Posts

Greg Craig in Trouble … But for What?

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I’ve disliked Greg Craig since the time–before Obama was elected–he insulted our intelligence by suggesting Obama had flip-flopped on FISA because FISA (and not the odious Protect America Act) was expiring. It was bad enough that Obama caved on an important issue without his advisor insulting our intelligence as to why.

But I’m worried that Greg Craig’s job as White House Counsel may be in jeopardy for the wrong reasons. 

The WSJ reports that is in jeopardy.

Mr. Craig has come under criticism from inside the administration and in Congress for a perceived failure to manage the political issues that have originated from Mr. Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo, according to officials in the administration and in Congress. This criticism has drawn focus away from president’s priorities, such as health care and energy.

Since when is it the job of the White House Counsel to manage "the political issues" on key national security issues? Isn’t that the job of the political people–men like Rahm Emanuel (whom Greg Craig saved a heap of headache in the way he handled the Blagojevich fallout, though in that, too, he insulted our intelligence) and David Axelrod?

And from there, the description gets even weirder. Apparently, Greg Craig is in trouble because Dick Cheney made a stink after Obama released the torture memos.

Mr. Craig and Attorney General Eric Holder won the fight to release the memorandums, with minimal redactions, but the White House had to move quickly to limit political damage. Former Vice President Dick Cheney sharpened criticism of Mr. Obama during a televised speech that followed Mr. Obama’s own address intended to explain his national-security vision. 

And because polls no longer support closing Gitmo.

Mr. Obama signed executive orders during his first week in office to close the Guantanamo prison, to review the cases of the more than 200 detainees there and to draw up possible changes to detention and interrogation policies.

At the time Mr. Obama enjoyed public support for his Guantanamo plans, polls showed. Six months later that public support has dissipated, polls show.

In other words, WSJ seems to suggest that Craig is in trouble because he supported the right decisions on policies, but the political people in the White House mismanaged implementing those decisions. Taking the correct stand on moral issues only works, after all, if you sustain that stand and refuse to be cowed by Dick Cheney.

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Suspension of Posse Comitatus for 9/11 Anniversary?

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Remember the OLC memo eviscerating the Fourth Amendment–the one they claimed was only ever hypothetical? Well, Cheney was itching to try it out to arrest the Lackawanna Six.

Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

[snip]

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

Unless I missed it, NYT didn’t tell you when Dick Cheney was proposing to suspend posse comitatus. But as it happens, most of the Lackawanna Six got arrested on September 14, 2002.

Which to me is just as interesting as the news that Cheney was pushing to do this: Imagine how well it would work to impose military rule just in time for the first anniversary of 9/11, and just as you’re rolling out the case for the Iraq War?

Update: scout prime reminds us that when it came to saving brown people, BushCo hesitated, citing the Constitution.

The Bush Fairy Tale on the Libby Pardon

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You need to keep one thing in mind as you read this story about Cheney’s campaign to get Bush to pardon Scooter Libby for his conviction related to the CIA Leak case. (h/t MadDog) Judge Emmet Sullivan has strongly suggested he’s going to rule in favor of CREW in its FOIA of Dick Cheney’s interview with Patrick Fitzgerald. So chances are good that we’ll get to see that interview in the foreseeable future. But Congress withdrew its request and CREW has not made any request to get Bush’s interview.

In other words, the sources for the story know that Cheney’s interview will soon become public, but that Bush’s probably won’t be.

As a result, the Bush partisans can tell a story about Bush being really miffed at Libby’s role in the case, all while claiming that the commutation (which of course was and still is the best way to ensure Libby never talks going forward) had nothing to do with Bush’s own knowledge of the leak.

Time Ignores that Libby Was Protecting Cheney AND Bush

This misleading narrative pervades the entire story. For example, Time suggests that Libby lied to the FBI because his job was on the line, and not because he was protecting Cheney and–at least to some degree–Bush. Time claims Cheney "assured Bush" Libby "wasn’t involved," when the note Cheney wrote prior to that exoneration implicates Bush himself and may reflect Cheney’s recognition that Libby had leaked the CIA trip report.

But Libby had reason to lie: his job was at stake, and his boss’s was on the line too. Bush had declared that anyone involved in leaking Plame’s identity would be fired. Cheney had personally assured Bush early on that his aide wasn’t involved, even persuading the President to exonerate Libby publicly through a spokesman.

And Time reports Bush officials acknowledging that Libby may well have taken the fall–but in spite of evidence of Bush’s personal involvement, portrays that acknowledgment as pertaining only to Cheney, not Bush himself.

As a former Bush senior aide explains, "I’m sure the President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up."

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“Protecting” President Cheney, Too

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In today’s second installment on ways American taxpayers are wasting money to protect Dick Cheney from embarrassment, Josh Gerstein has a report on today’s hearing on CREW’s FOIA of Cheney’s interview in the CIA Leak Case. And DOJ is unabashedly making the argument that it should not release Dick Cheney’s interview because it might embarrrass him. (h/t MadDog)

Smith said the Justice Department’s view was that a delay of five to ten years was appropriate, marked from the time the official or his or her administration left office. “It’s a judgment call,” Smith acknowledged.

Smith suggested that such a delay would make it more likely that the information was used for historical purposes and not for political embarrassment. “The distinction is between releasing it for historical view and releasing it into the political fray,” Smith said.

Funny, DOJ claimed it was arguing for the longer-than-statutes-of-limitation delay because of concerns that future Vice Presidents wouldn’t cooperate willingly with investigations. As time goes on an their arguments look shittier and shittier, I guess, they become more and more truthful. Thus their invention of a new FOIA embarrassment exemption.

It sounds like Emmet Sullivan is not buying that argument–though he is also unwilling to just order the release of the interview without giving Obama’s DOJ an opportunity to waste more money protecting Cheney from embarrassment.

As the hearing concluded, Sullivan said he thought Congress had drawn a “bright line” with language in the Freedom of Information Act that generally exempts information about pending investigations from disclosure, but not closed probes, like the CIA leak case. He also said he would stay any ruling so the government could appeal before he released any documents.

President Obama? Attorney General Holder? This nonsense has gone on long enough. As I noted, Cheney’s participation in this probe is proof enough that the investigative concerns are bunk. It really is high time to stop wasting money preventing taxpayers from learning what Cheney did in our name.

“Protecting” President Cheney

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The NYDN confirms that President Obama has agreed to Cheney’s request that his secret service protection be extended for another six months.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s Secret Service protection has been extended for at least another six months, beginning Tuesday.

Breaking! Dick Cheney remains an imperious paranoid fuck!!

Actually, the more interesting news comes (unsurprisingly) at the end of the story.

I’m particularly interested in the narrative construction here. This story was written by James Gordon Meeks, NYDN’s intelligence reporter, and Thomas DeFrank, an associate of Cheney’s dating back to the Ford Administration. And here’s what the two of them report.

Cheney’s friends have said he has become more concerned about his privacy and personal safety in recent years.

Like all "protectees," Cheney can petition the government for additional extensions of Secret Service protection, and several sources close to Cheney predicted he will do so once this new extension lapses.

Normally, the "threat level" diminishes dramatically after Presidents and vice presidents step down. In the post-9/11 world, that may no longer be the case.

Since 1997, former Presidents have been limited to 10 years of government protection. Bill Clinton – and wife Hillary – is the last ex-President entitled to a lifetime taxpayer-funded security cocoon.

Cheney’s friends say their paranoid friend as been more concerned "about his privacy and personal safety in recent years." If the timing here is accurate, the change has less to do with 9/11 (which is not all that recent anymore) and more to do with being an incredibly unpopular thug who shat on our Constitution. Given that the Secret Service agents protecting Cheney have arrested private citizens for what appears to be free speech (and have gone on to tell inconsistent stories about that arrest), I’d suggest Cheney really likes being protected–on the taxpayer dime–from hearing from taxpayers.

And, on the first day of his six month extension of taxpayer funded protection, Cheney’s friends say he plans to ask for further extensions (plural) once this six month extension lapses. Given how old Cheney is and how fragile his ticker, he’s basically asking for lifetime protection. 

Now look at those last two lines. Whose voice is suggesting that it "may no longer be the case" that the "threat level" goes down once a President or (!) Vice President leaves office? Because it makes no sense! Al Qaeda loves Dick Cheney–he took their bait hook, line, and sinker! Read more →

Im-me-di-ate: adjective (DOJ) 1. More Than 2 Years

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Goddamn did DOJ bring the stupid in their response to CREW’s brief in its Cheney interview FOIA.

745 days ago, George Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence, thereby ensuring that Scooter Libby would not testify about whether–as all the evidence indicated–Dick Cheney had ordered him to leak Valerie Wilson’s identity to Judy Miller. 745 days ago, for all intents and purposes, the investigation of Dick Cheney’s involvement in outing a CIA officer ended in the dead end of Scooter Libby’s successful criminal obstruction of justice.

Yet DOJ describes CREW’s efforts to get Cheney’s interview report via FOIA to be an attempt to get "a ruling that would make public interview reports of high ranking White House officials immediately upon the conclusion of the relevant investigation." For the whizzes in DOJ, I guess, 745 days equates to "immediate."

But that’s not the only heap of stupid they bring in this filing.

Next, these whizzes argue that if DOJ turns over Cheney’s interview, then senior White House officials will no longer provide criminal investigators a "full account of relevant events."

This argument, however, is ultimately immaterial because, while in some circumstances public pressure could possibly force a White House official to sit down for an interview, it cannot ensure that that official will be willing “to provide law enforcement officials with a full account of relevant events,”

Dudes! Let me tell you a secret about this case!! It ended in a successful perjury and obstruction of justice prosecution that revealed–among other things–that convicted felon Scooter Libby had worked out a cover story with Dick Cheney before Libby first testified to the FBI! Had Cheney given a "full account of relevant events," then Scooter Libby probably wouldn’t have been prosecuted successfully (or, at the least, Judy Miller wouldn’t have had to testify or Cheney would have been charged with obstruction himself).

Next, DOJ claims that a precedent in which the release of a summary of deliberations was found not to constitute a waiver over the source documents of that deliberation applies here, in which key source documents have already been released, but which wouldn’t–DOJ argues–constitute a waiver for the interview report which is fundamentally a summary. For DOJ, a precedent finding that a summary doesn’t equal source is the same as a source not equaling a summary. 

The D.C. Circuit held that the release of the report did not constitute a waiver of privilege and that the White House could retain privilege over all documents that had not specifically been provided to individuals outside the government. Id. at 741. Read more →

Liz “BabyDick” Cheney Returns

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It was inevitable. Given the news over the weekend that DOJ might investigate PapaDick Cheney, we had to expect Liz "BabyDick" Cheney would be out again defending her Daddy (and, just as inevitably, the press would give her the soap box to do so).

But as more and more investigations start to focus on her Daddy, BabyDick sounds more and more pathetic. For example, here’s her attempt to scold Democrats for upholding the rule of law.

CHENEY: His reaction to the story that we may well be prosecuting folks, I’m happy to talk about that. … You know, he is very angry, as you’ve heard him say publicly. You know the notion that this administration is going to come into office and they’re going to prosecute the brave men and women who carried out this program that kept America safe. It is, it is un-American. It’s something that hasn’t happened before in this country, in terms of somebody taking office and then starting to prosecute people who carried out policies that they disagreed with, you know, in the previous administration. He’s been very public about that.[my emphasis]

Um, no. Depending on who you ask, Holder is considering prosecuting either those who overstepped the stated policy and/or those–like her Daddy–who ignored the law when they developed that policy. But BabyDick has to characterize a potential investigation in terms that conflict with everything Obama and Holder have said about a torture investigation so people don’t note that her–and her Daddy’s–cries of "un-American!!" are really just self-serving claptrap.

As if it would be un-American to tell PapaDick he has to follow the law.

Not only didn’t he–as the guy who redirected efforts in Afghanistan to an illegal war of choice in Iraq–keep us safe. But just about everything he did was un-American.

The Assassination Squads: Two Points

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Siobhan Gorman reports that the secret program that Leon Panetta just revealed to Congress is an assassination squad.

A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn’t clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.

Two comments about this.

First, there must be something more. Aside from the near ubiquitous drone strikes, which seem to be fully acknowledged and non-controversial, there have been enough personal strikes against al Qaeda figures that appear likely to have been assassinations, that for all intents and purposes, it appears we are assassinating al Qaeda figures.

It may be, for example, that the conflict reported by Sy Hersh is the problem–that Special Ops has the mandate to kill but CIA is being dragged into those assassinations.

Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)

The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Read more →

The Scope of the (Hypothetical) Torture Investigation

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It was just last night that Newsweek floated the notion of a torture investigation, and we’re already into a hot debate about the scope of any (thus far still hypothetical) investigation. Here are the posts you should read:

  • Tim F @BalloonJuice arguing that an investigation of just the torturers who exceeded guidelines would be worse than no investigation
  • Spencer@Attackerman arguing that focusing on the CIA–rather than the decision-makers–would be wrong
  • Glenn@Salon cataloging the different stories about scope–and arguing that if the investigation focuses on CIA it’ll be Abu Ghraib redux

Glenn and Spencer both point to Scott Horton–reporting that there is unlikely to be such a limit on scope–in an article I’ll look at in some detail below.

My take–one derived from some weeds–is that if Holder approves an investigation, it’ll be unlikely to just take on low-level CIA interrogators.

First, consider who we’re talking about. We’re not, actually, talking about low level CIA interrogators. We’re talking about contractors. James Mitchell, to be exact. And if James Mitchell is not the psychologist/interrogator who acknowledged he had exceeded the limits set by John Yoo’s Bybee Memo, but justified it by saying he had exceeded those limits (by using way more water, for longer time, and pressing on the detainee’s gut) because those things make the simulated drowning technique "for real–and … more poignant and convincing," then it’s almost certainly someone who works for James Mitchell and probably used to work for the DOD entity that administers SERE.

I, frankly, have no problem with prosecuting Mr. Poignant the sadist torturer and, given his acknowledgment that he exceeded Yoo’s guidelines, that’s probably where an investigation would start.

Now, as I said, Mr. Poignant is either James Mitchell or someone associated with him–the "psychologist/interrogator" strongly suggests this person is a contractor, not a CIA employee.

That means that going after Mr. Poignant gets you, in either one step or two, to the contractors who worked from the start to profit off torture.

And that gets you, almost immediately, to the process that the torture architects used to authorize their torture. That’s because there is a paper trail showing that the torture architects knew and intended the torture to exceed even Yoo’s memo. This is a document that both Jim Haynes and John Rizzo had and–between the two of them–gave to John Yoo during the drafting process for the Bybee Memo as the basis for his description of waterboarding.

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When and To What Degree Was John Ashcroft Read Into the Illegal Surveillance Program?

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We have long known that John Ashcroft was not properly read into the illegal domestic surveillance program. Senator Whitehouse suggested as much when Attorney General Gonzales testified in July 2007. And both Gonzales and Robert Mueller revealed that John Ashcroft–from his ICU bed–complained that his advisors had not been able to get read into the program and as a result he was ill-informed about the program.

But here’s an interesting detail about the hospital visit:

I also recall that, prior to the time I departed, General Ashcroft briefly mentioned a concern about security clearances for members of his staff regarding the NSA activities that were the subject of the presidential order.

[snip]

Well, here’s the relevant detail from Mueller’s notes:

The AG also told [Card and Gonzales] that he was barred from obtaining the advice he needed on the program by the strict compartmentalization rules of the WH.

But the IG Report raises new and different questions about when–and to what degree–John Ashcroft was read into Cheney’s illegal domestic surveillance program. It includes the same details as Gonzales and Mueller have already revealed (though it looks like Gonzales was rather more cautious when speaking with the IG than before, and the IG appears not to have asked Mueller for his version of the story).

Former Attorney General Gonzales and former OLC Assistant Attorney General Bybee both told the DOJ OIG that they did not know how Yoo became responsible for analyzing the legality of the PSP.

[snip]

Gonzales told the DOJ OIG that the Yoo opinions represented the legal opinion of DOJ, and that it was Ashcroft’s decision as to how to satisfy his obligations as Attorney General. Gonzales told the DOJ OIG that Ashcroft complained to the White House that it was "inconvenient" not to have the Deputy Attorney General or Ashcroft’s Chief of Staff read into the PSP, but Gonzales also stated that he never got the sense from Ashcroft that this affected the quality of the legal advice about the program that DOJ provided to the White House. As noted, Ashcroft declined the DOJ OIG’s request for an interview. The DOJ OIG therefore was unable to determine from Ashcroft whether he sought additional DOJ read-ins to assist in the legal analysis of the program, how hard he may have pressed for these additional read-ins, or whether he believed he was receiving adequate legal advice about the program from Yoo alone during this early phase of the PSP.

But there’s one big–huge–tell about whether or not Ashcroft conducted sufficient analysis of this program to approve its legality: 

Attorney General John Ashcroft approved the first Presidential Authorization for the PSP as to "form and legality" on the same day he was read into the program.

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