Something I'd wanted to mention last week is "The Angler", the Washington Post's four-part series on Dick Cheney.
Upshot: he is very secretive, and he runs the government.
***
Civil rights, schmivel rights. Late Friday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a challenge the ACLU had mounted to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. The reason the court gave wasn't that they consider the wiretapping program legal, but rather that, since the program is secret, nobody can prove for sure that he or she has been surveilled under it. In other words, the administration can break the law on a massive and ongoing basis - and as long as they don't tell us whose rights are being violated, we can't challenge or stop 'em.
But to the broader point here. I've long thought it's at least possible the administration is right about this program. That is, it's possible that when it comes to the threat of something like nuclear terrorism, the right thing for our society to do may be to seek out plots using broad statistical analysis, say, rather than to cleave unwaveringly to our original legal model: ie, prosecuting crimes with evidence obtained by probable-cause warrant. But once it's put that way, you can see how profound a thing this means - a basic change in our whole paradigm of law enforcement. An asterisk on the cherished principle that we're innocent until proven guilty. Were such a change to be adopted in a democracy, it should first be the subject of a searching public dialogue, culminating in new legislation - new constitutional amendments - defining what kinds of data about its citizens the government might now track, and what rights to privacy we retain. But what you don't, don't, don't allow, is for the executive branch to just up and start running this program on its own recognizance without so much as telling anybody about it first (Bush's fig leaf that he briefed a handful of key congresspeople about it, under conditions of sworn secrecy, notwithstanding). Where are the checks and balances in this system? Where are the guarantees that it will be used strictly to track terrorism and not, say, drug trafficking - or a President's political opponents? Because though Bush surely has America's best interests at heart, the next President may not be quite as glowingly scrupulous.
Put simply, this is as impeachable as impeachable gets. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday that it doesn't carry the merit of so much as a lawsuit.
***
In '06, Iraq was costing us about $8.7 billion a month. Thanks to the surge, that's now up to more like $12. Total expenditures to date are pushing $420 billionish, and by any measure we have clearly spent a fraction of what we ultimately will (VA services for 25,000 wounded soldiers for the next 50 years, anyone?).
To put this cost into perspective, the US GDP was about $13 trillion in 2006. What we've spent to date on Iraq comes to something like a dozen days of our total economic output. Which I guess is pretty darn reasonable, as wars go. Of course, we're not actually paying any of these bills yet, just charging them to the national credit card; and, of course, the total costs of the war should ultimately top well over a trillion bucks.
Never mind that what we're buying with all this money is international political destabilization and decades of future terrorism. Sis boom bah.
***
Distressingly, it turns out that Rumsfeld scotched a 2005 Navy Seal assault at the last minute (they were suited up and on the tarmac) which could have resulted in killing or capturing a number of top Queda leaders in Pakistan, including al-Zawahiri. I guess it's hard to criticize this sort of decision without knowing all of the operational details behind it. But Donald's big concerns at the time were apparently (a) the assault had grown into a large affair, with greater exposure of US troops, and (b) Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wouldn't have been happy about it.
Well, (a) since when did Rumsfeld start caring about the exposure of US troops?, and (b) with friends like Musharraf....
***
Republican lawmakers who've ditched Bush and are now calling for a significant change/drawdown-of-troops in Iraq, mainly in this past week:
But anyway, we face the prospect again - like last year - that Democrats may win less by their own merits and more by default. Thus setting the stage for a major Republican comeback after.
But I get ahead of myself.
***
And the biggest political story of the week was obviously Bush's pardon Monday of the Scootster. Excuse me: his commutation of the Scootster's prison sentence. Why that difference is supposed to make any difference isn't clear to me. Sure, he's left with a $250,000 fine to pay and two years' probation. Considering that Libby's defense fund has so far raised about $5 million, the quarter-mil isn't so big a deal (yes, he made sure to pay it from his personal funds within two business days, but this goes precisely to the point that it was less than an unbearable hardship). And the judge in the case has been questioning whether you can even serve out a probation when you don't first do jail time....
Tony Snow and others made a howler of a case this week that following all the bad publicity, poor Irving Lewis will now have trouble making a living (before joining Cheney's staff, he was a high-powered lawyer, and ironically represented Mark Rich at the time of Clinton's more-than-dubious pardoning of him back in January '01). But yes, conservative folk hero that the man has now become, I'm sure poor Mr. Scoots will follow in the hard footsteps of (say) Oliver North, and will have a devil of a time landing a corner office at the Heritage Foundation, or seats on corporate boards, or the odd speaking engagement now and then. If he's capable of speaking, that is. One of the interesting things about this whole affair is how over the course of more than three years now, the guy's never given the press so much as a soundbyte. At least not that I've ever heard. "I am innocent." "I will not speak with the press about an ongoing investigation." "I am accused of no underlying crime - and perjury only counts if you're a Democrat lying about fellatio." But no, not a peep. All we've got to go by is that weird prose-poem he sent Judith Miller in prison about aspens turning with the seasons, or whatever.
Oh yes, and the novel he wrote where bears rape caged young women to train them to be prostitutes.
But who am I to criticize a fellow for writing bizarre fiction?
Anyway, I'm afraid this will be the end of the book on the Plame Affair. We've come a long way from the original issue, and it's hard to recall that what happened here involved not just the blowing of the cover of a covert CIA agent, but more importantly of her entire front-company - Brewster Jennings & Associates. Sure, she and her fake company may not have been doing anything very important... you know, investigating Iran's nuclear program or something. But the full damage done is unknown, since Plame was not the only covert agent using this company as a front. (Let us recall that it was the CIA itself that demanded an investigation of this matter in the first place).
The other part of the left-leaning argument about this whole brouhaha - that the Plame exposure was part of the Administration's effort to build a fallacious public case for war with Iraq - does, I admit, have the virtue of being true. But I wonder how much it matters. My vibe has been that the country was quite ready for war with Iraq back in 2003. Towelheads are towelheads, was really about as far as the reasoning went. And with some 40% of the public this is still true - they think to this day that Saddam was behind 9-11. So anyway, I think the Bush folks did overreach in trumping up their case: the fact is that they didn't need to try half as hard as they did. And therefore, anything that went on about outing Valerie Plame in order to retaliate against her whistleblower husband Joe Wilson in order to intimidate future possible critics of the administration... that really is what they call "inside baseball". And to suggest, however indirectly, (as I get the whiff of sometimes from the left) that this thing is an important part of how we ended up in Iraq today, is silly to me. What this is about is the Bush Administration's Mayberry-Machiavellian Stalinistic management of its own human resources.
Nonetheless: blowing the cover of a front company being used to investigate the Iranian nuclear program? To leak this kind of information to the public is, as papa Bush called it, "treason". (Conservatives, please give me an example of something Clinton's administration did that was as egregious.)
And yes, Dick Armitage leaked first, to Bob Woodward (Armtage's source being summary documents about Wilson drawn up at the request of Cheney's office). This is supposed to take the edge off of the scandal since Armitage was Colin Powell's #2 guy, and everyone knows Colin Powell is a birkenstock-wearing flower child. But Armitage did essentially drop the information to Woodward unwittingly, was mortified when the thing went public, and cooperated fully with Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation. Should he still have been punished? Maybe - the details of the Fitzgerald investigation have not been released to the public (a far cry from Ken Starr). Libby, contrariwise, leaked as an act of retaliation and then lied about it.
But anyway, you can see why this story is journalistically finished: it's way too complicated for anybody to bother following. Even my eyes are starting to glaze over.
Upshot: he is very secretive, and he runs the government.
***
Civil rights, schmivel rights. Late Friday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a challenge the ACLU had mounted to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. The reason the court gave wasn't that they consider the wiretapping program legal, but rather that, since the program is secret, nobody can prove for sure that he or she has been surveilled under it. In other words, the administration can break the law on a massive and ongoing basis - and as long as they don't tell us whose rights are being violated, we can't challenge or stop 'em.
But to the broader point here. I've long thought it's at least possible the administration is right about this program. That is, it's possible that when it comes to the threat of something like nuclear terrorism, the right thing for our society to do may be to seek out plots using broad statistical analysis, say, rather than to cleave unwaveringly to our original legal model: ie, prosecuting crimes with evidence obtained by probable-cause warrant. But once it's put that way, you can see how profound a thing this means - a basic change in our whole paradigm of law enforcement. An asterisk on the cherished principle that we're innocent until proven guilty. Were such a change to be adopted in a democracy, it should first be the subject of a searching public dialogue, culminating in new legislation - new constitutional amendments - defining what kinds of data about its citizens the government might now track, and what rights to privacy we retain. But what you don't, don't, don't allow, is for the executive branch to just up and start running this program on its own recognizance without so much as telling anybody about it first (Bush's fig leaf that he briefed a handful of key congresspeople about it, under conditions of sworn secrecy, notwithstanding). Where are the checks and balances in this system? Where are the guarantees that it will be used strictly to track terrorism and not, say, drug trafficking - or a President's political opponents? Because though Bush surely has America's best interests at heart, the next President may not be quite as glowingly scrupulous.
Put simply, this is as impeachable as impeachable gets. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday that it doesn't carry the merit of so much as a lawsuit.
***
In '06, Iraq was costing us about $8.7 billion a month. Thanks to the surge, that's now up to more like $12. Total expenditures to date are pushing $420 billionish, and by any measure we have clearly spent a fraction of what we ultimately will (VA services for 25,000 wounded soldiers for the next 50 years, anyone?).
To put this cost into perspective, the US GDP was about $13 trillion in 2006. What we've spent to date on Iraq comes to something like a dozen days of our total economic output. Which I guess is pretty darn reasonable, as wars go. Of course, we're not actually paying any of these bills yet, just charging them to the national credit card; and, of course, the total costs of the war should ultimately top well over a trillion bucks.
Never mind that what we're buying with all this money is international political destabilization and decades of future terrorism. Sis boom bah.
***
Distressingly, it turns out that Rumsfeld scotched a 2005 Navy Seal assault at the last minute (they were suited up and on the tarmac) which could have resulted in killing or capturing a number of top Queda leaders in Pakistan, including al-Zawahiri. I guess it's hard to criticize this sort of decision without knowing all of the operational details behind it. But Donald's big concerns at the time were apparently (a) the assault had grown into a large affair, with greater exposure of US troops, and (b) Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wouldn't have been happy about it.
Well, (a) since when did Rumsfeld start caring about the exposure of US troops?, and (b) with friends like Musharraf....
***
Republican lawmakers who've ditched Bush and are now calling for a significant change/drawdown-of-troops in Iraq, mainly in this past week:
- Dick Lugar (Senator, IN)
- John Warner (Senator, VA, and ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee)
- George Voinovich (Senator, OH)
- Pete Domenici (Senator, NM - currently under investigation for pressuring a US Attorney [David Iglesias] prior to his firing last fall)
- John Doolittle (Congressman, CA - an Abramoff payee)
But anyway, we face the prospect again - like last year - that Democrats may win less by their own merits and more by default. Thus setting the stage for a major Republican comeback after.
But I get ahead of myself.
***
And the biggest political story of the week was obviously Bush's pardon Monday of the Scootster. Excuse me: his commutation of the Scootster's prison sentence. Why that difference is supposed to make any difference isn't clear to me. Sure, he's left with a $250,000 fine to pay and two years' probation. Considering that Libby's defense fund has so far raised about $5 million, the quarter-mil isn't so big a deal (yes, he made sure to pay it from his personal funds within two business days, but this goes precisely to the point that it was less than an unbearable hardship). And the judge in the case has been questioning whether you can even serve out a probation when you don't first do jail time....
Tony Snow and others made a howler of a case this week that following all the bad publicity, poor Irving Lewis will now have trouble making a living (before joining Cheney's staff, he was a high-powered lawyer, and ironically represented Mark Rich at the time of Clinton's more-than-dubious pardoning of him back in January '01). But yes, conservative folk hero that the man has now become, I'm sure poor Mr. Scoots will follow in the hard footsteps of (say) Oliver North, and will have a devil of a time landing a corner office at the Heritage Foundation, or seats on corporate boards, or the odd speaking engagement now and then. If he's capable of speaking, that is. One of the interesting things about this whole affair is how over the course of more than three years now, the guy's never given the press so much as a soundbyte. At least not that I've ever heard. "I am innocent." "I will not speak with the press about an ongoing investigation." "I am accused of no underlying crime - and perjury only counts if you're a Democrat lying about fellatio." But no, not a peep. All we've got to go by is that weird prose-poem he sent Judith Miller in prison about aspens turning with the seasons, or whatever.
Oh yes, and the novel he wrote where bears rape caged young women to train them to be prostitutes.
But who am I to criticize a fellow for writing bizarre fiction?
Anyway, I'm afraid this will be the end of the book on the Plame Affair. We've come a long way from the original issue, and it's hard to recall that what happened here involved not just the blowing of the cover of a covert CIA agent, but more importantly of her entire front-company - Brewster Jennings & Associates. Sure, she and her fake company may not have been doing anything very important... you know, investigating Iran's nuclear program or something. But the full damage done is unknown, since Plame was not the only covert agent using this company as a front. (Let us recall that it was the CIA itself that demanded an investigation of this matter in the first place).
The other part of the left-leaning argument about this whole brouhaha - that the Plame exposure was part of the Administration's effort to build a fallacious public case for war with Iraq - does, I admit, have the virtue of being true. But I wonder how much it matters. My vibe has been that the country was quite ready for war with Iraq back in 2003. Towelheads are towelheads, was really about as far as the reasoning went. And with some 40% of the public this is still true - they think to this day that Saddam was behind 9-11. So anyway, I think the Bush folks did overreach in trumping up their case: the fact is that they didn't need to try half as hard as they did. And therefore, anything that went on about outing Valerie Plame in order to retaliate against her whistleblower husband Joe Wilson in order to intimidate future possible critics of the administration... that really is what they call "inside baseball". And to suggest, however indirectly, (as I get the whiff of sometimes from the left) that this thing is an important part of how we ended up in Iraq today, is silly to me. What this is about is the Bush Administration's Mayberry-Machiavellian Stalinistic management of its own human resources.
Nonetheless: blowing the cover of a front company being used to investigate the Iranian nuclear program? To leak this kind of information to the public is, as papa Bush called it, "treason". (Conservatives, please give me an example of something Clinton's administration did that was as egregious.)
And yes, Dick Armitage leaked first, to Bob Woodward (Armtage's source being summary documents about Wilson drawn up at the request of Cheney's office). This is supposed to take the edge off of the scandal since Armitage was Colin Powell's #2 guy, and everyone knows Colin Powell is a birkenstock-wearing flower child. But Armitage did essentially drop the information to Woodward unwittingly, was mortified when the thing went public, and cooperated fully with Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation. Should he still have been punished? Maybe - the details of the Fitzgerald investigation have not been released to the public (a far cry from Ken Starr). Libby, contrariwise, leaked as an act of retaliation and then lied about it.
But anyway, you can see why this story is journalistically finished: it's way too complicated for anybody to bother following. Even my eyes are starting to glaze over.
1 comment:
Marc you should write for a large publication, e.g. The New York Times.
I am not surprised about the results of the Libby Case. I am sure he is loaded with cash and his felon sentence will not destroy his career. He will probably write a book, and be pardoned by the end of Bush’s term. Even if he is not pardoned it's not like he will end up on the streets.
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