re: "Rule of law watch: Does Barack Obama have a fool for a client?"

Tigerhawk ("thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations") remarks on the first stage of some recent opinion shopping.

Money quote(s):

"Long-standing fans of the back-and-forth will remember the enormous grief that the Bush administration got for following the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel, particularly on the question of enhanced interrogation (or, if you are a liberal, "torture"). The accusation was, more or less, that the OLC's incumbent, John Yoo, was turning analytical cartwheels to arrive at the result that Dick Cheney wanted. Well, it turns out that on the question of the Libya war, Barack Obama overruled the OLC." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

&

"(I)t is "extraordinarily rare" for a president to overrule the OLC -- prior to Barack Obama, the last president to do it was FDR. Obama has now done it twice. Perhaps the president has such confidence in his own legal acumen that he does not need no stinkin' OLC approval."

re: "Historical Revisionism [Part 3]"

Bill at Castle Argghhh! finishes off the Big Lie about Iraq's WMD.

Money quote(s):

"Right after we captured Baghdad, there were a *lot* of PAO-type pix appearing in SIPRNET mail to various units (all combat arms outfits, as far as I could tell), showing US and Iraqi equipment, battlefield shots of blown-up tanks and people, etc., and some stuff highlighting the technology we used. Our S-2 knew I'd think that was real neat, so he called me in to show me. Among the goodies were two AWACS radar screenshots labeled "Iraqi truck convoys converging on Syria" -- lines of little glowing dots on the highways heading north, then turning northwest. They gave a timeline, but all I remember was it happened the night before we jumped.

Next day, there was a recall of the mail with the pix, citing OPSEC violations on the AWACS pix because they showed US positions -- bear in mind that the pix were a full week old, and that US units had already reached Baghdad by the time they were released. Our S-2, being a good S-2, promptly deleted the stuff without a thought. So did everybody else, as far as I can determine, including the military intel types OCONUS with SIPRNET access. Later, I heard the oblique AWACS screenshots were compared with satellite overhead photos and were matched to a gnat's eyelash.

Some time later, the Dems in Congress began screaming that Bush was a war criminal because we hadn't found Saddam's WMD -- we had found a lot of WMD and WMD-related stuff, but the Dems kept screaming "That's not the WMD Bush said they had."

Which morphed into the pre-election Talking/Screaming Point “We went to war in Iraq for a lie, because there were no WMD!” that continues to this day.

Now, let’s recap.

Did we find chemical weapons that Saddam had hidden from the UN inspectors? Yup.

Did we find biological warfare labs and delivery systems? Yup.

Two out of three, so far, and either one standing alone exposes “There were no WMD” as a lie."

It helps if you have no real understanding of the meaning of WMD in the first place. Then it's easier to be that stupid. (Ignorance is like that.)

That being said, I never saw any of that sort of "take." But then I didn't see much else in that line of intelligence collection: as intelligence collectors, we were just too far down in the weeds ourselves.

"Did we find a nuclear weapons program? Well, yes and no.

Yes, we found the evidence, but was it an ongoing program? Saddam himself lied about stopping and starting so often, that, if it wasn’t ongoing during the weeks before the invasion – and Saddam *knew* it was on the way -- chances are very good that he would have cranked it up again had we *not* jumped in.

Was the program stolen from under our noses while we were in the process of restoring some semblance of normalcy to Iraq?

Or was it just on hiatus until Saddam – or his designated heir – could open up for business in a new location? *Something* was on the convoys going into Syria, which the Iraqis, sources in at least two of Iraq’s neighbors, and the CIA's ace advisor have confirmed."

Bill then goes on to explain some basic facts about the party politics of Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria (which remains true today).

He concludes:

"Dick Cheney had the pix, he had the background info, he had the ear of the President, and he had enough personal authority to release them to shut the Dems up.

Those of us who knew about the pix kept expecting a dog-and-pony show from the White House which would stop this particular Big Lie in its tracks and reveal the Dems for what they were.

Any day, now... any day.

When he was asked (in 2010) why he didn't at least advise GWB to go public with the pix and their probable significance, Cheney just blew the question off, and said "we had other concerns at the time."

Swell. Thanks so much for being midwife to this particular Big Lie, Dick -- you gave us Barack Obama in 2008 and the resulting cascade of Big Lies we've been bombarded with ever since."

This is the most original reason for disliking Dick Cheney I've ever read. It bears thinking upon.

re: "You mean, now?"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club shared some observations on the disconnect between policy and practice.

Money quote(s):

"President Obama has failed to lay the legal groundwork for acts of targeted killing of “non-state enemies of the United States” and thereby risks impaling itself on the horns of a dilemma of his own making. By relying on “international humanitarian law” instead of asserting its own legal doctrine, the Obama administration will eventually find that it cannot defend the United States without condemning itself by the legal standard it has embraced."

Ouch.

"The really interesting thing about the administration’s increase in the use of targeted hits, its unwillingness to take custody of prisoners and indeed to hand them over to people like the Pakistani military; and indeed its declining ability to take any enemy combatant alive at all is that it is rooted not in what Anderson called Dick Cheney’s “brutish, simplistic” determination to defend America, but in President Obama’s desire to live up to the highest standards of International Humanitarian Law (IHL)."

That would the the Law of Unintended Consequences in operation.

Remember: you can't do just one thing.

&

"The problem goes back to the inability of political leadership to declare war and name an enemy. America is at war yet not at war. It is fighting an enemy, but none are named. It is fighting a something which respects no rules by applying the full protection of the Constitution to enemy combatants. And the predictable result of these contradictions is that it is tying itself into philosophical knots."

JO - The challenge of restoring US credibility

Jamaica Observer


The challenge of restoring US credibility


CLAUDE ROBINSON

Sunday, January 11, 2009


FROST-NIXON, one of several wonderful movies showing in New York City when I was there over the Christmas and New Year holidays, has a great line which could serve to introduce discussion in the US media around President-elect Barack Obama's pick to head the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

CLAUDE ROBINSON

The movie is based on the celebrated interview of President Richard Nixon by the British journalist and broadcaster David Frost about crimes committed by Nixon and some of his top aides in the Watergate burglary and executive cover-up leading to Nixon's fall in the 1970s.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"In one memorable sequence Frost quizzed Nixon as to whether he was suggesting that it was OK for the president to break the law. The reply was swift, if somewhat incredible: "What I am saying is that when the president does it, it is not illegal".

The exchange was a chilling reminder of assertions by the outgoing Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration that denial of the protections of the Geneva Conventions to detainees at Guantanamo was justified because they were not prisoners of war, as decreed by the Conventions and US law, but 'enemy combatants' as decreed by President Bush."

(Clearly this is another person who hasn't actually read the Geneva Conventions. - CAA)

ABS-CBN - US State Dept revokes visas of Erap, others in espionage case

From my archive of press clippings:

ABS-CBN News

US State Dept revokes visas of Erap, others in espionage case

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 5:56 PM

By CES DRILON

ABS-CBN News

The US State Department has revoked the US visas of at least six current and former government officials, in connection with the first known case of espionage from within the White House involving naturalized FIlipino American Leandro Aragoncillo last year.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"(A) close Estrada associate, whose visa was cancelled, estimates fifteen to twenty opposition figures suffered the cancellation of their visas, including former President Joseph Estrada and former House Speaker Arnulfo Fuentebella.

In July 2007, a Federal Court in New Jersey sentenced Aragoncillo, a naturalized Filipino-American intelligence analyst who worked for US Vice-President Richard "Dick" Cheney, to ten years imprisonment. He was charged for stealing classified information about President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and passing it on to known opposition leaders in the Philippines.

Former member of the Lower House Gilbert Remulla received a letter from the US Embassy in June last year informing him of the cancellation of his US visa. The letter cited the US Immigration and Nationality Act which "prohibits the issuance of a visa to anyone who seeks to engage in espionage against the US, as well as for sabotage and/or illegal export from the US of goods, technology and sensitive information."

Remulla said he has appealed his case and reapplied for a visa but was told by a US consular official that Washington would have to review his application.

In contrast, his children were granted visas valid for ten years."