When I was a kid back in the Seventies, a favorite sarcastic phrase used to peers who were getting a bit too full of themselves and getting all entitled and snippy about playing fair was: ‘What do you think you are — some kind of P.C.?’ ‘P.C.’ stood for ‘Privileged Character.’
Dick Cheney is now officially our nation’s most privileged character.
It seems that Cheney Branch has thought up another innovative new privilege to protect itself from Congressional Oversight. As Isikoff and Hosenball remark at Newsweek, (and as my colleague has likewise noted),
The decision by the White House to refuse to honor the subpoena from Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for Cheney’s interview was hardly unexpected, given the administration’s history of fiercely protecting presidential prerogatives. (Newsweek)
But as the article remarks with wonderful restraint,
What was surprising to some legal scholars was the basis for shielding the FBI interview report. It was covered, Mukasey said, by what he called "the law-enforcement component of executive privilege." (Newsweek)
Let me see if I can interpret this. Reading between the lines, I would interpret it to mean that any legal scholars who know anything about executive privilege and who still believe in ‘rule of law’ are gobsmacked that Mukasey would have the gall to make this absolutely specious argument. (Newsweek)
But of course, any legal scholar who hasn’t spent the last seven+ years locked in an ivory tower with no internet access doubtless isn’t all that surprised that he did. Mukasey quickly learned the Bush administration’s foolproof strategy: if you’re the executive and refuse to account for yourself, who is really going to make you if you come up with some kind of color-of-law excuse to refuse? Even if the judiciary calls you out, you can always make up another one.
Or as Benen more succinctly puts it, ‘The Bush gang plays by its own rules — the ones they make up as they go along.’
Being Israel and protecting the values on which it was founded is one helluva tough job, but a funny thing happened on the way to the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state: It has subsumed some of those values for political convenience and is kissing George Bush’s ass when it comes to torture.
This has great pertinence because Israel apparently is one of the relatively few countries that would roll out the welcome mat for administration officials who approved of and participated in the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the Rumsfeld Gulag in violation of international law. As a consequence, they might risk arrest as war criminals in, say, France, Germany or Italy.
Said Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff of those officials — all practicing attorneys — in a pointed public statement:
“Haynes, Feith Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and — at the apex — Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.”
It should be noted that Wilkerson can be outspoken to the point of intemperance, and he is no friend of the conservatives who run Israel.
It is no surprise that he would mention Saudia Arabia, a safe country for sure for those administration lawyers given its own religious and cultural embrace of torture. But Israel? A nation that emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s embrace of the very torture techniques that the CIA and other U.S. operatives have used?
How terribly sad.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to previous torture-related posts.
Photo illustration for Vanity Fair by Chris Mueller
CHENEY ONLY PRETENDED TO BE SLEEPING; MAYER WAS WIDE AWAKE
While it had been widely assumed that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the War on Terror began at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Bush administration long hid behind that “trickle up” explanation, it is now apparent that the origins of this dark chapter in American history — and the single most defining and insidious aspect of the Age of Bush — can be traced to Vice President Cheney.
Nevertheless, there has not been a satisfactory answer to the question of why in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the vice president and his cronies did not want to work within existing laws and systems with Congress and the courts, stubbornly objected to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and created an American gulag and rump court system that ignored constitutionally mandated niceties like habeas corpus.
Like the Watergate scandal of four decades earlier, the answer is that it was all about covering up, in this instance Cheney spearheading a not vast right-wing conspiracy that was predicated on scaring the crap out of Americans, hence the oft repeated mantra that “everything has changed” because of 9/11, and the use of that rationale for a descent into morally repugnant methods and actions unprecedented in modern American history.
The purpose was to cover up the administration’s failure to act on repeated warnings that Al Qaeda planned a major attack on the homeland, an attack that it now appears could have been prevented had the White House not been so caught up in its own arrogant sense of infallibility. (In Cheney’s case, this hubris is all the more amazing because he was obsessed with doomsday scenarios and had participated in many drills in previous years that simulated attacks that might destabilize the government.)
This descent included extracting false confessions through torture that became an underpinning of the bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection and WMD threat that led directly to a war now in its sixth year, and even to satisfy grievances that Mayer says the vice president had been harboring for decades.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for a new revelation concerning former Attorney General John Ashcroft, and here for an index with links to previous Bush torture regime-related posts.
Did you know that George W. Bush is still president? It’s true. And he’s still got plenty of ways to worsen things before his term is over, leaving us a country discredited in the eyes of our own allies, a more toxic and unstable environment, a military stretched to the breaking point, and an enormous deficit.
He merrily signed off at the G8 by saying his ‘"Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,’ knowing full well he was going to stave off any progress on climate change to the end of his term. Today’s Washington Post reports:
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce today that it will seek months of further public comment on the threat posed by global warming to human health and welfare — a matter that federal climate experts and international scientists have repeatedly said should be urgently addressed.
The Bush Administration discovered a great truth: a bare-faced lie, however it may be discredited, is as good as the truth if you pretend you believe it and act on it anyway. And if you don’t mind being called out as a liar, you can lie with complete impunity so long as there is no person with the authority (or the spine to wield it) to stop you.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s office worked to alter sworn congressional testimony provided by a federal official in order to play down the threat of global warming and head off regulation of greenhouse gas emissions…according to a former government official.
The former government official…
Jason K. Burnett, a former Environmental Protection Agency official, cited the behind-the-scenes efforts by unnamed officials in Cheney’s office in a letter to congressional investigators regarding testimony in January by his former boss, EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson.
And,
For Cheney, the new accusation, coming as he winds down his time in Washington, is similar to criticism he faced early in his vice presidency over private meetings he held to shape national energy policy. Then, as now, the White House refused to turn over documents sought by congressional investigators.
Finally, Senator Barbara Boxer said, according to the LA Times: “History will judge this Bush administration harshly for recklessly covering up a real threat to the people they’re supposed to protect.”
With all due respect, Senator, I don’t think we’ll have to wait for “history” to judge this administration for its rampant corruption. I believe we only have to wait about six more months.
You see, this latest revelation of Cheney’s shenanigans, is just another drip-drip that is slowly washing away the veneer hiding the corruption and lawlessness of the Bush administration. The full torrent of exposés will flow when this administration finally leaves office–very soon–and people can come freely forward, without the threats of retaliation or of having their reputations besmirched.
This piece of legislation — and what Congress has done to the fourth amendment—which protects the privacy of ordinary citizens from unreasonable invasion by the government — matters.
Those who defended the telecoms for breaking federal law at the request of the Bush administration kept talking about the telecoms’ subjection to ‘the heavy hand of government.’ This was always spurious argument in the case of the telecoms, who had no more obligation than you or I to comply with an unlawful demand to break the law (none) and the same obligation as you or I would have to refuse to comply. And in fact, not all telecoms chose to go along with the demand.
FISA, on the other hand, unleashes ‘the heavy hand of government’ against ordinary citizens.
Poland’s decision on July 4 to reject Washington’s latest offer to allow the stationing of elements of an anti-missile shield in that country is not only another European slap in the face for President Bush - it has triggered a political flap in Poland, with the opposition charging the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk of taking orders from Moscow. According to Polish Prime Minister Tusk, U.S. security guarantees - especially a lack of permanently-stationed Patriot Missile batteries - render Washington’s offer ‘unsatisfactory.’
For a change, I will refrain from expressing my personal opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the District of Columbia’s ban on hand guns, and I will especially refrain from “characterizing“–glorifying or demonizing– the Supreme Court justices for the way they voted.
On the latter–and as an aside–it has been fascinating to observe the diverging reactions by some to the flurry of decisions rendered by the Court in recent days–some of them on very emotional issues, such as on the death penalty for child rapists, on habeas corpus for enemy combatants, and on gun control. I am referring to the cable and radio talk show hosts and other pundits who one day applaud the Court’s decision as the next best thing since sliced bread, and sanctify the judges, and the next day deplore the decision and vilify the judges as tyrants or “vermin-wearing-black-robes” –sometimes referring to the very same swing judge or judges.
But back to the D.C “gun control” decision. As we know, on Thursday the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun for personal use and overturned the District‘s 32-year old ban on handguns, the strictest gun control law in our country ( And, again, the Court was either glorified or vilified). What struck me about this effort seeking to give D.C. residents the right to keep and bear arms is how little, if any, has been said or written about an even more important right: the right to vote.
Now, I am well aware that the landmark Supreme Court decision, one that ostensibly applies the Second Amendment to residents of the District of Columbia, will have a tremendous effect on gun control laws far beyond the District. It would be nice, however, if the same people, organizations (such as the NRA) and politicians (such as Dick Cheney) who have worked so hard to give District residents the right to keep and bear arms, would work just as zealously to give these same Americans a far more fundamental right: the right to elect a voting representative in Congress..
Setting aside the national ramifications of the gun control issue and ruling, it seems to me that some are of the opinion that D.C residents are sufficiently responsible to own and use firearms, but not responsible or deserving enough to vote for a real representative in Congress.
Entire forests have been pulped to provide the paper for all of the commentaries in the day and a half since the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, but when all is said and done this is what it comes down to:
Justice Antonin Scalia, who in vociferously opposing the majority in the Gitmo detainee decision two weeks ago wrote that it “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” has no such concern when it comes ignoring the literal meaning of the Constitution, let alone the well being of residents of violent inner city neighborhoods.
* * * * *
A few blocks from the Supreme Court, David Addington and John Yoo, the two key players in justifying the use of torture on those detainees and other guests in the Rumsfeld Gulag, cozied up to microphones and did a bad cop-good cop routine that would make Heinrich Himmler blush.
The graceless Yoo showed none of the fire he exhibited in a recent Wall Street Journalop-ed piece justifying his infamous torture memos and copped a poor-pitiful-me attitude in trying to blow smoke up the asses of his questioners by asserting that he was merely a bit player — and a misunderstood one at that. Nobody, of course, believed him.
* * * * *
There is an emerging consensus in the wake of that Supreme Court ruling that Gitmo has to go, but where? John McCain proposes the Army prison at Ft. Leavenworth, but the base commander and Kansas’ two Republican U.S. senators are crying NIMBY.
Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV says the Disciplinary Barracks, as the prison is formally known, would require a major revamping if foreign prisoners were to be brought in. This presumably would not mean having to add running water, a requisite for waterboarding.
* * * * *
The Fourth Branch of the U.S. government is unhappy about President Bush’s conciliatory gestures toward North Korea.
Mr. Fourth Branch answered question after question during an off-the-record sit-down with foreign reporters, but when the subject of the newly de-listed member of the Axis of Evil came up, participants say he froze and stared unsmilingly at his questioner for several long seconds, harrumphed that he was not the one to announce the decision, declared he was done taking questions and left.
* * * * *
Who are those people?
With 75 percent of Americans blaming George Bush for a hydra-headed economic meltdown, including the worst June on Wall Street since the Great Depression, and nearly that many people disapproving of the president’s overall job performance, you have to wonder who the holdouts are.
Why affluent John McCain supporters, of course, while Barack Obama is making substantial inroads among Americans who are struggling to make ends meet.
* * * * *
In a grown-up but no less immature version of a brat sticking his fingers in his ears and humming loudly so he can’t hear bad news, the White House told the Environmental Protection Agency that it would not open an email containing a document concluding that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled. The EPA found that there would be $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 30-plus years if auto emissions were curtailed.
The email remains in cyber-limbo, but the EPA was back this week with a sufficiently watered-down version that offers no conclusion.
* * * * *
Washington is full of boobs, but we’re not talking about politicians here. It’s exposed women’s breasts and even men’s willies, and Robert Hunt is very unhappy over this rampant immodesty.
The Texas rancher was appalled to find so many statues and art work of naked women and men when he visited the nation’s capital and recently proposed that the Texas Republican Party adopt a resolution calling for this filth to be removed from what he termed “our sacred cities.”
Photograph by Jim McMillan/Philadelphia Daily News
In “A Hot Political Trend: Saying Sorry.“ (June 23), U.S. News’ Kenneth Walsh discusses what he perceives to be a trend that “has gone generally unnoticed in the presidential campaign.“ The trend is that of “saying sorry.“
According to Walsh:
Politicians of all stripes are acknowledging mistakes more than ever. They seem to have finally realized that it’s not a cardinal sin to say you’re sorry. In fact, even candidates for president who don’t like to admit goofing up have finally realized that taking responsibility isn’t a bad thing.
To support his point, Walsh recounts recent apologies, or “mea culpas” by such well-known politicians as:
Vice President Cheney’s apology for insulting West Virginians with his incest joke.
Mike Huckabee’s apology to “Mormon Mitt Romney after questioning his religion’s theology in an insulting way.”
Obama’s apology for calling small-town people “bitter.”
John McCain’s apology for voting in 1983 against creating a Martin Luther King Day.
Hillary Clinton’s apologies for “saying, falsely, that she had escaped sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia in 1996 ,“and for “invoking the memory of Robert Kennedy’s assassination to illustrate her point that running for president can be unpredictable.”
There are others.
Walsh concludes by saying,
Maybe the candidates are just getting caught in more gaffes in the 24-hour news cycle. Maybe everyone is more sensitive about everything. Whatever the reason, the pols are taking responsibility for their mistakes. And that’s a good thing.
Now, about that war in Iraq.
Well, if Mr. Walsh‘s publishing deadline had been able to catch up with the following days’ news cycle (or vice-versa), he might have been able to include in his list one of the biggest mea culpas in recent history: “about that war in Iraq.”
We all know now, how President Bush handled questions about the war in Iraq during his recent tour of Europe. In an interview during his trip he said “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric,” “Sometimes my rhetoric was a little—was misunderstood. I mean, I can remember saying, you know, ‘dead or alive,’ which sent … signals that could be easily misinterpreted.”
This is about the closest Bush has come to admitting that he was wrong on anything, or to apologizing about anything. His admission of being almost wrong and his “almost apology” were definitely not about taking our country into an unnecessary and disastrous war, but about the words he used to fan the flames of war.
On second thought, this almost apology could not have been added to Walsh’s list of mea culpas. An almost apology about the rhetoric used to start a war under false pretenses does not count towards: “Now, about that war in Iraq.” For that, Walsh may have to wait a long, long time…
In testimony on Capitol Hill, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan basically painted a portrait of an administration that created its own credibility gap — and a White House response to his testimony further underscored why the gap continues to exist.
Former presidential spokesman Scott McClellan on Friday said President Bush has lost the public’s trust by failing to be open about his administration’s mistakes and backtracking on a promise to tell all about the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
“This White House promised or assured the American people that at some point when this was behind us they would talk publicly about it. And they have refused to,” McClellan told the House Judiciary Committee. “And that’s why I think more than any other reason we are here today and the suspicion still remains.”
The former White House press secretary suggested that Bush could do much to redeem his credibility on the Plame matter and his reasons for going to war in Iraq if he would embrace “openness and candor and then constantly strive to build trust across the aisle.”
That’s as likely right now as General Motors announcing that it has decided to quadruple its production of SUVs. The administration’s modus operandi — which is creating problems for GOP presumptive Presidential nominee as Democrats try mightily to tether him to the most unpopular President in recent American history — is now clear and documented.
The problem was underscored by the administration’s response to McClellan: not addressing the issues and in attack mode:
The White House was dismissive of the event and McClellan himself.
“I think Scott has probably told everyone everything he doesn’t know, so I don’t know if anyone should expect him to say anything new today,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.
U.S. President George W. Bush did not know about a White House effort to leak the identity of a CIA agent but tried to protect staffers who were involved in one of the biggest scandals of his administration, former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told Congress on Friday.
McClellan said he did not think Bush was involved in a 2003 effort to blow the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war.
But Bush, through his chief of staff, ordered McClellan to tell reporters that White House staffers Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby were not behind the leak, even though they both turned out to be involved, McClellan told the House Judiciary Committee.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s involvement in the leak might have been greater, McClellan said.
What’s the upshot of the testimony? (1) He further documented in general terms why the administration has a credibility gap. (2) His sworn testimony paints a picture of an administration that wasn’t honest with the American public because of backtracking at a time when original statements aren’t forgotten due to the Internet, YouTubes, and a non-ending news cycle. (3) The White House response that didn’t address issues raised by McClellan directly but just went after him personally underscored why there is a credibility gap for an administration that believes attack mode rather than explanation mode is the solution for controversies.
In “McCain: Four More Years of Mumbling?” Michael Reagan says, “…a quick look at the amazing progress in present day Iraq accomplished by the president reveals a greatness that offends liberals.”
While I agree with Michael Reagan that we definitely do not want “Four more years of mumbling,” and although I am not a “liberal,” I am offended, but–please–not by President Bush’s “greatness.” In fact let’s take a look at this president’s “greatness,” by examining what greatness is not.
“Greatness” is not taking our nation into a disastrous war based on lies, cooked intelligence, exaggerations and deception.
“Greatness” is not mismanaging such war at the expense of over 4,000 of our finest and bravest
“Greatness” is not Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, torture, waterboarding, black prisons and extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, the end of habeas corpus, kangaroo courts, warrantless NSA wiretapping on Americans…
“Greatness” is not Walter Reed, the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch lies, neglecting our veterans, outing a CIA operative.
“Greatness” is not Katrina, the firing of U.S. Attorneys, the Terry Schivo “case.”
“Greatness” is not, “Osama Bin Laden, where are you?”, “Heckuva job, Brownie,” “We don’t torture,”
“Greatness” is not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Paul Bremer, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith, John Bolton, Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Halliburton, Blackwater…
“Greatness” is not a vast increase in our budget deficit; an increase of over 60 percent in our national debt; attempts to privatize social security; pillaging Medicare, Medicaid, and children’s health care; declaring war on stem cell research, efforts to mitigate global warming, evolution science, abstinence programs; swift boating your political opponents.
“Greatness” is not the failure to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations; the failure to bring a modicum of peace and stability to the Middle East.
“Greatness” is not using signing statements (more than 150 of them) to obey and implement only those parts of the law one likes.
“Greatness” is not corruption, nepotism,cronyism, Dick Cheney’s secretive Energy Task Force, lost White House emails, ignoring subpoenas, stonewalling, subverting justice.
“Greatness” is not Recession, an economy in tatters, mounting fiscal deficits, tax relief only for the wealthy…
“Greatness” is not promising to “restore honor and integrity to the White House,” and doing just the opposite.
“Greatness” is not diminishing the image of and respect for our country abroad
“Greatness” is not, to begin with, getting selected by the Supreme Court with a little bit of help from Katherine Harris and “dimpled chads.”
Sorry, Michael, but this kind of greatness offends not only “liberals,” but every American.
The short list is down to “about twenty current top government officials, former top government officials and former military leaders” as Barack Obama looks for a running mate who would both give him credibility and be qualified to succeed him.
There is Hillary Clinton, of course, but name recognition of those being considered runs all the way down to the retired former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Gen. James Jones, who meets the first qualification but would be a little shaky on the second.
There are governors, of course–Tim Kaine of Virginia, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, although one of them, Ted Strickland has ruled himself out with a Shermanesque declaration.
Among former rivals for the nomination, John Edwards has professed no interest, leaving Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich–and Joe Biden.
The esteemed E. J. Dionne Jr. has made his choice known in the Washington Post: Biden “should be at the top of any list of vice presidential picks for Obama…Few Democrats know more about foreign policy, and few would so relish the fight against McCain on international affairs. Few are better placed to argue that withdrawal from Iraq will strengthen rather than weaken the United States.”
That may be more of an argument for Biden as Secretary of State than VP, for which there are countless contenders–Jim Webb, Evan Bayh, Mark Warner, Tom Daschle, Sam Nunn and on and on.
Obama’s vetting committee has a lot of work to do, but they may be inspired by recalling how less effort in going through the process produced Dick Cheney.
The airwaves, the print pages and the blogosphere–including my favorite site, TMV–have been full of news, commentary and opinion on continuing developments in the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton drama. Not that these events are unimportant, but there has been some other important news. For example, yesterday the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its “little“ 171-page “Report on Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq.”
According to the New York Times, “the report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it represented the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.”
I found the words and phrases that the various newspapers used to describe the Bush administration’s “use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence” quite interesting: “misled,” “overstated,” “exaggerated,” “false claims,” “false pretenses,” “fundamentally misleading,” “withholds vital information,” “repeatedly exaggerated evidence,” “ignored dissenting views,” “contradicted available intelligence,” “not giving a full and honest account.”
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va), chairman of the intelligence panel put several of these scattered words and phrases together into a more meaningful, and damning, statement: “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed…Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”
As I said, the words and phrases used to describe the Bush administration’s actions are “interesting.” But what I find even more interesting and telling is that most of us are still reluctant to use the noun “lies” (plural) or the verb “to lie” to describe such questionable conduct.
The New York Times came close to it and at the same time avoided the issue entirely when saying, “We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq.”
I must assume that we are still intimidated by Cheney’s gravitas and still hoodwinked by Bush’s flimflam.
To read a Press Release on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “Report on Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq” , go here
Behind the media popcorn of Scott McClellan’s revelations, relatively unnoticed is a new book by the former American commander in Iraq that should be red meat for historians.
This week’s Time has an excerpt from “Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story” by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez that nails his Pentagon boss Don Rumsfeld, along with the rest of the Bush Administration, for “gross incompetence and dereliction of duty” at the start of the unfolding disaster.
This is no out-of-the-loop flunky’s account of what happened, but the testimony of the man in the middle of it all, one of the generals whose advice Bush maintained he would follow but obviously did not.
(Via Memeorandum.) A report from ThinkProgress indicates that Congressman Henry Waxman (D - Calif 110) in his position as chairman of the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has issued a letter to Atty. General Mukasey requesting that he turn over transcripts of interviews conducted by the FBI with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. The interviews were conducted as part of the investigation regarding Scooter Libby and and Valerie Plame.
New revelations by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan raise additional questions about the actions of the President and the Vice President. Mr. McClellan has stated that “[t]he President and Vice President directed me to go out there and exonerate Scooter Libby.” He has also asserted that “the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.” It would be a major breach of trust if the Vice President personally directed Mr. McClellan to mislead the public.
At this late stage, it’s rather hard to tell how much of this is a new, valid line of investigation into the Plame case or how much might be political theater in a very high profile election year. Further, given the lack of luck most Democrats have enjoyed in getting the White House to release anything they don’t want to, the productivity of such a move is in question. In any event, we’ll stay on top of this story, as the White House response (in whatever form it takes) is likely to be more informative than the ongoing investigation.
Global op-ed and editorial reaction to major events in the United States usually takes a day or two - as is the case of Scott McClellan’s explosive look inside the Bush White House and it’s decision-making process.
“IT SEEMS that the outside world is less surprised than the White House about former Bush aide Scott McClellan’s coming clean, after suffering what appears to have been an uneasy conscience. … The former White House Spokesman’s book has greatly fueled suspicions shared by much of the world. … However strongly Bush & Co react, McClellan is likely to have the last laugh, not least because the increasing controversy will translate into more sales for his book. Since the international press is already out with hammer and tong for another go at the Bush lobby, he will come out the stronger.”
EDITORIAL
May 30, 2008
United Arab Emirates - Khaleej Times Original Article - English
IT SEEMS that the outside world is less surprised than the White House about former Bush aide Scott McClellan’s coming clean, after suffering what appears to have been an uneasy conscience. Though a good number of neocon-insiders have abandoned Bush’s ship of state over the long years of the war on terror, McClellan is unique. The former White House Spokesman’s book has greatly fueled suspicions shared by much of the world. From one who has been so close to the president since his days as the governor of Texas, charges that the Bush team deliberately formulated a false propaganda campaign to unleash an unjust war responsible for unprecedented misery is nothing short of damning.
Yet the White House has still has much to play with in its own defense. The simplest counter-argument is McClellan’s sudden change of heart - pointing to his often stubborn defense of Bush’s policies when he was drumming the official line. Even those who have given up the ill-fated neoconservative campaign have understandably sided with the White House, questioning McClellan’s past unflinching support and failure to come out into the open earlier.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing foreign pres coverage of the controversy surrounding Scott McClelland and his new book.
When he was the Bush White House’s press secretary, Scott McClellan took a lot heat and some analysts thought he showed every single sweat gland of it. Next week McClellan has a new memoir coming out, and according to reports President George Bush and the White House might begin sweating a bit — because they’re going to have to go into full damage/discredit control on this one: it is reportedly scathing.
According to the Politico, the book “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” will add to growing archive of published information on the Bush administration’s credibility gap — and how it starts at the top. The Politico reports:
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.
Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):
• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
May 14th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Today John Edwards is endorsing former competitor Barack Obama…
It is a late endorsement, given when the horses are already in the home stretch, and one horse is the stronger runner long distance, but the other horse has more than a neck and neck lead, and also appears to be running on the inside track next to the rail.
Clinton won over Obama by more than 2 votes to 1 in West Virginia. And it is said that so-called “white, working-class voters” also supported Edwards before he dropped out of the nomination race.
Edwards’ endorsement could be seen as an effort to bolster that group and to perhaps draw them to Obama now.
Senator Edwards, dropped out of the nomination race after three months of hoofs to the track hard running.
The AP reports:(writers Nedra Pickler and Stephen Ohlemacher in Washington, Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, N.C., contributed…)
A person close to Edwards, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he [Edwards] wanted to get involved now to begin unifying the party. Obama also signed on to Edwards’ anti-poverty initiative, which he launched Tuesday with the goal of reducing poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.
David “Mudcat” Saunders, a chief adviser for Edwards on rural affairs during his presidential campaign, said the timing of the endorsement couldn’t be better given Obama’s resounding loss in West Virginia on Tuesday.
“For Barack Obama, I think he ought to kiss Johnny Edwards on the lips to kill this 41-point loss,” he added. “The story is not going to be the 41-point loss. It’s going to be Edwards’ endorsement.”
Maybe.
But there are other overt and covert considerations to evaluate… even though most of the big news media has decided today to frame this news as being about Obama only, rather than seeing that it may also massively stimulate his opponent to more determined than ever. Among those considerations to weigh might be these: Read the rest of this entry »
Nevertheless, there has not been a satisfactory answer to the question of why in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the vice president and his cronies did not want to work within existing laws and systems with Congress and the courts, stubbornly objected to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and created an American gulag and rump court system that ignored constitutionally mandated niceties like habeas corpus.
