Tag Archives: John Hannah

The Crazy Man Above the Garage

By:  Tuesday August 18, 2009 3:09 am

cheney-wheelchair.thumbnail.pngSorry for being so late on this, but I wanted to come back to this bizarre Barton Gellman article on Cheney. Amidst news including 1) Cheney took notes, exactly none of which were introduced at trial and, 2) Cheney apologists like John Hannah are out giving interviews, Gellman provides the following weird two paragraphs, which provide the great drama of the story.

The depths of Cheney’s distress about another close friend, his former chief of staff and alter ego I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have only recently become clear. Bush refused a pardon after Libby’s felony convictions in 2007 for perjury and obstruction of an investigation of the leak of a clandestine CIA officer’s identity. Cheney tried mightily to prevent Libby’s fall, scrawling in a note made public at trial that he would not let anyone "sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder." Cheney never explained the allusion, but grand jury transcripts — and independent counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald — suggested that Libby’s false statements aimed above all to protect the vice president.

Last month, an account in Time magazine, based on close access to Bush’s personal lawyer and White House counsel, described Cheney’s desperate end-of-term efforts to change Bush’s mind about a pardon. Cheney, who has spent a professional lifetime ignoring unflattering stories, issued a quietly furious reply. In the most explicit terms, he accused Bush of abandoning "an innocent man" who had served the president with honor and then become the "victim of a severe miscarriage of justice." Cheney now says privately that his memoir, expected to be published in spring 2011, will describe their heated arguments in full.

 This bit–which is what stuck in my craw–deserves some really close unpacking.

Cheney tried mightily to prevent Libby’s fall, scrawling in a note made public at trial that he would not let anyone "sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder." Cheney never explained the allusion, but grand jury transcripts — and independent counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald — suggested that Libby’s false statements aimed above all to protect the vice president. 

Now, Gellman is ostensibly talking about Cheney’s efforts to get Bush to pardon Libby, actions that started in 2007 (and which, at the earliest, he might have first contemplated in 2005, when Judy Miller testified to the grand jury). Continue reading →


John Hannah: Unitary Executives Can Assassinate Enemy Leaders

By:  Monday March 30, 2009 5:47 pm

In his appearance tonight on Wolf Blitzer, Sy Hersh said the same thing I said about his "revelation" that JSOC had assassination squads that bypassed normal reporting channels–Hersh pointed out that he had reported all that previously, last July. The biggest news in that part of his appearance is that Hersh revealed the number of countries–twelve–in which JSOC could work its assassination teams.

After Hersh appeared, Wolf had John Hannah, Cheney’s replacement Scooter and by far the biggest hack witness at the Libby trial, to try to rebut Hersh’s reporting.

Though Hannah didn’t really do that.

Instead, he dismissed Hersh’s concerns about the legality of the operations by insisting that the Chairs of the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, and Congressional leadership, could learn about these operations. Aside from the fact that Hannah admitted he didn’t actually know that to be true, he’s working on the assumption that they’ll come and ask about something that Hannah admits is a very close hold. 

Wolf: And when he says this JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command has this authority that they don’t even tell Congress about?

Hannah: It is extremely hard for me to believe, I, I, don’t know exactly what the consultations are with the Congress but it’s hard for me to believe that those committee chairmen and the leadership on the Hill involved in intelligence and armed services, if they want to know about these operations, cannot get this information from the Defense Department.

Wolf: And so this would be, from your perspective–and you worked for the Bush Administration for many years–it would be totally constitutional, totally legal to go out, find these guys, and to whack them. 

Hannah: There’s no question, in a theater of war, when we are at war–and there’s no doubt, we are still at war against Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. and on that Pakistani border–that our troops have the authority to go out after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy. 

Ultimately, though, Hannah resorts to the Cheneyesque justification for all abuses of power, the AUMF, arguing that troops "in the theater of war" can capture and kill the enemy. 

Of course, we’ve already seen that, until last November at least, the Bush Administration considered the US to be in the theater of war.  And Hannah pretends these assassinations are only going on in Iraq (if you’re Nuri al-Maliki or Continue reading →