Was Accountability For Team Cheney-- A Nest Of War Criminals-- Ever Taken Off The Table?

Darrell Issa's idea of a scandal for his House Oversight Committee to investigate is an entirely partisan witch hunt like "Benghazi!" Though the magnitude around 9-11 was a thousand times greater on any scale, there's never been a peep out of Issa or any of his right-wing colleagues about the dereliction of duty on the part of Cheney and his administration inherent in that catastrophe. In his brilliant book, Angler, Barton Gellman makes it perfectly clear that Cheney aggressively and vehemently dismissed every serious warning that the American security and intelligence agencies flagged regarding al-Qaeda.

When suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole shortly before the 2000 election, killing seventeen sailors and nearly sinking the Navy destroyer, candidate Cheney said, "Any would-be terrorist out there needs to know that if you're going to attack, , you'll be hit very hard and very quick. It's not time for diplomacy and debate. It's time for action. This was an essential point of comparison in the 2000 campaign: the strength and resolve of the Bush-Cheney team in contrast to the ditherings of Clinton and Gore.

At the time, the Cole bombing looked like al Qaeda's doing, but U.S. intelligence lacked proof. Bush and Cheney, on the campaign trail, vowed to retaliate once the perpetrators became clear. Soon after they took office, the facts were in.

Cheney told his authorized biographer, "I don't recall it cropping up." That is surprising. At 4 p.m. on February 9, 2001, less than 3 weeks after arriving in the White House, Cheney received a briefing that featured this slide: "Al Qaeda responsible for Nairobi, Dar el Salaam, Tirana, Kampala, Yemen, WTC, NYC tunnels, Jordan millennium, Boston, LA, Washington State bomb materials, USS Cole." … Six days later, in a memo sent directly to Cheney, a senior director on the National Security Council staff suggested that the CIA should be ready to "definitively conclude that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole. Richard Clarke and others in his counter-terrorism directorate peppered Chaney, Condi Rice, and Steve Hadley with additional evidence-- and recommendations for a military response-- at least 5 more times in writing during the spring.

The vice president, like his colleagues, had other priorities.

Three months before September 11, 2001, when the armed Predator became available, Osama bin Laden had not yet reached the pinnacle of villainy in the American public mind. But he was well known inside the U.S. government. In an annual review of global threats, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said for three years running-- in 1999, 2000 and 2001-- that al Qaeda topped the list of most dangerous and immediate adversaries, at home and abroad. By the summer of 2001, Tenet and Clarke "had their hair on fire' with warnings that a large scale al Qaeda terrorist attack appeared to be imminent. On August 6, Bush and Cheney received the now-famous Presidential Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden determined to Strike in US," the thirty-sixth time in less than eight months that the CIA drew their attention to bin Laden. John McLaughlin, Tenet's deputy, expressed frustration that "some policy-makers, who had not lived through such threat surges before, questioned the validity of the intelligence or wondered if it was disinformation." An authoritative source said he was referring primarily to Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The CIA responded with a briefing titled "Bin Ladin Threats Are Real." Though far from specific about the time, place, or manner of an attack, the briefing did allude to terrorist discussions of hijacking aircraft and to surveillance of targets in New York City. Cheney later downplayed the summer warnings, describing them as "noise in the system" and saying he was not especially alarmed.

The CIA and Air Force wanted to go after bin Laden with a Predator drone and wanted to take out al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan. Cheney showed zero interest and the Predator drone was grounded. Cheney maintained an attitude all summer that all these warnings were on no interest to him, even though Bush had put him in over-all charge of the intelligence and terrorism portfolios at the White House. One participant in the briefings said, "Nobody gave a crap about this. It was theoretical." No resources were assigned to fighting al Qaeda.When the Senate Armed Services Committee recommended putting $600 million more into the military's counter-terrorism priorities Don Rumsfield urged a veto and Bush duly sent out a veto threat-- on September 9.

The ferocity of the response to 9/11 can be directly seen as a reaction by the Bush security team-- particularly Cheney-- to their malfeasance in protecting the country before the fact. We'll deal with Cheney's and his closest aides' enthusiasm for torture and for a dictatorial usurpation of power at another time. I just want to say that at every step of the way, Cheney's team was aware-- and extremely worried-- that they were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and that they could be tried and punished for their actions. From the first moment, Cheney, well aware of his own guilt in allowing 9/11 to happen, over-reacted. He immediately and without legal authority ordered the Air Force to shoot down civilian aircraft. Hours after the World Tours went down he told Rumsfield "it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out." He quickly moved to assert dictatorial powers for the White House and to shred as much of the Constitution as he could. He was especially eager to assert the power of ex ante pardons which his team insisted would make all war criminals in the Administration immune from prosecution. There was a constant fear that one day Bush and Cheney themselves would face trial as war criminals.



Yesterday, in her column, A Mad Tea Party, Maureen Dowd invoked Cheney's name in terms of most Americans now considering "the G.O.P.’s imperialistic unilaterists less loco than the narcissistic anarchists."

But before you start thinking Dick Cheney is temperate by comparison, consider the Commentary roast of the former vice president on Monday night at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

Cheney made a joke about waterboarding an antelope that he borrowed from Jay Leno. Donald Rumsfeld quasi-jested that he knew Dick “back when the president of the United States still led our foreign policy, instead of Putin.”

Ben Smith of BuzzFeed reported that the roast sponsored by Rupert Murdoch and others featured Rumsfeld, Joe Lieberman and Scooter Libby, known as “Cheney’s Cheney” until he was convicted of lying during a federal leak probe.

Lieberman, a guest told BuzzFeed, said it was nicer to be at the Plaza than in cages after a war crimes trial. There were pardon jokes about W., whose relationship with Cheney was shattered over not giving Libby one. Libby said W. sent a note: “Pardon me, I can’t make it.”

The acrid legacy of Cheney and Rummy lives on as they carp from the sidelines about the “so-called commander in chief.” In December, The Unknown Known, an Errol Morris documentary about the man who was the youngest and oldest secretary of defense, hits theaters.



Morris won an Oscar in 2004 for Fog of War, his documentary about another dangerous, delusional defense secretary with wire-rimmed glasses, Robert McNamara; in his acceptance speech, Morris warned that, with Iraq, America might be going down another “rabbit hole.”

But the cocky Rummy talked to him for 33 hours anyway. Unlike McNamara, however, Rumsfeld does not admit his historic blunders, but maintains his “Stuff happens” brio.

“You make a movie with the secretary of defense you have,” Morris told me dryly, “not with the secretary of defense you want to have.”

Still, the filmmaker was smart to bookend the men, opposite ends of the same warmongering problem: McNamara was so droning and unemotive that he lulled listeners into thinking that nothing bad could be happening, while Rumsfeld was so energetic and blithe that it was hard to believe that people were dying and the war was being lost. Morris’s wife and collaborator, Julia Sheehan, said that McNamara was “The Flying Dutchman” wandering the earth looking for redemption, while Rumsfeld is the Cheshire cat.

“All we’re left with at the very end is this infernal grin,” Morris said. “Everybody wants this smoking gun. The entire Bush administration is a smoking gun.

“In his memos and homilies, Rumsfeld will say things that are just contradictory, as though by saying everything, you’ve covered all your bases,” Morris continued. “It’s deeply anti-rational, as if there’s no deep reflection or thought. You have no evidence? Well, ‘the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ as Rumsfeld said about W.M.D. in Iraq. Taken to some crazy conclusion, you can justify anything that way.

“At times in his language, he descends into some strange insanity, as though he’s trying to convince himself.”

Asked the lesson of Vietnam-- Rumsfeld was the chief of staff to Gerald Ford when Saigon was evacuated-- Rumsfeld briskly replies: “Some things work out, some things don’t. That didn’t.”

When Morris presses Rumsfeld about the Justice Department’s “torture memos,” the former defense chief said they did not come out of “the Bush administration, per se; they came out of the U.S. Department of Justice.” That parsing would be beyond Bill Clinton.

About the memos that led to what Morris considers “one of the great stains in American history,” Rumsfeld says he never read them. When asked why, he replies, “I’m not a lawyer. What would I know?”

When Morris asks Rumsfeld about the “confusion” that linked Saddam to 9/11, he answers brightly, “I don’t think the American people were confused about that,” adding, “I don’t remember anyone in the Bush administration saying anything like that, nor do I recall anyone believing that.”

Holy mushroom cloud.

Rumsfeld doesn’t even seem to understand his signature phrase. Reading from a 2004 memo, he says, “There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. There are unknown unknowns.” He tells Morris that there are also unknown knowns. Things that you possibly may know that you don’t know you know.

Morris challenges him: “But the memo doesn’t say that. It says that we know less, not more, than we think we do."

Rumsfeld finally admits a boo-boo: “Yeah, I think that memo is backwards.” Then he chastises the filmmaker for “chasing the wrong rabbit.”

Right down the rabbit hole.

As poor Scotty talks to Keith, Richard Clarke reminds us that poor Scotty used to merrily dish out the abuse that's being heaped on him now

It was interesting last night seeing poor Scotty McClellan spend most of the Countdown hour with Keith Olbermann. (There's a complete transcript on the Countdown website.) The rest of the hour was filled out with an instructively complementary interview with onetime Nixon White House Counsel John Dean.

It was also interesting, later in the evening, to see counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke (flogging his new book, Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters) with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show recalling how when he published his 2004 book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, which accused the Bush administration of screwing up the anti-terrorism effort, he had been attacked with almost exactly the same talking points that McClellan is hearing now: disaffected former official, was totally out of the loop, never said those things while he was here, is just trying to sell books in an election year.

Of course back then Clarke heard the talking points from White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

I still don't hear much news in the "revelations" in poor Scotty's book, or for that matter in the interview. I think I got the circumstances pretty much right yesterday. The discovery that both Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had just plain lied to him when they told him unequivocally that they had not leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA identity seems to have gotten the poor boy's attention like being thwacked over the head with a two-by-four. After that wake-up call, he began to see the people around him rather differently.

The poor sap had entered the service of George W. Bush believing him to be what he had pretended to be as governor of Texas: a bipartisan uniter who could bring people together. Of course he wasn't really that in Texas either, but it was still possible for simple souls -- or complex ones with devious agendas -- to believe it. That's who he thought he was following to Washington, and even after 9/11, he really believed in, and was inspired by, Chimpy the Prez's supposed plan to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East, and any other damned place that got in his way.

I just don't think poor Scotty has much more to tell us about the Bush regime. Is he really telling us anything we didn't know about the regime's singleminded and ruthless pursuit of its vicious partisan agenda? The significance of his witness is that it comes from someone that close to the center of power.

John Dean also suspects that poor Scotty doesn't have much more to tell us, for the obvious reason that press secretaries really don't know very much about policy-making or the inner workings of an administration. In fact, the nature of the job dictates that the less they know, the more effectively they can sell what they do know to the media they service. The press secretary is briefed to know exactly what the administration wants him/her to pass on, and nothing more. This way he/she isn't put in the position of having to hide or lie about things he/she isn't supposed to talk about. (Conspicuously, when Keith tried to press the discussion beyond the few matters that have already been discussed, it usuallly turned out that it was an area poor Scotty had never been briefed on.)

Nevertheless, Dean agreed with Keith's suggestion that with the passage of time, Scotty may find that he has more to tell us. In his own case, once he had absorbed the beating he took from his former colleagues and friends over his congressional testimony laying bare some of the Nixon administration's grubbier secrets, he began to realize that other things he had witnessed and taken for granted might actually have larger significance.

The difference, of course, is that Dean as White House counsel really was often part of the policy-making (or at least policy-enforcing) apparatus. Poor Scotty was thought of and used as a tool. In that capacity he had the misfortune, as I suggested yesterday, of having a shred of decency that was both (a) absent from his regime predecessor and successors and (b) unsuspected by his regime overlords.


A CLARIFYING NOTE ON THE BUSH REGIME PRESS FLACKS

Just to be clear on this matter of White House press secretaries being basically out of the policy-making loop, it seems reasonable to assume that while this model applied to poor Scotty's dismal predecessor, Ari Fleischer, and to the incumbent, Dana Perino, it was probably not the case with poor Scotty's immediate successor, the unspeakable Tony Snow. I doubt that he would have taken the job under those conditions.

Snow brought conservative movement cred of his own to the job, and I suspect was permitted rare access and input for a press secretary. After all, since he had already established himself as one of the most accomplished liars and propagandists in the modern communications business, he could be trusted to bamboozle the docile White House press corps.

Even so, I doubt that our Tony would have lasted much longer in the job even without his health considerations. I suspect that the regime policy-makers were coming to find him a bad fit for the job. The last thing they needed or wanted was more opinions. They had all the opinions they needed, thank you very much.

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