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.
It's been established that Vice President Dick Cheney doesn't do touchy-feely.
As Countdown to Crawford reported last week, he was adamant in turning down President Bush's request three years ago that he hurry down to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to Barton Gellman in the new book "Angler."
And of course he doesn't do that old standby of vice presidential work: Funerals.
No, Cheney's well-known specialty has been intelligence. National security. Foreign policy. He travels the world quietly, with but a few reporters relegated to the back of Air Force Two. He meets with foreign leaders and then, when forced, holds a very brief news conference at which he effortlessly sticks well within the parameters of his talking points.
He does crises -- but he's particular about his crises.
Which brings up the crisis du jour, or, really now, du mois and more, and this question: When it comes to the economy, Wall Street bailouts and financial meltdown, where's Dick Cheney?
Please, if anyone sees his fingerprints, let us know.
As for his thinking about the economy, the top of a Fortune magazine story last November is telling:
To be sure, the magazine's Washington editor, Nina Easton, noted, Cheney is a well-known worrier and so might be "thinking dark thoughts about the economy."
But, she observed, his real concern was not the emerging catastrophe growing out of the subprime mortgage meltdown, but "Washington's impulse to fix it."
Looking into the vice president's work, she found back then that he was playing "a surprisingly major role in shaping the administration's economic policy."
And like so much in Cheney World, that role was well hidden -- and guided by his overall philosophy:
To hear President Bush tell it, there is one reason, overall, that violence has fallen in Baghdad: The surge.
It was the surge, he said last week, that allowed the U.S. to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. "Since we launched the surge last year, violence has fallen to its lowest point since the spring of 2004," he said in his radio address last Saturday. And just two days ago, he said of the surge: "The United States and the world is better off because of it."
Not so quick, according to a team of UCLA researchers.
Studying satellite imagery of night light in Baghdad neighborhoods dominated by Sunni residents, they came up with an alternative conclusion: The Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims had largely stopped killing each other by the time the "surge" of U.S. troops arrived in 2007.
In other words, the remaining Sunnis, defeated, turned out the lights and left. And then the U.S. troops came in.
Written by three members of UCLA's geography department and one political scientist, it states that "the overall night light signature of Baghdad" increased from 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, to 2006, and then declined dramatically from March 20, 2006 through Dec. 16, 2007.
The report notes:
The decrease in the night light signatures was not uniformly distributed across the city. The neighborhoods of East and West Rashid have experienced the greatest decline in night lights during the period of the surge. This pattern of declines appears associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing...
The professors found no similar decline in night light in four other large cities, Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala.
"Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect," they wrote.
Tough news for Vice President Dick Cheney from the federal court in Washington.
No, it has nothing to do with his signature issues -- anti-terrorism intelligence and energy.
This one deals with potential recreational pursuits back home in Wyoming. He is, after all, about to retire.
Well before the surge of interest in snowmobiles, President Richard M. Nixon and then President Jimmy Carter imposed limits on the use of off-road vehicles in the national parks.
In its last days in office, the Bill Clinton administration moved to phase out snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, but the Bush administration reversed that decision and instead moved to expand their access.
The Grand Teton mountains tower above Jackson Hole, where Cheney maintains a secluded home deep in a heavily forested spread.
Sullivan ruled that the park services "failed to articulate why a plan that will admittedly worsen air quality complies" with federal conservation rules.
The plan developed by the Bush administration "is arbitrary and capricious, unsupported by the record, and contrary to law," said Sullivan, who was nominated to the federal court by President Clinton, after serving in District of Columbia superior and appeals courts to which he was named by Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
He ruled that "in contravention" of the 1916 Organic Act that created the National Park Service, the snowmobile plan:
... clearly elevates use over conservation of park resources and values and fails to articulate why the Plan’s 'major adverse impacts' are 'necessary and appropriate to fulfill the purposes of the park.'
Under the straightforward and innocuous heading "Trip Statement of the Vice President," the White House disclosed this morning that Vice President Dick Cheney is being dispatched to one more international hot spot — and one very delightful Italian resort.
No word on whether the schedule will still allow the vice president to speak next Monday at the Republican National Convention. But the itinerary calls for him to begin the trip on Tuesday, so that should leave sufficient time for a quick round of politics in St. Paul, Minn., where the GOP is meeting, before heading eastward to ... the Caucasus.
President Bush has tasked Cheney with showing the American flag in Azerbaijan, Georgia and then Ukraine, before completing the journey at an international conference, the Ambrosetti Forum, on the shores of Lake Como, in the Italian lake district not far from Milan.
Plunging publicly into a crisis that has tied the U.S.-Russian relationship in knots just as the Bush administration is coming to an end, Cheney will meet with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, and President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine, in a clear effort to shore them up with a visible display of U.S. support in the face of Russian military and political pressure.
One of the big questions: To what extent will Cheney wave the blue and white NATO flag — a red flag in Russia's eyes? The Bush administration has been pushing to get Ukraine and Georgia, on Russia's southern border, into NATO, a move that Russia adamantly opposes.
Longtime allies of the vice president have been among those pushing hardest to bring the former Soviet satellites into the Atlantic Alliance fold. And, of course, Cheney isn't known for his soothing words — at least when it comes to national security matters.
His trip will be the third high-level U.S. visit to the region this year, following Bush's stop in Ukraine in March and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Georgia earlier this month following the Georgian-Russian clash.
In Italy, Cheney will meet with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of Bush's closest allies in Europe.
The Ambrosetti Forum is an annual conference — a miniature, late-summer version of the World Economic Forum that meets each winter in Davos, Switzerland — that aims to bring together world leaders, royalty, financiers and business executives to discuss "intelligence on the world, Europe and Italy."
For the White House announcement, click on Read Full Story below.
President Bush is putting out markers for his successor, at least in the fight against terrorism.
It is an old line -- one he has been using on and off since 9/11 -- but with a new president in the wings, the current president is making it clear that it would be wrong to look at the fight against terrorism as merely one of law enforcement, and those who would attack the United States as common criminals.
Not that Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain were taking such an approach -- or to suggest the president was entering the political fray.
In a speech prepared for delivery at midday to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Orlando, Fla., Bush is telling the veterans -- as well as the Democrat and Republican vying to replace him -- that the campaign against terrorism requires "all assets of national power."
“This war cannot be won,” he says, “if we treat terrorism primarily as a matter of law enforcement.”
Noting the use of law enforcement to track down and imprison some of those responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, he continues:
The lesson of this experience is: In this war, we must use all assets of national power to keep the pressure on the enemy, keep the terrorists on the run, and keep the American people safe from harm.
And, in case Obama or McCain should think otherwise, Bush says: “America’s future leaders must always remember that the war on terror will be won on the offense -- and that is where America’s military must stay.”
The proposed rule change was first set out for public comment on July 31, and drew little attention:
As law enforcement agencies, including local and state units, watch for signs of terrorist activity, they could target groups as well as individuals, and begin criminal intelligence investigations "based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists." And they could spread around the law enforcement world the fruits of the investigation.
In short, it would move local police forces into the realm of intelligence-gathering that had been the work of the FBI and other federal agencies.
The proposed shift was noticed by the Washington Post, which reported Saturday that the Justice Department's proposal "would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years."
The newspaper noted that the administration was in the process of revising domestic intelligence-gathering in its waning months in office, and would lock in policies for President Bush's successor, completing the greatest expansion of executive branch authority since the Watergate era.
Jim McMahon, deputy executive director of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, was quoted by the Post as saying the changes would "catch up with reality," updating rules from the early 1990s to the post-9/11 world.
He said police agencies would still have to demonstrate a "reasonable suspicion" that a target was involved in a crime before collecting intelligence, the paper said.
But, it noted, Michael German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and a 16-year veteran of the FBI, said police agencies could misunderstand it as allowing them to collect intelligence "even when no underlying crime is suspected."
He cited as an example an investigation into a charitable donation to a group later designated as a terrorist organization.
It risks turning police officers into "spies on behalf of the federal government," he said.
Dick Cheney was an assistant at the White House when Watergate was unfolding. By the time the scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974, the young Wyoming Republican had returned to the private sector. The new president, Gerald Ford, called him back. Cheney became deputy to Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, seen here on right when the two were named on Nov. 7, 1975. And when Rummy left (to run the Pentagon, but that's another story), Ford promoted Cheney. At 34, Richard Bruce Cheney became the youngest person ever to serve as White House chief of staff.
In his new book "The Way of the World," author Ron Suskind argues that Cheney concluded from his perch at the White House during those years that Nixon fell not because of his abuse of government -- he asked agencies such as the IRS and the FBI to shadow his enemies. Or because of the break-in of the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee by criminals with ties to CREEP (The Committee To Re-Elect the President). Or even because of the cover-up.
Suskind believes Cheney concluded that Nixon had been "overbriefed" and that his aides had failed to give him "plausible deniability." And so, a la Suskind, that is what Cheney set out to give George W. Bush.
Asked about it last night on Keith Olberman's "Countdown" on MSNBC, John Dean, White House counsel in the Nixon presidency, said Cheney has been so successful at this that it will prevent impeachment proceedings against Bush.
"Cheney's been very effective in setting up his deniability and always being the failsafe for Bush. Unless they start waterboarding the vice president, which it not too likely, he is the man, the trail ends right there."
Dean, the one who told Nixon there was "a cancer on the presidency," was convicted of obstruction of justice and admitted supervising hush payments to the break-in defendants. The author of a book called "Worse Than Watergate," Dean argues that the sins of the earlier Nixon era "didn't kill anyone," whereas those of the current administration include torture and war.
When foreign intelligence agents and law enforcement teams arrived at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to talk to their countrymen held there, a third party was likely listening in on the interrogations, according to a report published today: U.S. officials operating via sound and video recording equipment.
The Washington Post says the policy, revealed in documents it obtained, suggests that the U.S. government could have thousands of hours of taped conversations recorded between detainees and representatives of nearly three dozen countries.
Which opens these questions: Do the tapes still exist? Will the recordings -- sound and video -- surface?
And if so, will they show misbehavior? Threats? Useful intelligence? Or information exonerating a detainee who remains in captivity?
The Post noted:
Should such videotapes exist, they would reveal how representatives from countries such as China, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia treated detainees in small interrogation booths at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--sessions that some detainees have said were abusive and at times contained threats of torture or even death.
But, the newspaper also said, while defense attorneys have long sought such evidence, the Bush administration has not indicated the tapes exist.
Nonetheless, even as the Pentagon has said it did not "regularly videotape interrogations" at Gitmo, it acknowledged last month that it had recorded at least seven hours of Canadian officials interrogating terrorism suspect Omar Khadr. It acknowledged having the tapes after the Canadian Supreme Court ordered Canadian officials to release them.
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 ...
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.
