Cheney's Quiet Coup

Last year's debate over whether the Vice President was part of the executive or legislative arm of government is being mooted by revelations that Dick Cheney was operating as a separate branch of his own.

Now we learn from Leon Panetta that he was running a secret counterterrorism program that the CIA withheld from Congress for eight years on his direct orders. Add this to Seymour Hersh's recent charge that Cheney had been running "an executive assassination ring...going into countries... and finding people on a list and executing them," and the picture emerges of a Vice President running his own post-9/11 war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

President Obama himself adds fuel to the fire in a CNN interview, telling Anderson Cooper that "the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001."

As much as the President and the rest of us want to put the Bush era to rest, the ghosts of Cheney's secret and illegal private war within the war on terror keep coming up and haunting us with questions of how much power one man can exercise unchecked in the administration of a president who calls himself the Decider but, where it counts, isn’t.

That past won't stay buried until we see it all fully and clearly.

Spy Hard

News from two-thirds of the former Axis of Evil raises questions about whether US intelligence services are doing their jobs. How much do they really know about what's going on in Iran and North Korea?

The meaning of election results from Tehran and insight into Kim Jong-il's successor are as opaque as they would have been in a world without air travel, computers, satellites and huge budgets for undercover agents.

As they defend themselves over torturing prisoners who may or may not have known anything worth knowing, how skilled can our spy services be if what we find out about the new dictator of a nuclear-armed North Korea comes from a photo of him at age 11 and the 2003 memoirs of a sushi chef who met him when he was 7?

In a New Yorker interview, the new CIA director Leon Panetta stresses the need for the agency to increase its foreign-language skills and recruit officers of more diverse backgrounds who can infiltrate hostile parts of the world, but he seems to be hamstrung by dealing with the fallout from the torture debate. How long will it take to clean that up and start concentrating on today's global threats?

The unrest in Iran is outwardly murky, but how much do our government insiders know about what's happening under the radar?

Vice-President Joe Biden says on Meet the Press that "there’s some real doubt” about the election result, but “the decision has been made to talk” about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The White House may know more about whom we will be talking to and under what circumstances than they are telling us. But given the state of our spying after eight years of Bush-Cheney law-breaking and bungling, what are the odds?

Painful Debate About Torture

In releasing the Bush memos, Barack Obama reaffirms that responsibility starts at the top by stopping practices that "undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer," absolving the practitioners who believed what they were doing was legal and making public the twisted thinking that sanctioned them.

But critics like Professor David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center want more: "We must formally acknowledge that what was done was wrong, indeed criminal. At the very least, a credible independent investigation must be undertaken."

There is a good case to be made that American morality on torture should not depend on who is in the White House, but the argument collides with the realities that a President faces, that "in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security," as Obama put it in his statement.

His administration will not press criminal charges against CIA operatives who interrogated terrorism suspects during the Bush era. "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. says.

That position won't satisfy those who find a parallel with Nazis who were "only following orders" during the Holocaust, but 9/11 put Americans in a position where moral purity, or even the appearance of it, may be an impossible dream.

Meanwhile, the President has taken a step in the right direction by letting us see in detail just what was being done in our name and saying clearly that, on his watch, nothing like it will be done again.

After eight years of secrecy and lies by leaders who showed no doubts about their rectitude while abusing human beings, that's no small accomplishment.

Outing Julia Child

Before there was a CIA, during World War II, there was the OSS and now more than half a century later the National Archives is releasing files on almost 24,000 Americans who worked for the agency, including Julia Child.

Although she will be mentioned in the same breath as Valerie Plame, there was nothing covert about Julia, with whom I worked for more than a decade and whose only secretive moment came on camera when she dropped food on the kitchen floor, picked it up and confided to viewers, "Don't forget. If you're alone in the kitchen, no one will know."

The OSS revelations won't come as news to anyone who knew her, since she reveled in telling about her most dramatic exploit, helping to cook up a shark repellent to coat underwater explosives and keep them away from devices meant to blow up German U-boats.

The newly released list is a reminder of that innocent time when secretly working for your country was a source of pride for people like historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who later worked in JFK's White House as well as two sons of Theodore Roosevelt and Sterling Hayden, the actor now immortalized as Al Pacino's first murder victim in "The Godfather."

Nobody had to worry about the likes of Scooter Libby blabbing their names.

Senate's Slow Learners Speak Out

A duped Bush Administration lied us into Iraq and, with the help of comparable Middle East con men, has been drumming up a war with Iran, the Senate Intelligence Committee disclosed yesterday in two reports, several years after anyone who has been paying attention knew all about it.

One, 170 pages long, accuses the President and Vice President Cheney of "repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath" of 9/11.

According to Committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

Much of it, as we have known for years, was based on information provided by Ahmad Chalabi, touted by Neo-Cons as the “George Washington of Iraq,” a fugitive from Jordan convicted of bank fraud, who fed the Pentagon intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda for which we paid $33 million over four years, none of which turned out to be true.

The second Senate report details the work of his Iranian counterpart. In December 2001, Douglas Feith sent two Pentagon employees to Rome meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a middleman already dismissed by the CIA as untrustworthy, who outlined his plan for a change of government in Iran on a napkin.

The plan was pursued through at least May 2003, the report says, with requests for a $7 million loan, money for secret intelligence activity and an Iranian media outlet in Southern California in return for promised photos of suspected terrorists inside Iran and locations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that purportedly had been moved there.

Ghorbanifar turned out to be as reliable as Chalabi, but Feith (described by Gen. Tommy Franks as "the dumbest effing guy on the planet") and other Pentagon Neo-Cons kept feeding his "intelligence" to the White House without telling the CIA, which might have refuted it.

It's good to have the Senate Intelligence Committee putting all this Keystone Kops stuff on the record, however belatedly, although only two Republican members signed on to the reports with the others deeming them a waste of time but failing to comment on the stupidity and duplicity that led to waste of lives and billions of dollars.

The Truth About 935 Bush Lies

Did it take a thousand untruths to get us into Iraq? Not quite.

According to a new study by two non-profit journalism organizations, "President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials...made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

The orchestrated campaign has been documented by the staffs of the Fund for Independence in Journalism and the Center for Public Integrity to create a data base of deception.

Some of the highlights:

.On August 26, 2002, Dick Cheney made a speech saying "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." The CIA had no idea of the basis for that claim.

.A month later, in his weekly radio address, the President said: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given...This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year."

.In July 2002, asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists, Don Rumsfeld answered, "Sure" despite the fact that his own Defense Intelligence and the CIA had no such evidence.

.A year later, President Bush told Polish TV: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." The two labs he cited, a team of experts found, "had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons."

The report concludes that the Bush Administration "led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." White House reaction: "The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world." Add that to the list.

Now that 935 lies to get us into Iraq have been documented, collated and counted, how many more is it taking to keep us there?

New View of the 9/11 Stonewall

From the start, the Bush Administration did everything possible to hamper the 9/11 Commission, opposing its creation altogether and then, after authorizing it under pressure, appointing housebroken Henry Kissinger to head it until public outcry made them back off.

Today the chairman, former Republican Governor Tom Kean, and vice chairman Lee Hamilton in a New York Times OpEd review the CIA's and the White House's efforts to deny the Commission access to or even knowledge of the tapes that recorded Al Qaeda interrogations and, stopping just short of calling their actions illegal, characterize the process as "obstruction."

This only confirms what veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas in 2003 described as a "stonewall" of "public pledges of cordial cooperation with investigators, followed by private resistance, delay, excuses, partial compliance or self-righteous assertion of constitutional prerogatives."

The Commission, as Kean and Hamilton make clear, was not authorized to judge whether or not torture was involved in the questioning but had a critical need to learn what the senior Al Qaeda operatives knew. Apparently while trying to hide their methods, the CIA and White House denied them that information.

The more we learn, the worse it gets.

Everything a Politician Should Be

Lee Hamilton was visibly angry this week, a rare sight in more than 40 years as one of the most admirable figures in American politics.

Reacting to news that the CIA destroyed interrogation tapes, the co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission said, "Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes. Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge."

In a hero-less age, Americans might want to take a closer look at Hamilton, as the Christian Science Monitor did yesterday in a profile titled, "Washington's Bipartisan Power Broker."

The piece cites his success, as head of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, in getting Haleh Esfandiari, his director of Middle East Studies, out of a Tehran prison on charges of spying.

After being rebuffed for months by political leaders, Hamilton appealed to Iran's most powerful man, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and won her release.

Hamilton, the Monitor says, is "Washington's middleman, the mild-mannered moderate more interested in solutions than sound bites. People who know him well compare him...as a man of pragmatism, to 'that other Hamilton'–-Alexander, the Founding Father famous for his worry about the dangers of faction."

Watching Hamilton chair the House’s Iran-Contra hearings a quarter of a century ago, it struck me he should run for President in 1988.

It struck others, too, but the boomlet soon ended. “He told them he didn’t want to do it,” his aide announced, “he didn’t want to look into it, he just wants to keep doing what he’s doing.” The New York Times called his response “a standard of modesty believed to be extinct on Capitol Hill.”

Hamilton had skewered Oliver North, Bush pere and President Reagan himself with a flat-out “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” simplicity: “Policy was driven by a series of lies...A few do not know what is better for the American people than the people themselves.”

But he resisted pressure for impeachment, saying it would damage the country after the trauma of Nixon's departure a decade earlier.

Lee Hamilton was thinking about what's best for America, He still is.

Nuclear Hide-and-Seek

It keeps getting worse. Now we learn our government has given Pakistan $100 million and a "raft of equipment" to safeguard nuclear weapons since 9/11, but we have no idea whether any of it helped because they won't show us where or how what we gave them is being used.

Beleaguered President Musharraf says Pakistan's nuclear controls are "the best in the world" but won't reveal location of the weapons or the amount or type of new bomb-grade fuel his country is now producing.

After six years of secrecy, the Bush Administration is now starting to worry that Musharraf's "Trust me" on the nukes may be no more reliable than his assurances about fighting terrorists on the Afghanistan border.

The New York Times now admits it "has known details of the secret program for more than three years, based on interviews with a range of American officials and nuclear experts, some of whom were concerned that Pakistan’s arsenal remained vulnerable," but delayed publication when the Bush Administration "argued that premature disclosure could hurt the effort to secure the weapons."

In retrospect, there might have been some value in going public with the internal debate that pitted atomic scientists who favored technical sharing against the State Department, which prevailed by ruling such transfers were illegal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, says reluctance to share warhead security technology was making the world more dangerous. “Lawyers say it’s classified,” he told the Times. “That’s nonsense...You want to make sure that the guys who have their hands on the weapons can’t use them without proper authorization.”

Now we are faced with the nightmare of nuclear weapons that are who-knows-where and protected who-knows-how in an unstable nation whose leading scientist was once selling its technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who played a crucial role in stopping that proliferation, now says, “I am confident...the Pakistanis are very serious about securing this material, but also that someone in Pakistan is very intent on getting their hands on it.”

Spies, Secrets and Sexy Women

Mata Hari would have been mortified, and James Bond might have been stirred, even shaken. Here last night was Valerie Plame, the kind of elegant woman you meet at a Washington cocktail party, talking to Jon Stewart about what the CIA has redacted from her new book in a section about breast-feeding her baby.

Spying is not what it used to be and, from newly released figures, getting more costly and complicated all the time. This year the government is spending $43.5 billion on spy services, up from $26.6 billion a decade ago, according to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence.

What's more, since 9/11, most of it has been outsourced to civilian contractors in what amounts to a Blackwatering of national spy operations.

The Washington Post has quoted a former senior Pentagon intelligence official about the difficulty of military efforts in Iraq to provide human intelligence sources to forces that rotate out after tours of a single year. "That is hardly enough time to develop serious, dependable Iraqi sources," he said.

As with so much of what goes on in our Iraq adventure, we have no way of knowing who is being paid how much to do what to whom. Are we employing exotic dancers to seduce officials, as Mata Hari presumably did during World War I? Or are most of our spies office-bound matrons like Valerie Plame Wilson?

Unless or until Dick Cheney gets teed off at one of their husbands, we may never know.

Pulling the Curtain on CIA Wizard of Oz Act

Three months ago, it looked as if he had made a clean getaway. George Tenet had his Medal of Freedom, a $4 million book advance and was all over TV complaining that his “slam dunk” recommendation on invading Iraq had been distorted. He was in Bureaucrat Heaven.

But now, thanks to both Democratic and Republican leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee with no resistance from the Bush White House, Tenet gets his comeuppance from the newly released summary of a 2005 CIA report that shreds his claims of pre-9/11 competence.

“The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the report found, citing “failures to implement and manage important processes, to follow through with operations and to properly share and analyze critical data.”

This is a scathing indictment from an agency that never airs its dirty linen or even admits there is any. Tenet, of course, issued an instant denial, but his escape act that relied on CIA secrecy has been exposed for all to see.

The bottom line is that even the best-run intelligence agency could probably not have averted 9/11. But it’s satisfying to have confirmation that Tenet’s pitiful performance then was on a par with his failure to blow the whistle on Bush’s Neo-Cons when they distorted intelligence to justify invading Iraq the following year.

Washington schadenfreude is alive and well and, in this case, performing a public service.