Month: November 2005

The veep’s office, with David Addington central to it, now has a long, long record of of creating awful problems for the president, the war and American democracy itself. Ryan Lizza gives a useful summary here (free subscription required).

The French elite fights with itself. A helpful analysis from Bronwen Maddox.

Amy Sullivan asks why the Vatican is not demanding absolute pro-life reasoning from Catholic Supreme Court Justices. If the rule is good for pols, why not judges?

I’m starting a recurring watch feature on Dick Cheney’s refusal to answer even the most basic questions about his conduct in office. We are now a week since his former chief of staff was indicted on five counts, with many, many questions related to his role in the affair. Still, radio silence from the veep. We are also reaching the end-game on his refusal to ban torture and abuse in military detention policies. And still: no comment. Here’s something from the NYT today on Cheney’s threatening to veto the McCain Amendment and leaning as hard as he can to kill it in the conferecne committe:

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said Thursday that Mr. Cheney frequently met with members of Congress to discuss legislative issues, but she declined to characterize his stand on Mr. McCain’s provision or the proposed motion to instruct House conferees.

She declined? Who on earth does Cheney think he is? And when will the press get aggressive in pursuing him until he starts acting like an accountable elected official and not some monarch. If readers catch more instances of Cheney’s preposterous refusal to be accountable to the people who elected him and who pay his salary, please let me know.

A must-read piece from Amir Taheri. Money quote:

A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.

“All we demand is to be left alone,” said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local “emirs” engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

President Jacques Chirac and Premier de Villepin are especially sore because they had believed that their opposition to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 would give France a heroic image in the Muslim community.

That illusion has now been shattered – and the Chirac administration, already passing through a deepening political crisis, appears to be clueless about how to cope with what the Parisian daily France Soir has called a “ticking time bomb.”

It is now clear that a good portion of France’s Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into “the superior French culture,” but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire.

This is still a religious war: of fundamentalism versus secularism. And Chirac is discovering that no amount of appeasement can stave it off.

Ryan Lizza gets it right in seeing McClellan’s anger at being lied to by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, and now having to lose credibility on their behalf. Hey, but if you work for Blackberry Machiavellis and alleged perjurers … what do you expect? JPod concurs, but, of course, takes the side of the liars. Hey, that’s what it takes to be a Republican these days.

If you’re still mystified by vice-president Cheney’s adamant refusal to allow a ban on “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees, this story might help you out. Colin Powell’s former top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, claims that there is a direct paper trail from Cheney’s office directing abuse and torture in Iraq:

“The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president’s office,” Wilkerson said, “regardless of the president having put out this memo” – “they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we’ve seen.” He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.

There was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field,” authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said. The directives were “in carefully couched terms,” Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

“If you are a military man, you know that you just don’t do these sorts of things,” Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that “they have to do what they have to do to get it.” He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military.

Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer, “a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions.

This argument backs up Brigadier General Karpinski’s assertions that there were clear directives out of Rumsfeld’s office directing abuse of detainees for intelligence purposes. Her account has back up from others in the military, currently too leery to go public. If we begin to get some of them to talk on the record, we could find evidence of profound deception on the part of the Cheney cabal to hide authorized torture on their watch. This is not over yet.

That’s the proportion of Americans in a new poll who strongly disapprove of president Bush’s performance. The strongly approve number is 20 percent. 58 percent doubt his honesty. We’re approaching Carter-land.

I think she’s accusing him of covering for his Cheney-compromised wife.

Another haven for tolerance is attacked by young Muslim fanatics.