Bush: Conned or Con Man?
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Bush: Conned or Con Man? During His Spring Break, President George W. Bush may have reflected on Elisabetta Burba and her version of what helped to propel...
...The principal document at issue was a fake letter on the letterhead of Niger’s President...
...threatened to send the Senate’s sergeant at arms to arrest anyone from the Nixon White House who refused to testify before his committee...
...Like . . . weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, our Watergate team was subject to faulty intelligence...
...The second time he approved the plan for carrying out the executions...
...About the whole Attorneygate flap, as it may soon come to be called, one is tempted to say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff...
...Take “surge...
...Gonzales has barely been heard from...
...Another aide, Monica M. Goodling, has sought the Fifth Amendment’s protection against selfincrimination...
...Nor will it be included when White House files are subpoenaed by the FBI or by Congressional investigators...
...Then the move to discredit Wilson . . . the leak of his wife’s identity . . . the investigation and perjury conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby...
...Congress is wise to these tactics...
...Already one hears a lot of back-andforth between Congressional Democrats and the White House on the subject of executive privilege...
...No other Watergate figure would fare quite as well...
...Carol C. Lam, the prosecutor in San Diego, was dismissed as part of a plan hatched two years ago...
...A detailed account of Burba’s role, with pictures of the documents, is contained in a new book by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce entitled The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq...
...Bush has no direct stake in the contest, but a pardon before the balloting could have an impact on the fortunes of other Republicans...
...She took them to the American Embassy, but received no confirmation of their authenticity...
...attorneys becoming a major issue, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters, “I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on...
...Hunt wants the world to know, first, that he had nothing to do with John F. Kennedy’s assassination, as some have speculated...
...But the Administration clearly would prefer to focus attention on confessed terrorists rather than the storm over the Justice Department’s dismissal of eight U.S...
...On another level, the Administration appears to have opened a counteroffensive using an unlikely assist—captured terrorists...
...So now there are demands for Gonzales’ resignation on Capitol Hill...
...If our Watergate team had found that the Democrats were indeed being financed by Communist enemies, then our criminal actions might have been judged heroic,” he declares...
...attorneys...
...Bush should have admitted his mistakes early on and taken the rap,” he says...
...Why these confessions were withheld from the American public, and why they are being released now, is anyone’s guess...
...To me and to Webster, surge is a sudden wave that a surfer might encounter...
...First there will be the motion for a new trial, which will probably be denied...
...The Lexicon of Conflict If The Iraq war has done nothing else for us, it has enriched the lexicon of conflict, investing old words with new meanings...
...Now it is a temporary deployment of troops that might also be called an escalation...
...So the Bush Administration is in what looks like a lose-lose position...
...A unanimous Supreme Court held that executive privilege could not prevail against a criminal investigation...
...It explains that the term “civil war” does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict there, which includes extensive and widespread criminally motivated violence...
...But the Bush White House and Justice Department apparently did not consider, in the purge of prosecutors, that they might come up against a Democratic-controlled Congress...
...A Matter of Privilege For White House Counsel Fred F. Fielding, who worked with Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the developing donnybrook over testimony to Congress must have a familiar sound...
...said he knew about the strategy in October 2006—that is, one month before the balloting...
...In the end, Hunt indicates no regrets for his role...
...Representative Henry A. Waxman (D.-Calif...
...On one level, it is fighting a defensive battle to conduct a war growing numbers of Americans oppose...
...Former Representative Mark Foley (R.-Fla...
...Fielding implied a new court test in his compromise offer to Congressional Democrats when he referred to “the constitutional privileges of the Presidency...
...chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has already warned Republican National Committee members not to destroy any of the e-mail sent from its accounts...
...From this book, it appears the President had every reason to doubt the authenticity of the documents when he said in his State of the Union address that Iraq was getting significant quantities of uranium from Niger...
...It means getting the credit for wanting the troops to come home without running up against that other slogan, “support the troops...
...On short notice, the Pentagon invited Senators Carl Levin (D.-Mich...
...One Adventure To o Many I GUESS you had to be there—in Watergate Washington—to still have an interest in its conspiratorial characters...
...We were wrong, and we took our punishment...
...Had there been a leak...
...It is hard to tell how this situation will sort itself out...
...Anyway, I was fascinated to learn that E. Howard Hunt, f ield commander of the Watergate burglars who wound up costing Richard Nixon the Presidency, completed a memoir entitled American Spy before his death this past January 23...
...Soon afterward it released another transcript containing the confession of Waleed bin Attash, who claimed he masterminded the bombing of the USS Cole and the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania...
...Then an appeal to a three-member court of appeals panel, which could be stretched out by applying for a hearing en banc—that is, before all 12 members of the court...
...During His Spring Break, President George W. Bush may have reflected on Elisabetta Burba and her version of what helped to propel him into the bloody, seemingly endless war in Iraq...
...So Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, put the Pentagon’s own intelligence office on the job...
...Senator John McCain (R.-Ariz...
...Perhaps we are approaching collision course time again...
...Not exactly...
...President Dwight D. Eisenhower successfully invoked executive privilege in defying a subpoena from Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R.-Wisc...
...The Democratic leadership seems dead set against a compromise that would permit Administration figures to testify without an oath or a stenographic record...
...But no, it refers to abducting and transporting a terrorism suspect across borders to another country for some rough interrogation...
...All that could take us up to and even past the 2008 election...
...Think of it this way: In a world of wiretapping and surveillance, why should e-mail be exempt...
...Interesting word, “privilege...
...Returning to Washington, Senators Levin and Graham said they were impressed by the professionalism of the military tribunal...
...In 2002, he wrote a memo for President Bush suggesting that the “war on terrorism” rendered some provisions of the Geneva Conventions “quaint...
...But that should not cause us to forget some of the larger issues Gonzales has participated in as Attorney General and as White House counsel before then...
...The fuddy-duddy CIA and its associates found no smoking guns, no weapons of mass destruction, no link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists...
...Of President Ford’s pardon of Nixon, Hunt writes: “Nixon, the man who was conspirator in chief, would somehow rise like a phoenix from the ashes of ignominy and become an elder statesman whose funeral would draw every living American President, including President Clinton...
...Currently my favorite expression is “alternative intelligence assessment...
...Second, that he had originally advised against breaking into Democratic offices in the Watergate building as too risky...
...Twice in the preceding months he had been informed about what was going to happen...
...But can e-mail from private files be subpoenaed...
...Nixon, had he wanted to, could have pardoned the Watergate crew before resigning himself...
...Last January, at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he questioned whether the Constitution granted a right to habeas corpus...
...was also invited but declined—to make a quick trip to Guantánamo Bay to witness an unusual sight: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, confessing—nay, boasting—of the exploit and a lot more...
...That would enable Bush to issue his pardon before the inaugural without fear of consequences...
...Communicating electronically is a convenience...
...This is playing itself out in a politicized Congress, where it seems as risky to support the conflict as not to support it...
...That keeps this traff ic out of the White House e-mail system and means it will not automatically be archived...
...The closest thing to a precedent in the Bush Administration was a suit to compel the release of details about the Energy Task Force headed by Vice President Cheney...
...It can also be a menace, as some have learned to their dismay...
...One adventure too many...
...For instance, he also acknowledged, through a statement read by his representative, that he severed the head of American journalist Daniel Pearl...
...To the intense embarrassment of Gonzales and the White House, that wasn’t true...
...But the Court did recognize that the President needs confidential and candid advice from his aides in order to be able to perform his function...
...and Lindsey O. Graham (R.-S.C...
...Bush has clearly learned how much political harm a premature pardon can do...
...The inspector general also concluded that the Feith team acted inappropriately but did not violate the law...
...Documents not solid enough for an Italian magazine, however, were apparently solid enough for the President and his ideological team bent on regime change in Iraq...
...Which leaves us with the big question: Was Bush conned into invading Iraq, or was he the con man...
...For example, days after President Gerald R. Ford assumed office in 1974, he gave a blanket pardon to Nixon, who had resigned to avoid facing impeachment, and that may have cost Ford his own election in 1976...
...But the nation is likely to suffer the effects of his tinkering with civil liberties long after the furor over Attorneygate has died down...
...This time, however, she told him she would only pay him if the documents he gave her proved to be authentic...
...None of these issues is as sexy politically as the dismissal of the U.S...
...It concluded that Feith’s office had produced reports not fully substantiated by available intelligence...
...Eventually, there was an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general...
...FBI Director Robert Mueller has accepted responsibility for this violation of civil liberties...
...Third, that he did not, as reported, blackmail the White House for money to buy the imprisoned team’s silence about higher-ups...
...Thus when President Bush said, “I am pretty much going to stay out of it,” he probably thought, “until Election Day anyway”—with a silent prayer that Libby’ s legal team would still be arguing in the courts...
...And his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned days afterward, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 29 that he regularly consulted with the Attorney General about the discharges...
...It was Burba, a reporter for the Italian newsmagazine Panorama, who in October 2002 turned over to the American Embassy in Rome a folder of what were shortly determined to be forged documents, including one the President nevertheless relied on in 2003 to assert that Iraq was buying uranium from the African country of Niger...
...Then, special rights of confidentiality: doctor-patient, lawyer-client, priest-penitent...
...The rest you know: Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson I V, who earlier was sent to Niger to investigate, concluded, as Burba did, that there was no uranium sale to Iraq...
...The privilege being contested in Washington now—executive privilege—concerns the President’s right to keep confidential his deliberations in the course of formulating policies...
...Thereupon she flew to Niger to check for herself, and returned to her office in Milan dubious about Martino’s offerings...
...Gonzales has had to back away from his March 13 assertion...
...Recently, it was disclosed that some White House aides have taken to conducting their business using external e-mail accounts...
...This time around, no one is talking about an “alternative assessment...
...In a 2004 Supreme Court decision that sent the case back to a lower court (where the Administration prevailed), Justice Anthony M. Kennedy warned that executive privilege can set “coequal branches of the government on a collision course...
...It was part of the package Burba had received from freelance intelligence agent Rocco Martino, who had been a source of hers in the past...
...A Presidential pardon seems mainly a question of timing, as Bush indicated when he said he would stay out of the picture until the legal process has run its course...
...Ye t the Sheikh was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, four years ago, and his story was presumably wellknown to the military investigators...
...Nonbinding” means morally binding, but without the guts to say so...
...Its original dictionary meaning: the rights enjoyed by the very rich...
...I can recall one point in the Senate Watergate investigation when Chairman Sam Ervin (D.-N.C...
...The harvest of e-mails the Administration released refers generally to actions undertaken before last November’s election...
...And the case could conceivably end up in the Supreme Court...
...A recent national intelligence estimate of conditions in Iraq is unfailingly pessimistic...
...Representative Darrell E. Issa (R.-Calif...
...He has also defended the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretap program...
...Extraordinary rendition,” I would have thought, refers to Itzhak Perlman playing Beethoven...
...Attorneygate Fallout On March 13, with the f iring of eight U.S...
...I heard of that the first time when the CIA failed to uncover the information the Administration wanted in 2003 as it prepared to invade Iraq...
...Hunt tells most of the story pretty straight without signs of lingering resentments, except for one...
...She told her editor there was no story...
...Whatever the answer, in the fifth year of the Iraq intervention the Administration appears to be operating on two levels...
...President Nixon invoked it unsuccessfully while trying to withhold the Oval Off ice tapes that proved his undoing...
...And although he officially oversees the FBI, he did not intervene when the FBI was misusing so-called national security letters authorizing intelligence surveillance...
...was done in when some of his sex-laden instant messages to teenaged House pages got out...
...In a case like Libby’s, the legal process can take a long time, especially when the defendant, free on bail, has every interest in dragging it out...
...But win or lose that constitutional argument, the Republicans lose the political argument by somehow forgetting it is Democrats who wield the gavel on Capitol Hill today...
...Later that year he endorsed a Justice Department memo narrowly def ining torture as interrogation that causes pain equivalent to organ failure or death...
...The dictionary does not tell us how long “temporary” is...
...Libby’s Liberty It Is A Fair Bet that former Cheney aide Libby will not serve a day in prison...
...The Pentagon subsequently released a transcript of the Sheikh’s hearing...
...The information was contained in e-mail messages, sent to the Judiciary Committee amid 3,000 pages of requested material...
...President Bill Clinton, by contrast, waited until hours before leaving office to pardon the fugitive financier Marc Rich...
...Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, on trial for corruption, was damaged by e-mails documenting his efforts to acquire government properties...
...attorneys, who have political support in their home states and districts...
...My adventuresome life as a secret agent,” is how Hunt summarizes his career...
Vol. 90 • March 2007 • No. 2
