Torture Subpoenas: Will Administration Officials Testify? And Will It Matter?

Like the spin on everything else the Bush administration tries to hide, the spin on torture is endless and multi-layered. And everybody's buying it, or at least some of it -- except possibly some ultra-radical terrorist-sympathizers.

Thomas Ferraro for Reuters, in "Cheney aide subpoenaed to testify to Congress", writes:

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was subpoenaed on Wednesday to testify in a congressional probe of the administration's treatment and possible [sic] torture of enemy combatants [sic].

Not just enemy combatants, of course, but all those classified as such, many of whom were neither enemy nor combatants. But there was no classification for "in the wrong place at the wrong time".

And there's no real need for the word "possible" here. The torture is well-established, admitted, boasted even -- but only in the "right" company, in the "right" political climate.

House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, issued the subpoena to David Addington [photo] a day after it was authorized by a House panel.

John Conyers could have been a hero of American democracy but instead he decided to be a chump. This won't change anything. Just watch.

The administration contends its aides can not be forced to testify. But Addington has indicated he may do so if subpoenaed, congressional staffers said.

Megan Mitchell, spokeswoman for the vice president's office, said, "I can confirm that we have received the subpoena. We are reviewing it and will respond accordingly."

We already have a fairly good idea of what the vice president's office would consider to be a suitable response.

The subpoena orders Addington to appear on June 26 before the House Judiciary's subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which is examining the administration's treatment of detainees.

Addington reportedly played a key role in drafting U.S. strategies to combat [sic] terrorism after [sic] the September 11 attacks [sic] on the United States.

Or maybe the strategy is to foment terrorism and maybe it was drafted well before the September 11 attacks. Or whatever they were.

Bush maintains the United States does not torture, but he has refused to discuss interrogation techniques, saying he does not want to tip off the enemy.

Bush has also refused to sign a bill passed by both houses of congress which would have banned torture. In effect the president says, "We don't torture ... but we can't stop because our national security depends on it!"

The CIA has acknowledged using a simulated [sic] drowning technique known as waterboarding on three terrorism suspects, but says it stopped using that method in 2003.

Waterboarding is not simulated drowning; it is drowning. When the victim is tied down and his lungs are filling up with water, there's nothing simulated about it.

It's stopped just before the victim dies, and it can be done again and again. But that doesn't make it any less cruel or any more justifiable.

Waterboarding has been condemned by human rights groups, foreign countries and many U.S. lawmakers as torture.

It has also been outlawed by treaties signed by and therefore binding on the United States of America. So it doesn't really matter what human rights groups, foreign countries and many U.S. lawmakers think or say; waterboarding would be illegal even if they all approved of it!

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft and John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, have agreed to testify before the Judiciary subcommittee.

That's very civil of them, but it's entirely possible that they may not have the last say in the matter.

Bush has invoked executive privilege in rejecting congressional subpoenas for a number of current and former aides, many sought in a probe of the firing in 2006 of nine federal prosecutors.

In March, the House Judiciary Committee filed suit in U.S. District Court asking it to direct White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to produce subpoenaed documents and order former White House counsel Harriet Miers to comply with a subpoena and testify about the ousted prosecutors.

A ruling is not expected for at least several months.

... by which time all the damage these clowns have done will be permanent.

Oh wait! It already is!

The spin is global and pervasive. China's Xinhua says, "U.S. House panel subpoenas former, present gov't officials on torture":

WASHINGTON, May 6 -- A U.S. House panel subpoenaed several former and present high-ranking Bush administration officials on Tuesday to testify on the issue of alleged torture [a little better] of terror [sic] detainees.

Some of the detainees were captured and sold for ransom. The Americans were offering huge bounties for terror suspects in late 2001, and Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf wrote in his autobiography of receiving millions of dollars in exchange for detainees.

Among [the officials subpoenaed] are John Yoo, a former top Justice Department official who authored hugely controversial memos on interrogation techniques used on detainees, and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief-of-staff David Addington, who was heavily involved in preparing the memos.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and former Assistant Attorney General Dan Levin also agreed to testify on the issue before the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

The subcommittee said former CIA Director George Tenet is still in negotiations for testimony.

Subcommittee chairman Jerrold Nadler said torture is "un-American and yet it has been used by this government against those in our custody and control."

Torture is certainly not un-American. Americans have been training torture teams (which they call security forces") -- and death squads -- for employment in foreign countries for decades. But the torture -- and the death squads -- have been "clandestine". In other words, it's considered un-American to admit these grotesque facts, much less to obsess about them.

Xinhua continues:

"Now we know that these so-called 'enhanced' interrogation techniques were approved at the highest levels of government. Torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, besides being contrary to American values and traditions, have proven to be an ineffective means to obtaining actionable intelligence," [Nadler] added.

"Enhanced interrogation" is not about obtaining actionable intelligence. It's an instrument of oppression. But who's counting?

Malcolm Nance might be counting; he has an intimate knowledge of waterboarding and he's not afraid of saying what he knows. I doubt he would ever be asked to testify, but here's some of what he might say:

I know waterboarding is torture - because I did it myself

In the media, waterboarding is called "simulated drowning," but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.

Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

How much of this the victim is to endure depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim's face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs that show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia - meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.

The lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again. Call it "Chinese water torture," "the barrel," or "the waterfall." It is all the same.

Speaking of "all the same", Jim Freeman isn't counting on anything changing because of this sudden rash of subpoenas:

[T]he Democrats, including (but not limited to) Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Henry Waxman, John Conyers, Hapless Harry, Chuck Schumer and [...] Patrick Leahy, are all in on this long and ugly list of impeachable offenses, some of them treasonable. They are co-conspirators.

Anybody feel like arguing with Jim Freeman on this one? The floor is yours, if you want it...

Torture Tape Updates: White House Lied! CIA Violated Court Order! Mukasey Covered Up! ... [yawn] What Else Is New?

The Los Angeles Times says the CIA's destruction of some of its 9/11 torture videos may have been a violation of a court order.

Over the objections of the Justice Department, a federal judge said Tuesday he would explore whether the U.S. had violated a court order to preserve evidence when the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of two terrorism suspects in 2005.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. set a hearing for Friday in Washington in response to a request from Yemeni prisoners who are challenging their detention by the U.S. at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
...

The tapes were destroyed by a CIA official in November 2005, at a time of growing congressional and public concern about U.S. tactics in the war on terrorism, including interrogation techniques.

It was also five months after Kennedy, in the case of the Yemeni prisoners, issued an order requiring that the U.S. preserve and maintain "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees now" at Guantanamo Bay. According to court papers, government lawyers said at the time that a formal order was not necessary because they were "well aware of their obligation not to destroy evidence that may be relevant in pending litigation."
...

In court papers filed last week, the Justice Department argued that the videos weren't covered by the order because at the time [the prisoners shown on the tapes] were being held in secret CIA prisons overseas. The men were later transferred to the Guantanamo Bay prison.

That's a nice loophole they found there, no?

The New York Times says the White House was much more involved in pre-destruction discussions than the public has been told.

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes.
...

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes.

Sounds like a coverup, doesn't it? But what are they covering up?

A coverup, that's what?

Bob Parry says: "Surprise! Mukasey Covered Up Torture".

Last month, Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California joined Republicans to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, even though he refused to acknowledge that the simulated drowning of waterboarding was torture.

Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada helped the Bush administration, too, by rushing a floor vote on Mukasey before rank-and-file Democrats could get organized and push for a filibuster.

To show thanks, Mukasey [photo] now is slapping the Democratic-controlled Congress in the face by demanding it back off any oversight investigations into how and why the CIA in late 2005 destroyed videotapes of the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects.

Mukasey is covering up a lot more than torture, but the courageous Bob Parry won't go there. I have no such qualms. But first, let's recap, shall we?

The CIA may have violated a court order? To this administration, court orders are made to be (a) defied, or (b) used as "justification" for changing the laws they have violated, or (c) used against others. We'll see what they decide to do with this one.

The White House failed to tell the public the truth? That's been their policy forever. Get used to it. And please quit believing what they say, especially their non-denial denials!

Mukasey covered up torture? Of course he did. That was his litmus test for his appointment as Attorney General. And as Bob Parry points out, "leaders" from both parties made sure it happened.

Also: Larisa Alexandrovna says Paul Thompson has created a new section on the destruction of the tapes, at his invaluable site, Cooperative Research.

And finally, please see my previous piece on this matter: "Connecting The 9/11 Dots: Dead Cutouts, Destroyed Tapes, And The Hidden Assumption That Poisons Everything".

Jack Goldsmith: Shameless Shill? or Clueless Conservative?

In "Conscience of a Conservative", Jeffrey Rosen of the New York Times Magazine gives his readers an advance look at "The Terror Presidency", a book coming soon from Jack Goldsmith [photo], who headed the

Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power

for nine months between September 2003 and June 2004.

Goldsmith resigned in order to strengthen a decision he had made to restrict presidential power -- one of several such decisions that Goldsmith reportedly made during his short tenure in office.

Given that Goldsmith came to the administration as a highly-regarded University of Chicago law professor, and given that he's currently teaching at Harvard Law School, it doesn't seem right to call him "clueless". And given his resistance to the Bush administration's power-grabbing agenda, it doesn't seem right to call him "shameless". Or does it?

Read what Goldsmith says; author Jeffrey Rosen gets out of the way as much as possible in the following excerpts (my emphasis throughout):

About the Office of Legal Counsel:

The Office of Legal Counsel interprets all laws that bear on the powers of the executive branch. The opinions of the head of the office are binding, except on the rare occasions when they are reversed by the attorney general or the president.
...
For this reason, the office has two important powers: the power to put a brake on aggressive presidential action by saying no and, conversely, the power to dispense what Goldsmith calls “free get-out-of jail cards” by saying yes. Its opinions, he writes in his book, are the equivalent of “an advance pardon” for actions taken at the fuzzy edges of criminal laws.

In the Bush administration, however, the most important legal-policy decisions in the war on terror before Goldsmith’s arrival were made not by the Office of Legal Counsel but by a self-styled “war council.” This group met periodically in Gonzales’s office at the White House or Haynes’s office at the Pentagon. The members included Gonzales, Addington, Haynes and Yoo. These men shared a belief that the biggest obstacle to a vigorous response to the 9/11 attacks was the set of domestic and international laws that arose in the 1970s to constrain the president’s powers in response to the excesses of Watergate and the Vietnam War.
...

Goldsmith told me that he objected to what he calls the “extremely broad and unnecessary analysis of the president’s commander in chief power” in the memos. [...] He also found the tone of both opinions “tendentious” rather than cautious and feared that they might be interpreted as an attempt to immunize government officials for genuinely bad acts.

About the GWOT and the Geneva Conventions:

“I shared, and I still share, a lot of their concerns about what we have to do to meet the terrorist threat,” he told me. When I asked whether he thought Gonzales should have resigned and whether Addington should follow, he demurred. “I was friends with Gonzales and feel very sorry for him,” he said. “We got along really well. I admired and respected Addington, even when I thought his judgment was crazy. They thought they were doing the right thing.”
...

Several hours after Goldsmith was sworn in, on Oct. 6, 2003, he recalls that he received a phone call from Gonzales: the White House needed to know as soon as possible whether the Fourth Geneva Convention, which describes protections that explicitly cover civilians in war zones like Iraq, also covered insurgents and terrorists. After several days of study, Goldsmith agreed with lawyers in several other federal agencies, who had concluded that the convention applied to all Iraqi civilians, including terrorists and insurgents. In a meeting with Ashcroft, Goldsmith explained his analysis, which Ashcroft accepted. Later, Goldsmith drove from the Justice Department to the White House for a meeting with Gonzales and Addington. Goldsmith remembers his deputy Patrick Philbin turning to him in the car and saying: “They’re going to be really mad. They’re not going to understand our decision. They’ve never been told no.”

In his book, Goldsmith describes Addington as the “biggest presence in the room — a large man with large glasses and an imposing salt-and-pepper beard” who was “known throughout the bureaucracy as the best-informed, savviest and most conservative lawyer in the administration, someone who spoke for and acted with the full backing of the powerful vice president, and someone who crushed bureaucratic opponents.” When Goldsmith presented his analysis of the Geneva Conventions at the White House, Addington, according to Goldsmith, became livid. “The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. “You cannot question his decision.”
...

Months later, when Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. “If you rule that way,” Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, “the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.”

Subtle, no?

About the quest for unlimited power:

Instead of reaching out to Congress and the courts for support, which would have strengthened its legal hand, the administration asserted what Goldsmith considers an unnecessarily broad, “go-it-alone” view of executive power. As Goldsmith sees it, this strategy has backfired. “They embraced this vision,” he says, “because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it.”
...

Goldsmith puts the bulk of the responsibility for the excesses of the Office of Legal Counsel on the White House. “I probably had a hundred meetings with Gonzales, and there was only one time I was talking about a national-security issue when Addington wasn’t there,” Goldsmith told me. “My conflicts were all with Addington, who was a proxy for the vice president. They were very, very stressful.”
...

In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: “They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations,” he writes. Goldsmith’s first experienced this extraordinary concealment, or “strict compartmentalization,” in late 2003 when, he recalls, Addington angrily denied a request by the N.S.A.’s inspector general to see a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal analysis supporting the secret surveillance program. “Before I arrived in O.L.C., not even N.S.A. lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department’s legal analysis of what N.S.A. was doing,” Goldsmith writes.
...

He shared the White House’s concern that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might prevent wiretaps on international calls involving terrorists. But Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, which was highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts. “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.
...

“I don’t know if President Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making,” Goldsmith told me. “It’s hard to know how he would know.”
...

The Bush administration’s legalistic “go-it-alone approach,” Goldsmith suggests, is the antithesis of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s willingness to collaborate with Congress. Bush, he argues, ignored the truism that presidential power is the power to persuade. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense,” Goldsmith concludes in his book. “This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”
...

In retrospect, Goldsmith told me, Bush “could have achieved all that he wanted to achieve, and put it on a firmer foundation, if he had been willing to reach out to other institutions of government.” Instead, Goldsmith said, he weakened the presidency he was so determined to strengthen. “I don’t think any president in the near future can have the same attitude toward executive power, because the other institutions of government won’t allow it,” he said softly. “The Bush administration has borrowed its power against future presidents.”

In my view, Goldsmith's statement that Bush

“could have achieved all that he wanted to achieve, and put it on a firmer foundation, if he had been willing to reach out to other institutions of government.”

misses the point entirely.

Bush didn't "reach out to other institutions of government" because he was not looking to build a relationship with those institutions. He wanted to negate "other institutions of government", and he has managed extremely well.

There were always presidential powers other than the power to persuade. But there are a lot more of them now than there used to be.

It's a great mystery: How can a gifted attorney, who has seen the administration's favorite tactics close-up, fail to understand that this is what they were trying to do?

The patently illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and executive orders. Bush's self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them indefinitely -- even kill them -- has likewise been unchallenged by the legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas -- and even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to enforce them -- to no other reaction than a stern promise from Democratic leaders to "look further into this matter." His spokesmen -- and his "signing statements" -- now openly proclaim his utter disdain for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign right to "interpret" -- or ignore -- legislation as he wishes. He retains the right to "interpret" just which interrogation techniques are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons -- where those "strenuous" techniques are practiced -- remain open. His increasingly brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime.
...

Look at the facts, the reality: Bush wants Congressional approval of his illegal surveillance; he gets it. Bush wants to launch spy satellites against the American people; he does it. Bush wants concentration camps and secret prisons with torture; he's got them. Bush wants to escalate a ruinous, murderous, unpopular war; he does it. He wants to declare people "enemy combatants" and imprison them indefinitely; he does it. Bush's spokesmen openly claim that the laws passed by the people's representatives are "just advisory" and "the president can still do whatever he wants to do," and there is no outcry, no action, no defense of the Republic against this overthrow of the Constitution.

But despite all this, Jack Goldsmith says

that the Bush administration “badly overplayed a winning hand.” In retrospect, Goldsmith told me, Bush “could have achieved all that he wanted to achieve, and put it on a firmer foundation, if he had been willing to reach out to other institutions of government.” Instead, Goldsmith said, he weakened the presidency he was so determined to strengthen. “I don’t think any president in the near future can have the same attitude toward executive power, because the other institutions of government won’t allow it,” he said softly. “The Bush administration has borrowed its power against future presidents.”

Is he pitifully ignorant or deliberately lying? And why is our country always in the hands of people who are definitely one or the other?

On further reflection, it's a wrong question! There's no need for the "or". There's nothing mutually exclusive about anything here.

Goldsmith, despite his teaching history and his short-lived internal opposition to power-hunger, appears to be both shameless and clueless, just as our country appears to be in the hands of people who are both ignorant and lying.

But that may be a mirage. Jack Goldsmith was one of three editors of a book published in 2005 by Princeton University Press. The book is called "On Nineteen Eight-Four: Orwell And Our Future".

How do you get a gig like that? There's only one way.

He's not clueless. He's not ignorant. He's just a shameless spinner, who put up some token resistance that hasn't even mattered in the long run. But he's a hero -- the sort of guy who inspires the NYT editors to shoehorn the words "Conservative" and "Conscience" into the same title.

Another passage from "Magazine Preview: Conscience of a Conservative" shows that Goldsmith had no real concern for the preservation of liberty, and was only quibbling about methods:

“I’m not a civil libertarian, and what I did wasn’t driven by concerns about civil liberties per se,” he told me. “It was a disagreement about means, not ends, driven by a desire to make sure that the administration’s counterterrorism policies had a firm legal foundation.”

I can't help wondering whether that's the sort of thing one has to say to get the New York Times to promote one's new booke.

If Goldsmith had told the truth -- if he had said that far from weakening it, Bush has strengthened the presidency beyond beyond all constraint; if he had said that this was the president's goal all along -- he might just have had to go out and sell those books himself!

If you're Jack Goldsmith, you're thanking goodness for the old grey bitch of the "liberal media". If you preferred what your country used to be, you're shaking your head in disgust.

At least your eyes won't get stuck.

~~~

[See also]

Bob Parry: Bowing Before an American Tyranny

What's The Angle? Is The WaPo Cheney Series Ace Journalism, Or Subtle Psy-op?

The Washington Post has been a bit more interesting than usual lately, with an epic four-part series by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker about Dick Cheney and how he has changed the role of "Vice" President.

I've been reading and reading and my eyes are going wonky and I'm still trying to decide what to make of it. Is it "Pulitzer-quality journalism", as Gandhi suggests? Is it really as "breathtaking" as Larisa Alexandrovna thinks?

Or is it just another dose of the usual Bush-administration bunk, spun through an exceptionally clever filter: yet another limited hangout, slightly damaging but not really all that bad, something the spin-meisters think they can contain with a barrage of falsehoods which in turn will serve as a platform for further lies? At this point the jury's still out, in my estimation. (Your mileage may vary and vive la difference!)

Some passages in the series just beg to be highlighted. This passage grabbed Gandhi by the throat:

In a bunker beneath the East Wing of the White House, Cheney locked his eyes on CNN, chin resting on interlaced fingers. He was about to watch, in real time, as thousands were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Previous accounts have described Cheney's adrenaline-charged evacuation to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center that morning, a Secret Service agent on each arm. They have not detailed his reaction, 22 minutes later, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

"There was a groan in the room that I won't forget, ever," one witness said. "It seemed like one groan from everyone" -- among them Rice; her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley; economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey; counselor Matalin; Cheney's chief of staff, Libby; and the vice president's wife.

Cheney made no sound. "I remember turning my head and looking at the vice president, and his expression never changed," said the witness, reading from a notebook of observations written that day. Cheney closed his eyes against the image for one long, slow blink.

Three people who were present, not all of them admirers, said they saw no sign then or later of the profound psychological transformation that has often been imputed to Cheney. What they saw, they said, was extraordinary self-containment and a rapid shift of focus to the machinery of power.

Let that sink in for a moment, will you? Why not just hang around and let that gun smoke awhile?

Larisa quotes the same passage as well as the following:

While others assessed casualties and the work of "first responders," Cheney began planning for a conflict that would call upon lawyers as often as soldiers and spies."

I would suggest that the word "began" in the previous sentence is misleading. But whatever the case,

"In expanding presidential power, Cheney's foremost agent was David S. Addington, his formidable general counsel and legal adviser of many years. On the morning of Sept. 11, Addington was evacuated from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House and began to make his way toward his Virginia home on foot. As he neared the Arlington Memorial Bridge, someone in the White House reached him with a message: Turn around. The vice president needs you.

Down in the bunker, according to a colleague with firsthand knowledge, Cheney and Addington began contemplating the founding question of the legal revolution to come: What extraordinary powers will the president need for his response?

Before the day ended, Cheney's lawyer joined forces with Timothy E. Flanigan, the deputy White House counsel, linked by secure video from the Situation Room. Flanigan patched in John C. Yoo at the Justice Department's fourth-floor command center. White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales joined later.

Thus formed the core legal team that Cheney oversaw, directly and indirectly, after the terrorist attacks."

Larisa highlights it differently but she has this to say about it:

This is still September 11, 2001 remember and seemingly - although I may be reading this wrong - still during daylight hours, that is to say, in the process of the attacks. You will recall that building 7 did not collapse until around 5 PM EST. So we don't know who attacked us (we suspect), we don't know what the security breach was (how they boarded the planes, how many there were, etc.), in fact, at this point - and this I remember very well - there are still rumors that the Empire State building had a bomb in it, that the Holland tunnel had a bomb in it, and that there was still a 20th hijacker somewhere out there. I remember too a flight in Cleveland being suspected and grounded, and all major cities being evacuated. In fact, I remember that day from my vantage point almost play by play, where I was, how the day progressed, what the various threat alerts coming in were. It was chaos and confusion and no one knew if the country was secure, that is, if the attacks were over, for what appeared to be an eternity.

Yet as this is going on, Cheney's concern is not making sure the country was secure, or making sure that he knew - as best as could be known at the time - what the damage was, etc. His concern was a power grab? On 9/11, during the attacks, he calls in lawyers? This is horrifying to me because it shows a man so emotionally vacant that his reaction to horror is to figure out how it best benefits him?

I really don't see what the big surprise is here. Is it such a stretch -- especially given Norman Mineta's testimony -- to understand why Cheney didn't bother trying to find out whether the attacks were over? Or who was behind them?

Larisa finds it horrifying that a power grab was Cheney's immediate reaction.

But what if it wasn't a reaction at all? How horrifying is that?

To speak plainly: on this particular point I do not get Larisa. She's been dogging these guys for years; she knows how they operate; she has excellent sources; she's a fine investigator and a very capable tactician. And there was already plenty of evidence on the table suggesting that Cheney was not the slightest bit surprised -- or appalled -- by anything that happened on 9/11.

Obviously Larisa didn't know who attacked us, or what the security breach was, or the source or veracity of the rumors about the bombs in the Holland Tunnel and the Empire State Building, or anything about the other threat alerts that kept coming in all day long, or whether the country was secure, that is, whether the attacks were over.

Not that there's anything wrong with not knowing! There would in fact be something wrong with knowing!

None of us knew, except whoever planned the attacks. But if somebody did know, it would explain why he might not have been concerned with the answers to any of these questions, and it would also explain why he might show no sign of surprise or sadness -- not even a groan -- nothing but "extraordinary self-containment and a rapid shift of focus to the machinery of power".

~~~

Let us now turn to one of the results -- some would say the defining result -- of Cheney's rapid shift of focus to the machinery of power. Larisa said this made her skin crawl:

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.
...

No longer was the vice president focused on procedural rights, such as access to lawyers and courts. The subject now was more elemental: How much suffering could U.S. personnel inflict on an enemy to make him talk? Cheney's lawyer feared that future prosecutors, with motives "difficult to predict," might bring criminal charges against interrogators or Bush administration officials.

Geneva rules forbade not only torture but also, in equally categorical terms, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" against a detainee "at any time and in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony. The best defense against such a charge, Addington wrote, would combine a broad presidential directive for humane treatment, in general, with an assertion of unrestricted authority to make exceptions.

I agree about the skin crawl but unfortunately I no longer see any of this as a reaction.

Unfortunately? Well, it's unfortunate for me, because it makes my internal organs crawl too.

As far as the series is concerned, I'm still reading, and thinking ... and trying to figure out what has happened here. If this is for real, it's a big step forward -- especially for the Washington Post. And that's why I don't trust it.

But if it's a psy-op then it's a subtle one. I know, I know, psy-ops can be exceptionally subtle, and I can be exceptionally dense. But in my opinion, if it's a psy-op then it would likely be one of two kinds.

There's the all-discrediting psy-op in which somebody spots a flaw (or an alleged flaw) in one paragraph of one article and uses it to allegedly discredit the entire series, as well as the real-life story on which it is based (thus Rather-gate; in this instance it would be used to "legitimize" Cheney's every illegal action). I don't see that happening in this case but it's still early and I wouldn't eliminate the possibility just yet.

Then there's the thin-edge-of-the-wedge, limited-hangout approach which we noted quite recently, where everything turns out to be worse than it was originally portrayed. If this is the case here, there are going to be a lot of spontaneous human cranium implosions, even among the most jaded analysts. On the other hand, this is one of the administration's favorite tactics, so I'll be having my skull reinforced, and as soon as possible.

There are other kinds of psy-ops as well, of course, so it could very well be something else ... if it's a plant.

If it's real, we get a whole 'nother set of questions, like: What does it all mean?

I think Larisa has it right when she says:

I am not a legal scholar, but it appears there has been a coup and no one told the President about it.

That's pretty clear, in my opinion. Or at least the first half of it is. Perhaps they told him but he didn't get it. Or maybe they told him but he doesn't care. Or maybe they told him but there's nothing he can do about it. I don't know. How can anyone really know things like this?

And what can we say about the Washington Post's role in support of real journalism (if that indeed is what this is)?

Would it signify a revival in American journalism? Or just a speed-bump on the road to hell?

And where did all this inside information come from? And why is it all coming out now?

On this question, Larisa has an idea I find quite intriguing:

I get the sense now that Bush's family is hitting back via the WaPo piece, likely bringing in all of their contacts and former officials from the Bush 41 administration to castrate Cheney as all other measures appear to have failed, including the Iraq Study Group, Gates at DOD, and Negroponte at State.

We'll see ...

On a possibly related note, why has the CIA released so much incriminating information all of a sudden?

TIME Magazine's Robert Baer says it's an attempt to send a message to the White House:

Hayden's plan is not only to draw a line under the past but make a point to this and future White Houses: Politicize intelligence and you'll find your name on the front page of the newspaper.

But when is intelligence not politicized? When is the President's name not on the front page of the newspaper?

So why else would could it be? It couldn't possibly be an attempt to draw attention away from the WaPo series on Dick Cheney, could it?

Nah! I didn't think so either.

So I'll leave you with one more good quote from Larisa:

I am starting now to believe that the President of the United States and the Vice President did likely have an agreement, described by Cheney as "an understanding," in part one of the WaPo series. Bush wanted the office and title, Cheney wanted the power. If this is in fact the agreement, then the public is owed an explanation and the Congress needs to take a look at the legality of such an agreement. Would a Cheney-Bush ticket have won do you think? Would anyone have elected Dick Cheney as President of the United States? Never.

We didn't elect George Bush, either. Never. But in a sense Larisa is still right: if the ticket had been Cheney/Bush, neither "election" -- 2000 or 2004 -- would have been close enough to steal.

Nonetheless I think Larisa is right when she says:

Cheney needed Bush to get elected it appears and to mislead the public as to who the actual President would be. That is my sense after reading the first two parts of this series.

Someone needs to ask the President (if we only had a press corps) if he agreed to abdicate his role as President to Dick Cheney before the election... not in title, but in authority. If not, then someone needs to ask the President if he minds that there has been a coup in his administration.

David Horsey has it right, too:

Waxman: Cheney's Office Says It's Not Covered By The Oversight Law It Wants To Abolish

CNN says

Vice President Dick Cheney's office refused to cooperate with an agency that oversees classified documents, then tried to abolish the office when it challenged the actions, House oversight committee Chairman Henry Waxman said.

The National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office is charged by presidential order with ensuring that classified information and documents are properly handled by executive branch agencies.

According to a letter from William Leonard, director of the oversight office, Cheney's office argued it did not meet the definition of an executive branch agency and therefore was exempt.

Leonard also wrote that Cheney's office suggested his agency be abolished under a revision of the presidential order now under consideration.

And

when the National Archives' office attempted to visit Cheney's team in 2004, it was prevented from doing so by Cheney's staff, Waxman wrote in the letter. The office had complied with the order in 2001 and 2002 but started refusing to do so in 2003.

In 2006, Leonard wrote to Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, to contest the office's refusal to comply and was told that the vice president's office "does not believe it is included in the definition of 'agency' as set forth in the order," nor is it an "entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information," according to letters released Thursday by Waxman's committee.

So Waxman has taken a bold step:

"I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions," Waxman, D-California, wrote in a letter Thursday to Cheney.

I'm sure Big Dick is quakin' in his snakeskins. OMG -- a letter from Waxman! What do we do?

Why does this Vice President -- whose only official duty is to break a tie in the Senate -- get to decide whether or not any particular law applies to his own office?

Oh, right; I forgot. Because that is the way it is.

Dumsfeld, Others May Face Charges Over Abu Ghraib

Is there a noose in Dumsfeld's future? Could be.

This just in (via BB2): a new article by Adam Zagorin of Time Magazine says:

New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of [outgoing Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
...
Along with Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Tenet, the other defendants in the case are Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone; former assistant attorney general Jay Bybee; former deputy assisant attorney general John Yoo; General Counsel for the Department of Defense William James Haynes II; and David S. Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Senior military officers named in the filing are General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top Army official in Iraq; Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of Guantanamo; senior Iraq commander, Major General Walter Wojdakowski; and Col. Thomas Pappas, the one-time head of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib.

According to Zagorin's account,

one of the witnesses who will testify [on behalf of the plaintiffs] is former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the one-time commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq.

Karpinski [...] has issued a written statement to accompany the legal filing, which says, in part: "It was clear the knowledge and responsibility [for what happened at Abu Ghraib] goes all the way to the top of the chain of command to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld."

This could get interesting very fast.

As Zagorin notes,

the Bush Administration has rejected adherence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on grounds that it could be used to unjustly prosecute U.S. officials.

The fact that the ICC could be used to justly prosecute U.S. officials doesn't make any difference, does it? Oops! I wasn't supposed to mention that, was I?

Oh well ... They've had their fun; now it's time for them to hang.

Pray for justice. Then watch as the neocons eat their own.

I can guarantee it won't be pretty. But it might be fun anyway.