Obama blames economy for election losses but misses the point

U.S. President Barack Obama's statement yesterday that the majority Democrats had taken a "shellacking" in Tuesday's election because of the tepid economic recovery was shocking. Sure, if in the two years since Barack Obama took office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the U.S. economy had completely turned around and U.S. industries were crying for more workers, the opposition Republicans probably would not have won 60 seats to control the House of Representatives. Economic success would most likely have enabled the Democrats to retain a portion of the popularity they achieved in 2008, when Obama led his party back into the White House on a wave of public disgust over the performance of the Bush administration. But for all his vaunted political skills, Obama has repeatedly misread the American public since taking office. U.S. voters did not turn the Republicans out of the White House merely because the economy had been disastrously mishandled by his predecessor, they elected the first black president to repudiate the seemingly gleeful lawlessness of the Bush administration. The George W. Bush presidency broke a long list of the country's most-cherished legal principles and traditions -- eviscerating the constitutional separation of powers, overruling the U.S. Bill of Rights, disrespecting the sovereignty of other nations, ignoring the Geneva Conventions. For all the good Obama has been able to accomplish in reforming the way the country regulates itself, he has decidedly failed to address the biggest problem -- the one that has left the United States unsure of how to function. Bush and other officials in his administration, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, must be called to answer for their abuses of power. An investigation doesn't necessarily mean anybody is guilty of anything, although it seems so, it just means the United States is not afraid to examine its conduct and make corrections when warranted. The Congress should set up a commission, with the power to compel witnesses to testify, to figure out what went wrong during the Bush administration and how to prevent it from happening again. That is the only way for the United States to regain its footing as an international leader and for Obama to redeem his presidency.

Uh oh -- lost Bush administration e-mails are recovered

News that millions of missing e-mail messages from the archives of the Bush administration have been recovered must have caused a lot of former officials' stomachs to drop in the nation's capital. Two nonprofit groups that had sued to recover the messages in 2007 announced Monday that 94 days of e-mail traffic between 2003 and 2005 would be reconstituted, according to Cable News Network (CNN). The e-mails, considered government property, are expected to reveal information on the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 and the 2003 disclosure of the identity of an undercover CIA agent married to former U.S. ambassador who was a critic of the Iraq war. The e-mails were requested by Congressional committees investigating the firings, which some alleged were politically motivated, but the Bush administration said they were missing. The groups Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive filed suit contending the Bush administration violated federal laws that require presidential records to be preserved. A federal investigation into the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame led to the conviction of a top administration official on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, but his sentence was commuted by former U.S. President George W. Bush. The question of whether former Vice President Dick Cheney was involved was never answered, but the answer could be in the missing e-mails. Of course, this being the federal government, it could be years before all of the messages are made public because of a disagreement over whether the release is required under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act or the Presidential Records Act, which allows records to be kept secret for up to 10 years after an administration leaves office.

Revolving Interior Department door comes as no surprise

Is there anyone who would be surprised to learn that a top Bush administration environmental official is under investigation for possibly breaking ethics laws? Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the first interior secretary under former President George W. Bush, allegedly discussed future job opportunities with Royal Dutch Shell, the giant oil company, while she was considering awarded shale oil exploration leases to a Shell subsidiary, the New York Times reported today. The Times said officials of the department's inspector general's office confirmed the existence of an investigation, as did a Shell spokeswoman. The investigation was first reported in the Los Angeles Times, the New York newspaper said. Investigators have already turned over their findings to the Justice Department after a yearlong investigation into allegations that an award of three leases in Colorado to the Shell subsidiary might have been tainted by Norton's job search. She is now Shell's general counsel in the United States for unconventional fuels, the Times said. "We are aware of an investigation, the Shell spokeswoman, Kelly C. op de Weegh, told the New York Times. "However, we are not in a position to comment.” Norton also declined to comment, the New York paper said. Of course, the mere appearance of impropriety is not in itself improper. But while she was in office, Norton was an ally of Vice President Dick Cheney in the administration's push to open more federal land to energy exploration, the New York Times said. The government has long sought a way to extract oil from shale, which is common in the west. If Norton was looking for a job with a company that was seeking and was awarded government contracts, she could be soon facing a federal indictment.

The worst keeps getting worse

Most likely, the latest revelations about coercive interrogation techniques used by the CIA in Afghanistan are not nearly the end of the story of U.S. excesses in the so-called War on Terror. But they certainly help explain the maniacal secrecy of U.S. authorities under the Bush administration in keeping information about the interrogation program from the public. Top government officials, notably but probably not limited to Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush, knew the program violated the country's international treaty obligations but authorized it anyway, and kept it secret not out of concern for the United States, as they said, but to keep their own selves out of trouble. They probably expected to be honored as heroes for saving the country from danger and gave only passing thought to the fact that they were sacrificing the United States' very reason for existence. They probably still don't get it, and blame the new president, Barack Obama, for whatever is about to unfold. The fact that their policies were rejected by an overwhelming majority of voters in the last election does not even register as a repudiation -- they think the public just doesn't understand. But the people of the United States know when the government is taking away their constitutional rights, spying on them, and doing nearly unspeakable harm to others while hiding behind the flag. The new information, contained in a top-secret CIA report being made public next week, include threatening detainees with a mock execution, a handgun and an electric drill, was revealed by officials who had access to the report, according to the Washington Post newspaper. The threatened execution was used in an effort to pursuade suspected al-Qaida commander Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, suspected of being the mastermind of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 sailors in 1999, to provide information to his interrogators. Federal law prohibits threatening a prisoner with immediate death, the Post said. Al-Nashiri later was one of three detainees subjected to waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. A CIA spokesman said the agency did not endorse such excesses and promptly investigated any reports of them. "The CIA in no way endorsed behavior -- no matter how infrequent -- that went beyond formal guidance," said Paul Gimigliano, the agency spokesman, according to the Post. "This has all been looked at; professionals in the Department of Justice decided if and when to pursue prosecution. That's how the system was supposed to work, and that's how it did work." The actual report, which was compiled in 2004, is expected to be made public next week, the newspaper said.

Revelations about Bush government keep on coming

Yesterday's news from New York that Bush advisers discussed using U.S. soldiers to arrest a group of terror suspects in a suburb of Buffalo, on Lake Erie near the border with Canada, underscores the risk posed to the United States by its own self-righteous leaders. It's painfully obviously now that the Bush administration was so panicked by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that it was willing to throw out more than 200 years of Constitutional experience and tradition as part of its poorly considered response. According to the New York Times, Vice President Dick Cheney and other high-ranking officials, including now-infamous Justice Department attorney John Woo, advised then-President George W. Bush in 2002 that he had the authority to use U.S. troops on U.S. soil without the express authorization of Congress. U.S. troops have not been used domestically in a law enforcement capacity since the Civil War, and their use in that capacity is generally considered barred under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the Times said. Woo is the Justice Department lawyer whose memorandums were used to justify the use of brutal interrogation techniques on suspect al-Qaida operatives from 2002-2005. To their credit, opposition to the proposal came from within the administration by then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, National Security Council attorney John Bellinger, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Justice Department official Michael Chertoff and others. “Frankly, it was a bit of a turf war,” a former senior official told the Times. “For a number of people, crossing the line of having intelligence or military activities inside the United States was not worth the risk.” Bush eventually ordered the FBI to make the arrests of the Lackawanna Six, a group of Yemeni Americans who had been communicating with al-Qaida. The six pleaded guilty to terror-related charges in the first domestic terrorism case following the Sept. 11 attacks. Other unnamed former Bush administration officials opposed the use of troops, the Times said. “What would it look like to have the American military go into an American town and knock on people’s door?” another former official said during the internal debate. The Times said Bush was regularly briefed on the Lackawanna case by Muller and CIA Director George Tenet. If the new Obama government is sincere about wanting to avoid a full-blown investigation of the Bush years, some serious voluntary truth-telling is going to have to begin. Let's start with you, Mr. Cheney.

House panel to investigate effort to conceal secret CIA program

From Washington, D.C., comes word that the House Intelligence Committee has decided to formally investigate the Bush White House's effort to conceal from Congress the existence of a secret counterterrorism program. The program, which is so secret that its purpose has still not been revealed even as controversy about it roils the U.S. Capitol, was made public last month in a briefing by Obama CIA Director Leon Panetta, according to Cable News Network (CNN). Panetta said he had ended the program as soon as he found out about it, and that he understood that the CIA withheld information about it from Congress under orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney. In a statement released today, the intelligence committee's chairman, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said the probe was intended to find out if information was deliberately withheld from Congress in violation of federal law. "I intend to make this investigation fair and thorough," the statement said, "and it is my goal that it will not become a distraction of the men and women of the CIA. However, in order to assist them fully and keep them well-resources, it is the responsibility of the executive branch to ensure that the committee is kept fully and currently informed of all anticipated intelligence activities. The CIA said Thursday that the program was never fully implemented and was not a significant part of the country's efforts to battle al-Qaida and other violent extremists, CNN said.

What did we expect from the Bush administration?

Saturday's revelation that the CIA deliberately withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from the members of Congress who were supposed to oversee it certainly helps explain, at least in part, the initial reluctance of the new Obama administration to investigate the previous government's illegal activities. This is going to be big -- the Bush administration's excesses violated a lot of laws and principles, and put the future of the country at risk -- and a lot of former officials probably are going to end up in prison or have to fight furiously to stay out. No doubt, President Barack Obama did not want to be distracted from his sweeping domestic agenda at the start of his term. But Congress should have no such reluctance because its authority was compromised -- unless, of course, it is that such an investigation will reveal the failure of elected representatives to properly live up to their oversight responsibilities. Hopefully, the new Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress will recognize the damage done to the government traditions under the U.S. Constitution and work to see that it never happens again. Assuming reports are true, and there are no indications so far that they are not, new CIA director Leon Panetta told the House and Senate intelligence committees that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the agency not to reveal to Congress the existence of a still-secret counterterrorism program, according to the New York Times. Panetta said he ended the program when he took office. The issue of whether the Bush administration was candid with Congress has been roiling Capitol Hill since May, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said she had not been told that the agency had waterboarded a terror suspect in 2002. The National Security Act of 1947 requires the president to ensure that the Congress intelligence committees are "kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States," the Times said. A CIA spokesman declined to comment on Cheney's purported role in the concealment from Congress. "It's not agency practice to discuss what may or not have been said in a classified briefing," the spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, told the Times. “When a C.I.A. unit brought this matter to Director Panetta’s attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect.” Intelligence and Congressional officials told the Times that the unidentified program did not involve interrogation or domestic intelligence activities, but was started following Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Happy talk by former presidents obscures deep political divide

Nice to see former U.S. presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton getting along so well. The stuck up for each other and even joked around Friday at a political forum in Toronto when they spoke before a crowd of 6,000, according to the Associated Press. Neither criticized the other in their first appearance together, the AP said. Bush, who left office in January after eight controversial years as president, said he didn't like being criticized by previous administration officials and that Clinton never did that. Bush said there were "plenty of critics in America," the AP said. And Clinton, who was president from 1993-2001, did not even mention recent well-publicized comments by Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been highly critical of the new administration of Barak Obama. Bush even called Clinton his "brother" while joking about how much time his father, former President George H.W. Bush, spends with his immediate predecessor. Clinton and the elder Bush led international fundraising efforts after the southeast Asian tsunami and after hurricanes Katrina and Ike. The two former presidents made speeches before answering questions from the audience, the AP said. Clinton said he regretting not sending soldiers to Africa to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and Bush defended his administration's conduct of the Iraq war. "I don't buy the premise that our attention was diverted," Bush said, after Clinton said Bush should have given U.N. inspectors more time to look for weapons of mass destruction and instead concentrated more on Aghanistan, where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is still thought to be hiding. Clinton praised Bush for his contributions to efforts to battle the AIDS virus in Africa and for appointing a racially and ethnically diverse Cabinet. Bush said Clinton would not have been able to mobilize enough troops in time to stop the Rwanda bloodbath, in which Hutu militias killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in three months. The event was moderated Frank McKenna, a former Canadian ambassador to the United States.

Indictments in the offing for Bush and Cheney?

What isn't being said in the uproar over President Barack Obama's recent statements about investigating harsh interrogation tactics approved by Bush administration officials in apparent violation of longstanding treaty obligations is the obvious: that all investigations lead directly to the Oval Office. We now know that Condoleezza Rice personally approved the CIA's use of waterboarding, which involves simulated drowning, in 2002, and that the technique was used more than 200 times against three suspected terrorists, according to the Reuters international news service. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney said a year later that the White House backed the interrogation program, Reuters said, citing a report issued today by the Senate Intelligence Committee. We can tell where this is going. Rice would not have approved such a controversial program without discussing it with then-president George W. Bush, her good friend, and Bush would not have agreed without discussing it with Cheney. If anyone is ever going to be held liable for the Bush administration's gross perversion of justice, the indictments certainly should start at the top.

Obama changes course; may now favor prosecutions

Seemingly just days after ruling out the prosecution of CIA agents who used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects, President Barack Obama created a media firestorm Tuesday when he said he might favor investigating and prosecuting Bush administration officials who authorized the harsh methods. Obama's statement followed weeks of denials, in which the president said the country should be looking ahead and not examining the recent past, according to the New York Times. The controversial remarks came while Obama was answering questions from reporters in the oval office. "If and when there needs to be a further accounting," he said, Congress should figure out how to get it "in a bipartisan fashion" from people independent from the government. The comments certainly suggest that that Obama now favors an independent investigation of the Bush administration policies, perhaps by a special prosecutor. Obama also suggested he might favor the prosecution of the attorneys who wrote legal justifications for the harsh interrogation policies when he said that question would be up to Attorney General Eric Holder. "I don't want to prejudge that," Obama said. Three Bush administration lawyers who signed the legal memorandums, John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury, are expected to be the subject of a highly critical Justice Department report that could recommend their disbarment. Obama's latest statements come while reverberations from the administration's release of the secret memos are still reverberating in Washington. The memos revealed that two al-Qaida operatives were subjected to waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning, more than 250 times, the Times said. Release of the memos prompted the predictable howls of outrage from Obama's Republican critics, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, the Times said.