Even as he nears the final weeks of his term, President Bush is facing more trouble over the handling of prisoners and the war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo.
The Los Angeles Times is fronting a story Saturday by Josh Meyer saying that the Air Force general running the tribunals is facing two investigations into his conduct.
The most serious: an examination into whether he abused his power and "improperly influenced the prosecutions of enemy combatants."
Meyer is reporting that military officials said the internal Air Force investigation of Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann was launched "only after a preliminary inquiry found sufficient grounds to move forward."
After a major setback by the Supreme Court last June, the investigation raises anew questions about the troubled effort to prosecute detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other distant fields in the campaign against terrorism.
Among the allegations against Hartmann that are being reviewed by the Air Force: that he improperly bullied prosecutors, logistics officials and others at Gitmo, leading to cases going to trial before they were ready, and one prosecution in which the charges were unwarranted.
There are also assertions that he used coerced evidence despite objections from prosecutors.
An interesting way to show your friends back home that you love 'em: pardon the criminals.
Our colleagues at the Swamp took a look at President Bush's sparing use of pardon power and found that more convicts in Texas and Florida, where his younger brother, Jeb, was governor, benefited from his pardoning and clemency largess than those in any other state.
A matter of size, you say? Bigger states, more criminals? Perhaps.
But consider this: Convicts in Texas and Florida, both states that helped put Bush in the White House, were given 31 acts of presidential clemency. In California, eight convicts received clemency, and in New York, just one. And to which candidate did their electoral votes go?
For the Swamp's full account and a list of state-by-state pardons, click here.
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Jeb Bush, left, with President Bush. Credit: Paul J. Richards / AFP/Getty Images
Chalk it up as one last big win for Vice President Dick Cheney and his secretive -- OK, that's redundent when talking about a Cheney guy -- chief of staff, David Addington.
Remember when the president said in August 2007, "it should be a goal of the nation to shut down Guantanamo?" (Of course, he added, closing it is easier said than done.)
Never mind -- at least for now or anytime in the near future.
The State Department reportedly prepared memos on transferring the prisoners; so did the Pentagon. Bush considered none of them.
That's according to a report in today's New York Times, which said that after the Supreme Court ruling, Bush "adopted the view of his most hawkish advisors that closing Guantanamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon."
Steven Lee Myers, writing in The Times, says that despite the president's stated desire to close Gitmo, and the pressure that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have applied to accomplishing that, they have "acquiesced to the arguments of more hawkish advisors, including Vice President Dick Cheney."
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said of the Guantanamo decision: "It's very complex. It's complicated. It's difficult."
She said the admininistration was working to reduce the population at the prison -- and had brought it down from about 600 to 270.
"It's not as easy as snapping your fingers" and closing the prison, she said, adding, "unless you don't care."
That was a reference to the 7% of released detainees who, she said, have returned to the battlefield.
"It's slow work," Perino said at the daily White House news briefing this morning. "The president has made a decision to close Guantanamo Bay. That has not changed."
As for Cheney, his spokeswoman, Megan Mitchell, said by e-mail seconds after Perino spoke: "You heard from Dana in the briefing. I don't have anything to add beyond that."
As you may recall from an earlier post on Countdown to Crawford, a group of historians and activists from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is suing Vice President Dick Cheney so that he does not destroy or withhold official records when he leaves office.
Now, a judge overseeing the case has granted CREW's request to take the depositions of David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, and Nancy Smith, the National Archives and Records Administration official responsible for presidential papers under the Presidential Records Act. And U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, questioning whether the secrecy-loving Cheney is preserving all records or just those he deems worthy of public inspection, said the depositions must take place by Oct. 6.
CREW was delighted. Chief counsel Anne Weismann said today:
With this decision, there is now nowhere for the White House to duck and hide. We are hopeful that these depositions will allow us to finally uncover whether these important records are being preserved or deliberately lost to future generations.
He went to court to protect details about the role of energy executives in private meetings he led to develop the Bush administration's national energy strategy.
He went to Capitol Hill to argue for an exemption to a proposed ban on torture of terror suspects. He wanted to make sure the president had the flexibility to order water boarding or other horrific techniques to prevent a terrorist attack.
Now he's gone to court again to argue that a vice president need only preserve records central to his job as the official who presides over the U.S. Senate or relating to specific tasks assigned by the president. That would narrow the pile considerably.
Saturday, a judge from the U.S. District Court in D.C. rejected that idea, giving a first-round victory to a group of historians and others at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who had sued him in court, concerned about their eventual access to the records.
In her ruling, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly cast doubt on the vice president's argument, given that the Presidential Records Act was specifically amended to prevent former President Richard Nixon from destroying any of the tapes or documents that led to his resignation.
And here's the kicker: Any violation by the preliminary injunction is punishable by immediate contempt -- including the power to jail the offender.
The story first broke in London's Telegraph newspaper, under the headline "Barack Obama would consider charging Bush administration over Guantanamo." The article described a campaign event in Deerfield, Fla., in which, according to the Telegraph, vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said:
"If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president -- no one is above the law."
Asked about the comment this morning on Fox News, Biden said it is Congress -- not a potential Obama administration -- that is investigating the White House.
And he denied today that an Obama administration would launch criminal investigations against the 43rd president of the United States.
"The Obama-Biden administration is not going to start off saying, "God, let's go take a lot at what [happened]." The American people want to know what we're going to do, not what happened."
Biden also had some things to say about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, calling it "impressive" but lacking in specifics. And he called the media's treatment of Palin's family life "sexist."
And now for something completely different: President Bush, yes, this President Bush--as a liberal.
The Canadian magazine Macleans is making that argument, under the shocking headline "The shockingly liberal legacy of George W. Bush."
The irony that it misses: Could it be that Vice President Dick Cheney is the force behind at least one element of the "liberalization?"
In a lengthy article that addresses the breadth of the Bush presidency and notes that the administration's legacy is more than just the war in Iraq, it says: "In some areas it is the result of hard-line conservative ideology — but in others it is surprisingly liberal."
Consider the seeming contradictions: The tax-cutting conservative who ...
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.
A map of Camp David marked with President Bush's motorcade route. A document that appears to describe how to kill someone at a distance of 200 meters. Two fake IDs -- one as a CIA agent, the other as a federal contractor protected by the Geneva Convention. And a cache of armor, including 50 pounds of chemicals, assault-style weapons and armor-piercing bullets.
Those were among the items found by police in Montgomery County, Md., a suburb of Washington, according to an article in the Washington Post about the strange case. An 18-year-old recent high school grad, Collin McKenzie-Gude, is in jail facing charges of weapons violations, possession of explosives and attempted carjacking of a 78-year-old man in a local shopping mall. His father, a Treasury Department employee, has been charged with buying guns for his son.
Assistant State Atty. Peter Feeney said at a court hearing Tuesday that police also found a list of home addresses for teachers at the private St. John's College High, which McKenzie-Gude attended, and that "some of those names were highlighted." Feeney also said police found "kind of a to-do list of items to be bought by October of 2008," including "range-finding glasses that typically are used by a sniper team" and "equipment to convert semiautomatic rifles to fully automatic rifles."
With the discovery of items relating to the presidential motorcade, said prosecutors, the investigation has now been expanded to include officials from the CIA, the FBI and the Secret Service.
So now it turns out that the victim of syndicated columnist Robert Novak's hit-and-run pedestrian scuffle is not, as earlier reported by us and everyone else, 66 years old -- he's 86 years old. And homeless. And forgiving. And kind of tickled at all the attention.
Don Clifford Liljenquist told WMAL radio in Washington D.C. that Novak's account -- the columnist who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative said he didn't know he'd hit anyone until he was stopped by a bicyclist -- is plausible.
"Yeah, it's possible that he didn't know he hit me. The vehicle was moving at 10 miles per hour or something like that, and the driver might not have seen me, because I rolled off and fell down to the pavement. So, yeah, it's possible that he didn't see me. He wasn't paying attention to his driving."
Mostly he seemed delighted to hear that he had been hit by a famous person.
"Bob Novak is the one that hit me? Well, everybody knows who Bob Novak is! He's a famous journalist! . . . I was struck by Bob Novak? . . . Well, I think that makes it a great story!"
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.
So now it turns out that the victim of syndicated columnist Robert Novak's hit-and-run pedestrian scuffle is not, as earlier reported by us and everyone else, 66 years old -- he's 86 years old. And homeless. And forgiving. And kind of tickled at all the attention.
