The degrading effects of terrorism fears

"A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved."

John Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put it this way: "Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it pred...ominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it."

(updated below - Update II)

I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column in yesterday's New York Times that makes several insightful and important points. Brooks documents how "childish, contemptuous and hysterical" the national reaction has been to this latest terrorist episode, egged on -- as usual -- by the always-hysterical American media. The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe. Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens. Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe.

This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood. The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe. A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved. John Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put it this way:

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.

As Adams noted, political leaders possess an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels, as that is what maximizes their power. For a variety of reasons, nobody aids this process more than our establishment media, motivated by their own interests in ratcheting up fear and Terrorism melodrama as high as possible. The result is a citizenry far more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could ever dream of achieving on their own. For that reason, a risk that is completely dwarfed by numerous others -- the risk of death from Islamic Terrorism -- dominates our discourse, paralyzes us with fear, leads us to destroy our economic security and eradicate countless lives in more and more foreign wars, and causes us to beg and plead and demand that our political leaders invade more of our privacy, seize more of our freedom, and radically alter the system of government we were supposed to have. The one thing we don't do is ask whether we ourselves are doing anything to fuel this problem and whether we should stop doing it. As Adams said: fear "renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable."

What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety. A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death. And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in our political discourse. It is fear, and only fear, that predominates. No other competing values are recognized. We have Chris Matthews running around shrieking that he's scared of kung-fu-wielding Terrorists. Michael Chertoff is demanding that we stop listening to "privacy ideologues" -- i.e., that there should be no limits on Government's power to invade and monitor and scrutinize. Republican leaders have spent the decade preaching that only Government-provided Safety, not the Constitution, matters. All in response to this week's single failed terrorist attack, there are -- as always -- hysterical calls that we start more wars, initiate racial profiling, imprison innocent people indefinitely, and torture even more indiscriminately. These are the by-products of the weakness and panic and paralyzing fear that Americans have been fed in the name of Terrorism, continuously for a full decade now.

Ever since I began writing in late 2005 about this fear-addicted dynamic, the point on which Brooks focused yesterday is the one I've thought most important. What matters most about this blinding fear of Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result. Policies can always be changed. What matters most is the radical transformation of the national character of the United States. Reducing the citizenry to a frightened puddle of passivity, hysteria and a child-like expectation of Absolute Safety is irrevocable and far more consequential than any specific new laws. Fear is always the enabling force of authoritarianism: the desire to vest unlimited power in political authority in exchange for promises of protection. This is what I wrote about that back in early 2006 in How Would a Patriot Act?:

The president's embrace of radical theories of presidential power threatens to change the system of government we have. But worse still, his administration's relentless, never-ending attempts to keep the nation in a state of fear can also change the kind of nation we are.

This isn't exactly new: many of America's most serious historical transgressions -- the internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyite witch hunts, World War I censorship laws, the Alien and Sedition Act -- have been the result of fear-driven, over-reaction to external threats, not under-reaction. Fear is a degrading toxin, and there's no doubt that it has been the primary fuel over the last decade. As the events of the last week demonstrate, it continues to spread rapidly, and it produces exactly the kind of citizenry about which John Adams long ago warned.

UPDATE: Talking to one's friends and co-workers is not a reliable way of gauging public opinion on an issue. Those who want to claim that the media's hysteria over this incident is not matched by the general public's are going to have to explain this:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day. . . . Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters think the attempt by the Nigerian Muslim to blow up the airliner as it landed in Detroit should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Only 22% say it should be handled by civilian authorities as a criminal act, as is currently the case.

Does that sound like a calm and sober citizenry?

UPDATE II: On Fox News yesterday, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (ret.) announces that he wants to strip search all Muslim males between the ages of 18-28, and explains that "political correctness" -- the only possible reason one might have to object to such a proposal -- is going to result in our mass slaughter at the hands of jihadists. It's hard to overstate -- or even fathom -- what happens to people who have sat there for years and ingested this sort of ugliness and panic.

Cheney's stenographers fight back

Note from Greetings: Politico is a Dick Cheney press office, not a news organization. Clearly. Publishing his press releases verbatim with no questions, and no challenges. Politico, the Republican's press corps(e):

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

Throughout the year, Politico has repeatedly published as "news articles" comments from Dick Cheney, which its "reporters" faithfully write down and print with virtually no challenge, skepticism or contradiction. So extreme has this behavior become that even Beltway TV personalities such as Chris Matthews are beginning to mock it. This afternoon, Greg Sargent asked Editor-in-Chief John Harris to defend his magazine's conduct, and Harris replied by claiming, in essence, that Cheney's comments are "newsworthy" and that it's Politico's job to "get newsworthy people to say interesting things."

Harris' reply is a complete non sequitur. Nobody I've heard objects to Politico's act of telling its readers about the "interesting things" Cheney has to say. The objection is that Politico mindlessly reprints any and all claims Cheney wants to make, no matter how factually dubious or even blatantly false, without question or challenge. By definition, then, Politico serves Cheney as his official stenographer and spokesman (i.e., writing down and announcing what someone has said), rather than acting as journalists (i.e., stating what the facts are and how and why a politicians' statements are untrue). Harris doesn't dispute this; he simply explains that -- like most establishment journalists -- Politico's role is not to document someone's falsehoods, but only to repeat and amplify them. We're supposed to believe that what Judy Miller did was somehow anomalous and worthy of being disgraced, yet virtually every time "reporters" like Harris explain how they perceive their role, they describe exactly what Miller did: we get important people to say interesting things and write it down, regardless of whether it's true.

Thus, in their last Cheney "article," Politico let Cheney attack Obama for giving "terrorists the rights of Americans, let[ting] them lawyer up and read[ing] them their Miranda rights" -- without mentioning that the Bush administration did exactly that with Richard Reid, Zacharais Moussoui and several others (see this new Jake Tapper article detailing these contradictions for how an actual "journalist" reports on a political figure's false accusations). Politico also let Cheney accuse Obama of wanting to "release the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists" from Guantanamo -- without noting that (a) many of the to-be-released detainees are ones even the Bush administration concluded did nothing wrong and are not a threat; (b) the vast majority of detainees held at Guantanamo were completely innocent; (c) it was Bush/Cheney who released many of the detainees who have since returned to the so-called "battlefield," including one of the alleged leaders of Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula; and (d) Obama is using the same tools used by Bush/Cheney -- trials, military commissions and indefinite detention -- to imprison all detainees deemed to be a "threat." Politico also let Cheney repeatedly claim that "that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war" -- without noting that Obama twice escalated in Afghanistan, began bombing Yemen, and massively ratcheted up our drone attacks in Pakistan.

In other words, they dutifully wrote down a bunch of falsehoods and lies Cheney told, and passed those claim on to their readers without noting that they were false. When confronted with their conduct, Politico's Editor-in-Chief blithely claims that this misleading, subservient behavior is his understanding of what "journalists" are supposed to. And it undoubtedly is. It's true that, two days before printing its latest Cheney homage, Politico ran a good article by one of its few real reporters, Josh Gerstein, documenting that Bush waited longer to comment on Richard Reid than Obama waited to comment on the Northwest Airlines incident, but that's only one of Cheney's lies, and debunking it in an entirely separate article two days earlier doesn't justify printing Cheney's comments without challenge.

Of course, Politico will continue to serve Cheney in this way -- offering him a challenge-free platform to say whatever he wants -- because if they ever stopped being good little boys for Dick Cheney, he would find someone else to serve as his faithful stenographers, and then they, rather than Politico, would get the Drudge links and gossip attention which Politico, above all else, desperately craves.

* * * * *

I'm not a big fan of "we-are-doomed" symbolism. But for those looking for end-of-the-decade signs of our impending collapse, it would be hard to do better than pointing to the appointment of the Executive Editor of Politico -- of Politico -- to the Pulitzer Committee.

Think before surging

By Fareed Zakaria
Monday, October 26, 2009

Dick Cheney has accused Barack Obama of "dithering" over Afghanistan. If the president were to quickly invade a country on the basis of half-baked intelligence, would that demonstrate his courage and decisiveness to Cheney? In fact, it's not a bad idea for Obama to take his time, examine all options and watch how the post-election landscape in Afghanistan evolves.

The real question we should be asking about Afghanistan is: "Do we need a third surge?" The number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in January 2008 was 26,607. Over the next six months, the total rose to 48,250. President Bush described this policy as "the quiet surge," and he made the standard arguments about the need for a counterinsurgency capacity -- the troops had to not only fight the Taliban but also protect the Afghan population, strengthen and train the Afghan army and police, and assist in development.

In January, 3,000 more troops, originally ordered by Bush, went to Afghanistan in the first days of the Obama presidency. In February, responding to a request from the commander in the field, Obama ordered an additional 17,000 troops into the country. Put another way, over the past 18 months, troop levels in Afghanistan have almost tripled. Sending an additional 40,000 troops would mean an over 300 percent increase in U.S. troops since 2008. (The total surge in Iraq was just over 20,000 troops.) It is not dithering to try to figure out why previous increases have not worked and why we think additional ones would.

In fact, focusing on the number of additional troops needed "misses the point entirely," says Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander Obama put in place this summer. "The key takeaway" from his now-famous assessment "is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way we think and operate." The quotes are from the third paragraph of his 66-page memo. These changes in strategy have just begun.

To understand how U.S. troops had been fighting in Afghanistan, consider the Battle of Wanat. On July 13, 2008, a large number of Taliban fighters surrounded an American base in that village, in the southeastern corner of Afghanistan. After a few hours of fierce fighting, nine American soldiers lay dead, the largest number killed in a single engagement in years. Former Post reporter and defense expert Tom Ricks points out that Wanat is in a mountainous region with few people, many of them hostile to outsiders. So, he asks, "Why are we putting our fist in a hornet's nest?"

McChrystal has since pulled U.S. forces out of Wanat. The Post's Greg Jaffe, reporting on the town a year later, concluded recently that "ceding territory to the Taliban is more effective than maintaining small, vulnerable bases in forbidding terrain. In the past several weeks, U.S. commanders, based about six miles outside the village, have detected growing friction between Wanat residents and the Taliban commanders responsible for last year's attack." So why not let the Taliban try to set up bases in these remote areas with prickly locals? NATO forces can then periodically disrupt the Taliban rather than the other way around. In these places, counter-terrorism -- now often associated with Vice President Biden -- could work well with the grain of Afghan society.

Advocates of a troop increase act as if counterinsurgency is applied physics. McChrystal's team, having done the mathematical calculations, has apparently arrived at the exact answer. There is no room for variation or middle courses, the argument goes. But the theory that "it's 40,000 troops or no counterinsurgency" is absurd. The best evidence is that senior military officers assured me at various points over the past year that with the latest increase in troops they finally had enough forces to do counterinsurgency.

The crucial judgments that have to be made involve what the troops will do and how much of Afghanistan to cover. One option is the idea Ricks recently suggested to me: "Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?" Following that middle course might be the most practical solution; more forces could still be needed, as McChrystal suggests, or perhaps we can make do with the almost 100,000 coalition forces already there. Obama should carefully consider all the options before racing to demonstrate how tough he is.

Fareed Zakaria is editor of Newsweek International and the author of "The Post-American World." His e-mail address is comments@fareedzakaria.com.

Clear-eyed conservative realism -- translated into English.

22 Percent And Out Of Ideas

By Harold Meyerson
Friday, May 22, 2009

The dizzying downward spiral of the Republican Party continues apace. Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that the percentage of Americans who answer to the name Republican is down to 22 percent -- about as low as a party can go in a two-party system.

Also yesterday, former vice president Dick Cheney delivered a prolonged defense of "enhanced interrogation techniques" even as President Obama, speaking alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution at the National Archives, repudiated torture and spelled out the toll that the torture tactics used by the Bush-Cheney administration inflicted on America's standing in the world.

Cheney has become the GOP's Banquo's ghost -- a constant reminder (and, unlike poor Banquo, defender) of past crimes who just won't leave the dinner party.

But even when Republicans speak of the future these days, they sound like the voice of the past. They turn for new ideas to Newt Gingrich, whose biggest idea was to close down the federal government to force Bill Clinton to slash Medicare payments. They turn to Cheney for guidance on national defense and to Rush Limbaugh to set the standards for party orthodoxy.

They hold anti-tax rallies to protest an administration that has cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans. They see a bill that would rein in credit card companies as an opportunity to slip in an amendment that would allow Americans to bring concealed and loaded guns into national parks. Their national committee considers a resolution expressing the sense of the body that the Democrats should rename themselves the "Democrat Socialist Party."

They offer no solutions for the nation's problems but are chock-full of solutions for issues (such as the lack of concealed weapons in Yellowstone) that aren't problems. They play with renaming the Democrats while they're the ones with the identity crisis.

But there's a reason they enumerate old themes and gravitate to the most peripheral ones imaginable -- a reason that's neither old nor peripheral. The economic crisis has plunged their worldview into crisis, if not negated it altogether. What's more, several leading conservative economists and thinkers have acknowledged as much, though none has really suggested a plausible alternative course.

Some of this rethinking has taken the form of mea culpas from key economic figures of the Reagan age. Alan Greenspan confessed to a congressional committee late last year that his basic assumptions about the self-corrective tendencies and fundamental rationality of both the economic system and its leading players (the banks) were wrong. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, whose elevation of shareholder value over other corporate goals has been hugely influential since he began preaching that gospel in the early 1980s, has now said that shareholder value is just one of many goals that a business should pursue.

The most comprehensive repudiation by a conservative thinker of the tenets of laissez-faire has come from federal judge (and prolific off-bench author) Richard Posner, who has been a seminal influence on the conservative law-and-economics movement that has moved judges to consider economic efficiency in their rulings. In his new book, "A Failure of Capitalism," Posner argues that the current downturn, unlike any since the Great Depression, reveals that capitalism is not self-correcting, that market forces cannot in themselves produce a recovery for a crisis this systemic, and that what we are experiencing is, well, a failure of capitalism.

All this leaves Posner in a bit of a bind, since he remains hesitant to recommend the full range of governmental activism that, by his own lights, is all that's left to rebuild the economy because the markets cannot do it themselves. His writing, like that of other conservative intellectuals such as the New York Times' David Brooks, has a kind of Emily Litella "never mind" quality to it now: repudiating many of the conservative verities that they themselves advanced over the past several decades while refraining from actually embracing the kinds of remedies that the Obama administration is advancing.

Since the end of World War II, American conservatism defined itself above all by its anti-communism and, since the late '70s, by its support of a radical, laissez-faire capitalism. Win one, lose one, but the cumulative consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in more attenuated fashion, of the Wall Street banks is that the Republican Party isn't left with much of a defining doctrine. Packing heat in Yosemite and waterboarding in Guantanamo are not only stunningly dumb ideas, they're also no way to build a party.

Rumsfeld was even worse than you thought

A new report details the anger within the Bush administration toward the former secretary of defense, and shows how he hurt Katrina relief efforts.

Alex Koppelman, Salon.com

May. 18, 2009

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not a popular guy, and his tenure during the Bush administration isn't generally well-regarded. He even became the fall guy for Republicans' disastrous losses in the 2006 midterm elections, as then-President Bush very publicly accepted his resignation one day after the GOP lost control of both houses of Congress.

Now, though, a new article in GQ by Robert Draper is doing more damage to Rumsfeld's already-tarnished reputation. Veterans of the Bush administration, who'd apparently been waiting for the opportunity to unload on an old foe, dished plenty of dirt on the former defense secretary, and delivered some truly amazing images to go along with it.

On its Web site, GQ has published a slide show of cover sheets that accompanied intelligence updates produced by Rumsfeld's DOD for Bush. They all feature images of American soldiers in the field, and biblical quotes. It was, apparently, at least partially an attempt to appeal to Bush's religious belief, but it also made other administration officials quite unhappy, in part because if they ever leaked, the images would bolster the perception, which the administration had been working to counter, that America was fighting a holy war against Islam.

That's the most visually stunning element of Draper's story, but the portrait he paints of Rumsfeld as bureaucratic player is astounding too. The story of his actions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is particularly damning. "It was commonly known in the West Wing that there was a battle with Rumsfeld regarding this," Draper quotes one unnamed former "top White House official" as saying. "I can't imagine another defense secretary throwing up the kinds of obstacles he did."

Draper writes:

Rumsfeld's aversion to using active-duty troops was evident: "There's no doubt in my mind," says one of Bush's close advisers today, "that Rumsfeld didn't like the concept."

The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, "You're going to need several thousand troops."

"Well, I disagree," said the SecDef. "And I'm going to tell the president we don't need any more than the National Guard."

... Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, "Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what's on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I'm watching? What the hell are you doing?"

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create "unity of command" issues.

Even after that meeting, when the president expressed his disapproval of what Rumsfeld was doing, the defense secretary still continued dragging his feet on sending in troops.

-- Alex Koppelman

The Best on the Internet: The Gregory Brothers "Auto-Tune the News"

Gotta love The Gregory Brothers when they "auto-tune the news". It's the only time these folks all make sense.

Rogue Diva of Doom - Dick Cheney

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

When Bush 41 was ramping up to the Gulf War, assembling a coalition to fight Saddam, Jimmy Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council urging them not to rush into conflict without further exploring a negotiated solution.

The first President Bush and other Republicans in Washington considered this treasonous, a former president trying to thwart a sitting one, lobbying foreign diplomats to oppose his own country on a war resolution. In 2002, when Bush Junior was ramping up to his war against Saddam, Al Gore made a speech trying to slow down that war resolution, pointing out that pivoting from Osama to Saddam for no reason, initiating “pre-emptive” war, and blowing off our allies would undermine the war on terror.

Charles Krauthammer called Gore’s speech “a disgrace.” Michael Kelly, his fellow Washington Post columnist, called it “vile” and “contemptible.” Newt Gingrich said that the former vice president asserting that W. was making America less safe was “well outside the mark of an appropriate debate.”

“I think the president should be doing what he thinks is best as commander in chief,” Gingrich said flatly. Now, however, Gingrich backs Dick Cheney when he asserts that President Obama has made America less safe.

Asked by Bob Schieffer on Sunday how America could torture when it made a mockery of our ideals, Cheney blithely gave an answer that surely would have been labeled treasonous by Rush Limbaugh, if a Democratic ex-vice president had said it about a Republican president.

“Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America,” Doomsday Dick said.

Cheney has replaced Sarah Palin as Rogue Diva. Just as Jeb Bush and other Republicans are trying to get kinder and gentler, Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up. The man who wouldn’t list his office in the federal jobs directory, who had the vice president’s residence blocked on Google Earth, who went to the Supreme Court to keep from revealing which energy executives helped him write the nation’s energy policy, is now endlessly yelping about how President Obama is holding back documents that should be made public.

Cheney, who had five deferments himself to get out of going to Vietnam, would rather follow a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem (who also avoided Vietnam) than a four-star general who spent his life serving his country.

“Bush 41 cares about decorum and protocol,” said an official in Bush I. “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out. He is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.”

Cheney unleashed, egged on by the combative Lynne and Liz, is pretty much the same as Cheney underground: He’s batty, and he thinks he was the president.

W. admired Cheney’s brass (he used another word) but grew increasingly skeptical of him, the more he learned about foreign policy himself, and the more he got pulled into a diplomatic mode by Condi in the second term. There were even reports of W. doing a funny Cheney imitation and that it dawned on him that Cheney and Rummy represented a scofflaw, paranoid Nixon cell within his White House.

“Toward the end, 43 was just as confused as anybody about what makes Cheney tick,” said a Bush family loyalist.

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

He has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint. He still doesn’t fathom that his brutish invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America. He left our ports unsecured, our food supply unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose. No matter if or when terrorists attack here — and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan red/blue state timetable — Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

W.’s dark surrogate father is trying to pull the G.O.P. into a black hole of zealotry, just as the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother is trying to get his career back on track.

When Cheney was in the first Bush administration, he was odd man out. Poppy, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell corralled Cheney’s “Genghis Khan” side, as it was known, and his “rough streak.” Cheney didn’t care for Powell even then.

But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. Classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts.

The Justice Department, in response to inquiries from The New York Times, acknowledged Wednesday night that there had been problems with the N.S.A. surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved.

As part of a periodic review of the agency’s activities, the department “detected issues that raised concerns,” it said. Justice Department officials then “took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance” with the law and court orders, the statement said. It added that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. went to the national security court to seek a renewal of the surveillance program only after new safeguards were put in place.

In a statement on Wednesday night, the N.S.A. said that its “intelligence operations, including programs for collection and analysis, are in strict accordance with U.S. laws and regulations.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems but said in a statement that “when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.”

The questions may not be settled yet. Intelligence officials say they are still examining the scope of the N.S.A. practices, and Congressional investigators say they hope to determine if any violations of Americans’ privacy occurred. It is not clear to what extent the agency may have actively listened in on conversations or read e-mail messages of Americans without proper court authority, rather than simply obtained access to them.

The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers, and the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects.

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said.

After a contentious three-year debate that was set off by the disclosure in 2005 of the program of wiretapping without warrants that President George W. Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress gave the N.S.A. broad new authority to collect, without court-approved warrants, vast streams of international phone and e-mail traffic as it passed through American telecommunications gateways. The targets of the eavesdropping had to be “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. Under the new legislation, however, the N.S.A. still needed court approval to monitor the purely domestic communications of Americans who came under suspicion.

In recent weeks, the eavesdropping agency notified members of the Congressional intelligence committees that it had encountered operational and legal problems in complying with the new wiretapping law, Congressional officials said.

Officials would not discuss details of the overcollection problem because it involves classified intelligence-gathering techniques. But the issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages.

One official said that led the agency to inadvertently “target” groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred.

The overcollection problems appear to have been uncovered as part of a twice-annual certification that the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence are required to give to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on the protocols that the N.S.A. is using in wiretapping. That review, officials said, began in the waning days of the Bush administration and was continued by the Obama administration. It led intelligence officials to realize that the N.S.A. was improperly capturing information involving significant amounts of American traffic.

Notified of the problems by the N.S.A., officials with both the House and Senate intelligence committees said they had concerns that the agency had ignored civil liberties safeguards built into last year’s wiretapping law. “We have received notice of a serious issue involving the N.S.A., and we’ve begun inquiries into it,” a Congressional staff member said.

Separate from the new inquiries, the Justice Department has for more than two years been investigating aspects of the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program.

As part of that investigation, a senior F.B.I. agent recently came forward with what the inspector general’s office described as accusations of “significant misconduct” in the surveillance program, people with knowledge of the investigation said. Those accusations are said to involve whether the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism.

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

And They Keep Files on Everyone, Even Their Own Supporters

Friday, April 10, 2009 11:45 EDTm by Alex Koppleman, Salon.com

Karl Rove is making a list, checking it twice

It seems Karl Rove can't even eat dinner without being accosted by a former Hill Republican staffer.

Politico's Anne Schroeder Mullins reports that the former Bush advisor was eating dinner at a Washington, D.C. steakhouse on Thursday night when Jason Roe, who'd been chief of staff to former Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., came up to him looking for an argument over comments Rove had made on Fox News after the election, when Feeney -- and other Republicans, obviously -- had gone down to defeat. Rove had blamed the congressman for his own defeat, criticizing him pretty harshly, and Roe didn't want to take that lying down. That led to the following exchange, as written up by Mullins:

Roe walked over to the table, "I'm Jason Roe."

Rove: "Oh, the famous Jason Roe."

Roe: "I don't know that I'm famous but I'm Tom Feeney's former chief of staff and I'm offended by your comments on Fox about Tom. You guys wouldn't be in the White House without Tom. And you made these really degrading comments about him that offended a lot of people."

(Sidenote: Tom Feeney was the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives during the whole Bush/Gore 2000 recount.) Rove: "Well, I have a file on the things Tom Feeney said about George Bush."

Roe: "That says more about you than me that you kept a file on Tom Feeney. This guy was so restrained in his desire to criticize the President--even against this staff's advice." Rove: "I have a file."

Roe: "I'm right here, tell me to my face what's in that file."

Rove: "I'll send you the file."

Roe: "Well I hope the file is the beginning of the conversation and not the end. I would love to disabuse you of whatever you think of Tom Feeney's loyalty from this file."

Rove: "If you keep talking over me this conversation's going to end right now."

The two men reportedly had to be separated, though it doesn't seem like it took much effort to move Roe away from Rove's table.

― Alex Koppelman

Alberto Gonzalez, The Sequel

NY Times Editorial, January 28, 2009

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should have considered himself a lucky man when he was allowed to resign in disgrace in August 2007 without being hauled into Congress on perjury or contempt charges.

He was in the thick of President George W. Bush’s most damaging attacks on the rule of law. As White House counsel, he helped to justify torture and illegal wiretapping. As attorney general, he politicized the Justice Department. And he misled Congress in both jobs.

He could have told the truth about those things. Or, he could have gone quietly away and waited for a subpoena from the Obama administration.

Instead, he is trying for some sort of bizarre comeback by painting himself as an upstanding man victimized by a “mean-spirited town.”

In an interview with National Public Radio this week, Mr. Gonzales attacked President Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder, for saying that waterboarding is torture. To hear Mr. Gonzales tell it, Mr. Holder was in the wrong — not the lawyers like Mr. Gonzales who tortured the law to justify torture, or the former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who approved its use, or the interrogators who actually subjected detainees to waterboarding and other inhumane and illegal interrogation techniques.

Making a “blanket pronouncement like that,” Mr. Gonzales warned, might affect “the morale and dedication” of intelligence officials. He said agents at the Central Intelligence Agency “no longer have any interest in doing anything controversial.”

We’re certainly glad to hear that.

No one in the Bush administration — certainly not Mr. Gonzales — has offered evidence that torturing prisoners produced reliable information. It did undermine the law, further endanger American soldiers who might be captured in the field and destroy the nation’s image.

Mr. Gonzales did not stop there. He said it was his subordinates’ fault that nine United States attorneys were fired for obviously political reasons. “I deeply regret some of the decisions made by my staff,” he said.

Mr. Gonzales had no regrets about the infamous visit he paid to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2004 while he was White House counsel. Mr. Ashcroft was barely conscious after serious surgery, but Mr. Gonzales and Andrew Card, then the White House chief of staff, tried to get him to sign off on a program to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.

James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, rushed to the hospital and managed to thwart the plan. As for reports that the illegal eavesdropping program had prompted threats of a mass resignation by top Justice officials, Mr. Gonzales dismissed that with an airy “lawyers often disagree about important legal issues.”

Mr. Gonzales said he was not worried about being prosecuted for his actions because he was “acting in good faith” and — yes — following orders.

That smug self-assurance should be another powerful reminder to the White House of the need for an unsparing review of all of Mr. Bush’s policies on torture, wiretapping and executive power. Only by learning the details of those disastrous decisions can the nation hope to undo the damage and make sure these mistakes are not repeated.

Why the Uniter Divided Us

by E.J. Dionne, Jr. , Washington Post, January 19, 2009

There are many reasons why most Americans are not mourning President Bush's departure. But our new president would do well to concentrate on the deeper causes of the public's disaffection with the man headed to Texas.

From the very beginning of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his contest with Al Gore, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on power, the temper of the country and the proper role of partisanship in our political life. His win-at-all-costs strategy in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized.

Bush did not respect the obligation of a leader in a free society to forge a durable consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate opposition and plausible doubts about the courses he wished to pursue. It is partly because of these failures that Americans reacted by selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality.

Barack Obama's first response to a political problem is to offer a detailed analysis and put the challenge into some larger context. He loves sparring with his intellectual adversaries. And his "if you have a better idea, I'll take it" approach is the antithesis of the my-way-or-the-highway politics of the past eight years.

Bush was capable of considerable charm, but he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could use on behalf of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not have.

Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq war would have required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress on the eve of a midterm election using political threats and campaign-trail rhetoric. "It's better to fight them there than here" was not an argument that took the average citizen's intelligence seriously. Cutting taxes rather than asking us to pay for the war suggested that while the president might ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own.

Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush's larger failure can be found in the areas where he can claim genuine success.

Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from perfect. But they reflected broadly shared goals -- expanding health coverage, promoting accountability in education -- and involved actual bipartisan wrangling and negotiation. Aspects of both programs will endure.

Bush's dedication to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in foreign aid were admirable, and they surprised his fiercest critics. In the final days, his supporters were touting these least typical of his achievements.

For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly national leader. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the basis of more moderate, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq adventure and used the war on terrorism for electoral advantage.

A hyper-partisan domestic politics of us vs. them followed naturally from Bush's instinct to confuse moral certainty with moral clarity. In his farewell address, he declared yet again that "good and evil are present in this world, and between the two, there can be no compromise."

Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not between good and evil but between competing goods (security vs. liberty) or lesser evils (a draining war in Iraq vs. a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein).

Our new president will make his own characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his capacity to persuade his most implacable foes. He may forget that a two-party system inevitably creates its own dynamic of loyalty and opposition.

But he is decidedly not an us-vs.-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of partisanship. He has been known to quote the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral arrogance. He could make nuance and complexity cool again. Of course it will take more than that to be successful. But it's a start.

The Long, Lame Goodbye

By MAUREEN DOWD, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2009

WASHINGTON

As Barack Obama got to town, one of the first things he did was seek the counsel of past presidents, including George Bush senior.

As W. was leaving town, one of the last things he did was explain why he never sought the counsel of his father on issues that his father knew intimately, like Iraq and Saddam.

When Brit Hume did a joint interview last week with Bush father and son, dubbed “41st guy” and “43rd guy” by W., the Fox anchor asked whether it was true that “there wasn’t a lot of give and take” between them, except on family matters.

“See,” the Oedipally oddball W. replied, “the interesting thing is that a president has got plenty of advisers, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love.”

He talks about his father, the commander in chief who went to war with Saddam before he did, like a puppy. “You rarely have people,” he said, “who can pick up the phone and say, ‘I love you, son,’ or, ‘Hang in there, son.’ ”

Maybe he wouldn’t have needed so many Hang-in-there-sons if he had actually consulted his dad before he ignorantly and fraudulently rammed into the Middle East.

When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.

That is vividly apparent as we watch W. and Obama share the stage as they pass the battered baton. One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon.

Even Obama’s caution — a commodity notably absent from the White House for eight years — fills people with optimism.

W. lives in the shadow of his father’s presence, while Obama lives in the shadow of his father’s absence. W.’s parlous presidency, spent trashing the Constitution, the economy and the environment, was bound up, and burdened by, the psychological traits of an asphyxiated and pampered son.

The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.

W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.) Obama is delighted by doubt.

It’s astonishing that, as banks continue to fail and Americans continue to lose jobs and homes, W. was obtuse enough to go on TV and give a canned ode to can-do-ism. “Good and evil are present in this world,” he reiterated, “and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”

He gives the good-and-evil view of things a bad name. Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys. Good and evil intermingle in the same breath, let alone the same society. A moral analysis cannot be a simplistic analysis.

“You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made,” he said Thursday night. “But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”

Actually, no. His decisions have been, for the most part, disastrous. If he’d paid as much attention to facts as fitness, 9/11, Iraq, the drowning of New Orleans, the deterioration in Afghanistan and the financial deregulation orgy could have been prevented.

Bush fancied himself the Decider; Obama fancies himself the Convener. Some worry that a President Obama will overdo it and turn the Situation Room into the Seminar Room. (He’s already showing a distressing lack of concern over whether his cherished eggheads bend the rules, like Tim Geithner’s not paying all his taxes, because, after all, they’re the Best and the Brightest, not ordinary folk.)

W., Cheney and Rummy loved making enemies, under the mistaken assumption that the more people hated America, the more the Bushies were standing up for principle. But is Obama neurotically reluctant to make enemies, and overly concerned with winning over those who have smacked him, from Hillary and Bill to conservative columnists?

If W. and Cheney preferred Fox News on the TVs in the White House because they liked hearing their cheerleaders, Obama may leave the channel on Fox because he prefers seducing and sparring with antagonists to spooning with allies.

Right now, though, it’s a huge relief to be getting an inquisitive, complicated mind in the White House.

W. decided there was no need to be president of the whole country. He could just be president of his base. Obama is determined to be president of as much of the country as possible.

We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog. It feels good.

Forgive and Forget?

January 16, 2009

Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, NY Times

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” — their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.

The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.

Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.

There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

Why We Have to Look Back

By John Conyers Jr.
Friday, January 16, 2009; A19, Washingtonpost.com

This week, I released "Reining in the Imperial Presidency," a 486-page report detailing the abuses and excesses of the Bush administration and recommending steps to address them. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. popularized the term "imperial presidency" in the 1970s to describe an executive who had assumed more power than the Constitution allows and circumvented the checks and balances fundamental to our three-branch system of government. Until recently, the Nixon administration seemed to represent a singular embodiment of the idea. Unfortunately, it is clear that the threat of the imperial presidency lives on and, indeed, reached new heights under George W. Bush.

As this report documents, there was the administration's contrived drive to a needless war of aggression with Iraq, based on manipulated intelligence and facts that were "fixed around the policy." There was its politicization of the Justice Department; unconscionable and possibly illegal policies on detention, interrogation and extraordinary rendition; warrantless wiretaps of American citizens; the ravaging of our regulatory system and the use of signing statements to override the laws of the land; and the intimidation and silencing of critics and whistle-blowers who dared to tell fellow citizens what was being done in their name. And all of this was hidden behind an unprecedented veil of secrecy and outlandish claims of privilege.

I understand that many feel we should just move on. They worry that addressing these actions by the Bush administration will divert precious energy from the serious challenges facing our nation. I understand the power of that impulse. Indeed, I want to move on as well -- there are so many things that I would rather work on than further review of Bush's presidency. But in my view it would not be responsible to start our journey forward without first knowing exactly where we are.

We cannot rebuild the appropriate balance between the branches of government without fully understanding how that relationship has been distorted. Likewise, we cannot set an appropriate baseline for future presidential conduct without documenting and correcting the presidential excesses that have just occurred. After the Nixon imperial presidency, critical reviews such as the Church and Pike committees led to fundamental reforms that have served our nation well. Comparable steps are needed to begin the process of reining in the legacy of the Bush imperial presidency. I consider these three points crucial:

First, Congress should continue to pursue its document requests and subpoenas that were stonewalled under President Bush. Doing so will make clear that no executive can forever hide its misdeeds from the public.

Second, Congress should create an independent blue-ribbon panel or similar body to investigate a host of previously unreviewable activities of the Bush administration, including its detention, interrogation and surveillance programs. Only by chronicling and confronting the past in a comprehensive, bipartisan fashion can we reclaim our moral authority and establish a credible path forward to meet the complex challenges of a post-Sept. 11 world.

Third, the new administration should conduct an independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities. Just this week, in the pages of this newspaper, a Guantanamo Bay official acknowledged that a suspect there had been "tortured" -- her exact word -- in apparent violation of the law. The law is the law, and, if criminal conduct occurred, those responsible -- particularly those who ordered and approved the violations -- must be held accountable.

Some day, there is bound to be another national security crisis in America. A future president will face the same fear and uncertainty that we did after Sept. 11, 2001, and will feel the same temptation to believe that the ends justify the means -- temptation that drew our nation over to the "dark side" under the leadership of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. If those temptations are to be resisted -- if we are to face new threats in a manner that keeps faith with our values and strengthens rather than diminishes our authority around the world -- we must fully learn the lessons of our recent past.

The writer, a Democrat, represents Michigan's 14th District in the U.S. House and is chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

President Bush... Vice President Cheney... Open Your Books.. and start again!

Epitaph for the Bush Presidency

"Open your book up to Lesson 60 on page 153."

This is what the teacher of the elementary class said just before George Bush started to read his story, "The Pet Goat", as the planes flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.It defines Bush's Presidency.

He hid in reading to school children rather than get up and deal with the greatest crisis in our nation's recent history as events continued to unfold with his head buried in a childrens' story.

He has maintained that head-in-the-sand manner through every other crisis created under his administration as those disasters flew into other national landmarks... Katrina into New Orleans, torture (along with Abu Ghraib) into our armed forces heretofore good reputation, lack of oversight in our financial institutions as they came crashing down, spying on individual citizens not involved in terrorism (with agents laughing at the private conversations). It would be tedious and frightening to continue to list similar situations under his watch.

Yes, this quote sums it up again for another reason. This is where President Bush and Vice President Cheney should start over... in the grade where he was reading "The Pet Goat", rather than dealing with responsibility. They can go back and learn what responsibility and honor mean, starting in second grade.

So please...President Bush... Vice President Cheney..."Open your book up to Lesson 60 on page 153.".... and start again.

The World According to Cheney

Vice President Dick Cheney has a parting message for Americans: They should quit whining about all the things he and President Bush did to undermine the rule of law, erode the balance of powers between the White House and Congress, abuse prisoners and spy illegally on Americans. After all, he said, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln did worse than that.

So Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush managed to stop short of repeating two of the most outrageous abuses of power in American history — Roosevelt’s decision to force Japanese-Americans into camps and Lincoln’s declaration of martial law to silence his critics? That’s not exactly a lofty standard of behavior.

Then again, it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews where he has made those comments. It seems as if everything went just great in the Bush years.

The invasion of Iraq was exactly the right thing to do, not an unnecessary war that required misleading Americans. The postinvasion period was not bungled to the point where Americans got shot up by an insurgency that the Bush team failed to see building.

The horrors at Abu Ghraib were not the result of the Pentagon’s decision to authorize abusive and illegal interrogation techniques, which Mr. Cheney endorsed. And only three men were subjected to waterboarding. (Future truth commissions take note.)

In Mr. Cheney’s reality, the crippling budget deficit was caused mainly by fighting two wars and by essential programs like “enhancing the security of our shipping container business.”

Well, no. The Bush team’s program to scan cargo for nuclear materials at air, land and sea ports has been mired in delays, cost overruns and questions about effectiveness. As for the deficit, the Congressional Budget Office has said the Bush-Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy were the biggest reason that the budget went into the red.

Some of Mr. Cheney’s comments were self-serving spin (as when The Washington Times helpfully prodded him to reveal that even though the world might have seen Mr. Bush as insensitive to the casualties of war, Mr. Cheney himself made a “secret” mission to comfort the families of the dead.)

Mr. Cheney was simply dishonest about Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize spying on Americans’ international calls without a warrant. He claimed the White House kept the Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership fully briefed on the program starting in late 2001. He said he personally ran a meeting at which “they were unanimous, Republican and Democrat alike” that the program was essential and did not require further Congressional involvement.

But in a July 17, 2003, letter to Mr. Cheney, Senator John Rockefeller IV, then vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he wanted to “reiterate” the concerns he expressed in “the meeting today.” He said “the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues” and created “concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology and surveillance.”

Mr. Cheney mocked Vice President-elect Joseph Biden for saying that he does not intend to have his own “shadow government” in the White House. Mr. Cheney said it was up to Mr. Biden to decide if he wants “to diminish the office of vice president.”

Based on Mr. Cheney’s record and his standards for measuring these things, we’re certain a little diminishing of that office would be good for the country.

The Torture Report

New York Times Editorial

Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

•

That order set the stage for the infamous redefinition of torture at the Justice Department, and then Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization of “aggressive” interrogation methods. Some of those methods were torture by any rational definition and many of them violate laws and treaties against abusive and degrading treatment.

These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive.

One page of the report lists the repeated objections that President Bush and his aides so blithely and arrogantly ignored: The Air Force had “serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques”; the chief legal adviser to the military’s criminal investigative task force said they were of dubious value and may subject soldiers to prosecution; one of the Army’s top lawyers said some techniques that stopped well short of the horrifying practice of waterboarding “may violate the torture statute.” The Marines said they “arguably violate federal law.” The Navy pleaded for a real review.

The legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time started that review but told the Senate committee that her boss, Gen. Richard Myers, ordered her to stop on the instructions of Mr. Rumsfeld’s legal counsel, Mr. Haynes.

The report indicates that Mr. Haynes was an early proponent of the idea of using the agency that trains soldiers to withstand torture to devise plans for the interrogation of prisoners held by the American military. These trainers — who are not interrogators but experts only on how physical and mental pain is inflicted and may be endured — were sent to work with interrogators in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo and in Iraq.

On Dec. 2, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the interrogators at Guantánamo to use a range of abusive techniques that were already widespread in Afghanistan, enshrining them as official policy. Instead of a painstaking legal review, Mr. Rumsfeld based that authorization on a one-page memo from Mr. Haynes. The Senate panel noted that senior military lawyers considered the memo “ ‘legally insufficient’ and ‘woefully inadequate.’ ”

Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded his order a month later, and narrowed the number of “aggressive techniques” that could be used at Guantánamo. But he did so only after the Navy’s chief lawyer threatened to formally protest the illegal treatment of prisoners. By then, at least one prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, had been threatened with military dogs, deprived of sleep for weeks, stripped naked and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks. This year, a military tribunal at Guantánamo dismissed the charges against Mr. Qahtani.

The abuse and torture of prisoners continued at prisons run by the C.I.A. and specialists from the torture-resistance program remained involved in the military detention system until 2004. Some of the practices Mr. Rumsfeld left in place seem illegal, like prolonged sleep deprivation.

•

These policies have deeply harmed America’s image as a nation of laws and may make it impossible to bring dangerous men to real justice. The report said the interrogation techniques were ineffective, despite the administration’s repeated claims to the contrary.

Alberto Mora, the former Navy general counsel who protested the abuses, told the Senate committee that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”

We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding.

A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.

•

Given his other problems — and how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign — we do not hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step.

At the least, Mr. Obama should, as the organization Human Rights First suggested, order his attorney general to review more than two dozen prisoner-abuse cases that reportedly were referred to the Justice Department by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — and declined by Mr. Bush’s lawyers.

Mr. Obama should consider proposals from groups like Human Rights Watch and the Brennan Center for Justice to appoint an independent panel to look into these and other egregious violations of the law. Like the 9/11 commission, it would examine in depth the decisions on prisoner treatment, as well as warrantless wiretapping, that eroded the rule of law and violated Americans’ most basic rights. Unless the nation and its leaders know precisely what went wrong in the last seven years, it will be impossible to fix it and make sure those terrible mistakes are not repeated.

We expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.

That job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel.

A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.