Should we draw some type of scientific conclusion(s) about ABC’s journalists and George Bush’s propensity to think they’re a bunch of idiots? Sorry W., but Gibson and Raddatz are not idiots.
Just before Thanksgiving Bush told Charlie Gibson his "three George Washington books" story again. I’ve heard that story over the past couple of years more times than I have fingers and toes. Today, Sgt. Schultz let it rip again with ABC’s Martha Raddatz; she questioned Mr. Bush about the CIA’s destroyed videotapes.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News President Bush said Tuesday he did not know about the destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations.
The President said he was told just a few days ago.
"My first recollection of whether the tapes existed or whether they were destroyed was when [CIA Director] Michael Hayden briefed me," Bush said.
"There’s a preliminary inquiry going on and I think you’ll find that a lot more data, facts will be coming out," he said, "that’s good. It will be interesting to know what the true facts are."
Wait just one minute. What about Harriet Miers? Time to rewind the videotapes a bit. From the NYT last week:
According to two government officials, Mr. Muller then raised the idea of destroying the tapes during discussions in 2003 with Justice Department lawyers and with Harriet E. Miers, who was then a deputy White House chief of staff. Ms. Miers became White House counsel in early 2005.
The officials said that Ms. Miers and the Justice Department lawyers had advised against destroying the tapes, but that it was not clear what the basis for their advice had been.
George and Harriet have been BFF’s since Tippy was a pup. Are we really supposed to believe Miers didn’t talk to Bush about it? Look at Miers’ title — deputy WH COS. Karl Rove took that job when Miers became WH Counsel, and we know how tight W. and Turd Blossom are.
If any doubts remains about how tight Miers and Bush are, this will surely remove them. From Miers to Bush:
"You are the best governor ever - deserving of great respect," Harriet E. Miers wrote to George W. Bush days after his 51st birthday in July 1997. She also found him "cool," said he and his wife, Laura, were "the greatest!" and told him: "Keep up the great work. Texas is blessed."
More than a year into Mr. Bush’s first term as governor, Ms. Miers drew on their friendship by asking the Bushes to serve as "honorary chairs" at an Anti-Defamation League dinner in 1996 honoring Ms. Miers with the Jurisprudence Award for devotion to constitutional principles and democratic values.
A few days later, Ms. Miers wrote to thank the Bushes, saying, "Texas has a very popular governor and first lady!" She recalled a little girl who collected Mr. Bush’s autograph and said, "I was struck by the tremendous impact you have on the children whose lives you touch."
"Keep up all the great work," she wrote. "The state is in great hands. Thanks also for yours and your family’s personal sacrifice."
In October 1997, Ms. Miers sent Mr. Bush a flowery greeting card in thanks for a letter that he had written on her behalf. In it, she said of his daughters: "Hopefully Jenna and Barbara recognize that their parents are ‘cool’ - as do the rest of us."
She added, "All I hear is how great you and Laura are doing," and ended, "Texas is blessed."
Poppy Bush needs to take his boy out to the cherry tree for a father/son talk, while Laura sends an order to Amazon for the entire Hardy Boy’s series. If I remember correctly there are around 55 to 60 books in the series. That would be enough titles alone, forget the content, to keep W. busy until the Rapture.
Issues related to the economy get hotter by the day and when it comes to discussing it politically, I can’t think of a more boring subject. But if it continues to drop — and it can quickly — by Labor Day next year, bloggers will be economic experts as we are foreign policy experts today. There’s a good laugh in there if you’ll just find it.
The Federal Reserve cut a key interest rate today for the third time this year, continuing its campaign to prevent the worsening crisis in the housing and financial markets from causing a recession.
The central bank’s policymaking committee cut the federal funds rate, at which banks make overnight loans to each other, by a quarter-percentage point to 4.25 percent. The lower rate is likely to trickle through to interest rates on credit cards, business loans and other forms of borrowing, stimulating the economy.
Presidential candidates need to start speaking up about what their economic wizards are telling them and what their priorities are: the mortgage factor will eventually have a domino effect if not contained.
I imagine if you talked with senior executives at Lowe’s and Home Depot, they would probably describe their business environment as well into a serious economic downturn, or worse. The middle-management bonuses will likely be nothing more than wishes this year.
“Incoming information suggests that economic growth is slowing, reflecting the intensification of the housing correction and some softening in business and consumer spending,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
The committee used language that kept its options open for the next meeting: “The Committee will continue to assess the effects of financial and other developments on financial prospects and will act as needed to foster price stability and sustainable economic growth.”
When the Fed starts parsing words it’s time to pay close attention to what they are saying and what they are not saying.
I continue to hear “no end in sight.” The castle is what the American dream is built upon…well since WW II that’s been the basic structure. For the foreseeable future, there is no stopping the foreclosure dragons from getting across the moat. Just let the pace of foreclosures continue and there will be an incredible crying out of pain.
If per chance, a deserving soul falls within the guidelines of Bush’s plan today, I wouldn’t count on seeing any funds for a long time, if at all. Eligible today, but maybe not by the time they get the logistical and other similar aspects squared away.
It can only be a matter of time before the Bush administration blocks military and Executive Branch employees from telling Santa Claus what they want for Christmas.
The Department of Defense (DOD) and "the administration" refused to allow the DOD’s chief prosecutor to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today regarding the "politicization of… military tribunals," prosecutorial intervention, and detainees’ rights at Guantanamo.
In an opening statement to the Committee, Chairwoman Diane Feinstein said, "I invited Colonel Davis to testify at this hearing…the Defense Department has ordered him not to appear… Unfortunately, I have to conclude…the administration is trying to stop a fair and open discussion about the legal rights of detainees at Guantanamo."
After listening to Feinstein’s statement, you may be convinced the Bush administration made a duplicate copy of Alberto Gonzales’ operating model and policies at the Justice Department and implemented them all at Guantanamo.
Watch the highlights of Feinstein’s opening statement:
Partial transcript:
SEN. FEINSTEIN: "The defense department’s chief prosecutor, Colonel Morris Davis, has recently resigned over his concerns about how the military commission’s process has been politicized…On October 4th of this year, Colonel Davis resigned from his position after concluding that full, fair, and open trials were unlikely at Guantanamo."
"Colonel Davis has stated to me, yesterday, that the convening authority…has been compromised and politicized…"
"Colonel Davis has stated to DoD and publicly that the prosecution process has been politicized. That the convening authority and its legal adviser would direct the prosecution’s pre-trial preparation, including directing the office about what evidence to use, what charges to file, and that his efforts to ensure that the military commissions would be open and fair were being overridden by administration officials, who believed it was more important to get convictions before the 2008 elections.
"As Colonel Davis told the Washington Post on October 20…"There was a big concern that the election of 2008 is coming up. There was a rush to get high interest cases into court at the expense of openness."
"I invited Colonel Davis to testify at this hearing; however, The Defense Department has ordered him not to appear. That, indeed, is very disappointing.
"We assured the administration that Colonel Davis would not be asked about pending and open cases, but we were told simply that Colonel Davis was active-duty military, and because he was active-duty military, they could issue an order that he had to follow."
"…Unfortunately, I have to conclude that by prohibiting Colonel Davis from testifying, the administration is trying to stop a fair and open discussion about the legal rights of detainees at Guantanamo."
This is a perfect example of how poll results can be misleading and depending upon the credibility of the pollster, questions couched to produce desired results. Furthermore the basic principles behind it are highly indicative of how America goes about electing its presidents, and that is woefully bad.
AP/Ipsos Poll Courtesy of MSNBC
How would you answer the question?
If I based my answer on facts and the objectives as defined in President Bush’s surge strategy on January 10, 2007, I can’t give an empirical yes or no answer, and doubt that many, if any, could do otherwise. The only way I could answer the question today is with a high degree of subjectivity and applying provisions or caveats that the next person may or may not apply.
I’ll cite some reasons why I think this specific question is a bad poll question in a moment, but I want to make another point first based on the same principles. As I alluded to a moment ago, this is not a yes or no question, and unfortunately, it is indicative of the types of questions the presidential candidates are asked in debates, especially by CNN. Worse still are the asinine “raise your hand” questions.
Solutions or answers to complex issues and questions cannot be reduced to a neat little black or white box, one of which you choose and walk away with.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both stumbled in recent debates on the issue of providing undocumented workers drivers’ licenses. My personal opinion is Hillary Clinton simply blew it by trying to pander too much, but she’s not perfect like many expect her to be. Obama wanted to qualify his “Yes” answer, but Wolf Blitzer wanted no part of the details Obama had to offer. Blitzer ultimately achieved his, and CNN’s, biased goal - enhance Hillary’s performance and degrade Obama’s. And what was gained from that debate? Other than my rating of the worst debate I’ve ever watched, CNN was winner take all. It was substantially more about ratings and had little, if anything, to do with truly and objectively serving the voters needs.
Think about it. Harry Truman was probably the last president to be elected on something other than 30-second television sound bites. The year was 1948. I’m not slamming TV, I’m slamming what some have allowed it to become and continue to aggessively promote it — direclty and indirectly.
Moving back to the actual question posed above, these are just a few of the obvious holes, but I believe they will help emphasize my point.
If casualties drop from an average of 133 troops killed per month in the spring of this year to an average of 40 troops killed per month last month is that progress? Or would zero casualties be progress? If casualties spike to 75 next month, does that change the answer? Moreover, whatever the answer to the applicable question(s) is, is it a factor in determining if political objectives are being achieved, and if it is a factor, how much weight does it carry and which political objectives should it be applied to or subtracted from?
The number of casualties for U.S. troops and civilians (Iraqi and any other country) has declined over the past few months, but there has been no progress on the ultimate objective - the political solution. In fact, one could easily argue and win that the political objectives are substantially less likely to be achieved today than three months ago. President Bush proved that point by implementing his cut-and-run strategy for political objectives two weeks ago.
If I had to give a yes or no answer and could not qualify it, I would answer no because of the lack of political progress (regression in fact). And if that is not enough, what does my qualified, “No,” answer indicate?
Americans have serious questions they must answer over the next year. Not just two or three like who to vote for president, deciding a position on the war in Iraq, and immigration. The tougher questions are what are the needs of the country and the people? How should tomorrow be approached when no one knows what it will bring? What are the implications, if any to statements like Mitt Romney’s: “Religion needs freedom, and freedom needs religion”
Should certain Senators and Representatives be reelected because they earned it and are we sure we know what “it” is? Is expressing my opinion in the voting booth enough or should I do something else?
That’s enough soapbox-standing for the foreseeable future.
Information about the CIA’s destroying interrogation videotapes continue to drip at a slow pace, albeit fortunate that it comes at all. The New York Timesreleases an article today that amounts to an exposé of he-said-he-said-maybe-she-said debates between high-ranking officials in the White House (mostly lawyers at this juncture), the CIA, the Justice Department, and lawyers at varying levels from each organization that fail to agree within their own stove-pipe organizations and agree even less between the respective agencies and the White House.
The Times article today is the first of those published recently that begins to provide real insight into just how complex this albatross may be and how strong the debate is between “factions.” For example, just trying to determine what to do with the now destroyed tapes, has been a heated debate for more than two years.
The former intelligence official acknowledged that there had been nearly two years of debate among government agencies about what to do with the tapes, and that lawyers within the White House and the Justice Department had in 2003 advised against a plan to destroy them. But the official said that C.I.A. officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the C.I.A. was never given a direct order not to destroy the tapes.
“They never told us, ‘Hell, no,’” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘You cannot destroy them,’ we would not have destroyed them.”
I have to wonder how much “passing the hot potato” or cover-up – it could be either or both — is actually occurring here. If lawyers “within the White House and the Justice Department” previously advised the CIA to not destroy the tapes, does that sound like the same White House and Justice Department the country has endured for seven years? They destroy evidence and make no bones about it.
Consider this scenario: War, at some level, obviously exists between the White House, the CIA, and who knows what other agencies. If the White House was involved in planning, approving, implementing, or evaluating illegal torture such as waterboarding, they don’t want any evidence of the war crimes, literally, to be traceable to the White House. But if the CIA is in a conflict mode with the White House, the WH cannot simply destroy the evidence nor may they be able to simply send it over to the CIA for “safekeeping.”
If the White House is complicit, and presuming they are, the CIA may have told them to stuff it; they’ve had enough from Bush and Cheney over the years. The CIA may be taking the position: if there is the slightest chance they (the CIA) are going down for following Dick Cheney’s orders, they don’t intend to go down alone.
Another possibility may be that officials in the CIA decided that obstruction of justice or similar charges may be far less consequential than war crimes – destroying evidence of waterboarding may have been a very easy decision for them. This hypothesis requires giving the White House more credibility than I believe they have the capacity for, but miracles do happen. This gets a bit convoluted, but here goes.
Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., former head of the Directorate of Operations – the clandestine branch of the CIA – reportedly authorized the destruction of tapes (quantity accuracy, etc. is not important at the moment) based on legal opinions written by lawyers within the CIA. However, the White House, including Harriet Miers, allegedly advised the CIA on multiple occasions to not destroy the tapes. Moreover, the Justice Department is said to have intervened and echoed the same “advice” the White House was giving.
Now this is where I get confused and my lack of knowledge on Constitutional law is blatantly obvious.
Rodriguez is authorizing actions: (i) based on legal opinions composed within the CIA; (ii) they are in direct conflict with White House legal counsel’s “advice,” which seems to defy a logical chain of command – I don’t know that it does, but common sense tells me CIA must yield to WH; and (iii) are in conflict with the Justice Department’s “advice,” which I presume received some input from its Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
The OLC is the Executive Branch’s mini-Supreme Court. If the Executive Branch, which the CIA is part of, needs clarification on whether they are performing their duties within the boundaries of the Constitution and existing statutes, it is the OLC’s responsibility to undertake a legal review and render an opinion. That opinion is virtually law.
The OLC is a very powerful, little-known section of the Justice Department that the Bush administration has turned into a print shop for rendering opinions that it wants (e.g., infamous 2002 torture memo) regardless of constitutionality or adherence to existing statute.
So, for the first time I can ever remember, the Bush White House tells an agency – the CIA in this case – to not violate the law. The Justice Department and the possibly the OLC tells the CIA to not destroy the tapes. But instead, Rodriguez willingly and knowingly defied the common sense chain of command; if not the legal chain of command. With full awareness of possible incarceration, he dismisses congressional and criminal investigations underway, and discards the tapes.
To rebuke all that authority and counsel, there had to be extremely compelling reasons to discard the tapes.
Looking closer, there are contradictions, or at least nonsensical actions, taken by Rodriguez. He says he has the authority to destroy the recordings:
The former official said Mr. Rodriguez decided in November 2005 that he had sufficient authority to destroy the interrogation videos, based on the written authorization given to him from lawyers within the branch, then known as the Directorate of Operations.
So, Rodriguez seeks legal counsel before making his decision, but according to the Times, he stopped short of getting approval from – if not rebuked – the top lawyer in the CIA.
In describing the decision to destroy the tapes, current and former officials said John A. Rizzo, the agency’s top lawyer at the time, was not asked for final approval before the tapes were destroyed, although Mr. Rizzo had been involved in discussions for two years about the tapes.
It is unclear what weight an opinion from a lawyer within the clandestine service would have if it were not formally approved by Mr. Rizzo. But the former official said Mr. Rodriguez and others in the clandestine branch believed the legal judgment gave them the blessing to destroy the tapes.
The former official said the leaders of the clandestine service believed they “didn’t need to ask Rizzo’s permission.”
Why would Rodriguez bother to ask internal legal counsel about such an important matter, if on the other hand he intended to circumvent the required internal policy? It just doesn’t make sense.
Something was (or is) being covered up intentionally or the information has just not come forth yet. Ensuring the confidentiality of CIA operatives is too weak. There had to be several other alternatives to protect the agents. There was a very powerful and serious reason for Rodriguez to make the decision to destroy the videotapes, assuming he did authorize the destruction of the tapes, and someone else did not manage the situation for him.
DNI Mike McConnell is scheduled to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee today. Unfortunately it is a closed door session, and that brings up a bit of a tangent. Given the complexity of this case and the appearance of impropriety on his part, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV) should recuse himself from any investigation related to this matter.
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