The President and the Law

...Lott insisted he had not made up his mind about his future plans...

...Breaux has let it be known that he is leaving the Patton Boggs lobbying firm to start a new company with his son...

...The new rule goes into effect on January 1. So when Mississippi’s Republican Senator Trent Lott announced on November 26 that he was resigning from the Senate, it was widely believed he wanted to get under the one-year wire...

...and Chet Lott...

...Prime Minister Gordon Brown says the attempt to close the British centers is totally unacceptable, and has demanded that the Russian government reverse itself...

...He has also played what New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman calls “petropolitics”—using Russia’s vast oil resources to bolster his position internationally...

...The Congressional Republicans appear to have recovered their footing in the past year and they seem prepared to take on the Democrats in any struggle over war spending...

...In due course Medvedev could resign and open the way for Putin’s return to the presidency...

...At the center of that dispute is “waterboarding,” a practice that predates the Spanish Inquisition...

...Breaux and Lott are from different parties, but they are longstanding friends...

...It is well-known that President Bush has a penchant for nicknames, like “Boy Genius” for Karl Rove and “Fredo” for Alberto Gonzales...

...Angleton did not believe this...

...Historically, a troubled economy rises to the top of voter concerns...

...When President George W. Bush talks of interrogation under pressure, it tends to be in terms of dramatic worst-case scenarios, like a terrorist who has knowledge of planned attacks...

...Opposition billboards were rarely seen...

...So here is my request for the New Year: All you Chucks, Bobs and Teddies—on your letterhead, and when you’re invited to speak, please make it Charles, Robert and Edward...

...How many 9/11s have been averted by the use of wa terboarding remains to be ascertained...

...It is more that the public has about given up trying to influence decisions on the road ahead...

...In 1963, the legendary counterintelligence chief, James J. Angleton, issued a secret handbook on interrogation methods...

...I mean, when did public figures start referring to themselves by nicknames...

...It is not that the public has come to like the war...

...But in the past, war has tended to overshadow the pocketbook...

...The Iraq war comes in second followed by health care and terrorism...

...What seems clear is that as White House counsel and subsequently as attorney general, Gonzales was advising on an extensive interrogation program at Guantánamo Bay and at secret prisons abroad...

...Probably the most famous target of Cia interrogation was Kgb Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Nosenko, who defected to the United States 10 weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy...

...Last month Bush said, “When we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re going to detain them and you bet we’re going to question them...

...The Little Cold War Nothing better illustrates Russia’s slide toward authoritarian rule than the little Cold War that has erupted between the between the Putin Kremlin and Great Britain...

...The British responded by ordering the expulsion of four diplomats from the Russian Embassy in London...

...But it has not driven Americans into spasms of rage...

...Go down the U.S...

...Then there was Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...One reason may be that if Lott is actively making arrangements to become a lobbyist, he should have informed the Senate Ethics Committee to avoid the possibility of a conflict of interest while he is still in the Senate...

...But that’s not what bothers me...

...But how the vojd will wield power is not a question many Russians are worried about...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr The President and the Law It Is Now emerging, through documents and leaks, that the controversy over the country’s torture policy has been going on at least since the 9/11 attacks...

...Why...

...He believed the coincidental defection was too coincidental, and that Nosenko was a double agent sent to mislead the United States about Soviet participation in the assassination...

...There is I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who worked for “Dick” Cheney...

...Voters are returning to more traditional pocketbook issues and paying more attention to the shaky economy...

...It’s “Norm” Coleman and “Larry” Craig, although it’s still Joseph Biden and Joseph Lieberman...

...Mukasey’s response was direct: “The Constitution authorizes the President to ignore or disobey statutory law when he thinks it necessary to defend the country...

...And, oh yes, because the British government has undertaken “some actions damaging to our relations...

...You may wonder why I make such a point of this...

...So why don’t they announce it...

...Eventually, as Angleton’s power waned, Nosenko was released with a new name and identity— the standard treatment for a defector...

...Senator Dole is officially “Elizabeth,” yet her husband Bob refers to her in public as “Liddy...

...Meanwhile, during his recent confirmation hearings Gonzales’ successor, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, fudged his position on whether waterboarding is a form of torture...

...A recent CNN poll found that the economy now tops the list of issues important to voters...

...Aimed at defectors and double agents, it authorizes techniques involving pain, debility, hypnosis, and drugs...

...It undoubtedly has to do with my age and memories of a time when we expected public affairs to be conducted with a certain degree of dignity...

...It is “Mel” Martinez and “Ted” Stevens...

...Time Magazine reported that the President, in Moscow for a summit, referred to Putin as “Pootie Poot...

...Breaux-Lott would be an unusual bipartisan powerhouse lobby...

...Now Mukasey has served notice: Never mind constitutional constraints on Presidential powers...

...consulate in Karachi, a third involving flying hijacked planes into a London airport...

...It was on such cases that the Cia honed its interrogation techniques before 9/11...

...That seems to set the stage for one of those recurrent confrontations between the President and Congress...

...Tracking Trent Lott You may recall that the Senate, in a burst of ethical rectitude, voted to extend from one to two years the time that had to elapse before a former member could become a lobbyist...

...Comes along now the capitol newspaper, The Hill, with the fascinating revelation that six weeks before Lott’s retirement announcement, on October 16, the domain name BreauxLott.com was registered as a Web site...

...The Administration is undoubtedly concerned about the raft of lawsuits it may face over eavesdropping and the detention of terrorism suspects...

...One would have thought that in a democratic Russia this kind of thing would not be happening...

...Nosenko told the Fbi he handled the Kgb file on Lee Harvey Oswald during his stay in Russia...

...One of these days, too, we may be hearing about military action to eliminate a nuclear threat from Iran...

...Nosenko was subjected to some of the methods outlined in the Angleton manual, but he never broke...

...Lugovoi claims the British cultural centers are a cover for espionage, which the Council denies...

...He has not said Senator Lott and son will be part of that firm...

...They go back to Abraham Lincoln...

...It’s the economy, stupid” is a well-remembered phrase from the Clinton campaign in 1992...

...The next section is marked “deleted,” leaving to the imagination what horrors it may describe...

...In 2004 Daniel Levin, the acting head of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, voluntarily submitted to waterboarding to see what it was like...

...And then there is “Newt” Gingrich...

...Afterward, he signed a new legal opinion saying that torture was “abhorrent to American law and values...

...Putin has presented himself to apathetic Russians as the man in charge...

...He lost his fight with Congress over the National Recovery Act when it was struck down by the Supreme Court...

...President Dwight D. Eisenhower was universally known as “Ike,” but as far as I know, he never called himself that...

...And his government took extensive measures to insure a big turnout...

...But, wait, there’s more...

...It is distrusted by many career Justice Department officials, who believe that not much useful evidence is produced when suspects are willing to confess to anything to stop the torture...

...It would not be the first time a President attacked a foreign country without Congressional permission...

...The intervention, it was said would dominate the 2008 Presidential campaign...

...The Kremlin has replied that this can only make the situation worse...

...The move was part of a campaign against Bush’s plan to put elements of a missile defense system in former Soviet satellites Poland and the Czech Republic...

...That prediction has not held up—at least not yet...

...So one can envision a powerhouse K Street lobbying firm of fathers and sons...

...Putin has found that standing up, especially to President Bush, wins him kudos from those who feel Russia was humiliated after the collapse of the Soviet Union...

...For the next four and a half years, Nosenko was held incommunicado in a variety of uncomfortable places, one of them an airless cell at the Cia facility at Camp Peary, Virginia...

...Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, told him he would not be nominated to head the office...

...Congress and the Supreme Court thought otherwise...

...An investigating commission headed by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller later determined that the Nosenko case was an example of gross mistreatment...

...They give English lessons, stage Shakespeare plays, that sort of thing...

...Whether to his face is not clear...

...Russia has refused to make Lugovoi available, and to show where matters stood it designated him for a seat in the Duma, the Russian Parliament...

...The resulting altercation obscured another part of Mukasey’s testimony about a related issue on which he did not fudge at all— whether the President can break the law...

...asked Mukasey about the legality of Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, now known to have included massive tracking of telephone and e-mail traffic...

...But the agency is an old hand at unfriendly questioning dating back to the Cold War days...

...He also insists his father did not know anything about it...

...Voter Malaise After the 2006 election, the conventional wisdom was that Democratic gains reflected voter unhappiness with the Iraq war...

...And who can forget the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), Michael “Brownie” Brown...

...The President may ignore the law if he deems it necessary as a matter of national defense...

...The British Council is a nongovernmental organization devoted to spreading British culture around the world...

...In Russia there is the notion of the vojd—the big boss who will solve all existing troubles...

...It says that prior approval from headquarters should be obtained if bodily harm is to be inflicted, or for medical, chemical or electrical methods of coercion...

...That is still to be explored by a dubious Congress...

...A Russian spokesman says because the Council has no diplomatic standing...

...But there was no doubt that he was treating it as a referendum on his rule...

...Putin as theVojd Maybe the dolls in the window of a St...

...Bush took on Panama without Congressional approval...

...Senator Kennedy is known to his admirers as “Ted,” but he is officially listed as Edward...

...So are their lobbyist sons, John Breaux Jr...

...When I reported from the Soviet Union, more than a half century ago, such tit-for-tat reprisals were a common occurrence...

...Breaux told the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “I would love to have Lott come on board...

...Louisiana Democrat John Breaux retired from the Senate two years ago and has since become a lobbyist for some big firms...

...It is the growing practice of referring to oneself by a nickname, as though that would endear one to the masses as a regular fellow, that troubles me...

...The Russian government has ordered the British Council centers to close down...

...The election was, at least nominally, for Parliament...

...He has been helped by a moderate improvement in living conditions...

...But that Web site, Breaux-Lott, must mean something, and it suggests that somebody is being coy with the ethical rules...

...Lott’s son, Chet, said he was the one who registered the name...

...They have unveiled a report indicating that, with hidden costs, the price of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will reach a fearsome $3.5 trillion by 2017...

...This situation with the electorate takes us back to Jimmy Carter times, when it would have been called “malaise...

...I had to look that one up to discover that the name his parents gave him was “Newton...

...Remember that President Lyndon B. Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic, President Ronald Reagan attacked Grenada, and President George H.W...

...The polls do not indicate much confidence in either party to solve these problems...

...A Request from Dan What’s with this Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney business...

...With his term expiring next March and the rules barring him from serving aconsecutive third term, Putin has tapped his close aide Dmitri A. Medvedev to be president and has agreed to serve as prime minister...

...Lugovoi is wanted in Britain in the investigation of the radiation murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Kgb agent and Putin opponent...

...Putin was at the head of his United Russia Party list...

...But what potential clash over Presidential powers do Mukasey and the White House foresee that made them lay out the battle lines so directly...

...It is “Chuck” Schumer, “Chuck” Grassley and “Chuck” Hagel...

...The Kgb had never used Oswald for any purpose, Nosenko said, because it regarded him as mentally unstable...

...With his sweeping victory in an election December 2 widely regarded as rigged, President Vladimir V. Putin took a step toward reinstating the cult of personality that 50 years of post-Stalin leaders, from Nikita S. Khrushchev to Boris N. Yeltsin, had worked to end...

...For months, Whitehall has been pressing for Lugovoi’s extradition...

...Whether “question them” means “torture them” was left unsaid...

...But Senator Lott disclaims any responsibility for the domain name that suggests a lobbying partnership in the making...

...Specifically, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt...

...For years, it has operated two centers in Russia...

...As I write, the British Council has so far refused to close down...

...Angleton’s Handbook At issue at the moment is the CIA’s destruction of hundreds of hours of videotaped interrogations of terrorism suspects, and the “extraordinary rendition” grilling of others sent to countries like Egypt and Poland...

...And Richard M. Nixon, in a David Frost interview, famously dismissed Watergate-like operations by saying, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal...

...The White House has cited several thwarted attacks—one against a Marine camp in Djibouti, another against the U.S...

...Huge billboards all over Moscow featured slogans like “Putin is our choice...

...It is favored by interrogators because it doesn’t leave telltale wounds or scars...

...There they were: Lenin, Stalin, Putin...

...Oops, I mean Richard Cheney...

...Senate’s official roster and it is amazing how many have listed their nicknames as official names...

...It was probably a gesture of defiance as well that got Andrei Lugovoi a seat in Parliament as a member of Putin’s United Russia Party...

...Congressional Democrats have tried some three dozen times to attach bring-home-the-troops clauses to pending legislation and have not succeeded once...

...It was probably no coincidence that he chose the week before the election to announce Russia’s withdrawal from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, which limits the deployment of conventional weapons...

...Petersburg gift shop said it all...

...He authorized the suspension of habeas corpus and freed the slaves, both without seeking Congressional authority...