Dick Still Complaining that His Beloved Firewall Didn't Get Pardoned
Apparently, Dick Cheney doesn’t believe the little scold he sent Bush through Michael Isikoff the other day was sufficiently shrill. He’s out again today, explicitly criticizing Bush for not pardoning his little Scooter.
George Bush should have pardoned I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney said after stepping down as vice president this week.
"He was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision," Cheney told Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard, a leading conservative Washington magazine.
[snip]
Hayes said that Cheney had publicly disagreed with Bush only four times in the eight years of the Bush administration.
They were only out of office for a day before the fifth disagreement surfaced.
I wonder whether Cheney is worried that his firewall might not hold tight as Libby faces the rest of his life as a felon? Or perhaps Dick is just aghast that Bush–who after all asked Libby to stick his neck in a meat grinder–didn’t return the favor by sacrificing a little of his scarce posterity to thank Libby for his work protecting Bush?
In any case, I do hope Cheney’s mood about Bush remains contentious and sour. There is little I’d like more than to see Bush and Cheney take each other out during their retirement.
There is part of me that thinks that Bush took sort of the same position on pardons that many elementary school teachers used to do about chewing gum in class: “I can only let you do it if you have gum for everyone.” What I’d love to see is Cheney crawling to Obama to ask HIM to pardon Libby. Now wouldn’t THAT be something?
Would Obama even consider such a move? That would seem to be a suicide mission.
W.O. Can the appropriate congress members ask to see the Cheney Bush interviews with the F.B.I.?
Sure, that would be Chairman Ed. Townes of the House Oversight Committee (since Waxman moved up to Energy and Commerce) and/or Conyers of the Judiciary Commmittee. The deal is that those documents belong to the DOJ (they are FBI reports, after all). It’ll be hard to pry them loose until Obama gets an AG confirmed.
I know why Libby didn’t get pardoned. Among the OLC memos released recently is this one. On June 1, 2005, the Pardon Attorney asked if a presidential pardon expunged judicial and executive branch records:
On August 11, 2006, the OLC said no. The only discussion I’ve seen is at the Legal Times blog. Several things are interesting about this. For one, it took a long time to answer a very straightforward question. As the Legal Times blog mentioned, the timing vis a vis the Libby case is suggestive. I think Bush wanted to pardon Libby and destroy the records of his and Cheney’s interviews with the FBI. Since that wouldn’t work, Libby only got his commutation.
Its definitely all about protecting those two FBI interviews.
The problem of course being that a pardon would directly contradict what he said in those interviews. Otherwise there would have been a pardon. And Waas’s recent report was a shot across the bow to stop the pardon. What would be interesting to know is the internal mechinations attending the pardon application. I bet it all died right after Waas published.
WAG, as usual…
Bush is in Texas.
Texas has lots of quail.
Dick likes quail….
BTW Obama just revoked the Executive Order on Presidential and Vice-Presidential Records. Key sentence at the bottom.
Obama lifts Bushs veil of secrecy on presidential Records
That makes you wonder if quite a few members of the Bush-Cheney regime are trembling right now.
The graphic has now been added to the main post.
Kinda looks like Boehner.
Talk about a bad hair day. Looks like Eddie from the Munsters
Give that graphic artist a cigar…
Are folks at FDL convinced that Bush was totally aware of the plans to out Plame? Could there be a slight possibility that at that level it is only Cheney’s fingerprints that Fitz found there. (besides those of Rove, Libby, etc) Fitz did not say that there were “clouds” over the Presidents office.
Sounds like Cheney is concerned that those “clouds” over his office could be cleared up.
nope, sorry faulty logic
dead eye dick’s fingerprints are the fingerprints of george w bush
what part of “Commander in Chief” do you not understand
in fact, if george DIDN’T know, he carries more guilt
george had a positive requirement to since he was the commander in chief
and george is cupable for knowing AND for NOT KNOWING
george doesn’t get a pass just cuz he’s too stupid to know anything
hear the “Commander in Chief” argument..but how can a “commander in chief” know everything that is going on? Especially with a sly guy like Cheney around. I understand they still have to accept responsibility. Not GW’s MO for sure
In the end, I am very, very disappointed in the Bush pardons. There was certainly a lot of worry about preemptive pardons, the Scooter pardon, the Stevens pardon, the Dukestir pardon, etc., but alas, there seems to have been uncharacteristic restraint.
Why, do you suppose?
To burnish his already rancid legacy. One of the things that the GOPers go off the rails over is the Clinton pardons. Bush can point to the paucity and say at least I didn’t do that.
It is also an indication of how selfish Bush is too.
-G
Maintains the ability to hide behind 5th Amendment right to silence and he was worried about his legacy (bunch of pardons would have been an admission of criminality).
So if a lack of a pardon is a legal strategy to keep Libby from talking, by allowing him to plead the 5th, is Cheney’s criticism of no Libby pardon just posturing for a media narrative?
Just the thought of this household too.
It is not as though LIbby is going to go poor for as long as the bush/cheney cabal allows him to remain among the living.
I continue to believe that this really wasn’t a factor. Libby is in no danger of being compelled to testify to anything. He can just “not recall” anything incriminating. And his potential testimony would pose no danger to Bush. Libby is, after all, a convicted perjurer. Even if his testimony is corroborated by Dick “I-shot-an-old-man-in-the-face” Cheney, they would both have to admit to multiple lies in order to implicate Bush, and that’s reasonable doubt right there. Think about it: You’d have Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby saying that Bush ordered the whole operation, and you’d have George W Bush saying, “Aw, shucks. I’m way to incurious and stupid to come up with a scheme like that!” Who would you believe?
The question was about pardons in general, not Libby specifically.
Pardons would have been a tacit admission of mistakes or self-doubts and Bush couldn’t have that. Besides the famed Bush loyalty was all was a one-way street. Btw, I don’t think you saw my comment in reply to your description of Obama’s Presidential records order:
wo,
thanks for the compliment. I did make it up; but it is a cheater’s knowledge of the language. I had just watched an excerpt of Obama signing a statement and saying “I am a lefty, get used to it.” and professionally I work with a lot of left-handed compounds, s-enantiomers, so sinister.
i was an opportunistic poet, in the right place at the right time.
Thanks ew.
digg
cheney I believe does not know what he’s getting into, fighting bush is also fighting rove and we all know rove is ruthless
I need to buy stock in popcorn
The fact that he got clemency doesn’t mean that he can’t be disappeared into military detention for depraved, but unBearable, treatment though, right?
Leading to the OT – Obama wanting to get a review on the al-Marri case (the other military detention case from Comey’s watch as USA in SDNY), al-Marri’s lawyer wanting to head on to the Sup Ct without a lot of delay.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200….._combatant
How likely would it be for the Obama DOJ to pull the same thing that the Bush DOJ (let’s face it, it is and will be the Bush DOJ for years and years – it has no soul that hasn’t been sold to be remade into anything else) did with Padilla?
Maybe REAL likely. And whatever happend to the Thiessen report:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..99_pf.html
as a jumping off point?
Now that all the stories of torture and coercion are coming out, like the way Khadr was used to magically finger Arar (don’t you think that was likely the super duper secret info that Gonzales went trip trotting off to show the Canadian Ministry after the Arar report came out, only to be laughed at?) —
in any event, it makes you wonder what kind of techniques were used to put together the new and improved identification of al-Marri as a terrorist. He may well be, but lord – what have they done?
Would it be an altogether bad thing for Obama to authorize Fitzgerald to offer a pardon for flipping on Cheney?
Blair to Levin:
Apparently it’s not torture if someone is “act[ing] within their duties”
http://washingtonindependent.c…..orture-wtf
Nuremembering where I’ve heard that argument before.
I’m guessing if their duties include innocent people, family members, and children, ohsy wellsy.
He’s just trying not to piss off his soon-to-be underlings. We should treat his bumbling with all the scorn it so richly deserves, but remember it doesn’t mean much. Obama is the one calling the shots. He’s done the right thing so far, but we need to keep the pressure on. The executive orders he’s signed so far are compatible with, but stop just short of requiring, a repudiation of the Bush/Cheney torture regime. A little ambiguity is tolerable at this stage of the game, but the torturers are hoping we think the game is won and will turn our backs. We can’t let that happen.
I am not buying that for one minute
any judge can grant immunity, congress can and prosecuters can request it
cheney will still be able to invoke executive priviledge regardless
nope, me thinks this IS a slap in the face of cheney and libby
It seems to be me that Cheney has been marginalized (I suspect by Fellding) for some time. The corporate strategy depends on a level of plausible deniability for the executive. And add to this George was a master at incuriousity. I think the relationship has been chilly for a while.
21 – I understand your point, but I guess I’ve gone beyond really thinking there is much that Obama will truly do, other than airbrushing, other than “look forward” Every time someone says, “it’s ok, bc *they* thought they were following orders” again, but this time it is the “change” crew saying it, it just drives one more nail in America’s coffin.
The struggle now isn’t for Iraqi hearts and minds, it’s for discovering whether America’s soul can be salvaged.
Every time Obama’s leadership crew says, “good men” in their description of torturers, more of America dies.
With all this transition and news, it’s like whack-a-mole on the case by case issues. It’s gotten to where I have a hard time even caring about the frenetic efforts to whack the next one.
Instead, I’m just waiting for America’s leader to do the one thing he hasn’t shown any inclination to do, and that his crew hasn’t shown any inclinationt to do either, but IMO it’s the one thing that’s necessary for America. Even now, if it comes, it may just be too little too late.
That one things is to allocute for the country.
To stand up and say publically that in our response to 9/11, we swept up a lot of innocent people and treated them with depravity, treated them to torture, and we made some of our soldiers and our intelligence agents into something horrible – torturers of innocent people.
And America is sorry.
“it’s for discovering whether America’s soul can be salvaged”
For me this statement brings up a conversation I had with two students (Micheal and Simon)who are from France and are presently studying at Harvard. Standing outside of Union Station with one of Code Pink’s “We can can end the war” sign. One was working on his Masters in Economics the other International Studies.
Anyway as we discussed the war in Iraq, Afghanistan etc both Micheal and Simon expressed concern that Americans had not protested the invasion. I let them know that millions had marched, protested, lobbied against the invasion in the fall of 2002, and early 2003. We discussed how the MSM had not given this much air time.
They claimed that in France if the people had found out that they had been lied to by their leaders that folks would still be out in mass protesting against their leaders. They also said thought a French leader would have resigned having been caught lying about WMDs. They both shared that the people in France are so excited about the American people electing Obama
We agreed that what really concerned all of us was the lack of concern that most Americans and the MSM seem to have about the deaths and injuries of the Iraqi and Afghani people and the 5 million Iraq refugees.
How do we get our soul back while rolling over the bones and blood of the unnecessary and immoral deaths of all of these people?
The Iraq war was surely wrong, but are you saying that our attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was unjustified?
without the followup support that george bush squandered in Iraq
judged as george bush did it ???
YES, THE INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN WAS UNJUSTIFIED
unless you DO THE RIGHT THING, you ain’t got no justification
george FUCKED AFGHANISTAN UP
no debate about that …
Yes, W effed up Afghanistan. But not by invading it. He effed it up by taking our military into Iraq, instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan using a larger force.
The invasion of Afghanistan was justified.
Right on! Sadly, however, I think it’s too late to unfuck it, at least militarily. If Obama follows through with his announced plans to pour more resources into that morass it will likely be a reprise of the Soviet quagmire in the 1980s and the US experience in Vietnam. It would be far better to do something along the lines that William Lind suggests, but from what he’s said and the lack of visible Fourth Generation War chops among the people on the national security team he’s put in place I’m not optimistic. From the link:
Acknowledging that the Taliban, with their repulsive policies and all, is the only entity in a position to rule that unfortunate land may be hard to accept. However the alternative will likely be another quagmire and the resultant collapse of Obama’s political support.
This was the conclusion of both Haroon and his father. That the only way to deal with the less radical members of the Taliban was to ask them to pull a chair up to the negotiating table. Be inclusive and sensitive to their concerns…especially about the pace of information coming into Afghanistan.
our invasion and occupation of afghanistan was in many ways an attack on al quaeda as much as the israeli attack on gaza was an attack on hamas. ie stupid and wrong.
to be fair, there are people i respect a great deal who do not agree. but for myself, with time i’ve become more and more convinced that what we did in afghanistan was in every way very wrong.
Not that I want to credit the Bush administration overmuch, but it looked like we were hitting back at people who were engaged in a war with us. What am I missing?
tell me how many innocent afghanis we killed either directly or indirectly. tell me about the cluster bombs. tell me about the depleted uranium. tell me about the brutal warlords we put in power. tell me about mass graves and torture.
if you can’t tell me about these all these things and more…. well, imo, that’s what you are missing.
I’m neither asking the conduct of the war nor I’m I delusional enough to defend it, I was and am still asking if we were justified in invading. I thought that Leen was implying that we were not and asked if my understanding of her position was correct.
i am not answering for leen – only myself because i think this is an important topic and one i would like to discuss now that perhaps it could be returned to with some perspective and time.
mary makes an important distinction. al qaeda does not equal afghanistan. imo, we had a right to go after al qaeda (after pursuing extradiction if that was not successful) but not afghanistan.
I think we asked the Afghanis to turn over OBL in order to avoid our coming in. This was pretty much not expected to happen, as the Taliban ( who might or might not have been the Afghani gov’t), was entwined with OBL’s fighters.
Given that we had to go in to get Al Qaeda, and being in agreement with Mary that we should have done it and gotten right out, are we in disagreement?
imo we had a moral and legal obligation to attempt extradition. i’m not saying the taliban would have agreed i think likely not), but we don’t know because we didn’t try. the taliban did agree if to send obl (and possibly others) to third country for fair trial if we would provide evidence to support our claim (again not saying they would have followed through). iirc powell made a speech where he said that the usa would be making our case to the world by producing evidence. then… the decision was taken to go to war and nothing more was said.
if the taliban had refused our legal demand for extradition (which means we actually produce some honest evidence), then i do think we were not only justified, but obligated, in going after the people responsible – including the use of military force if necessary. but not any military force. never were cluster bombs justified, never depleted uranium, never blocking a short cease fire so that the annual polio vaccination could proceed as usual. never torture, never covering up mass murders.
in other words, the only acceptable use of military force for us in afghanistan is the one that if others used in our country we would agree is justified.
we argue here all the time about what the law is or should be. but we seem to be pretty agreed that whatever the law is it should apply equally to all – that there isn’t one set of rules for the powerful and other for the weak. shouldn’t that also apply in the case of international law? or do we think differently when it is our side that is powerful?
Hello again. Sorry not to answer sooner. At the time, I thought that the Taliban’s request for proof and offer to send OBL somewhere else were not sincere.
I think that if they really didn’t know OBL to be complicit, all they had to do was ask him. I remember waiting for them to say that they had and that he denied so being. I din’t think they ever did.
i did too.
but i’m no expert and have to rely on reports from others – many of whom i don’t trust. in any event, i don’t think we have the right to start killing innocent kids without trying the rule of law approach. that’s what i would want done if it was my country.
I’m in favor of law also. I think there are some difficulties in the practical appreciation of the rule of law in international relations in general (i.e. even-handed enforcement, procedures), and most particularly in how we could have found commonly-held laws in dealing with the Taliban.
My friend Haroon (who studied here in the states on a Fulbright and is now back in Afghanistan) said that the government of Afghanistan asked for solid evidence that OBL was directly involved with 9/11. No solid, verifiable evidence has ever been sent or received.
The whole time Haroon was in the states (I believe o5-08) most of the communication from his family was questioning the lack of effort to keep the Taliban on the run which was happenning for the firts year after our invasion of Afghanistan. Haroon’s father a retired Brigadier General who had fought against the Russians when they invaded kept asking Haroon “is the Bush administration trying to lose in Afghanistan” Some discussion of the big money (military, black market, U.S.) interest involved in opium trade.
i know because it was reported at the time. and promptly went down the memory hole.
Especially after the Bush administration took their eyes off the Taliban one year after the invasion of that country. Can’t remember the exact figures but I know a year ago the US had spent in Afghanistan in seven years what we spend in Iraq in one month. You know the saying “put your money where your mouth is” was.
Haroon and many others keep saying spend the money on infrastruture, roads water, electric, medial facilities replanting pomegrante, apricot, grape, almond orchards while subsidizing poppy growers while they do the switch and orchards are growing. (Russians wiped out many orchards, you know the way the Israeli settlers wipe out Palestinian olive trees, and we wiped out the Buffalo) Also pushing hard to find legal and medical outlets for legal poppy growing.
It was more like two months. In December, 2001, Bushco refused the request of the local commander on the ground for a Ranger battalion to close off the escape routes into Pakistan from the Tora Bora area where bin Laden and his entourage were surrounded. So we had to rely on Afghan and Paki units that were probably infiltrated by sympathizers, and in any case let the group slip through.
Also, in February, 2002, then-Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Bob Graham met with Gen. Franks at his Tampa HQ and was told the following:
I repeat what Haroon had shared with me (he was in Afghanistan at that point). He and his father said the US had the Taliban one the run for around a year. That the U.S’s efforts waned after the invasion of Iraq
I hope this gets more light … there have been allegations that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan because that Gov’t went back on its promise to give Western interests control of its massive energy reserves.
We seem to be in violent agreement. BTW, former CIA agent Bob Baer, in his book The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, strongly advocates for a rapprochement with Iran because, among other reasons the Persians have a strong national interest in constraining the Taliban.
See Mary’s remark @ 43
Having read further, I now think my remark @ 89 was premature. On another topic at this blog today there were a number of new voices raising taunts, the result was a long and sometimes ugly discussion. I surmised your question about the justification of the Afgan invasion to be more of the same. Apparantly I mis-surmised.
Right after 9/11, I had a discussion with a neighbor who asked what I thought of the talk of an invasion. I said that it seemed to me this called for a police-type response against a band of international criminal terrorists. What we needed was a James Bond character to be told that Clarke and the CIA had concluded this attack came from the al Queda network having training camps in Afganistan. He should take a cadre of assistants, find Bin Laden and remove him. If the assault required a couple hundred or even a thousand paratroopers, he should use them.
At the same time as the attack, a message (or diplomat) should convey to the Taliban that US forces were entering Afgan territory for the stated purpose. As long as the Taliban did not interfere, they would not be harmed. If they chose to hinder our efforts, they would be treated as accomplices.
Today I have little doubt that this could have been accomplished, and since it was done another way, I can only conclude it was done for other reasons, including the theory that control of the territory was desired for a gas pipeline to the Indian Ocean.
So, unjustified? Depends, doesn’t it?
Thanks for the second look. If only we all….
Strangely enough,I’m not trying to jerk everyone around.
I think we sent the Taliban a message that we wanted them to turn over OBL (and possibly others) some days before we attacked. Further , I think we included a promise that if they did so, no invasion would be forthcoming.
I’m also certain that we didn’t expect them to comply.
For some reason, everyone here thinks that I, despite my denials, support the ungodly mess that followed our invasion.
I see you still seem bruised by your reception. Again I say that its been along and temptuous day, tempers are for some reason short. If you have the time and the stomach, look at the Russel Tice article that came out this morning. There are 287 comments, including some new voices which seem to have a post-election sour grapes orientation that simply seem to want to vent on petty things not related to the topic at hand. Such crap as rude remaks about you libruls, Democrats, and one person actually called another a paranoid schizophrenic. You probably just picked a bad day to jump in.
Nah. Not bruised. Just wondering if my writing skills are so damn poor that instead of communicating, I’m just drooling onto the keyboard.
Thx.
Naw, I am in charge of the drooling here. You’re doing fine. The regulars here are all strong in opinions, knowledge and fortitude. They all also take the push and shove of discussion a lot easier with the other regulars because, well, we know each other. And it is pretty easy to fit in once you get used to it. As RHGreen said, don’t let the fact that a few uninvited lunkheads had to be addressed earlier bother you; they don’t show up that often. Heh, one of em won’t be returning at all. So we got that going for us.
Big thx
tell yer troll hunter that he sucks …
wait, scratch that
he’s doing a GREAT job
(wink)
and on-topic (I do that once in a while) I just get visions of george and dick sitting next to each other in a cell, and dick saying “I told you to pardon scooter, asshole”
The house troll keeper/hunter is doing superb work. Did have to cull and dispatch one from your herd of prey today. Jus to make yer quest easier of course….
I thought I was the one doing that.
It would contribute to the discussion if you hammered out the facts here by going over the contemporaneous news stories. I, too, vaguely recall an ulimatum, but “vague” is the key word here, and I shudder to recall the fog I was in, and how defenseless I still was in 2001 against concerted propaganda.
Your statement that “I’m also certain that we didn’t expect them to comply” suggests to me that you should question whether the previous administration were acting in good faith from the start. By analogy, that adminstration didn’t expect Iraq to comply with our demands for intrusive inspections…but Iraq did comply, to the discomfiture of the adminstration, who were caught out in their conspiracy to start a war.
You know, I was implying, and for you, I will flat out say it, at the time that we issued the ultimatum to the Taliban, there was a definite shortage of “good faith”.
If you want me to recall what was contemporary to that, I seem to recall that the mood of the entire nation was less than good.
I agree with that reading of the invasion. While Afghanistan was not as central a target as Iraq (and probably not at all in the stewing minds of the PNACers), it’s still true that Central Asia was and is of interest to lots of evil power-brokers, including Cheney, for a number of reasons, and in their ignorant arrogance, they believed it would be easy to take that li’l country fast and move on to Iraq. That’s why they never negotiated seriously with the Taliban, imho.
Even in the thick of things in Iraq, we would hear snippets about visits to Uzbekistan or one of the other Stans by Cheney or Rice. Resources, security of transportation lines, and regional hegemony — in this case a renewed contest with Russia — those ambitions never went away.
I also think that Cheney more or less traded control of al-Qaeda and the Taliban off in his private dealings with Musharraf. Cheney was more and more focused on Iran, and he wanted security for U.S. special forces along the Pakistan-Iran border, which was already a tall order for Musharraf. (Just ask the Baluchis.) For that, he winked at Musharraf’s failures in the tribal areas. That was what they were doing in all those private meetings they had, the ones where, we were told, Cheney lectured Musharraf severely. Horsefeathers.
The sentimental lies North Americans have been told about why we are in Afghanistan make me ill. And they’re still telling them: Laura Bush says she’s going to invite some of those lucky Afghan women who are free to read now for a visit at the ranch. Spare us. When was Laura ever in touch with RAWA?
It’s time to negotiate with the Taliban. It’s their country, and Western narcissism is mucking it up, not helping at all.
Agreed.
We can never “win” wars.
When I hear that fucking word my head explodes.
I’m predicating that when we withdraw troops from Iraq, and our occupation ends, the country will sink into intercine conflict, and Bush’s so called
experiment with democracy will fail.
I’ll bet my Red Sox tickets on it.
now quite true, we can win a war, what we can’t win is an occupation
we can win a war if we are indeed liberating a people from a dictator they do not want, we can then occupy their land just so long as they see us as benevolent and want us there
however the very second they do not want us there, that occupation cannot possibly be won
when faced with an unwanted occupation there are 4 choices;
1) you lose
2) you negotiate a piece and leave
3) you anialate them
4) you continue till you are out of resouces at which time see number 1
I see your point.
The first Gulf War was a success, I guess.
IMHO, we could never win the war in Nam cuz we couldn’t find our enemy.
Same true of this crazy terrorist environment.
I come from the Father Berrigan/Thomas Merton business school of thought, so I can NEVER see any fucking good with wars.
It wasn’t that we couldn’t find the enemy so much as the fact that we never understood that to the Vietnamese it was a war of colonial liberation, not one of Communist containment. We were intervening on the side of the colonial collaborators, as exemplified by the fact that the South Vietnamese leadership was predominantly Roman Catholic in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country. The only reason there still was a South Vietnam in the early 1960s was that the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, at the behest of the USA, refused to participate in the unifying elections that were called for in the Geneva accords (that Diem never signed) that ended the French phase of the Vietnames War of Liberation. He and we knew that the Viet Minh regime in the North would win handily.
Thanks. I tend to oversimplify.
I get really hung up on the word “win”
Win, what?
guess again
the first gulf war was the results of george herbert walker bush’s MAJOR DIPLOMATIC FUCKUP in July of 1990
when Saddam first mentioned invading Kuwait in July of 1990, george herbert walker bush told saddam “go ahead, we don’t care”
then george herbert walker bush realized what the fuck he just did, and changed his tune
the whole history of saddam husein is a tale of failed repuglitard foreign policy
ronnie raygun and donald dumsfeld created saddam, ignored saddam when he nearly sank a US Warship, ignored saddam when he gassed the Kurds and the Iranians, and ignored saddam as he prepared to invade kuwait
saddam Husein was a textbook example of “planting weeds so we can pick them later”
the first gulf war wasn’t a success, it was a partial coverup of a major repuglitard failure
had to be said …
Glad you said it…
I count beans and manage a “fantasy baseball” team for a living
Appreciate your comments
What are you up to on the bean count?
“success” is in the eye of the beholder. We were not doing Iraqi body counts then or now. I watched the MSM closely for a week after Daddy Bush pushed Saddam back and there was not one mention of one Iraqi soldeir or person dying. I finally called the Iraqi embassy,(closed) then the UN then the Red Cross at that time since there was not a mention of an Iraqi death. At that point there were reports that some 30,ooo had been killed. Later I heard around 70,000 Not a mention of one of these deaths in our MSM.
Even this statement is not quite true; I think it’s safe to say we won the occupations of Germany and Japan in the wake of World War II. However the conditions that enabled those successes don’t begin to pertain to Afghanistan and Iraq.
I second your agreement, which is why it frustrates me to no end to hear an Obama or a Kerry intoning that we have to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. There was a job to do in October 2001, it wasn’t done, and there’s no do-over. If there’s a “job” now, it hasn’t been explained.
At this point, exposing our military to attrition there makes no sense to me. In fact, I can only see it as overtly hostile to Pakistan, who consider their “strategic depth” in Afghanistan an imperative. Does anyone have a grasp of this here?
The capture and trial of Bin Laden might still be on the agenda…as for other policies in play with regard to Pakistan you might want to consider this: The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski
You do a more succinct job of expressing exactly the point I was trying to make upstream at #60. Not only is the job unexplained, but whatever it is it’s almost certainly undoable militarily at any cost commensurate with our best interests.
So far as I can tell, the only thing we lost in Vietnam was “bragging rights,” and that left a generation of American warriors feeling horribly betrayed, e.g., John McCain.
that, and 59,000 of the best and brightest of America’s youth
There was a job to do after the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan. We should have been pouring money for infrastructure in Afghanistan years ago.
I hope he’s edging that way. After all, in his inaugural speech, he rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”. That may not be an allocution, but it’s pretty stiff criticism for an inaugural. Unwinding the torture infrastructure is not easy. Cheney’s minions spent 8 years weaving it into the fabric of our government. If Obama wants to clean the Augean stables, he’s going to need the help of some folks who should have done more to stop the madness when they could. He may be allowing those folks a little time to find their spines. In any event, we have to do the right thing, whether he does or not. If he moves in the right direction, we should applaud. If not, we should heckle. An allocution can only come after the public at large understands what you and I already know. The U.S. government was involved in a sadistic human trafficking scheme devised for the purposes of generating propaganda and false confessions. Instead of keeping us safe, they were manufacturing hatred and anti-Americanism.
Hercules cleaned the stables in a day. I am not saying there is a comparison but it can be done.
Mary, admission is okay, but being and saying America is sorry is not near enough.
You’ve put my hopes into words. I was hoping for this in the Inauguration speech. I’m still hoping it will be said, somewhere, sometime.
In a way, I think some of the actions we’ve seen so far and some to come will speak loudly. But we still need “the allocution” as you called it.
27 – no, it’s not enough. But without admission, allocution, the orders and legal maneuvering here and there won’t really impact the country.
For the country (not for it’s victims, which need more and other)we won’t find the way out, the right tracks, unless there is something like a Presidential address where it is acknowledged. It’s not just a handful of people who still believe that everyone at GITMO was a terrorist – – its a huge number who believe that. In large part, bc the top officials of this nation have said it over and over without correction for years, and without any real response in our media other and some random stories now and then.
The country is an addict that isn’t admitting the problem and never will, while Blair talks about the good men doing their job and Obama talks about looking forward.
I agree. Thanks for your many informative comments.
That’s what Archbishop Tutu suggessted. America should say “we’re sorry”
really sincerely sorry.
I am terribly ashamed of my country and what has been done in our name
but how can a “commander in chief” know everything that is going on?
this was considered an Nuremberg
it was weighted against a commander in chief who would choose “Not To Know”
since “I didn’t Know” was a copout defense, the “I didn’t know” defense was ruled to be an admission of guily
george can argue with the Nuremberg Rulings, but he can’t get away from the fact that he has to repudiate the accomplishments of “The Greatest Generation” to even claim a defense
and uh, arguing against the Nuremberg rulings ???
no doubt which side your on there
history ain’t on that side
When I read the initial comment on this subject @ 8, I thought the question was about factual ignorance, not about responsibility, or an excuse for dodging responsibility. It seems that a case could be made that Bush was kept in ignorance of many of the details, only being “read in” as authorizations were needed. Not likely, I think, but possible.
what are you missing ???
world history from December of 2001 to the present
did ya notice what happened AFTER it looked like we were hitting back at people ???
I don’t think the Germans evaluate WW II by judging the success of the first few months
ya gotta include the whole story
most Germans figure they lost WW II, despite the early successes in Poland
sorry to be so snarky and disrespectful, but really, get a clue …
36 I pretty much agree, except I think “the other way around” on this An allocution can only come after the public at large understands what you and I already know.
I don’t think that the public at large will ever understand without an allocution, from the highest levels, covered in a format like a Presidential address and that leaves the MSM without wiggleroom or ability to ignore it. But I don’t see that happening.
I am supportive of things that are being done better. I’m just not that highly partisan and can make pro and con cases on lots of things on social, economic and even foreign policy fronts – they just don’t motivate me that much. What does motivate me is what motivated me on 9/11 as well, cruel depraved egomaniacal monsters visiting horrible things on innocent people. And all I keep hearing from Obamaco is about the “good people” who tortured KSM, but we aren’t going to do that anymore so Ta y’all. But booyah for “our” torturers.
Evil is evil whether you dress it up in a turban or in pig farmer wannabecowboy boots and its victims are victims, whether their name is Abbie or Abdul. It seems like the political leaders and major news outlets don’t want to make the acknowledgment and without it, I don’t see any policy changes being worth much.
I think we were discussing whether our attack on Afghanistan was justified, Things that happened afterward wouldn’t affect that. I can handle the snark, gimme your response to not whether it’s all been wrong after, but whether it was wrong from the start.
imo, wrong from the start.
Delineating the motive for involvement from the conduct is a false dichotomy.
The Geneva conventions and Nuremberg precedents would have no meaning it this were the generally accepted order of inquiry. The disregard of these standards gives rise to the questions of culpability.
This is really more directed at maquerman than you.
from what I understand it was not legitimate
If the Bush administration really wanted to be successful in Afghanistan would it not have made sense to pour more money, expertise in building the infrastructure into Afghanistan?
These folks have been taken hits from many sides for a long time. Haroon has said that no one wants to talk about the massive amounts of uranium deposits in Afghanistan
our attack on afghanistan was completely wrong. period.
al qaeda was a criminal organization and should have been pursued as such. they have never been a country, this was never a ‘war,’ except as the bush admin decided to make it such in order to rally and rattle the troops, and tricked stateside.
it was yet another case of going after a swarm of wasps with a bazooka; way overkill, literally killing far more innocents and never getting what we were after. in fact, a strong case could be made that bush and dick expressly avoided being successful there precisely because (a) they were really only interested in iraq anyway but had to keep afghanistan on the radar for the obvious pseudo-connection reasons, and (b) it was all part of the grand, abstract GWOT, doncha know, the overarching excuse to commit all manner of crimes and violations of civil and human rights.
afghanistan did NOT attack us on 9/11. apparently (no unequivocal proof here, either), al qaeda did. all our intel and special forces power should have been deployed to find these guys and yes, bring them to justice. as criminals. this is the way the brits approached the irish terrorist problem (though even so, the brits did not do a good job of keeping to the rules of civil and human rights in many of those cases), instead of bombing and occupying ireland. oops, that’s right, they did the latter. but you get the idea.
Yes,I think I do.
Thanks to you and all the others,mary and selise in particular, for some good ideas, and to a couple of folks for their hospitality.
You don’t sound like someone who was following the facts on the ground back then.
But let’s pass over the details to get to the more important issue that Obama will have to face:
What do you do with failed states that serve as a breeding ground for all kinds of international mischief? Afghanistan is still pretty much a failed state, although not as bad as it was back in 2001. Somalia is a failed state in a strategic location. And there are more failed states. Most of them are just too big and too diverse, and don’t have the infrastructure (social or physical) to hold together. A bunch of them are in Africa. What do you do when a group like Al Qaeda takes advantage of a weak central government to conduct their own operations, and use their camps in those so-called countries as the base for fostering mayhem in other countries?
Failed states are going to be a crucial problem in this century. I think this is something that the UN had better take on, to prevent them from becoming flashpoints for great power conflicts.
Bob in HI
We can differ on this. Their economy is now dominated by the opium trade now (and a new generation of smack junkies), their government traded one thoroughly corrupt regime for another thoroughly corrupt regime, and there are bigger and badder weapons.
6 of one, IMHO.
The problem that Obama will confront is that the “national” government has a limited reach. Afghanistan is still in the hands of half a dozen warlords. The national loya jirga is a positive step forward. But the road system is weak, and the Governors can pretty much do as they please. What you call a “thoroughly corrupt regime” essentially means a government without the power to enforce law and order. And opium is the best cash crop they have.
Obama appointed Holbrooke as special envoy to this region. I wonder if Holbrooke’s mastery of eastern Europe will do him any good in Afghanistan. They will have one heck of a time defining a reasonable mission and goals for American involvement in Afghanistan, and Obama had better beware the briar patch. Fortunately, Obama’s consultative approach should produce better results, but it would be easy to over-reach and become mired in unwinnable adventures.
I think it would be a better bet for Obama & Holbrooke to invest their millions in education for the masses, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Provide a systematic alternative to the madrassahs that are the current norm.
Just think: the Taliban are not the exception in southern and eastern Afghanistan; they’re the norm.
Bob in HI
The best analyses of what has happened in Somalia are those of the International Crisis Group, imho. They are too respectable and polite to put things quite as bluntly as I will, but their work over the years boils down to saying that, through this decade, the single baddest actor in Somalia has been the CIA.
I won’t work through the whole story here, but it’s easy to find the ICG reports on Somalia (one very recent, last week, I think), and I commend them as an alternative to the easy language of “failed states.” The Islamic Courts government that was deposed by the CIA-backed Ethiopian invasion (in support of the semi-exiled puppet government of warlords), was Islamic but was not al-Qaeda, not at the time of the invasion. As in Iraq, however, hysterical overreaction to any Islamic government has probably given al-Qaeda an opportunity. The puppet government is not going to stand much longer, and why should it? Because the CIA likes it? The Somalis don’t, nor it is obvious why they should.
Graham Greene published The Quiet American in 1955, and I can’t see that the script has changed much since then. Lord save the rest of the world from the so-called brightest and best.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Somalia and Afganistan. I agree that the term “failed state” has to be unpacked to understand what is going on. To me this term looks with a jaundiced eye to parts of the world that do not have a European-style central government with the power to control its people, and by extention are unable (not just unwilling) to exercise that control in the interests of the US. Someone mentioned last night that the Bush admin demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden just before the invasion. The outcome of that suggested that since this “failed state” could not do the proper thing, they were appropriate targets for invasion. The term is cover for the actions related to another book I recall: The Ugly American.
39 – I think you are missing that we didn’t hit back at al-Qaeda and leave, we stayed and occupied for years, killing civilians over and over. And over. And that “we” i.e. Bush, absolutely didn’t provide what was needed to capture or kill Bin Laden (pick up the ridiculously redacted Jawbreaker by Gary Berntsen) and “we” were already planning on invading Iraq and abandoning the strike back at “those” who “attacked” us even before we went into Afghanistan.
The ROE in Afghanistan have allowed for bombings of civilian targets on a 50/50 chance that some of those in the target area might be Taliban. Not exactly “striking back” at those who attacked us on 9/11
And those people were mass murderers, btw, not a nation state capable of an actual declaration of war. It was an assault by criminals that needed military support and backing to be addressed, but it was an assault by criminals that WE aggrandized into caliphs. Which was a bad idea even if it hadn’t ended up being an idea kept afloat on the blood of Iraqi and Afghan children.
Thanks for an actual response to what I asked.
Please, everybody, I asked a very small question. Don’t understand me to be some kind of warmonger. FTR, our conduct during the war has indeed been wrong in almost every way. The fact that we’re still there fighting now is incomprehensible.
If I agree with you’re last paragraph, with one question would that be OK?
my apologies. i did not mean to suggest that.
Selise/Macaquerman.
Do you think that the legitimacy of invading Afghanistan comes into play if the Bush administration never provided verifiable proof to the government of Afghanistan at the time that OBL was involved with 9/11?
Great question … first time I’ve seen it !
One of the tragic ironies of the Bush-Cheney cabal is that they played so loose with the truth that now if Condi or someone (just about anyone) said that we had hard evidence on intercepts but we can’t release them because of the risk to “sources and methods” the reaction would be “Yeah, sure!” Yet it’s quite plausible that this is the case. Remember that Richard Clarke and his crew was “running around with their hair on fire” during the summer of 2001 trying to get Condi et al to take seriously their concerns about the intelligence spike. From the same Vanity Fair piece I quoted in an earlier comment:
I should have added that even if they did release tapes purported to be smoking gun intercepts most Americans, not to mention people abroad, would assume they’d made it up.
If the Europeans would have confirmed them, people would have believed but only BushCo and their poodle, Blair were racing around the Globe, beating the War Drums.
Richard Clarke also noted in several interviews that Tenet believed the assessment of Clarke’s dept. and took Mueller over to meet Condi for an emergency meeting about the report, only to be treated dismissively by the dumbest NSA ever !
the condiliar can’t escape the speech she never gave
on September 11, 2001, the condiliar was scheduled to deliver a speech about the most dangerous threat to America
the topic of her speech was supposed to be Missile Defense and North Korea
then reality interupted
the condiliar gets the all time EPIC FAILURE for that one
Perhaps it was a cynical request.
Totally legitimate question. What do you think about whether it is important that the Bush administration provide verifiable proof that OBL was involved with 9/11?
Where were those 9/11 bombers from?
Free Patriot…so tired of that spin “we were not attacked for seven years” coming out of Bush, Cheney, Rice and the rest of the thugs Christ All Mighty 9/11 took place under the Bush administrations watch. After Hadley and Rice ignored Richard Clarke’s numerous warnings
When it was convenient, Bush would say that keeping troops in Iraq is drawing fire away from American Soil, therefore pulling them out will let the terrists focus once again on the U.S., putting Murkan citizens at risk.
This has been so easily forgotten by the MSM.
Yeah the Bush administrations “kill them over there before they come here” movement. Many Americans bought it
Attended a meeting last night here in D.C. at Bus Boys and Poets (a reasonably priced restaurant with great I mean great food). The place is so hip that it almost makes me feel ill. But the owner of the restaurant is a gem of a man and allows folks to hold meetings focusing of peace etc at his incredibly successful restaurant.
A wonderful group of attorneys pushing the “Bring the Guard Home. It’s the Law” movement. They have a great website (unable to link from this computer go check it out)
Thanks, will check it out.
My cousin who’s a Guard spent a year driving Trucks through some treacherous terrain and said it was scary as hell (Ret’d U.S. Marine Sgt., tough as nails)
I don’t think you’re a war monger
I think you’re a piss-poor military stratagist
but I don’t think you’re a warmonger
any war can only be judged in full, based on outcomes
our initial justification in Afghanistan was voided when we abandoned the mission and the country
it happened in December of 2001
and here’s an off topic suggestion:
when anybody says george bush kept us safe for 7 years, remind them that george bush was presnit for EIGHT YEARS
seven years out of eight sucks when your talking about keeping America safe
It was rather interesting to hear the questions from Haroon that his family asked weekly while he was here in the states. They (including Haroon) said that the U.S. had the Taliban on the run for the first year. Soon after the invasion of Iraq they backed off, Taliban “surged” towards the end of 2003 and have been “surging” ever since. During those years o4-o8 Haroon and I kept talking about how Afghanistan was off the Bush administrations radar along with the MSM here in the states. He and I listened to the one program Diane Rehm chose to do about what was going on in Afghanistan.(2007) The story she or her producers chose was one about a US woman who had opened a fucking beauty parlor in Kabul. It was a fucking absurd choice.
I had been lobbying the Rehm show to cover the “Future Leaders of Afghanistan” gathering in Chicago that Haroon attended. All 6o some Fulbright scholars from Afghanistan who were studying in the states were in attendance. All the while the MSM was reporting very little out of Afghanistan.
The money thrown at the war in Iraq and the sizeable difference of money in Afghanistan does not compute if they wanted the situation in Afghanistan to improve
jebus, you ARE dense, ain’t you
how about this:
let’s argue about whether Germany’s invasion of Poland was justified, and let’s just agree to forget about everything that happened after that
kind of a dumb discussion, isn’t it ???
the “afterwards” has a lot of influence on the judgment of the whole operation
Free, I’m as dense as granite.If I don’t understand that it’s possible for a state to undertake a war for either unjust or just cause, excuse me if you can.
(I think that Germany attacked Poland unjustly and Poland had a right to forcibly resist)
I have some understanding that armed conflict leads to unpleasant consequences. Just as my asking my original question has led to more consternation than it was worth.
59 – You don’t have to agree with it and can ask whatever, this is EW’s place and her rules are pretty loose. I won’t always be around to answer, but that’s bc this is just a blog and jobs and life are out there too.
I truly believe that they were mass murderers and that a response like those used for Noriega and for some of the drug warlord situations would have been more appropriate. OTOH, it’s not that I can’t understand an approach that this needed to be handled as an “act of war” That position allows for more immediate response, more rapid mobilization, less diplomatic tape (with actions taken place not on sovereign soil), and for what I think most Americans (at least me) were willing to accept in the situation – retaliation that would include strategies and tactics that might include the ultimate punishment (death) being visited on them in a country not our own.
I can understand the case for calling it a war response without: a) agreeing with that case, or b) getting too upset over the choice to follow that route even though I might not “nuts and bolts” agree with it. That reasoning, basically the kind of approach that Taft and Powell were advocating, a war response, but within the strictures of the laws of war and with a very targeted goal.
But the point from the beginning wasn’t whether or not to handle it like war, it was whether or not to be able to handle it with no law, be it UCMJ, domestic law, Geneva Conventions, or other, applying to ANYONE. And it was coupled with a deliberate effort to jazz people here at home up, for political purposes, into a “those people” approach to visiting force and violence. Not “the people” who attacked us, but to retaliate against “those people, over there” As Tom Friedman finally admitted, I think the politicians and the media just wanted to use our military to stage a public “ass kicking” event, to feel better, without really much concern for which brown ass got bought off a bounty hunter and kicked, or what village with a funny name should be decimated and its children left limbless and dead so we could feel better.
And most discouraging and disheartening of all, it seems very likely that a part of the point after there was such quick mobilization was to NOT have a quick resolution. To leave Berntsen’s team without the backup they requested and to use the attack for political purposes, not to seek justice for our murdered by military means.
I don’t think you are a warmonger, but I have a pretty strong feel that you have an agenda.
So do I.
I lay mine out in the open every time I fire off a comment. I’m not sure you do, but who knows?
Friedman has sure been spinning his support for the invasion of Iraq now that it is no longer popular.
One really has to wonder if chaos was the plan in Iraq. Lies to take us in, too few troops, protect the oil industry while allowing looting of Iraq’s treasures, getting rid of Garner, torture Bremer, disbanding the Iraqi army, the distruction of the Mosque, creating an environment for ethnic tensions to explode, millions of Iraqi people fleeing their homes.
Our dear friend Peggy Gish is back in Iraq with CPT (Christian Peace Maker Team) She was there before the invasion and for many years after. She has shared many times that many of the Iraqi people firmly believe chaos,death and destruction was the plan. Easier to grab the goods. One sure has to wonder
This has been classic American Foreign Policy for 40 years now … prolly longer.
That’s why it’s so galling to hear people even suggest that BushCo was unprepared for such a quick victory or any other fluff thrown out to hide what the rest of the world knows only too well.
Struggle with the question that Mary posed at 26 “whether America’s soul can be salvaged”
My question is did we ever have a “soul” in this nation? Built this nation as genocide was committed wiping most of the native Americans, enslaved Africans, burnt the life out of the Japanese and brought the people who survived those fire storms to their knees, slaughtered innocent Vietnamese. Did we ever have a “soul” to be salvaged? Can we cultivate a collective soul? A genuine awareness and concern about how we effect the rest of the world.
I think many Americans are ready for it We know the rest of the world is ready
You prolly know that I am a) A Canuck & b) A meditation teacher.
I place the U.S. Constitution at the level of my favorite texts – The Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and teachings of the great masters Buddha, Christ, etc.
America’s soul shines brightly in groups like this blog. Thanks to the Internet and Satellites, the World got a glimpse of the varied landscape of America’s soul over the past 8 years … from the greedy, selfish actions of BushCo to Americans standing up and voting someone who promises to head in the opposite direction.
Yes, lots of crap have happened throughout the World due to selfish policies of past Leaders.
But the miracle that is possible in America is known throughout the World, it is up to every citizen to strive for it.
Dang, the conversation can get pretty heavy when Mary comes around!
And good food to chew on.
FWIW, I think “America’s soul” is a work in progress, and has always been. The struggle has always been to become “a more perfect union,” not just with respect to race relations (code word for slavery and anti-Black bias), but also with redeeming the horrors perpetrated on American Indians, Asians (remember the “Yellow Peril”?), coal miners, laborers, and countless others.
We are a work in progress; will we take up the tools that our Constitution has given us, and make this a Republic to be proud of, a light to the World? Or will we just go shopping?
Thank you, Mary, for asking the hard questions.
Bob in HI
don’t forget the Irish
(wink)
if America has a soul, most Americans don’t want to see it
Machiavelli wasn’t wrong
human progress is a messy business, and we’re the busiest sausage shop in town …
I find this hard to believe. The whole story of the Bush-Cheney cabal on the national security front is the inability to think more than one step ahead, and in many cases not even that. Even Rove, in his domestic political sphere, wasn’t doing much better. He seemed, in retrospect, unable to see the long-term strategic downsides to some of his short term tactical coups.
You may not believe this but many Iraqi people do, Robert Fisk sure leans that way and so do countless others. We all have the right to our own opinions but the facts remain that the Bush administration lied the nation into war, did not send enough troops, disbanded the Iraqi army, tortured etc etc. Too many so called mistakes to be mistakes. These guys are not stupid…that is a myth. Many understood the ethnic tensions that have been brewing there for a long time…all they needed to do was create the environment for the Sunnis and Shiites to go after one another along with who knows how many undercover agents are there stirring it up. I firmly believe these were not mistakes.
Watch the documentary “No End In Sight” you will hear numerous high level military folks say the same thing.
Mary, my agenda was to have discussion. I am extremely gratified to have had some with you. Your comments have a force, cogency, and absence of cant that make even disagreement pleasurable and pleasant.
In addition to having my butt kicked all over this discussion, the old lady has started kicking it in actuality for my failure to finish cooking dinner.
I will check in later, and hope to be welcomed with more from you if possible.
Mary, if you’re available and willing to entertain my question, I like to pose it. I suspect that you would be the one best trained to answer.
How would our refusal to recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan affect our demand that they turn OBL over to us? Can we hold a de facto government to be responsible in affairs of this kind?
Your remarks are always so clear and consise and it’s difficult to understand how our intel agencies and policy got so screwed up.Everything seems so obvious the way you put it which leads me to conclude that you and alot of other people here are geniuses or that they are complete morons.I doubt that either is the case and more than likely these decisions were calculated.As hard as they’ve worked to screw things up as badly as they have one can only conclude that it had to be by design.What seems pointless on it’s face has an underlying purpose.Possibly the whole purpse of all this was the redistribution of wealth and power.Or to destroy America.But it sure is hard to believe that 19 hijackers could wreak such havok
clarification,
Please understand that by “they” I mean bushco not anyone here
65 – If Turkey asked Iraq to turn over the PEK or they would invade, would it happen?
On the one hand, we point over and over to failed state status of Afghanistan, and on the other say we asked “the Afghanis” to do this or that. Who do you “ask” in a failed state run by gangs? I think you could say we asked the Taliban, but even they were pretty loose group. If some members of a Crips or Bloods gang won’t turn someone over on a request from, oh, say law enforcement, then what is the appropriate response? Bombing apartment buildings miles away that might have a member of “the gang” in it?
That’s the kind of problem you have when you equate gangs and thugs with nation states and when you equate all of the civilian population with “those people” who wouldn’t do what we wanted done. Whether they had ability or capability or not.
Here’s the site Leen mentioned @ 82, it takes a little while to load – Bring the guard home … it’s the Law
Thanks
It took about 4 minutes to load … *g*
IIRC, wasn’t Bush always parsimonious with his pardons even as governor of TX.?
Anyway I am enjoying the collision of the two deluded realities of “what’s best for me” between cheney and bush.
I’m not a Texan, but I believe you’re correct. Remember the reports that when he denied clemency to that born-again ex-meth addict Hispanic woman (whose name I don’t recall) he mocked her begging to an aide (Fredo, perhaps?) while signing her death warrant? Talk about a glimpse of despicable character.
donald dumsfeld was making jokes about invading Iraq on 9-11-2001, and was quoted saying Afghanistan didn’t have enough worthy military targets
Afghanistan was always a sideshow to these mayberry Machiavellians and armchair warriors
in december of 2001 I was afraid of the innertubes (it took the invasion of Iraq to get me in here) and I knew about dumsfeld and wolfie’s inadequate plans for invading Iraq. if a clueless community college washout like me could figure out that we were headed for disaster …
wars are moral contests that are won in the temples before they are fought
we lost
wadda ya think ???
an a hat tip to Petrocelli. I knew you was a hoser, but I didn’t know about part b: The Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and teachings of the great masters Buddha, Christ, etc.
cool
I read some of that stuff too. I been working with a bunch of Sikhs in the past few years, they got some interesting tales to tell
Sorry, who said that? Whoever, they were right. In the run-up to the Afghan invasion, the U.S. demanded that Afghanistan fork over OBL and Mullah Omar (remember him?). Trouble was, as the CIA probably knew then, Afghanistan was a feudal state, with a weak center, run by war lords who controlled different parts of the country. Mullah Omar’s guys held a loya jirga in their part of the country and decided to tell Kabul to go cheney themselves (or words in Pashtu to that effect), which is what anyone with any knowledge of that area would have told you would happen, and the government in Kabul was powerless to do anything about. So that gave us our pretext to invade Afghanistan. And actually, I think we were justified in doing so. But Bush, of course, screwed it up by lusting after Iraq.
Bob in HI
o-t, somebody renamed “bush” street in san francisco
please re-address your letters to Obama Street
gotta love frisco …
(ducking and running)
clbrune @22
my thoughts too – public posturing, possibly to mollify libby’s wife and libby.
chenye surely knows that neither cheny nor bush would do well if libby talked freely.
if i remember correctly, fitzgerald never closed this case,
so not only bush and cheney but also rove, maitlin, et al are still at risk.
Cheney pardoned Libby while he was “acting President.” Read his words closely, he is only disappointed in Bush for not pardoning Libby. That doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t pardoned. Remember his letter to the grandkids while he was “acting President?
http://swampland.blogs.time.co…..pa_cheney/
Any guesses what else Dick did while he was “acting President?”
Pfft, he didn’t issue any pardon, especially to Scooter Libby. A secret pardon to Libby, or anyone else for that matter, doesn’t accomplish anything. The main purpose would be to restore his law license. Hasn’t been done. Furthermore, for there to be an effective pardon, there will have to be evidence the pardon was actually made lodged by the president. The new administration will out that immediately. I am not buying the existence of secret pardons. If Bush and/or Cheney executed secret pardons, they would get outed by the new administration and look even worse than if they had done them in public. I am just not buying it.
later folks..Hope all are sleeping better knowing we have Obama in the White House and there is a different tone and hopefully far more accoutability. My hope is that more people around the world are sleeping better too knowing that many Americans do care about what our government does.
The articles over at Information Clearing House on what took place in the Gaza during those 22 days is enlightening and terribly disturbing
Looks kinda bad to pardon your toadies when you couldn’t be bothered to carefully review the death sentences you handed out in Texas.
F*ck Dick and the Bush he rode in on.
This is a warning shot:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/65b1…..fd2ac.html
“In my decades as a public servant, I have strongly promoted the Arab-Israeli peace process. During recent months, I argued that the peace plan proposed by Saudi Arabia could be implemented under an Obama administration if the Israelis and Palestinians both accepted difficult compromises. I told my audiences this was worth the energies of the incoming administration for, as the late Indian diplomat Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru Pandit said: “The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.”
But after Israel launched its bloody attack on Gaza, these pleas for optimism and co-operation now seem a distant memory. In the past weeks, not only have the Israeli Defence Forces murdered more than 1,000 Palestinians, but they have come close to killing the prospect of peace itself. Unless the new US administration takes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship and the stability of the region are at risk.”
Sign up for the ft subscription (it’s free) and read the whole article. The Saudis are warning us their patience is running out. It’s pretty pointed.
Good link. The Saudis are being pressed hard by the Iranians. The publication of this letter in the western media is certainly a challenge, but I hope it to be a sign that the Saudis are willing to take an active hand in helping to ease the trouble, if Obama takes the lead.
I think that if the president is willing to demand an immediate end to the Israeli theft of land in the West Bank and actually fight to back up that demand, that might be a good first step.
I have the intuition that cheney took the reigns of power because he ‘knew’ what was ‘right’ on the issues before the country. His self- justification for his actions is born in his self-understanding as having the ‘necessary’ omniscience and omnipotence to deal with the post-9/11 world. He is ‘justified’ because he did what was ‘right’. If you look at the neocons’ sense of outrage at the charges brought against Libby as well as his conviction, they are judged as simply ‘WRONG’. Cheney wants the pardon for Libby to make things right and by doing so justify
the ‘rightness’ of his own actions and the rightness of his sense of himself. He’s just trying to do ‘good.’ His motives are simple and superficial. If Libby was right than cheney was right. cheney is not capable of self-reflexive, moral thought that Ben Franklin might have engaged in.
In other words, “We didn’t act criminally. We acted with our hearts in the right place – with the best interests of the country in mind – and were catastrophically incorrect. We are magnificent idiots, not criminals.”
In the context that Cheney (and the Cheney wing of the Administration) feelings of justification for their actions (thus the feeling of Libby being railroaded) bears somewhat out of the PNAC hegomony (imperialism) that they “honestly” felt as an American right. The neo-con wing has always lived by the “ends justifies the means” view of governing. Thus Valerie Plame became nothing more than collateral damage in their view. And as such, what that Administration did (and Libby in particular) was not viewed as wrong. Bush by not pardoning Libby did not correct that wrong.
To Bush, this is all about image and legacy. As mentioned in other posts, a pardon would be a tacit (if not overt) admission of guilt. With that would be renewed talks of more serious wrong doing on their part. Not to mention the potential legal issues they could face if Libby was later immunized. So for the most part, it seems that there are many reasons (legal and historical) as to why Bush didn’t extend the pardon to Libby in addition to the commutation of his sentence.
Dateline: January 29, 2009
Where: Justice Department
When: Post confirmation chat
Who: Holder on Libby
“Hey Mark flip me over the Fitzy files on George and Dickhead’s interview.”
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Someone has to ask Cheney exactly how he thinks justice was miscarried in Libby’s case, e.g., does he have undisclosed evidence that Libby did not lie to investigators?
I guess Dick wasn’t paying attention when George said he didn’t think pardons were needed, because he had legal opinions saying they could legally do what they did.
(I think George was talking about Iraq, Gitmo, and the prisoners, but I don’t know if he considered Plame to be separate. He certainly was acting as if he was in the right on that.)
Bush didn’t pardon many folks when he was governor. Also, I perceive that he’s a mean-spirited, vindictive man who enjoys other people’s pain. Regarding Libby, I wonder if his father had something to say, as past director of the CIA who I believe once said that anyone who outs an agent should be tried for treason. Maybe he decided he should listen to his daddy for a change.
so Barack Obama just washed away all of george bush’s ”executive privilege” protection
show of hands, how many people knew this was gonna happen ???
the only question I got is How did george not know this was gonna happen
W. hasn’t had a history of thinking very far ahead. Or thinking at all for that matter.
OT – From the Wired Blog:
Filing here.
Guess Obama is not ready to pull the plug on NSA hoovering, eh? This is not good news.
Perhaps Obama’s failure to take advantage of Tice’s assistance wasn’t an oversight on the part of his staff after all.
Not at all sure we should take Wired’s spin on this for granted. Judge Walker wanted to wait to see what the new AG’s position would be in this case. The Bush DoJ wanted to rush a decision to dismiss the case. Now we have a new president, whose name has now been inserted as the defendant in this case, being defended by the remains of the Bush DoJ and making legal claims in his name, while his choice of AG is being delayed. Holder himself did make some ambiguous statements at his confirmation hearing, but you know what that’s worth. We won’t know til the team is on the field what plays they’ll run. I don’t want to predict which way this will eventuate, but meanwhile spinning Obama as a sneak sells by playing to folk’s fears.
There’s something odd to me about these press interviews. After the point in time in which a pardon could be argued and effected, Here’s Cheney nuzzling 2 of his reliable outlets to complain about not getting his way. Question is: why? The Weekly Standard is the home of the rightwing talking point machine. It’s possible there is going to be a political struggle over who lost the Repulican majority, with a lot of finger-pointing and backbiting. This could be Cheney’s move to get in position to avoid being the target of the maelstrom to come. He can’t do anything for Libby now, so much as about his own relevance and standing in the peer group.
at the time that we issued the ultimatum to the Taliban, we didn’t recognize the Taliban, despite the fact that the Taliban had captured 90% of the territory of Afghanistan
if your knowledge of Afghanistan starts at 9-11-2001, you ain’t gonna be able to discuss the issue intelligently. Just before the attack, (six months or a year) I was teaching my mother about the “Stans” (there are 7 of them) I been following developments in afghanistan since 1978, and I studied what happened to maps after the soviet union dissolved, so I was pretty well informed on that day.
and I’ll tell you what I told a crowd of people outside my PolySci class on that day. It doesn’t matter what the Taliban does or says, we’re gonna declare war on Afghanistan
it’s kinda ironic that the United States didn’t acknowledge the existence of the Taliban until we declared war on them (although I still ain’t convinced that congress passed a valid declaration of war)
you could discuss the actions of several parties on that day. Do you remember the announcement of solidarity from “The Northern Alliance” ???
all of that is like george washington, it’s history
george bush’s actions have proven that our invasion of Afghanistan is unjust
you can’t cherry pick selected parts of an unjustified failure and claim that this piece was justified
“poison fruit from a poison tree” is more than a legal concept
george bush has as much right to claim credit for any future outcome in Afghanistan as Hitler and Tojo have the rights to claim success in WW II based on Germany and Japan today
george don’t get credit if somebody else fixes the problems
Hello again.
Let me adjust the tone of my comments for you.
I agree that I don’t know much about Afghanistan. I also agree that we didn’t recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government at the time. I seem to recall that almost no country in the world recognized the Taliban with the possible exception of, possibly, Saudi Arabia and more certainly the Taliban’s sponser, Pakistan.
I agree that the United States was going to invade Afghanistan. I repeatedly try to stress that the Taliban and the US coming to any terms of agreement to negate an invasion was unlikely to the point of absurdity.
I agree that we did neither well nor good in the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.
How did you do in your Poly Sci class?
Um, yes, you probably should consider it the formal position of the Obama Administration, because they government attorneys assert exactly that in the pleading. The document speaks for itself, this is Obama’s position, and as to the al Haramain litigation, it is exactly the same as Bush’s despicable position.
This is entirely consistent with Obama’s active push to have the FAA passed. You are grasping at illusory straws trying to maintain that the obvious is not, you know, obvious.
Let’s be clear; I’m not doing any such grasping, and the obvious is not so obvious. I agree that the position regarding the FAA may give a clue as to Obama’s true position, and Holder’s ambiguous remarks can fit with that position. Further, it is possible that Obama and Holder have made their position known to the current DoJ team and the motion presented is consistent between the administrations. Yet my remark addressed the odd position of the Obama DoJ administration being not yet in place, and the previous administration continuing to present it’s legal case, it would seem, of its own volition. When you think about the level of “dirty tricks” that can be played in these situations, this fits right in. (On the other hand, letting the Bush team holdovers carry the ball is a dirty trick in its own right.)
“Gov attorneys assert exactly that in the pleading”
On second thought,you may be right. I only scanned the plea MadDog linked. I’m trying to do about 3 things here today and didn’t read as carefully as one probably should, for such a serious matter. Can you point me to the part where things are so obvious; if not I’ll reread it tonite. Thanks, R.
the prof had a heart attack the previous thursday (that’s why we were standing outside), and the class was canceled
so I had to wait a year to repeat it
I took poly sci-5 ”foreign relations” during the ”Bush Doctrine” debate in the fall of 2002. It was a pretty fiery and partisan class. I got a B (turned in my essay a week late)
so now I’m qualified to transfer to a 4 year school as a jr in poly sci
but it wasn’t easy with that bastard bush in the whitehouse. I had to go back to robbing convience stores to pay my tuition …
(wink)
come to think of it, it was the prof from that class that introduced me to the innertubes
OK, I’ll bite.
Please explain the innertubes.
It would be unethical and career ending for these attorneys to freelance in that manner. To the point of having bar action taken if a complaint was filed. For better or worse, this is the action of Obama.
Glad to hear that, (sorta). I was writing while you were sending.