As the days dwindle down to a precious few for the grand jury investigating who leaked Valerie Plame’s undercover CIA status to journalists in mid-2003, most news stories about the controversy feel like filler and speculation right now: Who will Fitzgerald charge, and with what? How will Democratic and Republican leaders spin whatever Fitzgerald decides? What kind of a guy is the special prosecutor, anyway: crime fighter or nitpicker? And what if he brings no charges at all?
But two news items Tuesday managed to stand out from what President Bush last week called “the chatter.” (Funny how he used the term associated with intercepted information from al-Qaida, subtly linking terrorists and journalists. “Subliminable”? You decide.) One was the amazing New York Times report that lawyers close to Fitzgerald say the prosecutor has notes showing that I. Lewis Libby learned Plame’s identity from his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, not from journalists, as Libby apparently claimed. The other is the sad but predictable fact that the 2,000th American soldier died in Iraq today. If you miss those two pieces of news while playing Fitzgerald guessing games, you’ll miss the bigger point of Plamegate.
Even in the unlikely event that Fitzgerald doesn’t bring charges, we already know enough to conclude that something was seriously corrupt in the White House in the days before and after the Iraq war. Clearly the leak of her name harmed Plame, as well as her husband, Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who traveled to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons, and who revealed in a New York Times Op-Ed piece that “it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.” But the much greater harm was to the nation. The mind shrinks from taking in the outlines of the truth, but every day it becomes clearer that a cabal of White House insiders sold a disastrous war based on faulty intelligence that they invented or suborned, and that they engaged in a highly organized and vicious campaign to smear, discredit and sideline those who dared to raise questions about it all. The Fitzgerald investigation just examines some of the laws they may have broken to do it.
It has always been clear that Cheney was at the center of the story, but the Times revelation Tuesday about his role in the campaign against Wilson reveals the strange mixture of pettiness, fear and arrogance that prevailed in the White House as its lovely little war, and the rationale for it, came crashing down. It’s easy to say now that the White House overreacted to Wilson; it’s unlikely he’d have gained the stature he has if the White House hadn’t become obsessed with his Niger trip. Certainly his July New York Times Op-Ed piece boldly and directly challenged the underpinnings of the war, but we now know the White House was absorbed with discrediting Wilson even before that. The Los Angeles Times reported how Libby was personally driven to distraction by Wilson, monitoring his every utterance and urging a crusade to counter him.
But Libby clearly wasn’t acting alone. We know Rove was talking to journalists about the former ambassador, and now we know Cheney was the first to tell his loyal chief of staff about Plame. There’s always been something icky about the way the administration smeared Wilson: by implying he was an out-of-work nobody whose wife got him a gig for which he wasn’t qualified. Among the macho boys and girls peddling the war, that must have seemed like quite the insult. (Somehow it brings to mind Cheney and Bush’s priceless moment on the campaign trail, slurring the New York Times’ Adam Clymer just loud enough that their faux-manly exchange could be heard: When Bush calls Clymer a “major league asshole,” his veep just grunts, “Big time!”)
But the smearing of Wilson wasn’t just an escapade on the campaign trail, or in a gossipy, dysfunctional workplace; this was the White House, and Scooter Libby may now face charges for obscuring his boss’s role in the effort to discredit Wilson. Whatever laws were broken, though, the obsession with Wilson suggests a dysfunctional workplace indeed, a White House out of control, so obsessed with punishing political enemies that it ignored the nation’s real enemies — all that time spent discrediting a former ambassador, exactly when the Iraq insurgency was building strength and the real nature of the war was becoming clear, notwithstanding Bush’s silly “Mission Accomplished” photo op (just days before Wilson talked to the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, off the record, about his Niger trip).
There are still so many unanswered questions: According to the Times, Fitzgerald’s notes say CIA Director George Tenet gave Cheney Plame’s name, but a “former” high-ranking intelligence officer denies it. Meanwhile, there are tantalizing hints that Fitzgerald has taken his inquiry beyond the limits of who leaked Plame’s name — UPI reported that he’s looking into the forged Niger documents, and many news outlets say he’s been examining the workings of the White House Iraq Group, the high-level team of Bush insiders that came together to, in Chief of Staff Andy Card’s words, sell the “product” of war with Iraq with at best questionable, at worst forged, intelligence. There are also reports that Fitzgerald is investigating whether the actual target of the Cheney-Libby smear wasn’t Wilson or Plame, but the CIA front group Plame worked for, Brewster-Jennings, which posed as an energy consulting firm but was engaged in weapons nonproliferation work.
Ah, but we’re back in the dark but irresistible realm of speculation, and why bother when we’ll have answers soon. For now it’s best to stick to the facts. Cheney was in charge of the crusade to sell the Iraq war with faulty and forged intelligence, and he was central to, if not the head of, the effort to smear Joe Wilson. And 2,000 Americans have died as a result of his work.
In many ways the Fitzgerald investigation is a sideshow; we have plenty of evidence showing what happened. The secret Office of Special Plans, the “stovepiped” intelligence, the Pentagon’s war against State and the CIA — it has all been reported, and new evidence and accusations keep coming in. Just in the last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, blamed the war on “a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense … that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.” In the Oct. 31 issue of the New Yorker, Brent Scowcroft, who was national security advisor under Bush I, blasted the neocons who dreamed up the Iraq war, and uttered this amazing statement: “I consider Cheney a good friend — I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.”
Whatever Fitzgerald decides, it’s high time — past time — for Congress to begin asking deeper questions about how this war was sold to the American people. The 2,000 Americans who have given their lives deserve nothing less.
What does it mean that two of the nastiest men in the Republican Party are saying nice things about Newt Gingrich? On CNN Monday night Dick Cheney warned the GOP not to “underestimate” Gingrich, and lavished praise on the disgraced House speaker for his formidable political skills.
Today, also on CNN, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani likewise had kind words for Gingrich, arguing he’s more electable than Mitt Romney in a race against Barack Obama.
“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. “You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”
With a straight face, Giuliani explained why charges of “elitism” wouldn’t fly against Gingrich. “One of the strengths he has is he’s got a common touch, he’s able to talk to people, he comes from a poor family, understands poverty from that point of view. He doesn’t come from the American elite. It’s going to be hard to paint him that way. There are a lot of other ways you can paint him, but you can’t paint him that way.”
You can’t? The man with the half-million-dollar Tiffany credit line? The guy who wants to do away with “truly stupid” child labor laws? The one who thinks the poor lack a work ethic? The “historian” who earned just under $2 million from Fannie Mac and took in another $37 million for his healthcare think-tank? The candidate whose tax plan overwhelmingly favors the super-rich? How many ways is Giuliani wrong there? More ways than he and Gingrich have wives between them.
Can we also acknowledge there is no such thing as a “Reagan Democrat” anymore? There are white working-class people who now permanently vote against their own class interests, and they’re Republicans, not Democrats. Then there are white working-class people who are understandably sometimes confused about which party represents them, because Democrats have spent so many years sucking up to Wall Street and playing down their populist past. Some of those voters — the ones who are public workers, or union members, or close to retirement and listening to proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — are starting to realize that they have become the GOP’s latest scapegoat, the 21st century welfare queens, and they’re taking another look at Democrats. Some white working-class voters stayed Democrats. But the Reagan Democrat analysis hasn’t made sense for a long time.
Finally, I love the fact that Gingrich and Giuliani have six wives and two marriage annulments between them. Add in Donald Trump, who seems to be leaning toward Gingrich too, they can start a Three Wives Club. Way to go, family values party!
I’ll be talking about the latest on the GOP field with Ed Schultz and Ezra Klein on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.
Once again, CNN philanthropist journalist Erin Burnett has used her show to give voice to the voiceless, to seek out the powerless to offer opinion on the day’s news. She debuted her show “OutFront” in early October by mocking Occupy Wall Street and defending the industry that destroyed the economy.
On Monday night Burnett gave a platform to a man almost as loathed as his Wall Street buddies, former Vice President Dick Cheney. And Cheney, predictably but contemptibly, took the opportunity to bash President Obama for not authorizing “a quick airstrike” to retrieve a predator drone that was recently downed in Iran.
Cheney told Burnett:
The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. [...]
They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can’t do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that.
The former vice president has been insulting Obama since Inauguration Day, insisting his policies will make the country “less safe.” Two months into his administration, Cheney charged that the new president “is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.” He’s accused Obama of “half measures” and “dithering” on foreign policy. And more than once he’s criticized the president for not taking a tougher stance on Iran.
Even after Obama authorized the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden, who Bush and Cheney essentially let run free thanks to their discretionary war with Iraq, Cheney wasn’t happy. “I still am concerned about the fact that I think a lot of the techniques that we had used to keep the country safe for more than seven years are no longer available. That they’ve been sort of taken off the table, if you will.”
So Cheney’s carping is nothing new. But suggesting that the president launch “a quick airstrike” to retrieve the downed drone is ridiculous, even for Cheney. There’s no such thing. Cheney has to know that any new U.S. incursion, following on the drone discovery, would sharply escalate tension with Iran, and to do that to recover a drone isn’t at all worth the risk.
It was left to CBS Early Show co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis this morning to ask the follow-up question Burnett did not: “Would not, though, an airstrike on Iran have potentially led us into a war with them?” Cheney replied:
Well, if you look at what Iran has done over the years, they’ve been the prime backers of Hezbollah, of Hamas, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that cost us 241 American lives. These were Iranian-supported ventures. It’s not as though they haven’t already committed acts that some people would say come close to being acts of war.
For us to go in and take out the drone that crashed would have been, I think, a fairly simple operation, and it would have denied them the value of the intelligence they can collect by having that aircraft,” he said. “But the administrative basically limited itself to saying, ‘Please give it back,’ and the Iranians said no.
ThinkProgress made a good catch: When a U.S. spy plane ventured into Chinese airspace in April 2001 and crashed with a Chinese fighter jet, the Bush-Cheney administration wound up apologizing in order to get 11 soldiers released from Chinese custody. They didn’t send in “a quick airstrike.”
For the record, Cheney sounded bullish on Newt Gingrich in 2012, though he hasn’t endorsed anyone formally. “I wouldn’t underestimate him,” Cheney said, praising Gingrich’s political skills. “The thing I remember about Newt, we came to Congress together at the same time, ’78, and when Newt showed up, he said, ‘We can become the majority. We can take back the House of Representatives. We hadn’t had the House since the 1940s. And initially, none of us believed it, but he was persistent. And he was tenacious. He kept it up and kept it up and kept it up. And finally by ’94, he’s the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives with a Republican majority.” Cheney declined to describe the way Gingrich crashed and burned in the years that followed. You’ve got to count that among the nicest things anyone who’s worked with Gingrich has said about him during the whole campaign. Stay tuned.
This week, the Atlantic Media Co. held its “Washington Ideas Forum,” one of many regular events held for Washington’s political elite to gather and congratulate themselves for having so many ideas. The Atlantic — which also publishes a monthly magazine, I’m told — throws these pricey orgies of self-regard each year, in Washington and Aspen. One of the big “ideas” presented at this year’s forum was actually a pretty old one: that no matter how awful and criminal certain people’s behavior is in office, they will never, ever be kicked out of the Washington elite.
That’s why the forum hosted Henry Kissinger, this big idea’s mascot. And that’s why the forum ended with an interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a memoir to promote. Cheney was joined onstage by his daughter and co-author, Liz Cheney, who is devoting herself to whitewashing her father’s legacy of torture and death and shooting old men in the face.
They were technically being “interviewed” by a third party — a journalist! — but for some reason most of the question-asking was actually done by … Liz.
“Were you really secretly running things?” Liz Cheney asked.
“No,” her father said.
As proof, he cited the fact that President Bush once had Cheney’s dog banned from a section of Camp David.
This gentle interrogation seems to have struck certain high-profile Atlantic contributors as a bit silly but on the other hand it would be much harder to get big names to attend these things if they were worried someone might call them out for being a war criminal. (Hot tip for the International Criminal Court: Try sending out invitations for a sham “Ideas Festival”?)
The forum also hosted former Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf, an actual former dictator. (But one of the “good ones”!)
Remember Tevi Troy, the Republican “former senior White House aide” who criticized Barack Obama at the National Review Online for reading well-reviewed novels instead of Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” and other conservative book club selections? He’s back with another of his wonderful posts about the reading habits of prominent politicians. This time, he’s talking Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney’s memoir apparently mentions a lot of books he read and enjoyed. Mostly books about wars and frontier settlers and so on. Good Republican books. But the Washington Post’s nonfiction book editor notes that Cheney doesn’t mention reading anything while actually in office as vice president:
Noticeably missing from the pages of Cheney’s memoir are references to books examining the big issues of our day — issues of crucial importance during his tenure with the Bush administration. From his memoir, it is impossible to know if he took any counsel at all from the estimable books of the past decade on national security, terrorism, torture, Islam, domestic surveillance. He remains opaque to the end.
This seems sort of like a defensible version of the weird criticism Troy leveled at President Obama, right? (As Troy wrote of Obama: “the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.”) So does Troy agree with the Post on Cheney? No. No, he does not:
When it comes to the books Cheney read as vice president, though, Cheney is indeed less forthcoming about the titles. He does, however, list a variety of thinkers and writers with whom he met while in office, including Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, Nathaniel Philbrick, Jay Winik, Edmund Morris, David McCullough, Charles Krauthammer, and Victor Davis Hanson. In addition, while Cheney was vice president, there were public reports that Cheney read a number of books with contemporary policy implications, including Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy, Elliott Cohen’s [sic] Supreme Command, and Winik’s April 1865 (interestingly, President Bush was reported to have read all three of those as well). I am sure that neither of these lists depicts the totality of what Cheney was reading and to whom he was speaking, so I guess by some measure he does remain “opaque.” But the list of at least some of the outside influences Cheney looked to during his vice presidency was available and out there, both within and outside Cheney’s memoir, if one had chosen to look for them.
He may not have been reading serious nonfiction about contemporary issues, but he met with Charles Krauthammer! That is basically the same thing, right? Reading an “estimable book” on Islam is surely a waste of time when you can just call up Victor Davis Hanson for a chat.
So for Cheney’s reading list we’ve got those all-important “meetings” plus two historical war books and one foreign policy manifesto that plainly reinforced Cheney’s already extant biases. I can see why self-proclaimed presidential reading expert Troy was “somewhat bothered” by that Post piece that made the same argument he made about Obama two weeks ago except not as stupidly.
Turns out this Troy character may not actually be a serious scholar of the history and meaning of presidential reading, and may, in fact, just be some random shameless right-wing think tank hack!
Give the old vizier his due. Richard Cheney is the most influential and radical political leader of his times. The former vice president’s new autobiography, assertively titled “In My Time,” tells at least part of the story. The fuller telling of his biography will have to come from guilty aides, declassification of key documents, and possibly a future war crimes tribunal. In the meantime, what the man wants to tell us in the here and now is interesting enough.
Cheney’s memoir — by turns implacable, misleading and frank — presents strong evidence that he served as de facto co-president of the United States from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, until late 2006. Certainly, the book demonstrates that no vice president in American history has ever wielded such influence — some would say control — of the levers of power in Washington.
His radicalism is served proudly. “I wanted to make sure the governor understood my record was not moderate,” he writes about an early meeting with Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
The Cheney Regency featured a canny bureaucratic mandarin waging war in tandem with a passive chief executive, who shared his views but his not skills. There is nothing comparable in the history of the American presidency. Some sympathizers have discerned the hand of God in Bush’s presidency. Cheney, a less sentimental observer, gives more credit to himself.
Bush, his nominal boss, while occasionally lauded for his “courageous” decisions, cuts an unobtrusive and unimpressive figure in Cheney’s life. The first important political decision that Cheney attributes to Bush was selecting him as his vice-presidential running mate. “Dick, you’re the solution to my problem,” Cheney repeatedly quotes Bush as saying.
About Bush the man, Cheney has nothing to say. Nothing about his struggle with alcoholism, his troubled relationship with his father, his extensive record of two terms as governor of Texas, or his efforts to define a “compassionate conservatism.” Such irrelevant details do not interest Cheney who focuses relentlessly on power.
Chronologically, the next important decision that Cheney attributes to Bush came on Sept. ll as the White House confronted reports of hijacked airliners flying into buildings. The president, he writes,
“approved my recommendation that they [Air Force pilots] be authorized to fire on a civilian airliner if it had been contacted and would not divert … When the president came on the line I told him about the shootdown order.”
This is a fib, if not a lie, as a careful reading of the 9/11 Commission report indicates. While the report’s language is tactful, senior commission staffers certainly had their doubts that Cheney ever spoke to Bush about the order before it was given. The evidence supports their doubts.
That pattern recurs in Cheney’s book: The chain of command appears to function normally while the vice president shapes crucial decisions. As the Bush White House pondered how to respond to the attacks in September 2001, for example, Cheney recalls offering sage advice: “I suggested to the president that it would be useful to make certain that [Secretary of Defense] Rumsfeld had assigned priority to planning for possible military action against Saddam.” Rumsfeld’s plans would be put into action in Iraq 18 months later.
When British Prime Minister Tony Blair came to Washington in 2002 to ask the White House to support a U.N. resolution against Saddam, Cheney disagreed — and assumed he had Bush’s assent. “I knew the president was no more interested than I was in an endless round of inspections and deception in Iraq,” he writes.
As the preparation for war intensified in the early 2003, Prince Bandar, the Saudi potentate, came to Washington skeptical that Washington was really going to invade Iraq. Cheney says he met with Bandar, who was reassured.
“I conveyed the message to the president. He met with Bandar the following Monday.” End of story. Bush’s conversation with Bandar has no importance in Cheney’s account — and perhaps in reality.
After the destruction of Saddam’s regime in March 2003 and Bush’s reelection, in 2004, Cheney felt so secure in his power he starts omitting Bush from his ambitions altogether. “I felt strongly that a major change was needed in the national security team,” Cheney writes. “Getting a new secretary of state was a top priority.”
It is safe to say that no vice president in American history has dared use such presumptuous language about the composition of a presidential cabinet. Cheney’s target Colin Powell soon resigned — though he claims he planned to all along.
About Iraq’s descent into violent chaos from 2003 to 2006, Cheney is mostly silent. Not surprisingly, he does not address the human toll: the awful civilian deaths or the massive displacement of Iraqi Christians, and the impoverishment of millions. He shrugs off the worldwide revulsion generated by the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib. He offers occasional paeans to fallen U.S. soldiers, but more often he calls attention to his own influence in ways that seem condescending to his patron.
As the White House was forced by failure to consider a new policy in 2006, Cheney still tried to impose his will. When Bush’s aides prepared a presidential speech about the dismal situation in Iraq that did not include the word “victory,” Cheney proudly reveals that he intervened with the speechwriters — and literally put the talismanic word in the president’s mouth. Even Bush’s critics have stopped retailing such tart anecdotes about the former president. Cheney has not.
Not coincidentally, Bush broke with Cheney about this time. In November 2006, Bush fired Rumsfeld without asking for the vice president’s opinion. For the first time in five years, Bush started making key decisions on his own.
Cheney’s account turns petulant at this point. After 2006, no one in the Bush administration (besides Cheney) can do much good. The new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates mistreated two top generals. Secretary of State Condi Rice was so eager to reach an agreement with North Korea she issued a public statement that was “utterly misleading.” And President Bush had failed by acting on her recommendations, not his.
“The process and the decision that followed seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded ways I had seen him make decisions in the past,” he writes with surprise.
What had changed was that Cheney no longer dominated the process of presidential decision-making on foreign policy. He was merely the vice president. His reign was over but his pride remained. Like the man or not, the possessiveness of his book’s title is deserved. From 2001 to 2006 was Dick Cheney’s time.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, left, and Newt Gingrich (Credit: AP) 
Dick Cheney (Credit: AP) 
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, accompanied by his daughter Liz, addresses the Washington Ideas Forum on Thursday. (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta) 
Clockwise from upper left: Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell 
