Category: Old Dish

The Italian angle in Plamegate appears to be heating up. One name I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the near future: Larry Franklin.

It certainly appears so. Why am I not surprised?

McLellan was asked this morning. He wouldn’t answer. What if Cheney is not indicted, but it’s clear that he directly lied to the public about what he knew and when he knew it about Valerie Plame? That leaves his future as a political question, not a legal one.

She wants accountability, I guess.

Well, it’s as plausible as any:

Tenet told Cheney about Wilson’s wife. Cheney asked and Tenet answered. Then, in their zeal to discredit Wilson, Cheney’s henchmen blow her cover. An enraged Tenet makes the referral to the Justice Dept. and tells Fitzgerald (from day one) that he told Cheney about Plame. Fitzgerald has been working backwards from Cheney all along.

Now the question is whether Fitzgerald has looked more broadly into the methods Cheney has used to buttress his WMD convictions. As to what Bush thinks about Cheney in this respect, the New York Daily News tells us:

Bush has told associates Cheney was overly involved in intelligence issues in the runup to the Iraq war that have been seized on by Bush critics.

More distancing.

We are constantly told that the United States does not torture or abuse detainees as a matter of policy. President Bush has told the American people exactly that. Two facts in the news today show otherwise. The first is evidence of how many detainees have actually been tortured to death by the U.S. Over a hundred detainees have died in captivity. The ACLU looked at the records of 44 such deaths and concluded that 21 were homicides and that “at least eight resulted from abusive techniques by military or intelligence officers, such as strangulation or ‘blunt force injuries’, as noted in the autopsy reports.” This is the minimum we are likely to know about. Let’s see how the government itself has accounted for some of the deaths. In the following, the term “OGA” or “Other Government Agency” refers to the CIA:

An Iraqi detainee (also described as a white male) died on January 9, 2004, in Al Asad, Iraq, while being interrogated by “OGA.” He was standing, shackled to the top of a door frame with a gag in his mouth at the time he died. The cause of death was asphyxia and blunt force injuries. Notes summarizing the autopsies record the circumstances of death as “Q by OGA, gagged in standing restraint.” (Facts in the autopsy report appear to match the previously reported case of Abdul Jaleel.)

* A detainee was smothered to death during an interrogation by Military Intelligence on November 26, 2003, in Al Qaim, Iraq. A previously released autopsy report, that appears to be of General Mowhoush, lists “asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression” as the cause of death and cites bruises from the impact with a blunt object. New documents specifically record the circumstances of death as “Q by MI, died during interrogation.”

* A detainee at Abu Ghraib Prison, captured by Navy Seal Team number seven, died on November 4, 2003, during an interrogation by Navy Seals and “OGA.” A previously released autopsy report, that appears to be of Manadel Al Jamadi, shows that the cause of his death was “blunt force injury complicated by compromised respiration.” New documents specifically record the circumstances of death as “Q by OGA and NSWT died during interrogation.”

* An Afghan civilian died from “multiple blunt force injuries to head, torso and extremities” on November 6, 2003, at a Forward Operating Base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. (Facts in the autopsy report appear to match the previously reported case of Abdul Wahid.)

* A 52-year-old male Iraqi was strangled to death at the Whitehorse detainment facility on June 6, 2003, in Nasiriyah, Iraq. His autopsy also revealed bone and rib fractures, and multiple bruises on his body. (Facts in the autopsy report appear to match the previously reported case of Nagm Sadoon Hatab.)

Over to you, James Taranto.

EXEMPTING THE CIA: And now you begin to understand why the president is so insistent on the Roberts and Miers nominations (the one thing the two nominees have in common is complete deference to the executive in war-time, which means to say for the indefinite future). And you also understand why Bush is for the first time threatening to veto a piece of legislation – the McCain Amendment. If the administration doesn’t and would never condone abuse or torture of detainees, why would it want to exempt the CIA from the ban on torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners? If we are not abusing detainees as a matter of policy, why would the White House be in any way resistant to the amendment? The compromise is that the military will no longer abuse detainees, as long as the CIA still gets to do it. In other words, prodded by the Bush administration, the U.S. would actually legislate the government’s permission to torture for the first time. Money quote:

“They are explicitly saying, for the first time, that the intelligence community should have the ability to treat prisoners inhumanely,” Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said. “You can’t tell soldiers that inhumane treatment is always morally wrong if they see with their own eyes that C.I.A. personnel are allowed to engage in it.”

McCain is resisting any compromise, as he must. It’s one thing to have a rogue president, violating the law and instituting torture and abuse as militarily acceptable. It’s another thing to actually give him the cover of the law. One day, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld will be held accountable for their actions. Let them have no legal defense. Bush and Cheney are also threatening a veto of any independent investigation that would examine their own role in sanctioning torture and abuse in the military. Duh. If you were in their shoes, wouldn’t you?

GAY ARABS: The first magazine in the Arab world for homosexuals debuts. And gay life begins to come to life in Namibia. The shift in consciousness is global. And unstoppable.

It’s been pretty obvious for a while now. The heart of the Plamegate thingy is Dick Cheney. Who believes that Scooter Libby would be engaged in an elaborate attempt to defenestrate an administration critic on WMDs in Iraq without Cheney’s knowledge and approval? Over a week ago, I proposed the obvious scenario. It was Cheney who sicced Libby onto Miller et al. The question then becomes: how did Cheney know about Plame and did he know she was an officially undercover agent? The fact that Libby appears to have tried to cover for his boss – and dramatically tripped up in what looks like perjury, or, at least, an implausibly flawed memory under oath – only further leads to the conclusion that Cheney has and had something to hide. If all Cheney was doing was politics, why would Libby cover for him? And if Libby lied about where he first got the information, did Cheney also? Under oath? I’m beginning to understand, for example, why Bush told Andy Card to inform Dick Cheney about the Miers nomination. Bush was already insulating himself from Cheney and the legal trap Cheney might have signified.

MORE WILD SPECULATION: So let’s run a scenario here. Libby and Rove are indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Cheney, who appears to have been the source for Libby, remains vice-president. How plausible is that? It’s plausible if Cheney cannot be shown to have known Plame’s covert status or name; while Libby has tied himself into perjurial knots. It’s implausible if Fitzgerald has actually discovered clear evidence of Cheney’s and Libby’s knowledge of what was at stake in Plame’s CIA cover. Where would he get such clear evidence? Tenet hasn’t been summoned in months. I’m still interested in what, if anything, Colin Powell or other senior figures may have told Fitzgerald. Powell has motive and means to finger Cheney. Who else has both?

97 percent of the voters in the mainly Sunni Arab province, Anbar, voted against the new Iraq constitution. That’s the bad news. The good news is they voted (and that the number looks a little rigged). Three provinces voted no, but only two by more than two-thirds. The third, Nineveh, voted no by 55 percent. In other words, another 12 percent in one province would have torpedoed the entire thing. I don’t mean to be pessismistic. The fact that the political process is actually going forward is what matters, most of all. But the challenges of reconciling the voters of Anbar and Salahuddin are still enormous. The Iraqis have about a month to offer some sweeteners.

AND JASON TOO: The other co-conspirator at TNR’s new blog is Jason Zengerle. Today, he ponders what bad luck can possibly mean for Bill Frist.

You can’t really parody this exchange between an NYT interviewer and Connie Mack, former Republican senator, and president Bush’s point-man on tax reform. The dialogue is about spending and taxes:

NYT: Well, the U.S. government has to get money from somewhere. As a two-term former Republican senator from Florida, where do you suggest we get money from?

Mack: What money?

The money to run this country.

We’ll borrow it.

I never understand where all this money comes from.

When the president says we need another $200 billion for Katrina repairs, does he just go and borrow it from the Saudis? In a sense, we do. Maybe the Chinese.

Is that fair to our children? If we keep borrowing at this level, won’t the Arabs or the Chinese eventually own this country?

I am not worried about that. We are a huge country producing enormous assets day in and day out. We have great strength, and we have always adjusted to difficulties that faced us, and we will continue to do so.

This is what we’re dealing with. Essentially: fuck the next generation. And they call that conservatism these days.

The WSJ collects some economists’ reactions.