There's a healthy Internet buzz today on a Washington Post story saying the CIA endorsed such harsh interrogation techniques as waterboarding against Al Qaeda suspects in 2003 and 2004 -- and eventually got a written endorsement from Bush administration higher-ups.
What we find interesting about the story is the prospect that as the Bush administration fades, there remains the likelihood that its wall of secrecy will slowly turn into shards. The result: The pieces will continue to reveal details of how President Bush conducted the campaign against terrorism.
As for the latest shard:
The Post reported that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet requested the memos "more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations," to create a paper trail leading to the White House.
The paper reported:
The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured Al Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said.
And those concerns only grew after the revelations of prisoner abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
With barely seven weeks to go until election day, and four months left in office, the Bush administration has launched a three-phase plan intended "to strike at Osama bin Laden and top Al Qaeda leadership," NPR is reporting tonight.
President Bush has approved a plan that has brought a "surge" of CIA personnel from around the world into the fight along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, in an 11th-hour effort "to hammer Al Qaeda before the November election," the radio network says, quoting "two government officials."
Throughout the week, news organizations have been reporting on different elements of the stepped-up campaign.
The Los Angeles Times reported today that the United States was deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems as part of its escalating offensive against extremist targets in Pakistan.
The effort along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border raises this question: Why wasn't it started earlier?
And, as important, what does the election — and Bush's nearing departure from the White House — have to do with the timing?
Update at 11 a.m. PDT Sept. 15: Since posting the article, NPR has removed the reference to a strike being conducted before election day. Instead, it says: "The plan represents an 11th-hour effort to hammer Al Qaeda until the Bush administration leaves office, two government officials told NPR."
For the 7 1/2 years of the Bush administration, Zalmay Khalilzad has been the golden boy of U.S. foreign policy.
He began life in the Bush White House as a special assistant to the president for South Asia, Near East and North African Affairs--in other words, chief of the hot spots--on the National Security Council. In short order he moved into three of the most important ambassadorial jobs: Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, the United Nations.
He was the guy to whom Bush turned when he needed someone he trusted in an extremely sensitive job.
Now, he's gone from the guy on the hot seat to bubbling in hot water.
The New York Times is reporting today that he is "facing angry questions" from his colleagues at the top of the administration over unauthorized contacts with the Pakistani political leader, Asif Ali Zardari, who is a contender to succeed Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan's president.
It turns out, according to the Times, that Khalilzad had been speaking several times a week with Zardari, the widower of the assassinated opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. And he had planned the meet with Zardari next week while on vacation in Dubai, the paper reported, quoting administration officials.
Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, put an end to that plan after discovering through Zardari himself that the United States' U.N. ambassador was providing "advice and help." An angry e-mail from Boucher to Khalilzad ensued.
Such contacts would suggest an extreme violation of diplomatic protocol and U.S. policy; the administration has remained officially neutral in the contest to succeed Musharraf, and in any case diplomats are discouraged from such interference in any country's internal politics--the history of CIA involvement in instances around the world notwithstanding.
With the United States walking an extremely narrow line as it seeks to encourage a new Pakistani administration to fight the Taliban along the Afghan-Pakistan border--but not appear overly friendly with whomever takes over in Islamabad, for fear of complicating the security task--any signs of a U.S. official's meddling in Pakistani political affairs can only complicate the mission.
The Times notes an intriguing back story:
The conduct by Mr. Khalilzad, who is Afghan by birth has also raised hackles because of speculation that he might seek to succeed Hamid Karzi as president of Afghanistan.
The official State Department biography of Khalilzad makes no reference to his Afghan heritage.
To put a winner/loser take on things — one that Bush administration officials would surely object to — the shake-up of the intelligence community that the White House announced this morning leaves the director of national intelligence, J. Michael McConnell, with at least an upper hand vis-a-vis the CIA.
The DNI ends up with more formal oversight of the CIA and the 15 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, many of them run by the Pentagon.
The Times' Josh Meyer, preparing a lengthy report for latimes.com and Friday's print edition, says that congressional leaders, who were not consulted in the redesign, were sharply critical of the plan.
The two senior officials who spoke with reporters about the document said it reinforced civil liberties protections and continued an existing ban on assassination and limitations on human experimentation.
But a congressional official briefed on the changes said that it would take a while until the full ramifications were worked out. In other words, in the vague and hazy world of spycraft, there will be some give-and-take before policy becomes reality. And just because it looks as though McConnell came out on top ...
Syndicated columnist Bob Novak publicly revealed Valerie Plame-Wilson's identity as a covert CIA agent in 2003, setting in motion an investigation that brought down I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and seriously damaged the reputation of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and White House political maestro Karl Rove for leaking her name to other journalists.
The Wilsons left Washington two years ago to live in Santa Fe, N.M., where, as Wonkette put it "terrorists and Bob Novak will never find them." Now, from the desert, they are weighing in on Novak's latest brush with the law in the nation's capital -- an incident that happened Wednesday in which the 77-year-old syndicated columnist, driving a black Corvette, hit a pedestrian and kept on driving.
In a statement to ThinkProgress, the Wilsons equated Novak's disregard for pedestrians with a similar disdain for covert CIA officers.
Our sympathies go out to the victim of Novak’s action. Once again Novak has demonstrated his callous disregard for the rights of others, as well as his chronic inability to accept responsibility for his actions.
We have long argued that responsible adults should take Novak’s typewriter away. The time has arrived for them to also take away the keys to his Corvette.
Meanwhile, details are emerging on other aspects of the case.
The victim, 66-year-old Don Likinquist, may be in worse shape than earlier reported. Or not. WJLA-TV is quoting an unnamed source who said the man has casts on his neck and back and is awaiting a surgical team evaluation.
The lawyer who stopped Novak half a block away -- and who does not believe the columnist's claim that he had no idea he'd hit anyone -- turns out to be an Obama Democrat. David Bono, a partner at Harkins Cunningham, contributed $2,000 to the Obama campaign in May during the frenzied primary run against Hillary Rodham Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
As for Novak, he's not talking, but he told WJLA-TV yesterday that he feels "terrible," adding of the victim, "He's not dead, that's the main thing."
But, as C2C (that's us, Countdown to Crawford) reported Wednesday, Novak has shown disdain for pedestrians before. In 2001, according to the Washington Post's Lloyd Grove, Novak yelled at a jaywalker, later explaining to Grove: "He was crossing on the red light. I really hate jaywalkers. I despise them. Since I don't run the country, all I can do is yell at 'em. The other option is to run 'em over, but as a compassionate conservative, I would never do that."
That was the way former U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft today described his decision to back off controversial Justice Department legal opinions produced by then-Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. John Yoo. The memoranda, written in 2002 and 2003, you may remember, spelled out the use of interrogation techniques that described torture as "extreme acts" that cause pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure.
The memos said, in effect, that anything short of that was OK. They have been among the most controversial documents to come to light in the Bush administration in its campaign against terrorism.
The former attorney general, who ran the Justice Department from 2001 to 2005, was the man who originally approved the memos.
But testifying before the House Judiciary Committee today, he said: “It became apparent in the further examination of those opinions, when made in another time frame, that there were matters of concerns that were brought to my opinion."
Democrats challenged Ashcroft, according to the Associated Press account of the hearing, with questions about the frequency of waterboarding -- and he said he did not think that the procedure, as the CIA then described it, was torture.
The concept of executive privilege rings a special bell with readers of a certain age. It was relied on by the Richard M. Nixon White House seeking to shield documents and personnel from inquiring congressional committees and prosecutors during the Watergate investigations.
President Bush quietly claimed executive privilege on Tuesday, after Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey requested the shield. Mukasey is seeking to avoid delivering to congressional investigators documents dealing with interviews of Vice President Dick Cheney and members of his staff regarding the unmasking of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has subpoenaed the accounts of the FBI interviews, as well as notes about President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address in which he said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapon -- an assertion that proved wrong.
On Wednesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, joined the fray. He noted that the claim of executive privilege exempts the attorney general "from complying with a subpoena," and wrote to Mukasey:
This executive privilege claim, and your justification for it, appears to turn the privilege on its head. The purpose of executive privilege is to encourage candid advice to the president, not to cover up what the vice president and White House staff say to investigating authorities when that information is requested in the course of congressional oversight.
Is the United States conducting clandestine operations within Iran?
The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh thinks so, and reports in this week's issue that Congress agreed to a request from President Bush last year to fund a major escalation of covert activity against Iran -- aimed at destabilizing the country's regime by backing minority groups like the Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi.
The story was knocked down quickly by the administration -- "I can tell you flatly that U.S. forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran." U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker told CNN. Hersh dismissed the denial, arguing that "when you run secret operations ... sometimes it's better not to have the ambassador know."
Saying that he does not know why the administration would be increasing covert operations in Iran, Hersh told CNN in an interview today that he believes that President Bush and Vice President Cheney "do not want to leave Iran in place with a nuclear program.... They believe that their mission is to make sure that before they get out of offices next year, either Iran is attacked or it stops its weapons program."
The Times' Babylon and Beyond blog, which reports on the Middle East, has more details here.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: Posters of Iran's late spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (left) and current supreme leader Ali Khameni (sixth to the left) are included in a row of Hezbollah martyrs lining a street in southern Lebanon. Credit: RAMZI HAIDAR/AFP/Getty Images
More subpoenas have been issued in the case that keeps on going -- the CIA Valerie Plame leak investigation.
Top Bush officials, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, leaked stories to reporters disclosing Plame's identity as a CIA operative, ostensibly to discredit the anti-Iraq war views of her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Now the House Judiciary Committee, following in the footsteps of the House Oversight Committee, wants to see FBI notes of interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as well as interviews on the case from some top names that used to work for them -- political guru Karl Rove, vice presidential aide Scooter Libby, already convicted of lying in the case, and Scott McClellan, the former spokesman with a hot kiss-and-tell book.
In the past, the Justice Department has dismissed the requests on grounds of executive privilege. This time the deadline is July 7, but no one expects the results to be any different.
The committee's news release and link to the subpoena are here.
You don't often hear a lot of jokes about the Central Intelligence Agency. But the CIA directors for Bushes 41 and 43 traded punch lines today about the perils of the job.
As CIA director, you learn that "when you smell the flowers, look around for the coffin," said Robert M. Gates, who served at the spook agency from 1991 to 1993, during the administration of George H.W. Bush.
Gates, now Defense secretary, recounted how he had once been presented with a CIA scheme to float balloons over Libya that were to pop and drop leaflets urging the country's citizens to overthrow their government.
Fearing that wind might blow the balloons off course, Gates said he ordered the plotters to rewrite the leaflets to specify which government they wanted the residents to overthrow. Had the leaflets drifted over Egypt, Gates said, "I imagine Gen. Mubarak would have been none too pleased."
Michael V. Hayden, the current CIA chief, recited what he said was the first lesson he learned about the intelligence business: Spy agencies always get the blame. In Washington, he said, "there are operational successes and intelligence failures."
Hayden and Gates spoke during a retirement ceremony today for Hayden, who is leaving the Air Force as a four-star general after 39 years of service but is expected to remain CIA director for the remainder of the Bush administration.
-- Greg Miller
Photo: Michael V. Hayden. Credit: Brendan Smialowski / Associated Press
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
There's a healthy Internet buzz today on a Washington Post story saying the CIA endorsed such harsh interrogation techniques as waterboarding against Al Qaeda suspects in 2003 and 2004 -- and eventually got a written endorsement from Bush administration higher-ups.
