Category Archives: Dick Cheney

Think

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The Los Angeles Times is running duelling op-eds on torture today, one by a computer scientist and one by a former CIA operative. You can guess which one is for it.

The computer guy, David Gelernter, from what I’ve seen of his bio, has no experience with spying or war. He’s a computer guy. His knee-jerk argument is that those who support the McCain Amendment are knee-jerkers.

But of course you don’t have to be “pro-torture” to oppose the McCain amendment. That naive misunderstanding summarizes the threat posed by this good-hearted, wrong-headed legislation. Those who oppose the amendment don’t think the CIA should be permitted to use torture or other rough interrogation techniques. What they think is that sometimes the CIA should be required to squeeze the truth out of prisoners. Not because the CIA wants to torture people, but because it may be the only option we’ve got.

McCain’s amendment is a trap for the lazy minded. Whenever a position seems so obvious that you don’t even have to stop and think — stop and think.

But if you are ignorant of the subject at hand, even a smart guy can think all day long and still be wrong. People with experience (see the previous post) say that what you squeeze out of prisoners is unlikely to be truth. Gelernter doesn’t acknowledge even the possibility that tortured people will say anything to stop the torture. Nor does he address larger concerns about the residual effects of torture–that it creates new enemies and dehumanizes the torturer. Gelernter presents a mathematical equation–torture applied to bad guys equals useful information–without showing how he arrived at his “solution.”

Get this:

Those who defend McCain’s amendment and attack Cheney and Bush feel a nice warm glow, as if they’re basking in virtue, as in a hot tub, sipping Cabernet. But there is no virtue in joining a crowd, even if the crowd is right — and this one isn’t.

McCain is a bona fide hero. But there’s nothing courageous in standing firm with virtually the whole cultural leadership of this nation and the Western world, under any circumstances. It’s too easy. To take a principled stand that you know will make people loathe and vilify you — that’s what integrity, leadership and moral courage are all about. This time Cheney is the hero. McCain is taking the easy out.

That’s the weenie’s whole argument–people who oppose McCain’s Amendment do so because they are noble and courageous, never mind that it’s unlikely either Cheney or Gellenter will ever be required to dirty their hands with torture personally. People who favor the McCain Amendment are intellectually lazy and don’t understand the harsh realities of the world. This includes ex-POW John McCain who (Gelernter implies) is just too emotional on the subject of torture to understand it.

Gellenter hasn’t noticed that his own argument is entirely emotional. He offers no data or evidence to back up his assumptions. Instead, he puts himself on the pedestal of righteousness and smears the opposition. A true rightie.

On the other side, ex-CIA operative Larry Johnson offers information, not emotion.

If you inflict enough pain on someone, they will give you information, but what they tell you may not be true. You will have to corroborate it, which will take time. And, unless you kill every suspect you brutalize, you will make enemies of them, their families, maybe their entire villages. What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust — even with a terrorist, even if it’s time-consuming — than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets, who believed that national security always trumped human rights.

And that’s the point. We should never use our fear of being attacked as justification for dehumanizing ourselves or others….

… am not advocating that terrorists be given room service at the Four Seasons. Some sleep deprivation — of the sort mothers of newborns all endure — and spartan living conditions are appropriate. What we must not do is use physical pain or the threat of drowning, as in “waterboarding,” to gain information. Tough, relentless questioning is OK. Torture is not.

Thankfully, several Republican senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are defying Cheney’s campaign for a torture loophole. Cheney’s plea to permit CIA officers unrestricted interrogation methods would be the death of the CIA as a professional intelligence service and another stain on the reputation of the U.S.

This is from the Knight Ridder article discussed in the last post:

Advocates for flexibility argue that, in fighting terrorism, sometimes the stakes are so high that repugnant measures are justified.

One is the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which a captured terrorist has information on an imminent attack that could kill hundreds or thousands of civilians.

Two administration officials, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak to the press, said Cheney had described such a scenario several times, in which interrogators using generally approved methods can’t pry the particulars out of the prisoner in time to prevent an attack.

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz has argued that in such cases, torture should be used as a last resort, openly, with approval by the president or a Supreme Court justice.

But intelligence officers and other U.S. officials said the scenario was more likely to be found in James Bond films than in the real war on terrorism.

Asked how he’d handle it, McCain replied: “It’s a one in a million issue, and if something was one in a million situation, I would support whatever needs to be done. But that’s a one in a million situation.”

“If you have exceptions, then there’s more exceptions and more exceptions and more exceptions,” he said.

It tells you something when those with real-world experience of an issue are lining up on one side, and those on the other learned all they think they know from watching movies.

See also: John Cole Tim F. at Balloon Juice.

Still Crazy After All These Years

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Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder report that many former and some current CIA operatives are opposing the Dick’s effort to exempt the CIA from a ban on mistreatment of detainees.

“We ought to declare we don’t do this. We ought to declare the intelligence isn’t worth it,” said Frank Anderson, a former chief of the CIA’s Near East and South Asia division in the agency’s Operations Directorate, the clandestine service.

There’s also the question of what brutality does to those who carry it out, Anderson said.

“I will rebel against anyone who wants my son to torture, because it won’t ever heal,” he said, speaking at a conference this week sponsored by the Middle East Institute.

Anderson’s views were echoed, with some variation, in interviews with a half-dozen current and former CIA and military officers with extensive field experience. Retired and active officers made similar arguments against abusing prisoners, but none of the current CIA or military officers would agree to speak on the record because they aren’t authorized to talk to the media.

Robert Baer, a former CIA covert officer who worked in Iraq and elsewhere, said he recently spent time in an Israeli prison, talking with detainees from the radical Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas for a British documentary about suicide bombers.

The Israelis, Baer said, have learned that they can gain valuable information by establishing personal relationships with the inmates and gaining their trust.

“They found that torture, abusive tactics, made things overall worse for them politically,” Baer said. “The Israelis are friendly with their prisoners. They play cards with them and allow them to contact their families. They are getting in their minds to determine what makes up a suicide bomber.

However, Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder reports that the Dick isn’t backing down:

“There seems to be a kind of collective consciousness that he’s become weakened,” said Steven Clemons, a foreign policy specialist at the New America Foundation, a public-policy group that seeks to bridge partisan differences. “He’s going to continue to matter, but is he going to matter as much as he did before? Probably not.” …

… Most politicians in Cheney’s situation would scramble to change course, but he isn’t like most politicians. Days after Libby resigned, Cheney replaced him with David Addington, another longtime adviser, who helped draft a 2002 memo defending the use of torture in some circumstances.

The vice president courted more controversy by taking the lead role in trying to exempt the CIA from a ban on cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques.

“I just don’t think he cares,” said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant and a Cheney defender. “He believes that we are, in fact, at war. When you’re at war, you can’t be distracted by these kinds of things. He’s going to move ahead.”

And, of course, it never occurs to him that he might actually be wrong about anything.

When Bush first came to Washington, Cheney was widely viewed as the experienced, steady hand in an untested White House. Now he’s more likely to be pilloried as the hawk who helped push the president into a messy war that could drag on for years.

Longtime associates say Cheney has become obsessed with the threat of terrorism, especially the possibility of a biological, chemical or nuclear attack. By Bush’s own description, the vice president was “gung-ho” for war with Iraq well before the president committed to it.

Republicans who once bit their tongues or limited their criticism of Cheney to the cocktail circuit are starting to go public. Associates from Cheney’s days as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush say they don’t understand him.

(singing)

…I’ll never worry
Why should I?
It’s all gonna fade

Now I sit by my window
And I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years …

Update: Via Billmon—Laura Rozen at War and Piece says torture is a tactic for losers.

I was in a torture chamber once, in the basement of a police station in Kosovo days after it was abandoned by Serb forces defeated by Nato. It was hideous as you would imagine. The British soldiers who were with me were equally shocked. A lot of the instruments and interrogation drugs I saw there also suggest they were not designed to cause organ failure or death in their victims, just pain and terror, as Mr. Cheney and his office mates suggest is what they are going for in terms of legal wiggle room. And like Mr. Cheney and his office mates, Mr. Milosevic and his Serb troops didn’t seem to overly concern themselves with the Geneva conventions, until it was a bit late. Having laid my eyes on what such a scene looks like, I just associate such activities with the forces of not only the pathological and depraved, but those who are headed for defeat. If you’ve seen it, you realize in a way that’s hard to explain, it’s the tactics of the losers. If Cheney and his office mates haven’t had the experience, perhaps they should. And I really don’t think it’s inconceivable that the remote possibility of the Hague may lie in some of their futures. Things change fast when they do, as history shows, and they could find their current willing protectors eventually chucked from office, and a whole new climate at home and abroad.

Deconstructing Dick

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The Vice President is out of control. This is the essential message of several recent editorials and opinion pieces in the nation’s newspapers and political web sites.

James Carroll wrote in yesterday’s Boston Globe that it’s time to consider “just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States.”

After examining Cheney’s past career in which he enabled the rollback of essential antipoverty programs, tried to destroy detente, and always favored violence over diplomacy, Carroll progresses to what The Dick hath wrought as Veep:

With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as vice president) showed itself for a moment.

The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a ”specific threat” had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush’s absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation’s response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney’s usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.

I realize it can be argued that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what Junior did on 9/11, since Junior truly cannot watch TV and chew pretzels at the same time. But it’s the principle I’m talkin’ about. Carroll continues,

At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running, he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney ignited Osama bin Laden’s burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney fulfilled bin Laden’s purpose by joining him in the war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.

Ouch.

Daniel Benjamin writes at Slate:

It has become a cliché to say that Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president in American history. Nonetheless, here is a prediction: When the historians really get digging into the paper entrails of the Bush administration—or possibly when Scooter Libby goes on trial—those who have intoned that phrase will still be astonished at the extent to which the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney was the center of power inside the White House—and at the grip it had on foreign and defense policy.

With a national security staff that numbered 14 last year (Al Gore usually had four or five), Cheney’s office has a finger in every pie. Several of the State Department’s top diplomats, including Eric Edelman, now undersecretary of defense for policy, and Victoria Nuland, now ambassador to NATO, are alums of Cheney’s office. According to David L. Phillips’ Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, the dominant figure in some of the key interagency deliberations on postwar Iraq was not the State Department official who chaired them but Samantha Ravich, a Cheney aide who left the government and has since returned to OVP*. In addition, Cheney has remarkable influence over his onetime boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

For the next several centuries, historians will be writing about the dark duo of Rummy and Vice and how they destroyed America.

Kevin Drum writes,

As Benjamin points out, when you follow stuff like this back to its origin you invariably end up at the same place: Dick Cheney. Feith may have been the guy in charge of the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which produced much of the dodgy intelligence that made its way into public speeches from administration officials, but “Dick Cheney was CTEG’s patron.”

As a wise man said back in January 2003 regarding Cheney and his curiously enduring reputation for competence even in the face of mountains of contrary evidence, “his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see.” Looking back, perhaps historians will say that November 2005 was when they finally saw it.

Kevin links to an old Washington Monthly article by Josh Marshall, “Vice Grip,” that’s a must read. Josh documents that throughout his long, public career, The Dick was nearly always wrong. And I don’t mean “wrong” in an ideological sense, but “wrong” in the way policies and events eventually played out. “[I]t’s usually a sure bet that if Cheney has lined up on one side, the opposite course will turn out to be the wiser,” Josh wrote.

This is an editorial in today’s New York Times:

After President Bush’s disastrous visit to Latin America, it’s unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can’t afford an American government this bad for that long. …

Yes, the Times really published that in their lead editorial. However, they’ve yet to fire Judy Miller.

…Second terms may be difficult, but the chief executive still has the power to shape what happens. Ronald Reagan managed to turn his messy second term around and deliver – in great part through his own powers of leadership – a historic series of agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire. Mr. Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for such a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.

The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration’s most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney’s back is against the wall, and he’s declared war on the Geneva Conventions.

Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now.

In theory, I suppose a President with the backing of senior party leaders could in a behind-the-scenes way force a veep to resign, but let’s go on … So far, the Bush Administration has consisted of The Dick running foreign policy, Karl Rove running domestic policy, and Junior prancing about in his paramilitary costumes and playing the role of Dear Leader for the cameras. If Rove and The Dick go, the job of President of the United States would fall into George Bush’s lap. For the first time. Not a cheering thought. But possibly, if faced with doing the actual job he’s supposed to be doing, Junior would retreat to Crawford and spend the rest of his second term hiding under the bed. At least he’d be safely ineffectual.

Yet perhaps The Dick’s days of unfettered power are closing. Thomas DeFrank writes in the New York Daily News that the relationship between Dubya and The Dick is eroding:

Multiple sources close to Bush told the Daily News that while the vice president remains his boss’ valued political partner and counselor, his clout has lessened – primarily as a result of issues arising from the Iraq war.

“The relationship is not what it was,” a presidential counselor said. “There has been some distance for some time.” …

…Other sources familiar with Bush’s thinking say Cheney’s zealous advocacy for what has become a troubled Iraq policy has taken a toll – especially since Cheney’s predictions about how Iraq would play out have proven optimistic.

These sources also said Libby’s indictment was a wakeup call for White House aides who have long believed the Cheney national security operation has enjoyed too much of a free hand in administration policymaking.

“The vice president’s office will never be quite as independent from the White House as it has been,” said a key Bush associate. “That will end.

“Cheney never operated without a degree of [presidential] license, but there are people around who cannot believe some of the advice [Bush] has been given.”

My sense is that Bush has been sailing along not overtaxing his brain too much on foreign policy because he figured The Dick understood that stuff and knew what to do. But now even Junior is starting to notice that nothing has worked out as Dick promised. Iraq is a mess, the world is growing more and more dangerous, and pretty much everyone on the globe hates George W. Bush.

Last week on The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron discussed what she called Bush’s “rosebud moment.”

As you may recall, on May 11, 2005, a small plane made an unauthorized detour into the air space over the nation’s Capitol, setting off a red alert. The Secret Service evacuated Dick Cheney and rushed Laura Bush to a bunker in the White House. The President was not there. He was off riding his bicycle in Beltsville, Maryland, and the Secret Service didn’t notify him about the incident until it was over. At the time they claimed they didn’t want to disturb his bicycle ride. It’s my theory that this incident was one of the reasons for the rift between Bush and Cheney — a rift, I’m proud to say, that I was one of the first to point out (on the Huffington Post), on the basis of no information whatsoever, and which now turns out (according to this week’s Newsweek) to be absolutely true.

Ephron speculates that Bush is depressed, which is an idea I may address in a future post. But for now the point is that The Dick has an alarming tendency to assume power that isn’t rightfully his. And I think Bush is too much of a weenie to smack him down for it.

See also Dan Froomkin, “Cheney’s Dark Side Is Showing.”

Smokin’

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President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other Bush Administration officials based many of their pre-Iraq War claims of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda on the testimony of a detainee who was known to be a fabricator.

Douglas Jehl writes in this Sunday’s New York Times,

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The newly declassified portions of the document were given to Jehl by Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It appears this revelation had something to do with Senator Reid’s parliamentary move that closed the Senate last week. Levin and Senator John D. Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, made a request to declassify the two paragraphs on October 18. In its response, the CIA said it found “no reason for it to remain classified.”

The story in brief: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001. In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported in the two paragraphs that Libi’s statements were highly improbable. The report said he was “‘intentionally misleading the debriefers’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons,” writes Jehl.

Yet administration officials merrily went ahead and repeated Libi’s stories in their speeches.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’ …

… Mr. Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Mr. Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda.’’

For more examples of Bush Administration statements based on Libi’s fabrications, see Think Progress.

At the time Powell made his speech, Jehl says, an unclassified statement by the CIA said Libi’s stories were credible. “But Mr. Levin said he had learned that a classified C.I.A. assessment at the time stated ‘the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.,’ Jehl writes.

One might conclude that someone in the CIA was being helpful to the White House cause and making sure that statements supporting the war made the rounds, while those not supporting the war were hidden out of sight.

And the DIA report would have circulated widely in government, Jehl says, and would have been available to the CIA, the White House, the Pentagon, and other agencies. However, neither the Senate Intelligence Committee report nor the September 11 Commission report, both issued in 2004, made any reference to the 2002 DIA report. “It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel,” Jehl writes.

Libi recanted his stories in January 2004, which prompted the CIA to recall all intelligence reports based on his testimony. This fact was recorded in a footnote to the September 11 Commission report, but the original DIA report report is MIA from the 9/11 report.

Jehl continues,

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al-Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Senator Levin seems a tad miffed.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence. …

… In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to a portion of the D.I.A. report that expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence but was a pillar of the administration’s prewar claims.

“Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,’’ the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.’’

Libi, who apparently has been in custody at Guantanamo since 2003, was of course not the only intelligence source later uncovered as a fibber. For example, an Iraqi exile code named “Curveball” was the primary source for the ephemeral mobile biological weapons labs. And there is Ahmed Chalabi, beloved of neocons, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon all manner of misinformation.

So far, the White House has refused to comment, while Republicans are sticking to this weeks’ talking point that they weren’t the only ones to make mistakes in prewar assessments.

Jehl concludes,

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to meet beginning next week to review draft reports prepared as part of a long-postponed “Phase II’’ of the panel’s review of prewar intelligence on Iraq. At separate briefings for reporters on Friday, Republicans staff members said the writing had long been under way, while Senate Democrats on the committee claimed credit for reinvigorating the process, by forcing the closed session. They said that already nearly complete is a look at whether prewar intelligence accurately predicted the potential for an anti-American insurgency.

Other areas of focus include the role played by the Iraqi National Congress, that of the Pentagon in shaping intelligence assessments, and an examination of whether public statements about Iraq by members of the Bush and Clinton administrations, as well as members of Congress, were substantiated by intelligence available at the time.


Steve Soto of The Left Coaster writes,

When Harry Reid shut down the Senate earlier this week due to Pat Roberts and Bill Frist’s stonewalling of a Phase Two investigation over how the Bush Administration used intelligence in making its case for war, many of us wondered why now? What took you guys so long to use a procedural lever that you’ve had available to you all along that could have been employed before the election to raise the issue of Bush’s lies into a campaign issue? Was it a sudden re-growth of guts and balls that did this, or did the Democrats now come into possession of new information that was withheld from them before the election that gave them the club to force this issue out into the open now? We now know the answer, and it is the latter.

Moreover, Steve says, it puts Junior in a shitload of trouble.

… we now know that the Bush Administration also knew as far back as January 2003 that the Niger uranium claim was based on forgeries. We know that the Bush Administration was also told that the aluminum tubes story was bogus before the invasion as well. We now know that the claim that Saddam was assisting Al Qaeda was also a lie, and that the Administration knew this from Rummy himself as far back as February 2002. And we know that the IAEA was still on the ground in Iraq and had not confirmed any of Bush’s claims that Saddam had definitively stockpiled WMDs in violation of the two UN resolutions that Bush based his war upon.

And why exactly is this so important? Because take a look at the certification that Bush sent to Congress to start the war, which was required in the October 2002 war resolution, and then see that as we suspected over two and a half years ago, Bush has a big problem now …

This latest revelation means that at the time Bush justified the commencement of war against Iraq consistent with what was required under Public Law 107-243, he certified things not in evidence, and made claims to Congress (Saddam’s active operation of a WMD program and Saddam’s assistance to Al Qaeda) that he, Cheney, and Rummy already knew were false.

If Bush isn’t called to account for this, then there is no democracy in America any more.

[Cross-posted to The American Street.]

Government of Sadists

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They may not be much use in a hurricane and they’re a tad sloppy with intelligence, but when it comes to torture the Bush Administration will not be held back.

In today’s Washington Post Dana Priest writes that Porter Goss’s CIA is holding and “questioning” prisoners in secret prisons.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

I like the part about the “Soviet-era compound.” Are we filling a niche vacated by the fall of the Soviet Union? And do we want to think real hard about what that niche might be?

Priest continues,

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

And if that pesky Red Cross is kept out also, so much the better.

The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

It doesn’t say if our president knows the locations, notice. But I bet he has a secret stash of really good torture videos stuffed in some White House closet.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

Stalin would have been proud.

The prisons must be kept overseas because secret prisons are illegal in the U.S. However, they are also illegal in several of the “host” countries. And Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands are looking into allegations that the CIA secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and shipped them to who knows where.

The secret detention system was thrown together hastily after September 11. One senior intelligence official said the system is entirely reactive; no one ever sat down and worked out a “grand strategy” for dealing with prisoners of the War on Terror.

The idea of holding terrorists outside the U.S. legal system was not under consideration before Sept. 11, 2001, not even for Osama bin Laden, according to former government officials. The plan was to bring bin Laden and his top associates into the U.S. justice system for trial or to send them to foreign countries where they would be tried.

“The issue of detaining and interrogating people was never, ever discussed,” said a former senior intelligence officer who worked in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, during that period. “It was against the culture and they believed information was best gleaned by other means.” …

… The agency set up prisons under its covert action authority. Under U.S. law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers.

Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush signed a sweeping finding that gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world.

Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt write in the New York Times that some people in Washington want to adopt language from the Geneva Conventions for Defense Department guidelines.

The document under discussion, known as Department of Defense Directive 23.10, would provide broad guidance from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; while it would not spell out specific detention and interrogation techniques, officials said, those procedures would have to conform to its standards. It would not cover the treatment of detainees held by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Enter the allegedly “maverick” do-gooder, John McCain:

The behind-the-scenes debate over the Pentagon directive comes more than three years after President Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the fight against terrorism. It mirrors a public battle between the Bush administration and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is pressing a separate legislative effort to ban the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of any detainee in United States custody.

After a 90-to-9 vote in the Senate last month in favor of Mr. McCain’s amendment to a $445 billion defense spending bill, the White House moved to exempt clandestine C.I.A. activities from the provision. A House-Senate conference committee is expected to consider the issue this week.

And in the other corner–Dick “the Dick” Cheney:

Mr. Cheney and some of his aides have spearheaded the administration’s opposition to Senator McCain’s amendment; they were also quick to oppose a draft of the detention directive, which began to circulate in the Pentagon in mid-September, officials said.

I really like this part:

A central player in the fight over the directive is David S. Addington, who was the vice president’s counsel until he was named on Monday to succeed I. Lewis Libby Jr. as Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff. According to several officials, Mr. Addington verbally assailed a Pentagon aide who was called to brief him and Mr. Libby on the draft, objecting to its use of language drawn from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

“He left bruised and bloody,” one Defense Department official said of the Pentagon aide, Matthew C. Waxman, Mr. Rumsfeld’s chief adviser on detainee issues. “He tried to champion Article 3, and Addington just ate him for lunch.”

I assume the official was speaking figuratively.

An editorial in yesterday’s USA Today argues that torture is wrong

Forget, for a moment, the legal and moral questions surrounding government-sanctioned torture and consider the practical one: Does it produce useful information?

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was tortured repeatedly during his 5½ years of solitary confinement in North Vietnam, answers no: The tortured will say anything to stop the pain.

McCain’s insight offers lessons for U.S. conduct in the war on terror: Abusing prisoners elicits intelligence of questionable worth. It also unquestionably undercuts American values and produces international revulsion.

McCain and a majority of senators from both parties understand this. The Bush administration still doesn’t get it.

To clear up confusion about the treatment of prisoners and what the United States stands for, McCain is pushing an amendment to a military-spending bill that would ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading” interrogations. The Republican-controlled Senate passed the amendment, 90-9. The version of the bill in the House of Representatives contains no such amendment.

Senate and House negotiators are scheduled to meet this week to try to resolve the differences, and the White House is working behind the scenes to scuttle McCain’s amendment or, at a minimum, carve out an exception for the CIA. President Bush has even threatened to cast his first veto if the administration doesn’t get its way.

You’d think that after the abuse cases in Iraq and Afghanistan and at the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Bush would recognize the damage to the United States’ moral standing, particularly in the Muslim world. But the White House continues to hew closely to the dubious “few bad apples” theory to explain the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.

The theory doesn’t hold up to even minimal scrutiny. Early last month, Capt. Ian Fishback of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division came forward with evidence of routine abuse that occurred in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Superior officers in Iraq repeatedly told soldiers that the Geneva Conventions governing prisoner treatment do not apply in Iraq, Fishback reported.

The editorial argues that the United States “should not sink to the level of its enemies.”

Now, considering that it is widely believed torture is not the best way to gain intelligence, and the secret prisons and torture practices are not exactly helping us with international diplomacy, you’ve got to wonder why secret prisons and torture are so important to Bushies like Dick Cheney, not to mention David Addington, who rhetorically assaulted and cannibalized the unfortunate Mr. Waxman. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that these people are sadists. Torture is something they want to do. They get off on it.

Update: See also Eric Alterman.

Cross-posted on The American Street.

Fitz Watch

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[Update: Fitzgerald will hold a news conference at 2:00 pm.

Update update: Reuters says “information on the case will be available at noon.”]

I’m not sure if last night’s story from the New York Times that suggests only Scooter Libby will be indicted today should be given much weight. In this morning’s Washington Post, Jim VandeHei and Carol D. Leonnig write that Libby and Rove are preparing for possible indictments. On the other hand, CNN just now (8:01 am) announced that Rove “apparently” dodged an indictment but will remain under investigation.

Via Josh Marshall, John Solomon and Pete Yost of the Associated Press write,

White House officials braced for the possibility that Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide would be indicted in the CIA leak case, but held out hope presidential confidant Karl Rove might escape charges for the time being.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald signaled Thursday he might simply keep Rove under investigation, according to a person familiar with recent developments in the case who requested anonymity because of its sensitivity. That would spare Rove bad news Friday when the grand jury that has heard the case for two years is set to expire.

Solomon and Yost note that Dick Cheney and Scooter were up and about unusually early today. The Dick arrived at the White House at 6:25 this morning, and Scooter was seen leaving his home at 6:15.

Also via Josh, the Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required, and I don’t have one),

Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser and deputy White House chief of staff, was informed yesterday evening that he may not be charged today but remains in legal jeopardy, according to a person briefed on the matter. Mr. Fitzgerald, who meets with jurors this morning, has zeroed in on potential wrongdoing by I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and is likely to charge Mr. Libby at least with making false statements. The testimony of reporters who have been witnesses in the case has contradicted Mr. Libby’s public statements.

Mr. Fitzgerald appeared still to be pondering whether to charge Mr. Rove and has notified the political strategist that he remains under investigation.

Josh speculates that there are some negotiations going on between Fitzgerald and Rove. I speculate that perhaps these ongoing negotiations are delaying a Rove indictment, not ongoing investigation. VandeHei and Leonnig at WaPo write that “two legal sources” say Fitzgerald really does not want to empanel a new grand jury and would prefer to wrap the case up today.

Obstruction

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Murray Waas writes,

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Hmm, wonder if Harriet Miers was one of those lawyers?

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney’s office — and Libby in particular — pushed to be included in Powell’s speech, the sources said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was looking into whether the CIA or other agencies had provided faulty intelligence to the Bush Administration as it prepared to go to war in Iraq. However, Waas writes,

… the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.

Waas writes that both Republicans and Democrats felt the investigation had been hampered by the White House’s refusal to hand over critical documents. It’s not too late for a do-over, I say.

Jesse Lee at the Stakeholder writes that this passage from the Waas article stuck out:

At the same time, however, administration officials said in interviews that they cannot recall another instance in which Cheney and Libby played such direct personal roles in denying foreign policy papers to a congressional committee, and that in doing so they overruled White House staff and lawyers who advised that the materials should be turned over to the Senate panel.

Jesse Lee comments:

Notice anybody missing from that equation? Did President Bush even know there was a debate? Did he know there were any debates about anything ever?

Maybe he was busy working out on his mountain bike.

Via Josh Marshall, Rep. Jerry Nadler is calling for expanding the Fitzgerald investigation “to look at a possible White House conspiracy to deceive Congress.”

Specifically, I’ve asked that Mr. Fitzgerald seek answers to three pressing questions: whether the CIA leak incident was part of a larger, deliberate effort to deceive Congress into authorizing war in Iraq, who exactly was involved, and whether any of their actions were criminal. If a larger, intentional effort was indeed underway – as evidence is tending to show that it was – that amounts to a criminal conspiracy.

President Bush may be spending the rest of his term huddled in a closet with his lucky pillow.

Viceroy

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Mo Dowd’s on a roll today–

The shocking thing about the trellis of revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark conspiracies to juice up a case for war and demonize those who tried to tell the public the truth is how unshocking it all is.

It’s exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we’d actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike.

Mr. Cheney has been so well protected by his Praetorian guard all these years that it’s been hard for the public to see his dastardly deeds and petty schemes. But now, because of Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation and candid talk from Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson, he’s been flushed out as the heart of darkness: all sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly nicknamed Vice.

La Dowd sites the Tenet to The Dick to Scooter connection, then continues:

The Bush hawks presented themselves as protectors and exporters of American values. But they were so feverish about projecting the alternate reality they had constructed to link Saddam and Al Qaeda Рand fulfilling their id̩e fixe about invading Iraq Рthey perverted American values.

Whether or not it turns out to be illegal, outing a C.I.A. agent – undercover or not – simply to undermine her husband’s story is Rove-ishly sleazy. This no-leak administration was perfectly willing to leak to hurt anyone who got in its way.

In the Bush Administration, all dark roads lead to The Dick. In Salon, Jim Lobe writes that Cheney was at the center of the administration’s propaganda and intelligence-fixing efforts leading up to the Iraq War. Cheney, Lobe says, “started beating the nuclear drum with vigor significantly earlier than most remember; indeed at a time that was particularly curious given its proximity to the famous mission former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took on behalf of the CIA.”

Cheney’s drum-beating about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear capabilities began

… just after his return from a tour of Arab capitals where he had tried in vain to gin up local support for military action against Iraq. Indeed, the specific date on which his campaign was launched was March 24, 2002, when, on return from the Middle East, he appeared on three major Sunday public-affairs television programs bearing similar messages on each. On CNN’s “Late Edition,” he offered the following comment on Saddam:

“This is a man of great evil, as the President said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said:

“[T]here’s good reason to believe that he continues to aggressively pursue the development of a nuclear weapon. Now will he have one in a year, five years? I can’t be that precise.”

And on CBS’s “Face the Nation”:

“The notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil wealth, with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical weapons, that he might actually acquire a nuclear weapon is, I think, a frightening proposition for anybody who thinks about it. And part of my task out there was to go out and begin the dialogue with our friends to make sure they were thinking about it.”

Lobe writes that in March 2002 there were only two pieces of evidence of Saddam’s nuclear capabilities known to be available. One was a “defector” offered by Ahmed Chalabi who delivered testimony seized upon eagerly by the Cheney cabal, and reported in the New York Times by Judy Miller in December 2001, even though both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency thought the testimony was a fabrication. And the other piece was …

The infamous forged Niger yellowcake documents that, at some point in December, 2001 or January, 2002 somehow appeared on Cheney’s desk, supposedly through the Defense Intelligence Agency or the CIA, though accounts differ on the precise route it took from Italian military intelligence (SISMI) to the Vice President’s office. It was these and related documents that spurred Cheney to ask for additional information, a request that would eventually result in Wilson’s trip to Niger in late February, which, of course, set the Plame case in motion. Wilson’s conclusion — that there was nothing to the story — would echo the conclusions of both U.S. ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick and Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., then-deputy commander of the U.S. European Command who was also sent to Niger in February. A couple of days after his return to Washington, Wilson would be debriefed by the CIA.

How far up their respective chains of command Wilson’s and Fulford’s reports made it remains a significant mystery to this day. Cheney’s office, which reportedly had reminded the CIA of the Vice President’s interest in the agency’s follow-up efforts even while Wilson was in Niger, claims never to have heard about either report. We do know that Fulford’s report made it up to Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers whose spokesman, however, told the Washington Post in July 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on the New York Times op-ed page, that the general had “no recollection” of it and so no idea whether it continued on to the White House or Cheney’s office.

If you can get around Salon‘s subscription firewall I recommend the Jim Lobe article, as it contains a good account of how the neocons, the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, and other players like Judy Miller worked together to wave the nuclear shirt in support of an invasion of Iraq. But now I want to go on to Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly, who recently wrote a series of posts on the forged Niger yellowcake documents. See, for example, this and this. A story emerges that the documents were put together by some part of the Italian government to curry favor with the White House and push for war with Iraq. Via Kevin, we learn from Laura Rozen at TAP,

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002.

….Today’s exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Kevin comments,

La Repubblica‘s story suggests that the Italians pushed hard on the documents because they were eager to impress the Americans with their loyalty to the war cause. When the CIA and the State Department didn’t bite, they went straight to the White House. Read Laura’s entire piece for all the details.

And the forged documents made their way to Cheney’s desk in December 2001 or January 2002. The Big Dick took it from there.

In spite of the pressure he is under at the moment, the Dickster is still busy shaping American policy. This is from today’s New York Times:

Amid all the natural and political disasters it faces, the White House is certainly tireless in its effort to legalize torture. This week, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed a novel solution for the moral and legal problems raised by the use of American soldiers to abuse prisoners and the practice of turning captives over to governments willing to act as proxies in doing the torturing. Mr. Cheney wants to make it legal for the Central Intelligence Agency to do this wet work.

Mr. Cheney’s proposal was made in secret to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who won the votes of 89 other senators this month to require the civilized treatment of prisoners at camps run by America’s military and intelligence agencies. Mr. McCain’s legislation, an amendment to the Defense Department budget bill, would ban the “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners. In other words, it would impose age-old standards of democracy and decency on the new prisons.

President Bush’s threat to veto the entire military budget over this issue was bizarre enough by itself, considering that the amendment has the support of more than two dozen former military leaders, including Colin Powell. They know that torture doesn’t produce reliable intelligence and endangers Americans’ lives.

But Mr. Cheney’s proposal was even more ludicrous. It would give the president the power to allow government agencies outside the Defense Department (the administration has in mind the C.I.A.) to mistreat and torture prisoners as long as that behavior was part of “counterterrorism operations conducted abroad” and they were not American citizens. That would neatly legalize the illegal prisons the C.I.A. is said to be operating around the world and obviate the need for the torture outsourcing known as extraordinary rendition. It also raises disturbing questions about Iraq, which the Bush administration has falsely labeled a counterterrorism operation.

The obvious question is: What is wrong with these people?

The answer, IMO, appears in an article Josh Marshall wrote for Washington Monthly in September 2002, titled “Confidence Men.”

Dick Cheney was the signature figure [of the Bush Administration]: a former White House chief of staff, congressman, and wartime defense secretary, whose vaunted government savvy had been validated in the private sector as CEO of the energy giant Halliburton. Like the administration, Cheney was right-wing, but in a way that was at once daunting and oddly reassuring. You may not have liked what he was doing. But you had little doubt that he knew what he was doing.

Today, that record doesn’t look nearly so impressive. We now know that as CEO, Cheney got snookered into a disastrous merger that has since sent Halliburton’s stock price plummeting, while signing off on dubious balance sheets that have sparked a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. His mastery of the Beltway is similarly in question. Last year’s Cheney-led energy task force produced an all-drilling-no-conservation energy bill that went nowhere. The task force’s real legacy was to mire the administration in a thicket of congressional investigations and private lawsuits, all springing from Cheney’s insistence on Nixonian secrecy. His major foreign policy gambit–last spring’s shuttle-diplomacy mission to the Middle East to secure support for an invasion of Iraq–was a debacle. The tough-talking VP went to the region to line up the Arab states behind the United States against Saddam; days after Cheney’s return they were lining up behind Saddam against the United States. Less well known, but no less embarrassing, was Cheney’s leadership of the pre-9/11 anti-terrorism task force. In spring 2001, rather than back congressional efforts to implement the findings of the Hart-Rudman commission, Cheney opted to spearhead his own group, to put the administration’s stamp on whatever reforms occurred. But the task force did almost nothing for four months until terrorists struck on September 11. More recently, it was Cheney who advised Bush not to include any serious corporate reforms in his July speech on Wall Street, the one that sent markets plunging. While no one bats a thousand in politics, it’s actually difficult to think of one thing the vice president has been responsible for that has not ended in muddle or disaster. Yet his reputation for competence has survived.

Josh goes on to exlain how the Bushies emanate an aura of competence in spite of the fact that it’s a wonder they can keep their shoes tied. Much of that aura was destroyed only recently by Hurricane Katrina. And for all his repuation for smarts, Cheney’s history reveals plenty of massive blunders and misjudgments. And, unfortunately, he is a big enough fool not to have noticed his own shortcomings. Given near unlimited power, he’s been able to do a lot of damage.

Maybe it’s all about to catch up to him. Let’s hope.

Update: See also “The Cheney Factor” by Dan Froomkin.

Update update: See “Treasongate: The Real Significance of the Niger Uranium Forgery Stories in La Repubblica” by eriposte at The Left Coaster.

Cross-posted on The American Street.

Buggy

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This morning it seems the right sidebar has disappeared, taking the blogroll with it. Well, shoot. (Update: The WordPress Fairy brought the sidebar back! Yay!)

Following up the New York Times story about Tenet to The Dick to Scooter–Jane Hamsher at firedoglake points out that last year Cheney was interviewed by Fitzgerald under oath.

Oopsie!

And Jane figures that the reason Fitzgerald needed testimony from Matt Cooper and Judy Miller “to counter Scooter Libby’s testimony that he first heard about Valerie Plame’s identity from journalists.” Jane continues,

Also from the Times article:

It also explains why Mr. Fitzgerald waged a long legal battle to obtain the testimony of reporters who were known to have talked with Mr. Libby.

The reporters involved have said that they did not supply Mr. Libby with details about Mr. Wilson and his wife.

In other words: the testimonies of Cooper and Miller were necessary to bust Libby in a lie.

It appears there is some question about whether Mr. Cheney was under oath. I do recall that Bush was not interviewed under oath, but I don’t know about Cheney.

Update: In other news–The Iraq draft constitution has been approved. I’ll probably write some commentary on this later today.

Tenet to The Dick to Scooter?

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Just posted on the New York Times web site — David Johnston, Richard Stevenson, and Douglas Jehl write that Scooter Libby learned about Valerie Plame Wilson from … Dick the Dick.

I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program to justify the war.

Lawyers said the notes show that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003.

Libby’s notes say that Dick the Dick got his info from George Tenet, CIA director at the time. It wouldn’t be illegal for Tenet and Cheney to have discussed a CIA agent; it’s safe to assume they both have top security clearances. “But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry.”

To which I say … heh.