The Dish

There’s a dog walking around on two legs.

Here’s a rough start.

Torture = "Coercive Interrogation Technique"
Insurgency = "Dead-enders"
Law = "Signing Statement"
$43 trillion in Unfunded Government Liabilities = "Fiscal Responsibility"
Leaking = "Declassifying Intelligence"
Christianity = "Republicanism"

Any other suggestions?

The reason Super Adventure Club members Scientologists believe that a woman in labor should "be silent and make all physical movements slow and understandable" has now been explained. According to Scientologist, Anne Archer, "shouting things like ‘push, push’; can sometimes have an adverse effect later in life." On the baby. Just passing along public information. Meanwhile, Viacom still hasn’t put South Park’s "Trapped in the Closet" Scientology episode back into rotation. And Comedy Central still won’t let Matt and Trey include an image of Muhammed on South Park, despite the fact that they have done it before. In the battle between religion and free speech, Viacom is against free speech.

Thanks for your emails. Here’s some more information relevant to the discussion. Here is the executive order in March 2003 specifying who gets to declassify classified information. Money quote:

"The authority to classify information originally may be exercised only by:
(1) the President and, in the performance of executive duties, the Vice President;
(2) agency heads and officials designated by the President in the Federal Register; and
(3) United States Government officials delegated this authority pursuant to paragraph (c) of this section [which, again, is a section of an order by the President]"

The president seems to have the power to do what he did. But I stand corrected on one point. The NIE was never fully declassified. Bits of it dribbled out over the last couple of years, including the information that questioned the aluminum tube issue. But Bush wasn’t the driving force behind that; and his gambit was to selectively declassify certain bits of intelligence and selectively keep other contrary evidence from the public. As Steve Clemons notes, we don’t have the full NIE formally declassified sitting over at the National Security Archives at GWU. In fact, GW’s own website tell us the contrary, claiming in July 2004 that

"The CIA has decided to keep almost entirely secret the controversial October 2002 CIA intelligence estimate about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that is the subject of today’s Senate Intelligence Committee report, according to the CIA’s June 1, 2004 response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the National Security Archive."

The bottom line is that the president clearly used his prerogative to classify and declassify intelligence data to leak selectively to the press to give a misleading notion of what his own government believed about Saddam’s WMDs before the war. He was personally involved; and he tasked his veep to coordinate it. The most plausible explanation is that the president believes grave national security prerogatives can be used for political purposes and/or that he had something embarrassing to hide. Bottom bottom line: we can’t trust him to be fully honest with us on one of the bases on which he led us to war. That matters, doesn’t it?

"The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;"

– Philip Larkin, "The Trees."
The full poem can be read here.

A reader writes:

"I agree with you on the debater’s point, but only if the President actually declassified something. I don’t know the law of declassification, and maybe it allows the President to declassify orally. But, if the President declassifies something, isn’t it then available to the public? Were the leaked/disclosed portions of the NIE then provided to everyone who wanted them and had asked for them? I don’t know. But if they were not, then it would seem to me that the information is still classified, and the leak is a leak, not a disclosure."

That strikes me as a good point. Maybe someone can help us out on the formal legal/administrative details of declassification. If the president formally declassified the NIE, then we should all have been able to read all of it, simultaneously, right? And that’s what ultimately happened. And when we did, we saw that some government agencies disputed the president’s account on aluminum tubes. But before that, the president picked a few items to declassify – items that clearly misled the public – and told underlings to give them to selected members of the press. I think that’s a fair ethical description of a leak. At the very least, it’s a clear intent to mislead, by selectively releasing evidence. And if he deliberately misled the people after the war on intelligence, doesn’t that imply he was fully capable of doing so beforehand? This is not a matter of law ultimately. It’s a matter of character and honor. And it’s not a pretty perspective on this president. McClellan, by the way, flailed about this morning – and the transcript is here.

New data on the TimesSelect gambit: Not one TimesSelect column made the most e-mailed over the last 30 days.

Reihan Salam thinks the Massachusetts healthcare plan is a big boost to Mitt Romney’s presidential prospects. Joe Klein, another columnist for my corporate overlords, saw it coming; and likes it a lot. Joe jokes that he and I belong to the same political party. Pity it doesn’t exist.

"We do have full confidence in the Iraqi people to stay calm and to face the terrorism always and not to be led by them. The Iraqi people always lived together hundreds of years – different components – Arabs, Kurds and the Shiites. They’ve got strong ties and relations between them. They are stronger than the terrorist groups and the remnants of the regime," – Haitham al-Husseini, a spokesman for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He said that after an attack on a Shiite mosque that killed at least 70 people and injured well over 100.

The attorney-general, Alberto Gonzales, has already said he believes that the president has the constitutional right to overturn laws against torture, under his powers as commander-in-chief. He also believes that the president has the power to order warrantless wire-taps of phones from or to abroad if it’s necessary for national security, violating the law. Now, we find out that Gonzales also believes that the president has the constitutional authority to wiretap purely domestic calls without a warrant. Money quote:

"In response to a question from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Gonzales suggested that the administration could decide it was legal to listen in on a domestic call without supervision if it were related to al-Qaeda. "I’m not going to rule it out," Gonzales said. In the past, Gonzales and other officials refused to say whether they had the legal authority to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on domestic calls, and have stressed that the NSA eavesdropping program is focused only on international communications."

This is how they take your freedom away one sliver at a time. It’s important to remember that this comes from the attorney-general. The person who is supposed to represent citizens and retain some independence from the executive branch is an eager ally of the executive in its deeper and deeper incursions into basic civil liberties. For Gonzales, the president is an elected monarch. And we are his subjects.