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Elliott Abrams Gave the Israelis a Hall Pass

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The Israelis say that George Bush gave them written permission to expand settlements in the West Bank.

A letter that President Bush personally delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon four years ago has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president’s efforts to forge a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians during his last year in office.

Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli prime minister, said this week that Bush’s letter gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal, even though Bush’s peace plan officially calls for a freeze of Israeli settlements across Palestinian territories on the West Bank. In an interview this week, Sharon’s chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed this understanding in a secret agreement reached between Israel and the United States in the spring of 2005, just before Israel withdrew from Gaza.

The part of this story that you’ll really like, though, is that Colin Powell says he never made such an agreement.

Weissglas said that the letter built upon a prior understanding between then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, which would allow Israel to build up settlements within existing construction lines. But Powell denied that. "I never agreed to it," he said in an e-mail.

Whereas Weissglas admits that the final settlement came in an agreement with Iran-Contra alum Elliott Abrams.

Weissglas said he then negotiated a "verbal understanding" with deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams that would permit new construction in those key settlements; Rice and Sharon then approved the Weissglas-Abrams deal. "I do not recall that we had any kind of written formulation," Weissglas said.

Would it surprise anyone that Elliott Abrams concluded some super-secret, cross-my-fingers, Neocons-only deal with the Israelis? Or that Condi Rice, agreed to that settlement, but now pretends she didn’t?

There’s one part of this purported settlement, though, that is especially lovely. In true Neocon fashion, they used "market demand" as their fig leaf to rationalize the new settlements.

Israel could add homes in settlements expected to keep, as long as the construction was dictated by market demand, not subsidies.

It sounds like a remarkable piece of Elliott Abrams work: the West Bank for Gaza, in another freelance, off-the-books act of foreign policy, all the while enshrining the sanctity of the market.

Who “We” Included in the Torture Briefings

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rincewind made an important point in my post on the torture briefings. At least one of the sources for the story must be one of the briefees, not a briefer. rincewind points to these two quotes that come from someone within the committee.

“It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,” said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. “They’d say, ‘We’ve got so and so. This is the plan.’”

[snip]

“These discussions weren’t adding value,” a source said. “Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it’s legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it.”

This source obviously considers himself as one of the people receiving the briefing, which further suggests this source is not in the CIA.

As luck would have it, via Troutfishing’s diary and this McGovern piece, I checked out this February 7, 2002 memo in which Bush declares that Al Qaeda will not be entitled to Geneva Convention protections. The memo seems to indicate that it is addressed to all the people who have participated–at least thus far–in discussions on torture; it refers to "our recent extensive discussions regarding the status of Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees." Now check out the list of addressees:

Dick Cheney
Colin Powell
Rummy
John Ashcroft
Andy Card
George Tenet
Condi Rice
Richard Myers

In other words, two of the people whom Bush noted as being involved in "extensive discussions regarding the status of Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees" are not included in the list ABC News gave of the attendees of the meetings that took place slightly later in 2002: Andy Card and Richard Myers. Either is a possibility to be the "high-ranking official" who objected to the repeated discussions of what techniques to use. Certainly, Myers is on the record as having opposed the decision not to extend Geneva Convention protections to Al Qaeda (most recently in reports from Feith’s book). And he would count as "high-ranking" in more than one sense (though neither he, nor Card, is still an official, after all).

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Remember the Torture Tapes?

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Just about everyone is talking about ABC’s confirmation of what we already knew: the torture was approved–in excruciating detail–by the most senior members of the Bush Administration.

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Now, the article is actually incredibly vague about which of the high-value detainees the Principals discussed interrogating. For example, it suggests that Abu Zubaydah’s torture was planned by the Principals. But then–where elsewhere it asserts that all of the Principals approved the torture–it backs off that claim specifically with regards to Zubaydah.

But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, he was uncooperative.

[snip]

The CIA wanted to use more aggressive — and physical — methods to get information.

The agency briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, led by then-National Security Advisor Rice and including then-Attorney General Ashcroft, which then signed off on the plan, sources said. It is unclear whether anyone on the committee objected to the CIA’s plans for Zubaydah.

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Dougie’s Rant

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I’m less interested in the news that Dougie Feith is publishing a 900-page rant against his detractors in the Bush Administration and more interested in how a copy of that manuscript got liberated and delivered into the hands of Karen DeYoung, biographer of Feith detractor Colin Powell, and Thomas Ricks, all-around skeptic of Dougie’s disastrous war. The book appears to be primarily a long whining complaint that Colin Powell has retained moderately more of his credibility than Dougie and his allies in the Pentagon.

Powell, Feith argues, allowed himself to be publicly portrayed as a dove, but while Powell "downplayed" the degree and urgency of Iraq’s threat, he never expressed opposition to the invasion. Bremer, meanwhile, is said to have done more harm than good in Iraq. Feith also accuses Franks of being uninterested in postwar planning, and writes that Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser during most of Feith’s time in office, failed in her primary task of coordinating policy on the war.

He describes Bush as having wrestled seriously with difficult problems but as being ill-served by subordinates including Powell and Rice. Feith depicts former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with almost complete admiration, questioning only his rough handling of subordinates.

How remarkable that two credible journalists with superb ties to Powell and Franks (and Bremer, whom Dougie also attacks) happened to obtain a copy of the manuscript in plenty of time to do interviews with all those Dougie attacks in the book, huh? DeYoung and Ricks seem barely able to contain their disdain for "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet."

Despite its bulk, the book does not address some of the basic facts of the war, such as the widespread skepticism inside the top of the U.S. military about invading Iraq, with some generals arguing that doing so would distract attention from the war against global terrorists. Nor does Feith touch on the assertion of his fellow war architect, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, that Iraq would be able to pay for its reconstruction with oil revenue.

Feith says surprisingly little new about the conduct of the war on the ground, instead focusing on the policy battles in Washington and asserting that most accounts thus far have been written from the point of view of the State Department and the CIA. He attacks those criticisms as "fear-mongering" that serves the interests of Read more →