New Recipe For Success: "Quick, Deadly Strikes by U.S. Warplanes"
Seymour Hersh has in which he discloses a new strategic plan being bandied about by a "high level Pentagon war planner."
The strategist says the Pentagon envisions drawing down the troop level, and filling any operational gaps left by increasing the use of combat aircraft.
Haven't these people studied the Vietnam War? This was exactly what the U.
S. did when Congress, by means of the purse-strings, forced the military to remove American ground forces.
The reliance upon airpower alone didn't ensure victory for the U.
S. in Indochina.
In the case of Iraq, an urbanized country, collateral damage from a stepped-up bombing campaign would likely cause seriously detrimental ramifications to the national interests of the United States.
However, if the national interests of the U.S. were a vital concern to the Bush administration, we would never have gone to war in Iraq at all.
The kooks are clearly still making policy:
?We're not planning to diminish the war, Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson's views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting--Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield.
"
He continued, "We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004. The war against the insurgency ?
may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win," he said. "As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay on our side, we'?re set to go.
There's no sense that the world is caving in. We're in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message." One Pentagon adviser told me, ?
"There are always contingency plans, but why withdraw and take a chance? I don't think the President will go for it ?until the insurgency is broken.
?He's not going to back off. This is bigger than domestic politics.
"
Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.
Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments.
In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President'?s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq.
The President's belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that he'?
s the man, the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his re-election as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.
Bush comes across here as the type of rational leader our nation needs in trying times:
The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: I said to the President, We'?
re not winning the war.? And he asked, Are we losing?
I said, ?Not yet. The President, he said, ?
appeared displeased with that answer. ?I tried to tell him, the former senior official said.
And he couldn'?t hear it.
The President is more determined than ever to stay the course, the former defense official said.
He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage People may suffer and die, but the Church advances. He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney.
They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,? the former defense official said. Bush'?
s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House, the former official said, ?
but Bush has no idea."
The president's management skills, Harvard MBA notwithstanding, seems here to be lacking:
Many of the military's most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don'?t want to jeopardize their careers.
The Administration has so terrified the generals that they know they won'?t go public,? a former defense official said.
One person with whom the Pentagon's top commanders have shared their private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with devastating information.
For example, Murtha reported that the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer from what I call battle fatigue in the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as the common enemy? in Iraq.
He also took issue with one of the White House'?s claims that foreign fighters were playing the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers haven't captured any in this latest activity ?
the continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border with Syria. So this idea that they'?re coming in from outside, we still think there'?
s only seven per cent.?
Murtha'?
s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House'?s resolve. Administration officials ?
are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy both on substance and politically,? the former defense official said.
The proposed bombing campaign appears to be conceived as an intentional in-your-face to the entire Muslim world.
Perhaps it is a last-ditch attempt to ignite a holy war. The article makes clear that the fuckwits running this country won't be satisfied until there is no desolate, starving village anywhere on earth whose residents will not feel superior to the pathetic sickos who would elect such men to power.
Some retired CIA officers have in opposition to the Bush administration's preference for authorization of torture.These experienced interrogators are confirming that torture is ineffective in extracting useful information from captured enemies. The damage to the international moral credibility of the United States from the recent abandonment of our principles seems to be the reason for the candor of these officers.
Some perennially high-profile retired CIA officers like Bob Baer, Frank Anderson, and Vincent Cannistraro recently spoke out to Knight Ridder about their opposition to torture on practical grounds (Cannistraro said that detainees will "say virtually anything to end their torment"). But over the past 18 months, several lesser-known former officers have been trying, publicly and privately, to convince both the agency and the public that torture and other unduly coercive questioning tactics are morally wrong as well.
One retired officer is more explicit as to the effect of a policy allowing torture on the torturer's own society:
Speaking at a College of William and Mary forum last year, Burton L.
Gerber, a decorated Moscow station chief who retired in 1995 after 39 years with the CIA, surprised some in the audience when he said he opposes torture "because it corrupts the society that tolerates it."
This is a view, he confirmed in an interview with National Journal last week, that is rooted in Albert Camus's assertion in Preface to Algerian Reports that torture, "even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy," represents "a flouting of honor that serves no purpose but to degrade" a nation in its own eyes and the world's. "The reason I believe that torture corrupts the torturers and society," Gerber says, "is that a standard is changed, and that new standard that's acceptable is less than what our nation should stand for.
I think the standards in something like this are crucial to the identity of America as a free and just society."
The moral dimensions of torture, Gerber adds, are inextricably linked with the practical; aside from the fact that torture almost always fails to yield true or useful information, it has the potential to adversely affect CIA operations.
"Foreign nationals agree to spy for us for many different reasons; some do it out of an overwhelming admiration for America and what it stands for, and to those people, I think, America being associated with torture does affect their willingness to work with us," he says.
"But one of my arguments with the agency about ethics, particularly in this case, is that it's not about case studies, but philosophy. Aristotle says the ends and means must be in concert; if the ends and means are not in concert, good ends will be corrupted by bad means."
This, in a nutshell, is how Cheney, Addington, and the other torture fetishists are actively harming U.
S. intelligence capabilities. I have grave concerns about their true motivations.
I suspect that many Americans share my apprehension of the actions of these kooks. The issue of torture is related to but entirely separate from the comprehensive damage done to our country by unnecessarily going to war in a part of the world that is vital to U.S.
interests.
S. stop playing Mr. Nice Guy and let his militia go after their Sunni enemies.
Abdul Aziz Hakim, who leads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), says in an that the U.S. is being "too weak against Iraq's insurgency.
" He believes that his Badr Brigades would be able to defeat the "terrorists" with less interference from the United States. He stressed however, that he wants U.S.
troops to remain in Iraq in the meantime to continue to create a viable Iraqi military.
Hakim is basically laying out a formula for civil war. He claims to be against only the Sunni terrorists, but after living under years of persecution, it is hardly a secret that the Shias want to even the score.
The issue points to a key difference between U.S. officials and some of Iraq's conservative Shiite leaders about what it will take to end the insurgency.
Even the top U.S. generals say the ultimate solution is a political one, bringing minority Sunnis into a democracy that without them stands to be dominated permanently by the Shiite majority.
But the leaders of many Shiite religious parties, reflecting their years in exile and their bitterness over the killing of relatives and supporters during Hussein's dictatorship, say the endgame is a military one.
S. mistake, he said. "Terrorists should know there would be no dealing with them.
"
American troops, he said, had been in the building where the prison was discovered "four times a week."
But Hakim noted that the Kurdish-populated north already has such a region, and he contended that Baghdad, with its mixed population, and the heavily Sunni west should form separate regions as well.
"
The timing of a U.S. withdrawal will then only matter to the families of the Americans who will die while our elected leaders continue to try to ignore the inevitable by acting tough on terrorism to save their political careers.
CIFA is a Pentagon intelligence agency which will now be permitted to "investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.
"
According to an article by Walter Pincus in
), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview.
"
" Among domestic targets listed are people in the United States who it "is reasonably believed threaten the physical security of Defense Department employees, installations, operations or official visitors."
One CIFA activity, threat assessments, involves using "leading edge information technologies and data harvesting," according to a February 2004 Pentagon budget document. This involves "exploiting commercial data" with the help of outside contractors.
For CIFA, counterintelligence involves not just collecting data but also "conducting activities to protect DoD and the nation against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, assassinations, and terrorist activities," its brochure states.
The Bush administration is taking sinister advantage of a nation still quietly shitting itself.
Rumors about "the next big thing" from Google has been almost a cottage industry since Google itself was "the next big thing.
" The latest gossip claims that Google intends to become the world's biggest ISP. Cringely dismisses this, and in the process introduces the grist for another round in the Google rumor mill:
So why buy-up all that fiber, then?
The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View.
There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center.
Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig.
The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.
Cringely envisions Google creating not a super ISP, but a faster, improved internet itself:
There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top.
We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business.
That's the goal.
That's some kind of tall order, I say.
Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts at pretending to be Google.
And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can't match.
Microsoft can't compete.
Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion?
That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.
Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they'll be BUYING service from those outfits -- many of which are in or near bankruptcy.
Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is?
Wal-Mart's. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies.
ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.
0 IS Google.
Cringely's article is up to his usual high standards. He deals with other aspects of Web 2.
0 that I refrain from detailing here due to limits of fair usage. Look at the article for yourself if you are interested. Of course, whether all this comes to pass will be influenced by other factors, such as the health of the economy.
This is the "everyone saw the same intelligence" lie.
The Bush apologists claim that Senators, Congressmen, even foreign intelligence agencies all had access to the same reports and concluded that Saddam had WMDs. In , I mentioned how several of our allies had better intelligence about Iraq than the U.S.
and provided no proof of any ongoing WMD programs.
Today former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), finishes demolishing the "everyone saw the same intelligence" fiction.
in the Washington Post how, as the former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he saw reports that were not as clearly incriminating against Saddam as the administration was portraying publicly.
During Bush's stampede towards war, Graham makes known that the CIA had not even produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) until Graham instructed them to do so. This is shocking on the face of it.
NIEs are the basic intelligence community product, their stock in trade. NIEs are classified reports produced on every conceivable subject that may be viewed as a threat to U.S.
national security; such as epidemic diseases (West Nile Virus was one example), international drug cartels, weapons proliferation, political developments in various countries, etc.
DCI Tenet hastily threw together the Iraq weapons NIE in three weeks (they typically take several months). There were numerous dissents from community members about the existence of various weapons programs.
Dissents are usually included in NIEs as footnotes indicating which agency was disputing which assertions, this is a common occurrence.
Graham was disquieted by the way the administration was ignoring the dissenting intelligence data, and requested a unclassified version of the NIE that could be released to the public. I will allow former Senator Graham explain what came next:
On Oct.
4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.
11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.
I must finish with the following note. I have been told that the classified NIE was made available to be read by any Senator or Congressman who wished to see it. Only a few took the trouble, but the majority's willful ignorance did not stop them from deciding that the war sounded like a good idea.
Dumbshits.
Mike Brown and Michael Weiss have collected information for years on various odd things that made it onto the recordings issued by the Beatles. These include instances of mixing errors, messed up lyrics and musical notes, unintentional noises and voices, etc.
Once you have heard these songs hundreds (or thousands) of times, you just figure that many of these were supposed to be part of the song. This website shows you otherwise and deciphers just what you are hearing.
From the introductory page:
.
.. heard chattering, voices, or odd noises in the background of a Beatles song?
...
wondered who sang "She Loves You" at the end of All You Need Is Love ?
..
. heard stories about what John sings at the end of Baby You'?re A Rich Man?
...
wanted to know which Beatles song, played on the radio the world over, has an undeleted expletive in, where it is, and why it happened?
..
. wondered where the famous edit is in Strawberry Fields Forever, and what the Morse code in it might mean?
.
..puzzled over strange voices in I Am The Walrus, Yellow Submarine, and Revolution No.
9?
..
.or wondered about these backwards messages about Paul ?
.
..wanted to know about that alarm clock noise, where John can be heard chewing gum, what'?
s tapping through Blackbird, why there are bits missing in Day Tripper'?s guitars, what all those strange bits in Helter Skelter are all about, and who'?s got the blisters?
...
Then keep reading, for you are among friends.
The site is searchable by alphabetical order or by album. These lads (Mike and Michael) have a hard-copy book out too.
Take a look at the site, it will be well worth your time.
features the now retired Judith Miller. Judy is remembered here by many as a difficult person.
Her long suffering ex-colleagues detail some incidents which must have been infuriating to them at the time, but are revealing about her true nature:
Ibrahim, who was Middle East regional correspondent for the Times for 10 years beginning in 1986, says Miller tried to steal an interview he'd scheduled in the mid-1980s with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian foreign ministry official who would later become United Nations secretary general.
He is not even sure who hung up on whom. In the end, Ibrahim got his interview -- without Miller present.
W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication.
He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.
Do you know Judy Miller?"
She was so pushy and she was demanding and pressing us to take her to those al Qaeda camps but we couldn't go and she told us we were covering up" and on and on, the Afghanis yelled at Miller's amused colleague that day. And he was duly impressed. (He requested anonymity to avoid being drawn into the controversy.
)
"There are 300 non-government research labs registered to work with deadly germs like the Spanish flu, which killed millions of people worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will consider requests for samples from those labs "on a case-by-case basis," CDC spokesman Von Roebuck said Wednesday.
Dangerous biological agents are routinely shipped through commercial carriers like FedEx or DHL, following government packaging, safety and security guidelines.
Last month, U.S. scientists announced they had created "?
from scratch"? the 1918 virus. It was the first time an infectious agent behind a historic global epidemic had ever been reconstructed.
Researchers said they believed it would help them develop defenses against the threat of a future pandemic evolving from bird flu, which was found to have similar characteristics as the 1918 virus.
About 10 vials of virus were created, each containing about 10 million infectious virus particles. CDC officials said at the time the particles would be stored at a CDC facility in Atlanta, and that there were no plans to send samples off campus.
But that statement did not mean there was a policy against sending samples elsewhere, Roebuck said."
Just in case the precautions being taken break down somehow, the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services has established a pretty decent looking website to provide "official" information on pandemic influenza and the newest bogeyman--avian influenza.
features such categories as:
- Health and Safety
- Monitoring Outbreaks
- Planning and Response Activities
- Travel and Transportation
- Research Activities
The voices of morality, sanity and just plain operational effectiveness have joined Sen.
John McCain's lonely battle against the torture fetishists led by Dick Cheney and Porter Goss. McCain's amendment to the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act, which attempts to make the U.S.
comply with its obligations as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, has been fought tooth and nail by the administration. See also my earlier and for specifics of the dispute.
The advocates of torture are now seeking to exempt the CIA from McCain's Amendment.
The tell-tale sign that reason is rearing its head comes in the form of two pieces in the dominant establishment mouthpieces.
The New York Times has an on a report by the CIA's Inspector General from early 2004 which warned that some of the authorized techniques used in interrogations of detainees veered into prohibited territory vis a vis the U.N.
Convention Against Torture and the 1949 Geneva Conventions:
"The previously undisclosed findings from the report, which was completed in the spring of 2004, reflected deep unease within the C.I.A.
about the interrogation procedures, the officials said. A list of 10 techniques authorized early in 2002 for use against terror suspects included one known as waterboarding, and went well beyond those authorized by the military for use on prisoners of war.
The convention, which was drafted by the United Nations, bans torture, which is defined as the infliction of "severe" physical or mental pain or suffering, and prohibits lesser abuses that fall short of torture if they are "cruel, inhuman or degrading.
" The United States is a signatory, but with some reservations set when it was ratified by the Senate in 1994.
The report, by John L. Helgerson, the C.
I.A.'s inspector general, did not conclude that the techniques constituted torture, which is also prohibited under American law, the officials said.
But Mr. Helgerson did find, the officials said, that the techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the convention.
The agency said in a written statement in March that "all approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture.
" It reaffirmed that statement on Tuesday, but would not comment on any classified report issued by Mr. Helgerson. The statement in March did not specifically address techniques that could be labeled cruel, inhuman or degrading, and which are not explicitly prohibited in American law.
"
That last bit about all this crap being legal is CIA legalese asserting that they were not breaking the law, although the IG seems to think otherwise:
"In his report, Mr. Helgerson also raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability, the officials said. They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to C.
I.A. interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States.
...
"The ambiguity in the law must cause nightmares for intelligence officers who are engaged in aggressive interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects and other terrorism suspects," said John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the agency who left in 2004. Mr. Radsan, now an associate professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St.
Paul, would not comment on Mr. Helgerson's report.
.
..The agency issued its earlier statement on the legality of approved interrogation techniques after Mr.
Goss, in testimony before Congress on March 17, said that all interrogation techniques used "at this time" were legal but declined, when asked, to make the same broad assertion about practices used over the past few years.
On March 18, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, the agency's director of public affairs, said that "C.I.
A. policies on interrogation have always followed legal guidance from the Department of Justice."
Her reference to the DOJ hints at the scope of this bureaucratic battle.
The second revealing piece is an by ex-CIA General Counsel Jeffrey H. Smith, who as a State Department officer was instrumental in the negotiations that freed Natan Sharansky from Soviet imprisonment. Smith details inter alia the reasons that a policy allowing the torture of detainees is counterproductive.
One is the quid pro quo expected to be extended to Americans who may happen to be captured in the future. Another is the simple question of morality. Smith concludes with my exact point from last week:
"There may be an argument for exempting the CIA from the McCain amendment.
If so, the president and vice president should publicly make the case. They should say why they believe treatment of prisoners outside the Geneva Conventions would provide vital intelligence to protect us. They should give examples of how such treatment has produced valuable intelligence.
If the choice is between the McCain amendment as modified by Cheney and nothing, we are better off with doing nothing and leaving the law where it is. Sooner or later this nation will come to its senses and remember how important international law and the Geneva Conventions are to our standing in the world and the protection of our citizens."
The outlines of important battles in Washington can often be glimpsed in articles full of leaked classified info and on the op-ed pages.
You would think that if President Bush had no contemporaneous personal knowledge of Karl Rove's Joe and Val Wilson bashing, The White House would have come right out and said so explicitly.
Everyone knows about Bush's loyalty towards his people, but this would be carrying it to the level of absurdity. If Bush wasn't involved, one way or another, there is no way in hell he would allow this matter to decimate his poll numbers and credibility without sticking up for himself.
I know some people would claim Bush is not smart enough to figure this out.
But unless it is just George W. and Karl alone against the world, someone would have insisted he distance himself from "Plamegate" by asserting his innocence.
Just when I was thinking that I had been missing something, the publishes an article touching in an off-hand way on this very issue:
WASHINGTON, Nov.
5 - In the hours before the Justice Department informed the White House in late September 2003 that it would investigate the leak of a covert C.I.A.
officer's identity, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, gave reporters what turned out to be a rare glimpse into President Bush's knowledge of the case.
Mr. Bush, he said, "knows" that Karl Rove, his senior adviser, had not been the source of the leak.
Pressed on how Mr. Bush was certain, Mr. McClellan said he was "not going to get into conversations that the president has with advisers," but made no effort to erase the impression that Mr.
Rove had assured Mr. Bush that he had not been involved.
Since then, administration officials and Mr.
Bush himself have carefully avoided disclosing anything about any involvement the president may have had in the events surrounding the disclosure of the officer's identity or anything about what his aides may have told them about their roles. Citing the continuing investigation and now the pending trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr.
, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, they have declined to comment on almost any aspect of the case.
The issue now for the White House is how long it can go on deflecting the inquiries and trying to keep the focus away from Mr. Bush.
The establishment New York Times then takes great pains to steer the article away from the explosive intimation hinted to above:
While there has been no suggestion that Mr. Bush did anything wrong, the portrait of the White House that was painted by the special counsel in the indictment of Mr. Libby was one in which a variety of senior officials, including Mr.
Cheney, played some role in events that preceded the disclosure of the officer's identity.
Mr. Bush was not mentioned in the indictment.
But the fact that so many of his aides seem to have been involved in dealing with the issue that eventually led to the leak - how to rebut or discredit Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had challenged the administration's handling of prewar intelligence - leaves open the question of what the president knew.
The White House has also kept a tight lid on information about what Mr.
Bush learned afterward about any involvement that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby, Mr.
Rove and others may have had in the leak.
The Times later finds it necessary to wheel out a Republican tool:
"A White House that is aggressively on message is an unstoppable political tool," said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant. "Just as the Clinton White House got itself back together in '95 and after impeachment, this White House will get itself together, too.
"
Whatever political problems the Libby indictment creates, he said, "It's a long way from the Veep's office to the Oval. No one has ever hinted that President Bush was involved in this or was even aware of it. I really don't think the issue will have legs beyond the next couple of weeks.
"
The administration's supporters point out that Mr. Bush has repeatedly emphasized that the White House will cooperate fully with the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
The administration raised no issues of executive privilege when it came to documents sought by investigators. Mr. Fitzgerald had given no indication that he was denied any information on the ground of national security.
No officials are known to have taken the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating themselves.
Therefore, allies of the White House said, it would be hard to make a case, legally or politically, that there was any organized effort to cover up what happened, despite Mr. Libby's indictment on charges of trying to do just that.
And assuming that Mr. Fitzgerald does not indict Mr. Rove in the next few weeks, Mr.
Bush has a natural firebreak available to him.
If I was Bush and was innocent of any illegal involvement, I think that I would mention it.
Since 9-11, Addington has fought against officials who have insisted that the U.S. adhere to its obligations vis-a-vis enemy prisoners of war as an original signatory to the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Addington is at it again, according to today's , he has been attempting to cajole the Defense Department into ignoring the Geneva Convention in a new departmental policy on the treatment of detainees.
"The document under discussion, known as Department of Defense Directive 23.10, would provide broad guidance from Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld; while it would not spell out specific detention and interrogation techniques, officials said, those procedures would have to conform to its standards. It would not cover the treatment of detainees held by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The behind-the-scenes debate over the Pentagon directive comes more than three years after President Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the fight against terrorism.
It mirrors a public battle between the Bush administration and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is pressing a separate legislative effort to ban the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of any detainee in United States custody.
After a 90-to-9 vote in the Senate last month in favor of Mr. McCain's amendment to a $445 billion defense spending bill, the White House moved to exempt clandestine C.
I.A. activities from the provision.
A House-Senate conference committee is expected to consider the issue this week.
Mr. Cheney and some of his aides have spearheaded the administration's opposition to Senator McCain's amendment; they were also quick to oppose a draft of the detention directive, which began to circulate in the Pentagon in mid-September, officials said.
A central player in the fight over the directive is David S. Addington, who was the vice president's counsel until he was named on Monday to succeed I. Lewis Libby Jr.
as Mr. Cheney's chief of staff. According to several officials, Mr.
Addington verbally assailed a Pentagon aide who was called to brief him and Mr. Libby on the draft, objecting to its use of language drawn from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
"He left bruised and bloody," one Defense Department official said of the Pentagon aide, Matthew C.
Waxman, Mr. Rumsfeld's chief adviser on detainee issues. "He tried to champion Article 3, and Addington just ate him for lunch.
""
Before 9-11, if any official had been quoted as criticizing, much less aggressively pushing a policy contrary to the Geneva Convention, he or she would have been branded a dangerous kook and cast out of the Washington establishment.
The way of tea has nothing to do with discriminating good utensils from bad utensils nor considering the form of making tea. The basic meaning of tea is to realize samadhi while using tea utensils and to practice seeing into the original nature.
frost haze, the sky glows into sky, frost, starlight.
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