continues to push the line that “obviously” only flawed intelligence was at issue on Iraq, and as he told Newsweek last week, “we should not let the fact of past problems in that area lead us to ignore the threat we face today.” Cheney is himself to testify at the Libby trial. It is a good bet that he hopes questioning will stay away from these areas. ++
John Prados is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington. His current book is Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA
The Bait-and-Switch White House
NYT Editorial
January 27, 2007
We often wonder whether there is a limit to the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy, its assault on the rule of law, its disdain for the powers of Congress, its willingness to con the public and its refusal to heed expert advice or recognize facts on the ground. Events of the past week suggest the answer is no.
In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Bush stuck to his ill-conceived plans for Iraq, but at least admitted the situation was dire. He said he wanted to work with Congress and announced a bipartisan council on national security.
That lasted a day. By Wednesday evening, Vice President Dick Cheney was on CNN contradicting most of what Mr. Bush had said. We were left asking, once again, Who exactly is running this White House?
While Mr. Bush has been a bit more forthright lately about how badly things have gone in Iraq, Mr. Cheney spoke of “enormous successes” there and refused to pay even curled-lip service to consulting Congress. Whatever votes Congress takes on Iraq, Mr. Cheney said, “it won’t stop us.”
Whenever the vice president does this sort of thing, and it’s pretty often, Americans are faced with an unpleasant choice: Are Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney running a bait-and-switch operation, or does the vice president simply feel free to cut the ground out from under Mr. Bush?
All of that was distressing enough. But in Friday’s Times, Adam Liptak gave an account of the way the administration - after grandly announcing that it was finally going to obey the law on wiretapping - is trying to quash lawsuits over Mr. Bush’s outlaw eavesdropping operations by imposing outrageous secrecy and control over the courts.
Justice Department lawyers are withholding evidence from plaintiffs and even restricting the access of judges to documents in cases involving Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize the warrantless interception of e-mail and phone calls. In one suit, Justice Department lawyers tried to seize computers from the plaintiffs’ lawyers to remove a document central to their case against the government.
In response to these and other serious concerns, the Justice Department offered only the most twisted excuses, which a federal judge rightly compared to “Alice in Wonderland.”
When government lawyers tried to take back a document that has circulated around the world, the judge asked a Justice Department lawyer, “Who is it secret from?” The answer: “Anyone who has not seen it.”
These are not isolated events. The government has made the same Orwellian claims of secrecy in a lawsuit over the president’s decision to create secret C.I.A. prisons for terrorism suspects.
Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales routinely stonewalls legitimate Congressional requests for documents and information on a wide range of issues. He negotiated a secret agreement to give supposed judicial oversight to Mr. Bush’s wiretapping program, with a court that does not permit anyone into its hearings to argue against the government.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney claim that they are protecting the powers of the presidency. At least that’s the bait they use to explain their trampling on civil liberties and the constitutional balance of power. But by abusing the government’s legitimate right to claim secrecy in court hearings, they will make it harder for other presidents to do that when it is actually justified. And with that switch, they have done grievous harm to the credibility of the Oval Office and the country. ++
L’éminence Grise
by digby, Hullabaloo
1/26
This is interesting. A reader over at TPM writes:
Incidentally, Josh, you must have noticed that Bush’s very expansive claims of executive authority are being made by the first President in our history to delegate to his Vice President anything close to the authority over policy and personnel that he has ceded to Cheney. Back in 1980 the GOP Convention audience was kept amused by an effort to establish a “co-Presidency” with Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, who’d have been given extensive authority if elected. Reagan decided then that it was a stupid idea; he wasn’t running to be half a President. And now we have a President weak enough to make the “co-Presidency” a reality.
I was thinking along similar lines earlier today:
These people are proving that a president can get away with anything (but an illicit blowjob) if he’s willing to push the envelope. And that is exactly what Dick Cheney set out to do when he chose himself to be the defacto president back in 2000.
It truly is amazing that a vice president has not only wielded such power but has also stated openly that his goal in office was to expand executive authority:
In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.
President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.
“I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff,” Cheney said.
Most of Cheney’s colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of “disdain for the law.”
Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power.”
The Iran-contra scandal was not the first time the future vice president articulated a philosophy of unfettered executive power — nor would it be the last. The Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president’s hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast “inherent” powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress.
Cheney bypassed acts of Congress as defense secretary in the first Bush administration. And his office has been the driving force behind the current administration’s hoarding of secrets, its efforts to impose greater political control over career officials, and its defiance of a law requiring the government to obtain warrants when wiretapping Americans. Cheney’s staff has also been behind President Bush’s record number of signing statements asserting his right to disregard laws.
A close look at key moments in Cheney’s career — from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon and Ford administrations to his decade in Congress and his tenure as secretary of defense under the first President Bush — suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
That’s a practical problem for the US government and an abstract philosophical point — until you realize that the most powerful vice president in history, who could never have been elected president in his own right, pretty much appointed himself vice president to a man he knew was an imbecile. How very convenient.
This reminds of this essay by Michael Lind* from ‘03 that I’ve always found fascinating:
How did the neocon defense intellectuals - a small group at odds with most of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic - manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first - a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process - and that his administration, again like his father’s, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney’s right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
Never forget that John McCain’s BFF in the 2000 election was Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard braintrust. They used to call it “National Greatness” conservatism or “benevolent hagemony” but they’re really just obfuscatory terms for American imperialism or world domination.
These are the people who Dick Cheney, the accidental vice president, brought into the government. They did it during the truncated transition and while Junior was off on a partridge hunt with Brent Scowcroft and Prince Bandar and James Baker was busy in Florida:
Once in Spain, Bush, Knight and the executives were joined by Norman Schwarzkopf and proceeded to a private estate in Pinos Altos, about 60 kilometers from Madrid, to shoot red-legged partridges, the fastest game birds in the world. Bush impressed the hunting party as a fine wing shot and a gentleman — the 76-year-old former president was not above offering to clean mud off the boots of his fellow hunters. Throughout the trip, Bush kept in touch with the election developments via e-mail. By Saturday, Nov. 11, a machine recount had shrunk his son’s lead in Florida to a minuscule 327 votes. “I kind of wish I was in the U.S. so I could help prevent the Democrats from working their mischief,” he told another hunter in his party.
On Tuesday, November 14, Bush and Schwarzkopf arrived in England, where Brent Scowcroft joined them and they continued their game hunting on Bandar’s estate. They kept a close eye on the zigs and zags of the recount battle. As a power play to demonstrate his confidence to the media, the Democratic Party, and the American populace, George W. Bush announced the members of his White House transition team even before the Florida vote-count battle was over.
I’m not sure what it all means except that Cheney is an undemocratic, power-mad freak, which we already knew. But as I watching what’s emerging from the Libby Trail, it’s more and more apparent that his dark influence on the empty codpiece was …. no accident.
*Let us all add Lind to the list of intellectuals who were right about the war and are ignored by the media. He is not only an intellectual, he works at a centrist think tank, he used to be a Republican and he is from Texas. What more do they want? This piece was written in April of 2003, right after the invasion and it was right on.
But no, let’s listen to all the usual suspects be wrong over and over again. ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
January 31st, 2007