Transcendental photo op of our time, my friends

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

How hard is John McCain trying to keep Georgia in the news? He's sending his wife, Cindy, there for a photo op with president Mikheil Saakashvili.

SACRAMENTO -- Cindy McCain, wife of Sen. John McCain, is headed to the Republic of Georgia, where tensions between the government and Russia have sparked international concern and have become an issue on the presidential campaign trail.

McCain announced to a group of fundraisers in Sacramento that his wife was headed to the country, but the campaign did not provide any details about the trip.

McCain has been very aggressive in his condemnation of Russia's invasion of Georgia, and his campaign has been critical of Obama's more measured response when Russian tanks first pushed into the country.

You've got to hand it to him. Four years ago, George Bush tried to change the subject by sending his wife and kids to New York. At least McCain's wife is heading to an actual war zone. Even scarier, there are rumors that Dick Cheney may be hunting in Tbilisi.

Game over

The New York Times has a story today about how hard it is to be the father of a total failure, in this case George Bush:

These are distressing days for the Bush family patriarch, only the second former president in American history, after John Adams, to see his son take the White House. At 83, he finds it tough to watch his son get criticized from the sidelines; often, he likens himself to a Little League father whose kid is having a rough game. And like the proud and angry Little League dad who cannot help but yell at the umpire, sometimes he just cannot help getting involved.

Only in the Bush family could they compare a man engineering conflicts that are costing thousands of lives with a kid booting a ball at third base. There are plenty of fathers today who will never go to a Little League game with their sons.

Because they're dead now.

I was going to let this go, it being the puff piece that it is, but I saw this from Atrios:

Three months ago today, the 4th branch of government said that it was "game time" in Iraq.

Since then, approximately 177 US troops have died in Cheney's game.

It's all a game to them. Today on Countdown, Jonathan Alter told Keith Olbermann that when Steve Skvara asked John Edwards about health care during Tuesday's debate, Alter was so moved he turned to his son and told him "This isn't sports."

It's nice to know there are people in the media who are still able to snap out of it.

Before the debate, Tucker Carlson said "You are watching MSNBC, the place for politics. Eight minutes from game time." As soon as it was over, Chris Matthews said "It wasn't an NFL football game, but it was pretty close." In fairness, the debate was at Soldier Field. I'm not sure it would have made a difference.

P.S. Can somebody at MSNBC.com please get with the program and make transcripts available promptly like CNN does? It's not even close.

Weakest Link

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

The news about toothpaste made of antifreeze and dumplings made of cardboard have gotten quite a bit of attention on television lately (quite rightly). But odds are, the television you're watching was also imported. And on top of that, there's a pretty good chance the shows you enjoy first aired somewhere else. For example, The Office or American Idol, both of which originated in England.

The United States is also bringing in quite a few movies from other parts of the world. Last year's Oscar-winning Best Picture, The Departed was based on a film called Mou gaan dou. I can't tell you how upset I am that a remake is in the works of what is possibly my favorite film of all time, Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru.

I was visiting Steve Clemons' Washington Note and saw the show America absolutely must import from England:

The BBC has a must-listen show on radio tomorrow titled Called to Account (times noted further below) offering a theatrical version of Tony Blair's indictment for Iraq War-related crimes. This may inspire many on this side of the Atlantic pond to think about various strategies to hold America's current political leadership accountable for duplicity and mismanagement of America's national security portfolio -- and particularly for the Iraq War.

Democracy has become a term derided in much of the world today because for many beleaguered peoples it has come to mean Western duplicity, uneven standards between the mighty and the weak, an excuse for invasion and occupation, a code word for regime change, or obsessive focus on ballots rather than healthy civil society institutions like courts and a free media that help to keep power accountable.

If 'Democracy' is ever going to shed its bad name, accountability must be one of its fundamental pillars in any genuine system of checks and balances. There should be a price paid for serious errors by national leaders -- and an even higher price paid by those who wield power with impunity and who lie to their publics in so-called democracies.

Sounds like a good idea to me. If Congress won't hold Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. accountable, let Hollywood do it. They can do a better job scripting an indictment than any Senate or House committee. As compelling as C-Span has been since November 2006, the lack of coordination in these hearings is incredibly frustrating.

Who would you cast for the prosecution? It doesn't have to be an actor. Fred Thompson can try to defend his friends if he wants, though.

Is our Cheney learning?

In my quiet, but urban neighborhood, after the sun goes down, you don't hear a lot. Pretty much any sound you hear is the result of a human. The loudest noise invariably comes courtesy of the LA Times, who, I'm convinced, deliberately remove the mufflers from their delivery vehicles.

Unless the earth does something to remind you that you are on it, it's easy to forget that's the case. Despite the most obscenely expensive 3-D computer-animated weather reports on the local news, you could go months without hearing a forecast here and it would have absolutely no impact on your life. The only time I've seen more than 12 stars in the sky here was after the 1994 Northridge earthquake knocked out all the power.

Last night, I was lured outside by an eerie conversation. Under the light of a nearly-full moon, I discovered that the nonsensical blathering was actually a pair of insane cats. I had no idea they could make noises like that.

What a relief. For a moment, I was convinced that Tucker Carlson and Jonah Goldberg (another example of the LA Times amplifying a dull roar) were continuing their bromidic paean to Dick Cheney right outside my door.

Asked by host Tucker Carlson why some critics have such a strong distaste for Cheney, Goldberg offered this penetrating analysis:

I have no idea. I truly have no idea. I like Dick Cheney — love to have a beer with the guy. I think he is a smart, serious man in American life. I think one of the things that bothers them is he doesn’t care. … He looks like he should be eating a sandwich while he’s [giving a speech]. That’s just the sort of matter-of-fact, eating lunch over the sink, oh yeah and by the way, here’s my view of the world. I love that!

As it turns out, the cats might not have just been howling at the moon. They might have been inspired to join our lunar companion in the Carlson-Goldberg celebration:

It's hard to know what these events really are, but if they're the result of gas seeping from the interior, we might learn some interesting things about the Moon by studying them. Like most people, I normally think of the Moon as a dead, unchanging place, but if it's outgassing from time to time, that view may not be so accurate.

Glenn Greenwald, typically, wrote a brilliant post about the segment:

But I want to focus on one specific exchange between Tucker and Jonah as they explored the Greatness of Dick Cheney:

[...]

GOLDBERG: And you know, but I do think that what Cheney has learned after a lifetime in Washington as a power player, is that the person who holds the secrets has power. And he is using that for what I would say, or probably what he believes to be certainly good ends. A lot of people disagree on that, but he's trying to do best as he can and he sees holding onto power as a tool to do that.

That, of course, is the defining mentality of the Authoritarian Mind, captured in its purest essence by Jonah. Our Leaders are Good and want to protect us. Therefore, we must accept -- and even be grateful -- when they prevent us from knowing what they are doing. The less we know, the more powerful our Leaders are. And that is something we accept and celebrate, for our Leaders are Good and we trust that the more powerful they are, the better we all shall be.

The part that jumps out at me in that jewel of wisdom from Goldberg is the word "learned." I guess we're finally discovering what, exactly, Cheney "learned" at the "refresher courses on ethics and handling classified materials" everybody in the administration was ordered to attend back in 2005.

Cheney "learned" that adhering "to the spirit as well as the letter of all rules governing ethical conduct" is the same thing as accumulating even more power for himself.

As was the case with "[t]he British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," the Cheney administration has disabused me of the notion that something had to actually happen for you to "learn" that it did.

After all, I also "learned" that our government was created with three branches.

Impeach Cheney

That's the title of Bruce Fein's article in Slate.

There's nothing I can add to it. Just read it. Fein has been an unrelenting defender of the Constitution during these dark Cheney years.

While Chris Matthews and the other talking heads spend day after day babbling about that loser who calls Democrats playground names, this nation is missing out on the debate it should be having: Whether or not we still believe in the Constitution. Fein should be on every program.

Cheney, Dick

Barton Gellman and Jo Becker's four-part Washington Post series on Dick Cheney is so infuriating (and has been covered so well by other bloggers) that I'm just going to list my favorite sentence from each chapter:

Part I: "The thing I remember about it is how rude, there's no other word for it, the attorney general [John Ashcroft] was to the vice president," said one of those in the room.

Part II: [Colin] Powell remarked admiringly, as they emerged, that [Condoleezza] Rice dressed down the president's lawyer "in full Nurse Ratched mode," a reference to the head nurse of the mental hospital in the 1975 film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Part III: "I can't think of a time when I have thought I was right and the vice president was wrong." -- Edward P. Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers

Part IV: "What does the law say?" [Ron] Christie, the former aide, recalled the vice president asking. "Isn't there some way around it?"

Christie: Unnamed sources are unfair

Can you find a better example of political cognitive dissonance than Ron Christie's appearance today on Tucker, mercifully hosted by David Schuster?

Christie was on the program to defend Dick Cheney, his former boss, and to continue calling for a pardon for Scooter Libby. The clip at Crooks & Liars is a must-see primarily for its end, when Schuster says:

You're a great guest, you're a great guy, but on the politics and the law in the Scooter Libby case, you're wrong.

MSNBC really ought to bring back the Gong Show. They could give gong beaters to Keith Olbermann, Schuster and Jack Cafferty (hired away from CNN). Then, during a Chris Matthews interview, they could bang away on the thing, half the time while Tweety is asking one of his insipid questions.

Christie would have earned the gong so many times in this interview, they'd have to buy a new one. In addition to his support of the nonsensical position that Cheney is a member of the legislative branch and his fact-free defense of Libby, Christie floated this absurd gripe a few times:

...I would say this to you: So much of this article, I looked at it there are all these unnamed quotes and these people who won't speak on the record...

[...]

First of all, that makes the assumption that everything in was in that Post article was true, which... I do not necessarily subscribe to that. When you have unnamed sources, when you have people who are unwilling to have the courage to put their name behind some of the statements...

[...]

The problem with this sort of "gotcha politics" that's going on with this Post story it seems to me is that there's one side of the story. What else is there? What is it that we don't know? I would just hope that some of the folks who have come forward with these anonymous quotes and these leaked materials would put their names to it so they could actually give this a little more color.

This is from a man who is vehemently defending a convicted liar who, at the bequest of the vice president (whom he is also defending) leaked classified information to Judith Miller, demanding that the quotes be attributed to a "former Hill staffer." The information he gave her from the NIE was only "one side of the story" and was exaggerated at that. The quotes went into the paper so Cheney could go on the Sunday talk shows and point to the article as confirmation of the need to follow his nefarious agenda and start an unnecessary war in Iraq.

There could not possibly be a better example of a pair of men using anonymous, one-sided leaks of information in a more perverse manner of manipulating the American people than Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby -- the exact duo Christie is on television to defend.

Cry me a river, Ron.

Slow down

Just once I'd like to return from a trip to find that nothing really happened while I was gone.

I missed Glenn Greenwald's FDL Book Salon, hosted by Digby, the NY Times article about Dick Cheney's ridiculous interpretation of his Constitutional role, and the first two Washington Post articles about the Cheney Administration. Oh yeah, and the Supreme Court decisions.

For the second time this month, I'm going to be playing catch-up.

In the meantime, here's another reminder to go buy Glenn's book if you haven't already.

Pathological

One month ago, DB wrote a post about my fears over the logistics of an American withdrawal from Iraq:

But then, I'm afraid, it will get even uglier. Assuming he hasn't started anything with Iran by then, with a majority of Congress calling for withdrawal, Bush will have to start redeploying. It is important to realize that extracting ourselves from Iraq will be a complicated and dangerous operation.

Consider the incompetence of this administration for a moment. Now imagine this Commander in Chief presiding over that redeployment. It has the potential to be a disaster. And, as Pat Buchanan has been saying all week, they will blame every problem and death on the "party of defeat."

Philip Carter wrote an excellent piece about what the withdrawal will probably look like.

But then I reached a point in my post that caused me a great deal of anguish. I revised it three times, eventually toning it down. Here's what I wrote:

I'm not suggesting that they will deliberately make the exit a disaster. I will not enter "Republican Strategist" Ed Rogers' dwelling:

The clumsy politics that the Kerry campaign is playing on terrorism should be offensive to all Americans. And the media should blow the whistle on them. I think -- in my heart of hearts, I think that they're hoping for an attack, so that they can say, I told you so.

(I must say it makes me quite apprehensive to hear people with such a pathological lack of empathy and who are the embodiment of solipsism making comments like that.)

But, no, I will not go there. I will only go as far as asking how much this administration, which hasn't given a crap about the troops throughout the entire war, will care about them at this dangerous juncture?

Part of me wanted to "go there," but the thought of following Ed Rogers there -- even for the sole reason that he is already there -- was too much for me.

But I cannot deny that this administration and its mindless defenders scare the crap out of me. I truly believe they are pathological and have a disturbing lack of empathy. Consider how far removed from the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes you have to be to think Katrina survivors might think it's "kind of fun" to lose their houses and be forced to live in shelters. Or that the victims might actually be better off since they were so poor. Or that Iraq is not in that bad shape since it looks peaceful from 30,000 feet above. I mean, imagine how much you would have to be disconnected from the suffering to say, "And are people being killed? Yes. And is it unfortunate? Yes."

It's just disgusting. There's no way to account for the lack of compassion on behalf of the people running this country other than to say simply that they lack the fundamental ability to see things from other people's perspectives. And the conclusion that follows is that they are solipsistic and everything out of their mouths says more about them than the people they are trying to smear.

When they blame the media for being biased, I have always felt that clearly indicated that they themselves felt no obligation to speak honestly. I reasoned that if these people felt that the public forums provided by the modern era were fundamentally dishonest, then they would also feel that the proper way to play the game was to lie "just like everybody else." I still think this is true, but I realize now that it stems more from a projection of themselves than it does from any legitimate analysis of the environment they are in.

Which leads me back to Ed Rogers' horrible, horrible accusation. I really didn't want to write this a month ago, but I have a deep fear that when somebody like Rogers suggests that liberals want to see an attack on American soil, it's because he would think the same thing if he thought his party would benefit from such an attack. Perhaps he truly believes liberals think like that. He probably does. But he's wrong... and worse, he's projecting.

You know, I'm still not willing to believe that the Bush administration -- not even Cheney -- would deliberately allow the withdrawal to be a disaster so the Democrats could be blamed for ending the war. I still think they're incompetent enough to make it a disaster, but I won't say they'd be evil enough to make it a disaster deliberately.

But I revisit this topic today because I just read this, from Dennis Milligan, Chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party:

"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001 ], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country."

Unlike this important Republican, I pray we never have another attack on American soil. Unlike another important Republican, I won't even wish the next attack upon his family.

The modern GOP is the lowest assortment of cretins we've ever had at the helm of our nation.

Bush: The enemy lurks

In ducking the question about James Comey's testimony, the president not only used the blanket of fear to shield himself, he also said things that appear to be outright falsehoods.

Q: There’s been some very dramatic testimony before the Senate this week from one of your former top Justice Department officials who describes a scene that some Senators called stunning, about a time when the warrantless wiretap program was being reviewed. Sir, did you send your then chief of staff and White House counsel to the bedside of John Ashcroft while he was ill to get him to approve that program, and do you believe that kind of conduct from White House officials is appropriate?

BUSH: Kelly, there’s a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn’t happen. I’m not going to talk about it. It’s a very sensitive program. I will tell you that one, the program was necessary to protect the American people and it’s still necessary, because there’s still an enemy that wants to do us harm, and therefore I have an obligation to put in place programs that honor the civil liberties of the American people — a program that was, in this case, constantly reviewed, and briefed to the United States Congress. And the program, as I say, is an essential part of protecting this country, and so there will be all kinds of talk about it. As i say, I’m not going to move the issue forward by talking about something as highly classified subject. I will tell you, however, that the program was necessary.

Q: Was it on your order, sir?

BUSH: As I said, the program is a necessary program that was constantly reviewed and constantly briefed to the Congress. It’s an important part of protecting the United States, and it’s still an important part of our protection, because there’s still an enemy that would like to attack us, no matter how calm it may seem in America, an enemy lurks and they would like to strike. They would like to do harm to the American people, because they have an agenda. They want to impose an ideology. They want us to retreat from the world. They want to find safe haven, and these just aren’t empty words. These are the words of al Qaeda themselves, and so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people and programs that we constantly brief to Congress.

One thing we learned from the Comey testimony, was that John Ashcroft was signing off on this program regularly without having seriously reviewed it. Here's how a "TPM Reader" puts it:

What to make of this long narrative?

Simply this. The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected.

When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again.

As far as informing Congress, that's a joke. Sen. Rockefeller even wrote a letter to Vice President Cheney (PDF) complaining that he didn't have enough information to evaluate the program.

Yesterday, I posted some excerpts from the hearings on Sen. Feingold's censure motion. I posted a response by Bruce Fein, but I ended it after he talked about "bad faith." Here is his full response to Sen. Specter:

Mr. Fein. Let me make a couple of observations about bad faith or secrecy. One, we don't have the information, if it exists, indicating what advice President Bush received just before he commenced the warrantless surveillance program. You don't know, I don't know, and he is resisting giving that information to you that could dispel any uncertainty on such a critical matter. That still is secret.

Second, with regard to informing a handful of Members of Congress, that is not all Members of Congress. And, of course, as you pointed out, we don't want the President to do things that would risk the national security of the United States and to inform in such detail that intelligence sources and methods could be disclosed.

But if you are going to have accountability, you have to have accountability to the Congress of the United States, not just one or two Members, and accountability that at least indicates the nature of the program in sufficient detail to enable an assessment of its legality and wisdom. If you don't know how many people are being spied on in the United States, you don't know what the results of that are. How can you make an assessment as to its reasonableness?

The purpose of informing is not just to have informing for its own sake. It is to have the operation of checks and balances at work, and it has to be done in a framework then that enables a collective judgment of Congress to be brought on the legality, the success of the program. It is still so secret, in my judgment, that it is still impossible for Congress to make that assessment at present.

I think that Fein sums it up perfectly. President Bush (and Vice President Cheney) acted on bad faith and the president is still deceiving the American people. That he is doing it while simultaneously trying to scare us into succumbing to his will is spectacularly rotten.

Liz Cheney's 'qualifications'

In response to an earlier post, reader Bryce pointed out in comments that the Washington Post failed to identify Liz Cheney as the daughter of the vice president in her op-ed.

After agreeing that her bylines were unsatisfactory, DB went on a Google search to see if the WaPo even took it upon themselves to report on what exactly Liz Cheney has done in her capacity at the State Department. I haven't found much at all.

While I've been on my quest, I see that Greg Sargent has taken an interest in this topic as well. He got Fred Hiatt to answer for the lack of full disclosure on her relationship to her father:

We published Liz Cheney's piece based on her qualifications as a former high-ranking State Dept. official with oversight of Near Eastern Affairs. I don't believe qualified professional women need to be identified by their husbands or fathers, even when well-known.

Pathetic. But what about the news division? If Liz Cheney is so qualified, why aren't there more reports about what she's been up to? As I've noted before, the Iran Syria Operations Group's existence was denied by the White House initially. Liz Cheney has had a budget of $80 million dollars to spend on influencing politics (one way or another) in Iran. What has her group been up to? Shouldn't the WaPo be reporting on that?

Isn't it incumbent upon a newspaper that gives prime real estate to an individual based solely on her "qualifications" and not relationship to a certain world leader to actually report once in a while what exactly she has been doing?

Can anybody out there find some examples of the Washington Post (or anyone else for that matter) reporting on what exactly Liz Cheney was up to while working at State?

UPDATE: I'd add... What qualifications can anybody working in the Cheney operations claim to have with regards to Syria? Is there even a policy other than do nothing and hope for something to trigger a war?

UPDATE II: As far as Hiatt's response goes... what is he talking about? It's got nothing to do with respect for a professional woman. She didn't work her way up in the world of advertising or construction or something, writing about something unrelated to her father and his work. She got a choice position in her father's administration. She no longer works in that administration, but she's writing an attack on her father's primary political opposition and the only other thing she's written in the Post was a similar attack mirroring her father's arguments. All that on top of the point of this post... If she's so qualified to attack the Speaker of the House, what has the Post ever written about her excellent deeds?

UPDATE III: Leaching off Sargent's blog... One of his commenters found this Hiatt column, dated Jan. 29, 2005:

When we publish a letter to the editor, we formally ask writers whether they have any conflict of interest that should be disclosed. By that we mean any relationship -- financial, family, employment or otherwise -- that a reasonable reader might consider relevant. We try to ascertain the same from op-ed writers, though the question has not been part of our official acceptance process. From now on it will be.

Ouch. But, again, what has the Post ever written about Liz Cheney's work involving Syria? What has she done that makes her a credible critic of Nancy Pelosi? And more important, when will Hiatt's paper write something about the Iran Syria Operations Group in the vice president's office and the $80 million of taxpayer money Liz Cheney once had at her disposal (and what she did with it)?

Another Cheney boondoggle

When DB heard speculation around the blog-o-sphere that Elliott Abrams was behind the recent Pelosi smears, that came as no surprise, for many reasons. The biggest reason was that I heard this exchange at a State Department press briefing:

MR. MCCORMACK: I can't tell you exactly how this -- how it works. There were some staff- level contacts. Typically when congressional delegations do make plans for a visit, they do have to work with the Administration in terms of arranging the logistics and, you know, mundane things like getting country clearance from the embassy. So there is a necessary level of work that needs to be done before any foreign travel by official visitors from the government, whether that's in the Executive Branch or the Legislative Branch. I can't tell you exactly when those contacts were initiated. But of course, when we learned of the intentions of a visit, we huddled, thought about whether or not that it was in fact a good idea, whether or not this -- our position had changed from previous such proposed visits, and at that point we initiated staff-level contacts.

And when it became clear that Speaker Pelosi intended to move forward with her visit, then we offered up the briefing about where we stand in our policy vis-à-vis Syria and how we saw events in the region. Jim Jeffrey, our number two guy in the Near East Bureau, Middle East bureau, went up to Capitol Hill and I think he was actually briefing Speaker Pelosi herself as well as other members of the delegation and their staffs.

QUESTION: You said that --

QUESTION: Jim Jeffrey was going to ask Pelosi to deliver a tough message to --

MR. MCCORMACK: That's our advice. That was our advice.

Jim Jeffrey is more than a diplomat in the Near East Bureau. He's got an important job in the Iran Syria Operations Group, whose very existence was at one point denied by the White House. Here's how Laura Rozen described his position in January:

Formally overseen by a steering committee headed by National Security Council Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams and James Jeffrey, the State Department's principal deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, the so-called ISOG is managed day to day by David Denehy, a senior adviser at State's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and a former official with the International Republican Institute. Denehy has recently told some associates that he plans to move sometime early this year to the Office of the Vice President, where he would continue to coordinate the Iran-Syria group.

I wrote about the ISOG and the cast of characters (war-mongers) and former Office of Special Plans (con artists who now work there) back in January, when a ridiculous op-ed by Liz Cheney hit the pages of the Washington Post.

What do you know? She's at it again! Dick sent his daughter on another journalistic boondoggle today to keep the pressure on Pelosi and to hide the fact that the only policy the State Department has for Syria is to hold their breath and hope it will be our sailors who wind up in an Iranian or Syrian prison instead of the wimpy British, who no longer remember how to start a glorious war.

How do you know you are dealing with people who love war? Ask if we should consider using nuclear weapons. If they say "We should keep all our options on the table," ask them if we should negotiate. When they say you cannot, you'll know for sure. No matter how much you increase the threat of violence, all options are on the table. No matter how much you reduce the potential impact of dialog, that option is off the table.

"All our options" doesn't include talking. Talking is not an option. There's no reason in the world to expect any cooperation from Syria. Period.

During the past five years, there have been no acts of terrorism against US citizens in Syria. The Government of Syria has cooperated significantly with the United States and other foreign governments against al-Qaida, the Taliban, and other terrorist organizations and individuals. It also has discouraged any signs of public support for al-Qaida, including in the media and at mosques. -- U.S. State Dept. (PDF)

Uh... Er... Well, we can only ask for cooperation if they'll going to torture a Canadian for us. That's an offer the Cheneys can't refuse. Otherwise, expect more op-eds about what rotten people they are.

'Wolf, you can come up with all kinds of what-ifs.'

DB doesn't have time for a good post on this right now, and it will doubtlessly be linked everywhere anyway... but this Dick Cheney interview is too incredible not to link here immediately.

In it to fight

Yesterday, we got to read a dumbed-down version of a Dick Cheney speech in the Washington Post, courtesy of his daughter, Liz.

Josh Marshall remarked that it "read like it was written by someone in junior high." Indeed, Cheney implores non-Lieberman politicians to reflect on "basic facts" like "Beware the polls."

If you make it past the typical Cheney nonsense we've grown accustomed to reading over the past six years -- including an obligatory neocon tip of the hat to Winston Churchill -- you'll make it to this final and frightening line:

The writer is former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.

This is where the story gets interesting. As Financial Times reported in April:

The US and UK are working on a strategy to promote democratic change in Iran, according to officials who see the joint effort as the start of a new phase in the diplomatic campaign to counter the Islamic republic's nuclear programme without resorting to military intervention.

A newly created Iran Syria Operations Group [ISOG] inside the State Department is co-ordinating the work and reporting to Elizabeth Cheney, the senior US official leading democracy promotion in the broader Middle East.

"Democracy promotion is a rubric to get the Europeans behind a more robust policy without calling it regime change," a former Bush administration official commented.

After the ISOG's existence was denied by the administration, eventually it became clear the group had, in fact, been formed and that Cheney had over $80 million at her disposal.

Over at TNR, Lawrence Kaplan wrote:

Far from being beefed up, as The Washington Post reported last month the State Department's Iran desk continues to be manned by only two foreign service officers. At the same time, additional Iran analysts, several of them political appointees, have been brought into ISOG. Unsurprisingly, this has led to grumbling at NEA, with staffers complaining the Bush team has set up its own Iran shop and has been making end runs around the State Department's traditional bureaucracy. Does this mean that ISOG has emerged as the latest equivalent to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, a secretive cell to stir the imaginations of Paul Krugmans everywhere? Hardly. According to State Department and Pentagon officials, ISOG has no role to play on security issues, doesn't coordinate at all with White House efforts against Iran at the United Nations, and confines itself to promoting regime change from within.

Great, so no worries about another Office of Special Plans, cooking up bogus reasons to go to war, right? Well, Liz Cheney took some time off to have a child and write lousy op-eds, handing the reigns to the other neocons in the Cheney cabal. Laura Rozen wrote just last week (emphasis mine):

Sources close to the administration's Iran policy say the primary vehicle for U.S. government planning on Iran is the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group, an inter-agency body created in early 2006 that includes representatives and Iran specialists from the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and other agencies.

The overall group has four or five subgroups, including a recently combined one that focuses on "public diplomacy and promoting democracy" in Iran. That subgroup doled out some of the $85 million that Congress approved to support pro-democracy efforts in Iran. A second subgroup is devoted exclusively to Syria. A third focuses on counter-terrorism issues, and a fourth has a military agenda. Formally overseen by a steering committee headed by National Security Council Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams and James Jeffrey, the State Department's principal deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, the so-called ISOG is managed day to day by David Denehy, a senior adviser at State's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and a former official with the International Republican Institute. Denehy has recently told some associates that he plans to move sometime early this year to the Office of the Vice President, where he would continue to coordinate the Iran-Syria group.

In addition to the ISOG, the Pentagon last spring set up a six-person Iranian directorate in the Office of the Secretary of Defense that includes three former members of the Office of Special Plans, a controversial unit established by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that produced discredited intelligence analysis linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda.

U.S. officials say that multiple inter-agency meetings on Iran are going on every day under the auspices of the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group, and that the pace of activity has quickened. "There are so many meetings; we're doing stuff, writing papers; actions are being taken," said one person involved with the group. "It's very intense."

Elliot Abrams is the PNAC member who was never to work in an administration again after George H.W. Bush pardoned him for lying to Congress:

Elliot Abrams is a felon. He was involved in stealing Pentagon weapons from US stockpiles, selling them to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and then stealing the Iranian funds so garnered to give to far-right Central American death squads, and then lying about all this to Congress. The Congress in the Constitution controls the budget. The Congress had cut off money to the rightwing death squads supported by Reagan and henchmen like Abrams. This elaborate criminal conspiracy inside the White House was the Right's response. They shredded the Constitution (and ever since have been calling their critics "unpatriotic.")

In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.

Abrams worked for Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom he co-authored a paper entitled "A Clean Break," which advocated war against Iran and Syria. Here's what Salon's Gary Kamiya wrote about him when he joined the administration in 2002:

Abrams fits right into the Bush White House, and not just because he almost went to jail for a scandal so much bigger and nastier than Whitewater it's embarrassing even to mention them in the same breath. Like the Big Three in the Bush Tetrarchy -- Rice, Rumsfeld and Cheney -- Abrams is a hawk, unabashed about using American power unilaterally. Like them, his worldview has been shaped by a black-and-white Cold War ideology in which stopping Communist or leftist expansion by any means necessary was America's top priority. If that meant looking away while sadistic thugs like El Salvador's Roberto D'Aubuisson killed lots of peasants who didn't know from Lenin but only wanted to be rid of their murderous, authoritarian (but not "totalitarian"!) regimes, well, better dead than red. As a key player in implementing Ronald Reagan's vicious "anti-Communist" Central American policies, he defended the savage regimes that slaughtered thousands of civilians, and denied that massacres carried out by U.S.-backed troops -- such as the infamous massacre at Mozote -- had taken place.

When Abrams is unavailable, his role is assumed by Michael Doran.

Michael S. Doran may have been destined to work for a Republican administration. During the 1972 presidential campaign, his father ran him around Carmel, Ind., to rip down posters of Democratic candidate George McGovern. His father was a Republican precinct committeeman.

"That was fun for a 10-year-old," Doran recalled recently.

...

"Mike's politics on the Middle East are pure neo-con," said the University of Vermont's F. Gregory Gause III.

James. F. Jeffrey is also considered a hawk. In fact, if there's anybody in this group with any experience focusing in making friends in the Middle East, it might be David Denehy. The bad news there is that the major diplomatic success story he'd have witnessed would be the work of Karen Hughes, for whom he was a senior advisor. He, too, is a neocon and he previously worked under L. Paul Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. A close associate of Liz Cheney, Denehy used to work for the neocon-founded International Republican Institute, whose Chairman of the Board is none other than Senate hawk John McCain.

Is there any reason to think this group full of hawks, operating out of the Vice President's office, isn't gearing up for a military conflict? They're even following the smashing success formula that is Iraq:

ISOG was modeled after the Iraq Policy and Operations Group, set up in 2004 to shepherd information and coordinate US action in Iraq. ISOG has raised eyebrows within the State Department for hiring BearingPoint -- the same Washington-based private contracting firm used by the Iraq group -- to handle its administrative work, rather than State Department employees.

Some lower level State Department officials saw the decision to outsource responsibility for scheduling meetings, record keeping, and distributing reports as an effort to circumvent the normal diplomatic machinery and provide extra secrecy for the group.

But State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said BearingPoint was hired for its experience and good work on Iraq.

It's Iraq all over again, with the same cabal working to make it happen. Go ahead and laugh at the cheap facsimile of her father's schtick that's in Liz Cheney's op-ed. But remember that she's a key ingredient in a group of unaccountable war mongers with all the power in the world.

UPDATE: Over at HuffPo, Larisa Alexandrovna writes more about Cheney and ISOG.

Cheney's got a gun

No, it's not the Onion. Dick Cheney really shot somebody (stupid enough to be around an armed Dick Cheney).

Plamegate: First reactions

1. Russert finally talks and says... Nothing! He couldn't say that earlier?

2. Where's the outrage from the media? Russert was discussing the fact that Cheney lied to him on Meet the Press, but all he said was that interview "would be scrutinized." He can't even admit his show was used to spread misinformation.

3. Where's the outrage from the media, Part II: The media made a huge stink about protecting sources. How could a whistleblower feel free to come forward? Well, know we know for a fact, not only were no whistleblowers being protected, but Libby was telling Fitzgerald that the media was to blame. Do I need to repeat that?

Reporters were willing to go to jail to protect a guy who told the prosecutor to go after them!

4. Cheney tells us not to judge Libby until he's had his chance to face the charges. Does anybody in the universe think Libby is going to trial? He's the FALL GUY! There's no way he allows this to drag on in court, with the Vice President possibly being called in to testify. No way the administration lets the rationale for war get debated in the "trial of the century" or whatever they label it.

5. Anybody who said or says Plame wasn't undercover... Time to put that one to rest.

More to come...

It's news, but no big secret

What is really so amazing about former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson's speech yesterday is how obviously true the parts about the administration's secrecy were. The fact that the words are coming from a member of the Bush administration makes it big news. But beginning with Dick Cheney's secret energy meetings during their first year in office, it should be clear to everybody that these guys don't like to share. Wilkerson's point that the secrecy itself is an obstacle to success by its very nature of exclusion is a lesson for future administrations.

As Lawrence O'Donnell said in his interview with John Amato at Crooks and Liars, Colin Powell would probably run away with the 2008 election if he were Dick Cheney's replacement as VP. But Wilkerson also confirmed and reinforced, despite his respect for his former boss, that Powell's loyalty to this administration trumped any feelings of loyalty to either the truth or the public.

Chris Matthews is correct when he says that the nukes were the "deal maker" for many Americans when it came to Iraq in 2002. But the fact that Powell was even in this administration, let alone the fact that he was the one trying to persuade the U.N., is what convinced many of us to give Bush the benefit of the doubt.

That is, until Bush kicked out the inspectors and rushed into war.