Cheney: the next generation

You think the next set of Republicans in the White House won't resume criminal torture? Just check this out: Liz Cheney: I’m Proud My Daddy Is the Prime Mover of Torture by Marcy Wheeler 04/23/09

There's a big difference between this torture program and lynch-law in the segregated South. In the segregated South, the governors of the states didn't publicly declare that lynching was a wonderful program and that "people are very proud of what we've accomplished" with lynchings.



This is what we're looking at, folks. The second-ranking member of the Cheney dynasty, who could well have ambitions as great as her father's, is saying bluntly on national television that she's proud of torture. Proud of torture.

Tags: accountability for torture, cheney, torture

How democracy dies, Chapter 423

We can't forget: Jeb Bush is waiting his turn to continue what Dick Cheney started

The editors of the Washington Post weighed in on the latest torture revelations, in an editorial of 04/17/09, called Dealing With a Disgrace. It illustrates the prevailing attitude of the Beltway Village: obsequious toward power, especially Republican power; timid even when pretending to be outraged (at least when the outrage is directed toward Republicans); smugly cynical; contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law; and, horrified at the thought that respectable government officials would be held criminally responsible for torture.

Let's start with the title of their editorial. It refers to a "disgrace", not to "torture", "crimes" or "war crimes". I'll give them credit for finally, in the last of five paragraphs they finally refer to "the circumstances that gave rise to torture", which at least acknowledges that some kind of torture occurred. But it's not entirely clear from their careful weasel-wording that they actually recognized that the government of Dick Cheney and his assistant George Bush authorized torture and actually tortured people. Because the immediately following sentence is, "the so-called torture memos are released is that common sense and established legal doctrine were often contorted to justify abhorrent techniques" (my emphasis). Maybe they think it was only some other entities than the United States government under Dick Cheney that actually succumbed to "the circumstances that gave rise to torture".

This kind of mealy-mouthed cowardice is what gave us Judith Miller and the Iraq War, Bob Woodward's hagiography of Bush the Great War Leader, and the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer with the connivance of leading press institutions in what they knew to be the commission of a serious crime by senior government officials acting on the most venal political motives.

The first two paragraphs tell a big story - about the Washington Post:

THE OBAMA administration acted courageously and wisely yesterday with its dual actions on interrogation policy. The pair of decisions -- one essentially forgiving government agents who may have committed heinous acts they were told were legal, the other signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States -- struck exactly the right balance.

The administration announced that it would not seek to press criminal charges against CIA operatives who participated in enhanced interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. [my emphasis]

Complete with the Orwellian phrase "enhanced interrogations" (which the Post didn't put in quotation marks), I don't see any reasonable reading of those two paragraphs that wouldn't say they show the Post editors are more concerned about seeing "government agents who may [sic] have committed heinous acts" of torture getting a free pass from prosecution for their crimes than they are about ending the torture policy.

And even that reading is too generous. Because what the Post actually praises in those words just quoted are "signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States". It adopts the let's-just-look-forward position that is the a key slogan of those defending torture, especially among the Democrats. And if we really want to give it a close reading, that opening comment doesn't go beyond praising the good public relations that Obama is practicing. And when you look at the PR they praise, it's the "signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States" (my emphasis). Which is really not the same as admitting the grim reality: that such acts were not only condoned but systematically practiced by the US government at the direction of Cheney-Bush administration officials that not only knew that what they were doing was criminal but should be held responsible for their crimes.

We're talking about torture here! Did you even think back in 2000 before the Scalia Five handed the election to the losers Cheney and Bush that we would be seeing the I piously editorializing against prosecuting torturers? Did you expect defending torture to become a central value of the Republican Party?

It may be too much to hope that the Washington Post editorial board will ever recognize the magnitude of what's happened with the torture policy. But the rest of us had better recognize it. And we'd better recognized the central, indispensable role that "respectable" media institutions like the Washington Post played in what has happened.

I don't want to assume that all current advocates of a "truth commission" approach to investigating the torture policy and other criminal acts of the Cheney-Bush administration are all hoping for that to avoid the legal issues and produce a "bipartisan" feel-good report opposing holding the perpetrators of the torture policy legally accountable for their crimes. But that would almost certainly be the effect. And in the case of the Washington Post, given their record and what they say in this very editorial, I do assume that's what they want to see happen:

More light needs to be shed on how decisions were made and why. And more information is needed on who in the Bush administration made the ultimate decision to authorize the use of techniques that have long been considered torture and a violation of domestic and international legal strictures. A commission like the one that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks would likely provide the best vehicle for such an exploration. [my emphasis]

Refer it to a committee: the time-honored, classical bureaucratic move to make an issue just go away.

I know it sounds melodramatic at a moment where "respectable" opinion like that of the Washington Post can barely bring themselves to describe the criminal acts at issue as what the entire world knows very well they were, torture. But in all likelihood, the future of Constitutional democracy and the rule of law hangs on having the crimes involved in the torture policy prosecuted.

Because without that, the next Republican administration will almost certainly pick up right where Dick Cheney had to leave off. And the results will be even uglier than what we know up to this point about Cheney's results.

On last thought for now: If the torture policy is prosecuted as the law and our international treaty obligations require, part of what will inevitably be exposed is the shamefully lax attitude of major press outlets like the Washington Post that facilitated the torture policy. The Post editorial board wouldn't be entirely wrong in thinking its in their own self-interest to see the torture crimes swept under the historical rug as quickly as possible.

But this issue is too big and too serious. It's not going away.

Tags: accountability for torture, cheney, torture

Obama, the Afghanistan War and Cheney's "movement"

The President gave an interview to 60 Minutes last night. So the beings who make up our "press corps" focused on what was important and significant in it: Following Politico's lead, media fixate on Obama's "awkward laughter" in 60 Minutes interview Media Matters 03/23/09. The transcript is available here.

But there were a couple of things Obama said that caught my attention in particular. One was when he was talking about the Afghanistan War he said, "And there's gotta be an exit strategy. There - there's gotta be a sense that this is not perpetual drift."

That was the story from the interview as reported by the Vienna paper Der Standard Online, Obama will Exit-Strategie 23.03.2009 and in Spain's El País, Obama propondrá una estrategia de salida para la guerra afgana de Yolanda Monge 24.03.2009.

We'll see what the strategy is that he settles on soon. I expect him to continue a policy of escalation, which I think is a major mistake. But I'm still hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

The other thing that particularly caught my attention was this:

STEVE KROFT:A week ago Vice President Cheney-- said essentially that your willingness to shut down Guantanamo and to change the way prisoners are treated and interrogator-- interrogated-- was making America weaker and more vulnerable to another attack. And that-- the interrogation techniques that were used at Guantanamo were essential in preventing another attack against the United States.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney. Not surprisingly. You know, I think that-- Vice President Cheney has been-- at the head of a-- movement whose notion is somehow that we can't reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national security interests. I think he's drawing the l-- wrong lesson from history.

The facts don't bear him out. I think he is-- that attitude, that philosophy has done incredible damage-- to our image and position in the world. I mean, the fact of the matter is after all these years how many convictions actually came out of Guantanamo? How many-- how many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment. Which means that there is constant effective recruitment of-- Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against U.S. interests all around the world. [my emphasis]

Obama was ambiguous on the status of "terrorist" suspects, for which dday rightly criticizes him in ... Hullabaloo blog 03/23/09. On the one hand, I hope Obama's formulation on that is part of a continuing move away from the Bush approach. But seeing is believing. The Geneva Convention distinctions between prisoners of war and criminal suspects should be enough.

But Obama made a definite case against the Cheney torture policy:

Well, I think we're going to have to figure out a mechanism to make sure that they not released and do us harm. But-- do so in a way that is consistent with both our traditions, sense of due process, international law. But this is-- this is the legacy that's been left behind. And, you know, I'm surprised that-- the Vice President is eager-- to defend-- a legacy that was unsustainable[.]

[L]et's assume that we didn't change these practices. How-- how long are we going to go? Are we going to just keep on going until-- you know, the entire Muslim world and Arab world-- despises us? Do we think that's really going to make us safer? I-- I don't know-- a lot of thoughtful thinkers, liberal or conservative-- who think that that was the right approach.

I was particularly struck by Obama's comment that "Cheney has been - at the head of a - movement whose notion is somehow that we can't reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national security interests."

I think there's some real significance to Obama's formulation. For one, he's saying that Dick Cheney, not Shrub Bush, was the head of this "movement". And he not only calls it a "movement", but a movement that opposes core American values and the Constitution itself.

I don't want to minimize Bush's responsibility for what happened, because after all he was the Decider. But it certainly seems to be the case that Cheney, not Bush, was the driving ideological and organizing force behind the authoritarian Unilateral Executive policies and foreign policy in general.

There's nothing extraordinary about the factual description that Obama gave there. It's a statement of the plain truth. But the fact that the President and the head of the Democratic Party is willing to formulate it this way does strike me as significant.

Tags: afghanistan+war, cheney, obama administration, torture

Cheney, the Dark Lord of torture

Paul Krugman writes at TPM Cafe:

The big test for the next few months will be whether policymakers here and abroad can wrap their minds around this Alice-in-Wonderland world. If they can't, nobody knows how deep the rabbit hole goes.

He was referring to the world economic crisis. But the same notion applies to the twisted approach to governance of the Cheney-Bush administration, which combined the Predator State with the Permanent War State and the Torture State.

As the transition from the Cheney regime proceeds, I keep getting the grim feeling that we're only now in a position to start understanding how truly bad this has been.

The Dark Lord himself seemed to be taking things to a qualitative new level in his interview this week with ABC News. He was parsing his words carefully, and one could argue that he doesn't quite admit explicitly that his government used waterboarding, which hereafter I'll refer to by its traditional name of "the drowning torture". But he at least comes about as close as you can without saying it explicitly. In my reading, he's admitting it explicitly.

He also explicitly said that he had been part of the discussions on authorizing the torture techniques used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which we know from solid reporting included the drowning torture, and that he had supported it. And he encourages the Obama administration to continue it.

I shared some of my initial reactions to this in the comments to Digby's post Confessions 12/16/08. I'll work some of those into a subsequent post. Here I'm trying to look at what this latest development means in news and legal terms.

ABC News titles the transcript Cheney Defends Hard Line Tactics 12/16/08. The newspaper online site for the online Argentine paper Clarín headlined its story Para Cheney, la tortura del "submarino" es "notablemente exitosa" (For Cheney, the "submarino" torture is "notably successful") 16.12.2008. "Submarino" is the Argentine term for the drowning torture. It is well known as one of the most notorious practices of the vicious junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. That period is remembered there, among other names, as the period of "el terrorismo de Estado": "the terror of the state" or "state terrorism". I'm going to be looking to see if any mainstream American news service will use the appropriate word "torture" in their headlines on this interview.

Here are some key passages from the Cheney interview with Jonathan Karl:

On the question of so-called torture, we don't do torture. We never have. It's not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross.

The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful -- wouldn't do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal. And any suggestion to the contrary is just wrong. Did it produce the desired results? I think it did.

I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the number three man in al Qaeda, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information. There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source. So, it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.

And I think those who allege that we've been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don't know what they're talking about.

This administration has based its very thin legal excuse for violating the anti-torture laws by essentially defining any torture practice they authorized as not qualifying as "torture".

Those Justice Department alibi memos to which he refers were criminal acts in themselves. They really were like Mob lawyer acts meant specifically to facilitate breaking the law.

No one should need to argue the pragmatic point that Cheney makes alleging that the torture was effective. Torture is criminal, it's a fundamental violation of human rights, it's incompatible with the basic rule of law, and it's just plain wrong.

But in the world in which we now live, opponents of torture will also have to wrestle with the practical argument. So it's important to recognize that the only "evidence" we have that the Cheney-Bush torture policy has been practically useful in any way in combating terrorism comes from characters like Cheney and Bush who have a vested interest in justifying their torture policy, and who are without meaningful credibility on any such claim.

Jimmy Carter, by contrast, has immense credibility on human rights issues. He reminded us in Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005), "The primary goal of torture or the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear."

Cheney continued:

KARL: Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

CHENEY: I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.

KARL: In hindsight, do you think any of those tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others went too far?

CHENEY: I don't.

KARL: What is your advice to President-elect Obama then on this? Because he's been quite critical. And he might have supported...

CHENEY: He has.

KARL: ... FISA. But President-elect Obama has been very critical of the counterterrorism policies of this administration.

CHENEY: Well, counterterrorism policy's designed to defeat the terrorists. It turns on intelligence. You can't do anything without collecting first-rate intelligence. And that's what these programs are all about.

I would argue that, for the new administration, how they deal with these issues are going to be very important, because it's going to have a direct impact on whether or not they retain the tools that have been so essential and defending the nation for the last seven-and-a-half years, or whether they give them up.

It's significant that so secretive a man as Cheney is being so explicit about his complicity in criminal acts. I'm not sure what that significance is. But his explicit statement - even if carefully worded in light of his legal vulnerability - is surprising.

He's demanding that the Obama administration continue his and Bush's criminal torture policy.

KARL: And on KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed], one of those tactics, of course, widely reported was waterboarding. And that seems to be a tactic we no longer use. Even that you think was appropriate?

CHENEY: I do.

KARL: More than two years ago, President Bush said that he was - wanted to close down Guantanamo Bay. Why has that not happened?

CHENEY: It's very hard to do. Guantanamo has been the repository, if you will, of hundreds of terrorists, or suspected terrorists, that we've captured since 9/11. They - many of them, hundreds - have been released back to their home countries. What we have left is the hard core.

Their cases are reviewed on an annual basis to see whether or not they're still a threat, whether or not they're still intelligence value in terms of continuing to hold them.

But - and we're down now to some 200 being held at Guantanamo. But that includes the core group, the really high-value targets like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Now, the question: If you're going to close Guantanamo, what are you going to do with those prisoners?

One suggestion is, well, we bring them to the United States. Well, I don't know very many congressmen, for example, who are eager to have 200 al Qaeda terrorists deposited in their district. It's a complex and difficult problem. If you bring them onshore into the United States, they automatically acquire a certain legal rights and responsibilities that the government would then have, that they don't as long as they're at Guantanamo. And that's an important consideration. [my emphasis]

Cheney does think long term when it comes to destroying the Constitution. And along those lines, he's trying to do a couple of things here: (1) to persuade the Obama administration to continue the lynch-law system he established with the "Bush Gulag" (Al Gore's term) and the torture policy to provide "bipartisan" validation for those criminal enterprises; (2) to set a line of Republican attack when Obama shuts down the Gulag which will also serve as a political excuse for the next Republican President to re-instate it.

It's long past time for everybody to start asking themselves how we "know" that any of the prisoners at Guantánamo or other stations of the Bush Gulag are guilty of anything? None of them have so far been through any judicial process worth the name. Basically all we have to rely on is the more-than-dubious word of Cheney, Bush and their spokespeople.

Some of the independent reporting we have on a few of them may be reliable in alleging they have been involved in terrorism against Americans. But remember the "dirty bomber" who in the end wasn't charged with anything to do with a "dirty bomb"? The one who basically only went to prison because he had previously been tortured out of his mind and couldn't mount a meaningful defense of himself? If they have actual evidence, they should have presented it in legitimate trials.

Republicans love to ask this question about what if we let them go? But I've yet to hear one Republican, not even one, ask what's going to happen when all these torturers we've trained return to civilian life? I'm assuming that with few exceptions, the torturers willingly agreed to participate. What happens when most of these guys (they are mostly men, it appears) are put back in society? After learning to get off on stripping guys down, tying them up, inserting foreign objects into their rectums or performing other abusive sadomasochistic acts on them, is it really going to do it for them to just come home and sleep with their wives or girlfriends? Or will they look for outlets for their less conventional acquired tastes? Would you date someone who you knew had been an interrogator at Guantánamo? What would your reaction be if your son or daughter was getting involved with someone like that? (This is one big reason that I think it's important to prosecute the torturers themselves as well as those who designed and authorized the torture program.)

Cheney's interview provides vivid illustration of the reasons that it is imperative to have a thorough criminal investigation of the torture policy and war crimes, in particular. The torture policy voids the rule of law in a fundamental way that no "truth commission" is going to remedy.

It's going to take real trials to impress on the minds of everyone how very serious this has been. And it's going to take real trials and also seeing some of these high-level perpetrators like Cheney and Rumsfeld actually go to prison in order to discourage the next Republican administration from doing the same, and worse.

Defenders of torture argue that if the perpetrators are prosecuted, then in the future soldiers or CIA officers or contractors may be reluctant to carry out their assignments if they are afraid of being prosecuted.

But that's the purpose of having a law. When they are ordered to torture someone, anyone in the service of the US government or any government agency should be thinking twice and three times that no matter what Mob-style legal loopholes their commanding conspirators have set up, there's a very good chance they will be prosecuted, exposed to the public as grotesque sadists and sent to prison.

No "truth commission" or Congressional investigation is going to accomplish that. The Obama administration has a solemn obligation to enforce the law and to see that such egregious violations of the law as torture are prosecuted. It's most important to prosecute the senior perpetrators. But it would be much better to prosecute them from top to bottom, with the usual considerations of allowing more junior members of a criminal enterprise to get more lenient treatment if they flip on the higher-ups.

Only real prosecutions have a chance of fixing this. And only real prosecutions are going to lay the evidence out publicly in such a way that even Republicans and even some of our esteemed Great Pundits will find it difficult to overlook what a gruesomely awful thing this torture policy is.

And unless he wants to continue the Cheney-Bush lynch law, Obama's most straightforward approach to shutting down the Bush Gulag would be to follow the existing rules that were in place on 9/11. Put the prisoners in front of an independent court as international law requires to determine whether they are prisoners-of-war. If they are, treat them according to the Geneva Convention which prohibits torture and requires their release once the conflict is over.

If they are not prisoners-of-war, then process them through the American court system. If Cheney and Bush managed to collect enough legitimate information on them that's not tainted by their thoroughly sick torture program to convict them, then they will be sentenced according to the law. If they are acquitted, they're free. If sending them back to their home countries would subject them to personal danger from their home government, they can find some place where they can resume regular life, for those to whom it would still be possible.

The Republicans will howl in fake outrage. But putting them through a process that the world and all American citizens can see as legitimate is the best way to go. And part of what such procedures would surely make clear is just how outrageous bad the Cheney-Bush process has been.

For additional comments on the Cheney interview, see Memeorandum.

Tags: cheney, torture

The Dark Lord of the Bush Presidency

David Bromwich in The Co-President at Work New York Review of Books 10/22/08 (11/20/08 issue) gives us a good reminder of how this country has been ruled for the last eight years under the Cheney-Bush administration. This is a telling story about Cheney's methods of operation, in this case around his own selection as Vice President:

As early as March 2000, Bush asked him whether he would consider taking the second slot. Cheney at first said no. Later, he agreed to serve as Bush's inspector of the qualifications of others; his lieutenants were David Addington and his daughter Liz. Some way into that work, Bush asked Cheney again, and this time he said yes. The understanding was concluded before any of the lesser candidates were interviewed. It was perhaps the first public deception that they worked at together: a lie of omission - and a trespass against probity - to give an air of legitimacy to the search for a nominee. But their concurrence in the stratagem, and the way each saw the other hold to its terms, signaled an equality in manipulation as no formal contract could have done. It is hardly likely that an exchange of words was necessary.

The vice-presidential search in the spring of 2000 was characteristic of the co-presidency to come in one other way. It involved the collection of information for future use against political rivals. In this case, the rivals were the other potential VPs, among them Lamar Alexander, Chuck Hagel, and Frank Keating. They had been asked to submit exhaustive data concerning friends, enemies, sexual partners, psychological vicissitudes (noting all visits to therapists of any kind), personal embarrassments, and sources of possible slander, plus a complete medical history. Each also signed a notarized letter that gave Cheney the power to request records from doctors without further clearance.

All this information would prove useful in later years. Barton Gellman reveals in Angler that soon after Frank Keating was mentioned as a likely candidate for attorney general, a story appeared in Newsweek about an awkward secret in his past: an eccentric patron had paid for his children's college education. No law had been broken, and nothing wrongly concealed; but the story killed a chance for Keating to be named attorney general; and the leak could only have come from one person. Doubtless most of the secrets in Cheney's possession were the more effective for not being used. [my emphasis]

Along that same line, Bromwich notes, "When he ran for Congress in 1978, and won election for the first of five terms, he got himself quickly appointed to an odd combination of committees: Ethics and Intelligence. They had in common the access they offered to secrets of entirely different kinds."

Bromwich does not refer to the 2006 book by Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency. But they described that same process of how Cheney manipulated the Vice Presidential nominating process in their book, which was published before those formally included in his review.

Referring to the web of think-tanks and policy groups and personal relationships that Sidney Blumenthal described back in 1986 in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, Bromwich observes, "Republicans, since 1975, have had a foreign policy establishment that stays in place even when they are out of power."

That's true for domestic policy, as well. And that's not likely to change during an Obama administration. The Democrats have built up more of a "civil society" infrastructure during the last eight years. But what Bromwich writes is still largely true, that "Democrats can claim nothing of the sort". Certainly not on the scale that institutions like the American Enterprise Institute have exercised influence.

And Bromwich is also correct in saying, "Through the continuity of neoconservative advisers, the military-statist wing of the Republican Party has thus, for three decades now, had the consistency and coherence of a shadow government." There's nothing inherently wrong or necessarily destructive about such a thing. On the contrary, parliamentary systems can and do have have more-or-less formal shadow cabinets, in which a member of the main opposition party assumes the role of primary spokesperson on parallel lines to the responsibilities of the Cabinet Ministers. But the neocons and their nationalist/unilateralist allies like Cheney and Don Rumsfeld did have destructive goals in mind. And still do.

I'm not quite ready to adopt Bromwich's formulation in the following. But it is a potentially very useful framework for understanding the foreign-policy neocons, in particular:

Never before, in the history of the United States, has there been an ideological camp so fully formed and equipped to extend itself as neoconservatism in the year 1999. It was, and remains, a sect that has some of the properties of a party. There are mentors now in the generation of the fathers as well as the grandfathers, summer internships for young enthusiasts, semiofficial platforms of programmed reactions to breaking news. But to grasp their collective character, one must think of a party that does not run for office at election time. They can therefore evade responsibility for botched policies and the leaders who promote those policies. Donald Rumsfeld had his first and warmest partisans among the neoconservatives, but they were also the first, with the solitary apparent exception of Cheney, to identify him as a scapegoat for the Iraq war and to call for his firing when the insurgency tore the country apart in 2006. [my emphasis]

Of course, I cried a river over poor Rummy's fall. (NOT!)

One reservation I have about this approach, though, is that it could be taken to imply that the genuinely militaristic ideas of the neocons are more distinct from the Republican Party as such than they really are. The Christian Right activists generally don't consider themselves neoconservatives. But they are the most enthusiastic popular base for the Cheney-Bush foreign policy.

There are those critics of this administration who think Cheney's role is exaggerated by critics arguing along the lines of Bromwich. And we certainly should give Bush a pass on his responsibility for the things he's done even if Cheney masterminded them. But I also have the impression that Cheney has been the most important moving force in this administration, particularly on foreign policy but also on much of domestic policy, like the critical area of energy.

Josh Marshall deserves credit for describing what an outsized role Cheney played in this administration earlier than most in his article Vice Grip Washington Monthly Jan/Feb 2003. And he pointed out how Cheney's influence was especially associated with bad results:

Indeed, on almost any issue, it's usually a sure bet that if Cheney has lined up on one side, the opposite course will turn out to be the wiser.

Yet somehow, in Washington's collective mind, Cheney's numerous stumbles and missteps have not displaced the reputation he enjoys as a sober, reliable, skilled inside player. .... If there were any justice or logic in this administration as to who should or shouldn't keep their job, there'd be another high-ranking official in line for one of those awkward conversations: Dick Cheney.

And his concluding analysis in that article has been sustained by events in the subsequent years:

Why, though, has the press failed to grasp Cheney's ineptitude? The answer seems to lie in the power of political assumptions. The historian of science Thomas Kuhn famously observed that scientific theories or "paradigms"--Newtonian physics, for instance--could accommodate vast amounts of contradictory evidence while still maintaining a grip on intelligent people's minds. Such theories tend to give way not incrementally, as new and conflicting data slowly accumulates, but in sudden crashes, when a better theory comes along that explains the anomalous facts. Washington conventional wisdom works in a similar way. It doesn't take long for a given politician to get pegged with his or her own brief story line. And those facts and stories that get attention tend to be those that conform to the established narrative. In much the same way, Cheney's reputation as the steady hand at the helm of the Bush administration--the CEO to Bush's chairman--is so potent as to blind Beltway commentators to the examples of vice presidential incompetence accumulating, literally, under their noses. Though far less egregious, Cheney's bad judgment is akin to Trent Lott's ugly history on race: Everyone sort of knew it was there, only no one ever really took notice until it was pointed out in a way that was difficult to ignore. Cheney is lucky; as vice president, he can't be fired. But his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see. [my emphasis]

Tags: cheney, dick cheney

McCain's Straight Walk Express by Robert S. McElvaine

"Just a closer walk with thee."

It should be the theme song of the McCain campaign, and the "thee" is George W. Bush.

John McCain has given up Straight Talk for a Straight Walk. He is walking in lockstep with the campaign's Invisible Man, George W. Bush, in a straight line in the same direction Bush has been taking the nation.

The direction of that straight walk is over a cliff, and the American people know it. Walking straight ahead at a time when 9 out of 10 American believe the country is heading in the wrong direction is plainly not a plan for either political or national success.

It is obvious to most Americans that the United States must change direction, and it should be equally obvious that following in march behind the crooked-talk, straight walk McCain will not provide that change of course.

Any remaining doubt was removed on Saturday when what might be the most important and least coveted endorsement of the campaign was made.

In effect, Dick Cheney invited John McCain on a hunting trip, during which he fired a blast with the full force of his own 18 percent approval rating at the Arizona senator.

"I'm delighted to support John McCain," Cheney said in Laramie, Wyoming. "He is a man who has looked in the face of evil and not flinched," declared a vice president who looks at the face of evil every morning while shaving.

Cheney's message to McCain in the campaign's dying hours is: Don't worry John, I've got your back! Apparently the back of his party's presidential nominee was irresistible as a target for the vice president's knife.

Sen. McCain's response to the latest endorsement of his straight walk with Bush is reportedly: Et tu, Cheney?

Tags: mccain, cheney, robert mcelvaine

All you need to know about the Presidential campaign

The Dark Lord endorses his candidate:



Tags: cheney, dick cheney

That strike into Syria

I already "fisked" this article, This article today, Officials Say U.S. Killed an Iraqi in Raid in Syria by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker New York Times 10/27/08, at some length in another, "long-form" post. But I wanted to return to it to summarize some of the most important points.

One is that the administration is all-but-officially admitting they made a military strike into Syrian territory. This was not a "covert action". It was a full-on military strike, a "targeted assassination" operation aimed at a particular individual, if the anonymous sources are to be believed. Do I need to add that there's no clear reason why these sources should have been granted anonymity since the story couldn't sound more like an officially-sanctioned "leak"? Or it could be some kind of "trial balloon" to test public and Congressional reaction.


Targeted assassination in general is a highly dubious policy with a highly dubious legal status. This one clearly includes some very real immediate practical risks: reduction of Syrian cooperation with US anti-terrorism operations (which could be a lucky break for Syrian nationals selected for the CIA's "special rendition"); a relaxing of border controls on the Syrian side; retaliation by Syrian against Iraqi refugees currently residing there; interference with Israeli diplomacy aimed at improving their relations with Syria.

I'm not an attorney or a specialist in international law. But I know enough about it that I would be amazed if it weren't a straight-up illegal act of aggression. And it's very notable that the anonymous administration officials are pitching this one not just as an application of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war but an expansion of it.

Motives? The administration officials could be telling the truth. (Hey, it's theoretically possible!) There clearly seems to be an idea of locking the Obama administration into these kinds of strikes, if not into expanded wars in Pakistan, Syria and/or Iran. The anonymous official included an explicit hint that the same thing might happen to Iran, where there have already been covert actions, according to Seymour Hersh's reporting. There was even a passage that could be read as a suggestion that the assassination target may have been killed after he was taken into custody.

I'm also worried that one purpose, maybe even the main purpose, is to establish precedents for the next Republican administration to provide some kind of thin validation for further illegal acts. This is why it's so important that there be official, criminal investigations of this current administration's bad acts. Because if Obama decides to give them all a pass, the Cheneyized Republican Party will take that as a green light to go back to the use of a lawless "Unitary Executive" the next time they come to power.

This strike into Syria could be a much bigger deal than it might appear on the surface.

Tags: authoritarianism, cheney, dick cheney, syria, unilateral executive, unitary executive

Covert war against Iran

When will his destructive actions end?

Seymour Hersh has a new piece out, Preparing the Battlefield New Yorker 07/07/08 issue; accessed 06/29/08.

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of "high-value targets" in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

And, yes, at least some Democrats who were aware of the operation as part of the established Congressional oversight procedures apparently went along cheerfully:

The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates, [Joint Chiefs of Staff head Adm. William] Fallon, and many others. "The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted" by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. "The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing."

What will it take to get the Democrats to stand up effectively to the right wing on national security? What will it take?

Hersh also talks about one of the most dangerous practices initiated by Rummy as Defense Secretary, having the military instead of the CIA run some covert operations. Not that the CIA's covert operations have had such spectacular results, other than in the imaginations of neoconservatives and Cheney militarists. Hersh writes:

"This is a big deal," the person familiar with the Finding said. "The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror." He added, "The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray"—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not - "but now it’s a shade of mush."

I ask again, what will it take to get the Democrats to stand up effectively to the right wing on national security?

And these operations are not taking place only in Iran but also in Pakistan:

The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

There could be considerable more justification for such operations in Pakistan, though there are serious chain-of-command issues involved. Pakistan's government could conceivably secretly agreed to those raids, since they are nominally an American ally. We need to remember though that justified is not the same as effective. After all, our government is still run by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. The missile strikes that are connected to these operations in Pakistan have been the source of controversy with Pakistan this year.

One of Hersh's Pentagon sources also mentioned - seemingly in passing - such operations in the "Horn of Africa", which presumably means at least in Somalia. The United States is effectively in low-level direct conflicts in Pakistan, Somalia and Iran, in addition to the bigger wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Extracting the US from this tangle of commitments while maintaining necessary anti-terrorist capabilities is going to be a monumental task for any President that undertakes it. Involvements like this are much easier to create than to get out of.

Then there's this:

A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, "it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control." He went on, "We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration." He added, "This Administration has been so secretive."

I'm not sure why such a comment needed to be anonymous. And I'm willing to be generous and acknowledge the possibility that the person is referring to a Democratic victory in Congressional elections. But, given the situation, I have to wonder whether the assumption is that a President Obama wouldn't be willing to shut down counter-productive and needless CIA and military covert operations on his own. Congress should not leave it to the President of either Party. But, still, that sort of comment from Dems worries me; assuming here it was a Democrat because Hersh doesn't identify them as such.

For those who may be tempted to read Adm. Fallon's pragmatic skepticism about a military attack on Iran as the diametric opposite of the Cheney-Bush position, Hersh's interviews with him are worth noting:

One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”

Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. "When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood."

I don't doubt from what all kind of reporters and experts are saying that Iran is heavily involved in Iraq. But it's not been proven that Iran is actively waging operations against Americans or inciting or directing them. And, strategically, the reason for such action by Iran would be very puzzling. Iran supports the Maliki government which the Americans also support. The perceived interests of Iran and the US in that regard are effectively the same in Iraq.

But, obviously, the war threats do give Iran some incentive to keep the American troops tied down with trouble in Iraq. Middle East politics can be very complicated. But the Bush administration's more dramatic accusations on Iranian involvement have been shaky.

Then, if Hersh is right, the US is actually carrying out military operations on Iranian territory, even kidnapping elite soldiers from Iran's Quds Force. So we can hardly assume that any Iranian action come from pure unprovoked hostility toward the US. That's not a moral judgment, it's a practical fact about those kinds of covert operations. In Vietnam, the CIA was running covert military operations on North Vietnamese territory, and the landing of one such team was probably the immediate motive for the North Vietnamese attack that did occur in the notorious Tonkin Gulf incident. The Johnson administration pumped it up to sound even more serious, and didn't bother to explain to Congress and the public about the CIA covert ops under way there.

Hersh's article explains that the military covert ops also are run in violation of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, which requires that the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations in his area of command. But at least some of the covert ops are being run outside of Fallon's command as head of CENTCOM. His protests over this situation were apparently a big factor in his untimely ouster as CENTCOM commander.

In other words, the White House is running what sure sounds like rogue military operations that in concept are similar to Nixon's Plumbers or Reagan's Nicaragua Contra operation that led to the Iran-Contra scandal. And who knows what operations they may be running with Blackwater or other mercenaries.

Gee, who could be behind this? An anonymous military colleague of Fallon's said that the admiral "would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney." Wow, what a surprise!

A former intelligence official told Hersh, "The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney's office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results." Another of his sources told him about a meeting in the Vice President's office during January or February: "The subject was how to create a casus belli [excuse for war] between Tehran and Washington."

Any worries about "blowback" from these current operations? Hersh:

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. "These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we're once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties." Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. "This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists," [Vali] Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture." The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

Another important question: just how much damage will Dick Cheney be able to do before he leaves office?

Hersh also interviewed one of the best authorities on Western policies in the Middle East, former German Foreign Minister and former Green Party leader Joschka Fischer:

Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach [to the Iranian nuclear program] includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. "The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council," Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. "This could be acceptable to the Iranians - if they have good will."

The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. "I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran," he said. "Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue."

I saw Fischer speak in San Francisco in May 2007 and he talked then about the seriousness of the Iranian nuclear program, saying that despite Iranian denials, the US and Europe had to assume that they were intending to build nuclear weapons. But when he was asked about the option of a military attack on Iran, he just shook his head in dismay and said it wasn't a viable option.

Once more: just how much damage will Dick Cheney be able to do before he leaves office?

Tags: cheney, iran, iraq war, seymour hersh

Dick Cheney, short version

Are you ready for four (or eight) more years of Dick Cheney government?

Pat Lang doesn't really like my quoting him. But he manages to say some things that are spot-on. Like the following, from The Vice President does not care what we think Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008 blog 03/22/08:

I am still perplexed by the existence of Dick Cheney. This is a man who has evidently believed for a long time that the Framers of the US Constitution somehow got it wrong but who has still managed to rise to the second highest executive branch office in the country. How did that happen? As I have written before, Cheney does not like our present form of government.

Tags: cheney, pat lang

Is the Dark Lord surging?

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official and currently a columnist and contributing editor of isolationist magazine, The American Conservative, does some decent analysis of issues related to terrorism and the Iraq War. He argues in a Huffington Post piece from last week, The Return of Dick Cheney 01/21/08, that Cheney's malign influence on Middle East policy is having a resurgence, after supposedly being in eclipse for a while:

According to intelligence sources in Washington, Vice President Cheney has again begun to urge Bush to act against Iran before the end of his presidency. Cheney has suggested that if the Israelis act against Iran, the US will be implicated in the attack and would have no choice but to join Tel Aviv in taking military action. The resurgence of Cheney and the instability arising from Bush's attempts to reinvigorate the faltering anti-Iran Arab coalition has alarmed several senior members of the American intelligence community who are now backing away from their optimistic assessment that the NIE on Iran ensured the US would not attack Iran. Many now believe Bush has agreed in principle with Cheney that military conflict with Iran must be initiated before the next President takes office.

Scott Horton of Antiwar.com Radio interviewed Giraldi on 01/24/08. (As always with Antiwar.com, be cautious about anti-Israel claims from their site.)

Tags: cheney, philip giraldi

Thanksgiving with Bush, Cheney and war in Iraq

When I first saw Stephen Graubard's Mr. Bush's War: Adventures in the Politics of Illusion, I thought, "Oh, another book about Bush and the Iraq War". But actually, it was published in 1991 and is about Old Man Bush's Gulf War in 1992. Not only the title but the text as well provides a strong reminder that the temptation to contrast the supposedly less ideological, more pragmatic Reagan and Old Man Bush administrations to the radical and dogmatic Cheney-Bush administration can be very misleading. In fact, there are heavy continuities from the Iran-Contra affair during St. Reagan's administration to the Gulf War of Old Man Bush's to the overall disaster we are experiencing today.

Graubard is one of the leading historians of the American Presidency. So it's no surprise that he focuses on how events are seen from the perspective of the incumbent Presidents. But what very few of us knew in 1992, probably including Graubard, is what a potent and poisonous influence Dick Cheney would prove to be. Knowing what we know now, it's hard not to wonder if the Dark Lord's influence was underestimated in the past, as well.

Then-Congressman Cheney was the ranking minority member of the Joint Congressional Committee that investigated the Iran-Contra affair. His doctrine of the "unitary Executive" was first articulated publicly in the minority report on Iran-Contra, much of which was written by David Addington, now the Dark Lord's chief of staff.

Cheney was Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War of 1991 and during the buildup to it. As SecDef, Cheney stayed out of the limelight. Unlike his mentor Rummy during the Iraq War, SecDef Cheney let Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell be the stars of Pentagon press conferences on the war. Cheney has always preferred to operate on "the dark side".

One of the reasons Old Man Bush and his SecDef gave for the urgency of engaging Iraq militarily after their seizure of Kuwait was that Iraq was massing troops near the Saudi Arabian border. It was widely accepted in those days, even by the most "dovish" Democrats, that the US (for better or worse) had a national interest in the survival of the Saudi monarchy because of our dependence on Saudi oil. In those days before the Internet had become a mass product, the St. Petersburg Times down in Florida purchased photos taken at two different times from a commercial satellite and neither showed any sign of the alleged Iraqi buildup near the Saudi border. They published a story on it, but the Establishment media was already slavering over the profits to be had from jingoistic coverage. So the dissenting story didn't get much national attention. SecDef Cheney refused to release intelligence photos on which his claims were based. Last I heard, they had never been released. And I'm guessing never will be, if the Dark Lord has his way.

Graubard does discuss one incident in a way that focuses on the dark side of the SecDef, which we now know so well. In September, 1990, the chief of the Air Force, Gen. Michael Dugan, stated publicly that it would be a good idea to try to decapitate the Iraqi regime by targeting Saddam Hussein for pinpoint air strikes. SecDef Cheney fired him. The general assumption was that Cheney had done so because what Dugan suggested sounded like assassination of a head of state, which was against US policy and international law.

Today, just stating the assumption is enough to see how ridiculous an idea it is. It's always possible that Old Man Bush ordered Cheney to fire him. But we know today that the Dark Lord doesn't give a flying [Cheney] for American or international law. It's inconceivable to me that Cheney would have fired him for that reason.

Graubard suggests a more consistent explanation. Dugan's real sin, he thought, was that in his statement, Dugan said that the Iraqi Air Force "has very limited capability" and that its army was "incompetent". For reasons, I discuss below, this was seriously outside the bounds of the Bush-Cheney Party line on the situation facing the US in the Gulf. So Cheney fired him. Graubard's explanation rings true. Cheney has no compunction against breaking the law. But for violating the Party line in public, sure, Cheney would fire a general. He would even out an undercover CIA agent for that.

The Party line there had to do with the potential difficulty of the war. For political reasons, Old Man Bush and his administration preferred that the general public think that the Iraqi armed forces were ferocious, and that the upcoming war against them could be long and costly. Graubard argues that they knew very well that expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait could be done relatively quickly and easily. But Old Man Bush wanted it to look like he was a far-seeing Churchill, bravely undertaking a huge military risk because of his determination to never let Saddam Hitler get away with aggression, or allow a timid-hearted West to appease him.

The lessons of St. Reagan

Graubard argues that the Reagan and Bush administrations suffered from a real lack of political sophistication in foreign affairs. This not only contradicts the Republican adulation of St. Reagan. It also violates the enduring conventional wisdom that Old Man Bush and his staunch Secretary of State and Bush family consigliere James Baker were skilled operators in foreign policy.

He sees Old Man Bush as copying heavily the lessons he learned from St. Reagan, including Reagan's faults. Reagan and his advisers were largely clueless about the changes that the Soviet Union was undergoing during the Gorbachev era. But his focus was above all on the US-Soviet relationship, because the core importance of that relationship was a central assumption of Cold War diplomacy. Obviously, there were some good reasons for that. But one of the implications was that St. Reagan and his administration paid even less attention to what was going in the rest of the world and so remained clueless about a lot of what they were doing, not least in the Middle East.

Graubard certainly understands the Iran-Contra affair for the criminal and un-Constitutional operation is was. But he mainly focuses on it as a prime example of the complete disarray of Reagan's Middle East policies. Iran was presumed to be a terrible menace because of the experiences of the 1979 Revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis. His administration backed Saddam's Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War with little actual understanding of the issues involved and the implications of such active US involvement. (Oddly, though he gives a big emphasis to the fact that the US backed Iraq during that war, he doesn't even mention that Reagan's administration briefly entered the war as an active naval belligerent on Iraq's side.)

But Reagan's own attention was particularly focused on new hostage situations in the Middle East. The newly-formed Hizbullah in Lebanon had taken some American hostages. Arms-for-hostages swaps were the core of the US-Iranian arrangement in the Iran-Contra affair. In those days, Iran did have a greater influence on Lebanese Hizbullah than it is likely to have today, though they are still closely allied.

But Reagan was good at political theater. I'm not one to mock acting as a background for the American Presidency, because communicating effectively through the mass media is a vitally necessary skill for the President. And, as Graubard explains, Reagan realized that there was real political advantage to be found in small wars that could be done for little visible cost to Americans. So he intervened to quash the devilish Marxist menace from mighty Grenada, populartion circa 30,000 at the time. He bombed Libya, which was also considered an Islamic bogeyman country at the time. He backed Iraq against Iran (and Iran against Iraq in the arms-for-hostages swap), he supported the freedom fighters (aka, murderous terrorists) known as the Contras in Nicaragua, and provided substantial support to the brave mujahadeen (aka, Muslim terrorists) in Afghanistan against the Evil Empire (the USSR). Most of those proved popular, though Nicaragua was an exception. Amazingly enough, in those days, which really weren't that long ago, Congress was actually willing to challenge the President on an important foreign policy issue. Congress even prohibited aid to the Contras. Though some Republicans thought Reagan had the power to disregard that law, like Congressman Dick Cheney. (Funny how that name keeps popping up.)

Old Man Bush, the student of St. Reagan

Old Man Bush was much impressed with the notion that the President could rally the country around a foreign war. So when opportunity presented itself, he jumped at it. (Did I mention that Dick Cheney was his SecDef?) First, in an intervention with only the thinnest of legal justifications, he sent troops into Panama to capture the Panamanian head of state, Gen. Manuel Noriega, which he did successfully, shooting up a few thousand Panamanians in the process. But Panamanians don't vote in American elections.

His great moment, though, came when Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait in August, 1990. He organized an international coalition to drive Saddam out, with the requisite comparisons to Hitler and warnings of a new "Munich". While this is celebrated today as a "good war", Graubard makes some important points about Bush's motivations in undertaking it, in addition to his cynical political calculations.

Old Man Bush's first year as President, 1989, was the year the Eastern bloc of Communist nations clearly started coming apart. The Berlin Wall was officially opened in November, 1989. It was clearly a new era. But what kind of new era? Graubard argues that Old Man Bush and his advisers really had no grand conception of what the "new world order" that Bush rhetorically invoked should look like. They were still focused on the centrality of the US-Soviet relationship and failed to see how weak Gorbachev's government had become until the coup attempt in August, 1991, which essentially set in motion the final collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Old Man Bush, consigliere James Baker and SecDef Cheney saw the Gulf War as an opportunity to assert a new status of worldwide hegemony for the United States. And, more specifically, to demonstrate to the world that the USSR no longer had any significant power to influence events in the Middle East in opposition to the US.

But Graubard also points out that their administration had no more of an overall Middle East policy than St. Reagan's had. They gave little real thought to the various effects of the United States making war on a Muslim country, or of the long-term involvements and problems that were likely to result from their consciously limited goal of driving Iraq out of Kuwait. From what we now know, it appears that Old Man Bush expected an internal uprising to overthrow Saddam after his defeat in Kuwait.

Graubard's book was evidently completed sometime around the end of 1991. So he had no way of knowing how rapidly Bush's war-related popularity would decline. But he makes a number of valuable observations, a number of which suggest that the conventional view today of the Gulf War is quite distorted.

One thing that is a major continuity between Old Man Bush's administration with Dick Cheney and Shrub Bush's administration with Dick Cheney is that Old Man Bush wanted to build up the Gulf War as an historic victory, far beyond what it actually was, in order to pose politically as a mighty military leader. His pitiful son obviously had something similar in mind, as we saw with his now-infamous appearance on the USS Abraham Lincoln in his flight suit and manly codpiece.

Their blundering ignorance about the Middle East and their grossly exaggerated sense of the ability of US military power to drive political events there are also notable continuities.

And we should never forget what is likely the most important continuity of all: Dick Cheney.

Graubard's book also reminds us that the good-vs.-evil dualism that the Cheney-Bush administration of today has made so prominent didn't begin on 9/11/2001, in a passage that also reminds us of the hopeless shallowness of the ways in which the Bushes have used Second World War imagery:

The same Manichaean idiom, to distinguish between the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union and the democratic republic across the Atlantic, was increasingly used to describe the population at home, divided between an industrious and virtuous majority and a reckless, indolent, and vice-ridden minority, who caused all the trouble. An older American style of political debate went out of fashion; the new style, created for use on television, depended on code words, especially significant at those crucial four-year intervals when the future of the nation was being decided. Melodrama became the staple of politics; humor was banished. To suggest that the White House had been recently used as a retirement home [for St. Reagan], that a minor tyrant [Saddam Hussein] was elevated to appear as a new Hitler, that a make-believe war [the Gulf War], which could have had only one result militarily, was given more cosmic importance - and that these were the characteristic features of the new American politics - these were fairly serious charges, legitimated only by the fact that they were true, that they described a country governed by an executive increasingly given to staging media events, incapable of coping with serious revolutionary issues.

Roosevelt was courted by Churchill and Stalin because he was prepared to mobilize and share the produce of a self-confident society, recently emerged from a traumatic depression, but still unscathed by war. In his willingness to conscript, deploy, and risk armies and navies - asking for sacrifice from millions - Roosevelt recognized the importance of engaging the public. He had no interest in their mouthing popular patriotic sentiments, though he had no objection to them. Neither he nor his allies ever doubted that the margin between victory and defeat lay substantially in what the United States agreed to do, what the Congress and the people were to accept. The Second World War was dangerous for all who fought it, and not simply because Allied leaders announced that fact publicly. (my emphasis)

No, today's authoritarian Republican Party didn't begin with the Scalia Five's appointment of George W. Bush as President in 2000. But Dick Cheney has had a major role in the process for decades.

Tags: cheney, dick cheney, george h. w. bush, gulf war, iraq war, james baker, mr. bush's war, stephen graubard

Roots of Cheneyism

I started off to blog about a column that pulled several seemingly very different things together in a surprising way. Then I realized I was linking several different things in the way I was thinking about the column, too.

One thing is that it struck me that the current controversy in the Senate over Judge Michael Mukasey to be Attorney General has taken an important step back on the road to Constitutional government without fireworks going off. Even if the Republicans and Joe Lieberman manage to get Mukasey confirmed, the phrase "water-boarding" has been put front and center in the political vocabulary. And that's important.

Pat Lang blogged a year or two ago about how when he gave speeches related to the so-called war on terror", he would often get questions about the torture policy. But they were usually worded euphemistically, as in "aggressive interrogation techniques" or something similar. And he said he could often tell from the expression on the questioner's face that they thought the idea was dandy.

But he always made a point in responding to mention specific acts that were being committed on prisoners: extreme sensory deprivation, partial drowning (water-boarding), tying people in painful "stress" positions for extended periods, etc. This normally wiped the smile off the questioner's face. His speculation was that lots of suburbanites enjoyed a Sadie-Masey fantasy about torture, as long as they could picture it as some relatively benign coercion. But once he framed it realistically as the cruel, sadistic practice that it is, it wasn't such a charming secret fantasy any more.

And that's what's happened with the Mukasey hearings. The issue with him has become a specific practice of torture: tying a helpless man or woman onto a table, their head tilted back, covering their face with a cloth, and pouring water on their face to give them the terrifying and painful feeling of drowning. And then repeating it again and again. This is what our Christian President has made standard American policy. This is what becomes of our politics and government policy when men like Dick Cheney with the mentality of the worst segregationist misfits get the power to hurt people. They use it to hurt people.

Like the more secular-oriented dogmatic conservatives, Christian fundis will try to dodge responsibility for the torture policy - even while they support it like good segregationists supported lynch-murder and the associated torture - by arguing that the Cheney-Bush administration didn't represent pure Christian fundamentalist theocracy. But in reality, the mentality and the political support of the Christianists (politicized fundamentalists) were very much a part of these people like Cheney and Rummy thinking they could do this and get away with it.

Christian fundamentalism promises certainty about the state of one's soul. That's one of its primary emotional appeals. Often that level of certainty is carried over into more material matters, as well. The reasons trials and legal due process are barriers against tyranny and arbitrary government is that they require the government to prove its accusations against individuals it accuses of wrongdoing, i.e, they recognize that divine levels of certainty are impossible for us mere mortals.

When vicious characters like Cheney or Rummy get the power to just arrest somebody and order them subjected to sadistic torture with no restraints and no requirement to obey due process, the only real result is to exercise state-sponsored terrorism. Which is the only real function of torture anyway. (Individual sadism does exist; but torture is overwhelmingly a practice of governments because only governments can create the conditions - imprisonment, secrecy, etc. - to use it on a wide scale.)

Another line of thought is the way Spain proceeded against those who were just convicted of involvement in the "11-M" (March 11) bombing of a Madrid train station three years ago. They tracked down the perpetrators, prosecuted them under the law without (so far as anything I've seen reported) recourse to torture or evidence tainted by torture, and got convictions for most of the accused. Did the trial achieve 100% justice? I don't know. But that's why we have trials, to require the government to prove its case on a systematic basis.

The trial also produced reality-based information on the terrorists involved. It showed that the Basque separatist group ETA was not involved, and that the conservative government in office at the time used accusations against ETA to demagogue the election that took place a few days later. The facts that emerged also raised real questions as to whether the attack was really part of some systematic Al Qa'ida effort to target Spain for the presence of its troops in Iraq, an assumption that American rightwingers immediately weaved into a bogus narrative about Spanish "appeasement".

In the 9/11 attacks, one of the consequences of the torture policy is that we are unlikely in the extreme to ever have a trial of the accused perpetrators that produces anything like the amount of real information that Spain's prosecution of the 11-M perps has.

It also made me think of something that Larry McMurtry argues in his very informative but not especially cheerful book Oh What A Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846-1890 (2005). Which is that even though no amount of atonement or contrition can bring back the dead, in some real way these sorts of crimes have a way of coming to light. At the risk of slipping into purple prose, it's like the way Abel's blood was said to cry out of the ground against Cain, his brother and murderer. The Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857, for instance, continues to haunt the Mormon Church to this day. And when a number of bones were discovered at the massacre site in 1999, it became evident that even the cover-up is far from over. That massacre, by the way, took place on September 11. McMurtry observes that it is "a date that might be said to favor massacres".

The torture policy couldn't stay secret. But, as Paul Kiel and Marty Lederman point out, Congress' disgraceful grant of retroactive immunity for many of the torturers greatly complicates the possibility that any of them will be prosecuted, even by a succeeding administration that moves to restore the rule of law in such matters.

It reminds me so much of the situation in Argentina that I was reading about recently in connection with the election of the new President. One of her long-time political goals is to prosecute government officials who perpetrated crimes during the "long war" of the military dictatorship there that fell a quarter of a century ago. The military extracted a grant of amnesty in ceding power, but the Argentine Supreme Court eventually overturned it.

The more I think about the task before a Democratic administration, if we get one elected in 2008, the more I realize that to restore Constitutional processes and the rule of law, something very much like the post-dictatorship actions of other countries with relatively-new or recently-restored democracies is essential to make the restoration is to be as permanent as possible. Although the Ford administration (in which Cheney and Rummy were key players) blocked any such broad process around the Vietnam War, Congress did take actions like the War Powers Act, the Church Committee investigation of CIA abuses, and subsequent legal limitations on covert operations and domestic spying, that substantively addressed some of the abuses of power that had come to light.

The Argentine junta practiced much more widespread domestic brutality (I don't know if they used water-boarding but they did torture a lot of people) than the Cheney-Bush administration has. But Cheney's government has gone much farther in trashing the Constitution than Richard Nixon's did, or than Ronald Reagan did with the Iran-Contra covert operations.

Which brings me to the article that set me on this train of thought, The sad decline of Michael Mukasey by Sidney Blumenthal Salon 11/01/07. In a narrative that's surprisingly coherent given the twisted paths it travels, he discusses some of the ways that the Iran-Contra operations became the template of the current administration for foreign policy and for Cheney's version of unlimited Presidential power.

In charting how the Republican Party got to the place it is today, where defending "water-boarding" has become a touchstone of Party loyalty, we could adapt the saying "follow the money" to: "Follow Dick Cheney" and "follow the segregationists". Those two intertwining paths are the main pathways that took the Republican Party from the party of Eisenhower to the Party of Dick Cheney and water-boarding.

Tags: authoritarianism, cheney, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, marty lederman, paul kiel, republican party, sidney blumenthal, torture

Cheney and the Soviet model of governance

Gregory Djerejian in "Serious Consequences" at the Belgravia Dispatch blog 10/21/07 also took note of Cheney's admiring comments about his image of the Soviet Union and its allegedly ruthless dealings with Islamic terrorists:

It's really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors)--openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union - our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided. Indeed, we fought a decades-long Cold War so that Western style constitutional freedoms would trump Soviet authoritarianism. But yes, from this Sovietophile posture, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus protections makes all the sense in the world, doesn't it? Because we have a Vice-President all but openly emulating and cheer-leading the tactics of the KGB, not in the wilds of Wyoming, but to a soi disant sophisticated audience in Washington DC. Put differently, he is very proud of his world-view, indeed eager to share it with Beltway 'elites'. Who will clear this dangerous rot out of Washington and help us restore our good name? The stakes are high, that is, the preservation of the American democratic model as a leading force for moderation and rule of law on the world stage. (my emphasis)

Seriously, after Cheney and Bush leave office, whether by election or impeachment, we're going to need some kind of formal process not unlike what former dictatorships have set up to process and reveal the destructive things this administration has been up to. (See Gobiernos contra dictaduras El País 11.10.2007) It should include actual prosecution of criminal acts. But it also needs to shine the sunlight into the dark corners of this darkest of Presidential administrations.

We Americans really need to take a "Never Again!" approach to the misdeeds of the Cheney-Bush government.

Tags: authoritarianism, bush administration, cheney, dick cheney, gregory djerejian