April 2006: This Far and No Further

Searching This Site by Topic

Highlights of This Page

US using Iranian terrorist group to foment insurrection inside Iran. Iraqi National Assembly elects Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister. Bush uses signing statements to break, ignore laws with impunity.

See my Update Information page for an explanation of why this and other pages between September 2004 and September 2006 are not yet complete.

April: Valerie Plame Wilson, who left the CIA at the end of 2005, and her husband Joseph Wilson file a civil lawsuit against Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, and unnamed White House officials.
Plame outing
The Wilsons claim that these officials violated their constitutional rights by conspiring to "discredit, punish, and seek revenge" them in the combination of the Wilson smear campaign orchestrated by Rove and the White House, and in the resulting "Plamegate" CIA leak scandal. Plame is also writing a memoir, tentatively titled Fair Game, the term Rove used with MSNBC's Chris Matthews to describe what he considered her. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)

April 2: Condoleezza Rice and her British counterpart, Foreign Minister Jack Straw, fly to Baghdad to pressure interim prime minister Ibrahim al-Jafari to drop his bid to become Iraq's first permanent prime minister.
Iraq war and occupation
Al-Jafari, a Shi'ite with strong connections to Moqtada al-Sadr and a favorite of the Iranian government, has no support among either the Sunnis or the Kurds, and is viewed by the US and others as a weak leader. In their meeting with al-Jafari, Rice says bluntly, "Time to step aside." Al-Jafari will not commit to doing anything. In a press conference after the meeting, when Rice is asked what she will do if she doesn't see a new government taking shape in five weeks, she replies, "I can assure you that I'm not going to wait five weeks."
National security advisor Stephen Hadley's chief for Iraq, Meghan O'Sullivan, and US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad meet with al-Jafari after Rice and Straw leave. They press the fact that under the new Iraqi constitution, the prime minister must form a government with the support and participation of all three communities -- Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurd. Al-Jafari has so far refused to work with anyone but his own Shi'ites. Al-Jafari disputes that assessment. Neither the US nor Britain intends to allow Iraq to have a prime minister so in the pocket of al-Sadr and the Iranians. But at the moment, al-Jafari is standing firm in his intentions to become Iraq's first real prime minister. He will reluctantly step aside on April 20. (Bob Woodward)

April 3: The American Bar Association votes unanimously to investigate Bush's use of signing statements to duck, ignore, and flaunt laws passed by Congress which he feels he does not have to obey.
"Unitary executive"
The ABA approves the creation of a bipartisan legal panel staffed with some of America's most respected lawyers and jurists, including a former federal appeals court chief judge, a former FBI director, and several prominent scholars, all of whom will evaluate Bush's assertions that he has the power to ignore laws that conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution. (See earlier items about Bush's unconstitutional use of signing statements.)
ABa president Michael Greco says he proposed the task force because he believes the scope and aggressiveness of Bush's signing statements may raise serious constitutional concerns. The ABA, Greco says, has a duty to speak out about such legal issues to the public, the courts, and Congress: "The American Bar Association feels a very serious obligation to ensure that when there are legal issues that affect the American people, the ABA adopts a policy regarding such issues and then speaks out about it. In this instance, the president's practice of attaching signing statements to laws squarely presents a constitutional issue about the separation of powers among the three branches."
Panel member Mickey Edwards, a former Republican Congressman, says, "I think one of the most critical issues in the country right now is the extent to which the White House has tried to expand its powers and basically tried to cut the legislative branch out of its own constitutionally equal role, and the signing statements are a particularly egregious example of that. I've been doing a lot of speaking and writing about this, and when the ABA said they were looking to take a position on signing statements, I said that's serious because those people carry a lot of weight." Retired federal judge William Sessions, who headed the FBI under Reagan and the elder Bush, says the statements raise a "serious problem" for the American constitutional system. "I think it's very important for the people of the United States to have trust and reliance that the president is not going around the law," he says. "The importance of it speaks for itself." A third panel member, former chief appellate judge Patricia Wald, says she has monitored the use of signing statements by previous administrations, but "the accelerated use in recent years presents a real question about separation of powers and checks and balances." Wald also says she is interested in studying how signing statements affect the federal bureaucracy. As a judge, she dealt with many cases involving challenges to decisions made by administrative agencies. She says that courts are deferential to such decisions because they are supposed to be made by objective specialists in the agencies. But a heavy use of signing statements could call that assumption into question. "If Congress passes a law telling the people in the bureaucracy that 'this is what you should do,' and the president signs it but attaches a statement saying 'I don't want you to do it,' how is that going to affect the motivation of the bureaucracy?" she asks.
Panel member Stephen Salzburg, a George Washington University law professor, says that signing statements themselves are neither unconstitutional nor legally binding. "The president can say anything he wants when he signs a bill," says Saltzburg, but "what does it say about respect for the Constitution and for the notion of checks and balances to have the president repeatedly claim the authority not to obey statutes, which he is signing into law?"
Other panel members include Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School and a former official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations; Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of Stanford Law School; Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor; former Democratic legal counselor Mark Agrast, and former DOJ official and Senate legal counsel Thomas Susman. The task force is chaired by Neal Sonnett, a former federal prosecutor who earlier this year chaired a similar ABA panel of bipartisan specialists who studied the legality of Bush's warrantless spying program. The task force is scheduled to produce its final report during the summer, and the entire ABA House of Delegates will vote on whether or not to adopt its findings in August. (Boston Globe)

April 6: Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming.
Global warming and the environment
The result is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing. Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a US Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, say that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well. These scientists, who work nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, NJ, and Boulder, Colorado, say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. "There has been a change in how we're expected to interact with the press," says Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. Though Tans says he often "ignores the rules" the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some people feel intimidated -- I see that."
Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the US Geological Survey, says he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation's water supply. Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause "great problems with the department." In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, but, according to Milly, "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.'"
Though administration officials say they are merely enforcing long-standing policies that have not been enforced in the past, in reality, NOAA and other officials have tried to alter what these scientists tell the media. When Tans was helping to organize the International Carbon Dioxide Conference near Boulder last fall, his lab director told him participants could not use the term "climate change" in conference paper's titles and abstracts. Tans and others disregarded that advice.
In January 2006, James Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters that the administration sought to muzzle him after he gave a lecture in December 2005 calling for cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Two weeks later, Hansen suggested to an audience at the New School University in New York that his counterparts at NOAA were experiencing even more severe censorship. "It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States," he told the crowd. NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher responded by sending an agency-wide e-mail that said he is "a strong believer in open, peer-reviewed science as well as the right and duty of scientists to seek the truth and to provide the best scientific advice possible. ...I encourage our scientists to speak freely and openly. We ask only that you specify when you are communicating personal views and when you are characterizing your work as part of your specific contribution to NOAA's mission." But other NOAA scientists cite repeated instances in which the administration played down the threat of climate change in their documents and news releases. Although Bush and his top advisers have grudgingly admitted that the Earth is warming and human activity has contributed to this, they continue to question some predictions and assert that mandatory limits on carbon dioxide could damage the nation's economy. (Washington Post)
April 6: Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff for Dick Cheney, testifies that Bush personally authorized Libby to disclose portions of the contents of a highly classified intelligence assessment to the media to defend the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Libby tells a grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame Wilson leak that he had received "approval from the President through the Vice President" to divulge portions of an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, in an attempt to "prove" to the American public that Saddam Hussein had a viable nuclear weapons development program. According to Libby, such authorization was "unique in his recollection." Libby adds that an administration lawyer told him that Bush, by authorizing the disclosure of classified information, had in effect declassified the information. Legal experts disagree on whether the president has the authority to declassify information on his own. Libby has also said that Cheney authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. In some instances, the information leaked was directly discussed with Cheney, while in other instances Libby believed he had broad authority to release information that would make the case to go to war. In yet another instance, Libby has claimed that Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for Plan of Attack, a book written by Woodward about the run-up to the Iraqi war. (Like Woodward's 2002 book Bush at War, Woodward's second book in the Bush series was extremely favorable towards the administration. Woodward was granted unprecedented access to classified information for the writing of the two books -- in some cases, access to information that Congressional legislators were denied.)
Bush and Cheney authorized the release of the information regarding the NIE in the summer of 2003, as part of a damage-control effort undertaken only days after former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote in a New York Times op-ed that claims by Bush that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger were most likely a hoax. According to court filings from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, "At some point after the publication of the July 6 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice President Cheney, [Libby's] immediate supervisor, expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."
Two days after Wilson's July 6 op-ed, Libby met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and not only disclosed portions of the NIE, but also Plame's CIA employment and potential role in her husband's trip. Regarding that meeting, Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized in advance... to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller" because Vice President Cheney believed it to be "very important" to do so, according to court papers filed Wednesday. Libby "further testified that he at first advised the Vice President that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller because of the classified nature of the NIE.," Libby "testified that the Vice President had advised [Libby] that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose relevant portions of the NIE." Cheney's chief counsel, David Addington, told Libby, according to Libby's testimony, that Bush's "authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document." Addington succeeded Libby as Cheney's chief of staff after Libby was indicted by a federal grand jury on Oct. 28, 2005 on five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice in attempting to conceal his role in outing Plame as an undercover CIA operative.
Four days after the meeting with Miller, on July 12, 2003, Libby spoke again to Miller, and also for the first time with Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper, during which Libby spoke to both journalists about Plame's CIA employment and her possible role in sending her husband to Niger. Regarding those conversations, Libby understood that the Vice President specifically selected him to "speak to the press in place of Cathie Martin (then the communications person for the Vice President) regarding the NIE and Wilson." Libby also testified that "at the time of his conversations with Miller and Cooper, he understood that only three people -- the President, the Vice President and [Libby] -- knew that the key judgments of the NIE had been declassified. [Libby] testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials-including Cabinet level officials-were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson's trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003." It is unclear from the court papers what the January 24, 2003 document might be.
During those very same conversations with the press that day Libby "discussed Ms. Wilson's CIA employment with both Matthew Cooper (for the first time) and Judith Miller (for the third time)." It is as yet unclear whether Cheney authorized or encouraged Libby to release information about Plame's covert CIA status, but the court papers say that Cheney had "expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife." (See other items throughout this site that show Cheney did, indeed, prompt Cheney to leak Plame's identity to the press.) Cheney has told FBI investigators that he had learned of Plame's employment by the CIA and her potential role in her husband being sent to Niger by then-CIA director George Tenet. But Tenet has told investigators that he had no specific recollection of discussing Plame or her role in her husband's trip with Cheney. Tenet did recall making inquiries regarding the veracity of the Niger intelligence information as a result of inquires from both Cheney and Libby. As a result of those inquiries, Tenet then had the CIA conduct a new review of its Niger intelligence, and concluded that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had in fact attempted to purchase uranium from Niger or other African nations. Tenet and other CIA officials then informed Cheney, other administration officials, and the congressional intelligence committees of the new findings, but neither Cheney nor Libby accepted those conclusions.
Six days after Libby's conversation with Cooper and Miller regarding Plame, on July 18, 2003, the Bush administration formally declassified portions of the NIE on Iraqi weapons programs in an effort to further blunt the damage of Wilson's allegations that the Bush administration misused the faulty Niger intelligence information to make the case to go to war. One former senior government official says that both Bush and Cheney, in directing Libby to disclose classified information to defend the administration's case to go to war with Iraq and in formally declassifying portions of the NIE later, were misusing the classification process for political reasons. The official says that while the administration declassified portions of the NIE that would appear exculpatory to the White House, it insisted that a one-page summary of the NIE which would have suggested that the President mischaracterized other intelligence information to go to war remain classified. The one-page summary of the NIE told Bush that although "most agencies judge" that an Iraqi procurement of aluminum tubes was "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons." Again, White House officials refused to believe the assertion about the aluminum tubes, and in Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, he said bluntly, and falsely: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." The former senior official says that he believes that the attempt to conceal the contents of the one-page summary were intertwined with the efforts to declassify portions of the NIE and to leak information to the media regarding Plame: "It was part and parcel of the same effort, but people don't see it in that context yet."
Two other senior government officials say that Libby had asserted that Cheney had more broadly authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists during the run-up to war with Iraq as part of an administration effort to make the case to go to war. In another instance, Libby had claimed that Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for his book Plan of Attack. Other former senior government officials say that Bush directed people to assist Woodward in the book's preparation: "There were people on the Seventh Floor [of the CIA] who were told by Tenet to cooperate because the president wanted it done. There were calls to people to by [White House communication director] Dan Bartlett that the president wanted it done, if you were not co-operating. And sometimes the president himself told people that they should co-operate," one says.
In a February 17, 2006 letter to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller wrote that he believed that disclosures in Woodward's book damaged national security. "According to [Woodward's] account, he was provided information related to sources and methods, extremely sensitive covert actions, and foreign intelligence liaison services." Woodward's book contains, for example, a detailed account of a January 25, 2003 briefing that Libby provided to senior White House staff to make the case that Saddam Hussein had aggressive programs underway to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Two former government officials say that the account provided sensitive intelligence information that had not been cleared for release. The book referred to intercepts by the National Security Agency of Iraqi officials that purportedly showed that Iraq was engaging in weapons of mass destruction program. Much of the information presented by Libby at the senior White House staff meeting was later discarded by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-CIA Director George Tenet as unreliable, and would not have either otherwise been made public. One former senior official says, "They [the leakers] might have tipped people to our eavesdropping capacities, and other serious sources and methods issues. But to what end? The information was never presented to the public because it was bunk in the first place." In his letter to Negroponte, Rockefeller noted, "I [previously] wrote both former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and Acting DCI John McLaughlin seeking to determine what steps were being taken to address the appalling disclosures in [Woodward's book]. The only response that I received was to indicate that the leaks had been authorized by the Administration." (National Journal)

April 9: The Bush administration is studying various options in preparing for military strikes against Iran.
War with Iran
Officials say the preparations are merely part of the administration's broader strategy to use coercive diplomacy to pressure Tehran into abandoning its supposed nuclear weapons development program, a program that an August 2005 National Intelligence Estimate says is at least ten years away from being able to field a nuclear weapon. Critics say that any such strike would not be effective in the long term, and would merely push Iran to work harder to develop a nuclear bomb.
Some of the strategies under consideration include air strikes against targets such as the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. Other plans cover a more comprehensive air strike strategy designed to lay waste to Iran's military. In the White House's new National Security Strategy, released last month, it labeled Iran as the most serious challenge to the US posed by any country.
Many military officers and specialists believe that Bush's saber rattling will just inflame international opinion even more against the US, particularly in the Muslim world, and make US forces in Iraq more vulnerable to Iranian retaliations. "My sense is that any talk of a strike is the diplomatic gambit to keep pressure on others that if they don't help solve the problem, we will have to," says Kori Schake, who worked on Bush's National Security Council staff and now teaches at West Point. Others believe is is merely bluster. "The Bush team is looking at the viability of airstrikes simply because many think airstrikes are the only real option ahead," says former Pentagon policy official Kurt Campbell.
While Bush officials are working with, or pretending to work with, its European allies on a diplomatic solution, the administration is coming under increasing pressure from Israel to do something tangible about Iran, which it perceives as an imminent threat to its existence.
Bush has been careful never to rule out the possibility of a military strike against Iran in his public rhetoric, particularly if it ever does anything against Israel, and Dick Cheney and UN ambassador John Bolton have gone even farther, issuing numerous veiled threats against Iran. Bush has also spoken with several Republican senators about the viability of regime change in Iran.
The US has flown numerous reconnaissance missions over Iran, using unmanned surveillance drones, since 2004, and has inserted several combat teams inside Iran to collect intelligence and military targeting data. Israel has gone farther, training its military for a heavy strike at the Natanz nuclear power plant and other targets, but US strategists do not believe Israel has the capability of destroying Israel's nuclear capacity without using its own nuclear arsenal. In return, Iran has worked to reinforce and "harden" its key nuclear and military sites, and has made a show of testing missiles.
Many US strategists say that if the US really wants to obliterate Iran's nuclear capability, it will have to use nuclear weapons itself. Retired Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner, an expert in wargames and targeting who teaches at the National Defense University, recently gamed an attack against Iran, and said that to achieve any measure of success, the US would have to conduct at least five days' worth of attacks that successfully hit at least 400 different targets. 75 of those targets would require penetrating weapons. Special Operations forces on the ground would be required. Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says that any attack would only firm up Iranian resolve to develop weapons. "Whatever you do," he says, "is almost certain to accelerate a nuclear bomb program rather than destroy it." (Washington Post)

US using Iranian terrorist group to foment insurrection inside Iran

April 13: The press learns that the Pentagon has ordered the "outsourcing" of special operations in Iraq to a violent Iranian guerrilla group with Communist leanings that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the US government.
War with Iran
The group is a right-wing terror organization called the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being "run" in two southern regional areas of Iran, the Sunni stronghold of Baluchistan and the Shi'ite enclave of Khuzestan. Both regions have been rocked by a series of deadly attacks in recent months. The orders to use MEK in Iraq originated shortly after the March 2003 invasion; they came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and gained the critical support of Dick Cheney. Opposition from the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, had little impact.
"The MEK is run by a husband and wife team who were given bases in northern Baghdad by Saddam," says an unnamed counterterrorism official. "The US army secured a key MEK facility 60 miles northwest of Baghdad shortly after the 2003 invasion, but they did not secure the MEK and let them basically be because [then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz was thinking ahead to Iran." About 3,500 MEK fighters were captured and detained shortly after the invasion. The official continues, "We disarmed [the captured MEK] of major weapons but not small arms. Rumsfeld was pushing to use them as a military special ops team, but policy infighting between their camp and Condi, but she was able to fight them off for a while." Another intelligence source says the policy infighting ended last year when Rumsfeld, under pressure from Cheney, came up with a plan to "convert" the MEK by having them simply quit their organization. "These guys are nuts," says the source. "Cambone and those guys made MEK members swear an oath to Democracy and resign from the MEK and then our guys incorporated them into their unit and trained them." Stephen Cambone is the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.
The idea of rearming and deploying MEK fighters, who are part of a violent terrorist organization that has struck at Iranian and US targets, alarmed many in the intelligence and military communities, but Rumsfeld, under orders from Cheney, went forward: he ordered that the group begin undertaking special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential US military strike against that country. The idea seems to be, according to a UN official, that the MEK special ops -- or terrorist strikes -- will foment an insurgency among Iranian Sunnis against the Iranian government. "They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all," says an intelligence source. The UN official puts it more bluntly: "We are already at war." MEK fighters have taken part in operations within Iran that have included the use of unmanned drones operated by American forces.
Saddam Hussein had used the MEK for acts of terror against non-Sunni Muslims and had assigned domestic security detail to the MEK as a way of policing dissent among his own people. It was under the guidance of MEK 'policing' that Iraqi citizens who were not Sunni were routinely tortured, attacked and arrested.
It may be the British who slow the use of the MEK to prepare for a strike against Iran. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has called an American strike on Iran "inconceivable," while Prime Minister Tony Blair, more cautious, has said he's keeping all his options open. Asked about the MEK, a senior British intelligence official says that the British are not yet sure of what the situation on Iran's southern border is, but vehemently condemns any joint activity with the terrorist organization. "We don't know who precisely is carrying out those attacks in the south but we believe it is MEK," he says. He confirms that there is at least one US unit inside Iran gathering information, but says he isn't sure that that unit is involved with MEK. "The people who are inside Iran are from a US Special mission unit," the source says. "They are called by codenames, but would not be involved in the bomb blasts. They want to get in, get the intelligence and go out with anyone knowing they have been there. But the bomb blasts might be diversions away from the operations by this US special mission unit. The British are definitely not involved in any of this. ...We have very strict rules and can't go consorting with terrorists. We did it in Northern Ireland. No more." (Raw Story)

April 14: Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report.
Conservative smear campaigns
(See the June and July 2003 pages for more information.) Libby's testimony adds to the mountain of documentary evidence and corroborating testimony that proves Cheney was deeply involved in the effort to smear and discredit Wilson, including the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA agent. The classified CIA report leaked by Libby, at Cheney's behest, was a March 2002 debriefing of Wilson to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation, according to government records. Both Wilson and the CIA wasted no time in determining the Iraq-Niger allegations fraudulent. The CIA report did not mention Plame, or the role Cheney and other White House officials say Plame played in her husband's selection by the CIA to go to Niger.
Libby's grand jury testimony is significant because only hours after Cheney reportedly instructed Libby to disclose information from the CIA report, Libby divulged to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper that Plame was a CIA officer, and that she been involved in selecting her husband for the Niger mission. The question remaining to be answered is, did Cheney authorize, encourage, or direct Libby to disclose Plame's CIA identity? Both Cheney and Libby say no, but a growing body of evidence leads one to conclude otherwise.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in an April 5 court filing that Wilson's July 6, 2003 op-ed piece in the New York Times criticizing the Bush administration's Iraq policies "was viewed in the office of Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." Moreover, on July 12, 2003, the same day that Libby spoke to both Cooper and Miller, Libby and Cheney traveled aboard Air Force Two for the dedication of a new aircraft carrier in Norfolk, Virginia. During the flight either to or from Norfolk, Cheney, Libby, and Catherine Martin, then-assistant to the vice president for public affairs, discussed how they might rebut Wilson's charges and discredit him, according to federal court records, and interviews with people with first-hand knowledge of accounts that all three provided to federal investigators. It has long been known that Cheney was among the first people in the government to tell Libby that Plame worked for the CIA. The federal indictment of Libby states: "On or about June 12, 2003, Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA." In the days before Libby divulged Plame's identity to Miller and Cooper, "Vice President Cheney, [Libby's] immediate superior, expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."
Last week, Libby testified that Cheney told him that as part of the effort to rebut Wilson's criticism, Bush had authorized the leaking of portions of a then-classified National Intelligence Estimate concerning purported attempts by Iraq to develop nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has asserted that presidents have the constitutional right to declassify information. Although vice presidents haven't shared such authority, Bush issued an executive order in March 2003 allowing Cheney to share such authority with him. According to Fitzgerald's April 5 filing, Libby has also testified that in July 2003, Cheney's then-counsel David Addington "opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amount to a declassification of the document." Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel for the CIA, says that while there are executive orders that apparently allow the vice president "on his own to determine what to declassify and to whom," that authority should "not exempt him or anyone from exercising prudence or good judgment" in doing so. "You would want the president or the vice president to seek the views of the CIA or any other intelligence agencies...to make sure that there is no potential disclosing an intelligence source" or some other sensitive information. Democrat Jane Harman, the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, said last week, "Leaking classified information to the press when you want to get your side out or silence your critics is not appropriate. If I had leaked the information, I'd be in jail. Why should the president be above the law? I am stunned."
Libby says he was originally reluctant to reveal the contents of the classified NIE to Miller, but that Cheney told him Bush had authorized Libby to disclose selected portions of that report. Those portions were cherrypicked from the entire NIE in order to give the impression that the entire US intelligence community was 100% behind the justifications given for the invasion of Iraq. Steve Aftergood, a senior research analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, who tracks government secrecy and classification issues, says that "presents himself in this instance and others as being very scrupulous in adhering to the rules. He is not someone carried on by the rush of events. If you take his account before the grand jury on face value, he is cautious and deliberative in his behavior. That is almost the exact opposite as to how he behaves when it comes to disclosing Plame's identity. All of a sudden he doesn't play within the rules. He doesn't seek authorization. If you believe his account, he almost acts capriciously. You have to ask yourself why his behavior changes so dramatically, if he is telling the truth that this was not authorized and that he did not talk to higher-ups." Libby insists that Cheney never authorized or told him to discuss Plame's identity. Although Libby discussed Plame with Miller and Cooper on July 12, 2003 -- the same day he says he was authorized by Cheney to leak portions of the NIE and the CIA report -- Libby insists the two actions are unrelated. Believe that if you will.
The question of Bush's own involvement arises. Some Bush officials such as NSC director Stephen Hadley and White House communications director Dan Bartlett have said they knew nothing of Cheney's authorization of disclosing the CIA report on Wilson's Niger mission (see related April 26 item). They have asserted that Bush himself might not have known about Cheney's decision to disclose classified information. A senior administration official said that even if Cheney did not directly authorize Libby to leak the information to the press, Cheney might have set a climate in which his aides viewed it as routine to release classified information whenever it served their purposes. But this line of speculation is proven specious when evidence surfaces proving Bush indeed directed Cheney to release the classified information.
Interestingly, other administration officials were working to formally declassify portions of that selfsame document when Cheney gave Libby the authorization to disclose it to the press. According to Fitzgerald, Libby "testified that on July 12, 2003, he was specifically directed by the Vice President to speak to the press in the place of Cathie Martin (then the communications person for the Vice President) regarding the NIE and Wilson. [Libby] was instructed... to [also] provide information contained in a document [he] understood to be the cable authored by Mr. Wilson. During the conversations that followed on July 12 [Libby] discussed Ms. Wilson's [CIA] employment with both Matthew Cooper (for the first time) and Judith Miller (for the third time)." The Wilson cable refers to the classified CIA debriefing of Wilson. Wilson never himself authored a cable on his Niger mission. Rather, the CIA Directorate of Operations, which sent Wilson to Niger in February 2002, produced a March 8, 2002 report based on Wilson's debriefing by intelligence officers. The report did not name Wilson, or even describe him as a former ambassador, but rather as a "contact with excellent access who does not have an established reporting record" to protect the-then covert nature of the trip. The report was then "widely distributed in routine channels," according to a 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Other testimony from government officials with firsthand knowledge of events shows that Cheney, Libby, and other White House officials were working assiduously to find out as much about Wilson's Niger trip as they could, in order to begin discrediting and smearing Wilson. A relatively small amount of information derived from the March 2002 report was revealed on July 11, 2003, when then-CIA Director George Tenet released a statement regarding Wilson's trip to Niger in which he disclosed some aspects of the debriefing described in the document. Other portions remained highly classified at the time that Cheney directed Libby to leak portions of the report. According to two goverment officials, the White House abandoned its attempt to declassify all or part of the March 2002 report when Tenet released his statement. The federal indictment of Libby states: "On or about June 9, 2003, a number of classified documents were faxed to the Office of the Vice President to the personal attention of Libby and another person in the Office of the Vice President. The faxed documents, which were marked as classified, discussed, among other things, Wilson and his trip to Niger, but did not mention Wilson by name. After receiving these documents, Libby and one or more persons in the Office of the Vice President handwrote the names 'Wilson' and 'Joe Wilson' on the documents." It is obvious that Libby and others wanted to identify the unnamed ambassador as Wilson.
One of the strategies used by the White House in the report leak was the attempt to discredit Wilson's work in Niger by showing that Wilson had only spoken with former, and not current, Nigeran government officials. This is true, but as Wilson has said, a concurrent investigation by the US ambassador to Niger, and the State Department, was ongoing. Thusly, he had no need to speak to the current officials, because they were to be interviewed by other US government officials. Wilson was chosen for the Niger trip precisely for his contacts with former Nigeran officials. "When I arrived in Niger, I spoke to the ambassador who thought that she had already debunked the allegations with current Niger officials," Wilson said. "We agreed then that I would speak to former government officials, who I knew better than she did because I worked with them while I was on the NSC staff at the White House, and thereafter. So that was the division of labor." Wilson also said that the ambassador told him that a "four-star Marine general had also already talked to current officials, and that he too had concluded and reported that he believed there was nothing to the allegations." (National Journal)

April 17: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accuses retired military generals who are privately calling for his resignation of aiding the enemies of the United States.
Conservative smear campaigns
Since then, an orchestrated barrage of op-eds and commentaries by conservative supporters, including other retired generals, of Rumsfeld echo and extend Rumsfeld's ugly remarks. Rumsfeld starts the ball rolling by telling Rush Limbaugh, "[I]f every time there were critics and opponents to war, we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War, and we wouldn't have been involved in World War I or II, or if we had, we would have failed. And our country would be a totally different place if it existed at all, if every time there were some critics that we tossed in the towel." More caustically, he says that while "people have a right to say what they want to say," they should also "recognize that the terrorists, [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden and [Ayman al-] Zawahiri, those people have media committees. They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States. They are very good at it. They're much better at managing those kinds of things than we are."
Simultaneously with Rumsfeld's remarks, the Wall Street Journal prints an April 17 op-ed featuring four retired generals writing, "Like former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, we do not believe that it is appropriate for active duty, or retired, senior military officers to publicly criticize US civilian leadership during war. Calling for the secretary's resignation during wartime may undercut the US mission and incites individual challenge to the good order and discipline of our military culture. At best, such comments may send a confusing message to our troops deployed on dangerous missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. At worst, they can also inspire and motivate the evil forces we seek to defeat." Two days later, retired secretary of defense Melvin Laird and retired general Robert Pursley make a similar argument, writing, "We do not advocate a silencing of debate on the war in Iraq. But care must be taken by those experienced officers who had their chance to speak up while on active duty. In speaking out now, they may think they are doing a service by adding to the reasoned debate. But the enemy does not understand or appreciate reasoned public debate. It is perceived as a sign of weakness and lack of resolve."
The conservative commentators pile on. April 18 sees a syndicated column by Fox News commentator Cal Thomas that reads, "What is one to make of the six retired generals who, in recent days, have called not only for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but have questioned whether US troops should remain in Iraq much longer? Only that it will further embolden America's enemies who are betting that the United States is weak, morally corrupt and lacks the stomach for protracted conflict. ...This isn't about one secretary of defense or six generals who don't like his policies. This is about winning the most dangerous and important war America has ever fought. By going public with their criticisms in the midst of the war, those generals are making victory more difficult. They are encouraging the enemy to fight on, believing we will ultimately surrender. There can be no good that will come from the comments of the former leaders of our volunteer soldiers, at least no good for what they once called 'our side.'" Thomas's implication that dissent equals treason is crystal clear, even going so far as to compare the generals' criticism with the behavior of alleged "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui, who, according to Thomas, "isn't retreating or calling for the resignation of Osama bin Laden or any other leader in the terrorist war on America and the West."
An April 20 New York Post editorial says that the generals' actions are more likely to "energize America's enemies ... given the unseemly glee with which congressional Democrats have joined the fray."
The comments come within weeks of earlier comments by Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials accusing the media of "aiding and abetting" terrorists by their "negative and biased" war reporting. (MediaMatters)

"I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense." -- George W. Bush, April 18, 2006

April 18: During a rambling press conference where he repeatedly touts his commitment to change and his bold decisiveness,
Iraq war and occupation
Donald Rumsfeld is asked about the initial plans to send around 400,000 US troops to Iraq, a decision widely known to have been personally vetoed by Rumsfeld in favor of a much smaller force. But in the conference, Rumsfeld blames former US military commander General Tommy Franks. "...General Franks called me and said stop the force flow," Rumsfeld says. "He didn't need more." Rumsfeld says he went with the recommendations of his ground commander. It is a breathtakingly blatant rewriting of the facts; worse, Rumsfeld asks for, and receives, verification of his revisionism from General Peter Pace, the deputy chair of the Joint Chiefs, during the conference. (Bob Woodward)

April 19: On MSNBC’s Hardball, White House counselor Dan Barlett adamantly denies that anyone in the administration ever claimed that the Iraq war would lead to lower gas prices.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
Host Chris Matthews says, "[W]e've been struck by higher gas prices. That was another promise made, that this war would help us get cheaper gas.... None of these promises come through." Bartlett retorts, "That's not correct, Chris. The president or no one else ever said that this war was going to result in cheaper gas prices." Matthews replies, "Okay, so just to make it official, Dan, no one in the administration has ever said that we would have cheaper gas because of war in Iraq, just to make it official?" "I don't recall anybody ever saying that, Chris." Bartlett's spinmeistering does not stand up to the truth. For just one of many examples, on September 19, 2002, during the runup to the Iraq invasion, then-senior economic advisor Laurence Lindsey said, in a report quoted by the Washington Times, "As for the impact of a war with Iraq, 'It depends how the war goes.' But [Lindsey] quickly adds that that 'Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits that would come from a successful prosecution of the war. The key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil,' which would drive down oil prices, giving the US economy an added boost." One lie piled atop another. (MSNBC/Think Progress)

April 20: Dick Cheney and the Defense Department have hired Iranian arms merchant and con man Manucher Ghorbanifar as their "man on the ground," in order to report on any interaction and attempts at negotiations between Iranian officials and US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, according to three intelligence sources.
War with Iran
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative allies in the Pentagon do not want any productive dialogue between Iran and the US, and Ghorbanifar's job is, apparently, to ensure that Cheney and Rumsfeld are given enough information about Khalilzad's negotiations to successfully derail them and keep the US and Iran at loggerheads. Asked if Ghorbanifar was essentially being employed as a spy, one former senior counterintelligence official says, "You could put it that way."
While some elements of the Bush administration and the State Department wish to broaden dialogue with Iran, in order to defuse tensions in the Middle East, lessen Iran's alleged influence among Iraqi Shi'ite insurgents, and keep closer tabs on Iran's burgeoning nuclear power program, Cheney is the point man for a hawkish, neoconservative element in the administration that wants to keep relations between Iran and the US as confrontational and dangerous as possible. Many suspect that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their allies and colleagues wish to foment a war with Iran.
It is certain that, while Bush officials say that the Iranians are blocking its attempts at opening diplomatic talks, the opposite is true. All three intelligence sources say that it is the US, not Iran, that is blocking attempts to open talks, an assertion confirmed by UN Security Council sources. For example, earlier in April 2006, Iran's UN ambassador, Javad Zarif, published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for talks and promising that Iran is committed to nuclear nonproliferation. But instead of responding positively, Bush officials have continued to answer Iran with belligerent, groundless accusations and veiled threats.
Interestingly, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, a Republican, approved using Ghorbanifar as an intermediary. Hoekstra attended at least one meeting in Paris with fellow House Republican Curt Weldon and Defense Department official Harold Rhode to meet with Ghorbanifar. (See the December 2001 page for more information about previous meetings between Rhode, Ghorbanifar, and other American and foreign officials to discuss regime change in Iran.) "Hoekstra okayed these channels," says an intelligence source. "He gave his blessing." (See the April 2003 item about Weldon's previous meetings with either Ghorbanifar or Ghorbanifar's associate Fereidoun Mahdavi, whom Weldon nicknamed "Ali," and who apparently successfully used Weldon to pass a raft of disinformation to the Bush administration. Hoekstra and Weldon met with "Ali" in July 2005, accompanied by Iran-Contra go-between Vaughn Forrest; the participants met again in either the spring or summer of 2006, though word of that meeting has been kept closely guarded.
Ghorbanifar is best remembered for his own shadowy role in facilitating contacts between the Reagan adminstration and the Iranian regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini when Reagan officials secretly negotiated an arms-for-hostage deal with the Iranians, a deal that was later uncovered as part of the Iran-Contra scandal. But Ghorbanifar is also known to have played some part, however unclear, in the more recent attempt to use fraudulent documents to push the assertion that Iraq attempted to buy weapons-grade uranium from Niger. He has long been marked as a fabricator and a liar by the CIA. As for Forrest, his current connection may be through Hoekstra. "Vaughn Forrest [has] for years done the work for the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, a group funded entirely by the Republican members of Congress, not an official Congressional committee," says a a former high-ranking intelligence official, referring to the group more accurately known as the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. "They have been conduits for Likud propaganda crap, and allegedly [Forrest's close associate Yosef] Bodansky has received some funding from Likud." Of Hoekstra, another intelligence official asks incredulously, "Who elected Hoekstra to run sources? And how is Hoekstra from his position able to judge whether or not this information given [to him] by a fabricator is accurate or not?" (Raw Story, Raw Story)

Iraqi National Assembly elects Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister

April 21: The Iraqi National Assembly chooses Nouri al-Maliki, a stiff, cerebral Shi'ite, as the country's new prime minister.
Iraq war and occupation
US intelligence knows very little about al-Maliki. He was in exile from the Hussein regime for 23 years, apparently spending most of his time in Syria and Iran, and was a spokesman for the powerful Shi'ite Dawa Party and the deputy to transitional prime minister Ibrahim al-Jafari. Four days later, al-Maliki meets with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Zalmay Khalilzad in Baghdad. He says he intends on improving relations between the Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds; that will lessen the violence rocking his country. He also wants to oversee improvements in basic services such as electricity, water, and sewage. He says he does not trust the Iraqi police, and intends to revamp and overhaul the corruption-riddled Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the police. Before long, Rumsfeld opens, indirectly, the subject of US withdrawal of troops. "It's way too early to be talking about that," al-Maliki protests. Rice leaves Baghdad impressed with al-Maliki's determination to take responsibilities on his own shoulders, and tells Bush on her return that al-Maliki is the first Iraqi leader to say, "This is on me."
Rice's communications advisor, Jim Wilkinson, stays with al-Maliki as a liason between the State Department and the Prime Minister's office. Almost immediately, they run into bureaucratic snags. Al-Maliki has brought in Dr. Salah Abdulrazzak as his spokesman, along with Abdulrazzak's family; rightfully fearing for their lives, he requests that they be found living quarters in the Green Zone. Wilkinson has to fight merely to get Abdulrazzak a room at the Al-Rashid Hotel. Wilkinson then runs into static in his attempts to get al-Maliki's chief of staff and spokesmen credentials to allow them into the Green Zone. Six or eight weeks, he is told; Wilkinson has to throw a fit and get Khalilzad involved to get the men credentials in a reasonable amount of time. Wilkinson scrounges computers for al-Maliki's office, battles to get phones installed, and even has to give al-Maliki's office pens and paper from his own office supplies. Al-Maliki tells Wilkinson that he can only invite around 10% of the National Assembly to his inauguration because the large hall that the ceremony will be held in lacks air conditioning. Wilkinson manages to get the embassy and the military to cooperate in installing an air conditioning system. Wilkinson's first impression of al-Maliki is that the new prime minister is very competent as a manager, and says all the right things, but can't get a read on what his new policies might be.
Wilkinson discusses with al-Maliki the innate contradiction in the US presence there: while Bush and Rice continue to insist that victory is essential in Iraq for the stability of the Middle East and, indeed, for the future of civilization, the internal pressure in the military is to get out as quickly as possible. Wilkinson finally tells al-Maliki that his government is Iraq's last chance to get it right; if he can't show his people why democracy is better, can't get services up and running, and can't tighten security, it will collapse. "I'm not sure what Plan B is," Wilkinson says. Will al-Maliki be judged by American mistakes, Wilkinson wonders, and will America be judged by his? And what, exactly, will defeat Islamic terrorism? On the other side of the debate, Rice's Iraq policy coordinator, Jim Jeffrey, thinks the whole idea of the al-Maliki government being Iraq's last chance for democracy is bunk. All it takes to win, he thinks, is the willpower of the US to force a victory. The US only lost in Vietnam because they turned and fled. If the US leaves, either the country descends into anarchy or becomes an extremist "rogue nation" like Iran. And, of course, there is Iraq's oil. The US isn't leaving, Jeffrey determines, no matter whether al-Maliki stands or falls. (Bob Woodward, T. Christian Miller)

April 22: Democratic presidential hopeful and former senator John Edwards, interviewed by Air America's Jackie Guerra, responds bluntly to the question,
2004 presidential elections
"One of the most obnoxious suggestions I often hear is that poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough. What's your response to that?" Edwards fires back, "It's a lie." He continues, "It's so obvious. Most folks who are at or near the poverty line are not only working -- they work two or three jobs. They're responsible, they love their kids, and they are doing everything they know how to do to have a better life and, for their kids, to give them a better and easier life than they've had. They are just faced with such obstacles. They don't make enough money because pay is so low, they don't have health care coverage, and they don't make enough money to pay for even the basic needs of life. So many families have to figure out which bills they can pay each month. This is immoral. Nobody should work full-time in our country and still live in poverty."
Edwards says that, contrary to Republican teachings, it is indeed the government's responsibility to help eradicate poverty, and that by doing so, America improves as a society and as a nation. "All of us benefit from living in America.... Whether it's a business, a charitable organization, or an individual, everyone gets benefits from living in the United States of America. So all we're suggesting is, why in the world should people who live at or near the poverty line be left out of that? It's not the government taking care of them; they want a chance to take care of themselves. So things like raising the minimum wage, unionization in the workplace are enormously important. The most important antipoverty movement in American history is the organized labor movement." (Air America Playbook)

"I can look you in the eye and tell you I feel I've tried to solve the problem diplomatically to the max, and would have committed troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq knowing what I know today." -- George W. Bush, April 24, 2006

April 25: A former senior Iranian diplomat gives startling details about US covert operations in Iran to reporters from the Asia Times.
War with Iran
The diplomat, who refuses to be identified, says that the US is attempting to destabilize the Iranian government and topple the regime -- or is preparing to attack. "The Iranian government knows and is aware of such infiltration," the former diplomat says. "It means that the Iranian government has identified them [the covert operatives] but for some reason does not want to show [this]." The former diplomat, an ex-Foreign Ministry official, says the agents being used by the US "were originally Iranians and not Americans" possibly recruited in the United States or through US embassies in Dubai and Ankara. He also warns that such actions will engender "some reactions," saying, "Both sides will certainly do something,"" referring to Iran's capability to stir trouble up in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan for the occupying US troops there.
Recently, eminent American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote that the Bush administration has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack as the crisis with Iran over its nuclear program escalates. Hersh wrote in the New Yorker that "teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups." He compared the process to the period that preceded US air strikes against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan during which a covert CIA campaign distributed millions of dollars to tribal allies. UPI intelligence correspondent Richard Sale confirms the Iranian diplomat's assertions: "The Iranian accusations are true," he says, referring to charges that the US is using the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) organization and other groups to carry out cross-border operations. "But it is being done on such a small scale -- a series of pinpricks -- it would seem to have no strategic value at all." Retired Army colonel Sam Gardiner, who specializes in war-game scenarios, says, "The president hasn't notified the Congress that American troops are operating inside Iran. So it's a very serious question about the constitutional framework under which we are now conducting military operations in Iran." US commanders in Iraq deny that any US forces are crossing the border to operate inside Iraq.
Hersh tells a different story. He says US combat troops are already in Iran, and, in the event of air strikes, are positioned to mark critical targets with laser beams to ensure the accuracy of bombing runs. They are also positioned to excite sectarian tensions which will increase civil unrest and might lead to the creation of an anti-government insurgency. To that end, Hersh reported, units are working with several Iranian minority groups, including the Azeris in the north, the Balochis in the southeast, and the Kurds in the northwest.
The US has denied Iranian reports that on April 9 Iranian missiles shot down an unmanned American surveillance plane. The US has also denied reports in the US media that the military has been secretly flying surveillance drones over Iran since 2004, using radar, video, still photography and air filters to monitor Iranian military formations and track Iran's air-defense system. And Iranian officials have accused US forces of bringing down a military airplane carrying 11 of the top leaders of the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards through "electronic jamming."
"Given all intelligence information that we have gathered, we can say that agents of the United States, Britain and Israel are seeking to destabilize Iran through a coordinated plan," said Minister of Interior Mustafa Pour-Mohammadi after the April plane crash. Another plane crash, in February 2005, raised eyebrows: the plane took off from Azerbaijan, transited Iranian airspace, and crashed just inside Iraq. The Iranian Mehr news agency reported that the "passengers on board were possibly of Israeli origin," and added that US troops have restricted access to the site to Iraqi Kurdish officials and that Western media were reporting the passengers aboard as having been German.
It is partly in response to these alleged American incursions that Iran has retaliated, such as shelling Iranian Kurdish rebel bases inside Iraq. The former Iranian diplomat warns that the totality of American military operations will drive President Mahmud Ahmadinejad towards "weaponization of the [nuclear] technology...and a military strike." He says, "The Americans are pushing Iran to become a nuclear state. Iran just wants to be a supplier of nuclear fuel. But [with their threats] they are pushing it further." (Asia Times)
April 25: National Journal reporter Murray Waas points out the tremendous double standard on leaks within the Bush administration and its Republican coterie.
Secrecy of Bush administration
Days before, the CIA announced the firing of employee Mary McCarthy, who, according to the agency, "knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence" with a newspaper reporter, earning the praise of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, who said that "unauthorized disclosures of classified information can significantly harm our ability to protect the American people." Roberts, a Republican who is one of the loudest defenders of the Bush administration's effort to stop the flow of sensitive information to the press, adds, "Those who leak classified information not only risk the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods, but also expose the brave men and women of the intelligence community to greater danger. Clearly, those guilty of improperly disclosing classified information should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Apparently the standards are different when it is Roberts who is leaking classified information.
On March 20, 2003, during the first hours of the US invasion of Iraq, Roberts said in a speech to the National Newspaper Association that he had "been in touch with our intelligence community" and that the CIA had informed President Bush and the National Security Council "of intelligence information from what we call human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein and his leadership in a bunker in the suburbs of Baghdad." Roberts thus revealed classified intelligence information to a gaggle of reporters, intelligence that directly bore on the issue of intelligence-gathering sources and methods, and revealed that Iraqis close to Hussein were probably talking to the United States. One former senior intelligence official who worked closely with a number of leak investigations contrasts the Roberts and McCarthy leaks: "On a scale of one to ten, if Mary McCarthy did what she is accused of doing, it would be at best a six or seven," the official says. "What Pat Roberts did, from a legal and national security point of view, was an eleven." This former official, and others, say the Roberts and McCarthy cases show how rank and file intelligence professionals now have much to fear from legitimate and even inadvertent contacts with journalists, while senior executive branch officials and members of Congress are almost never held accountable when they seriously breach national security through leaks of information.
McCarthy, who was fired ten days before her retirement, says through her lawyer that she did not leak any classified information to anyone, and that she did not even have access to the information that was revealed to a reporter. The CIA also accuses McCarthy of having what it calls "unauthorized contacts" with journalists, but a former colleague of McCarthy's says that she was often authorized and directed by her superiors to talk to the press. "It is not uncommon for an officer, when they are designated to talk to the press, to let something slip, or not report every contact," the former official says. "Mary might have said something or disclosed something inadvertently, which is exactly Roberts' defense. The only difference between them is that Pat Roberts is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Mary is somebody that they are using to set an example."
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, responding to Waas's request for a response to this article, says that the Bush White House is on a campaign to intimidate the press. "I'm not sure journalists fully appreciate the threat confronting us," Keller says. "The Times in the eavesdropping case, the Post for its CIA prison stories, and everyone else who has tried to look behind the war on terror." Keller asserts that "there's sometimes a vindictive tone in the way [administration officials] talk about dragging reporters before grand juries and in the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public's business risk being branded traitors." He warns that journalists possibly are "suffering a bit of subpoena fatigue. Maybe some people are a little intimidated by the way the White House plays the soft-on-terror card. Whatever the reason, I worry that we're not as worried as we should be."
A former senior intelligence official, possibly referring to the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case, says that the Bush administration has targeted "leaks and leakers they don't like, while turning a blind eye to those they do like, or [leaks] they do themselves." Should this continue, the former official says, it will set a "dangerous precedent in that any president will be able to control the flow of information regarding any policy dispute.... When historians examine this, they will see that is how we got into war with Iraq." Bush has said that the NSA story and those who leaked to the Times had engaged in a "shameful act" and were "helping the enemy" in a "time of war" -- an accusation just short of an accusation of treason. And CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate in February that it was his "hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information."
A senior federal law enforcement official says that by the time the FBI investigation is completed into who provided information to the Times for its articles it may well be the most extensive leak investigation ever undertaken by the bureau in terms of agents assigned to the case, resources dedicated to it, and overall expense. By contrast, the circumstances involving Roberts' statements three years ago to the newspaper group were never subjected to official scrutiny. The senator's comments, while highly significant, received almost no press attention at the time.
The above quote from Roberts is not the extent of his disclosure of classified information to the National Newspaper Association. After opening his speech with the information about human intelligence and Saddam Hussein's location in a Baghdad bunker, Robert told the assemblage that Bush had conferred with his top military advisers and had "authorized a pre-emptive surgical strike with 40 Tomahawk Missiles launched by ship and submarines and so-called bunker bombs by F-117 stealth aircraft. I do not have a damage assessment. The Iraqis report 14 killed and one wounded and are reporting damage in residential areas." By disclosing this information, Roberts indirectly revealed one of the US government's most sensitive secrets: the CIA had recruited Iraqi nationals who claimed to have infiltrated Hussein's inner circle to be able to follow his movements at the onset of war. But after the bombs and missiles hit an Iraqi governmental complex known as Dora Park, located on the Tigris River south of Baghdad, Hussein either was not there, or escaped unharmed. (Waas is referring to a group of Iraqi CIA assets labeled the ROCKSTARS; see other references in this site for more information.) According to former intelligence officials, Roberts almost certainly tipped off Hussein that there were CIA spies close to him. "He [Roberts] had given up that we had a penetration of [Saddam's] inner circle," says one former senior intelligence official. "It was the worst thing you could ever do." It has been difficult to determine what repercussions were brought about by Roberts' disclosure of government secrets. Two former intelligence officials say the disclosure by Roberts may have made it more difficult to launch a second missile or bombing attack against Saddam Hussein in the early days of the war.
A Republican congressional aide familiar with the March 20, 2003 speech and who spoke to Roberts about it around the time it occurred, says that Roberts' comments were a "mistake" and a "dumb act," and "not done with bad intent." The aide suggests that Roberts might have been carried away by the moment, or acted out of "self-aggrandizement." So, if one accepts the rationale of the aide, then it's apparently acceptable to disclose classified information if you call yourself names and admit that you did it either out of stupidity or out of a desire to puff yourself up in the eyes of others.
Democrats on Capitol Hill and other administration critics argue that while the Bush administration has been pressing in an unprecedented way to stop leaks of classified information, White House officials have simultaneously engaged in their own leaks that are often worse then the ones they criticize; the Plame leak is the most well-known, but perhaps not the worst, example of administration leaking for its own purposes. In February 2006, Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller charged, in a letter to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, that the most "damaging revelations of intelligence sources and methods are generated primarily by Executive Branch officials pushing a particular policy, and not by rank-and-file employees of intelligence agencies." Rockefeller also wrote, "Given the Administration's continuing abuse of intelligence information for political purposes, its criticism of leaks is extraordinarily hypocritical. Preventing damage to intelligence sources and methods from media leaks will not be possible until the highest level of the Administration ceases to disclose classified information on a classified basis for political purposes." Rockefeller cited the "almost unfettered access to classified material of the most sensitive nature" granted to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for his 2002 book Bush at War, which lauds the Bush policies towards Iraq. Rockefeller noted, "According to [Woodward's] account, he was provided information related to sources and methods, extremely sensitive covert actions, and foreign intelligence liaison relationships. It is no wonder, as Director Goss wrote, 'because of the number of recent news reports discussing our relationships with other intelligence services, some of these partners have even informed the CIA that they are reconsidering their participation of some of our most important antiterrorism ventures.'" When Rockefeller wrote to former CIA director George Tenet and acting director John McLaughlin "seeking to determine what steps were being taken to address the appalling disclosures contained in Bush at War," he said, "The...response I received was to indicate that the leaks had been authorized by the Administration."
Rockefeller cited numerous examples of other administration-approved leaks of classified information, and charged that "blatant abuse of intelligence information for political purposes is inexcusable, but all too common. Throughout this period leading up to the Iraq war the Administration selectively declassified or leaked information related to Iraq's acquisition of aluminum tubes, the alleged purchase of uranium, the non-existent operational connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and numerous other issues." (National Journal)

April 28: Karl Rove appears for a fifth and final testimony session before the grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA leak case.
Plame outing
Rove was called back to testify by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald because of contradictions between Rove's previous testimony and testimony from Time reporter Matthew Cooper on the substance of their July 2003 conversation regarding Plame. In several hours of testimony, Rove is again asked how he learned three years ago that Plame worked for the CIA, and the circumstances of how he relayed that information to Cooper.
Rove has testified that when he told Cooper about Plame's status as a covert CIA agent, he was only passing along what he calls unverified gossip of no real import. Cooper has painted a much different picture; he has testified that Rove told him in a phone conversation on July 11, 2003, that Plame worked for the CIA and played a role in having the agency select her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to make a fact-finding trip to Niger in 2002. Cooper has also testified that Rove, as well as a second source, Lewis Libby, then-chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, portrayed the information about Plame as accurate and authoritative. Cooper has testified that based on his conversations with Rove and Libby, he felt confident enough about the information to identify Plame as a CIA officer in a July 17 Time story. Cooper's story appeared several days after a column by conservative pundit Robert Novak outed Plame. Rove was one of Novak's sources on Plame as well. Rove was one of Cooper's two sources; Lewis Libby was the other.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been trying to determine whether Rove tried to mislead the FBI and the grand jury in the early stages of the leak probe when he failed to disclose that he had talked to Cooper about Plame three days before she was outed as a CIA officer. Fitzgerald's grilling of Rove, focusing on his contradictions between Cooper's and Rove's accounts of their crucial July 11 conversation is part of that attempt to prove whether or not Rove lied to the FBI and to Fitzgerald's grand jury in his previous appearance. Rove did not disclose the conversation with Cooper when he was first interviewed in the early stages of the leak probe by the FBI in October 2003, and again during his first appearance before the grand jury in February 2004 (see earlier items about Rove's apparent memory lapse). Later, Rove returned to the grand jury on October 15, 2004, and testified about the Cooper conversation, saying he had forgotten about it in his earlier statements to the FBI and in his first grand jury appearance. Rove then told the jury that while he understood he had indeed spoken to Cooper about Plame, he has little recollection of what was said.
Rove's new testimony is prompted by the discovery of a July 11 White House email that Rove had written to then-deputy National Security advisor Stephen Hadley in which Rove said he had spoken to Cooper about the Niger controversy. Like Libby, Rove blames a faulty memory for the contradictory testimony. Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, have also argued that it would have been foolhardy for Rove to lie, knowing that Cooper might someday testify against him, and that other evidence might surface showing that the two had talked about Plame; however, Rove may well have been counting on Cooper's unwillingness to reveal sources. It will be difficult for Fitzgerald to prosecute Rove on criminal charges of knowingly disclosing classified information if Rove sticks to the faulty memory assertion -- though it seems clear that, even if the charges don't meet the burden of legal proof, Rove indeed knowingly revealed classified information and then lied to the FBI and to the grand jury about his disclosure. Fordham University law school professor Dan Richman, a former federal prosecutor, says such cases are typically difficult to bring because "in many instances you almost have to literally take the jury inside a defendant's head...to demonstrate their intent." Richman says the fact that Rove voluntarily returned to the grand jury to testify about his conversation with Cooper might "prove to be an obstacle to any [potential] obstruction or perjury case in that the person ultimately cooperated and told what he knew. But if Rove only revised his earlier statements when faced with the likelihood that he was going to be found out anyway, Richman says, that would demonstrate the crucial element of intent to a jury. "You do score points for coming in and retracting or clarifying your previous false testimony. But it is an entirely different case if you are doing so only out of fear that you are about to be caught." (Fitzgerald will later decide not to prosecute Rove.)
Luskin has been forced to provide evidence to prosecutors about his own contacts with another Time reporter, Viveca Novak (no relation to Robert Novak), in an attempt to show that Rove has testified as honestly as he could to the federal grand jury. Luskin has told prosecutors that Novak told him prior to Rove's first grand jury appearance that she had heard from colleagues at Time that Rove was one of the sources for Cooper's story about Plame. Luskin in turn said that he told Rove about this, but Rove still did not disclose to the grand jury that he had ever spoken to Cooper about Plame. But in her own testimony, Novak could not pinpoint the date that she had her conversation with Luskin, and told prosecutors that she was not sure wheter it was before or after the first time Rove testified before the grand jury. Rove granted a limited waiver for his attorney-client privilege so that Luskin could testify that he remembered the conversation with Novak having occurred earlier than she had.
Rove, like Libby, testifies that he can't remember where he learned about Plame's CIA status, though he believes it was from a journalist. However, other testimony and documentary evidence prove that Rove learned Plame's identity from either Cheney or Libby. Rove says that he spoke with Robert Novak about Plame on July 9, 2003. During that conversation, Rove falsely asserts, Novak told him that he had heard that Plame -- referred to during the conversation only as Wilson's wife -- worked for the CIA. Because of that conversation with Novak, Rove says he believed that Plame worked for the CIA. Since his initial assertions that he learned from White House sources that Plame was a CIA agent because they apparently wanted to leak the information to him, Novak has changed his own story to parallel Rove's tale that Rove dropped the Plame tidbit as unsubstantiated, meaningless gossip. One person with first-hand knowledge of the grand jury testimony of both men says, "If you believe both of them, Novak was saying that Rove was his source, and Rove was saying that Novak was his source." Rove also testifies to the grand jury that he had heard from Libby that Plame worked for the CIA. But Rove adds that Libby told him that he only heard the information as rumors being passed on to him by journalists, in an obvious attempt to bolster Libby's own lies to the grand jury.
Cooper has said he told the grand jury that Libby was a second source for his July 17 story reporting that Plame worked for the CIA. Libby spoke to him on July 12, one day after his conversation with Rove. But Libby told the grand jury that when he told Cooper that Plame worked for the CIA he was careful to say that the information was only an unsubstantiated rumor that Libby himself had first heard from others. Regarding his conversation with Cooper, according to the indictment of Libby, he told the grand jury: "I was very clear to say reporters are telling us that because in my mind I still don't know it as fact. Later, Libby added: "And I said [to Cooper] reporters are telling us that, I don't know if it's true." A raft of testimony and documentary evidence show that Libby lied to the grand jury. (National Journal)
April 26: Conservative maven Rush Limbaugh,
Conservative smear campaigns

discussing a videotape released by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, tells his listeners, "It sounds just like the DNC [Democratic National Committee] is writing his scripts now." (MediaMatters)

Bush uses signing statements to break, ignore laws with impunity

April 30: In his more than five years as president, Bush has used "signing statements" to claim the authority to disobey and ignore over 750 laws that he himself has signed into law, claiming that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
"Unitary executive"
The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage examines Bush's use of signing statements in this and others of a series of articles, which in 2007 will win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. (Note: Savage refrains from making editorial comments and observations throughout his series. The editor of this site does not. Some of the more assertive language in this item, as with others throughout this site, is mine and not the original author's.)
Bush has claimed that, among other laws, he can ignore military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, "'whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. This is part of his administration's broader attempt to assert the "unitary executive" theory of the presidency, which in essence says that an American president is, like a king or dictator, essentially above the law. According to this theory, the president supersedes laws passed by Congress, and can enforce them, follow them, ignore them, or break them at his pleasure. Naturally, Constitutional scholars disagree, noting that the Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to "execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.
Some former administration officers advance the specious argument that Bush is doing nothing worrisome because, in many instances, he isn't actually refusing to obey a law, he is just reserving the right to do so if he wants to. But they ignore the recent disclosures of Bush's illegal, warrantless domestic spying program, in which Bush ignored the law that requires warrants to tap the phones of American citizens. And that is just one example. Many legal specialists say that Bush is anything but reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the constitutional authority to override. When Bush -- or more specifically, Bush, along with his legal advisors and his vice president, Dick Cheney -- feels that a law infringes on his power under the Constitution as the head of the executive branch and as commander in chief of the military, he does not hesitate to ignore or actually break a law. Although other presidents have occasionally engaged in such actions, Bush has gone much farther than any of his predecessors in asserting his powers of office.
Indeed, many legal scholars say they believe that Bush's theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts. Law professor Phillip Cooper, an expert on Bush's claims of executive power, says that Bush and his legal team have spent the past five years quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House. "There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government," he says. "This is really big, very expansive, and very significant."
Until recently, Congress and the mainstream media paid little attention to Bush's assumptions of unlimited power. (Isolated, liberal voices in both sectors have been raising a ruckus about Bush's drive towards all-consuming executive power for years.) But that has changed in recent months, with increasing levels of publicity surrounding the domestic surveillance program, Bush's refusal to uphold the Congressional ban on torture, and his refusal to give Congress detailed reports on how he is using the USA Patriot Act. Savage, the Globe reporter responsible for this and other reports, was refused access to White House or Department of Justice lawyers to explain Bush's claims; instead, Savage was merely steered to previous responses to questions about Bush's assertions that he could ignore sections of the Patriot Act. At the time, White House spokespersons said that Bush was merely following a practice that has "been used for several administrations" and that "the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution."
Those statements are anything but accurate. No president has ever used signing statements in such a broad, sweeping manner, and the phrase "in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution" is problematic at best because, legal scholars say, Bush is setting himself up as the ultimate authority on Constitutional interpretation. I can do it because I say the Constitution gives me the authority, Bush is saying with his actions, and he is doing so in an unprecedented fashion.
Bush has yet to veto a bill in his five and a half years in office. Instead, he signs the bills that pass the Republican-controlled Congress into law, often in lavish signing ceremonies filled with praise for the bills and their sponsors. Then, after the cameras are off and the lawmakers have left, Bush quietly files a signing statement in which he asserts his intention not to follow the law. These statements are recorded in the Federal Register. Savage reports, "In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills -- sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed." Political science professor Christopher Kelley says, "He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises -- and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened."
Bush has been particularly quick to bypass and ignore laws involving the military. Under the Constitution, Congress, not the president, has the power to create armies, to declare war, to make rules for captured enemies, and "to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces." But, citing his role as commander in chief, Bush says he can ignore any act of Congress that seeks to regulate the military. On at least four occasions while Bush has been president, Congress has passed laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia, where the US military is advising the government in its struggle against drug-funded Marxist rebels. After signing each bill, Bush declared in his signing statement that he did not have to obey any of the Colombia restrictions because he is commander in chief.
Bush has also said he does not have to obey laws requiring him to tell Congress before diverting money from authorized programs into secret operations, such as the "black sites" used to house, interrogate, and torture suspected terrorists.
Congress has twice passed laws forbidding the military from using intelligence that was not "lawfully collected," including any information on Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches. Congress passed the provision in August 2004, before the existence of Bush's domestic spying program became public knowledge, and passed it again after the program was revealed in December 2005. Bush signed both provisions into law, and then declared that, as commander in chief, he does not have to obey the law, and it is for him and only him to decide whether the military can use such intelligence.
In October 2004, the ongoing revelations of torture and abuse from Abu Ghraib led to Congress's passage of a series of new rules and regulations for military prisons. Bush signed each provision into law, then said he doesn't have to follow those laws as commander in chief. One provision made clear that military lawyers can give their commanders independent advice on such issues as what would constitute torture. But Bush declared that military lawyers could not contradict his administration's lawyers. Other provisions required the Pentagon to retrain military prison guards on the requirements for humane treatment of detainees under the Geneva Conventions, to perform background checks on civilian contractors in Iraq, and to ban such contractors from performing "security, intelligence, law enforcement, and criminal justice functions." Instead, Bush asserted that he can ignore any or all of those requirements. The new law also created the position of inspector general for Iraq. But Bush wrote in his signing statement that the inspector "shall refrain" from investigating any intelligence or national security matter, or any crime the Pentagon says it prefers to investigate for itself.
As egregrious as the other examples are, the last one is particularly interesting. Bush seems to have a particular aversion to allowing any real oversight to take place, especially if such oversight has to do with the occupation of Iraq. When Congress created the position of inspector general for the Iraq occupation in November 2003, a position that required the IG to notify Congress if a US official refused to cooperate with his inquiries, Bush said that the IG could not give any information to Congress without permission from the administration.
Oversight in general seems to be anathema for Bush. Many of the laws he has stated he can ignore involve requirements to give information about government activity to congressional oversight committees. In December 2004, Congress passed an intelligence bill requiring the Justice Department to tell them how often, and in what situations, the FBI was using special national security wiretaps on US soil. The law also required the Justice Department to give oversight committees copies of administration memos outlining any new interpretations of domestic-spying laws. It contained eleven other requirements for reports about such issues as civil liberties, security clearances, border security, and counternarcotics efforts. After signing the bill, Bush issued a signing statement saying he could withhold all the information sought by Congress. And Congress's creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 mandated that oversight committees must be given information about vulnerabilities at chemical plants and the screening of checked bags at airports, and said that Congress must be shown unaltered reports about problems with visa services prepared by a new immigration ombudsman. Bush asserted the right to withhold the information and alter the reports.
Bush has also said he could ignore and even nullify laws creating "whistleblower" job protections for federal employees that would stop any attempt to fire them as punishment for telling a member of Congress about possible government wrongdoing. When Congress passed a huge energy package in August, for example, it strengthened whistle-blower protections for employees at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Lawmakers wanted to ensure that Bush appointees were less able to intimidate nuclear specialists and keep them from testifying about safety issues regarding the planned nuclear waste site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. But when Bush signed the energy bill, he issued a signing statement declaring that the executive branch could ignore the whistle-blower protections.
Bush's signing statements have not been restricted to laws that he himself signed into law. The whistleblower statement signaled that he felt no compunction to obey laws that have been on the books for years before he took office. Same with the domestic spying program; in that case, Bush violated a surveillance law enacted 23 years before he took office.
Law professor and executive-power expert David Golove says Bush has cast a cloud over "the whole idea that there is a rule of law," because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore. "Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional."
Bush is also jealous of his own supremacy when the law, or the courts, have assigned other executive branch officials the power to act independently of the president in certain instances, even when the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of those assignations. For example, the court has upheld laws creating special prosecutors free of Justice Department oversight and insulating the board of the Federal Trade Commission from political interference, but Bush said in a signing statement that the Constitution lets him control any executive official, no matter what a statute passed by Congress might say. In November 2002, for example, Congress, seeking to generate independent statistics about student performance, passed a law setting up an educational research institute to conduct studies and publish reports "without the approval" of the Secretary of Education. Bush was having none of it, and decreed that the institute's director would be "subject to the supervision and direction of the secretary of education."
Affirmative action rulings have also earned a signatory smirk from Bush. In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld a race-conscious university admissions program over the strong objections of Bush, who argued that such programs should be struck down as unconstitutional. Bush has also taken exception -- at least nine times -- to provisions that seek to ensure that minorities are represented among recipients of government jobs, contracts, and grants. Each time, he singled out the provisions, declaring that he would construe them "in a manner consistent with" the Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection" to all -- which many legal scholars say amounts to an argument that the affirmative-action provisions represent reverse discrimination against whites.
Golove says that to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution in defiance of the Supreme Court's precedents, he threatens to "overturn the existing structures of constitutional law," which seems to be exactly the point. A president who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to challenge him, Golove says, can make the Constitution simply "disappear."
Such signing statements have been used on occasion as far back as the 19th century. But the first modern president to make extensive use of signing statements was Ronald Reagan, after his Attorney General, Edwin Meese, decided that signing statements could be used to increase the power of the president. Savage explains: "When interpreting an ambiguous law, courts often look at the statute's legislative history, debate and testimony, to see what Congress intended it to mean. Meese realized that recording what the president thought the law meant in a signing statement might increase a president's influence over future court rulings. Under Meese's direction in 1986, a young Justice Department lawyer named Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a strategy memo about signing statements. It came to light in late 2005, after Bush named Alito to the Supreme Court. In the memo, Alito predicted that Congress would resent the president's attempt to grab some of its power by seizing 'the last word on questions of interpretation.' He suggested that Reagan's legal team should 'concentrate on points of true ambiguity, rather than issuing interpretations that may seem to conflict with those of Congress.'"
George H.W. Bush challenged the law 232 times in his four years in office; during Bill Clinton's eight years, he issued 140 challenges. Many of these involved longstanding legal ambiguities and points of conflict between the president and Congress. But Reagan, the elder Bush, and Clinton made far more use of the presidential veto, rather than signing a bill into law and then issuing an edict saying that he didn't have to obey it. The veto is far more aboveboard and open, and gives Congress a chance to modify the bill or override their decision. Instead, George W. Bush has abandoned the veto and, by use of the signing statement (which has no basis in law whatsoever), has attempted to cut Congress out of the process, abandoning even the caution counseled by Alito in 1986. In his five-plus years, Bush has already issued over 750 challenges, an astonishing number, and is the first president since Thomas Jefferson to have stayed in office this long without issuing a veto. "What we haven't seen until this administration is the sheer number of objections that are being raised on every bill passed through the White House," says Kelley. "That is what is staggering. The numbers are well out of the norm from any previous administration."
There are examples to back the assertions by Bush defenders that the signing statements are little more than political chest-thumping by his lawyers who are determined to defend Bush's prerogatives. For example, citing his power to "withhold information" in September 2002, Bush declared that he could ignore a law requiring the State Department to list the number of overseas deaths of US citizens in foreign countries. Nevertheless, the department has still put the list on its website. But the examples are few and of little impact.
Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who until 2005 oversaw the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for the administration, says the statements do not change the law; they just let people know how the president is interpreting it. "Nobody reads them," says Goldsmith. "They have no significance. Nothing in the world changes by the publication of a signing statement. The statements merely serve as public notice about how the administration is interpreting the law. Criticism of this practice is surprising, since the usual complaint is that the administration is too secretive in its legal interpretations." Goldsmith's sugary objections are ingenuous and misleading. Cooper points out that the signing statements are indeed being closely read -- and followed -- by the bureaucrats who actually implement new laws. Lower-level officials will follow the president's instructions even when his understanding of a law conflicts with the clear intent of Congress, crafting policies that may endure long after Bush leaves office, he says. "Years down the road, people will not understand why the policy doesn't look like the legislation," he says. And in many cases, critics contend, there is no way to know whether the administration is violating laws or merely preserving the "right" to do so. Many of the laws Bush has challenged involve national security, where it is almost impossible to verify what the government is doing. Since the disclosure of Bush's domestic spying program, many people have expressed alarm about his sweeping claims of the authority to violate laws.
Republicans and Democrats alike in Congress have objected, to varying degrees, of Bush's attempts to categorically and unilaterally usurp power through his use of signing statements. Commenting on Bush's unwillingness to obey the ban on torture, GOP senator Lindsey Graham said, "I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to set aside any...law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified." Of Bush's attempt to ignore the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, Democratic senator Patrick Leahy accused Bush of trying to "cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow." House Democrats Jane Harman and John Conyers wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanding that Bush rescind his claim and abide by the law, saying in part, "Many members who supported the final law did so based upon the guarantee of additional reporting and oversight. The administration cannot, after the fact, unilaterally repeal provisions of the law implementing such oversight.... Once the president signs a bill, he and all of us are bound by it."
Legal experts fear that the only check on Bush's claims to near-absolute power is the political fallout he may -- or may not -- have to endure. The courts have little chance of reviewing Bush's assertions, especially in the secret realm of national security matters. "There can't be judicial review if nobody knows about it," warns law professor and former Justice Department official Neil Kinkopf. "And if they avoid judicial review, they avoid having their constitutional theories rebuked." Without court involvement, only Congress can check a president who goes too far. But Bush's fellow Republicans control both chambers, and they have shown limited interest in launching the kind of oversight that could damage their party. "The president is daring Congress to act against his positions, and they're not taking action because they don't want to appear to be too critical of the president, given that their own fortunes are tied to his because they are all Republicans," says law professor Jack Beermann. "Oversight gets much reduced in a situation where the president and Congress are controlled by the same party." Golove says, "Bush has essentially said that 'We're the executive branch and we're going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it.'" Former Reagan-era deputy attorney general Bruce Fein says that the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch "to exercise some self-restraint." But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he says, and then ruled for himself every time. "This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy," Fein says. "There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn't doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power." (Boston Globe)

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

April 2006

Searching This Site by Topic

Highlights of This Page

US using Iranian terrorist group to foment insurrection inside Iran

Iraqi National Assembly elects Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister

Bush uses signing statements to break, ignore laws with impunity

Quick Navigation Menu

2003 Month by Month

2004 Month by Month

2005 Month by Month

2006 Month by Month

2007 Month by Month

Other Pages On This Site

Copyright © 2002-2007 Max Black