Edwards campaign accuses Hillary of swiping his health care proposals. That and more political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.
When it comes to Middle East policy, career U.S. intelligence officer Patrick Lang is hardly a slouch. He was in charge of the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s, and was later tapped to run the Pentagon’s international spying operations.
So when he sat down in 2001 with Doug Feith for a job interview, Feith probably should have been anxious to bring someone with Lang’s experience, stature, and expertise into the young Bush administration. Feith needed someone to run the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, and Lang had been recommended for the position. The interview didn’t go well. (via TP)
Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.
“He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me.
“He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’
“He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’
“And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’
“That’s too bad,” Feith said.
The audience howled.
“That was the end of the interview,” Lang said. “I’m not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out.”
Feith & Co. apparently realized that it’s best not to have too many qualified experts cluttering up the administration. Who knows what kind of reality-based policies they might have pursued?
Way back in February 2006, Barack Obama and John McCain got into quite a dust-up over a lobbying reform measure. McCain wanted a task force, Obama preferred using standing committees, and McCain lost his cool. (It’s a long story.)
Yesterday, as you’ve probably heard, their rivalry grew considerably more intense. McCain took a shot at Obama over his war-funding vote; Obama responded in kind. McCain took another shot, highlighting a typo in an Obama transcript that the media finds fascinating, followed by a cheap shot by a McCain campaign aide to the Politico.
Now, it’s possible this became fascinating to the political world because it was a slow news day, but I think we know better. We’re talking about two of the most powerful personalities in American politics, both of whom are top-tier candidates for the presidency, and both of whom seemed to revel in trading shots yesterday.
There are plenty of opinions available about which of the two came out on top as a result of the scuffle, but one thing I noticed yesterday, watching Obama deliver his response to McCain’s initial shot, was that he seemed to enjoy mixing it up a little bit. Obama is running a campaign in which he frequently talks about changing the way politics is done. His stump speech emphasizes above-the-fray concepts and bipartisanship. It’s led plenty of Democrats to wonder if Obama is aggressive enough to swing a few elbows when he has to.
Indeed, the conventional wisdom suggests one of the central questions about Obama is whether he can take a punch. My question has always been the opposite: can he deliver a punch?
That was what made yesterday’s back-and-forth interesting to me. Obama almost smiled calling McCain out, by name. It was one of the first, if not the very first, direct shots he took at the Republicans’ top tier. It was almost as if Obama was delivering an underlying message to Dems: “Don’t worry, I’m not nice all the time.”
Good for him.
At a White House press conference this week, NBC’s David Gregory asked the president a highly relevant question: “Can you explain why you believe you’re still a credible messenger on the war?” Bush didn’t hesitate. “I’m credible because I read the intelligence, David,” he said.
It’s one thing to read intelligence reports; it’s another to take the reports’ warnings seriously.
Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and “probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups” in the Muslim world.
The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be “a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.” The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was “largely bereft of the social underpinnings” to support democratic development.
More than four years after the March 2003 invasion, with Iraq still mired in violence and 150,000 U.S. troops there under continued attack from al-Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents, the intelligence warnings seem prophetic. Other predictions, however, were less than accurate. Intelligence analysts assessed that any postwar increase in terrorism would slowly subside in three to five years, and that Iraq’s vast oil reserves would quickly facilitate economic reconstruction.
In other words, the White House managed to reject what intelligence agencies got right and embrace what the agencies got wrong. How exquisitely true to form.
In a strong dissent, Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.), the committee’s vice chairman, said the inquiry itself was “a bad idea,” and called on the committee to stop asking questions about how badly the administration screwed up before and start focusing on “the myriad of threats we face today.”
Of course. Whatâs done is done; letâs not dwell on who cherry-picked what in order to kill whom. Please. Accountability demands answers. Even more importantly, the same White House that made these tragic mistakes before is still at it. If we don’t take note of how tragically wrong the Bush gang was in 2003, some may forget why they lack credibility in 2007.
Following up on an earlier post for a moment, it may seem odd that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is just now, in mid-2007, producing a report on the White House ignoring warnings about Iraq in 2003. The war is already in its fifth year. Where has this information been? And wouldn’t it have been a lot useful before, say, before the 2004 presidential election?
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane. The Senate Intelligence Committee began a comprehensive investigation on the use (misuse) of pre-war intelligence towards the end of 2003. Initially, the committee was prepared to release one authoritative document on the intelligence, what it said, and how it was handled.
With the 2004 presidential election looming, and Bush’s chances for a second term in doubt, then-Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) decided to split the report in two — Phase I would document how wrong the intelligence community was (which was released quickly), while Phase II would report on how the White House used/misused/abused the available information.
And that’s when the stonewalling began. First Roberts said publicly that he’d “try” to have Phase II available to the public before the 2004 election. He didn’t. Roberts then gave his word, in writing, that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee would have a draft report on controversial “public statements” from administration officials. That didn’t happen either. Then Roberts indicated that he might just give up on the second part of the investigation altogether, because, he argued, there was nothing left to learn.
Under pressure to release Phase II before the 2006 elections, Roberts agreed to release subparts of the report, which documented what Ahmed Chalabi and other well-paid Iraqi exiles told the administration before the invasion, but nothing about the White House’s mistakes.
In January 2007, after the Senate changed hands, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) agreed that it was finally time to take this investigation seriously.
As for why Rockefeller and committee Dems decided to release the report on a Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend … well, I can’t figure that one out.
Last week, we learned that prosecutor purge scandal had wreaked so much havoc at the Justice Department that no one wants to apply to replace Paul McNulty as the Deputy Attorney General. (“I’d rather trade places with Jose Padilla,” joked Viet Dinh, a former senior Justice official under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.)
This week, we learn that no one wants to be a Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney, either.
The Bush administration’s decision to fire nine U.S. attorneys last year has created a new problem for the White House: The controversy appears to be discouraging applications for some of the 22 prosecutor posts that President Bush needs to fill. […]
In Florida, the panel that’s evaluating candidates and making recommendations to the White House has received only two applicants for the vacancy left by U.S. Attorney Paul Perez in Tampa – even after it extended the May 3 deadline to apply. Perez, who resigned in March, left for a private-sector job. He’s said that he wasn’t forced out.
“I personally was disappointed we didn’t have more,” said Michael J. Grindstaff, the chairman of the Florida Federal Judicial Nominating Commission. “I was wondering if there was a way to attract more applicants.”
Some other states where Congress is investigating prosecutors’ ousters also have gotten fewer responses than the administration hoped for.
Asked for a response to the problem, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, “It has nothing to do with recent events.”
I didn’t see Fratto make the comment, but one wonders if he was able to say it with a straight face.
Dick Cheney, yesterday, at the United States Military Academy Commencement at West Point:
“As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.”
At the risk of sounding picky, is it too much to ask the Vice President to refer to the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States as good things? Perhaps protections that he’s proud of?
A nice summary of the White House’s Iraq reasoning from Maureen Dowd:
The president said an intelligence report (which turned out to be two years old) showed that Osama had been trying to send Qaeda terrorists in Iraq to attack America. So clearly, Osama is capable of multitasking: Order the killers in Iraq to go after American soldiers there and American civilians here. There AND here. Get it, W.?
The president is on a continuous loop of sophistry: We have to push on in Iraq because Al Qaeda is there, even though Al Qaeda is there because we pushed into Iraq. Our troops have to keep dying there because our troops have been dying there. We have to stay so the enemy doesnât know weâre leaving. Osama hasnât been found because heâs hiding.
The terrorists moved into George Bushâs Iraq, not Saddam Husseinâs. W.âs ranting about Al Qaeda there is like planting fleurs du mal and then complaining your garden is toxic.
There are a lot of interesting insights in Michael Isikoff’s and Evan Thomas’ Newsweek piece on what they call “The Gonzales Mess,” but the follow-up to James Comey’s hospital-room story stood out.
Back at the Justice Department, there is an equally extraordinary scene. Appalled by the White House’s heavy-handed attempt to coerce the gravely ill attorney general, virtually the entire top leadership of the Justice Department is threatening to resign. The group includes the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum and the chief of the Criminal Division, Chris Wray. Some of them gather in the conference room of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who describes Ashcroft’s bravely turning away the president’s men from his hospital bed. The mood that night in the conference room was tense — and sober.
“This was a showdown,” says a former senior Justice Department official who was there. “Everybody understood the choice they were making and the gravity of the situation. Everybody knew what the stakes were.” A different source estimated that as many as 30 top DOJ officials would have resigned.
I seem to recall Alberto Gonzales testifying under oath that wasn’t any “serious disagreement about the program” at the Justice Department. Is that still operative?
The Washington Post editorial board apparently believes Tom DeLay’s style of ruthless corruption is still around — because Jack Murtha picked up where “The Hammer” left off.
The action unfolded on the Republican side of the House floor May 17. That’s where Mr. Murtha, chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, laced into Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) for trying to stop a $23 million earmark for a drug intelligence center in Mr. Murtha’s district. According to Mr. Rogers, Mr. Murtha threatened him in an explosive tirade complete with a slew of F-bombs and a barnyard expletive here and there. The ultimate Murtha message: “You will not get any earmarks now and forever.” As a result, Mr. Rogers tried to get the BMOC of House Democrats reprimanded for such bald intimidation. That bid, unfortunately but not surprisingly, failed Tuesday. […]
Camp Murtha wasn’t inclined to respond to our inquiries about the Rogers confrontation. “He’s just not going to comment on it,” a spokesman said. But Mr. Murtha did reach out to Mr. Rogers on Wednesday. In a handwritten note, Mr. Murtha said he was sorry if his outburst offended Mr. Rogers.
For this incident, the Post describes Murtha as “Mr. Delay’s Democratic Party pork-barrel twin.”
To be sure, Murtha’s earmark threat was inappropriate, and he’s apologized. That style of politics has been common on the Hill for, say, a couple of centuries now, but the new Dem majority vowed to change the process.
But there’s a key detail the Post editorial neglected to mention — Murtha’s threat was entirely hollow. As Dana Milbank explained this week, “By tacit agreement between the parties, Murtha controls only the Democratic earmarks and lets the ranking Republican on the committee, Bill Young of Florida, handle GOP earmarks.” Murtha wasn’t in a position to punish Rogers, even if he wanted to.
When DeLay threatened a House colleague, he or she knew DeLay would follow through. Murtha’s threat was largely meaningless.
Comparing anyone to DeLay is a pretty low blow, but in Murtha’s case, it’s pretty silly.