1 Boring Old Man

CIA Wants to Stall All Summer on IG Report
By emptywheel
July 2, 2009

Uh oh. The ACLU asked the CIA to stop stalling on production of the CIA IG report. And now the CIA has invented a reason to stall until the August 31 deadline that Hellerstein has given them – they want to review the 318 other documents it owes the ACLU first.

^{As we explained to the Court and Plaintiffs when Plaintiffs first raised the prospect of expediting the Special Review Report, the Report poses unique processing issues. It is over 200 pages long and contains a comprehensive summary and review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The Report touches upon the information contained in virtually all of the remaining 318 documents remanded for further review. Although the Government has endeavored in good faith to complete the review of the Special Review Report first, as we have gone through the process, we have determined that prioritizing the Report is simply untenable. In this instance, we have determined that the only practicable approach is to first complete the review of the remaining 318 documents, and then apply the withholding determinations made with respect to the information in those documents to the Special Review Report. One month into that process, we have concluded that we must review all of the documents together, and that the review will take until August 31, 2009.}

Shorter the CIA: Obama said we have to make this stuff public. So we’re going to buy ourselves two more months until we make it public. If Judge Hellerstein allows them.

Update: The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer responds:

^{The CIA has already had more than five months to review the inspector general’s report, and the report is only about two hundred pages long. We’re increasingly troubled that the Obama administration is suppressing documents that would provide more evidence that the CIA’s interrogation program was both ineffective and illegal. President Obama should not allow the CIA to determine whether evidence of its own unlawful conduct should be made available to the public. The public has a right to know what took place in the CIA’s secret prisons and on whose authority.}

^{There is nothing I can do that will make anyone feel better for the pain and suffering I caused them, but I will live with this pain, with this torment for the rest of my life. I apologize to my victims. I will turn and face you. I am sorry. I know that doesn’t help you.}

^{So if Hellerstein says “no dice” and forces them to release it forthwith, will they simply release another mostly redacted version? What will Hellerstein’s response likely be?}

The operative old saying here is, "Don’t do the Crime, if you can’t do the time." It’s a better choice that the one Bush couldn’t remember, "Fool me once, Shame on you. Fool me twice, Shame on me." But that one applies too. These people [Cheney, the C.I.A.] have hidden in the cracks too many times! We’re onto them.

^{President Obama should not allow the CIA to determine whether evidence of its own unlawful conduct should be made available to the public. The public has a right to know what took place in the CIA’s secret prisons and on whose authority.}

So yesterday, Mark Sanford tells the intimate details of his secret search for love in the dance halls of South America, and his readiness to die knowing he’s at last found his soulmate Maria [who apparently remains cloistered in an Argentine high rise]. Today, his wife, Jenny, releases a public statement offering potential forgiveness, then outlining the requirements for his redemption, reconcilliation, and his return to the family. Tomorrow, he joins them in Florida for the holiday weekend.

For review, Governor Mark Sanford disappeared for  days, then he is found one morning getting off of a plane in Atlanta – from Argentina. He tells the reporter about adventure trips he takes to blow off steam – "some place exotic." But the paper is holding emails between he and an Argentine woman named Maria. They call and threaten to release their emails, so by that afternoon, Sanford tells us that he’s been having an affair [after more history about his adventure trips and some folksy religious blathering]. In the next few days, we learn that his wife knows about the affair, and that the Governor has been in counselling with his Christian friends. He’s asked his wife let him visit the other woman. He’s suggested that his wife go with him to meet the other woman. He’s flown to meet her in New York with one of his spiritual advisers to break it off.  Then we find out that he and his wife have been separated for two weeks, and on the day he separated, he booked a ticket to Argentina for the fateful "missing Governor" trip.

Since then, we’ve had daily updates on the intimate details of Sanford’s affair. Of all the public confessionals of erring public officials to date, Governor Mark Sanford has taken the crown away from President Clinton – previous record holder. Mark Sanford has painted himself into a cramped corner and sounds like a mental case – which he obviously is. About the only thing that would surprise us at this point would be for a space ship to land on the grounds of the Governor’s mansion that takes him up into the sky. Now that I think of it, that’s about the only thing that would resolve this impossible dilemma.

Which brings me to this release from his wife. Governor Sanford talks about his relationship with Maria like a love-sick teenager. In every interview, he talks about his duties to his wife and children, his "fiduciary" duty to the people of South Carolina, and "what’s right" vis-a-vis the Bible. Then he lapses into talking about his soul-mate Maria, and his love, and tragedy. Surely wife Jenny reads all this stuff about him wanting to fall in love with his wife again [meaning he isn’t]. Surely she hears all this talk about his "heart" being elsewhere. Surely she knows that she’s married to a guy who is big time damaged goods.

So in this statement, she’s talking about forgiving him, "[the] essence of forgiveness and the critical need to channel one’s energy into positive steps that uphold the dignity of marriage and the family, and lead to reconciliation over time. My forgiveness is essential for us both to move on with our lives, with peace, in whatever direction that may take us." She’s willing to forgive him if he works real hard, "Forgiveness opens the door for Mark to begin to work privately, humbly and respectfully toward reconciliation with me. However, to achieve true reconciliation will take time, involve repentance, and will not be easy."

So, in this very public forum, Governor Sanford is talking about his duty to reconcile with his wife while making it beyond clear that his heart is in Argentina. And Jenny, his wife, is talking about her duty to forgive him as he repents and restores the dignity of their marriage. It seems a little premature from where I sit for Jenny Sanford to be setting up her parameters for forgiveness while her husband is talking about his devotion to his soul-mate in Buenos Aires. Surely she’s reading the same Governor Sanford interviews as the rest of us.

 ⁴ In your anger do not sin;
       when you are on your beds,
       search your hearts and be silent.
       Selah

Time for an Israeli Strike?
Washington Post
By John R. Bolton
July 2, 2009

With Iran’s hard-line mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unmistakably back in control, Israel’s decision of whether to use military force against Tehran’s nuclear weapons program is more urgent than ever.

Iran’s nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability. Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not.

He still wants "engagement" [a particularly evocative term now] with Iran’s current regime. Last Thursday, the State Department confirmed that Secretary Hillary Clinton spoke to her Russian and Chinese counterparts about "getting Iran back to negotiating on some of these concerns that the international community has." This is precisely the view of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, reflected in the Group of Eight communique the next day…

Sanford admits to more liaisons with mistress
The Hill
By Reid Wilson
06/30/09

In an interview with The Associated Press, Sanford admitted to as many as seven meetings with Maria Belen Chapur since 2001, including five during the year Sanford has said he was engaged in a romantic relationship with her. Further, the two-term Republican governor said he had casual encounters with other women, but that he did not have sex with them. Those encounters happened, he said, outside the United States but before he met Chapur… Sanford’s wife, Jenny, discovered the affair in January when she discovered a letter he had written her. Sanford told the AP he asked his wife to visit Chapur with him several times, but she refused. In the interview, Sanford called Chapur his ‘soul mate,’ but said he is trying to fall back in love with his wife…

On Monday, Sanford issued an apology letter to supporters in which he asked for their forgiveness and said he had considered, then rejected, thoughts of resigning. "Immediately after all this unfolded last week I had thought I would resign — as I believe in the military model of leadership and when trust of any form is broken one lays down the sword," Sanford wrote to supporters. "While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride."

Sanford, who has often clashed with fellow Republicans in the Palmetto State Legislature, said instead he thought the 2010 legislative session — his last as governor — could turn a page. His friends said their "belief was that if I walked in with a real spirit of humility then this last legislative term could well be our most productive one — and that outside this term, I would ultimately be a better person and of more service in whatever doors God opened next in life if I stuck around to learn lessons rather than running and hiding down at the farm," Sanford wrote.

SC gov gambles to ‘lay it all out’ about affair
The State
By TAMARA LUSH and BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE
June 30, 2009

… Among the additional visits with Chapur that Sanford detailed was an encounter that he described as a failed attempt at a farewell meeting in New York this past winter, chaperoned by a spiritual adviser and sanctioned by his wife soon after she found out about the affair.

Sanford said he saw Chapur five times over the past year, including two romantic, multi-night stays with her in New York – one in Manhattan, one in the Hamptons, both paid for in cash so no one would know – before they met in the city again with the intention of breaking up.

Four months later, he got on a plane to Argentina for another rendezvous with Chapur when he made an important discovery. "I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate," he said…

Note that ALL of the O.L.C. opinions used for the War on Terror have been withdrawn [prior to Obama’s Inauguration]…

Iraq Marks Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Cities

New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
June 30, 2009

BAGHDAD — Iraq celebrated the withdrawal of American troops from its cities with parades, fireworks and a national holiday on Tuesday as the prime minister trumpeted the country’s sovereignty from American occupation to a wary public.

Even with a deadly car bombing and other mayhem marring the day — the deadline for the American troop pullback under an agreement that took effect Jan. 1 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki seized on the occasion to position himself as a proud leader of a country independent at last, looking ahead to the next milestone of parliamentary elections in January.

He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline…

^{David Addington and John Yoo sharing a smirk at the Congressional Hearing on Torture}

Having read Angler and The Dark Side back to back, I find it impossible not to compare them – but not on an axis of which was "better." They both were "best." Barton Gellman’s Angler takes vignettes from the Cheney Vice Presidency and uses them to frame the character of the man [or its absence]. Since it’s impossible to separate anything Cheney from David Addington, his Counsel, Chief of Staff, and alter-ego, Addington is well represented in Gellman’s pages. Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side in less a character study, more like an exquisitely detailed and finely drawn narrative of a country going insane – our country.

In both of these books, the guides for our trip into the darkness were these two once secret players – David Addington and John Yoo. Most of us never heard of John Yoo until after he was long gone from government, back in California teaching Constitutional Law. The first I really ever knew of David Addington was when he testified in the Libby Trial in January 2007. In researching who he was, I ran across this article in the U.S. News and World Report [May 2006], aptly subtitled [Cheney’s Guy …the most powerful man you’ve never heard of]. But we didn’t get to know the pair of them in person until they testified together in a Congressional Hearing this time last year [June 2008]. They were both evasive, arrogant, and sarcastic — visibly sneering at the Congressmen questioning them — but Addington was more openly hostile, exuding contempt from every pore [I posted a couple of clips from that testimony last week].

In Jane Mayer’s narrative, Addington is everywhere. Even though Bush’s Counsels [Alberto Gonzales and later Harriet Miers] were presumably higher ranked because they were connected to the President, David Addington clearly ran the show – appearing at every meeting apparently acting like he did in his Congressional testimony – like a bully. He was obviously a major author of the torture and spying memos signed by Yoo. He was the one that kept them secret. He was the force that blocked, undermined, silenced critics of the Torture Program. As the story unfolds, Mayer makes it painfully clear that Addington ruled the roost at the White House. While Addington spoke as if these absurd rulings and programs came from the President [Unitary Executive], we presumed all along that he was really speaking for Vice President Cheney. But after reading these two books, I wondered if that wasn’t backwards – that Cheney was following Addington’s lead.

And it wasn’t just his obsession with unlimited executive power, or with his guarded secrecy, or  the power of his bullying and contemptuousness that shaped the crazy story. It was by direct manipulation of appointments. One instance will illustrate the pattern. When Jay Bybee got his judgeship, John Yoo wanted his job as director of the Office of Legal Counsel – the DoJ office that generated the outrageous legal opinions that justified Torture and Domestic Spying. Attorney General Ashcroft said no, in part because Yoo had consulted with Addington in writing the memos rather than his boss [Ashcroft]. So Bybee was replaced with Jack Goldsmith who, in spite of his strong conservative credentials, saw how crazy Yoo’s memos were and withdrew several of them. As an index of Addington’s power, Goldsmith withdrew one of the memos and resigned the next day – presumably as a way of circumventing Addington’s wrath. So the next appointee, David Levin, came to OLC and was immediately asked to reaffirm Yoo’s torture permissions. He was too contientious, too straight, so he was replaced with Stephen Bradbury on a probationary appointment – pending his performance. That is remarkable! They appointed someone to the DoJ office that was supposed to make independent determinations of the legality of Presidential policy – but made his job dependent on whether he gave them what they wanted. Like I said, it’s a "narrative of a country going insane."

Mayer and Gellman not only document the incredible power wielded by Addington and Cheney, they also makes explicit another thread that runs throughout this  story – lying. Everyone in the piece lies, over and over – particularly about Torture. They said Abu Ghraib was the work of a few rogue soldiers, yet they knew that wasn’t true – not even close to true. The Abu Ghraib photos appeared in April 2004. By then, the Torture Program of the CIA was everywhere – GTMO, "black sites" around the world, and in Military Policy at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan. They just lied and continued to lie for years. The Torture Program never slowed from its inception shortly after we began to collect detainees in October 2001. If anything, it accelerated after it was being exposed and widely condemned. They all lied about it from the top to the bottom. There were some heros along the way that tried to stop it, but they were suppressed or removed. And the Administration just kept lying – not twisting the truth a little bit – but outright lying.

These two books carry the words [Mayer] and the music [Gellman] of a terrible dirge that is the biggest blot on the American Soul in our history. It’s not only that these misguided power-mongers did things that were wrong in an absolute sense, they did them badly. Their precious programs [Domestic Surveillance and Torture], as horrible as they both  were, were done so poorly that they produced nothing of value. If anything, they shamed us on the world stage, and probably interfered with our intelligence gathering abilities. Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo were each dark actors, on their own. But the devastating impact of their Triumvirate was greater than the sum of its parts.

^{Dick Cheney and David Addington in the White House Bunker on 9/11}

AP Newsbreak: SC gov ‘crossed lines’ with women
Washington Post
The Associated Press
June 30, 2009

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford declared his Argentine mistress his soul mate Tuesday but said he is committed to reconciling with his wife in hopes of saving his family and what is left of his political career. Sanford, who also admitted meeting his lover more times than he had previously claimed, told The Associated Press in emotional interviews that he "crossed lines" with a handful of other women during 20 years of marriage. But he said he never went as far as he did with Maria Belen Chapur, the woman at the center of the scandal that has derailed his once-promising political future.

Even with the latest revelations, Sanford maintains he is fit to govern and has no plans to resign. And he insisted his relationship with Chapur, whom he met at an open air dance spot in Uruguay eight years ago, was more than just sex. "This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," Sanford said. "A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day." During more than three hours of interviews over two days at his Statehouse office, Sanford said he is trying to fall back in love with his wife even as he grapples with his deep feelings for Chapur.

Sanford detailed more encounters with his mistress than he had disclosed during a rambling, emotional press conference last week. The new revelations Tuesday led the state attorney general to launch an investigation of his travels, and some are calling for him to step down. Among the encounters was what he described as a farewell meeting in New York this past winter, chaperoned by a spiritual adviser and sanctioned by his wife soon after she found out about the affair…

In early 2009, after Jenny Sanford discovered the affair, the couple went into counseling. She has told AP that he asked her for permission several times to visit the mistress and she refused. But the governor claims he wanted to end the affair in person and, with his wife’s permission, went to New York with a "trusted spiritual adviser" serving as chaperone. The three went to church and dinner together and parted ways the same night. But he visited Chapur again in Argentina on June 18, the trip that brought the affair to light…

He acknowledged that he had casual encounters with other women while he was married but before he met Chapur, on trips outside the country to "blow off steam" with male friends. "What I would say is that I’ve never had sex with another woman. Have I done stupid? I have. You know you meet someone. You dance with them. You go to a place where you probably shouldn’t have gone," Sanford said, declining to discuss details. But he said those encounters were nothing like his relationship with Chapur.

"If you’re a married guy at the end of the day you shouldn’t be dancing with somebody else. So anyway, without wandering into that field we’ll just say that I let my guard down in all senses of the word without ever crossing the line that I crossed with this situation."