WE Blog » President Bush

Bush finds new calling

Rhonda Holman — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:00:45 +0000

The Bushes have joined the “Get Motivated” seminar program. Asked about George W. Bush’s first speaking gig — today in Fort Worth, on a bill including Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Terry Bradshaw, Zig Ziglar and Robert Schuller — University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato suggested the country is beyond asking whether such top-dollar talks should be beneath former presidents. But “Bob Dole selling Viagra — now that lacked dignity,” Sabato told the New York Daily News.

Cheney continues war of words

Phillip Brownlee — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:55:28 +0000

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is back at it, calling the Obama administration’s abandonment of a missile-defense program in Eastern Europe “a strategic blunder,” criticizing diplomatic outreach efforts to Iran, and disparaging complaints about torture as “a libel against dedicated professionals.” During a speech Wednesday to the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., Cheney also accused President Obama of “dithering” on Afghanistan “while America’s armed forces are in danger.” Cheney said that Obama “seems afraid to make a decision, and unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to complete his mission.”
But retired Gen. Paul Eaton, who used to oversee training of the Iraqi military, responded that Cheney and other Bush administration officials were “incompetent war fighters” who left a mess that Obama must clean up. He said they “ignored Afghanistan for seven years with a crude approach to counterinsurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it. 2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it.”

Where was outrage about Bush’s czars?

Phillip Brownlee — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:03:46 +0000

Many of those complaining about President Obama’s “unelected and unaccountable czars” seem to have a bad case of amnesia — or at least selective outrage. After all, President Bush had more such “czars” than President Obama supposedly has. Yet during the Bush years, columnist Dick Polman noted, “there was nary a cry about imperial Russia from the president’s congressional cheerleaders, nor from his fans on Fox.”

Gonzales’ unraveling set to music

Rhonda Holman — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:00:46 +0000

First came a Rumsfeld song cycle. Now there’s the Gonzales Cantata, a 40-minute work for soloists, chorus and orchestra based on the transcripts of two 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ 2007 resignation statement. Melissa Dunphy wrote the piece while still a student; it was performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival last weekend. “It’s about a man who made some mistakes and is facing the music. It’s also an exploration of how a man could so brazenly politicize the Department of Justice without really standing up for the reasons he went into politics in the first place,” Dunphy told the Wall Street Journal. Unpredictably, Dunphy uses female voices for the men in the story and vice versa. Predictably, the phrase “I don’t recall” is frequently heard.

Bush administration tried to protect secret prisons

Phillip Brownlee — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:00:44 +0000

The Bush administration spent from 2003 to 2006 quietly trying to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish “enforced disappearances,” the Washington Post reported. Why? Because the treaty aimed at ending official kidnappings and detentions in Latin America, Russia, China, Iran and other countries — a treaty that the United States has long supported — could expose the CIA to possible punishment because of the secret prisons it was operating to hold terrorism suspects. Foreign governments opposed the proposed wording change, and the Bush administration ended up not endorsing the ban, which has since been signed by at least 81 countries.

Torturing harmed us

Phillip Brownlee — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:15:04 +0000

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday” that the attorney general’s decision to investigate prisoner abuse by the CIA “offends the hell out of me.”But many Americans, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., are offended that the United States, at Cheney’s urging, violated U.S. and international law prohibiting torture and set aside its own values and moral leadership. Though McCain doesn’t support a CIA probe, he said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “torturing harmed us.” McCain said that the interrogations were “in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan,” and that the interrogations “helped al-Qaida recruit” and harmed our ability to work with our allies. “The damage that it did to America’s image in the world is something we’re still on the way to repairing,” McCain said. And as for the effectiveness of the tactics, McCain noted that, according to the FBI and others, the information gained by torture “could have been gained through other methods.”

Hard for Holder not to investigate torture, abuse

Phillip Brownlee — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:16:07 +0000

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility reportedly is recommending that the department open investigations of CIA abuse and torture of terrorism suspects. President Obama already has said that he doesn’t want to focus on the past, but it will be difficult for Attorney General Eric Holder to overlook violations of U.S. law and the recommendation of the department’s ethics office, which has spent several years reviewing the cases. That said, Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel for the CIA, makes some good arguments for why the investigations might do more harm than good, including that the techniques reportedly were authorized by President Bush and approved by the Justice Department (albeit using shoddy legal reasoning).

Cynics correct about terrorism warnings

Phillip Brownlee — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:02:50 +0000

Turns out the cynics were correct in saying that the Bush administration manipulated terrorism threat warnings for political gain. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s wrote in his new memoir, “The Test of Our Times,” that the weekend before the 2004 presidential election, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed him to raise the color-coded warning for political reasons. “I consider the episode to be not only a dramatic moment in Washington’s recent history, but another illustration of the intersection of politics, fear, credibility and security,” wrote Ridge, who resigned shortly after the incident. Some other claims by Ridge that don’t reflect well on the Bush administration: Ridge wasn’t invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings, was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld information from him, and tried to block Michael Brown from being named to lead FEMA.

Rove says role was ‘entirely proper’

Rhonda Holman — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:00:53 +0000

Recent news accounts about information gathered by the House Judiciary Committee have drawn a clear and political link between Bush adviser Karl Rove and the firings of a number of U.S. attorneys during President Bush’s second term. Rove dismisses his critics in his Wall Street Journal column, saying the facts “show that my role in the U.S. attorneys issue was minimal and entirely proper.” He also brushes off allegations that he was behind the 2004 prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Far from admitting any mistakes, Rove suggests that the New York Times’ and Washington Post’s editorial boards should admit they got it wrong about him. “It would be the responsible thing to do,” Rove concluded.

Rove involved in firings of U.S. attorneys

Phillip Brownlee — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:36:39 +0000

Congressional testimony and e-mail messages released Tuesday showed that Bush administration political adviser Karl Rove and other senior aides played an early and active role in the 2006 firings of a number of federal prosecutors, the New York Times reported. “This basic truth can no longer be denied: Karl Rove and his cohorts at the Bush White House were the driving force behind several of these firings, which were done for improper reasons,” said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.

Hard not to investigate Cheney, torture

Phillip Brownlee — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:14:05 +0000

President Obama wants Congress and the country to focus on the future, not the past. But that’s getting tougher to do with the new allegation that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to withhold information from Congress.
CIA Director Leon Panetta reportedly told the Senate and House intelligence committees that the CIA withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program for eight years on direct order from Cheney. That could be a violation of a law requiring the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”
Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether the CIA tortured terrorism suspects, the Washington Post reported.

The ‘Daily Show’ defense against open records?

Phillip Brownlee — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:03:33 +0000

The Obama administration is supporting a goofy legal claim previously put forward by the Bush administration that it shouldn’t have to release statements that Dick Cheney made to a special prosecutor about outed spy Valerie Plame because it could become fodder for “The Daily Show.” Even the judge hearing the open records lawsuit couldn’t believe it.

Bush speaks

Rhonda Holman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:39:52 +0000

Even as he said he would not directly criticize his successor, President Bush told a business crowd in Erie, Pa., on Wednesday some things that sounded critical, including:

– “I know it’s going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we’re in.”

– “I’ll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don’t believe that — persuasion isn’t going to work. Therapy isn’t going to cause terrorists to change their mind.”

– “I worry about encouraging the government to replace the private sector when it comes to providing insurance for health care.”

– “When I look in the mirror, I say, ‘He did not sell his soul for short-term politics.’”

And when asked whether President Obama’s policies were “socialist,” Bush said: “We’ll see.”

Torturing the wrong person

Phillip Brownlee — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:01:30 +0000

Some Americans are willing to overlook or justify the torture of terrorism detainees. But what if we torture the wrong person? President Bush said in 2002 that Abu Zubaydah was “al-Qaida’s chief of operations.” The CIA held him in a secret prison and waterboarded him 83 times. But officials eventually determined that Zubaydah, though a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, was not a member of al-Qaida and not one of its leaders. According to a transcript of Zubaydah’s hearing that was released this week, he said that officials told him, “Sorry, we discover that you are not No. 3, not a partner, not even a fighter.”
In 2007, the Canadian government agreed to pay $9 million to a Canadian engineer who was seized by U.S. officials and taken to Syria, where he was tortured before officials realized they had the wrong man.

Several attorneys thought torture was legal

Phillip Brownlee — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:01:21 +0000

Three top former Justice Department attorneys have received most of the criticism for providing legal cover for torturing suspected terrorists. But e-mails and additional information show that other Justice Department attorneys agreed with them that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal, though several objected to their use, reported the New York Times. For example, James B. Comey (in photo), the former deputy attorney general who balked at the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program, concluded that the interrogation techniques were legal, though he said in e-mails that “some of this stuff was simply awful” and warned then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that “it would come back to haunt him and the department.”
The fact that several attorneys thought the techniques were legal makes it difficult to press ethics or legal charges against former Justice Department attorneys John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, as some have called for. Still, Brian Tamanaha, a St. John’s University law professor who has studied the interrogation memorandums, contends that concluding that waterboarding was legal required “extraordinary contortions in language and legal analysis.”

SEC policies thwarted investigations

Phillip Brownlee — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:00:11 +0000

Former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox “adopted practices that undermined the enforcement division’s efforts to investigate cases of corporate wrongdoing and punish those involved, according to interviews with 19 current and former SEC officials,” the Washington Post reported. For example, Cox required investigators to get the commission’s approval before subpoenaing documents, compelling interviews or approaching a company about a civil settlement. The cumbersome process resulted in long delays and had a chilling effect on investigations, according to current and former agency officials.

Paulson was worst ever, Tiahrt says

Phillip Brownlee — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:03:58 +0000

Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, thinks that former Bush Cabinet member Henry Paulson should go down as the worst Treasury secretary ever and that current Secretary Timothy Geithner is the next worst. Tiahrt told The Eagle editorial board that if the United States focuses on growing the economy from the ground up, rather than the government taking over much of the economy, the recession could be over in six months.

Cheney should take cues from Bush

Phillip Brownlee — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:59:12 +0000

“I want you to understand that anything I say is not to be critical of my successor,” President George W. Bush said last week. “There are plenty of critics in American society.” That, unfortunately, includes his former vice president, Dick Cheney, who should take cues from the civility and respect shown by Bush and President Clinton when they shared a stage in Toronto on Friday. Not only did the two presidents avoid criticizing President Obama, they defended each other’s actions on Rwanda and Darfur.

Cheney running in 2012?

Rhonda Holman — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:00:33 +0000

Maybe Dick Cheney is everywhere because he wants to be president after all. As a GOP leader, wrote Roger Simon of Politico, the 68-year-old former vice president “has many pluses. He is very, very good on TV. (People who don’t like what he says overlook how good he is at saying it.) He is calm, articulate and often courageous.” And, Simon added, “the Republicans need a person who knows how to attack. John McCain never seemed comfortable in that role.” He concluded: “Dick Cheney is the voice, the face, the spirit and the guts of the Republican Party today. He’s tanned, he’s rested and his approval ratings can only go up. The Republicans could do worse in 2012. And probably will.”

Already weary of Sebelius-speak

Rhonda Holman — Mon, 25 May 2009 11:01:24 +0000

Peggy Noonan is unimpressed by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ way with words, as exhibited by our former governor when asked about health care reform on MSNBC. Noonan wrote: “Ms. Sebelius began to answer in that dead and deadening governmental language that does not reveal or clarify but instead wraps legitimate queries in clouds of words and sends them on their way. I think I heard ‘accessing affordable quality health care,’ ‘single-payer plan vis-a-vis private multiparty insurers’ and ‘key component of quality improvement.’ In any case, she didn’t answer the question, which was a disappointment but not a surprise. No one answers the question anymore.” Casting beyond Sebelius-speak, Noonan said: “Do members of the administration speak obscurely because they can’t help themselves, or do they speak the way they speak because they really aren’t all that keen to have people understand them? Maybe they calculate that lack of clarity ensures maximum ability to maneuver. But maybe they should think less about maneuvering. They’re not helping the prevailing sense of national anxiety by speaking in a special lingo all their own.”

Cheney is really attacking Bush

Phillip Brownlee — Sun, 24 May 2009 11:03:25 +0000

“When (Dick) Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration,” wrote columnist David Brooks. Brooks noted how by 2005, the Bush administration had already backed away from or ended many of the policies that Cheney is criticizing President Obama about. For example, the CIA had stopped waterboarding and had rejected its legal justification while Bush was president, and Bush officials were working on trying to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. “The inauguration of Barack Obama has simply not marked a dramatic shift in the substance of American anti-terror policy,” Brooks said. “It has marked a shift in the public credibility of that policy.” Which is likely why Cheney is so worked up.

Torture objections aren’t ‘phony moralizing’

Phillip Brownlee — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:03:11 +0000

Former Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed many of the objections to his administration’s interrogation methods as “contrived indignation and phony moralizing.” His speech Thursday to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, was filled with false choices — such as how you either have to support the Bush administration “comprehensive strategy” in its entirety or you think that Sept. 11 was just a “one-off event.” And he claimed that to call some of the interrogation techniques “torture” is to “cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims.” Does Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has condemned waterboarding as torture, think terrorists are innocent victims? Cheney needs to go back to an undisclosed location.

Would Cheney have taken on McCain, too?

Rhonda Holman — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:03:01 +0000

MSNBC’s First Read blog asks: “Would Dick Cheney have spoken out as aggressively — or at all — on defending the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics (if) John McCain had won in November? Remember that McCain, a torture victim, spoke out against waterboarding and torture, and likely would have discontinued their practices as president.”
Meanwhile, many Republicans are concerned about — and Democrats are pleased with — Cheney’s high-profile defense of torture, the Washington Post reported. “Given that Dick Cheney is as popular as Britney Spears at a Sunday-school teacher convention, we hope he continues to be the face of the Republican Party,” said Hari Sevugan of the Democratic National Committee.

Attorneys tortured the law

Phillip Brownlee — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:59:48 +0000

“I believe it’s impossible that lawyers of such great talent and intelligence could have written these memos in the good faith belief that they accurately state the law,” David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University, testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on torture. He said Justice Department attorneys — such as John Yoo (in photo) — have a special responsibility not to “rubber stamp administration policies” or “provide cover for illegal actions.”

Torture was legal because Bush authorized it?

Phillip Brownlee — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:14:24 +0000

A fourth-grader at a Washington, D.C., school asked former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the weekend about the Bush administration’s torture policy. Rice responded that “the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country.”
But when pressed last week by two students at Stanford University, Rice claimed that waterboarding wasn’t torture because President Bush authorized it (see YouTube video). “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture,” she said.
That sounds a lot like President Nixon’s claim in defense of Watergate that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”