Posts

Dick versus Scottish Haggis: The Grudge Match

/66 Comments/in , , /by

Arlen "Scottish Haggis" Specter took the opportunity yesterday to enter a letter exchange he had with Dick Cheney into the Congressional Record. Here’s that exchange (see below the letters for my analysis; h/t for Selise to alerting me the transcripts were up):

U.S. SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY,

Washington, DC, June 7, 2006.
Hon. Richard B. Cheney,
The Vice President,
Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Vice President: I am taking this unusual step in writing to you to establish a public record. It is neither pleasant nor easy to raise these issues with the Administration of my own party, but I do so because of their importance,

No one has been more supportive of a strong national defense and tough action against terrorism than I. However, the Administration’s continuing position on the NSA electronic surveillance program rejects the historical constitutional practice of judicial approval of warrants before wiretapping and denigrates the constitutional authority and responsibility of the Congress and specifically the Judiciary Committee to conduct oversight on constitutional issues.

On March 16, 2006, I introduced legislation to authorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to rule on the constitutionality of the Administration’s electronic surveillance program. Expert witnesses, including four former judges of the FISA Court, supported the legislation as an effective way to preserve the secrecy of the program and protect civil rights. The FISA Court has an unblemished record for keeping secrets and it has the obvious expertise to rule on the issue. The FISA Court judges and other experts concluded that the legislation satisfied the case-in-controversy requirement and was not a prohibited advisory opinion. Notwithstanding my repeated efforts to get the Administration’s position on this legislation, I have been unable to get any response, including a “no”. Read more →

Share this entry

WHORM and WAVES

/in /by

Amid the excitement yesterday, you may have missed the news that the White House visitor logs are public documents.

A U.S. judge ordered the Secret Service on Monday to disclose records of visits by nine prominent conservative Christian leaders to the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence.

The ruling, in response to a legal watchdog group’s suit, could shed light on the influence leaders like James Dobson of Focus on the Family have had on President George W. Bush’s administration. It may also affect legal efforts to force the release of visiting records of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and other similar cases.

I’m sure this will be in the Courts for another year and a half–at which point Dick will invite Scalia to go quail hunting again, and we’ll never get the records.

But for now, look at the oozing skepticism of Judge Royce Lamberth. He describes the fluid nature of Secret Service records.

The Secret Service’s past retention practices for WAVES and ACR records have proven to be pliant and evolving. Paul Morrissey, the Deputy Assistant Director of the Office of Protective Operations, declares that every 30 to 60 days the Secret Service will copy the WAVES records stored on the Secret Service’s “servers” to a compact disc (CD-ROM). 3d Morrissey Decl. at ¶ 18. After making a copy of the records, the Secret Service transfers the CD-ROM containing the WAVES records to the White House Office of Records Management (WHORM). Id. at ¶ 18. A WHORM employee “typically signs a form acknowledging receipt of the records.” Id. After delivering the CD-ROM to the WHORM, the Secret Service erases the WAVES records “from its computer
system.” Id. The Secret Service’s practice of purging and overwriting WAVES records that are “older than 60 days” occurred from “at least 2001” until “November 2004.”[my emphasis]

And then elaborates on that in a footnote. Read more →

Share this entry

When All EOs Are Pixie Dust, It Means Dick Can Declassify Anything He Wants

/in , /by

Brit Hume once asked Dick Cheney whether he had declassified "information" in response to Joe Wilson’s op-ed. Cheney claimed he had the ability under an Executive Order to declassify such "information."

HUME: On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors — unidentified — authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?

CHENEY: There’s nothing I can talk about, Brit. It’s an issue that’s been under investigation for a couple of years. I’ve cooperated fully, including being interviews done by a special prosecutor. All of it’s now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He is a great guy. I worked with him for a long time. I have tremendous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it is therefore inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.

HUME: Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a vice president has the authority to declassify information?

CHENEY: There is an executive order to that effect.

HUME: There is.

CHENEY: Yeah.

HUME: Have you done it?

CHENEY: Well, I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions.

HUME: Have you —

(CROSSTALK)

CHENEY: I don’t want to get into that. There’s an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously it focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president.

But the EO in question–EO 12958 as modified by EO 13292–says no such thing. The modified EO gives the Vice President to classify information. Read more →

Share this entry

Bam!!! CIA Scores Direct Hit on the Unitary Executive!

/in /by

At least that’s what I take from this quote:

In the e-mail version of the Politico Playbook this morning, Mike Allen quotes “a senior administration official” lamenting that “they should have burned the NIE and kept the tapes.” The official was referring to the administration’s debacles with the intelligence community since the new NIE on Iran was released and the CIA revealed that it had destroyed videotaped interrogations.

In the month of December, CIA 2, Dick Cheney 0.

Share this entry

Intelligence Oversight and Partisanship

/in /by

David Ignatius picks up on a point I raised last week. We need to have better oversight of our intelligence activities.

Reading the newspapers over the past week, you would have to conclude that this oversight system is broken. It was intended to set clear limits for intelligence activities and then provide bipartisan political support for the operatives who do the dirty work. Instead, the process has allowed practices that are later viewed as abuses — and then, once the news leaks, it has encouraged a feeding frenzy of recrimination against the intelligence agencies.

And then he goes on to identify one of the biggest problems with our intelligence committees–partisanship.

The oversight process has broken down in a deeper way: The intelligence committees have become politicized. Members and staffers encourage political vendettas against intelligence officers they don’t like, as happened when Goss brought his congressional aides with him to the CIA. The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran has become a political football; so has negotiation over legal rules on intercepting foreign communications, one of the nation’s most sensitive activities. The bickering has turned the intelligence world into a nonstop political circus, to the point that foreign governments have become increasingly wary of sharing secrets. Read more →

Share this entry

Bush Turned His EO on Classified Information into Pixie Dust, Too

/in /by

Yesterday, I expanded on the reasons why the OLC opinion holding that Presidents aren’t bound by their own Executive Orders is so scary. It means that every Executive Order may have been turned to Pixie Dust by the President–and we’d never know it.

Unless, of course, there were persistent, unpunished violations of what we believed to be the Executive Order. If there were an Executive Order that the Executive branch was publicly flouting, we might assume that Bush had turned that EO, too, into Pixie Dust.

And that is apparently what happened with EO 12958. It governs the treatment of classified information: what can be classified, when it should be declassified, what records one should keep of classification and declassification, and who can declassify classified information, and how classified information should be protected.

It’s an EO that Vice President Cheney has had epic difficulties with.

In 2003, for example, Vice President Cheney (and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board) stopped providing the National Archives with data describing his office’s classification and declassification activities. No explanation, he just stopped doing so.

Then, in 2004, the National Archives prepared to do an inspection of OVP, as it is mandated to do. Yet OVP refused to let the NA conduct the inspection.

Finally, when Bill Leonard of ISOO appealed to DOJ for a ruling on Cheney’s refusal to submit to the plain text meaning of Bush’s EO, he was told (six months later) that the EO had turned to Pixie Dust. Specifically, he was told four years after the fact that President Bush did not intend for OVP to be an agency under the EO.

On July 12, 2007, the Counsel to the President wrote a letter to Congress stating that "[t]he President has asked me to confirm to you that … the Office of the Vice President … is not an ‘agency’ for purposes of the Order." … That statement on behalf of the President resolves the question you presented to the Attorney General. Therefore, the Department of Justice will not be providing an opinion addressing this question.

Read more →

Share this entry

The Revolt of the Spooks

/in , /by

(Or Is it Civil War?)

There has been a lot of hand-wringing in this post, suggesting that the story revealing some Democratic members of the Gang of Four was a hit piece by Republicans (or, specifically, Porter Goss). That strikes me as an overly Manichean view of things, in which an article that makes Democrats look bad could only be a Republican hit piece. There’s another party in this equation–the Intelligence Community. The events of the last ten days make more sense, it seems to me, if you consider all of those events as a revolt on the part of the Intelligence Community.

Start with the release of the NIE. Pat Lang passes on the explanation that the NIE was declassified after "intelligence career seniors" threatened to leak the NIE to the press, legal consequences be damned.

The "jungle telegraph" in Washington is booming with news of the Iran NIE. I am told that the reason the conclusions of the NIE were released is that it was communicated to the White House that "intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary" if the document’s gist were not given to the public. Translation? Someone in that group would have gone to the media "on the record" to disclose its contents.

Dafna Linzer and Peter Baker provide the polite version–but still point to a senior intelligence officer who describes making the decision in the first person plural.

By last weekend, an intense discussion broke out about whether to keep it secret. "We knew it would leak, so honesty required that we get this out ahead, to prevent it from appearing to be cherry picking," said a top intelligence official. So McConnell reversed himself, and analysts scrambled over the weekend to draft a declassified version.

So somewhere in the ranks of the "career seniors" and the "top intelligence officials" some folks made a decision to confront Dick Cheney’s war-mongering directly. That’s a pretty serious escalation of the long-brewing conflict between Cheney and the Intelligence Community.

Then there’s the blockbuster by Mark Mazzetti (NYT’s intelligence reporter) revealing the destruction of the torture tapes. He sources it to:

current and former government officials

several officials

current and former government officials

former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue

But not Porter Goss (who would otherwise qualify as a "former government official"); Goss declined to comment through a spokesperson. And also not Michael Hayden, who wrote a letter to pre-empt Mazzetti’s story that provides a laughable party line for CIA officers to parrot. Read more →

Share this entry

Bush’s Direct and Constant Knowledge of the NIE Intelligence

/in /by

Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer have an article that answers most of our questions on the genesis of the NIE. What they don’t say–though their article shows–is that Bush was much more cognizant of the development of the NIE than he has let on. Not only did he keep the US people in the dark about the new intelligence on Iraq, he also kept our European allies in the dark (and, I wonder, perhaps even Condi?), even while he was demanding they impose more sanctions.

The article starts with the news that not just Dick this time, but Bush himself, has been meeting with analysts on Iran directly.

They call them "deep dives," special briefings for President Bush to meet with not just his advisers but also the analysts who study Iran in the bowels of the intelligence world. Starting last year, aides arranged a series of sessions for Bush to "get his hands dirty," in the White House vernacular for digging into intelligence to understand what is known and not known.

Those deep dives led directly to the discovery of the new Iran intell. As with Dick Cheney, when he claimed he never got an answer to his questions about uranium in Niger, Bush has been telling us no one informed him of the answer to questions he, himself, posed. Uh huh. Read more →

Share this entry

Everything Leaks

/in , /by

At 7:39 on Wednesday evening, Pool Boy and his friends posted this interview with Dick Cheney.

Also on Wednesday evening–though at an unknown time–the NYT informed the CIA it would reveal the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations of high value Al Qaeda detainees.

The New York Times informed the C.I.A. on Wednesday evening that it planned to publish an article in Friday’s newspaper about the destruction of the tapes. Today, the C.I.A. director, General Michael V. Hayden, wrote a letter to the agency workforce explaining the matter.

Given this exchange from Dick in his Pool Boy interview…

Cheney said the [NIE] was released because “there was a general belief that we all shared that it was important to put it out — that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway,” he said.

Cheney said that “especially in light of what happened with respect to Iraq and the NIE on weapons of destruction,” officials wanted to be “upfront with what we knew.”

He said he agreed that was “the right call.” So he thought it might leak? “Everything leaks,” he said with a chuckle.

…I wonder whether Dick had already learned that the news of the destruction of the terror tapes had leaked?

Share this entry

Dick Vetted the Intelligence Two Weeks Ago

/in , /by

The NYT provides more details about the intelligence collected in mid-2007 that confirmed the judgment that Iran suspended its nukes program back in 2003. In addition to the intercepted communications, there were also notes from Iran’s military leaders.

Most interesting–at least to those who obsess about the timing of all this–is that the intelligence analysts had to present the raw intelligence to Cheney.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

“It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation.

Good to see the Vice President hasn’t lost his affection for twisting arms.

Here’s how this looks in our big timeline: Read more →

Share this entry