I’m anxiously waiting the WaPo’s analysis of today’s GAO report. You’ll recall the WaPo reported last week that someone had liberated a copy of the GAO to prevent BushCO from "softening" its conclusions. But the numbers suggest that some of the conclusions were softened: whereas on Thursday, the WaPo reported Iraq had met three and partially met two of the benchmarks, the GAO has since added two more partially met objectives–on not providing a safe haven for outlaws, and on preparing three Iraqi brigades in Baghdad. In other words, over the weekend, Bush squeezed two more gentleman’s C’s out of the GAO.

More interesting still is the chart on page 12, which shows why Bush tried so hard to get GAO to give it some more passing grades. That chart shows shows how much more generous BushCo was in its July 2007 assessment. How else to explain that in July, BushCo found that Iraq had made satisfactory progress on eight benchmarks, whereas today’s softened GAO report finds that Iraq has made satisfactory progress on only three. And BushCo gave Iraq more positive grades than GAO did on two other benchmarks.

The GAO has quantified just how much lying Bush has already been doing in his assessments of success in Iraq.

It’s instructive, too, to see where there are variances.

• GAO says Iraq has failed to form a Constitutional Review Committee; BushCo says it has fully satisfied this benchmark
• GAO says Iraq has partially met benchmarks on forming semi-autonomous regions; BushCo says it has met this objective
• GAO says Iraq has failed to establish provincial authorities; BushCo says it has partially met this benchmark
• Rather than judge Iraq as failing to pass amnesty and disarmament, BushCo says simply that "conditions are not present for these benchmarks"
• GAO says Iraq has partially met its goal of three Iraqi brigades in Baghdad; BushCo says it has met this objective (on Thursday the report said Iraq had failed to meet this objective)
• GAO says Iraq has partially met its goal of "not providing a safe haven for outlaws"; BushCo is satisfied with Iraq’s progress on this score (on Thursday the report said Iraq had failed to meet this objective)
• GAO says Iraq has failed to eliminate militia control of local security; BushCo gives it partial credit
• GAO says Iraq has partially met its spending goal; BushCo gives it full credit

The key part of the GAO report is not just that it shows that the surge has been a failure. It also quantifies who much BushCo is lying to us to make us believe that it has succeeded.

Glenn highlighted a part of the Jeffrey Rosen on Jack Goldsmith article that I wanted to return to:

[Goldsmith] shared the White House’s concern that the Foreign IntelligenceSurveillance Act might prevent wiretaps on international calls involving terrorists.But Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, whichwas highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts. “We’reone bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmithrecalls Addington telling him in February 2004. [my emphasis]

Since I raised the question of why this piece got published early, I’ll point out one other timing detail.

The government just submitted a response to the ACLU’s motion to have the FISA Court’s two adverse rulings released. The whole debate is one that may free up documentation about the FISA program sooner rather than later, since the FISA Court technically owns the rulings in question, unlike almost all the other documents people have requested or FOIAed. The FISA Court is no doubt currently considering the government’s argument while it waits for the ACLU’s response, due on September 14.

You know–the FISA Court? The one Addington deemed "obnoxious"?

While I don’t think the ACLU motion is the reason for the early release of the Goldsmith article, I do find it amusing that the FISA Court will be considering the government’s arguments knowing full well that Addington has been running around anticipating their demise.

Via CREW, I see Ed Gillespie making grand promises that the GOP will have a scandal-free election in 2008.

Ed Gillespie, President Bush’s counselor and a former chairman of theRepublican Party, acknowledged that ethical scandals have hurt the GOP.He predicted that by 2008, the party "will not have candidates who haveany kind of ethical considerations that will be a concern to thevoters."

Like CREW, I’m not holding my breath that the GOP will be willing to jettison Stevens, Domenici, Doolittle, Lewis, and a slew of others.

But I’m increasingly fascinated with the prominent role of Lobbyist-in-Chief, Ed Gillespie. We now know he was included in discussions, in spring of 2006 (at precisely the time Andy Card and Scottie McClellan were ousted), about whether or not to fire Rummy. He picked up the portfolios of both Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove, two of the last hold-outs from the Texas Mafia. And now here he is, promising to do what Karl Rove couldn’t do–excommunicate the corruption from the Corruption Party.

The Lobbyist-in-Chief is accruing an awful lot of power in fairly short order. Is Gillespie the guy corporate America imposed on BushCo to ensure the Republicans not lose power for all eternity? And is Gillespie the guy who told Rove and Gonzales to leave?

To bail out those poor, helpless little credit card companies? Well, it’s time to revoke it:

As subprime borrowers began to default on their mortgages in rapidlygrowing numbers this year, credit card issuers increased their effortsto sign up such customers with tarnished financial histories, accordingto a market research firm.

Direct mail credit card offers to subprime customers in the UnitedStates jumped 41 percent in the first half of this year, compared withthe first half in 2006, according to Mintel International Group. Directmail offers targeted at customers with the best credit fell more than13 percent.

Yet, during this same period, defaults on subprimemortgages, which charge higher interest rates because the borrowers’blemished credit makes them bigger risks, rose significantly. In June,nearly 1 in 5 subprime mortgages were at least 60 days past due, andmore than 1 in 20 were in foreclosure, according to First AmericanLoanPerformance, a San Francisco firm that collects and analyzesmortgage data.

These are people already on the verge of bankruptcy. But credit card companies are targeting them selectively, luring them with yet another promise that they can get what they don’t–and can’t–pay for. And the credit card companies claim they’re doing these borrowers a favor, giving the cash to … what? Acquire tens of thousands of more debt?

The bankers running our house of cards economy just keep doubling down, it seems.

And so the man who began a silent revolt against BushCo’s shredding of the Constitution begins to speak. The NYT has a long Magazine article on Jack Goldsmith reviewing the revolt and previewing Goldsmith’s book, due to come out on September 17. The article provides details we’ve known in sketchy form before–like how the key decisions, prior to Goldsmith’s arrival, were made by Cheney and Addington bypassing normal channels in the Department of Justice and instead developing these opinions with a small cabal.

In the Bush administration, however, the most important legal-policy decisionsin the war on terror before Goldsmith’s arrival were made not by theOffice of Legal Counsel but by a self-styled “war council.” Thisgroup met periodically in Gonzales’s office at the White House or Haynes’soffice at the Pentagon. The members included Gonzales, Addington, Haynes andYoo. These men shared a belief that the biggest obstacle to a vigorous responseto the 9/11 attacks was the set of domestic and international laws that arosein the 1970s to constrain the president’s powers in response to the excessesof Watergate and the Vietnam War. (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Actof 1978, for example, requires that executive officials get a warrant beforewiretapping suspected enemies in the United States.) The head of the Officeof Legal Counsel in the first years of the Bush administration, Jay Bybee,had little experience with national-security issues, and he delegated responsibilityfor that subject matter to Yoo, giving him the authority to draft opinionsthat were binding on the entire executive branch. Yoo was a “godsend” toa White House nervous about war-crimes prosecutions, Goldsmith writes in hisbook, because his opinions reassured the White House that no official who reliedon them could be prosecuted after the fact. But Yoo’s direct access toGonzales angered his boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to Goldsmith.

It depicts the compartmentalization that Cheney and Addington used to make sure they could ignore the country’s laws.

If you haven’t already read Pat Lang on Bush’s surprise visit to Iraq today, do so now. For whatever PR value BushCo is trying to milk out of this visit (here’s C&L with coverage), Lang is persuasive that the chief reason for the visit is to bring his war cheerleaders together to develop a game plan for the next few weeks.

I note that the president’s travel party to AssadAir base in Anbar Province includes; Gates, Rice, Pace, Fallon, Lute,Hadley.  There, he will, of course, see Petraeus and Crocker as well. Anyone else of note? Any AEIers? Sounds like a council of war to me. Nice and isolated, minimal press interference and possibility ofoperational security planning breach.  Well thought out.  This will bea good place to get everyone "on board" and to coordinate tactics forthe Petraeus/Crocker show to come.

I’d love to know the answer to the questions Lang lays out. Learning who else attended this meeting would tell us a lot about ongoing strategy. Did they really have this meeting without anyone from OVP? For the record, I’m not entirely sure Hadley attended, though he could be considered an OVP mole if he did. And the WaPo quoted Ed Gillespie speaking on AF1, so he may have attended, too.

David Cloud of the NYT suggests there may be more to things:

Though Mr. Bush and General Petraeus had met as recently as last weekby video hookup, the seemingly last-minute nature of the trip and thearray of top officials from both governments who attended did not meanthere were deep disagreements among President Bush’s top advisers aboutstrategy in Iraq, they said.

And if there was a disagreement–either between Maliki and the Administration, or those who attended, it makes the attendance list all the more interesting.

The government’s primary strategy, in responding to the ACLU’s request for release of the FISC rulings disallowing parts of the Administration’s domestic wiretapping program, is to argue that the ACLU doesn’t have standing to ask for the documents. Only an aggrieved person can ask for such rulings, and even then, the aggrieved person cannot see the orders themselves that authorize domestic spying.

But there are two problems with that, it seems. First, the administration simply ignores that opinions are presumptively public, and therefore doesn’t address the historic role courts have played in whether they can publish their own orders. Further, the examples the Administration cites for refusing to release the FISC orders are cases in which the FISC approved wiretapping–not where it ruled wiretaps illegal.

Congress, which recognized the necessity for strict secrecy in matters handled by the FISC, specifically provided that the FISC operates under special security measures, and that FISA orders and applications are not to be disclosed absent specific judicial findings. See 50 U.S.C. 5 1803(c) ("application made and orders grantedlI] shall be maintained under security measures"); id. § 1806(f) (FISA orders, applications and related materials may be disclosed by a reviewing court in a criminal case "only where such disclosure is necessary to make an accurate determination of the legality of the surveillance"); FISC R. Pro. 3 (FISC must comply with 9 1803(c), 5 1822(e), and Executive Order 12,958 governing classification of national security information).

The government cites examples where the government’s application was granted, not, as in this case, where it was denied. There’s no question–the order in question was deemed illegal.

The other problem is that, if the materials requested are as classified as the government claims, then John Boehner should be prosecuted for leaking classified information. The government argues that Alberto Gonzales’ revelations about the FISC orders were authorized, but it does not say whether Tony Snow’s, Mike McConnell’s, and John Boehner’s revelations were. And it bases its discussion of the limited release solely on that Gonzales reference.

First, a correction. I suggested the other day that Dick was one of the three people who voted not to keep Rummy when Bush took a show of hands on Rummy’s fate. But Cheney may not have been among those polled. The WaPo has a review of the book and the incident today, and Cheney is not among those named (though Abramowitz does not identify all of the votes).

For Canning Rummy
Josh Bolten
Andrew Card
Condi Rice
Ed Gillespie
Three more people

Against Canning Rummy
Bush
Rove
Stephen Hadley
One other, probably Cheney

But here’s what I’m really struck by. Ed Gillespie, right there among the paid Presidential advisors, casting a "can Rummy" vote.

I’ve been harping for some time on the problem with a big-time lobbyist entering the White House to take on the Counselor role. After all, when a guy had been lobbying for the telecom industry, a number of front organizations for corporate interests, and those student loan companies that are bankrupting our families, it suggests he might have divided loyalties when he enters the White House.

This anecdote shows that Gillespie had entered the White House in a substantive advisory role long before he stopped being paid by those corporate interests. Ed Gillespie was taking votes on personnel decisions (which Cheney no doubt promptly overrode) at the same time as he was trying to convince Bush how important it was to give the telecoms immunity for illegally cooperating in domestic spying.

The NYT has a really weird story out today which tries to explain why news outlets don’t publish "open secrets" about public figures.

Old-fashioned as it seems, there are still tacit rules about when anopen secret can remain in its own netherworld, without consequence tothe politician who keeps it. But now that any whisper can become aglobal shout in an instant, how much longer can those rules apply? Andshould they, anyway?

[snip]

In the mainstream media, the recent standard for pursuing open secretshas been murky, but generally guided by the notion that privatebehavior matters when it is at odds with public declarations. Mr.Foley’s bawdy flirtation with pages was fair game not least because hehad sponsored legislation seeking to protect children from onlinepredators. Mr. Craig supported a 2006 amendment to the IdahoConstitution barring gay marriage and civil unions and has voted inCongress against gay rights.

Of course, the article gets a bunch of things wrong. The mainstream media let Craig and Foley (and continues to let David Dreier and others) off the hook for years, in spite of their clear hypocrisy. And Jim McGreevy was not outed because of hypocrisy–he was outed because of the clear impropriety of hiring his boyfriend (and here again, the example of Dreier is worth raising). Nor does the mainstream media ever point out the hypocrisy, in this case, of the Republican Party, which likes to mobilize the base by cultivating homophobia while remaining quite tolerant (up to a point–Dreier couldn’t become majority leader, after all) of barely-closeted gay men. At some point, the hypocrisy of the Republican party needs to become part of the story.

And perhaps most curiously, the article doesn’t discuss the reasons to report legal wrong-doing–even if it involves personal behavior. That is, shouldn’t the media have reported on Foley’s behavior with congressional pages, since those pages were underage? Shouldn’t the media report that David Vitter has admitted to breaking the law?

And, finally, the article doesn’t quote either of the two people who ought to be quoted for the story, Mike Rogers and Lane Hudson. Are they afraid to talk to the guys who proved the mainstream media complicit?

You’ll recall that the AIPAC defendants called Condi and Stephen Hadley to testify about how they routinely leak classified information. Well, the government claims that these two, at least, don’t have to testify.

 

Secretaryof State Condoleezza Rice and other senior intelligence officialsshould not be forced to testify about whether they discussed classifiedinformation with pro-Israel lobbyists, federal prosecutors argued in aclosed-door court hearing Friday.

Two former American IsraelPublic Affairs Committee lobbyists facing espionage charges havesubpoenaed Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, DeputyNational Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and several others to testifyat their trial next year.

If their testimony is allowed by U.S.District Judge T.S. Ellis III, the trial could offer abehind-the-scenes look at the way U.S. foreign policy is crafted.

(Note, it’s unclear whether the government is claiming just Hadley and Rice don’t have to testify, or whether they’re making the same claim for the others who have been subpoenaed, including Richard Armitage and Anthony Zinni.)

Basically, the Administration is arguing it should be able to keep its strategy of using A1 Cut-Outs secret. By A1 Cut-Out, I’m referring to the Administration’s practice of leaking classified information to a journalist–usually at the NYT and, until she was gone, often to Judy Miller–who then publishes it on the front page of the paper. The Administration then points to that story, pretending that they don’t know the information remains highly classified. The Administration famously did this with the aluminum tubes story, but it comes in really handy when you’re trying to drum up wars against countries whose names have four-letters starting in "Ira."