George W. Bush Made Retroactive N.S.A. ‘Fix’ After Hospital Room Showdown

The New York Times reports George W. Bush Made Retroactive N.S.A. ‘Fix’ After Hospital Room Showdown.

"For example, Mr. Bush’s secret directives to the agency, starting in October 2001, said the N.S.A. could ‘acquire’ phone and email metadata — logs showing who contacted whom, but not what they said — if at least one end was foreign or if a specific message were linked to terrorism. But the agency was apparently gathering purely domestic metadata in bulk, too, the Justice Department found.

Mr. Bush, in response to the discrepancy identified by the Justice Department, declared that the N.S.A. was authorized to systematically collect the metadata of purely domestic communications, too, so long as analysts only looked at records linked to terrorism. He also declared that the agency had been authorized to do that all along."

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

A few days before George W Bush took office, The Onion wrote a remarkably prescient article, Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'. Here's just one bit: "During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years."

Bush Administration, Not Science, Prevented Regulation of Toxin In Drinking Water

TPM states what we all knew, Bush Administration, Not Science, Prevented Regulation of Toxin In Drinking Water. "The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to look into the EPA's evaluation of the known thyroid-disturbant, and found that the path to the no-regulation decision "used a process and scientific analyses that were atypical, lacked transparency, and limited the agency's independence in developing and communicating scientific findings." Instead of the EPA's usual process—which begins with creating a work group of "professional staff with relevant expertise from across the agency"—the Agency placed a "less inclusive, small group of high-level officials" in charge of the deliberations. These high-level members included officials who answered directly to the White House."

The President's Speech

Bush Did Ignore Climate Science

I'm surprised I haven't seen more about this, Bombshell: Bush EPA Administrator said the science necessitated action on global warming — President “overruled” EPA due to “Cheney … and Exxon Mobil”.

"[EPA Administrator Steven] Johnson was ready to advance on greenhouse gas pollution limits but Bush overruled him after hearing counter-arguments from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the Office of Management and Budget, the Transportation Department and Exxon Mobil Corp."

What's worse, "Energy Committee Chair Fred Upton has already drafted legislation to block EPA from these common sense, moderate steps to reduce pollution. He seems determined to play the Cheney role, while Koch Industries – a major polluter and Upton backer –fills in for ExxonMobil."

Bush's Swiss Visit Off After Complaints on Torture

Reuters reports Bush's Swiss visit off after complaints on torture "Former President George W. Bush has canceled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday."

"President Bush has admitted he ordered waterboarding which everyone considers to be a form of torture under international law. Under the Convention against Torture, authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite George Bush," Brody said.

Swiss judicial officials have said that Bush would still enjoy a certain diplomatic immunity as a former head of state.

Dominique Baettig, a member of the Swiss parliament from the right-wing People's Party, wrote to the Swiss federal government last week calling for the arrest of Bush for alleged war crimes if he came to the neutral country.

George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books

Ryan Grim writes in the Huffington Post George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books "Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial 'decision points' of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir."

Definition of Scathing

Matthew Norman in The Independent reviews Bush's memoir, How did this wastrel ever find his way to the White House? A few choice exerts...

"His sadness over Hurricane Katrina is not for the victims in New Orleans, as Mr West understood, but for the damage done to his reputation by that snap of him staring blankly and aloofly down on the catastrophe from the window of Air Force One. His paramount distress over Iraq is not over the loss of life, civilian and military, but how that banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" on the aircraft carrier came to make him look naive and vainglorious. He reveals his shallowness and vapidity with these reflections in the most crystalline of clarity, and hasn't a notion he is doing so."

"It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied him. Unlike Mr Tony Blair, who emerges from his well-calibrated if often chilling memoir as a man of colossal cleverness (though not intellect), W has the self-awareness of a bison. There seems even less to him than met the eye, and there was precious little of that. Astounding as it appears, we misoverestimated him."

"Almost every sentence in the Times extraction (and it does feel like having a tooth pulled) invokes a fatigued he-just-doesn't-get-it. Churchill is inevitably adduced, while W bangs on about his passion for reading history. Inevitably, he fails to make the connection. "Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft," urged Winston, and while Bush did little as president other than read history books, the stagecraft entirely eluded him. Some of those tomes must have dealt with the British and Soviet experiences of invading Afghanistan, and not a word sunk in."

This week I've seen Bush interviewed by Oprah and Matt Lauer. Both times he struck me as Alfred E. Neuman with his "What me worry?" smirk. Both interviewers pressed him only a little. When asked about regrets about going to war with Iraq he says the intelligence was wrong about WMD and everyone thought he had them, but the world is still better off without Saddam. Neither interviewer asked about how his administration cherry picked the intelligence, removing the caveats from the internal reports or about the fact that many people at the time thought he didn't have them. Also neither asked about the 4000+ US soldiers killed in that war or the many other wounded or let alone the 100,000+ Iraqis killed. They certainly aren't better off.

Lauer asked what he misses most about being President and Bush answered being Commander in Chief because he loved the troops. But no, there was no followup question about the burden of responsibility of that position during two wars or his failed policies that let those wars become some of the longest in US history.

Update: Oh yeah, there was another point. Lauer did ask him about the deficit and how he's the only president to not raise taxes during a war. Bush said the only fair way to compare presidents is by deficit as a percentage of GDP and that he was better than Reagan or his father and only Clinton in the modern presidents had done better. Lauer didn't follow up saying Reagan had the worst deficit before you. But if I have it right (click on the graph for details), here's a graph of Federal Deficits divided by GDP.

Bush Considered Dropping Cheney From 2004 Ticket

Peter Baker in a New York TImes blog writes Bush Considered Dropping Cheney From 2004 Ticket. It offers various tidbits from Bush's upcoming memoir.

"President George W. Bush considered dumping Vice President Dick Cheney from his 2004 reelection ticket to dispel the myths about Mr. Cheney’s power in the White House and ‘demonstrate that I was in charge,’ the former president says in a new memoir."

I think the next sentence is brilliantly ironic: "The idea came from Mr. Cheney, who offered to drop out of the race one day during a private lunch between the two men in mid-2003."

Poverty During the Bush Years

Ezra Klein on The poverty numbers you should worry about. "Between 2001 and 2007, the poverty rate increased from 11.7 percent to 12.5 percent. But the economy grew in every one of those years. This was the first period since we began keeping records in which the economy expanded but poverty went up -- usually, economic expansions bring the poverty rate down. It's more evidence that the pre-crisis 'normal' was an economy that wasn't working very well for a lot of people, even when it was growing."

Remember, The Deficit is Bush's Fault

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years. "Some critics continue to assert that President George W. Bush’s policies bear little responsibility for the deficits the nation faces over the coming decade — that, instead, the new policies of President Barack Obama and the 111th Congress are to blame. Most recently, a Heritage Foundation paper downplayed the role of Bush-era policies (for more on that paper, see p. 4). Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years (see Figure 1)."

Attacking Obama for Blaming Bush

I watched part of Morning Joe today. Guiliani was on and complaining that Obama has done nothing right regarding the oil spill. Apparently he should have contacted other industry experts to get their opinions, those that are better than BP at this stuff. Of the course the fact that top kills have never been tried 1 mile down, by anyone, seems lost on him (and the rest of the Morning Joe crew). I've read about a number of other spills in the world and it seems the top kill approaches mostly fail and it takes until a relief well is drilled for the problem to be solved. And often it takes more than one attempt at a relief well. This one is no different (and Obama forced BP to drill not one but two wells, in case the first one fails). Rudy also whined that Obama should stop blaming Bush since its 18 months into his presidency.

I've heard this a lot lately and I don't get it. I don't hear Obama blaming Bush too much. It is clear that Bush was against regulation of any industry. The Bush administration was also a gift to all forms of mining. And while we don't know what Cheney said in his secret meetings with oil executives we do know that oil companies did very well in the last decade. It's clear that MMS was crappy under Bush so I think Obama's comments on Tuesday were fair:

"One place we’ve already begun to take action is at the agency in charge of regulating drilling and issuing permits, known as the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility -- a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations. When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency. But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow."

But if people (ok, Republicans) are saying Obama is wrong to blame Bush at all for things that happened under his term, what were they saying when Bush was blaming Clinton? As I recall Bush was always blaming Clinton or liberals or anyone for his mistakes. I've seen a bunch of comments online that seem to forget this, so I've collected some:

In July 2004, just before the 9/11 Commission Report came out, the G.O.P. Blames Clinton For Intelligence Failures. "After their briefing, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and other House Republican leaders held a news conference at which they suggested that the report, which is scheduled to be made public on Thursday, would show that intelligence and law enforcement failures before the Sept. 11 attacks were more the responsibility of the Clinton administration than of the Bush administration." Of course that's not really what the report concluded.

As I recall a common theme was that Republicans blamed Clinton for not immediately retaliating on al Qaeda for the Oct 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole. But the facts are we didn't have evidence that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack until Bush was in office and Bush choose to do nothing.

Here's a NY Times article from Sept 2004 (during the reelection campaign), Cheney's Praise of Bush Takes a Dig at Clinton (and Reagan). "He blamed the Clinton and Reagan administrations for teaching terrorists that 'they could strike us with relative impunity' and that 'if they hit us hard enough, they could change our policy.'" Also, "On the economy, Mr. Cheney said Mr. Clinton left office with the country on the road to a recession. Then, he said, the Sept. 11 attacks dealt another serious blow to the economy, but he cited recent gains as signs that the president's policies, including tax cuts, were working." Yup they were working great.

A year later in Aug 2005, in speech Bush gave commemorating the 60th anniversary of World War II victory in the Pacific, he brought this up again. "They looked at our response after the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombings of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center attack, the killing of American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. They concluded that free societies lack the courage and character to defend themselves against a determined enemy." A week later, Bush asked Clinton to help raise money for Katrina relief.

In October 2006 North Korea tested a nuclear bomb. Here's a Washington Post article (Oct 12, 2006) Bush Faults Clinton Policy, But the Debate is Complex with Bush (well Condolessa Rice) blaming Clinton for it.

Here's a CNN article From July 28, 2008 White House projects record deficit for 2009. This chart of theirs shows the history of budget surpluses and deficits. Remember Bush was the first president to cut taxes during a war, "But a senior administration official says the budgetary problems stem from what he called inadequate defense, intelligence and homeland security resources that were handed down from Clinton." And Bush never included the cost of the war in his budgets and kept it as emergency funding or some such thing.

In Feb 2009 Michael Steele was also blaming Clinton for the economy. And this wasn't new. In August 2002, Bush says he inherited recession.

And of course it wasn't just the administration blaming Clinton, Fox News did it constantly.

I don't have the patience for the hypocrisy. And I don't have the need to watch news programs that let one side or the other come on spew it without being challenged. Why is it that only The Daily Show seems to put some of these things in context. Last night, Stewart had a great segment on how "The last eight presidents have gone on television and promised to move America towards an energy-independent future."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
An Energy-Independent Future
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Timelines

The White House published a timeline of The Ongoing Administration-Wide Response to the Deepwater BP Oil Spill "We have compiled this chronology in the spirit of transparency so the American people can have a clear understanding of what their government has been and is doing to respond to the massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster."

Interesting to compare it to the Katrina Timeline that ThinkProgress put together.

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'

The (London) Times reports George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'.

"George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times."

"Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”."

"He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”."

I'd still like to see a war crimes trial.

Did this Guy Lie or Not?

I'm cleaning up some old saved links. In July, dday wrote Cannot Tell A Lie, about an article about Cheney's last minute efforts to get Scooter Libby a pardon. Fun read.

Video Shows Bush Getting Katrina Warning

The BBC writes Video shows Bush Katrina warning "Video showing President George W Bush being warned on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that New Orleans' flood defences could be overcome has emerged."

The video shows a briefing saying the storm is a bad one and the levees might not hold. Bush asks no questions and ends by saying "We are fully prepared to help." But of course, those were just words, they weren't prepared at all.

And of course after the disaster Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

I can't believe we had a president for 8 years who didn't understand what the words he said meant. And he didn't use big words! Fuck you W.

Bush Raised Threat Level for Politial Reasons

The Washington Post reports, Ridge Cites Pressure Before 2004 Election to raise the threat level for political reasons.

"Former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, the first director of the Department of Homeland Security, says that he was pressured by other agency heads to raise the terrorism threat level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election -- a move he rejected as having political undertones. The disclosure comes in promotional materials for Ridge's new book, due out Sept. 1, in which he writes that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft tried to pressure him to raise the threat level."

Marc Ambinder says Don't Cry for Tom Ridge and that " Our skepticism about the activists' conclusions was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." Marcy Wheeler calls him out on it, Ambinder: Sorry I Was So Stupid, But I Was Right To Be Stupid. Ambinder updated his post. Brad DeLong wasn't satisfied, and his link to a Ron Suskind article, What Bush Meant, is a must-read.

Of course it's Glenn Greenwald who covers the topic most completely in Fringe leftist losers: wrong even when they're right. Also as usual, his Updates at the bottom of the post are even better than the article, including pointing out this bit from Atrios: "And just so it's clear: using the threat of terrorism to try to achieve political goals is, you know, what terrorists do."

I'm curious to see the full allegations when Ridge's book comes out. At the time of these incidents the raises did seem a bit coincidental. If the Bush administration really did this, I want him prosecuted, because Atrios is right, that's terrorism itself. Though we'll probably never have enough evidence to convict.

Imposing Freedom

The Economist a few weeks ago had a special report on the Arab world. I really liked this article, Imposing freedom - Well that didn't work.

"Why did Mr Bush’s message of reform fail? One reason, a lot of Arab reformers say, is that he and his colleagues were—or at least became—the worst possible messengers. Thus Hossam Bahgat, founding director of a pressure group, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, admits to having been impressed and surprised when Ms Rice turned up at the American University in Cairo to say exactly what people like him had been longing to hear: that there would be no more American support for dictators. But when the American government then started to defend its own human-rights abuses at Guantánamo and elsewhere, he felt disgusted. ‘What we learnt from the Bush years was that reform was our own business,’ he says now.

In Arab eyes, the freedom agenda was also tainted by the war in Iraq. How could America claim to have Arab interests at heart while laying waste to one of the Arab world’s biggest countries (and, cynical Arabs add, the one most dangerous to Israel)?"

Obama and State Secrets? Shhh…

Obama's Justice Department is following up on suits against the Bush administration's most egregious cases of violating habeas corpus taking the same position as the Bush administration.

Columbia Journalism Review writes about how the press is just barely covering it. Obama and State Secrets? Shhh… "Obama, like Bush, decides to limit what the courts and the people can know about warrantless wiretapping. Isn’t that a big story? Not just yet."

Glenn Greenwald today wrote on the topic, Obama and habeas corpus -- then and now.

I think this all started with this piece last week by Greenwald, New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ.

March Torture Articles

Here are some articles from last month I finally got around to reading on the Bush administration torture policy.

In US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites, Mark Danner reviews the International Committee of the Red Cross' Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody. The review is really long, so I read Brian Tamanaha''s summary, No More Debate About Whether We Tortured.

"This article by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books ends the debate over whether we tortured. Danner's article is based upon a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which interviewed prisoners. The report explicitly concludes that we "tortured" a number of prisoners. But don't take the ICRC's word for it. Read the extensive accounts by the prisoners of their treatment and decide for yourself (although they were kept in isolation, their accounts substantially coincide).

On Sunday, the Washington Post wrote, Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots. Bush described Zubaida as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations" but he wasn't even an official member of al-Qaeda.

"When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him. The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said."

digby commented on the article. "Dick Cheney is going to hell. But we knew that. And so are Bush and Rice and all the rest who insisted on torturing Abu Zubaida, a brain damaged man who was so desperate that he made up fantastical terrorist plots just to make the torture stop. They not only committed a war crime, they made us all less safe by sending investigators all over the world on wild goose chases."

Dan Froomkin comments on it too, in Bush's Torture Rationale Debunked. "Zubaida wasn't a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn't holding back critical information. His torture didn't produce valuable intelligence -- and it certainly didn't save lives."

"All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well."