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22 Things Dick Cheney Can't Recall About the Plame Case

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Nick Baumann - Oct. 31 (Opinion) - Notes from former Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with the FBI about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity were finally released on Friday afternoon after a lengthy legal battle. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the Justice Department last year to obtain the interview notes; a judge finally ordered their release on October 1. In the interview, Cheney demonstrated a behavior common among Bush administration officials under investigation: he couldn't remember much of anything. Here's a non-comprehensive list of 22 things Dick Cheney claimed he couldn't recall about the Plame case, in the order they appear in the FBI's notes:

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Obama administration seeks to block wiretap suit

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Devlin Barrett - Oct. 31 (News Report) - The Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege Friday to try to stop a lawsuit over Bush-era wiretapping -- the first time the Obama administration has done so under its new policy on such cases. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision in a California lawsuit challenging the warrantless wiretapping program begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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Official resigns over Afghan war

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Karen DeYoung - Oct. 27 (Special Report) - A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed. But last

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Zakaria on a Third Surge in Afghanistan

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Fareed Zakaria - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - The real question we should be asking in Afghanistan is not "Do we need a surge?" but rather "Do we need a third surge?" The number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in January 2008 was 26,607. Over the next six months, the Bush administration raised the total to 48,250. President Bush described this policy as "the quiet surge," and he made the standard arguments about the need for a counterinsurgency capacity—the troops had to not only fight the Taliban but protect the Afghan population, strengthen and train the Afghan Army and police, and assist in development.

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Obama's Choice: Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Nick Turse - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory.

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EPA Releases Bush-Era Endangerment Document

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Darren Samuelsohn, Robin Bravender - Oct. 13 (News Report) - U.S. EPA released a long-sequestered document on global warming today showing the George W. Bush administration had concluded in December 2007 that greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles were endangering public welfare and needed to be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

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Obama’s Dick Cheney Moment

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Benjamin Wittes - Sep. 28 (Opinion) - His decision not to consult Congress on detentions represents a virtually wholesale adoption of Bush’s failed policies.

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The Republican War Against ACORN

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Jason Leopold - Sep. 27 (News Report) - In recent days, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major news outlets have recounted the "troubled" history of the poor people's advocacy group ACORN, but left out the five-year anti-ACORN campaign led by White House adviser Karl Rove and other Republican operatives.

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Meet the Hazzards

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Nomi Prins, Christopher Hayes - Sep. 23 (Special Report) - As we mark the end of the first year of the financial bailout, the public seems to regard the government's actions with a toxic combination of rage and confusion. People are pissed off but too bewildered to know what to do with that anger. The confusion isn't an accident. The government hasn't exactly been forthcoming about how it's made buckets of money available to the banking sector. When it does disclose some information--such as in July's SIGTARP report from the Treasury or the Federal Reserve's weekly balance sheet--it's in the form of intimidating descriptions, accounting mumbo jumbo and technical reports that do little to illuminate just what the hell is going on. What's worse, banks and the establishment press have portrayed TARP as the sum of the banking industry's federal subsidies. An August 30 New York Times article, "As Banks Repay Bailout Money, U.S. Sees a Profit," gives the impression that taxpayers should be happy to have made $4 billion on the deal, as if our checks were in the mail. But when the government became Wall Street's bank, it wasn't just $700 billion of TARP money that flew north to Wall Street. TARP was but a small fraction (roughly 4 percent) of the full $17.5 trillion bailout and subsidization of the financial sector. [See image.] The details of this total bailout are complicated, but the basic mechanisms aren't beyond the average citizen's grasp. We're going to walk you through it.

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Torturing 'does not get truth'

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - Sep. 22 (News Report) - Torture techniques used on suspected terrorists by the Bush administration may have failed to get to the truth, researchers say. Professor Shane O'Mara of Trinity College, Dublin, said the interrogation techniques had a detrimental effect on brain.

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Todd S. Purdum on Henry Paulson

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Vanity Fair - By Todd S. Purdum - Sep. 21 (Special Report) - Henry Paulson, then the Treasury secretary, in his office last September, the month Lehman fell and the bailout took shape. By Nigel Parry/CPi Syndication. It was February 2008, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a prince of Wall Street turned secretary of the

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Fear was no excuse to condone torture

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Charles C. Krulak, Joseph P. Hoar - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.

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David Cole on "The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable"

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Amy Goodman, David Cole - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - Legal scholar and attorney David Cole looks at the story behind the infamous Bush administration torture memos. Cole argues the memos show that the United States government’s top attorneys were instrumental in rationalizing acts of torture and cruelty, employing chillingly twisted logic and Orwellian reasoning to authorize what the law absolutely forbids.

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So far, Obama's failing miserably

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Politico - By Jeremy Lott - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - When he ran for president, George W. Bush promised to be a modest reformer at home and a humble representative of the United States on the world stage. The Al Qaeda-organized-and-funded terrorist attacks of eight years ago changed all that.

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Sept. 11 Attacks Helped Shape Obama's Worldview

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Scott Wilson - Sep. 12 (News Report) - It was not hollow rhetoric. The attacks and the steps that the Bush administration took to prevent another one have defined the way Obama views the world and have influenced, more than any other event, his understanding of national security. That

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Karzai, Election Fraud and the Wages of Empire

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By John Nichols - Sep. 10 (Opinion) - So we get the "news" -- not from the satirical Onion but from the nation's newspaper of record -- that U.S. officials are trying to prevent Karzai from declaring "victory" in the exercise in fraud that naive commentators still insist on referring to as an election.

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Appeals court rules against Ashcroft in 9/11 case

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - Sep. 04 (News Report) - A federal appeals court delivered a stinging rebuke Friday to the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 detention policies, ruling that former Attorney General John Ashcroft can be held liable for people who were wrongfully detained as material witnesses after 9/11. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the government's improper use of material witnesses after Sept. 11 was "repugnant to the Constitution and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history

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Obama formalizes Bush policy on digital searches and seizures

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

wsws.org - By Tom Eley - Sep. 01 (News) - The Obama administration disclosed on August 27 that it will carry on Bush administration policies that allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to seize and search international travelers' laptop computers, cellular phones, cameras, and other electronic devices, even in the absence of suspicion of criminal activity.

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Cheney Still Manipulating People -- Now In Public

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dan Froomkin - Aug. 31 (News Analysis) - When he was vice president, Dick Cheney got his way by secretly wielding the instruments of power. Now that he's no longer in government, Cheney is still pulling levers and pushing buttons - he's just doing it in plain view. And it's the media that he's manipulating.

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Liz Cheney can't handle the truth

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Vincent Rossmeier - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - Liz Cheney, the easily exasperated eldest daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has become a one-woman TV juggernaut in 2009, racking up more airtime than a cloud as she defends her daddy's administration records. And boy, is she wrong. Unlike so many TV pundits who spin and slide around the facts, Cheney makes no fuss about completely ignoring them, and sticking to talking points that have little relation to the truth.

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Cheney for President

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By James Taranto - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - As the Obama administration moves toward prosecuting intelligence agents for allegedly overzealous questioning of terrorism in the months following the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post delivers a timely reminder of why those methods were thought necessary.

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Video: Dick Cheney calls Eric Holder's interrogation investigation political

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Fox News - By Chris Wallace - Aug. 31 (Interview) - WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it. CHENEY: I am.

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Novak Without Tears

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Eric Alterman - Aug. 26 (Special Report) - Journalist and television personality Robert Novak died August 18. I think it's time to do him the honor of taking his life's work seriously. I got to know Novak a bit in the late 1980s while writing a magazine profile of him, and another of his then-colleague John McLaughlin while researching a book on the history of punditry. I found myself immune to Novak's charms--as he was to mine--but I don't begrudge the fact that many people in Washington did not. Novak was an extremely popular figure within the capital; and while I extend his close friends and family my sincere sympathy, as a historian of journalism I worry that his myriad personal connections may have the effect of obscuring the historical record with regard to his actions. With that in mind, here are a few aspects of Mr. Novak's career that have received short shrift during the past week:

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Reopening the Interrogation File

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Eugene Robinson - Aug. 25 (Opinion) - History's demands can seem inconvenient, unfair or unreasonable. But they can't be ignored. The Obama administration has a legal and moral duty to determine whether crimes were committed in the Bush-era detention and interrogation of "war on terror" prisoners -- and, if so, to prosecute those responsible.

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For Obama, interrogation fight won't be welcome

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Christi Parsons, Julian E. Barnes - Aug. 25 (News Analysis) - The White House had hoped to avoid a polarizing dispute over the CIA's tactics in questioning terrorists. It's likely to be a prolonged distraction from healthcare and other domestic priorities.

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