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Is Cheney Behind the Attack on Obama’s Plans to Withdraw from Iraq?

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picture-80.thumbnail.pngA number of people have pointed to this important Gareth Porter article describing an insubordinate attack on Obama’s plan to withdraw from Iraq in 16 months.

A network of senior military officers is also reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and Odierno by mobilizing public opinion against Obama’s decision.

[snip]

The source says the network, which includes senior active-duty officers in the Pentagon, will begin making the argument to journalists covering the Pentagon that Obama’s withdrawal policy risks an eventual collapse in Iraq. That would raise the political cost to Obama of sticking to his withdrawal policy.

If Obama does not change the policy, according to the source, they hope to have planted the seeds of a future political narrative blaming his withdrawal policy for the "collapse" they expect in an Iraq without US troops. 

One aspect of the article has been underplayed in coverage of this insubordination: the centrality in this plot of Jack Keane.

The opening argument by the Petraeus-Odierno faction against Obama’s withdrawal policy was revealed the evening of the January 21 meeting when retired army General Jack Keane, one of the authors of the Bush troop-surge policy and a close political ally and mentor of Petraeus, appeared on the "Lehrer News Hour" to comment on Obama’s pledge on Iraq combat troop withdrawal. 

[snip]

Keane, the army vice chief of staff from 1999-03, has ties to a network of active and retired four-star army generals, and since Obama’s January 21 order on the 16-month withdrawal plan, some of the retired four-star generals in that network have begun discussing a campaign to blame Obama’s troop withdrawal from Iraq for the ultimate collapse of the political "stability" that they expect to follow the US withdrawal, according to a military source familiar with the network’s plans. 

But what really hasn’t gotten enough attention, IMO, are the ties between Keane and Dick Cheney.

Ever since he began working on the troop surge, Keane has been the central figure manipulating policy in order to keep as many US troops in Iraq as possible. It was Keane who got Vice President Dick Cheney to push for Petraeus as top commander in Iraq in late 2006 when the existing commander, General George W. Casey, did not support the troop surge. 

Now, as Porter suggests,  Keane’s role in the surge and his relationship with Cheney is best chronicled in Woodward’s most recent book. Read more →

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Crappy Record-Keeping: A Feature, Not a Bug

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Catalog of records the Bush Administration kept in such disorganized fashion that no one could reconstruct WTF BushCo had been doing on that subject:

(What am I missing?)

You see, historically, authoritarians usually happen to be superb record-keepers. That has been their undoing, once historians got to them. One thing the Bush fuckers got right (from their perspective, mind you) was to avoid leaving usable records.

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Jay Rockefeller Told Us What Russell Tice Just Confirmed, Years Ago

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On KO the other night, Russell Tice expanded on the details of the warrantless wiretapping program, revealing that, the government has been data mining both our telecom communications and our credit card transactions.

As far as the wiretap information that made it to NSA, there was also data mining that was involved. At some point information from credit cards and financial transactions was married in with that information. So of the lucky US citizens, tens of thousands of whom, that are now on digital databases at NSA who have no idea of this also have that sort of information that has been included on those digital files that have been warehoused.

[snip]

This is garnered from algorithms that have been put together to try to just dream up scenarios that might be information that is associated with how a terrorist could operate. Like I mentioned last night, the one to two minute pizza delivery call, things of that nature, of which an innocent citizen could be easily tied into these things. And once that information gets to the NSA, and they start to put it through the filters there, where they have langauge interpreters and stuff and they start looking for word-recognition, if someone just talked about the daily news and mentioned, you know, something about the Middle East they could easily be brought to the forefront of having that little flag put by their name that says "potential terrorist" and of course this US citizen wouldn’t have a clue.

[snip]

I have a guess where it was developed. I think it was probably developed out of the Department of Defense; this is probably the remnants of the Total Information Awareness that came out of DARPA. That’s my guess.

Again, this should surprise no one who has followed our detailed discussions over the last four years about the kind of data mining they were probably doing.

In fact, we learned as much from someone briefed on the program in the days following the first revelations about the program in December 2005. That’s when Jello Jay Rockefeller released the letter he had sent to Cheney about the program. That letter described the program in precisely those terms–the old TIA program that Iran-Contra retread John Poindexter had developed.

As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter’s TIA project sprung to mind, Read more →

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Dick Still Complaining that His Beloved Firewall Didn't Get Pardoned

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Apparently, Dick Cheney doesn’t believe the little scold he sent Bush through Michael Isikoff the other day was sufficiently shrill. He’s out again today, explicitly criticizing Bush for not pardoning his little Scooter.

h/t mikepellegrini

h/t mikepellegrini

George Bush should have pardoned I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney said after stepping down as vice president this week.

"He was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision," Cheney told Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard, a leading conservative Washington magazine.

[snip]

Hayes said that Cheney had publicly disagreed with Bush only four times in the eight years of the Bush administration.

They were only out of office for a day before the fifth disagreement surfaced.

I wonder whether Cheney is worried that his firewall might not hold tight as Libby faces the rest of his life as a felon? Or perhaps Dick is just aghast that Bush–who after all asked Libby to stick his neck in a meat grinder–didn’t return the favor by sacrificing a little of his scarce posterity to thank Libby for his work protecting Bush?

In any case, I do hope Cheney’s mood about Bush remains contentious and sour. There is little I’d like more than to see Bush and Cheney take each other out during their retirement.

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Bush Opts for Continued Protection Over Payback

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When Cheney’s people wanted to shore up the cover story for Dick Cheney’s involvement in leaking Valerie Plame’s identity, they went to Michael Isikoff. So I guess it’s not surprising that Isikoff would be the outlet for conservative fury over the news that Bush did not pardon Scooter Libby.

In a move that has keenly disappointed some of his strongest conservative allies, President Bush has decided not to pardon Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for his 2007 conviction in the CIA leak case, two White House officials said Monday.

[snip]

But the decision not to pardon Libby stunned some longtime Bush backers who had been quietly making the case for the former vice presidential aide in recent weeks. A number of Libby’s allies had raised the issue with White House officials, arguing that as a loyal aide who played a key role in shaping Bush’s foreign policy during the president’s first term, including the decision to invade Iraq, Libby deserved to have the stain of his felony conviction erased from the record. In the only public sign of the lobbying campaign, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial strongly urging Libby’s pardon.

"I’m flabbergasted," said one influential Republican activist, who had raised the issue with White House aides, but who asked not to be identified criticizing the president. Ambassador Richard Carlson, the vice chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think tank, added that he too was "shocked" at Bush’s denial of a pardon for Libby.

"George Bush has always prided himself on doing the right thing regardless of the polls or the pundits," Carlson said. "Now he is leaving office with a shameful cloud over his head." Carlson, who was among those who recently weighed in on behalf of Libby with the White House and previously raised money for his legal defense fund, said that Libby had taken a "knife in the heart" from critics of the president and deserved to have his conviction erased.

Apparently, none of these conservative wailers understand that pardoning Libby would negate Libby’s ability to invoke the Fifth Amendment if, say, John Conyers ever held a hearing on George Bush’s role in leaking Valerie Plame’s identity. And so Scooter Libby will remain a felon–at least until the time when another Republican lands in the White House and pardons him.

Read more →

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Dick’s Talking Points, Two

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When Libby was first asked about any discussions he had with Cheney in response to Joe Wilson’s op-ed, he first claimed he had not discussed the op-ed until after the Novak column (though with his aborted discussion of a "conver–"sation, he may have been thinking of the July 9 conversation he had with Novak and subsequently hid).

I don’t recall that conversation until after the, until after the Novak piece. I don’t recall it during this week of July 6. I recall it after the Novak conver — after the Novak article appeared I recall it , and I recall being asked by the Vice President early on, you know, about this envoy, you know, who is it and — but I don’t recall that, early on he asked about it in connection with the wife, although he may well have given the note that I took.

Q. And so your recollection is that he wrote on July — that you discussed with the Vice President, did his wife send him on a junket? As a response to the July 14th Novak column that said, he was sent because his wife sent him and she works at the CIA?

A. I don’t recall discussing it –yes, I don’t recall discussing it in connection with when this article first appeared. I recall it later.

Then, when Fitz points out the utter absurdity of discussing with Cheney, speculatively, that Plame was purportedly involved in sending her husband, after Novak had already reported that fact directly, Libby shifts, and tries to claim they talked about it after July 10 when–he claimed–Tim Russert had told him of Plame’s identity.

Q. And are you telling us under oath that from July 6th to July 14th you never discussed with Vice President Cheney whether Mr. Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA?

A. No, no, I’m not saying that. On July 10 or 11 I learned, I thought anew, that the wife — that, that reporters I lwere telling us that the wife worked at the CIA. And I may have had a conversation then with the Vice President either late on the 11th or on the 12th in which I relayed that reporters were saying that.

Basically, Libby was trying to date the notations Cheney had made on Wilson’s op-ed ("Or did his wife send him on a junket?") Read more →

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Cheney’s FBI Report

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Murray’s got an important Christmas Eve scoop, reporting key details from Cheney’s FBI interview. I’ll return to the main point of it later, but IMO the really interesting detail is this one:

Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame’s identity.

This answers the really substantive question I had about Cheney’s FBI interview: whether he attempted to leave open the possibility that he had ordered Libby to leak Plame’s identity–and that, because either Cheney or Bush insta-declassified Plame’s identity, the leak was legal. 

Apparently, Cheney did not. 

I’m off for dinner with mr. ew, so I’ll have to return to the implications of this fact and others later. But in the meantime, go read Murray’s scoop. 

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Is Cheney Relying on Gonzales’ Retroactive Notes?

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Glenn picked up on Cheney’s recent reiteration of a claim that Alberto Gonzales has made (and may be in trouble for lying to Congress for): that he briefed Congressional leaders on the illegal warrantless wiretap program and they all agreed it should go forward without Congressional approval.  Glenn calls on those Congressional leaders who were at the briefing to respond to Cheney’s claims. But I’m more interested in the way Cheney’s willingness to repeat Gonzales’ story puts the notes Gonzales made to (presumably) back his side of the story back in play.

As I emailed Glenn and Barton Gellman explains to Rachel Maddow (at 6:30 and following), the meeting in question is the March 10, 2004 meeting at which Cheney tried to go around Jim Comey so as to get legal cover for their warrantless wiretap program.

Gellman: He’s talking about a meeting on March 10 of 2004. He’s never previously talked about it in public. And he’s backing up the official story which is that eight members of Congress–four Republicans and four Democrats–came in and were told "The Justice Department thinks this program is illegal, should we go ahead with it anyway, despite there’s no law in Congress authorizing it?"And that four Republicans and four Democrats said "Yes, go right ahead. Do the illegal thing." Now, I talked to four people who were in that meeting and not all of them were Democrats and all of them dispute that that’s the way it happened.

Maddow: Isn’t there some way that could be checked? Doesn’t somebody write down what happens at those things?

Gellman: Yeah, and it was Top Secret code word classified and remains so. 

First, let me correct Gellman. Cheney’s making a somewhat different claim–one apparently disproven by the facts. He’s claiming he briefed all nine Congressional leaders: that is, the Gang of Eight, plus Tom DeLay.

CHENEY: We brought in the chairman and the ranking member, House and Senate, and briefed them a number of times up until – this was – be from late ’01 up until ’04 when there was additional controversy concerning the program.

At that point, we brought in what I describe as the big nine – not only the intel people but also the speaker, the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate, and brought them into the situation room in the basement of the White House.

I presided over the meeting. Read more →

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Who Killed the Combustion Car?

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I have to admit, it’s pretty gloomy in MI right now. Suppliers are doing quarterly plans–but putting a giant asterisk on the plan saying "If GM fails, we don’t know WTF happens." Ford is trying to anticipate how they can chase down and reclaim the tools from dying suppliers in time to keep their own supply chain alive. And a local environmentally-focused pol and I started plotting yesterday to turn MI into the beacon of new agriculture–not just because we’ve got the foundation to do so, not just because we need to think about what to do when our economy dies completely, but out of spite at the Californians who seem ready to jettison the Midwest and its jobs of late (soon their dying way of irrigation-dependent industrial Ag will be begging MI for a bailout!).

So it’s tough getting back on the automobile beat, when I can just blithely read tea leaves in the Blago mess. That said, readers are rightly kicking me in the ass for avoiding this very important subject. So I’m watching an empty Senate on CSPAN 2 and making a list: a list of all those who, either out of self-interest or because they are salivating to bust the union, have decided to let the American auto industry–and with it, the economy more generally–die. 

That list starts, of course, with the self-interested union-busters: Richard Shelby, Bob Corker, Jeff Sessions. Mitch McConnell has officially jumped onto the union-busting Japanese SUV, though it goes against the interest of a goodly number of his constituents. And Jim DeMint seems anxious to jump to the head of this class, with his call to free car companies from the "barnacles of unionism wrapped around their necks."

Fuck you, Jim DeMint.

But I am taking a perverse kind of solace out of the discovery that the guy who’s on top of all my other shit lists is on top of this one too.

Dick Cheney.

You see, Dick went to Congress to try to get them on board with the idea of saving the auto industry. And that made it worse.

Yesterday, [in spite of Cheney’s similar failure at rallying support for the financial bailout in September] White House nevertheless dispatched Bolten and Cheney to meet with Senate Republicans about the auto bailout plan, where they “heard a barrage of criticism — and offered few satisfying answers.” Read more →

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Joe and Dick: Looks Like Everything Went Swimmingly

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I can’t tell whether all the giggling was from nervousness or just because Joe and Dick have been in DC for longer than forever.

And Biden’s staff isn’t telling:

"The Vice President-elect and Dr. Jill Biden met with Vice President Cheney and his wife Lynne at the Naval Observatory this evening.  The Bidens thank the Cheneys for welcoming them into their home and for their gracious hospitality," said spokesperson for the Vice President-elect Elizabeth Alexander.  

No giggling from Dick, though. And no word on the man-sized safe, either. 

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