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Bush's cooperation with 9/11 commission
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| daffodil |
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/p...pagewanted=2&hp
Very interesting article, I think. Particularly the part that chronicles instances where Bush has yielded to growing media pressure. I don't like Bush, so I like that this makes him look like a bit of a pig-headed, stubborn jerk.
Bush and Cheney claim that executive power has been eroded in the past few administrations, and this article describe the current administration as "very secretive." Do y'all think that's a good thing? On one hand, there are obviously security issues that the public doesn't need to know about, but honestly, I don't trust Bush to disclose what should be disclosed. His administration has struck me as remarkably self-serving and revenge-oriented.
I'll probably add more later, must go to work now!
| quote: | WASHINGTON, March 30 — When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took office three years ago, they made no secret of their intention to restore presidential powers and prerogatives that they believed had withered under the onslaught of Washington's cycle of televised, all-consuming investigations.
But time and again, that effort by the Bush White House has fallen victim to political reality. It did so once more on Tuesday, when the president made a four-minute appearance in the White House press room to announce that he was giving in to demands from the 9/11 commission that he had resisted for months.
His decision to reverse course, dropping his claim of executive privilege preventing public, sworn testimony by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was part of a distinct pattern that has emerged inside this highly secretive White House.
The first reaction to most demands for outside inquiries, or for details about energy policy decisions or intelligence concerning Iraqi weapons or Nigerian uranium, has been to build walls: Mr. Bush, or more often Mr. Cheney in his stead, asserts a clear, inviolate principle that the president and his advisers need the freedom to gather information, develop policy and exchange ideas in private.
But eventually other forces come into play. Gradually pressure builds until Mr. Bush's advisers — including Ms. Rice herself in this case, several officials said — determine that the cost is too high.
"It was only in the last few days, down at the ranch, that the president began to think that the public wasn't getting the right impression about our cooperation with the commission," one of Mr. Bush's most influential advisers, Dan Bartlett, his director of communications, said Tuesday. "It was a debate all about process, and he wanted to shift it back to the substance."
Mr. Bartlett did not explain why that decision had taken so long, since the sparring with the commission had been going on for months. Other administration aides say it takes time to move the president and Mr. Cheney, citing an ingrained reluctance on their part to give ground.
"I think it goes to a deep feeling, much of it surrounding Cheney and his office, that the powers of the presidency were eroded for years and that this administration has to claw them back," one senior American diplomat who has sat in on some White House strategy meetings said Tuesday. "Then the pressure grows. And grows. And now people know that if you keep it on long enough, these guys will give way."
In fact, Mr. Bush and the vice president resisted the creation of the 9/11 commission itself for more than a year after the terrorist attacks, saying a public airing of what had gone wrong among intelligence agencies, in the White House and at the F.B.I. would inevitably detract from a focus on fighting terrorism. They cited the example of the Pearl Harbor inquiry, which was not undertaken until years after the Japanese attack.
But eventually the demand, even from some Republicans, for a full inquiry into what had led to history's biggest attack on American soil overwhelmed the Bush team.
The next fight concerned whether the commission could see the most highly classified documents in government: the President's Daily Brief, the intelligence warnings that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice and only a handful of others receive each morning. After months of negotiations, Mr. Bush granted access to four commission officials.
Mr. Bush has also resisted the forming of another commission, to examine the intelligence failures that led to a great overestimation of Iraq's weapons stockpiles; as Democrats cried cover-up, he created one. Most telling was the uproar over how the president had come to assert, in a State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa. It took a month of news accounts before the White House declassified a National Intelligence Estimate, and conceded that the evidence was so weak that Mr. Bush should never have uttered the statement.
"They wait until a gallon of blood has been shed," one administration official said.
The leaders of the 9/11 commission seemed to sense that, this official added, and bided their time as pressure built and Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief, declared that Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice, in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, dragged their feet in developing efforts to fight Al Qaeda. On Monday the chairman of the commission, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean, Republican of New Jersey, upped the ante and demanded that Ms. Rice testify under oath and "under the penalty of perjury." The deal was struck within hours.
The exception to this dynamic has been Mr. Cheney himself, who, despite the shaking of heads within the White House, has steadfastly resisted all calls that he release information from the administration's energy task force, which he headed. That case has become fodder for Democrats, and on April 27 it goes to the Supreme Court. White House officials say this refusal to make some accommodation is the exception precisely because the issue is Mr. Cheney's own and so has only an indirect political effect on the president.
Not surprisingly, though, White House officials see events in a light very different from one that depicts a president prepared to cave in to intense pressure. Mr. Bartlett argues that such an image is a creation of Washington's talking heads.
"We never said we were opposed to a 9/11 commission," he said, "only that we had concerns about timing."
Similarly, he argued that Mr. Bush's initial resistance to the idea of creating a Department of Homeland Security had arisen from concerns about reorganizing the government "in the midst of a war."
Certainly other administrations have had to back down, on issues big and small.
"Everybody does this sometimes," said Samuel R. Berger, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, who could be seen chatting with Ms. Rice at a White House ceremony Monday afternoon, just as the administration was deciding to give in to the commission's demands. "And whenever you do it, you say you are not setting a precedent."
But Mr. Berger, who is advising Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign, said he thought that in the case of the 9/11 commission, "the position that they would not fully cooperate was always untenable, in the light of public opinion."
Mr. Bush's bet now appears to be that by having Ms. Rice testify, possibly as early as next week, he can get the issue of cooperation off the front pages and try to regain ground on the substantive questions: Did the administration do all it could before 9/11 to prevent the attacks? Have the miscommunications between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. been resolved?
Ms. Rice's testimony will pave the way for interviews the commission tried to seal for months, with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves. As part of the same deal, they will answer questions in private and not under oath, but will permit questioning from all the commissioners and have dropped limits on how long they will testify.
They will appear together, and thus presumably be able to correct each other's memories. And in the end, it is their performance — behind closed doors but likely to leak quickly — that may prove the most politically crucial. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Thanx for the article. It's a nice summary of this Administration's need for deception. Here's another commentary article from William Rivers Pitt:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/033004A.shtml
Most notably, he outlines some other folks blowing the whistle on this Administration:
| quote: | * Tom Maertens, who was National Security Council director for nuclear non-proliferation for both the Clinton and Bush White House. Maertens' own words tell the tale: "Clarke was a colleague of mine for 15 months in the White House, under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Subsequently, I moved to the U.S. State Department as deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, and worked with him and his staff before and after 9/11. The Bush administration did ignore the threat of terrorism. It was focused on tax cuts, building a ballistic missile system, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty and rejecting the Kyoto Protocol. Clarke's gutsy insider recounting of events related to 9/11 is an important public service. From my perspective, the Bush administration has practiced the most cynical, opportunistic form of politics I witnessed in my 28 years in government: hijacking legitimate American outrage and patriotism over 9/11 to conduct a pre-ordained war against Saddam Hussein."
* Roger Cressey, Clarke's former deputy. Cressey backs up one of the most damning charges that has been leveled against the administration by Clarke: They blew past al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks, focusing instead on Iraq. Cressey is one of four eyewitnesses to an exchange between Clarke and Bush which took place in the White House Situation Room on September 12, 2001. Bush pressed Clarke three times on September 12 to find evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks. According to his book, 'Against All Enemies,' Clarke protested that al-Qaida, and not Iraq, was responsible. Bush angrily ordered him to "'look into Iraq, Saddam,'" and then left the room. According to Cressey, Condoleezza Rice was also a witness to this exchange. The word from administration officials is that Rice can't seem to remember it. This, among others, is a reason Rice is refusing to testify publicly before the September 11 commission.
* Donald Kerrick, a three-star General who served as deputy National Security Advisor under Clinton, and stayed for several months in the Bush White House. According to a report by Sidney Blumenthal from March 25, Kerrick wrote Stephen Hadley, his replacement in the White House, a two-page memo. "It was classified," Kerrick told Blumenthal. "I said they needed to pay attention to al-Qaida and counterterrorism. I said we were going to be struck again. We didn't know where or when. They never once asked me a question nor did I see them having a serious discussion about it. They didn't feel it was an imminent threat the way the Clinton administration did. Hadley did not respond to my memo. I know he had it. I agree with Dick that they saw those problems through an Iraqi prism. But the evidence wasn't there." Hadley has since become a White House front man in the attacks against Rickard Clarke.
* Paul O'Neill, former Treasury Secretary for George W. Bush. O'Neill was afforded a position on the National Security Council because of his job as Treasury Secretary, and sat in on the Iraq invasion planning sessions which were taking place months before the attacks of September 11. "It was all about finding a way to do it," says O'Neill. "That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'" O'Neill describes the process of decision-making between Bush and his people as being "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind captured O'Neill's views in a new book titled 'The Price of Loyalty.' "From the very first instance, it was about Iraq," says Suskind about his interviews with O'Neill and his review of 19,000 pages of documentary evidence provided by O'Neill. "It was about what we can do to change this regime. Day one, these things were laid and sealed."
* Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador and career diplomat who received lavish praise from the first President Bush for his work in Iraq before the first Gulf War. Wilson was the man dispatched in February 2002 to Niger to see if charges that Iraq was seeking uranium from that nation to make nuclear bombs had any merit. He investigated, returned, and informed the CIA, the State Department, the office of the National Security Advisor and the office of Vice President Cheney that the charges were without merit. Eleven months later, George W. Bush used the Niger uranium claim in his State of the Union address to scare the cheese out of everyone, despite the fact that the claim had been irrefutably debunked. Wilson went public, exposing this central bit of evidence to support the Iraq invasion as the lie it was. A few days later, Wilson's wife came under attack from the White House, whose agents used press proxies to destroy her career in the CIA as a warning to Wilson and anyone else who might come forward. For the record, Wilson's wife was a deep-cover agent running a network which worked to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. The irony is palpable.
* Greg Thielmann, former Director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Issues in the State Department. Thielmann, like Ambassador Wilson, was involved in investigating whether the Niger uranium claims had any merit. Thielmann told Newsweek at the beginning of June 2003 that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research had concluded the documents used to support the Niger uranium claims were "garbage." In fact, they were crude forgeries. Thielmann was stunned to see Bush use the claims in his State of the Union address eleven months after the charge had been dispensed with as nonsense. "When I saw that, it really blew me away," Thielmann told Newsweek. He watched Bush use the claim and said, "Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was, how did that get into the speech?"
* Karen Kwiatkowski, a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force and a career Pentagon officer. Kwiatkowski worked in the office of Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, and worked specifically with the Office of Special Plans. Kwiatkowski's own words tell her story: "From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president."
* Rand Beers, who served the Bush administration on the National Security Council at the White House as a special assistant to the President for combating terrorism. Mr. Beers served in government for more than 30 years working in international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, intelligence, and counter-terrorism. He worked for the National Security Council under presidents Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton. Because of his position, Beers saw everything. In a June 25 2003 interview with Ted Koppel on Nightline, Beers reported that the administration was failing dramatically to defend the United States against terrorism. According to Beers, al Qaeda presented a far greater threat to America than Hussein and Iraq, and that the Iraq war was a terrible and unnecessary distraction from what was truly needed to keep the nation safe. |
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| anuneventrade |
Jane, wonderful article! I'm proud of you for coming back! :D Yoepus, interesting article as well :)
As I've commented repeatedly before, Bush from day one in office had certain goals that he wished to obtain, and now when they are being revealed and he is forced to own up to the careless decisions he has made, he is attempting to place the blame elsewhere, which is ruining the public's trust and opinion of him (However, probably not enough to make him lose the presidential race). |
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| daffodil |
sara, i swear i'm always around! i'll never abandon this forum, i just prefer not to post unless i have something particularly thoughtful to say. this being the exception because i thought the article really spoke for itself.
i agree that bush had priorities when he took office and he's trying to cover his ass now. he's in a hole and i'm hoping no fancy talking (hahah, fancy talking from bush...) or emotional patriotic bull is going to get him out of it. i'm glad to see the media holding him accountable. in one of my first journalism classes, my professor said that one of the main purposes of the media was to hold public officials accountable. that was one of the most inspiring things i had ever heard and made me truly want to be an effective journalist. i wish the rest of the media would get that message as well... |
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| smokeape |
Y'all are really missing the point here. Three Branches: Executive (President), Legislative (Congress), and Legal (Supreme Court) which all wield equal power. One does not simply demand the other do something. Bush does not want to set a precedent by Congress compelling his National Security Advisor or anyone else in his administration to testify about anything. They have no legal right to do so. Bush has finally relented to let her speak, but only with extremely limited stipulations that his own or future administrations would not feel compelled to do so in the future.
9/11 is not the issue.
[[[smoke]]] |
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| PhloTron |
| quote: | Originally posted by daffodil
i agree that bush had priorities when he took office and he's trying to cover his ass now. |
Yes, so did Clinton, but his presidential fantasies had to do with interns and sexual relations instead. Brings new meaning to the term "shock and awe"...maybe he was too busy with that instead of taking care of some international business. I blame the Bush administration for plenty of mishaps and lies...but I think some of them could have been prevented if the previous administration actually did their job as well.
So quickly we forget all the dreadfulness of previous CIC's. |
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