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Phase II: Four Years Later

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It has taken the SSCI four years, but it is about to release the long-awaited second-to-last installment of Phase II of its investigation into Iraqi intelligence claims (the last one, which examines Dougie Feith’s little intelligence shop, may be finished around the time his book comes out). This report catalogs Administration claims about Iraq’s WMD and ties to Al Qaeda and analyzes whether the intelligence supported those claims. Greg Miller writes that the report will have mixed conclusions.

The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.

But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.

The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence assessments in circulation at the time.

Many of the conclusions will be predictable. The BW and CW claims were largely backed up by intelligence (though I’m anxious to see where Colin Powell got the catalog of amounts he cited in his UN speech–at least some of that information came from one of Judy’s informants). But with nuclear claims, the Administration simply provided the most inflammatory judgment, ignoring the caveats. And finally, the report Scooter and Shooter’s claims that Iraq and Al Qaeda were in cahoots was made up out of thin air.

Prewar assertions about Iraq’s nuclear program were more problematic because they were supported by some intelligence assessments but not others.

"They were substantiated," a congressional official said, "but didn’t convey the disagreements within the intelligence community."

In August 2002, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that "Saddam [Hussein] has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." But by that time, the State Department’s intelligence bureau was challenging the assumption that Iraq’s nuclear program had been reactivated.

White House suggestions that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda were at odds with intelligence assessments that voiced skepticism about such a relationship.

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Will Dick Finally Get Busted for His Leaks?

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I am of the opinion Dick Cheney escaped any repercussions from ordering his Chief of Staff to leak a CIA NOC’s identity because Bush’s Pixie Dust gave Dick the right to insta-declassify classified material as if he were King President. I wonder, though, whether Bush has Pixie Dust somewhere that will permit Dick Cheney to ignore a gag order imposed by a Court? That’s what Colonel Morris Davis suggests Cheney may have done–leak a video purportedly showing Gitmo detainee Omar Khadr making a bomb to 60 Minutes (h/t TP).

Omar Khadr’s defense lawyers will try to find out whether U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office secretly leaked a video of the detained Canadian to an American media outlet – an allegation that, if proven, would be a clear violation of court orders and further proof that the process by which Mr. Khadr is being tried is a political, not legal one, his military lawyer says.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail Monday night, Lieutenant Commander Bill Kuebler said he is trying to find out how a highly secret video showing Mr. Khadr in Afghanistan was leaked to the U.S. news program 60 Minutes. The video appears to show Mr. Khadr building a bomb.

The news program aired the footage last November.

Lt.-Cmdr Kuebler, Mr. Khadr’s top U.S. military lawyer, said he met with Colonel Morris Davis, the previous top prosecutor of military commissions – the body that is expected to try Mr. Khadr in Guantanamo Bay later this year – last week.

At the meeting, Lt.-Cmdr. Kuebler asked the Colonel where he thought the leak may have come from. In response, Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler said, Col. Davis offered the opinion that the Vice-President’s office may have been involved.

[snip]

Lt.-Cmdr. Kuebler said the prosecution had wanted to play the tape in court – in view of the media – late last year, but the request was denied by a judge. A few weeks later, 60 Minutes had the report.

Given that context, Lt.-Cmdr. Kuebler said he believes the tape was leaked, and he tends to agree with Col. Davis, who told him it was unlikely a junior officer would be the one to leak it.

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Help Me Stave Off Dick Cheney’s Michigan Invasion!

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Dick Cheney is coming to my neighborhood on Friday to help scary wingnut Congressman Tim Walberg raise money. Walberg’s district (MI-07) begins about one mile from my doorstep, and I’d really like Tim and his crazy friend Dick to stay away.

Luckily, we’ve got a great candidate this year to replace Walberg–Mark Schauer. Schauer is currently the State Senator representing much of the district, as well as the Democratic leader in MI’s Senate. He is a wonderful person, a very energetic politician, and a true Democrat. And a good friend of the blogosphere.

This week, MI’s blogs, MichiganLiberal and Blogging for Michigan, and Blue America are running a fundraiser for Mark to punish Cheney for coming to Michigan. If you can help out, please do so. Think of it as an effective way to tell Dick to Go Cheney Himself.

Donate Here

Update: Title corrected per ralphbon.

Bush Administration Tries to Reverse A1 Cut-Out Declassification

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Remember back in the halcyon days when people still believed Judy Miller was a journalist? The Bush Administration repeatedly used her as a cut-out, leaking highly classified information to her (like intelligence about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons labs, and even covert agents’ identities). She would then publish a story on the first page of the NYT. And Administration officials would quote her story, now treating the highly classified information as if it had been declassified. It worked like a charm until Judy’s credibility got so damaged with her Iraq reporting that she couldn’t oblige Cheney by writing an article leaking Valerie Wilson’s identity.

In 1992, the opposite occurred. Someone leaked a draft of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s Defense Policy Guidance to the NYT.

The document was provided to The New York Times by an official who believes this post-cold-war strategy debate should be carried out in the public domain.

[snip]

In contrast, the new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders "must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

The NYT published chunks of the draft, which shocked voters and allies. So poor little Scooter Libby, always the faithful acolyte, had to rewrite the draft to hide Cheney’s aggressive nature, perhaps believing they could persuade presidential year voters that Bush’s aides weren’t a bunch of nut-cases before the election that November.

Now the National Security Archive has published a series of those drafts, including a few memos from Libby, now a felon, to the guy he’d later commit a felony to protect (unfortunately, there’s none of Libby’s chicken scratch notes, so all the skills we’ve developed reading trial exhibits will be wasted).

Pathetically, the Bush Administration has refused to declassify some of the same passages that appeared in the NYT almost sixteen years ago.

Remarkably, these new releases censor a half dozen large sections of text that The New York Times printed on March 8, 1992, as well as a number of phrases that were officially published by the Pentagon in January 1993. "On close inspection none of those deleted passages actually meet the standards for classification because embarrassment is not a legal basis for secrecy," remarked Tom Blanton, director of the Archive." The language that the Times publicized can be seen side-by-side with the relevant portions of the February 18, 1992 draft (see document 3 below) that was the subject of the leak.

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January 23, 2006

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Sorry. I’m afraid Waxman has me hooked on these damn email documents.

But I wanted to point out a curious bit of timing. I’m working on a mega-timeline, but note this mini-timeline:

January 20, 2006: McDevitt and friends determine that there are gaps where the missing emails should be.

January 23, 2006: Fitzgerald informs Libby’s lawyers "via Telefax and regular mail" that:

In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.

January 23, 2006, 11:18 AM: McDevitt writes Susan Crippen,

Someone needs to fill in some of the blanks.

January 23, 2006, 1:19 PM: Crippen responds,

SIS has "filled in" the blanks.

January 24, 2006: Someone in the White House writes a document claiming to have found the missing emails.

According to a document dated just four days later that was shown to Committee staff, but not provided to them, the White House team recovercd 17,956 e-mails from these individual mailboxes on the backup tape and used these as their basis to search for e-mails responsive to the Special Counsel’s request.

January 31, 2006: Fitzgerald’s letter entered into PACER, alerting the press and DFH bloggers to the missing emails.

February 2, 2006: Addington prints off email for discovery.

February 6, 2006: Fitzgerald receives "missing" emails.

February 11, 2006: Dick shoots an old man in the face.

Okay, okay, I just included Dick’s lawyer-hunting for fun (though I have long believed the revelation of Cheney’s NIE cover story and the missing emails contributed to his carelessness that day).

But does anyone else find it odd that the WH "found" the missing emails the day after Libby’s lawyers learned that news of them would imminently become public?

OPR Endorses Pixie Dust

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Back in January, Steven Aftergood sent a letter to the Office of Professional Responsibility outlining the absurdity of the Adminsitration’s claims that Cheney was exempt from normal rules on classified information.

The complaint makes a number of worthwhile points, including:

  • "Shall" means "have to"
  • Fielding’s letter didn’t resolve the conflict
  • Dana "Pig Missile" Perino’s public statements–which Fielding cited in his own letter–didn’t resolve the conflict
  • "Person" of the Vice President is not the same thing as "Office" of the Vice President

And, finally, this doozy: "not different" is not the same as "different":

What Mr. Fielding failed to recognize is that some members of the President’s office do report to the Information Security Oversight Office. These include the President’s National Security Advisor, the President’s Science Advisor, and others.

So if the Vice President is “not different” from the President, then at least some of the Vice President’s staff would be expected to report their classification and declassification activity to ISOO, as do some of the President’s staff.

The executive order provides no basis for concluding that the President’s National Security Advisor, for example, must report to ISOO every year, as he does, while the Vice President’s National Security Advisor should not. That makes no sense at all. Yet this incongruous result reflects the Justice Department’s failure to correctly analyze the requirements of the executive order, which is a professional lapse.

Alternatively, if the Vice President’s National Security Advisor (among others) does not have to report to ISOO, this would contradict the President’s expressed intent that the Vice President is “not different” than the President for purposes of the executive order. It would mean that the President intended the Vice President’s staff to receive less oversight from ISOO than does his own staff. Yet that is contrary to what the President’s spokeswoman indicated. [my emphasis]

I guess this is the nonsense you get when you send Dana "Pig Missile" Perino to address matters of ontology.

Aftergood asked OPR to investigate whether the OLC had acted improperly when it blew off Bill Leonard’s request for clarification on the issue.

On Valentine’s Day, OPR sent Aftergood a love letter in response, basically endorsing the Pixie Dust theory and telling Aftergood to embrace the Bush Administration in all its absurd glory.

In addition, this matter does not involve the allegation of affirmative malfeasance, but rather, the alleged improper failure to perform an act. It is important to note that the Executive Order, as amended, was issued pursuant to the current President’s executive authority and the President has the pwoer to modify or revoke such orders. Therefore, the President’s interpretation of the order is particularly significant.

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Mukasey Oversight: HJC Edition

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Coming in at the end of the opening statements. Conyers’ emphasis is on questions on torture and voting rights. Lamar Smith says crack dealers who have already served longer than coke dealers should stay in jail. And Mukasey says the telecoms need [ut oh, he’s got his talking points wrong] retroactive immunity and those crack dealers need to stay in jail.

Conyers

Any additional comments about waterboarding now that Hayden confirmed it?

MM: Do you have a particular question?

JC: Are you ready to start a criminal investigation?

MM: That’s a direct question. No, I am not. Whatever was done as part of the CIA program, was part of DOJ opinion, through OLC, permissible under law as it existed then. For me to use occasion of disclosure that that was once an authorized part of the CIA program would be for me to tell that they will now be subject to criminal investigation. That would put into question not only that opinion, but also any other opinion from DOJ. That’s not something that would be appropriate and not something I would do.

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Arlen “Scottish Haggis” Specter Enumerates Bush’s Law-Breaking

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(Thanks to Selise for the YouTube)

Yesterday, Scottish Haggis went even further than he did the other day the other day in asserting that Bush broke the law when he instituted his illegal wiretapping program. He asserted flatly that Bush had violated two statutes (FISA and the National Security Act).

I believe it is vital that the courts remain open. I say that because on our delicate constitutional balance of separation of powers, the Congress has been totally ineffective on oversight and on restraining the expansion of executive authority. But the courts have the capacity, the will, and the effectiveness to maintain a balance.

But we find that the President has asserted his constitutional authority under article II to disregard statutes, the law of the land passed by Congress and signed by the President.

I start with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which provides that the only way to wiretap is to have a court order. The Executive Branch initiated the Terrorist Surveillance Program in flat violation of that statute. Now, the President argues that he has constitutional authority which supersedes the statute. And if he does, the statute cannot modify the Constitution. Only a constitutional amendment can. But that program, initiated in 2001, is still being litigated in the courts. So we do not know on the balancing test whether the Executive has the asserted constitutional authority.

But if you foreclose a judicial decision, the courts are cut off. Then the executive branch has violated the National Security Act of 1947, which mandates that the Intelligence Committees of both the House and the Senate be informed of matters like the Terrorist Surveillance Program. I served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the 109th Congress. The chairman and the ranking member, under protocol and practice, ought to be notified about a program like that. But I was surprised to read about it in the newspapers one day, on the final day of argument on the PATRIOT Act Re-authorization. It was a long time, with a lot of pressure–really to get the confirmation of General Hayden as CIA Director–before the executive branch finally complied with the statute to notify the full Intelligence Committees.

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Dick’s Big Stick and the Democratic Alpha Male

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Well, darnit. I got forwarded the Lizza column and assumed it was recent. It’s not. So Lizza should not remember the Cheney comment, because it happened after Lizza’s column. I apologize to Lizza, but not that the manly men Dingell and Murtha were, in fact, in Congress already when Lizza wrote the column. 

Ryan Lizza must have forgotten that Dick Cheney insinuated Nancy Pelosi had emasculated John Murtha and John Dingell.

Cheney, in an interview with Politico, said Murtha (Pa.) and Dingell (Mich.), two of the most powerful House Democrats, "march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi," adding that "they are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected."

That’s because Lizza has discovered, as if it were new, the Democratic Alpha Male.

The members of this new faction, which helped the Democrats expand into majority status, stand out not for their ideology or racial background but for their carefully cultivated masculinity.

"As much as the policy positions is the background and character of these Democrats," says John Lapp, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who helped recruit this new breed of candidate. "So we went to C.I.A. agents, F.B.I. agents, N.F.L. quarterbacks, sheriffs, Iraq war vets. These are red-blooded Americans who are tough."

Mr. Lapp even coined a term to describe these manly — and they are all men — pols: "the Macho Dems."

The return of Democratic manliness was no accident; it was a carefully planned strategy. But now that the Macho Dems are walking the halls of Congress, it remains to be seen whether they will create as many problems for Democrats as they solved. After all, these new Democrats have heterodox political views that could complicate Democratic caucus politics, and their success may raise uncomfortable questions for those Democrats who don’t pass the new macho test.

Call me crazy, but to suggest that John Murtha isn’t a manly man is as much a slight to his long-term service in the Marines as when Mean Jean called Murtha a coward. And one of the biggest reasons why I have John Dingell representing me in the House, rather than Lynn Rivers, is because Dingell is a hunter’s hunter–a better shot than Dick Cheney, I’d wager.

Somehow, these two manly men have survived–even flourished–in the House for a combined eighty-five years. Yet Lizza would have you believe the Democratic Alpha Male is a recent fad.

Dick’s Evolving Demands for Immunity

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Thanks to Faiz, who watches Rush, so I don’t have to.

Once again, the Administration has trotted out Dick to lobby for immunity for himself telecom immunity. All the things I said last week about the inappropriateness of sending the guy who would most directly benefit from immunity out to lobby for it still hold.

So someone decided that they would get the person least willing to cooperate with Democrats, the person who single-handedly could eliminate the legal problem they allege the telecoms have, and the person who stands to benefit most from an immunity provision for telecoms, to head out to pressure Congress? And they thought this would work to persuade Democrats to put aside all the troubling legal issues to grant immunity?

But I’m interested in slight changes to Dick’s spiel over the last eight days of legislative wrangling. As an aside, you’d think that some of these differences might stem from the fact that your average Heritage Foundation member has about four times the IQ of your average Rush listener, but Dick’s statements to Rush are much more measured.

One thing I hadn’t noticed in Dick’s Heritage Foundation speech is that it already included (and was perhaps the roll-out of) the Orwellian "liability protection" in lieu of the more accurate "retroactive immunity."

Actions by Congress sometimes have unexpected consequences. But a failure to enact a permanent FISA update with liability protections would have predictable and serious consequences.

It must have polled well, because Dick is developing into an elaborate metaphor including a dig at trial lawyers.

One of the main things we need in there, for example, is retroactive liability protection for the companies that have worked with us and helped us prevent further attacks against the United States —

[snip]

RUSH: The opposition in the Senate is primarily from Democrats, correct?

CHENEY: Correct. People who don’t want to — I guess want to leave open the possibility that the trial lawyers can go after a big company that may have helped. [my emphasis]

I wonder how the ACLU and EFF feel about being labeled trial lawyers? Read more →