Today we heard this from the President:
| "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Bush said emphatically. "And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans.
"Anything we do . . . to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law," he said. "We do not torture." |
Apparently his Vice Pesident didn't get the memo:
| WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session. |
This suggests one of two things. Either the President is lying, or Cheney is ignoring the President and Bush either doesn't care or hasn't noticed. Either prospect is terrifying. Particularly given this report today from Slate. If you care at all about the future of our republic, you have to read this entire piece. With aplogies to Slate, here is a substantial portion:
| The information CTEG put together was treated differently than other intelligence. Unlike other reports, CTEG's conclusions about Iraq's training of jihadists in the use of explosives and weapons of mass destruction were never distributed to the many different agencies in the intelligence community. Although CTEG analysts met once with Director George Tenet and other CIA officials, they changed no minds at the agency on the issue of Saddam and al-Qaida, and their work was never "coordinated" or cleared by the various agencies that weigh in on intelligence publications. Top officers in military intelligence who saw the report refused to concur with it.
Nonetheless, CTEG's findings were the basis for briefings in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Some of CTEG's material was leaked to the Weekly Standard, where it was published. In that form, the Feith "annex" achieved some renown as a classic in the genre of cherry-picked intelligence. Dick Cheney was CTEG's patron. He had the group present its material at OVP and the National Security Council. He made frequent public remarks, drawing on CTEG conclusions, alleging an al-Qaida/Saddam connection. (Even after the 9/11 commission delivered its verdict that there was no collaborative relationship between the two sides, Cheney announced that the evidence of the Bin Laden-Baghdad ties was "overwhelming.") John Hannah, a Cheney aide who became the vice president's national security adviser after Libby's resignation, recycled some of the material into a draft of the speech Secretary of State Colin Powell was to give at the United Nations in February 2003—a draft that Powell threw out, calling it "bullshit." The wide airing of CTEG material clearly irked George Tenet, who declared at one point when pressed by congressmen in 2003 that he would "talk to" Cheney about some of the claims he was making. Whatever passed between them, Cheney was not deterred. In January 2004, he told a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News that the Standard article was the "best source of information" on Saddam's ties to al-Qaida. In June 2004, Cheney was still claiming that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta met an Iraqi agent in Prague. Much is still to be learned about how intelligence was used and abused in CTEG and OVP. But one story gives a hint of what the historians may find: When I interviewed him several months ago, Powell's former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson recounted the story of a meeting in the White House situation room during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq when policymakers met with top intelligence officials from a number of agencies. After the intelligence officials made their presentations, Douglas Feith "leapt to his feet, pointed to a certain National Intelligence Officer and declared 'You people don't know what you're talking about.' " Feith had worked for Cheney—together with Scooter Libby—when he was secretary of defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush and, according to former administration sources, was even closer to Rumsfeld than Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was. After that outburst, Feith held up a piece of paper and read aloud an account of al-Qaida's ties with Iraq in the early 1990s. Then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, a man well-known and well-liked in Washington for his gentlemanly manners, looked on, aghast at the scene. Wilkerson told me that after the end of the meeting, he got a copy of the paper and determined it was a newspaper clipping that had been retyped in the vice president's office to be presented as "intelligence." Browbeating intelligence officials, disregard for the National Security Council's traditional leadership of the interagency process—this kind of behavior, plenty of Bush administration officials privately attest, was typical as the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis that took the country to war. "Who knows," Larry Wilkerson wondered to me, "how many other people they intimidated." |
I realize this paints a bleak picture, and I realize it may sound like I've started gathering a colelction of tinfoil hats, but one after another these stories keep coming out. And each adds a significant new piece to the puzzle.
Bush is the boy president in the bubble. Even his staff admits this (example: days after Katrina they had to burn him a DVD so that he could catch up on coverage in the news). Cheney saw this, has known it from the beginning. Whatever my personal and political feelings aout Cheney, he's not a man whose intelligence I would ever underestimate. My guess is, from the day he joined the ticket he saw how this would work. He saw that Bush possesed a less than formidibale intellict. That Bush knew nothing about the world outside of this country (Proof? Bush today: "Wow! Brazil is big!". And most importantly, that Bush didn't care much for foreign policy. He saw, in short, that he could run foreign policy. That if he played his cards right, he could enact policies in secret that a vast majority of Americans would oppose. And should you doubt that, a quick look at any of the latest polls should do.
I know. I know. Tinfoil hats. So please - give me your theory. Tell me your version of the story. I cannot for the life of me figure out any other way this makes sense. In the past two weeks we've had stories from very VERY credible sources indicating that both Sec. of State Powell and Sec. of State Rice pushed back hard against Cheney, usually with limited success. Today's article in the Post depicts Rice as almost frantic at time in her efforts to stop Cheney. Powell's Chief of Staff has made clear that he believes our foreign policy apparatus was "hijacked by a cabal." These are people that were and still are on the adminsitration's side. If these are partisans, they're partisans on the side of the adminsitration!
Read the WaPo article again. Or any of the other stories I've linked to on this blog over the past week or two. And while you're doing it ask yourself one question: Where is the president in these stories? Where is he while Cheney is working the backrooms? Where is he while Cheney is pushing his lies? Because the way I read thing, either he is MIA and his administration is completely out of control, or.... what exactly? Revisit Wilkerson's claims. Cheney had a staff that spied on the President's NSA staff and that actively worked to withhold critical intelligence from the president himself.
But I will not despair. No. As depressing as this deluge of stories is, I will take it as a positive sign. The truth seeks daylight. It always does. It will find its way out of the darkness and into the light. It already is finding its way. They overreached. They pushed too far. WAY too far. And we will find out. We will know.
Perhaps these stories are all one big misunderstanding. Perhaps they paint only a portion of the portrait. Sitting here, piecing it together, I don't see how, but I recognize that it is possible. Maybe I've got it all wrong. Honestly, I'd really like to believe that. But sadly, I don't.
Soon enough, we will know. Stay tuned....
UPDATE: Want more? It took about 10 minutes to find more. First up, it looks like Cheney is going to meet with Ahmed Chalabi. That's right. The man who stands accused of leaking US intelligence secrets to Iran. Yes, the same Iran that is one of the founding members of the axis of evil.
Call me crazy, but before members of the administration meet with him, shouldn't the Justice DEpartment conclude their investigation into the allegations? Spying. For the Axis of Evil.
Am I the only one who feels like they've taken a huge helping of crazy pills?
UPDATE II: OK, now this is just piling on.
James Carroll @ The Boston Globe
General Norman Schwarzkopf
Digby
Kevin Drum
Larry Johnson
Is this "Cheney is a raving lunatic" thing the hot new meme? I don't think I've ever stopped to think it through this way. Click through and read the above links. Wrong about the end of the Cold War. Wrong about the first Gulf War. Wrong about bin Laden. Wrong about 9/11. Wrong about al Qaeda. Wrong about Iraq.
Has this man ever been right about anything? How did this happen?
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