1 Boring Old Man

South Carolina: Sanford Is Away, With His Wife

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 15, 2009

Gov. Mark Sanford headed out of state for personal time with his wife, as the two try to reconcile, and skipped a meeting with a top economic adviser ahead of what is expected to be more bad economic news, including rising unemployment. A spokesman for Mr. Sanford, Joel Sawyer, refused to say where the Sanfords were going or how they were getting there, but said they would not be traveling with their four sons. Mr. Sanford is in the midst of trying to reconcile with his wife, Jenny Sanford, after a tearful confession of an affair with an Argentine woman, María Belén Chapur. Mr. Sawyer said meetings skipped this week would be rescheduled.

A few weeks ago, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford needed to take some personal time. Seems like the job was getting to him. So he took off to visit his girlfriend/soulmate in Argentina, while Jenny and the boys managed hearth and home on Sullivan’s Island on the coast. Flash to the present, after a tough couple of weeks, Governor Sanford has decided to take some personal time. So he’s off to an undisclosed location. What’s different? This time he took a woman with him, his wife Jenny, while his soulmate in Argentina, María Belén Chapur, manages hearth and home [and groceries] in Buenos Aires.

I’m thinking that being one of the ‘chosen’ like King David, must be hard work. South Carolina is third hardest hit by the recession with 12% unemployment. I wonder what kind of shape Israel was in back in the days when King David was up on the roof watching the ladies bathe and first spied Bathsheba?

The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You’ve covered your ass, now." Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton [now the State Department’s counterterrorism chief], brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan’s army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton’s message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful."

487 Days At Camp David For Bush
CBS News
Posted by Brian Montopoli
January 16, 2009

George W. Bush is today making his final visit to Camp David as president.

He will likely miss the place: According to CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller, today’s trip marks Mr. Bush’s 149th visit to the presidential retreat. The planned three-day stay, during which the president is being joined by family and former and current aides, will bring his total time spent at Camp David to all or part of 487 days.

Yes, that’s 487 days. And Camp David is not even where the president has spent the most time when not at the White House: Knoller reports that Mr. Bush has made 77 visits to his ranch in Crawford during his presidency, and spent all or part of 490 days there.

I don’t really begrudge President Bush or Governor Sanford having a lot of personal time. Public Office is a bit like being a sole practitioner Physician – always on call. Actually, it’s worse because there are so many evening functions. But I’ll hold my point. These people take their vacations when there’s desperate work to be done. Governor Sanford is staying in office as he says to "win back the trust of the people of South Carolina" and to work out his personal issues. Meanwhile, he fought to turn down the Stimulus money to remain true to his Conservative Principles. Using the Governorship of a floundering State as a Marital Therapy experience takes the cake for misguided thinking in office – right up there with a President looking at an urgent comminication of an impending terrorist attack as a C.Y.A. maneuver for an aide.

CIA Assassin Plan Was Set to Go Active
Panetta Terminated Secret Anti-Terror Program After Learning of Training Proposals
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post
July 16, 2009

^{CIA officials were proposing to activate a plan to train anti-terrorist assassination teams overseas when agency managers brought the secret program to the attention of CIA Director Leon Panetta last month, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, which had been on the agency’s backburner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a "somewhat more operational phase." Shortly after learning of the plan, CIA Director Leon Panetta terminated the program and then went to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers, who had been kept in the dark since 2001.}

^{The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, yesterday defended Panetta’s decision to cancel the program, which he said had raised serious questions among intelligence officials about its "effectiveness, maturity and the level of control." But Blair broke with some Democrats in Congress by asserting that the CIA did not violate the law when it failed to inform lawmakers about the secret program until last month. Blair said agency officials may not have been required to notify Congress about the program, though he believes they should have done so…}

^{The plan to deploy small teams of assassins grew out of the CIA’s early efforts to battle al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A secret document known as a "presidential finding" was signed by then-President George W. Bush that same month, granting the agency broad authority to use deadly force against bin Laden as well as other senior members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency’s actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive…}

^{Some U.S. officials familiar with the program say it never progressed beyond concepts and feasibility studies, but others described more advanced preparations, including selection of teams and limited training. All of the attempts ultimately had to be scrapped, often because of logistical difficulties or because the risks were deemed too great, said several officials who served in counterterrorism units or had access to top-secret files…}

^{Despite the new activity surrounding the program, there were "concerns about its feasibility," the official said. "If the country ever needs a capability like this going forward, smart minds will figure out a better way to do it." Blair said that Panetta told him in advance of his decision to terminate the program, and that he supported the action as well as the decision to inform Congress. "He felt it was urgent and appropriate to brief the Hill," Blair said. "You can make a judgment call on whether a briefing was necessary. We were on the side of ‘Let’s do it.’ We’re trying to reset our relations with Congress"…}

^{"This particular program didn’t make the cut," he said. "But it is absolutely not true that we are doing less against al-Qaeda. Our primary criterion is effectiveness, and we will continue to do things that we think are effective to make terrorist lives miserable, and hopefully, short"…}

I’ve been thinking a lot about how this question about what to do about the conduct of the Bush Administration. I know I don’t want to ignore it. It was so far off the mark that it seems to me it would be like having a Commercial Airliner that barely made it to the ground after innumerable systems failed on a long flight, then loading it up with passengers for the next destination. I say put it in the hanger for a thorough overhaul. So, looking forward because we’ve got other problems to deal with? No thanks.

But the push for investigations, truth commissions, legal cases has broken down along party lines. Conservative Republicans say move ahead. Liberal Democrats and Progressives clamor for  a thorough retrospective. That’s unfortunate, because it intensifies the charge of partisanism, or revenge. Not that partisanism or revenge are necessarily horrible things, but there are better non-emotional reasons for wanting an in depth retrospective.

– that the real force behind American Foreign Policy in the Invasion of Iraq was Commerce – the Oil Trade. Cheney said it in 1998:

^{I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we have to choose between "commercial" interests and other interests that the United States might have in a particular country or region around the world. Oftentimes the absolute best way to advance human rights and the cause of freedom or the development of democratic institutions is through the active involvement of American businesses. Investment and trade can oftentimes do more to open up a society and to create opportunity for a society’s citizens than reams of diplomatic cables from our State Department.}

– that the Geneva Conventions are optional – habaes corpus, due process, humane treatment.
– that American Foreign Policy involves: pre-emptive strikes without provocation, unilateral military action, strength without equal, ‘evangelical’ democracy.
– that the U.N. is only important when it follows our interests.
– that we have a "unitary executive" – an imperial presidency.
– that the President can invalidate legislation with Signing Statements.
– that secrecy can be used to hide behind rather than only for National security.
– that the DoJ is a tool of the Executive Branch.
– that the Vice President in outside the Executive Branch.

These things and others have been part of our government for eight years. I see no way to repudiate them definitively than by taking action in hearings and in the courts. Otherwise, they become precedents. There’s nothing Conservative or Liberal about these points, nothing Republican or Democrat about them either. These are American points.

The “Other Intelligence Activities”
By: emptywheel
July 15, 2009

• The O.I.A. ["Other Intelligence Activities"] included massive data-mining.
• The showdown at the hospital [Comey versus Gonzales] was about these O.I.A.s.

Sec. 8131:
[snip]
(b) None of the funds provided for Processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence shall be available for deployment or implementation except for:
(1) lawful military operations of the United States conducted outside the United States; or
(2) lawful foreign intelligence activities conducted wholly overseas, or wholly against non-United States citizens.

• This was the Administration’s M.O., finding sleazy ways around the Law.
• Bush tacked Signing Statements onto any Congressional Bill that attempted to limit him in any way. This was Cheney’s and Addington’s abiding hobby – reading every Congressional Act to find evidence of any attempt to limit the King[s], and blocking it with a Signing Statement.

• The DoJ [Comey and Goldsmith] did not recognize the validity of these Signing Statements.
• Even the Bush Administration was afraid to rely on these absurd Signing Statements, and continued trying to get DoJ approval.

…Credible or not [coming from a guy who approved the program on the same day he was read into it], Ashcroft pointed to Yoo’s inaccurate description of these OIA when he explained why he had authorized the program in the past.

In a May 20, 2004 memorandum, Ashcroft wrote that it was not until Philbin and later Goldsmith explained to him that aspects of the NSA’s Other Intelligence Activities were not accurately described in the prior Authorizations that he realized that he had been certifying the Authorizations prior to March 2004 based on a misimpression of those activities.

So why didn’t Yoo include these activities in his original opinions? We know that the Administration briefed Congress – at least partly – on the data mining aspects of the program; presumably, that’s why Jello Jay invoked TIA when he wrote his letter to Cheney. Did the Gang of Four get a full briefing on July 17, 2003, on the eve of defunding any data mining?

Or did Yoo – and the rest of the Administration – leave Congress and much of DOJ in the dark about the extent to which they were data mining the communications of American people?

Modified Limited Hang-Out on Cheney’s Murder Inc.
at-Largely
by Larisa Alexandrovna
July 14, 2009

…

Modified Limited Hang-Out

Is a similar type of deception or partial deception, but slightly different. Here is how the San Francisco Chronicle describes a modified limited hang-out:

^{"That was the game plan; that was the playbook. The White House would admit to only those things that were already known; it would give ground with great reluctance and retrench rapidly; it would above all things protect the guy at the top from any whisper of scandal."}

I would go a step further to something I call it intelligence laundry. Here is an example of a modified limited hang-out – or intel laundry:

^{A former Vice President (really President) – we will call him Mr. Smith – gets wind that a reporter will soon be coming out with a book in which it is alleged that Smith ran a death squad, which operated in several countries, including our own. Smith knows that he will have to admit to some of this, because the reporter has managed to get some incriminating information. Smith decides that he will get ahead of this story by controlling it. Smith’s version will be that he had initiated a program to assassinate ONLY the really bad guys plotting to kill us. But, he decided against activating the program because it was illegal and he was having second thoughts. In Smith’s version of the story, it will be admitted that Smith did in fact mislead Congress and ordered others to do so, but ONLY because the program was never activated.}
^{Smith will then have a few loyal pals still active in government launder this version of events by planting the story in the press. Smith won’t comment for the story, but Smith’s daughter will do the TV rounds and point to the article(s) and say see, it never operated and if it had it would have only gone after the really evil guys who tried to blow up America.}

That is the reason the current version of Cheney’s Murder Inc., makes no sense. Because it is not true.

I love smart Russian poet expatriot bloggers, particularly when they agree with me. What she’s saying is the very fish we’ve all been smelling. The only question is whether Cheney is getting in front of a story of another real black-op like torturing already compliant witnesses to get them to confirm lies so he can start an illegal war, or whether this whole recent story is much ado about nothing – a smoke screen. Listening to Liz Cheney, I’m suspecting the latter, but always open to a Dick Cheney curve-ball.

^{From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an "iron curtain" has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.}

In the end, the Iron Curtain worked by blanking out and controlling information. It worked for a while, but then it began to leak, and finally down it came with a thud. I think of the early Bush Administration in the same way – they controlled what we knew, and for inapparent reasons, our information services [television, the newspapers] went along with it. When I read back over the 2001-2002 articles in the paper or the transcripts of "Meet the Press," I’m kind of astonished at the kind of things our leaders said. It’s very obviously misinformation – an American version Pravda of sorts:

^{MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the issue of Iraq. You have said that it poses a mortal threat to the United States. How? Define mortal threat.}

^{VICE PRES. CHENEY: You know, this will take some time, but it’s important for us, as I mentioned earlier, to remember that the world has changed. That prior to 9/11, we really focused our defense capabilities on the possibility, for example, during the Cold War the Soviet Union attacking, and we worked with strategies of deterrents and containment. If we could hold at risk the targets the Soviet Union cared about, then they wouldn’t attack us. That strategy, obviously, worked. What we found on September 11 is that the danger now is an attack that’s launched from within the United States itself, not from some foreign territory, as happened with respect to the hijackers on 9/11. Also that, in this particular case, it was backed up by a cell, terrorist cell, operating in Hamburg, Germany. You have to completely recalibrate your thinking in terms of how you deal with that. Now, if you start with that as background, then you deal with Saddam Hussein and his 11 years, now, since 1991, since the end of the war, his refusal to comply with the U.N. Security Council resolutions. If you look at the extent to which he has aggressively sought to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, over the years, the fact that he has previously used them-he used chemical weapons both against the Kurds and against the Iranians during the 1980s-the fact that he has twice invaded his neighbors. He’s launched ballistic missiles against four of his neighbors over the years. There’s a pattern and a track record there that one has to be concerned about.}

^{Now, the more recent developments have to do with our now being able to conclude, based on intelligence that’s becoming available, some of it has been made public, more of it hopefully will be, that he has indeed stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons, that he has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon, that there are efforts under way inside Iraq to significantly expand his capability. There are other elements that need to be considered here. For some 10 or 11 years now, the international community has attempted to deal with this, but it’s been generally ineffective.}

^{The sanctions are breaking down. The willingness of nations to trade with Saddam Hussein is increased. He’s also sitting on top of about 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves and generating enough illicit oil revenue now on the sides that he’s got a lot of money to invest in developing these kinds of programs. So we find ourselves, on the one hand, with the demonstrated greater vulnerability of September 11; and, on the other hand, with the very clear evidence that this is a man who is resuming all of those programs that the U.N. Security Council tried to get him to forgo some 10 or 11 years ago. And increasingly we believe that the United States may well become the target of those activities.}

^{MR. RUSSERT: What, specifically, has he obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program?}

^{VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, in the nuclear weapons arena, you’ve got sort of three key elements that you need to acquire. You need the technical expertise. You need to have a group of scientists and technicians, engineers, who know how to put together the infrastructure and to build a weapon. He’s got that. He had it because of his program that was there previously, which I’ll come back and talk about in a minute, but we know he’s been working for 20 years trying to acquire this capability. He’s got a well-established scientifically, technically competent crew to do it.}

^{Secondly, you need a weapons design. One of the toughest parts about building a nuclear weapon is knowing how to do it. And they’ve got that. He had it back prior to the Gulf War. We know from things that were uncovered during the course of the inspections back in the early ’90s that he did, in fact, have at least two designs for nuclear weapons.}

^{The third thing you need is fissile material, weapons-grade material. Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. And what we’ve seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.}

^{MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.}

^{VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There’s a story in The New York Times this morning-this is-I don’t-and I want to attribute The Times. I don’t want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it’s now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb. This is a technology he was working on back, say, before the Gulf War. And one of the reasons it’s of concern, Tim, is, you know, we know about a particular shipment. We’ve intercepted that. We don’t know what else-what other avenues he may be taking out there, what he may have already acquired. We do know he’s had four years without any inspections at all in Iraq to develop that capability.}

That 2002 Cheney interview hasn’t got one certified fact in it anywhere. If anything, it’s a study in inneundo and outright lying. The Aluminum Tubes story Cheney is alluding to is one he leaked himself, or had leaked by his trusty sidekick. So, leak the Tubes story, then refer to it as an independent confirmation. It’s all staged, all lies, all the time. It’s not exactly an Iron Curtain like in the days of Pravda and the KGB. It’s more like a Puppet Theater, where the Puppets don’t exactly know they are Puppets. I expect it takes a lot of skill to bring off such a thing, but since we know of so many examples, I guess we have to marvel at their skills.

• Jesus plus nothing:
• Q&A with Jeffrey Sharlet
• The Family
• shouting out while watching is allowed…
• the real story…
• The Family
• Youth with a Mission
• National Prayer Breakfast

While this brand of Christianity [I call Christian Jihadists] is not all Christians, there is no apparent force within Christianity [as we once knew it] to counter these fundamentalist trends. Somehow, the Republican Party was able to mobilize these forces in 2000 to elect George W. Bush. It’s hard for me to understand why they supported him in 2000, or 2004, or his followers in 2008. But the Ensign and Sanford Sexcapades have called our attention to something else, though it’s not exactly clear what it really is. Even with all of the reports in our news media on "C Street," "Ivanwald," "The Cedars," "Youth with a Mission," "The National Prayer Breakfast," it remains cloaked in mystery. All of this seems to go back to a preacher named Abraham Vereide in Seattle who founded something called The Family in 1935 that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast and prayer groups for Congressmen. They have a place called The Cedars [Ivanwald] on the Potomac and apparently operate the C Street House [owned by Youth with a Mission].

This is different from the Religious Right that we know, but even more ominous because of its secret connection to many of our Congressmen and Leaders. What are these people about? Who is Doug Coe, their leader? What does he have in mind? What does he preach? Right now, the hottest news celebrity is Jeffrey Sharlet, an editor at Harpers who wrote several articles in his Magazine and a book [The Family] after living at The Cedars for a time. I expect we’re going to hear a lot about this organization[s] in the coming days. It has to do with a peculiar view of the teachings of Jesus – something about the leaders being chosen to lead, something about the wealthy, something about a theocracy. I don’t yet get it [I expect because it’s cloaked in secrecy and anonymnity], but I have a creepy feeling when I read anything about it. An example:

^{A few weeks into my stay, David Coe, Doug’s son, dropped by Ivanwald. My brothers and I assembled in the living room, where David had draped his tall frame over a burgundy leather recliner like a frat boy, one leg hanging over a padded arm.}

^{“You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world.” He was in his late forties, with dark, gray-flecked hair, an olive complexion, teeth like a slab of white marble, dark eyes so big they didn’t need to move to take in the room. We sat around him in a rough circle, on couches and chairs, as the afternoon light slanted through the wooden blinds onto a wall adorned with a giant tapestry of the Last Supper. Rafael, a wealthy Ecuadoran, had a hard time with English, and he didn’t understand what David had said. He stared, lips parted in puzzlement. David seemed to like that. He stared back, holding Raf’s gaze like it was a pretty thing he’d found on the ground. “You have very intense eyes,” David said.}

^{“Thank you,” Raf mumbled.}

^{“Hey,” David said, “let’s talk about the Old Testament.” His voice was like a river that’s smooth on the surface but swirling beneath. “Who” — he paused — “would you say are its good guys?”}

^{“Noah,” suggested Ruggi, a shaggy-haired guy from Kentucky with a silver loop on the upper ridge of his right ear.}

^{“Moses,” offered Josh, a lean man from Atlanta more interested in serving Jesus than his father’s small empire of shower door manufacturing.}

^{“David,” Beau volunteered.}

^{“King David,” David Coe said. “That’s a good one. David. Hey. What would you say made King David a good guy?” He giggled, not from nervousness but from barely containable delight.}

^{“Faith?” Beau said. “His faith was so strong?”}

^{“Yeah.” David nodded as if he hadn’t heard that before. “Hey, you know what’s interesting about King David?” From the blank stares of the others, I could see that they did not. Many didn’t even carry a full Bible, preferring a slim volume of New Testament Gospels and Epistles and Old Testament Psalms, respected but seldom read. Others had the whole book, but the gold gilt on the pages of the first two-thirds remained undisturbed. “King David,” David Coe went on, “liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here’s this guy who slept with another man’s wife — Bathsheba, right? — and then basically murdered her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.” David shook his head. “I mean, Jimminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What,” he said, “is that all about?”}

^{“Is it because he tried?” asked Bengt. “He wanted to do the right thing?” Bengt knew the Bible, Old Testament and New, better than any of the others, but he offered his answer with a question mark on the end. Bengt was dutiful in checking his worst sin, his fierce pride, and he frequently turned his certainties into questions.}

^{“That’s nice, Bengt,” David said. “But it isn’t the answer. Anyone else?”}

^{“Because he was chosen,” I said. For the first time David looked my way.}

^{“Yes,” he said, smiling. “Chosen. Interesting set of rules, isn’t it?” He turned to Beau. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”}

^{Beau, given to bellowing Ivanwald’s daily call to sports like a bull elephant, shrank into the cushions. “Probably that I’m pretty bad?”}

^{“No, Beau.” David’s voice was kind. “I wouldn’t.” He drew Beau back into the circle with a stare that seemed to have its own gravitational pull. Beau nodded, brow furrowed, as if in the presence of something profound. “Because,” David continued, “I’m not here to judge you. That’s not my job. I’m here for only one thing. Do you know what that is?”}

^{Understanding blossomed in Beau’s eyes. “Jesus?” he said. David smiled and winked. “Hey,” he said. “Did you guys see Toy Story?” Half the room had. “Remember how there was a toy cowboy, Woody? And then the boy who owns Woody gets a new toy, a spaceman? Only the toy spaceman thinks he’s real. Thinks he’s a real spaceman, and he’s got to figure out what he’s doing on this strange planet. So what does Woody say to him? He says, ‘You’re just a toy.’ ” David sat quietly, waiting for us to absorb this. “Just a toy. We’re not really spacemen. We’re just toys. Created for God. For His plea sure, nothing else. Just a toy. Period.”}

^{He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered” — David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere — “nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”}

^{Genghis Khan’s genius, David went on, lay in his understanding that there could be only one king. When Genghis entered a defeated city, he would call in the local headman. Conversion to the Khan’s cause was not an option, as Genghis was uninterested in halfhearted deputies. Instead, said David, Genghis would have the man stuffed into a crate, and over the crate’s surface would be spread a tablecloth, on which a wonderful meal would be arrayed.}

^{“And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn’t even hear the man’s screams.” David stood on the couch, a finger in the air. “Do you know what that means?”}

^{To their credit, my brothers did not. Perhaps on account of my earlier insight, David turned to me. “I think so,” I said. “Out with the old, in with the new.”}

^{Yes, he nodded. “Christ’s parable of the wineskins. You can’t pour new into old.” One day, he continued, some monks from Europe show up in Genghis Khan’s court. Genghis welcomes them in the name of God. Says that in truth, they worship the same great Lord. Then why, the monks ask, must he conquer the world? “I don’t ask,” says Genghis. “I submit.”}

^{David returned to his chair. “We elect our leaders,” he said. “Jesus elects his.”}

^{He reached over and squeezed the arm of Pavel. “Isn’t that great?” David said. “That’s the way everything in life happens. If you’re a person known to be around Jesus, you can go and do anything. And that’s who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to know the value of Jesus, you’re going to know the people who rule the world. It’s about vision. Get your vision straight, then relate. Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that but of the world.” Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan’s vast, reclaimable empire.}

Jeff Sharlet July 14th, 2009 at 4:45 pm … The Family helped found Officers Christian Fellowship, the group I wrote about in my May Harper’s cover story that declares the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “spiritual war of the highest magnitude” and has 15,000 military officers in its ranks. Also: Campus Crusade, Young Life, Promise Keepers, and a whole host of smaller outfits.

Jeff Sharlet July 14th, 2009 at 6:46 pm … I came across what looked like some Mike Pence connections but didn’t follow up for the book. That’s worth investigating. Of course, the easiest way to start is to ask him — that’s how I learned of Rep. Frank Wolf’s involvement, for instance. As for connections to youth ministries: galore. The House on C Street is actually owned by Youth With a Mission. The Family has long looked at Young Life, a mostly innocuous outfit, as something akin to a farm team. Likewise the Navigators, from whence the current leader, Doug Coe, came. Bill Bright and Campus Crusade were helped out in the early days by the Family and repaid the favor many times over during the last couple decades.

Don’t Shoot
Newsweek
By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff
July 14, 2009

A ferocious dispute between the CIA and congressional Democrats centers on an ultrasecret effort launched by agency officials after 9/11 to draw up plans to hunt down and kill terrorists using commando teams similar to those deployed by Israel after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, according to a former senior U.S. official.

Officials of the CIA’s undercover spying branch, then known as the Directorate of Operations, on and off over the last several years repeatedly floated and revised plans for such operations, which would involve sending squads of operatives overseas, sometimes into friendly countries, to track and assassinate Al Qaeda leaders, much the same way Israeli Mossad agents sent assassins to Europe to kill men they believed responsible for murdering Israeli Olympic athletes, the former official said. But several former and current officials said the highly classified plans, which last week provoked bitter argument between Congress and the CIA, never became "fully operational," and CIA Director Leon Panetta put an end to the program in June.

According to two former officials—who, like others quoted in this story, asked for anonymity to speak about sensitive matters—shortly after 9/11, the Bush White House consulted with the Directorate of Operations about expanding the agency’s powers to track or lure terrorists. Top CIA officials ultimately concluded the program posed an unacceptable risk of failure or exposure, according to another former official. As a result, the initial plans proposed by officers of the Directorate of Operations—now known as the National Clandestine Service—were put on hold by CIA Director George Tenet before he left office in 2004, former officials said. Tenet’s two successors, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, kept the plans in the deep freeze. But a former official said that until Panetta killed the program outright last month, the CIA never totally abandoned the plans for kill teams; agency personnel believed it was important to have them ready as an option for the president to use, and they continued to try to refine the idea…

So the pendulum swings from day to day – will it be another horrible secret program like torture or domestic communications data-mining or will it turn out to be an understandable response to the 9/11 massacre and al Qaeda threat [C.I.A. business as usual]. This article says it’s the latter. The last one I reported suggested the former.

It brings up a point. I doubt that any of us see Cheney as an evil character who only does bad things. That’s not the issue. If this program is as it’s described in this article, they should’ve told Congress. But it’s only icing on the cake compared to the other abuses of secrecy. The bigees are falsifying the prewar intelligence, torturing people to get confirmation of a lie, invading a country under false pretenses, suspending the Geneva Conventions, ignoring the Legislative Branch, marginalizing the Military Command, crippling the State Department, invading the Department of Justice, sending John [f—–g] Bolton to the U.N. – stuff like that. Emulating the Israeli hit squads to get al Qaeda isn’t what we’re mad about.

CIA Vet: Agency Doesn’t Need Secret Program To Target al Qaeda
TPMmuckracker
By Zachary Roth
July 13, 2009

Earlier today, we raised a few questions about the notion that the secret CIA program that Dick Cheney reportedly withheld from Congress concerned an effort to kill or capture al Qaeda leaders. And now a top counter-terror expert is doing the same. Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we’ve been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization.

Since the war on terror began, said Cannistraro, the CIA has routinely conducted operations targeting top Qaeda leaders. "The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time," said Cannistraro, explaining that there’s no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife. Cannistraro said the Defense Department has also conducted such targeted efforts, under an initiative that New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh has written about… The Rumsfeld initiative seems to be the subject of this report from a few hours ago in The Guardian…

But Cannistraro cautioned that that DOD program has nothing to do with the secret, unidentified CIA program which Cheney is said to have hid from Congress, and which CIA director Leon Panetta ended last month. As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn’t acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro…

The Choices That Closed a Window Into Afghanistan
New York Times
MICHIKO KAKUTANI
July 13, 2009
Book Review of:
IN THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES: America’s War in Afghanistan
By Seth G. Jones

It’s hard for the reader to finish this volume without being struck by the remarkable parallels between the American failure to prevent a re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and its failure to prevent the emergence of an insurgency in Iraq. In both cases the determination of Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon to use a smaller deployment than others recommended [what Mr. Jones calls a “light footprint”] and to attempt to do reconstruction on the cheap resulted in a lack of sufficient troops and resources to maintain law and order and to provide the local population with basic services like electricity. In both cases these failures led to residents’ growing dissatisfaction with the United States-backed government and a tilt toward the insurgents, who rushed to fill the power vacuum.

Cobra II: PBS Interview with Gordon and Trainor
By Matt Armstrong
April 14, 2006

MARGARET WARNER: Now, the debate about troop levels is an old one. But you all also have some new information on that score, which was that it wasn’t just Army chief of staff, General Shinseki who had said we’re going to need a more robust force, but that there were a lot of military commanders who in the planning phase were saying you’re going to need more.

MICHAEL GORDON: The central point that General Shinseki made in congressional testimony in response to a question was that the force you need to control the country after the regime falls is larger than the force you need to destroy the regime.

And what we’ve discovered in this book is this was by no means his unique assessment, number one. There was an Army General, Steve Hawkins  who worked on planning issues for the land war command, who the day before General Shinseki testified told him that his internal estimate was that you could need in excess of 300,000 forces to control the country.

MICHAEL GORDON: Also, there was a Marine officer on the staff of the National Security Council who put together a study of the number of forces that have typically been required for postwar situations. And he looked at Bosnia, and he looked at a whole host of them. And he said based on past experience, he took the Balkans, for example, as your model. How many would we need in Iraq? And what he discovered is you need 300,000 to 400,000…

The decision to invade Iraq was ill considered, beside being based on deceit. The deployment in Iraq was mismanaged and detracted from our "real war" in Afghanistan. The conduct of both wars was inept. The issue is why were they able to garner so much power to do things so badly. The only battle they won was their fight for control of our government in order to lead us down their road to failure.

The reason to exhume their methodology is clear. It’s the same reasons doctors push for autopsies in difficult cases – to find out what they missed and what went wrong, in order to learn from bad experience so as not to make the same mistakes. Most physicians involved in critical care have made fatal mistakes – myself included [and the ones that sting the most are the ones where I didn’t get outside help when I needed it]. We physicians have a rule, "Do no harm." It’s an impossible rule, but it’s a worthy goal. When we fail, it’s incumbant on us to look at why – in detail. When a country makes a mistake this large, we need the autopsy to look at our failure squarely in the eye. It’s not just about the Bush Administration. It’s about the American people and the American system that allowed this to happen…

C.I.A. Had Plan to Assassinate Qaeda Leaders
New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE
July 13, 2009

WASHINGTON — Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials. The plans remained vague and were never carried out, the officials said, and Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, canceled the program last month.

Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles. How could the role of the United States be masked? Should allies be informed and might they block the access of the C.I.A. teams to their targets? What if American officers or their foreign surrogates were caught in the midst of an operation? Would such activities violate international law or American restrictions on assassinations overseas?

Yet year after year, according to officials briefed on the program, the plans were never completely shelved because the Bush administration sought an alternative to killing terror suspects with missiles fired from drone aircraft or seizing them overseas and imprisoning them in secret C.I.A. jails.

Mr. Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney…

I’m so paranoid about Cheney at this point, I’m wondering if the story isn’t a trap – something to make him look good. Maybe we ought to ask why they weren’t able to get this program going instead of wasting time, money, and people invading Iraq. This was one of the few ideas that at least targets our actual enemy.

Now, back to lying to get us into a war, ignoring our laws, data-mining our email, and torturing people…

UPDATE: "Old friend" after all?:

Dick Cheney Responds To Panetta: I Hope He Was "Misquoted"
The Huffington Post   |  Rachel Weiner
06-15-09

CIA Director Leon Panetta caused a stir this weekend, when New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer quoted him saying former VP Dick Cheney almost seems to want another terrorist attack. Cheney has responded, saying he hopes Panetta was misquoted.

"I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted," said Cheney in a terse statement. "The important thing is whether or not the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years."

Panetta had said of Cheney: "I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics."