Book Bin: "War And Indecision: Inside The Pentagon At The Dawn of The War on Terrorism by Douglas Feith

At the Washington Times, John Weisman writes:

There is a lot to recommend "War and Decision," Douglas J. Feith's apologia of his 2001-2005 tour as Donald Rumsfeld's under secretary of defense for policy. Few books have chronicled the labyrinthine, cutthroat process of policy-making from the inside in as detailed a manner as has Mr. Feith. Mr. Feith is also a fine writer. But the most important contribution "W&D" makes to the growing body of literature about Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on terror and why it should be required reading in schools of public service and government was probably inadvertent on Mr. Feith's part.

"W&D" should be widely read so we never again make the mistakes Mr. Feith and his fellow Pentagon, State Department, CIA and White House senior political staffers made during their planning and execution of the Iraq war, or their tunnel vision abandonment of a successful Afghan campaign that has condemned us to near stalemate and a rejuvenated, opium-funded Taliban. It is obvious Mr. Feith is bright. His vacuity about the real world, however, is shocking.

But not unexpected. Mr. Feith's entire professional life has been spent either in the practice of law or the development of public policy. Thus, he comes off as the textbook example of someone to whom process is more important than victory. Mr. Feith loses sight of the real battlefields — the ones on which soldiers die — in favor of the paper wars fought between competing factions of bureaucrats.

This is a fatal flaw during wartime. Winston Churchill — one of Mr. Feith's heroes — understood this truth. To Churchill, victory meant everything. And if it took head-cracking and tossing process out the window to achieve victory at all costs, so be it. Mr. Feith doesn't think that way. For Mr. Feith, process is all.

There are also some gaps in "W&D." But then Mr. Feith, like the lawyer he is, is prone to buttressing his position with pointillist details and citations while leaving out anything that might give aid and comfort to opposing counsel. He is hugely antagonistic toward CIA. Thus, CIA's many flaws get ample verbiage in "War and Decision." Its accomplishments do not. Even when they deserve to.

Take for example Mr. Feith's timeline "Afghanistan and the War on Terror, September 2001-December 2002." He cites October 7 as the beginning of the Afghan war and October 19th as "First entry into Afghanistan of U.S. Special Ops Forces." Neither Mr. Feith's timeline nor his prose mention the fact that CIA's JAWBREAKER team led by veteran CIA operations officer Gary C. Schroen hit the ground in Afghanistan at 2:45 PM (Local time) on 26 September, 2001, more than three weeks before the first Green Beret.

Mr. Feith never explains that JAWBREAKER, which carried millions of dollars to buy the Northern Alliance's assistance, both paved the way for the Army's special operations personnel, and worked hand in glove with its SF partners to marshal indigenous forces that killed and captured large numbers of Taliban and al-Qaeda combatants.

Equally jarring is Mr. Feith's wide-eyed assertion that his colleague Paul Wolfowitz made "an important contribution" by proposing the concept that Green Beret forces "make contact with the Afghan Northern Alliance and any other potentially cooperating local forces" to act as force multipliers. What is mind-boggling about his assertion is that Mr. Feith appears to have no idea that Green Berets have been acting as force multipliers for decades. Indeed, they are doing exactly that in Afghanistan right now.

Maybe it's naive, but one expects that under secretaries of defense will have at minimum a rudimentary working knowledge of military doctrine and capabilities. Mr. Feith seems not to, which becomes even more than frightening given his wide swath of responsibilities under Secretary Rumsfeld.

Another example of Mr. Feith's real-world ignorance is evident in his coverage of Secretary Rumsfeld's "Strategic Thoughts" paper, Mr. Rumsfeld's "conception of a global war on terrorism." In a nutshell, the Rumsfeldian concept was to get state sponsors of terrorism to alter their behavior through an asymmetric stick-and-carrot combination of military threat, political pressure, humanitarian aid and the use of NGOs.

Again, Mr. Feith's wide-eyed, 'gee whiz' reaction belies the fact that this approach is essentially the same one employed in the 1980s by such counterterrorist pioneers as Adm. James A. Lyons, Jr., who as CINCPACFLT balanced the projection of awesome American sea power with the subtle threat of special forces and humanitarian assistance of the hospital ship USNS Mercy, or Duane R. Clarridge, creator and first chief of CIA CounterTerrorist Center, whose effective asymmetric campaign against the Abu Nidal Organization combined covert action, diplomacy, and PSYOP elements to put Abu Nidal out of business. Seems to me that one vital part of policy-making is knowing when you've invented the wheel, and when you haven't. Once again, Mr. Feith seems clueless.

Mr. Feith does a fair amount of score-settling in "W&D." He repeatedly goes after CIA for its shoddy work, politicized leadership and flawed analysis. And he hits CIA for its inability to gather human-sourced intelligence. "We knew the CIA's coverage of Iraq was spotty," Mr. Feith writes, "though it wasn't until after Saddam's ouster that we learned how pathetically scant its sources in Iraq were."

But even here Mr. Feith's puzzlement is troubling, because as far back as 2001, CIA alumni (including veteran Middle East Clandestine Service officer Robert Baer in his memoir "See No Evil") had gone public about CIA's dearth of human sources in Iraq and the bloodshed and turmoil that would follow any regime change. Did no one in Mr. Feith's office — including Mr. Feith's trusted staffer Chris Straub — who had actually traveled to Northern Iraq with Mr. Baer in the 1990s — read any of these articles or books?

Mr. Feith does have a nice way with words. He portrays former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage as "A hulking bodybuilder with a foghorn voice [who] cultivated the persona of a stereotypical longshoreman union enforcer." Nicely done and spot-on accurate. To Mr. Feith, Mr. Armitage is a constant roadblock to effective policy.

So is Mr. Armitage's boss, SECSTATE Colin Powell, who comes off as insincere and ineffective when it comes to pushing the administration's positions. Mr. Feith is convinced that if Mr. Powell had arm-twisted the Europeans — especially the French and the Germans — and had put his prestige on the line with the Turks pre-invasion, things might have gone differently. And CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks (who according to Bob Woodward's 2004 book "Plan of Attack" once referred to Mr. Feith as "the [expletive] stupidest guy on the face of the earth"), is castigated mainly for his inattention to post-war planning in Iraq.

Here, I must quibble. In his criticism of Gen. Franks, Mr. Feith is far too kind.

There are also fascinating enlightenments. Mr. Feith relates how SECDEF Rumsfeld wrote a pre-war memo listing all the possible calamities that could befall the United States in Iraq. It is unsettling to realize that most of Mr. Rumsfeld's list, which came to be known as the "Parade of the Horribles," came true. And Mr. Feith admits straight up that neither he nor Mr. Rumsfeld nor anyone else anticipated "post regime violence of the type that we encountered in the insurgency . . ." The evidence was there of course, but no one wanted to see it.

And if there was ever any doubt that the Bush administration became so fixated on Iraq that it allowed its initial success in Afghanistan to wither from inattention, Mr. Feith provides a smoking gun. All one has to do is check the index of his book for "Afghanistan." After page 165 of a tome that runs 674 pages there are but three passing citations. Obviously in Mr. Feith's mind, and by extension the administration's, Afghanistan was no longer a matter of consequence once the decision to invade Iraq was made. Once again, process trumped victory. Quel dommage.

John Weisman's most recent CIA novel, "Direct Action," is currently available from Avon Books. He can be reached at blackops@johnweisman.com.

The Growing Battle for the Right to Water

At AlterNet.org, Tara Lohan writes:

From Chile to the Philippines to South Africa to her home country of Canada, Maude Barlow is one of a few people who truly understands the scope of the world's water woes. Her newest book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, details her discoveries around the globe about our diminishing water resources, the increasing privatization trend and the grassroots groups that are fighting back against corporate theft, government mismanagement and a changing climate.

If you want to know where the water is running low (including 36 U.S. states), why we haven't been able to protect it and what we can do to ensure everyone has the right to water, Barlow's book is an essential read. It is part science, part policy and part impassioned call. And the information in Blue Covenant couldn't come from a more reliable source. Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, which is instrumental in the international community in working for the right to water for all people. She also authored Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World's Water with Tony Clarke. And she's the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (known as the "Alternative Nobel") for her global water justice work.

She took a moment to talk to AlterNet in between the Canadian and U.S. legs of a book tour for Blue Covenant:

Tara Lohan: This year in the U.S. there has been a whole lot press about the drought in Atlanta and the Southeast, and I think for a lot of people in the U.S. it is the first they are hearing about drought, but the crisis here in North America is really pretty extreme isn't it?

Maude Barlow: It really is, and it kind of surprises me when I hear people, for instance in Atlanta say, "We didn't know it was coming." I don't know how that could be possible, and I do have to say that I blame our political leaders. I don't understand how they could not have been reading what I've been reading and what anyone who is watching this has been reading.

I remember attending a conference in Boise, Idaho, three years ago and hearing a lot of scientists get up and say, "Read my lips, this isn't a drought, this is permanent drying out." We are overpumping the Ogallala, Lake Powell and Lake Meade. The back up systems are now being depleted. This is by no means a drought ...

The thing that I'm trying to establish with the first chapter, which is called "Where Has All the Water Gone," is that what we learned in grade five about the hydrologic cycle being a closed, fixed cycle that could never be interrupted and could never go anywhere, is not true. They weren't lying to us, but they weren't aware of the human capacity to destroy it, and the reality is that we've interrupted the hydrologic cycle in many parts of the world and the American Southwest is one of them.

TL: How is this happening?

MB: By farming in deserts and taking up water from aquifers or watersheds. Or by urbanizing -- massive urbanization causes the hydrologic cycle to not function correctly because rain needs to fall back on green stuff -- vegetation and grass -- so that the process can repeat itself. Or we are sending huge amounts of water from large watersheds to megacities and some of them are 10 to 20 million people, and if those cities are on the ocean, some of that water gets dumped into the ocean. It is not returned to the cycle.

We are massively polluting surface water, so that the water may be there, but we can't use it. And we are also mining groundwater faster than it can be replenished by nature, which means we are not allowing the cycle to renew itself. The Ogallala aquifer is one example of massive overpumping. There are bore wells in the Lake Michigan shore that go as deep into the ground as Chicago skyscrapers go into the ground and they are sucking groundwater that should be feeding the lake so hard that they are pulling up lake water now, and they are reversing the flow of water in Lake Michigan for the first time.

We are interrupting the natural cycle. And another thing we are doing is something called virtual water trade. That is where you send water out of the watershed in the form of products or agriculture. You've used the water to produce something and then you export it, and about 20 percent of water used in the world is exported out of watershed in this way, because so much of our economy is about export. In the U.S. you are sending about one-third of your water out of watersheds -- it is not sustainable.

This is not a cyclical drought. We are actually creating hot stains, as I and some scientists call them, around the world. These are parts of the world that are running out of water and will be, or are, in crisis. Which means that millions more people will be without water. I argue that this is one of the causes of global warming. We usually hear water being a result of climate change, and it is, particularly with the melting of the glaciers. But our abuse, mismanagement and treatment of water is actually one of the causes, and we have not placed that analysis at the center of our thinking about climate change and environmental destruction, and until we do, we are only addressing half the question.

I do blame in a very big way, the political leadership in most of our countries for having failed to heed the call of scientists and ecologists and water managers who've been telling us for years now there is a crisis coming -- there are 36 states in the U.S. in some form of water stress, from serious to severe. Thirty-six states! Most Americans don't know this -- why is this not part of people's everyday concerns? That is what I'm hoping this book will help do.

TL: Do you think governments, like the U.S. or Canada, have any kind of a contingency plan?

MB: No. There are people in the U.S. who believe Canada is the contingency plant. Or Northeast water or Alaska water. So, moving water is one of the contingency plans, likely by pipeline. You could also ship it by tanker. Other than that, no. And not only are there no backup plans, but there is not even an understanding that you've got to stop increasing the demand on water. In the U.S., people are moving into the very area of the country that has no water -- a huge migration is taking place to to the American Southwest where they're building more golf courses.

I just read about a new water theme park in Arizona that will have waves so big you can have serious surfers, like real surfing in the desert. There is just this lack of understanding about how nature works, how the hydrologic cycle needs to be protected and how watersheds need to be protected, and when you start playing god by moving this stuff around like this we are just creating this massive crisis. There is not enough water for the demands being made on it in the American Southwest.

TL: You said 36 states in the U.S. are water stressed -- what does that actually mean for the people who live there?

MB: Well, in a dire case, literally running out of water. In many other cases, the predictions are that the demand will increase seriously and they've got to start planning. I quote in the book that the demand in Florida is growing so much and overpumping is happening so much that there are actually sink holes opening up and swallowing homes and streets and sometimes whole shopping centers. It is called subsidence. Mexico City is sinking in on itself because all the water under the city has been taken out and now they are going farther afield pumping water.

It can go from that kind of crisis, or as in some communities in the Midwest, you face having no water to the Chicago area, where the demand is going to grow hugely, and therefore the demand will be on the Great Lakes, which are already in trouble. There are four trillion liters taken out of the Great Lakes every single day and believe me, nature is not putting a trillion gallons back in. It is not rocket science that we are not allowing nature to refill and replenish. And now there are new demands on the Great Lakes because communities and industries off the basin are now demanding access to it.

TL: You mentioned global warming earlier, and I just want to come back to that for a moment. Are we approaching climate change in the wrong way by not recognizing its connection to water?

MB: Yes.

TL: So what should we be doing?

MB: Well, we have to put it into the equation. I've found that some politicians are actually using global warming as an excuse not to do anything, and I'll give you an example. It is the polar opposite of the Bush administration, which is that global warming doesn't exist. In Australia, which thankfully has gone through a government change, they are disengaging the water from the countryside and letting farmers sell it through brokers, they are disrupting streams and aquifers. They are draining the wetlands. They are privatizing. They are doing all sorts of things wrong, including overusing and polluting it, and so on. And what did the prime minister say? "It's got nothing to do with anything we're doing; it's global warming, and it blew here from away -- we didn't even create it."

I think global warming is becoming a little bit of a catch all for some governments to do nothing or to put off a solution to other things until they find a solution to global warming, and there is no excuse. Right now we have got to stop the abuse of water. The single most important thing that we can do for global warming, aside from stopping the overpumping of greenhouse gas emissions, but the twin to that is to retain water in watersheds. Because the hydrologic cycle is what cools the temperature.

Global warming can be averted through a great extent if we could maintain watersheds and maintain the cycle in its purest form. That means keeping green spaces, building green rings around urban centers -- everything from parks and gardens -- stop polluting, stop overmining groundwater and retain water in watersheds, which means we have to live more sustainably, we have to grow our food differently, we have to stop believing in unlimited growth and more stuff and more competition, and all of that.

I find that global warming is such a crisis that we won't do anything on any other front because all our attention is going there. I think we are terribly missing the boat on this, and I'm very interested in getting a debate going on this in the climate-change community so that when people are talking about the causes of climate change, our drying up of the earth from below will be considered as serious a cause as the trapping of heat from greenhouse gas emissions. It is not only part of the analysis we are missing, but part of the solution.

TL: That is interesting. I haven't heard a lot of people talking about it from that angle.

MB: Nobody.

I'm working with a group of scientists in Slovakia and a few other places, voices in the wilderness, but when you start putting it together, honestly, it makes such sense. I mean if you start to look at the growth of deserts -- in the last 30 years we've doubled the growth of deserts in the world, and it will double again in 20 years. Well, if you are creating deserts and you've got heat rising from the earth with urban heat islands, the inability for the hydrologic cycle to be maintained because of urbanization, it makes a lot of sense. Of course that is all exacerbated by melting glaciers and the lowering of the ice packs, which protects from evaporation. It is kind of a deadly combination. I spoke at a conference about this recently in London, England, and was received by people from the climate change world, really, really well, and I thought "This is a good sign."

TL: You spent a lot of time in this book, and also in Blue Gold, talking about privatization. Can you talk a little about why we should be concerned about it?

MB: Well, as water dwindles in the world and available fresh water is becoming more scarce, the demand is growing, water is becoming a commodity, it is becoming valuable to those who want to put a price on it, which is why I called the first book Blue Gold. And this blue gold is attracting private sector interest in many, many ways, and there is a private sector interest coming together to control every level of water, from when we take it out of the ground, bottle it, to how we deliver it, to wastewater treatment, and now the biggest and newest is water reuse and recycling. That sounds benign at first, but when you really start to look at it, really it is about big, big corporations like GE, Dow Chemical, Proctor & Gamble getting into the ownership, control, and recycling of dirty water, which because there are billions of dollars at stake, in my opinion, becomes a disincentive to protect source water. And you can start to understand why governments, in collusion with these companies, are starting to spend millions of dollars on cleanup technology but will not enforce rules to stop pollution in the first place.

And then we have desalination. There are 30 desal plants planned for California alone. They are now talking about nuclear-powered desalination. They are talking about building those plants as we speak. The people in the anti-nuclear movement had better dust off and come back because it is all coming back with desalination. And then there is nanotechnology, which they want to be totally deregulated. I've got a great quote in the book where this guy says, "We are going to do to water what we did to telecommunications in the 1990s," which is total deregulation. They want governments out of the business of water.

I have a whole section in the book on how water has become such a hot commodity. When I wrote Blue Gold there was no water being exchanged on the Stock Exchange, now there are over a dozen indexes just for trading water. It has become a multi-multibillion-dollar industry just overnight. A lot of it is this water reuse -- it is the fast-growing section of the water industry. I argue that there is a race going on over who's going to control water, whether it will be seen as a public commons, a public trust, and part of our collective heritage that also belongs to the earth -- or whether it will be controlled by private corporations, and I don't know who will win.

TL: But it is not all bad news.

MB: No, we are making good inroads in the bottled water area -- a lot of universities, high schools, are having drives to reject bottled water. We're getting restaurants now taking the challenge up to not serve bottled water, and we're getting people to take a pledge not to drink bottled water.

There has been a huge fight back from the big utility companies, particularly in the global south, to the extent that Suez has basically announced it is going to leave Latin America because people are so furious with them, which has been the result of fabulous grass-roots activism. So, it is not that this is a done deal, but most of the our governments are supportive of these private-sector incursions.

It is all about technology and not about lifestyle and alternative ways and decreasing growth and stuff -- they are saying we are not going to challenge the model, it is unlimited growth, continued competition, continued economical globalization, continued privatization, continued deregulation -- we'll just continue to find ways to clean up the mess as we go along.

TL: Water is not just an environmental issue, but a national security issue, you discovered with this book.

MB: Yes, water has become an issue of national security in the U.S. Six years ago I couldn't find any inkling at the national level -- the Pentagon or White House -- of a coming water crisis, either globally or in the U.S. But in the last, two to three years, this has been hugely changed. There is now a consortium advising the Bush administration and the Pentagon -- it is called Global Water Futures. It is made up of this think tank called the Center for International Studies and Sandia Laboratories. Then I dug deeper and found it is being contracted out to be run by Lockheed Martin. And this consortium involves Coke and Proctor & Gamble and others. So you finally have the U.S. government saying, "Holy crap, we're in trouble here, you can't be a super power if you don't have energy and water." Now they've got this advisory body that not only has this think tank and the corporate side too, and the high technology side, and the military side. It becomes very clear what you are dealing with.

TL: Can you talk more about the grass-roots resistance to all of this?

MB: The thing that is so stunning, especially in the global south, is that when you are dealing with water, you are dealing with life and death. For a lot of people it is like, "Well, we didn't know what to do when they privatized our education or shut down our public hospitals -- but water is different." They are willing to go the wall for it -- as one person said to me, "You may as well kill me with a bullet as dirty water." People just take a stand and are determined they are not going to compromise.

We took the time as a movement ... whenever anybody always asks me how to build a campaign, I always include these steps. We took the time to find language that we all jointly agreed on -- that water is not a commodity, that it belongs to the earth and all species, it is a public trust and human right, and so on. We've taken the time to work this out so that if you ask any of us around the world, you are going to hear the same kind of language. There is a trust that we have built in this shared philosophy and shared vision.

TL: How is it that you've managed to create such as worldwide message and come together?

MB: Part of the origin was when I wrote a report for the International Forum on Globalization back in 1999. It was called Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply. It took off, and a bunch of people from around the world started reading it. We got it translated into many, many languages, and I started hearing from people saying, "I thought this was personal and we were fighting this particular company in our community, and we didn't know that this was a global fight."

So, to my knowledge, that was the first analysis, and that morphed into the book. I started traveling and meeting people and Food & Water Watch got set up in the U.S. And then there was meeting people in Europe who were fighting big water companies, coming together at the big World Water Forum and bringing folks together from the global south to challenge what we call the "lords of water." And, of course, technology has been incredible. You don't have to have a computer in every house -- you just have to have somebody on the other end who has the capacity to receive this information.

TL: What else do we need to be doing?

MB: We need laws. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Legislation won't change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless." We need legislation at every level of our government. It is all well for grass-roots people to do all their wonderful work -- but they shouldn't have to do all the work. We need laws at every level, from municipal up to state to national to international, that protect water ecologically on one hand and protect the notion of a human right and right of the earth, and not a commodity, and that is so fundamental.

That is why I call the book "blue covenant" -- we need a covenant of three parts -- from humans to the earth to stop destroying the lifeblood of the earth, from the rich to the poor (global north to the south) for water justice, not charity -- justice. Water should be a fundamental right for all generations, and no one should be allowed to sell it for profit. We want this right up to the United Nations. It is a struggle at every level. But we just keep going. The fight back around the world is claiming space, but we have to have the weight of law behind us. We have to make, as a society, decisions about what matters. And if we believe that people shouldn't die because they can't afford water, then we have to bring things to bear to make that happen -- we have to change things. If the World Bank has money to give to Suez or Veolia, they've got the money to give to a public agency.

TL: So are you hopeful we can move change in the right direction?

MB: I'm always hopeful -- it is part of my job. I consider hope to be a moral imperative, and I also don't think you have any right to go around alarming people with these facts unless you are also prepared to talk about what needs to be done, and success stories, and be hopeful. I am very very hopeful that we can collectively do this.

If I'm worried -- it is about the exponential abuse of water -- can we catch this and stop it fast enough?

List of stops and dates for Barlow's book tour.

FBI Deputizes Business

At The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild writes:

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.

InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”
The ACLU is not so sanguine.

“There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” the ACLU warned in its August 2004 report The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.

InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public. Its communications with the FBI and Homeland Security are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act under the “trade secrets” exemption, its website says. And any conversation with the public or the media is supposed to be carefully rehearsed.

“The interests of InfraGard must be protected whenever presented to non-InfraGard members,” the website states. “During interviews with members of the press, controlling the image of InfraGard being presented can be difficult. Proper preparation for the interview will minimize the risk of embarrassment. . . . The InfraGard leadership and the local FBI representative should review the submitted questions, agree on the predilection of the answers, and identify the appropriate interviewee. . . . Tailor answers to the expected audience. . . . Questions concerning sensitive information should be avoided.”

One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.

The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”
InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.

“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”

On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.

“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”

Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”

In return for being in the know, InfraGard members cooperate with the FBI and Homeland Security. “InfraGard members have contributed to about 100 FBI cases,” Schneck says. “What InfraGard brings you is reach into the regional and local communities. We are a 22,000-member vetted body of subject-matter experts that reaches across seventeen matrixes. All the different stovepipes can connect with InfraGard.”

Schneck is proud of the relationships the InfraGard Members Alliance has built with the FBI. “If you had to call 1-800-FBI, you probably wouldn’t bother,” she says. “But if you knew Joe from a local meeting you had with him over a donut, you might call them. Either to give or to get. We want everyone to have a little black book.”
This black book may come in handy in times of an emergency. “On the back of each membership card,” Schneck says, “we have all the numbers you’d need: for Homeland Security, for the FBI, for the cyber center. And by calling up as an InfraGard member, you will be listened to.” She also says that members would have an easier time obtaining a “special telecommunications card that will enable your call to go through when others will not.”

This special status concerns the ACLU.

“The FBI should not be creating a privileged class of Americans who get special treatment,” says Jay Stanley, public education director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program. “There’s no ‘business class’ in law enforcement. If there’s information the FBI can share with 22,000 corporate bigwigs, why don’t they just share it with the public? That’s who their real ‘special relationship’ is supposed to be with. Secrecy is not a party favor to be given out to friends. . . . This bears a disturbing resemblance to the FBI’s handing out ‘goodies’ to corporations in return for folding them into its domestic surveillance machinery.”

When the government raises its alert levels, InfraGard is in the loop. For instance, in a press release on February 7, 2003, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General announced that the national alert level was being raised from yellow to orange. They then listed “additional steps” that agencies were taking to “increase their protective measures.” One of those steps was to “provide alert information to InfraGard program.”

“They’re very much looped into our readiness capability,” says Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. “We provide speakers, as well as do joint presentations [with the FBI]. We also train alongside them, and they have participated in readiness exercises.”

On May 9, 2007, George Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 entitled “National Continuity Policy.” In it, he instructed the Secretary of Homeland Security to coordinate with “private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency.”

Asked if the InfraGard National Members Alliance was involved with these plans, Schneck said it was “not directly participating at this point.” Hershman, chairman of the group’s advisory board, however, said that it was.

InfraGard members, sometimes hundreds at a time, have been used in “national emergency preparation drills,” Schneck acknowledges.

“In case something happens, everybody is ready,” says Norm Arendt, the head of the Madison, Wisconsin, chapter of InfraGard, and the safety director for the consulting firm Short Elliott Hendrickson, Inc. “There’s been lots of discussions about what happens under an emergency.”

One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation—and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.
But that’s not all.

“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.

I was able to confirm that the meeting took place where he said it had, and that the FBI and Homeland Security did make presentations there. One InfraGard member who attended that meeting denies that the subject of lethal force came up. But the whistleblower is 100 percent certain of it. “I have nothing to gain by telling you this, and everything to lose,” he adds. “I’m so nervous about this, and I’m not someone who gets nervous.”

Though Schneck says that FBI and Homeland Security agents do make presentations to InfraGard, she denies that InfraGard members would have any civil patrol or law enforcement functions. “I have never heard of InfraGard members being told to use lethal force anywhere,” Schneck says.

The FBI adamantly denies it, also. “That’s ridiculous,” says Catherine Milhoan, an FBI spokesperson. “If you want to quote a businessperson saying that, knock yourself out. If that’s what you want to print, fine.”

But one other InfraGard member corroborated the whistleblower’s account, and another would not deny it.

Christine Moerke is a business continuity consultant for Alliant Energy in Madison, Wisconsin. She says she’s an InfraGard member, and she confirms that she has attended InfraGard meetings that went into the details about what kind of civil patrol function—including engaging in lethal force—that InfraGard members may be called upon to perform.

“There have been discussions like that, that I’ve heard of and participated in,” she says.

Curt Haugen is CEO of S’Curo Group, a company that does “strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety,” according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. “It’s the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership,” he says. “It’s all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That’s what makes it work.”

He says InfraGard “absolutely” does emergency preparedness exercises. When I ask about discussions the FBI and Homeland Security have had with InfraGard members about their use of lethal force, he says: “That much I cannot comment on. But as a private citizen, you have the right to use force if you feel threatened.”

“We were assured that if we were forced to kill someone to protect our infrastructure, there would be no repercussions,” the whistleblower says. “It gave me goose bumps. It chilled me to the bone.”

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine and the author of "You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression." This article, "The FBI Deputizes Business," is the cover story of the March issue of The Progressive.

Twins Brought Up On Either Side Of The Iron Curtain, But Lived Identical Lives

Twins Ulrike Reichenbach (left) and Conny Holzbrecher were reunited only after the fall of the Berlin Wall

The Daily Mail reports:


When Conny Holzbrecher was a little girl, she had a much-loved doll that accompanied her everywhere - to school, to friends' houses, to bed at night.

But when people asked what the doll's name was, she always gave the same enigmatic answer: "She hasn't got a name. She's just my sister."

At the time, her parents thought her behaviour was a reaction to being an only child. And, because she had been adopted by an infertile couple, there was little they could do to help her.

"But I always had that feeling, deep in my soul, that there was something missing from my life or my family. I was trying to reach out, to connect with someone," says Conny, now 38.

"Somehow I always felt an underlying sense of loss."

And, astonishingly, she was right. For Conny was not an only child - she had an identical twin sister, living hundreds of miles away.

Thanks to a cruel twist of fate, the two were separated as babies, and remained so for 26 years.

Today, Conny is reunited with her identical sister, Ulrike Reichenbach.

They wear similar clothes, identical make-up, have the same hairstyles and even complete each other's sentences.

It's impossible to believe that, for the first two-thirds of their lives, they were apart. But theirs is an extraordinary tale of loss and reunion, now published in a moving book they have co-written.

Their story casts intriguing light on the endless debate over whether nature or nurture has a greater hold over our characters.

In short, Ulrike and Conny are hauntingly similar, not just in looks, but also in demeanour, tastes, sense of humour and outlook.

But there is one more twist to their extraordinary story. For they were adopted by two very different families and ended up living on either side of the Berlin Wall.

Ulrike was raised in affluent West Germany with every modern luxury and freedom, while Conny grew up amid the deprivation of the communist East.

Despite this, both twins had their appendixes removed at 16, both had their first child at 19, and both have the same career - event management. And yet they did not meet until they were adults and mothers themselves.

Today, they could not be closer. Their mannerisms are eerily alike, they laugh in the same way and both are calm, kindly and intelligent.

It is entirely impossible to tell them apart - the only difference seems to be that Conny is half an inch taller than Ulrike.

"We were born in East Germany in 1969," Conny explained to me this week.

"We've since discovered that our mother was forced by the communist state to put us up for adoption because she was a young mother with three older children by our father, a graphic designer and artist.

"She was struggling, especially as all women were expected to work as well."

Tragically, there are no photographs of the two girls together, even though they were with their parents until the age of three months. Then, they were taken to the orphanage where, cruelly, the state policy was that twins had no right to be kept together.

"When my adoptive father came to the orphanage to adopt me, a nurse took him by the arm and told him about another child he might like to take as well, and showed him Conny in her cot," says Ulrike.

"She was obviously horrified that we were going to be separated. He saw Conny and how alike we looked and realised we could be twins, though the nurse wasn't at liberty to say for sure."

Ulrike's adoptive father hurried back to his wife to ask her about taking not one but two babies. She agreed, but when they returned, the orphanage refused to allow it, or even to admit officially that the girls were twins.

The reason was that Conny had already been offered to another family, the paperwork was done and there was no going back. So she was whisked away into the arms of another family, who had no absolutely idea she had a sister.

Conny was raised as the only child of a plumber and his wife in the small town of Friedrichroda in East Germany, where she still lives.

For 26 years, she and her adoptive parents had no inkling that she was a twin. Her teenage years were difficult due to the political oppression, but she says she feels no envy of Ulrike's more privileged Western upbringing.

"My adoptive parents are very good people. They're very kind and Christian," she says.

"Politically things were very difficult for my family. I always knew I couldn't speak freely anywhere except within the four walls of my family home.

"The secret police were everywhere. There was little to buy or to eat in the shops, no freedom and things like fashion and music were very limited.

"I was 20 when the Berlin Wall came down, and I was so thrilled to be able to buy jeans, high-heeled shoes and makeup for the first time.

"But I grew up surrounded by love, feeling very much wanted by my parents. It's that, I am sure, which has helped me to cope with the shock of our reunion so well."

Meanwhile, Ulrike had been adopted by a childless ophthalmic surgeon and his wife. But both her adoptive parents were political dissidents who were first imprisoned, then expelled from East Germany when Ulrike was 12 for their involvement with the then-banned Christian church.

They moved to Mainz in the West, where Ulrike's family prospered.

"As a teenager in the West, I wanted for nothing. We had lovely summer holidays on the Mediterranean, went skiing in the winter and every Christmas and birthday I was showered with presents.

"I'd been told from a young age that I was adopted, but it was only when we moved to the West that my father told me about Conny's existence," remembers Ulrike.

"Up until that moment, he felt I was not old enough to cope with the knowledge. It was a tough conversation and we both cried.

"I think he always felt regret that he hadn't been able to adopt her, too.

"Back then I knew that, living in West Germany, there was little chance of tracking my sister down in the East.

"But every year, on my birthday, I would think of her and feel my heart yearning."

"At first, I was afraid of just parachuting into her life and I was too scared to track her down.

"I used to agonise over it, particularly after the age of 20 when the Wall came down and travel to the East became possible. But I was married with a child and my life was very full.

"For a long time I didn't have the emotional resources to force myself into my twin's life. I suppose I was too scared."

But when Ulrike was 26, she finally summoned the courage to track her sister down with the blessing and support of her adoptive parents.

The youth department in the newly reunited Germany acted as gatekeeper to the old adoption records of the former East German State. They gave her the details of the only other little girl from the orphanage with the same birthday as her: April 4, 1969.

"I was given an address and a telephone number," remembers Ulrike.

"I knew I ought to have written a letter but I just couldn't wait. So I rang up and spoke to Conny's adoptive parents."

Inevitably, it was a call which was to turn Conny's life on its head. She recalls: "Ulrike rang my family home one Saturday completely out of the blue and told my mother who she was.

"As you can imagine, Mum was absolutely astonished because she and my dad still knew nothing about me having a twin. She asked Ulrike to call back the next day, to give her time to break the news to me.

"At the time, I was married and living nearby with two young daughters. Mum asked me to come to their house, sat me down and very gently and slowly told me that I was in fact an identical twin and that my sister wanted to see me."

For Conny, suddenly her whole life made sense.

"I realised then and there what the problem was that had always been there for me, this feeling of incompleteness. This was what I had been searching for all my life.

"After all, if you look at ultrasounds of twins in the womb, they communicate with each other. They touch, play, even fight.

"Nature meant for us to grow up together. It was so desperately cruel for the orphanage to keep us apart.'

At first, the girls spoke over the phone. "Well, we mostly cried for the first ten minutes," remembers Conny.

"Then we started talking and it seemed as though everything one of us said, the other replied: 'Me too!'

"It was so exciting and wonderful. We thought alike, loved the same music and books, both were keen amateur artists. Even our voices were the same pitch, though we had slightly different accents because we lived so far apart in Germany."

The sisters exchanged letters and photographs. "It was extraordinary," says Conny.

"Her handwriting was exactly the same as mine. And here were photos that looked just like me, but living a life I could not imagine, with people I'd never met.

"It was like getting a letter from myself, but with a different life."

The twins met up three weeks later, with both sets of adoptive parents present.

"We were both very nervous and needed our mums and dads to support us," remembers Conny.

"Ulrike and her parents came to see me at my family home. I spent hours waiting by the window. I wanted to catch a glimpse of Ulrike before she saw me because I was actually very frightened of meeting her. It suddenly all seemed very real.

"But then Ulrike stepped out of the car and I couldn't contain myself. I ran out of the house and we just rushed into each other's arms and held on to each other as if we never could bear to let go again.

"When we finally let go, we felt almost shy with each other and sat side by side on the sofa, unable to quite look each other in the eye.

"It was so strange to be sitting with my mirror image. I couldn't get over it. It was like seeing myself face=to-face.

"Gradually the ice broke and in the end we talked all day and it was just wonderful. Since then, I've been a stronger, more self-confident person.

"Just to know I have a sister who cares so much about me, as I do about her, means so much. I'm no longer alone.

"Ulrike and her parents stayed overnight and in the next few weeks I visited her home. It was lovely to see her children and for her to meet mine."

Today, they speak daily on the phone and meet every two months. Conny still lives in a part of Germany that used to be in the East, and Ulrike lives on the other side of the country in the town of Bad Pyrmont.

"We would love to live closer, but she has children and so do I," explains Conny. "But we talk all the time and are both more complete, somehow, now that we have each other."

And the similarities between the two sisters continue to amaze them. "As children, we both loved art and painting, chose the same subjects at school and both went into the same career, event management, which unites our creative and practical sides. And we each had our first children, both daughters, when we were 19," says Conny.

"We both married young, at 18 and 19, I think because we were so desperate for closeness with someone. But funnily enough, since we found each other, we've both got divorced from the men we married as teenagers.

"We're both now living happily with new partners instead and have had younger children with them.

"I've got three children, aged 20, 17 and eight, and Ulrike has four, aged 20, 16, six and two. We even both like the same colour schemes in our houses and often meet up wearing the same or near-identical outfits.

"We've had the same hairstyle as each other - long hair - all our adult lives and wear the same make-up.

"We do have different taste in men, however. Ulrike's partner is blond while mine's dark. So none of our children look alike, though you can tell they're related."

The twins feel an unrelenting fury at the communist apparatus that separated them, but have been unable to find an individual to hold responsible.

"It's so obviously wrong, unethical and immoral to separate two babies who were meant to be together. We're identical twins - why split us up, especially when people wanted to adopt both of us?" says Conny.

"We both feel so much anger at the system that kept us apart for so long. But since we found each other, we're so full of joy that the idea of trying to take any sort of action against the adoption agency seems a negative way to spend our precious time.

"We would rather share time together than waste it trying to find someone to blame for what has gone before."

Indeed, given the huge political upheavals during their lives, the pair would find it difficult to pursue the authorities that parted them.

After their reunion, the twins went on to find their birth mother. Incredibly, she did not want anything to do with them and refused to meet them.

"When we found her through an agency, she couldn't cope with being reminded of what was clearly a harrowing time in her life," says Conny.

"Though we were both heartbroken that she didn't want to see us, we felt we had to respect her choice.

"She did give us the information that our father was an artist and graphic designer, which explains why we both love art. And somewhere out there are our three older siblings.

"But I've never felt the same longing to meet them or my parents as I did throughout my childhood for a sister. That's what I was really missing.

"The one thing our story shows is that, no matter what happens, some people are just meant to be together."

Book Links Jamming to GOP 'High Ups'

Operative imprisoned in case tells his story.

Republican consultant Allen Raymond

The Concord Monitor reports:

The conspiracy to jam New Hampshire Democratic Party phone lines on Election Day 2002 must have gone to the top of the Republican Party, one of the operatives imprisoned in the scheme writes in a forthcoming book.

Republican consultant Allen Raymond writes that he became involved only because he'd been called by James Tobin, then the New England political director for the Republican National Committee.

"The Bush White House had complete control of the RNC, and there was no way someone like Tobin was going to try what he was proposing without first getting it vetted by his high-ups," Raymond wrote in How To Rig an Election, a book set for publication next month. "That's if Tobin, rather than one of his bosses, had even thought of the ploy himself - which seemed unlikely."

Raymond, who once had the same RNC job as Tobin for the mid-Atlantic region, said that before Tobin's call, his telemarketing outfit, GOP Marketplace, had been shut out of RNC jobs. Allen figured he'd lost favor because he publicly aired his disdain for Bush and feuded with a Bush vendor. "I figured this was the Dare - the Bushies' way of making me prove my stripes to get back into the club," he wrote.

In an interview, Raymond said the book had two aims: To entertain - he said he aimed for a cross between Ball Four and Wise Guys (the book Goodfellas was based on) - and to follow the adage "sunlight's the best disinfectant."

"Anybody who reads this book and is mad at me has no sense of humor," he said.

The Monitor obtained an advance copy yesterday. The book is set for release Jan. 8, the day of New Hampshire's presidential primary.

Former gossip columnist Ian Spiegelman, who used to write the New York Post's Page Six, co-wrote the book, which is full of vulgar, colorful language. Raymond said he was connected with Spiegelman through his agent.

"The gossip world at the level he was working is highly charged, highly political," Raymond said. "So I knew that he'd understand what I was talking about."

President Bush is described as a "Connecticut-raised cowboy who'd been blind drunk until he was forty." Steve Forbes, whose presidential campaign Raymond worked for in 2000, "looked like he'd been put together on an operating table" and "had a stammering speech pattern that made you think he was on the verge of a seizure."

Raymond, 40, also knocks the Republican Party that employed him for nearly a decade. "Ever hear the one about the president who picked a land war in the Middle East?" he writes. "Or the one about the vice president who took a scattergun to an old man's face? And then got the old man to apologize for getting shot? That's the type I was dealing with."

Tobin, meanwhile, is painted as a moderate New Englander who'd gone to work for Bush's campaign and "reinvented himself as a full-fledged, Bible-thumping, fear-mongering acolyte for the Holy Connecticut Cowboy."

The U.S. attorneys who handled Tobin's trial also don't escape derision. Prosecutors Nick Marsh and Andrew Levchuk are described as the "pair from Keystone" who "knew exactly nothing" when they took over the case.

The phone-jamming scheme involved repeated hang-up calls made to jam six phone lines - five at the Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote operation and one for a firefighters union offering rides to the polls. Raymond writes that the plan was to tie up the lines all day, but it was aborted after 90 minutes on orders from then-state Republican Party Chairman John Dowd, who insisted it was illegal.

The calls were made on the day of the down-to-the-wire Senate race between Jeanne Shaheen and John Sununu, whose names are almost afterthoughts in the book, mentioned only after pages of discussing the scheme. Sununu won the election by 19,571 votes; the two may face a rematch next year.

Raymond, who served three months in federal prison, and two other men pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy charges for their roles in the scheme. Chuck McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party at the time, came up with the idea. Idaho telemarketer Shaun Hansen owned the company that made the calls.

As the phone-jamming blew up in the press and the FBI investigated, Allen wrote, the RNC opted for "the old-school cover-up" route.

Tobin pleaded not guilty, went to trial and was convicted of telephone harassment in 2005. This spring, an appeals court overturned the ruling and sent the case back to U.S. District Court in Concord for further arguments. Tobin is slated for a new trial in February, though Judge Steven McAuliffe is considering a motion to acquit him.

To Raymond, Tobin was the scheme's "linchpin," and he wrote that he "couldn't believe it" when he read in the newspaper that Tobin pleaded not guilty.

"Now, Tobin was not mentally defective; he could not have believed his own lies," Raymond wrote. To Raymond, he said, the key question is: "Who is he protecting?"

Raymond repeatedly notes that the RNC has paid millions for Tobin's legal defense. "My old pals at the Republican National Committee were spending almost $3 million on my coconspirator's legal defense because he was still a loyal member of the GOP family, while at the same time labeling me a liar, a rogue and a thief to any news outlet that would listen," he wrote.

The smaller details of being a man under indictment are also detailed in the book.

Raymond went to great pains to convince lawyers at the Department of Justice that he wasn't what they were expecting - "a slimy D.C. scoundrel in a Gucci suit, French cuffs, tassel shoes and a fat watch." When he was under investigation, he owned three watches worth a total of $6,000 - so he went to CVS and bought a Timex. He also pulled out the first suit he'd owned, "a power tie from 1990" and loafers with a whole.

"When I put the whole ensemble together, (my wife) Elizabeth just clucked her tongue and gave me the thumbs-up," he wrote. "And then I jumped into my Audi and went to my meeting."

In addition to phone jamming, Raymond elaborates on other political dirty tricks, such as using racial tensions to target phone calls in a New Jersey congressional race that sounded as if they were coming in support of his opponent. He deployed the "angry black man" voice on Eastern European Democrats and used actors with "thick Spanish accents" to tape calls aimed at union households.

These days, Raymond said, he's promoting his book, coaching little league and working at a few business ventures on the side. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his wife and two elementary-school-age sons.

He's done with working in politics. As a felon, he said, he's not allowed to vote. But if he could, he'd call himself undeclared, no longer a Republican.

"I love politics, but I'm done. I'll never make a living in politics again," Raymond said in the interview. "After what I went through, one, who would hire me? And two, why would I ever want to work for anybody who would hire me?"

GOP Trickster Says He Was A Scapegoat

Phone jammer claims higher-ups in the party took part in the scheme in New Hampshire

The Houston Chronicle reports:

A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal Election Day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the GOP of trying to hang the blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

Raymond's book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, offers a raw glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs.

McClatchy obtained an advance copy of the book.

The 2002 New Hampshire Senate race, in which GOP Rep. John Sununu edged Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen by 19,000 votes, was among several targeted by Republicans seeking to win control of the U.S. Senate.

Raymond said those who have tried to make him the fall guy for the New Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other evidence documented the complicity of a top state GOP official and the Republican National Committee's northeast regional director.

Both men were later convicted of charges related to the phone harassment, along with Raymond and an Idaho phone bank operator. Defense lawyers have since won a retrial for James Tobin, the former regional director for both the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

A lawyer for Tobin didn't respond to phone messages.

GOP committees have paid Washington law firms more than $6 million to defend Tobin and to fight a Democratic civil suit against the party. Raymond, himself a former RNC official, said he believes that the scandal reaches higher.

"Any tactic that didn't pass the smell test would never see the light of day without, at the very least, the approval of an RNC attorney," he wrote.

Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said that phone records obtained in the civil suit showed that Tobin made 22 calls to the White House political office in the 24 hours before and after the jamming.

Twomey said Tobin refused to testify about the calls, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Asked about Raymond's book, RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said that "it would be hard to find two less credible individuals" than Raymond and co-author Ian Spiegelman, who lost his job as a New York Post gossip columnist for sending a threatening e-mail accusing a source of trying to plant a fake story.

Raymond, who served three months in jail last year, said he earned a graduate degree in political management solely to make money off politics, and it made no difference to him whether he was a Republican or a Democrat.

Transcript of 'Democracy Now!' for October 12, 2007

Charlie Savage, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, covers national legal affairs for the Boston Globe with a focus on 9/11 issues. He has written extensively about President Bush’s signing statements and other White House efforts to expand executive branch secrecy and unchecked power. Warrantless wiretapping is one part of this story. Savage has just published a book charting the means the Bush administration devised to circumvent laws and expand Presidential authority. It’s called “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.”

The House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees approved a bill Wednesday granting federal judges greater oversight over the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. Rejecting President Bush’s request, the bill does not provide retroactive legal immunity to phone and internet companies that shared information with intelligence officials. President Bush criticized the bill Tuesday and outlined his demands to renew the government’s broad eavesdropping authority.

Wednesday’s bill updates the Protect America Act that was pushed through Congress in August of this year and is set to expire in February of 2008. Although the bill restores some of the checks and balances removed by the Protect America Act it also increases other spying powers. It continues the policy of warrantless eavesdropping of overseas communications and increases the period of warrantless emergency surveillance of US residents. Also the so-called “basket” or “blanket” warrants issued by the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court would only need to be reviewed once a year. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized this provision as “not anywhere close to the rigorous privacy safeguards Americans deserve.”

Transcript:

JUAN GONZALEZ: The House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees approved a bill Wednesday granting federal judges greater oversight over the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. Rejecting President Bush’s request, the bill does not provide retroactive legal immunity to phone and internet companies that shared information with intelligence officials. President Bush criticized the bill Tuesday and outlined his demands to renew the government’s broad eavesdropping authority.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The final bill must meet certain criteria. It must give our intelligence professionals the tools and flexibility they need to protect our country. It must keep the intelligence gap firmly closed and ensure that protections intended for the American people are not extended to terrorists overseas who are plotting to harm us. And it must grant liability protection to companies who are facing multi-billion-dollar lawsuits only because they are believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend our nation following the 9/11 attacks.

Terrorists in faraway lands are plotting and planning new ways to kill Americans. The security of our country and the safety of our citizens depend on learning about their plans. The Protect America Act is a vital tool in stopping the terrorists, and it would be a grave mistake for Congress to weaken this tool.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Wednesday’s bill updates the Protect America Act that was pushed through Congress in August of this year and is set to expire in February of 2008. Although the bill restores some of the checks and balances removed by the Protect America Act, it also increases other spying powers. It continues the policy of warrantless eavesdropping of overseas communications and increases the period of warrantless emergency surveillance of US residents. Also, the so-called “basket” or “blanket” warrants issued by the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court would only need to be reviewed once a year. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized this provision as “not anywhere close to the rigorous privacy safeguards Americans deserve.”

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the Boston Globe, has written extensively about President Bush’s signing statements and other White House efforts to expand executive branch secrecy and unchecked power. Warrantless wiretapping is one part of this story. Charlie Savage has just published a book charting the means the Bush administration devised to circumvent laws and expand presidential authority. It’s called Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. Joining us now in our firehouse studio, Charlie Savage. Welcome.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: Thanks for having me on.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie, you begin in a very dramatic way on September 11, 2001. Tell us about what Dick Cheney was doing.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: That’s right. Well, I began with this sort of unusual moment in the midst of the 9/11 attacks, in which the military believed that at least one more plane is still in the air and hijacked, and they asked Dick Cheney in the bunker beneath the White House whether they should shoot this plane down. And Cheney gives them authority to shoot down United 93, as it were. Now, it turns out that that was a moot point, because United 93 had already crashed amid the passenger uprising. They were looking at an image of where it would be if it were still in the air.

But this shoot-down order became the subject of an intense dispute with the 9/11 Commission, because Cheney later told the commission, and Bush agreed with him, that Bush had given Cheney prior authority as the commander-in-chief, who actually commands the military to take such an extraordinary step. But the 9/11 Commission looked at all the notes of the people aboard Air Force One and in the bunker, and they looked at all the switchboard logs from the bunker and the military of communications going in and out, and they found no evidence, no documentary evidence that that call existed.

And so, I use that moment to open this book, Takeover, because it’s a very vivid illustration of, first of all, the climate, you know, the atmosphere of 9/11, which really helped this push to concentrate more power in the White House, but also Cheney taking command inside the administration, especially in the national security context, Bush acquiescing to Cheney’s point of view, and then their effort -- their administration's effort to control the flow of information about kind of what’s happening behind the closed doors at the executive branch.

AMY GOODMAN: And when they had the 9/11 Commission hearing meeting, the insistence by Cheney and Bush that it not be sworn testimony, that Cheney be sitting physically directly next to President Bush, and that there be no recording of their statements made about this conversation, about whether Bush had given the actual command or whether it was Cheney.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: That’s right. You know, and, of course, it is a moot point. The planes were down. It doesn’t really matter that much, but it’s a vivid way of illustrating Cheney's role in the administration, and therefore getting into the topic of what Cheney used that influence to do. And one of the most important things and one of the most successfully implemented policies of this administration, one that they never talk about and that I think has received scant attention, just depending on how sweeping it is and how successfully they pulled it off, was that he had wanted, when they arrived in office long before 9/11, to use that time in office to reshape American democracy by concentrating more power in the White House, by expanding presidential power, by throwing off checks and balances.

This was an agenda that he had with him, dating back thirty years to his time in the White House as chief of staff to Gerald Ford in that period after Watergate and Vietnam, when Congress was re-imposing some checks and balances on the imperial presidency that had grown up during the early Cold War. And Cheney would spend the next thirty years trying to throw that off. Finally, as vice president, the most experienced vice president in history dealing with one of the least experienced presidents in history, he was in a position to shape this administration’s practices and tactics as it went forward, now pushing into eight years, in order to take actions and set precedents across a huge range of issues and ways that were going to leave the presidency much stronger than it was when they arrived.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And specifically the use of the signing statements, which, of course, was the subject of much of your reporting -- how did the signing statements fit into this overall policy?

CHARLIE SAVAGE: The signing statements are one tactic among many, but it’s an illustration of how much more aggressive this administration has been than any that came before and how it’s kind of thrown off sort of unofficial constraints, practices of restraint. A signing statement is an official legal document the President issues on the day he signs a bill into law. It consists of instructions to his subordinates in the executive branch about how they are to implement the new laws created by a bill. And it becomes controversial when the President says, “You will interpret Section 103 as being unconstitutional, because I alone have said it’s unconstitutional, and you do what I tell you. And if it’s unconstitutional, that means you don’t need to enforce it.” And where that becomes very controversial is when Section 103 is a check or a balance on the President’s own power, because then not enforcing that law means not having to obey that law.

Now, previous presidents have occasionally used signing statements like this, but President Bush has challenged more laws than all previous presidents in American history combined, using signing statements, a dramatic escalation of this tactic, in what the American Bar Association has said is evolving into kind of a backdoor override-proof line-item veto power, which can really prevent Congress from ever again imposing any new checks on presidential power. It’s just but -- it’s an extraordinary thing, an extraordinary development in our constitutional law, and yet it’s just one of many, many different tactics the administration has used to concentrate more unchecked power in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about wiretapping, the controversy now, the frustration that people have with the Democrats, supposedly the opposition party, going along with the Republicans.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, the background is that after 9/11, as we all know now, Bush gave the military the authority to wiretap phone calls without warrants, in defiance of a 1978 law that required warrants for that situation. And he used a very aggressive legal theory about the President's powers as commander-in-chief to bypass laws at his own discretion. Because that program was only legal if that theory were true, that meant that the fact that they did this set a precedent that says that theory is true, and future presidents will be able to cite that precedent when they want to evade any other law that restricts their own authority.

So now, going forward, one of the ways this agenda has been able to be so successfully implemented was that there was no resistance from Congress. At the very moment there was this stronger push coming out of the Vice President's office to expand the presidential power as an end to itself in any way possible, because of one-party rule for six years and because of the atmosphere of crisis after 9/11, there was no push back. And that’s how the ball was moved so far down the field.

And one of the things that’s been very interesting about the last year is now we have split control of government again, and so the question was, how is that going to change things? And what we’ve seen from the Protect America Act in August and the dynamic going forward is that even with split control of government, the dynamic is still there. Congress is just as it was for the first twenty or thirty years of the Cold War, when the original imperial presidency was growing under presidents of both parties, by the way. Congress is again unwilling to push back against the White House's assertion that it needs ever more authority, and checks and balances will result in bloodshed. And so, I think, going forward, that you can see that this dynamic is going to be with us. And, of course, two years from now, we may have one-party control of government again, the other party, but that will just sort of hurl us further down this path, I think.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And this issue of the President seeking to protect those in the corporate world who go along with his policies -- well, first of all, obviously, there was the retroactive immunity to the airline companies after 9/11 for their failure to act to provide a kind of security on their planes, giving them immunity from any possible lawsuits, and now this effort by the administration to try to provide retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that went along with his surveillance program.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, and what this is, is because Congress has demonstrated that it’s really not going to do anything about the basic fact that the President asserted he could bypass a law and then he acted on that assertion, and, you know, that established he can do that, or whoever else is president at any given moment from now on can do that, that the one sort of last place where critics of this sort of extraordinary development could still have some traction was the lawsuit against the companies, which had also evidently broken privacy laws by going along with this. So, by seeking retroactive immunity, it’s sort of the last place closing off the possibility of accountability.

And accountability for how people use their power is one of the great ways in which the administration has successfully expanded their own powers, as well. For example, by dramatically expanding secrecy surrounding the executive branch in all kinds of ways, going after open government laws, expanding executive privilege, expanding the use of the state secret privilege to get rid of lawsuits in courts, and on and on and on, what they’ve done is they’ve made the executive branch much more of a black box so that outsiders, whether Congress, the courts or just voters, don’t know what officials are doing with these powers at the very moment that the powers are being dramatically increased, and that means that the officials who have that power, whoever they are at any given moment, are much freer to do whatever they want with them.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage, how is the Bush administration remaking the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department?

CHARLIE SAVAGE: This is another example of the myriad ways in which they're concentrating more power in the White House, in this case centralizing greater control over the permanent government, the bureaucracy. There’s eight or nine case studies in my book that explain different tactics for this, which have been very successfully implemented. One of them is in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which is an agency set up by statute with a mission by statute of enforcing the nation's civil rights laws, primarily to protect minorities against discrimination.

Conservative presidents have long tussled with his agency, because they have different ideas about, you know, how much affirmative action should be part of these kinds of things. But no president, until this administration, has messed with longstanding traditional procedures for hiring career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division. And even under Reagan, even under Nixon, they never went this far.

But what this administration did, starting in 2002, is they changed the procedures, whereby -- if there was a vacancy in the career ranks, previously career veterans would decide who should fill that position, and that meant that they were still hiring people who had a demonstrated commitment to enforcing civil rights laws. In 2002, in an unprecedented step, the administration changed that and centralized control among political appointees for hiring replacement career lawyers and stopped hiring people with a demonstrated commitment to enforcing civil rights and started hiring people who are members of the Federalist Society and who had no experience on civil rights law, or if they did have experience, their experience was fighting against the traditional enforcement of civil rights, defending companies against discrimination lawsuits, and so forth.

And so, they’ve been remaking that division as a way of sort of behind the scenes seizing and imposing greater political control over it. Lawsuits alleging systematic discrimination against minorities have fallen -- against African Americans, that is -- and the agency is redirecting its resources now towards reverse-discrimination against whites, discrimination against Christians, these sorts of things that are more in line with the President’s agenda, just one more example of centralizing greater control in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds. Do you think the takeover is complete?

CHARLIE SAVAGE: I think this has been the single most successfully implemented policy of this administration, and I think that presidential power acts like a one-way ratchet. It’s easier to increase than it is to roll back again. And I don’t see, because of the continuing dynamic of the war on terror, this being reversed.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, won in 2007 for his reporting on this issue. Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy is the name of his new book.

Through Republicans' Eyes . . . .

. . . . White House misjudged how presidential campaign would radicalize Democrats against Iraq war.

For Examiner, Bill Sammon writes:

President Bush’s chief of staff says White House officials misjudged how much the presidential campaign would radicalize the Democratic Party against the Iraq war.

In an interview for the new book, “The Evangelical President,” White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said he and other administration officials did not expect the Democratic presidential candidates to pull their party so sharply to the left.

“A lot of us probably underestimated the potency of presidential politics in all of this,” Bolten told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “The need of every candidate to remain in good stead with the Democratic Party’s left wing has pretty dramatically dragged not just the candidates, but the whole party to the left.”

Bolten said the phenomenon has been accelerated by the fact that primary elections and caucuses for the 2008 presidential cycle are scheduled earlier than ever before, creating pressure on the candidates to pacify the party’s liberal base.

“They have to move to the view rapidly that will satisfy the left wing of their party and I think that’s bled over into the approach of the Democratic leadership,” Bolten said. “It shifted more rapidly than I thought.”

Bolten said Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress “moved the party more rapidly and radically to the left on the war than you might have expected.” The leaders themselves are being pulled leftward by their party’s “netroots,” the uncompromising activists who write the liberal blogs proliferating across the Internet.

The resulting political acrimony between liberals and conservatives over Iraq is a far cry from 2002 when the parties agreed that Saddam Hussein should be removed.

“In the ideal world, there would be a consensus, a bipartisan consensus about how to go forward,” Bush told The Examiner in an Oval Office interview. “Whether or not that’s achievable, time will tell.”

Bush expressed sympathy for lawmakers who are being pressured by anti-war forces.

“I’m not going to second-guess anybody’s motives; it’s just a very difficult political environment for members of Congress,” the president said. “They’re worried about the different consequences of different decisions. And we’re constantly listening.”

Vice President Dick Cheney was less willing to give anti-war Democrats the benefit of the doubt.

“There are some who are against it just because we’re for it, who are looking for any excuse they can come up with to try to defeat George Bush and the Republicans. Substance doesn’t have much to do with it,” Cheney told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “I think it’s very shortsighted on their part, because if they prevail, then ultimately they’re going to have to deal with the world as it is, having opposed all of those things that have made it possible for us to be successful.”

These include controversial anti-terror measures such as the Patriot Act and the terrorist surveillance program. Although Bush has been working to institutionalize these programs, they could be undone by Democrats in the future, Cheney warned.

“A couple of possible outcomes here,” he said. “One is, obviously, the Democrats ultimately prevail and implement the policy they claim they support. I think it will do enormous damage. On the other hand, I think, ultimately, the country would look at that and make a decision that the Democrats can’t be trusted with the nation’s security.”

Karl Rove, who until this month was the president’s closest political adviser, said that even if a Democrat wins the White House next year, he or she will find it difficult to reverse Bush’s policies in the war on terrorism.

“What American president in the foreseeable future is going to say, ‘You know what? Let’s not rock the boat. Let’s accept the fact that we have authoritarian regimes that allow their people no means of expression, except through radical madrassas. We don’t need to foster democracy,’” Rove told The Examiner. “It’s going to be hard for any president of the United States to step away from the Bush Doctrine: If you feed a terrorist, arm a terrorist, train a terrorist, host a terrorist, you’re just as bad as a terrorist. It’s going to be very hard.

“People may be able to nibble around the edges, but future presidents — for the foreseeable future — are going to adopt the doctrine that we cannot wait until dangers fully materialize. We must take necessary pre-emptive action. The question is going to be what’s necessary and pre-emptive, but that doctrine is ingrained.”

In addition to being surprised by the impact of Democratic presidential politics on the war agenda, the White House has had difficulty adjusting to the new reality of this year’s Democratically controlled Congress.

“What’s different — and I think something of a shock to the system here — is we cannot control the agenda,” Bolten said. “And so if they want to talk about subpoenas … they can do it. They can dictate what the conversation is about and when it’s going to be.”

Another Bush aide groused that the White House can no longer hold cooperative discussions with the leadership of the House and Senate about the legislative agenda.

“We’ve gone from being able to know and discuss and plan,” the official said, “to basically having to wait for whatever the latest episodic revelation that’s handed down from the mountain.

“It requires you to be reactive, in a tactical sense. The way to sort of get above that is to be more ... strategically pro-active,” he said. “It also requires us to rely more on the Senate than we have. In the past, we used the House to drive action. Now we work with our Senate colleagues to both drive action and redirect action.”

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed grudging admiration for the ability of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an unabashed liberal, to control her caucus.

“What’s amazing,” the official said, “is that they have been able to effect discipline on people. You’ll have a conversation and somebody will say, in essence, ‘I’m not for the first measure that we’re using for withdrawal, but I’ve got to vote for it because the leadership has told me I’ve got to. It’s not where I am, but I feel obligated.’ Or, ‘I’m uncomfortable about the budget resolution because it’s got way too much in taxes and not enough in spending restraint, but I’ve got to vote for it.’”

Bolten agreed. “Speaker Pelosi has turned out to be a stronger figure than most people expected,” he said, adding that she “is a tougher disciplinarian on her party than most people expected.”

Bush Quietly Advising Hillary Clinton, Top Democrats, Says New Book

For Examiner, Bill Sammon writes:

President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.

In an interview for the new book “The Evangelical President,” White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said Bush has “been urging candidates: ‘Don’t get yourself too locked in where you stand right now. If you end up sitting where I sit, things could change dramatically.’ ”

Bolten said Bush wants enough continuity in his Iraq policy that “even a Democratic president would be in a position to sustain a legitimate presence there.”

“Especially if it’s a Democrat,” the chief of staff told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out.”

“It’s different being a candidate and being the president,” Bush said in an Oval Office interview. “No matter who the president is, no matter what party, when they sit here in the Oval Office and seriously consider the effect of a vacuum being created in the Middle East, particularly one trying to be created by al Qaeda, they will then begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy.”

To that end, Bush is institutionalizing controversial anti-terror programs so they can be used by the next president.

“Look, I’d like to make as many hard decisions as I can make, and do a lot of the heavy lifting prior to whoever my successor is,” Bush said. “And then that person is going to have to come and look at the same data I’ve been looking at, and come to their own conclusion.”

As an example, Bush cited his detainee program, which allows him to keep enemy combatants imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay while they await adjudication. Bush is unmoved by endless criticism of the program because he says his successor will need it.

“I specifically talked about it so that a candidate and/or president wouldn’t have to deal with the issue,” he said. “The next person has got the opportunity to analyze the utility of the program and make his or her decision about whether or not it is necessary to protect the homeland. I suspect they’ll find that it is necessary. But my only point to you is that it was important for me to lay it out there, so that the politics wouldn’t enter into whether or not the program ought to survive beyond my period.”

The Examiner asked Bush why Democratic candidates such as Clinton and Barack Obama, who routinely lambaste his handling of Iraq, should take his advice.

“First of all, I expect them to criticize me. That’s one way you get elected in the Democratic primary, is to criticize the president,” Bush replied. “I don’t expect them to necessarily take advice from me. I would expect their insiders to at least get a perspective about how we see things.”

He added: “We have an obligation to make sure that whoever is interested, they get our point of view, because you want somebody running for president to at least understand all perspectives, apart from the politics.”

Besides, Bush suggested that Clinton and Obama just might benefit from his advice.

“If I were a candidate running for president in a complex world that we’re in, I would be asking my national security team to touch base with the White House just to at least listen about plans, thoughts,” he said.

So far, Bush has been encouraged by the fact that Democratic candidates are preserving enough wiggle room in their anti-war rhetoric to enable them to keep at least some troops in Iraq.

“If you listen carefully, there are Democrats that say, ‘Well, there needs to be some kind of presence,’” Bush said.

A senior White House official said the administration did not put much stock in pledges by Democratic presidential candidates to swiftly end the Iraq war if elected.

“Well, first of all, if you’re a presidential candidate,” the official said, “you’re able to [finesse] the public posturing that you may be required to do, or that you fall into doing.

“The other thing is, they are being advised by smart people,” the official said. “We’ve got colleagues here on the staff who have good communications with some of the thinkers on that side.

“And there is a recognition by most of them that there has to be a long-term presence by the United States if we hope to avoid America being brought back into the region in a very precarious way, at a point where all-out resources are required.”

One topic discussed by the White House and Democratic presidential campaigns is whether such a long-term presence should be inside Iraq, as Clinton prefers, or just outside, as Democratic candidate John Edwards has suggested.

Asked by The Examiner whether the Democrats were reluctant to have private contacts with the administration, the White House official replied: “No, I think they sort of welcome conversation.”

Besides, he said, Democrats understand the negative consequences of moving too quickly to reverse Bush’s Iraq policy. The official noted that in the wake of Vietnam, anti-war Democrats “suffered for 20-some-odd years because they were identified as the party, when it came to national security, of being weak.”

“If I were a Democrat, I would not want to be in a place where I was forcing us to withdraw in ’08,” he said. “It’s an election year and any bad consequences would immediately be on their head.

“One of two things will happen if a Democrat gets elected president,” he said. “They will either have to withdraw U.S. troops in order to remain true to the rhetoric — in which case, any consequences in the aftermath fall on their heads. Or they have to break their word, in which case they encourage fratricide on the left of their party. Now that’s a thorny issue to work through.”

Vice President Dick Cheney was philosophical about the possibility of a Democratic president fundamentally reversing the policies that he and Bush have worked so hard to implement in Iraq.

“It’s the nature of the business, in a sense,” he shrugged during an interview in his West Wing office. “I mean, you get two terms. We were fortunate to get two terms. And I think we’ll increasingly see a lot of emphasis on deciding who the next occupant of the Oval Office is going to be.”