Not that it necessarily matters

McClatchy Newspapers:

Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Even his own administration appears divided about the immediacy of the threat. While Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney speak of an Iranian weapons program as a fact, Bush's point man on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, has attempted to ratchet down the rhetoric.

Democrats: Stop Being Defensive on Security and Defense, Part 1

The capitulation on the FISA bill is only the latest manifestation of Democrats being ruled by political fear rather than pragmatics and sound policy. This clearly wasn't about fear of terrorism; it was about fear of a political backlash. Beyond the obvious absurdity of being afraid to confront one of the most unpopular "presidents" ever, there is something much more insidiously dangerous at play. This is about a stereotype that has kept Democrats on their political heels for decades: Democrats are weak on defense, soft on national security, the "mommy" party, focused on nurturing and comforting, but not much use when a strong "daddy" is needed. If we're working to shatter such asinine sexual stereotypes, it's time we also shattered this partisan one.

The facts speak for themselves. I've been hammering on this issue for some time, and this is part of the reason why. If Democrats can, as they should, claim the mantle as the party of national security and defense, the Republicans will be without any issue on which to fall back. Beyond that, Democrats will not have to be so reflexively defensive, blustering about their own toughness, while enabling those who want to shred the Constitution and destroy what makes this nation great, supposedly in order to save it.

This will probably be a three-part series, because there is just too much evidence to compile. The three parts will be as follows:

1) The Bush Administration's narrow ideological focus, negligence, and just plain incompetence, enabled the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This is not about Conspiracy Theories, it's about easily demonstrable facts, that are already on record, even in the corporate media. For the purposes of this series, the only thing that matters about Bush and September 11 is that he could have prevented it. For the purposes of this series, it is not about conscious complicity, it is about ineptitude.

2) Bush is undermining our national security from without, by making the United States more hated, around the world, which is emboldening and facilitating terrorists.

3) Bush is undermining our national security from within, by destroying our military.

So, let's begin by looking at the evidence, and reviewing some facts about the Bush Administration's inattention to screaming warnings, before the September 11 attacks. Bush's political strength was built on the media's hyperventilating support, after September 11; but even though they have since reported his failures before September 11, those latter reports have not been sufficiently publicized to overcome that ridiculously inaccurate image they originally helped create.

Right from the start, the Bush Administration was warned of the dangers of terrorism and al Qaeda, and right from the start, they ignored it. As Joe Conason wrote, for
Salon, in August 2003:

Departing National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and the National Security Council's counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, who was held over by Bush, gave Condoleezza Rice a series of urgent briefings on terrorism during the presidential transition in January 2001. "You're going to spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and al-Qaida specifically than any issue," Berger told his successor. Clarke delivered similar emphatic briefings to Vice President Cheney and to Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy. But the supposedly competent national security managers in the new administration, including Rice, Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were too preoccupied with other matters (such as national missile defense) to pay heed to the most serious threat since the end of the Cold War.

As CNN reported, in 2004:

President Bush's former counterterrorism chief (Richard Clarke) testified Wednesday that the administration did not consider terrorism an urgent priority before the September 11, 2001, attacks, despite his repeated warnings about Osama bin Laden's terror network.

In fact, the Administration ended or ignored President Clinton's counterterrorism efforts. From the Associated Press, in June 2003:

Though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the Bush administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months and was still refining a plan to use one armed with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader when Sept. 11 unfolded, current and former U.S. officials say.

Of course, President Clinton had appointed a commission to study terrorism. Led by former Democratic Senator Gary Hart and former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, the commission made its final report shortly after Bush took office. As Jake Tapper reported, in Salon, the day after September 11:

Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.

As the Washington Post reported, in January 2002:

Bush said that day that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and "I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place.

Why?

Bush and his top aides had higher priorities – above all, ballistic missile defense.

In April 2001, Judy Woodruff reported,on CNN that the Bush Administration thought it was wrong to even focus on Osama bin Laden:

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there's no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and "personalizing terrorism."

Because, in the post-Cold War world, nothing could have possibly been more important. And, of course, "missile defense" would have worked wonders in stopping a gang of terrorists armed with boxcutters.

As Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate, in April 2004, that disastrous summer of 2001 had been replete with warnings:

Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.

Even Joe Klein reported on the Administration's incompetence. As he wrote for Time Magazine:

And now, with Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, and subsequent Washington Post reports, we've been reminded that CIA Director George Tenet warned Rice on July 10, 2001, that "the system was blinking red," meaning that there could be "multiple, simultaneous" al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests in the coming weeks or months.

And then, of course, there was the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, which Bush received while on a month-long vacation. CNN has the transcript. The title, alone, should have been enough:

Bin Laden determined to strike in US.

As Ron Suskind wrote, in his book The One Percent Doctrine, Bush's response to that day's CIA briefer was the following:

All right. You've covered your ass, now.

And the ignorance and incompetence continued, literally right up to the day of the attack.

As Newsweek reported:

At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism.

And, according to that January, 2002 Washington Post article:

That threat came Sept. 9.

Not to be outdone, Attorney General John Ashcroft demonstrated his own incompetence, just a day later- a day before the attacks. According to the New York Times:

In his final budget request for the fiscal year 2003 submitted on Sept. 10 to the budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the attorney general called for spending increases in 68 programs, none of which directly involved counterterrorism. Upgrading the F.B.I.'s computer system, one of the areas in which he sought an increase, is relevant to combating terrorism, though Mr. Ashcroft did not defend it on that ground.

But in his Sept. 10 submission to the budget office, Mr. Ashcroft did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators.

Mr. Ashcroft proposed cuts in 14 programs. One proposed $65 million cut was for a program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants for equipment, including radios and decontamination suits and training to localities for counterterrorism preparedness.

That 2002 Washington Post article also lists the following facts:

*President Clinton kept submarines and gunships with cruise missile capabilities covertly deployed "on six-hour alert near Afghanistan's borders." Bush did not.

*Despite having twice warned the Taliban that they would be held accountable for any al Qaeda attacks, when Cheney was briefed, on February 9, 2001, that al Qaeda had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, Bush did nothing.

*In the spring of 2001, CIA officers made a first-hand assessment of Afghan rebel commander Ahmed Shah Massoud's forces, and although they concluded those forces were in worse shape than they had been the previous summer, they only gave Massoud money and small amounts of supplies; they were not authorized to help Massoud's combat capability against the Taliban.

*Bush did not speak to the public about the threat of terrorism, except to promote "missile defense": "At least three times he mentioned "terrorist threats that face us" to explain the need to discard the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty."

*Interagency disputes "left the administration without a position on legislative initiatives to combat money laundering. And until the summer, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill suspended U.S. participation in allied efforts to penetrate offshore banking havens, whose secrecy protects the cash flows of drug traffickers, tax evaders and terrorists."

Add it all up, and there is only one conclusion: we didn't need a police state, we didn't need a "Patriot Act", and we didn't need unfettered domestic spying to prevent the September 11 attacks. We only needed an administration that was paying attention. Instead, we had one that was so dogmatic and ideological that it was obsessed with worthless boondoggle gifts to the military industrial complex- like "missile defense", while all around them sirens were screaming about an impending attack.

Any other administration would have been forced from office, for this alone. It's too late for that to happen for this, but it's not too late for Democrats to begin reframing the now standard presumptions about Bush, Republicans, and national security. The worst terrorist attack in U.S. history happened during a Republican administration. It happened because that Republican administration ignored abundant evidence that it was going to happen. The Republicans are not the party of national security and defense, and it's time for the Democrats to start making that clear. Not by assisting their every abuse of power, but by simply repeating the facts, over and over and over. And by offering a better way.

Another big surprise...

Washington Post:

At 10 a.m. on April 4, 2001, representatives of 13 environmental groups were brought into the Old Executive Office Building for a long-anticipated meeting. Since late January, a task force headed by Vice President Cheney had been busy drawing up a new national energy policy, and the groups were getting their one chance to be heard.

Cheney was not there, but so many environmentalists were in the room that introductions took up "about half the meeting," recalled Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth. Anna Aurilio of the U.S. Public Interest Group said, "It was clear to us that they were just being nice to us."

A confidential list prepared by the Bush administration shows that Cheney and his aides had already held at least 40 meetings with interest groups, most of them from energy-producing industries. By the time of the meeting with environmental groups, according to a former White House official who provided the list to The Washington Post, the initial draft of the task force was substantially complete and President Bush had been briefed on its progress.

Dead Earth: George W. Bush and Global Warming

On a weekend when a self-described "recovering politician," who has not held public office in more than six years, has the whole world focused on global warming, it's important to also note the complete collapse of leadership by the man who holds the most powerful political office on the planet. This is what we lost, in 2000. Some said there was no difference between the candidates from the two major political parties. We now know how wrong they were.

Just two months into his first term, CBS News reported:

The White House said Wednesday that President Bush would not implement the climate treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, but would seek an alternative that would "include the world" in the effort to reduce pollution.

That April, Business Week reminded that:

In mid-March, George W. Bush made a stunning reversal of a campaign pledge to limit emissions of carbon dioxide, a culprit in global warming--and immediately found himself on the hot seat. Predictably, environmental groups are mobilizing to flood the White House with letters demanding that Bush stick to his promise. Bush may pay little attention to them, but in the weeks to come he will face pressure from others who will be much tougher to ignore.

It will come from European leaders, CEOs who favor action on global warming, and members of his own party in Congress.

But, of course, he did ignore them. And his alternative "strategy" was play-acting. The honor system. As New Scientist reported, in February 2002:

George W Bush unveiled the details of his alternative strategy for halting global warming in an address to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday.

He made no promises to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, but instead set a national target of reducing by 18 per cent the amount of greenhouse gases the country produces for every unit of GDP.

Targets without promises. Toothless. Worthless. And he continued to deny the very existence of human-caused global warming. From CBS News, in June 2003:

President Bush dismissed on Tuesday a report put out by his administration warning that human activities are behind climate change that is having significant effects on the environment.

The report released by the Environmental Protection Agency was a surprising endorsement of what many scientists and weather experts have long argued — that human activities such as oil refining, power plants and automobile emissions are important causes of global warming.

But it suggests nothing beyond voluntary action by industry for dealing with the so-called "greenhouse" gases, the program Bush advocated in rejecting a treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 calling for mandatory reduction of those gases by industrial nations.

"I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," Mr. Bush said dismissively when asked about the EPA report, adding that he still opposes the Kyoto treaty.

How clever and snide: "the bureaucracy." Those damn bureaucrats just don't have the special understanding that the Decider has. By the late stages of the 2004 presidential campaign, Salon's Katharine Mieszkowski was writing:

Don't expect President Bush to discuss global warming -- the world's most serious environmental problem -- on the campaign trail in the next eight weeks. The former oilman from Texas doesn't dare alienate his friends in the fossil fuel and auto industries, prime purveyors of global warming. Bush still refuses to admit that burning Chevron with Techron in our Jeep Grand Cherokees, not to mention megatons of coal in our power plants, has brought us 19 of the 20 hottest years on record since 1980.

"You're talking about a president who says that the jury is out on evolution, so what possible evidence would you need to muster to prove the existence of global warming?" says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author of the new book "Crimes Against Nature." "We've got polar ice caps melting, glaciers disappearing all over the world, ocean levels rising, coral reefs dying. But these people are flat-earthers."

In fact, Bush's see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance on global warming is so intractable that even when his own administration's scientists weigh in on the issue, he simply won't hear of it.

Because he doesn't want to hear. As Think Progress noted, in March 2006:

During a speech today, President Bush said “First of all, the globe is warming. The fundamental debate — is it manmade or natural?” Actually, that’s no longer a debate, at least among the overwhelming majority of scientists.

Yes, those annoying scientists. There's only one way to deal with scientists who disagree with the party line.

From the New York Times, in June 2005:

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

And there's also this, as the Boston Globe reported, in June 2006:

NASA is canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth's changing climate and environment.

The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture -- a key factor in helping scientists understand the impact of global warming and predict droughts and floods. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, intended to observe climate factors such as solar radiation, ozone, clouds, and water vapor more comprehensively than existing satellites, also has been canceled.

And in its 2007 budget, NASA proposes significant delays in a global precipitation measuring mission to help with weather predictions, as well as the launch of a satellite designed to increase the timeliness and accuracy of severe weather forecasts and improve climate models.

The changes come as NASA prioritizes its budget to pay for completion of the International Space Station and the return of astronauts to the moon by 2020 -- a goal set by President Bush that promises a more distant and arguably less practical scientific payoff. Ultimately, scientists say, the delays and cancellations could make hurricane predictions less accurate, create gaps in long-term monitoring of weather, and result in less clarity about the earth's hydrological systems, which play an integral part in climate change.

And then, there's the politics. When the Times of London reported on the new United Nations' IPCC climate report, in April of this year, this was what they had to say about the Bush Administration's role:

The report's accompanying summary was agreed this morning after experts and officials wrapped up a week of talks in Brussels with a marathon 24-hour negotiating session. Delegates said that the United States, China and Saudi Arabia provoked charges of political interference by objecting to the scientists' tough wording.

Some scientists even vowed never to take part in the process again. “The authors lost,” said one, who did not want to be named because the process is confidential. “A lot of authors are not going to engage in the IPCC process anymore. I have had it with them.”

And then, just weeks later, the Guardian reported that Bush was also undermining G-8 efforts to address global warming:

The US has rejected any prospect of a deal on climate change at the G8 summit in Germany next month, according to a leaked document.

Despite Tony Blair's declaration on Thursday that Washington would sign up to "at least the beginnings" of action to cut carbon emissions, a note attached to a draft document circulated by Germany says the US is "fundamentally opposed" to the proposals.

The note, written in red ink, says the deal "runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to".

And, of course, the Associated Press reported, just last month:

The Bush administration is drastically scaling back efforts to measure global warming from space, just as the president tries to convince the world the U.S. is ready to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases.

A confidential report to the White House, obtained by The Associated Press, warns that U.S. scientists will soon lose much of their ability to monitor warming from space using a costly and problem-plagued satellite initiative begun more than a decade ago.

Corporate media critics deride us for our unapologetic animosity towards the Bush Administration. They disingenuously ask why we are so angry. There are many reasons, but this, alone, is more than enough. As Tim Dickinson wrote in a recent issue of Rolling Stone:

Earlier this year, the world's top climate scientists released a definitive report on global warming. It is now "unequivocal," they concluded, that the planet is heating up. Humans are directly responsible for the planetary heat wave, and only by taking immediate action can the world avert a climate catastrophe. Megadroughts, raging wildfires, decimated forests, dengue fever, legions of Katrinas - unless humans act now to curb our climate-warming pollution, warned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "we are in deep trouble."

You would think, in the wake of such stark and conclusive findings, that the White House would at least offer some small gesture to signal its concern about the impending crisis. It's not every day, after all, that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell. But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of science - especially when it comes from international experts. So after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of global warming.

"We're going to see a big debate on it going forward," Cheney told ABC News, about "the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it's caused by man." What we know today, he added, is "not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that's going to 'solve' the problem."...

Cheney's statements were the latest move in the Bush administration's ongoing strategy to block federal action on global warming. It is no secret that industry-connected appointees within the White House have worked actively to distort the findings of federal climate scientists, playing down the threat of climate change. But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters.

There is more. There is much more.

I would love to be a political Purity Troll. My heart's in it. My head understands that something much more sinister and dangerous is at play. However disappointed I sometimes am at the compromises and lack of fortitude by Democratic Party leaders, the plain truth is this: on global warming, there is no comparison between the two Parties. The Democrats all get it. The Republicans don't. We face a graver crisis than humanity has ever before faced. The survival of our species may literally be at stake. We can't afford to waste time. Any Democratic presidential candidate will be immeasurably better on global warming than will be any Republican candidate. No matter who is nominated, next year, I will be a passionate supporter. It may not be my first, second, third, or even fifth choice, but another four years of the alternative is unthinkable.

Great Idea

USA Today:

If Vice President Cheney believes his office is not an "entity within the executive branch," then a House Democratic leader says taxpayers shouldn't have to finance his executive expenses.

Cheney's office has claimed his constitutional role as president of the Senate also makes him part of the legislative branch and therefore is not covered by a presidential order requiring executive branch workers to report their numbers of classified and declassified government documents.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Sunday that a court should decide whether the vice president belongs to the executive or legislative branch. "The vice president needs to make a decision," he said.

Defund Cheney!

Buying a Clue for Sally Quinn

Doyenne of the Beltway cocktail party circuit, Sally Quinn epitomizes thinking inside the box. In today's Washington Post, she has something important to say: the Republicans want to be rid of Dick Cheney. This effectively refutes one of the major arguments propounded by those Democrats frightened of an impeachment process that would include both Cheney and his supposed boss. But Quinn is Quinn. She misses the key point. She says the Republicans want to replace Cheney with someone who can win in 2008. Here's the clue: the Democratic Congress has to confirm any replacement Vice President. Should Cheney go, they can tell Bush to appoint someone to their liking- someone moderate, bipartisan, and uninterested in 2008, or he will have to serve out his term, and face possible consequences for his own high crimes and misdemeanors, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi first in line to succeed him.

The Most Despicable Man In America

Washington Post:

Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience on the subject. Vice President Cheney's lawyer, who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby. The meeting marked "the first time that the issue of interrogations comes up" among top-ranking White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo, who represented the Justice Department. "The CIA guys said, 'We're going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees'" if interrogators confined themselves to humane techniques allowed by the Geneva Conventions.

From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials.

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

Let's be clear, because the Washington Post won't be: we're talking about war crimes. We're talking about the Vice President of the United States advocating for and implementing a policy of war crimes.

The Most Despicable Man In America Deals With Oversight

New York Times:

For four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has resisted routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information, and when the National Archives unit that monitors classification in the executive branch objected, the vice president’s office suggested abolishing the oversight unit, according to documents released yesterday by a Democratic congressman.

The Information Security Oversight Office, a unit of the National Archives, appealed the issue to the Justice Department, which has not yet ruled on the matter.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, disclosed Mr. Cheney’s effort to shut down the oversight office. Mr. Waxman, who has had a leading role in the stepped-up efforts by Democrats to investigate the Bush administration, outlined the matter in an eight-page letter sent Thursday to the vice president and posted, along with other documentation, on the committee’s Web site.

Cheney Placed At Center Of Domestic Spying Scandal!

Yesterday's Washington Post reports:

Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.

So, the Vice President was personally involved in authorizing Domestic Spying; and if you don't recall the macabre story about White House efforts to force ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft to override DOJ objections, and also sign off on this baltantly illegal program, the Washington Post's editorial board had this to say:

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. The episode involved a 2004 nighttime visit to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. Only the broadest outlines of this visit were previously known: that Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's illness, had refused to recertify the legality of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program; that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card had tried to do an end-run around Mr. Comey; that Mr. Ashcroft had rebuffed them.

Mr. Comey's vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care -- a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey -- to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation's chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice's authorization. Only in the face of the prospect of mass resignations -- Mr. Comey, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most likely Mr. Ashcroft himself -- did the president back down.

Yesterday's Post article states that this disclosure places Cheney more at the center of this scandal than had been known. For the first time, Cheney is shown to have been personally involved in attempting to override the Department of Justice's own ruling that Domestic Spying was illegal; and it indicates that the urgency of the White House's attempt to bully Ashcroft into authorizing the spying was directly linked.

It's now very clear: the White House knew they were breaking the law. The Vice President knew he was breaking the law. They wanted to use Ashcroft to provide political cover for their knowingly breaking the law. They were so desperate to use Ashcroft as political coverage for their knowingly breaking the law, that they attempted to storm into his hospital room and force him to sign something he might not have even been coherent enough to know he was signing!

And, as all Bush Administration scandals do, it gets even worse. Also from today's Post article:

Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.

In other words, a career professional whose professional opinion didn't accord with the White House's desire to break the law was punished for wanting the White House to do so.

Alberto Gonzales, Andrew Card, and Dick Cheney are criminals. They know it. We know it. It's time for Congress to act like they know it!

The Most Despicable Man In America

Cheney takes on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and gets smacked down.

New York Times:

Mr. Cheney said the senator’s complaint on Monday that the White House did not engage in “substantive” discussions about Iraq was at odds with his description of a meeting last week as “a good exchange.”

“What’s most troubling about Senator Reid’s comments yesterday is his defeatism,” Mr. Cheney said. “It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage. Leaders should make decisions based on the security interests of our country, not on the interests of their political party.”

Only minutes later, Mr. Reid spoke, after the Democrats’ policy luncheon. “The president sends out his attack dog often,” Mr. Reid said. “That’s also known as Dick Cheney.”

Cheney takes on former Democratic Presidential Nominee, former Senator, and decorated war veteran George McGovern, and gets smacked down even harder!

McGovern, in the Los Angeles Times:

VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney recently attacked my 1972 presidential platform and contended that today's Democratic Party has reverted to the views I advocated in 1972. In a sense, this is a compliment, both to me and the Democratic Party. Cheney intended no such compliment. Instead, he twisted my views and those of my party beyond recognition. The city where the vice president spoke, Chicago, is sometimes dubbed "the Windy City." Cheney converted the chilly wind of Chicago into hot air....

In the war of my youth, World War II, I volunteered for military service at the age of 19 and flew 35 combat missions, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross as the pilot of a B-24 bomber. By contrast, in the war of his youth, the Vietnam War, Cheney got five deferments and has never seen a day of combat — a record matched by President Bush.

Cheney charged that today's Democrats don't appreciate the terrorist danger when they move to end U.S. involvement in the Iraq war. The fact is that Bush and Cheney misled the public when they implied that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. That was the work of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda team. Cheney and Bush blew the effort to trap Bin Laden in Afghanistan by their sluggish and inept response after the 9/11 attacks.

Bush and Cheney both like to talk tough, but they're both chickenhawk liars who destroy the lives of others for their own cynical political purposes. McGovern is 85 years old, and he can still kick both their asses.

The Most Despicable Man In America

Washington Post:

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

Cheney caught lying again... In other news, water was found to still be wet.

The Most Despicable Man in America

AP:

Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday harshly criticized Democrats' attempts to thwart President Bush's troop buildup in Iraq, saying their approach would "validate the al-Qaida strategy." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fired back that Cheney was questioning critics' patriotism.

"I hope the president will repudiate and distance himself from the vice president's remarks," Pelosi said. She said she tried to complain about Cheney to President Bush but could not reach him.

"You cannot say as the president of the United States, 'I welcome disagreement in a time of war,' and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country," the speaker said.

On face value, Dick Cheney's neo-McCarthyite tactics are despicable; but having received seven deferments from serving in a war he supported, having taken the lead in lying us into a war that didn't need to be fought, and having been instrumental in outing the identity of an undercover CIA agent who had been working to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Dick Cheney is literally the last person in the United States who has a right to question anyone's patriotism.