"Seriously creepy ..."

Atrios: Holy Crap I have to say, as bad as some of us dirty hippies warned the Bush administration would be, most of us were way too optimistic.

Benen: DRAPER ON RUMSFELD....

Frank Rich teased the new blockbuster article in his NYT column today, noting that GQ has run an important new piece by Robert Draper, "adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld's corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security."

In general, when these pieces run, the right reflexively attacks the motives (and/or ideology) of the writer. But Draper is hardly a left-leaning partisan -- he wrote the Bush-endorsed biography, "Dead Certain," written after receiving cooperation from the former president and some of his top aides.

Rich highlights some of Draper's Rumsfeld-related revelations.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld's monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America's most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper's biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What's up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary's actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world's apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout "would be as bad as Abu Ghraib."

The cover-sheets are not only creepy, they point to Rumsfeld's belief -- which was probably accurate -- that then-President Bush was easily manipulated. Accompanying a photo of U.S. tanks rolling into an Iraqi city, Rumsfeld included this scriptural reference: "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, The nation that keeps faith."

Draper's piece is online. Read it, as the saying goes, and weep.

Hilzoy: "The Righteous Nation"

Steve already mentioned GQ's article about Donald Rumsfeld. You should really read the whole thing. I just thought I'd highlight this bit, about the Biblically-themed cover sheets that Rumsfeld attached to the President's daily intelligence briefings on Iraq:

"In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer's staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle. Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed the biblical passages more suitable. Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout -- as one Pentagon staffer would later say -- "would be as bad as Abu Ghraib." (...)

The Scripture-adorned cover sheets illustrate one specific complaint I heard again and again: that Rumsfeld's tactics -- such as playing a religious angle with the president -- often ran counter to sound decision-making and could, occasionally, compromise the administration's best interests. In the case of the sheets, publicly flaunting his own religious views was not at all the SecDef's style -- "Rumsfeld was old-fashioned that way," Shaffer acknowledged when I contacted him about the briefings -- but it was decidedly Bush's style, and Rumsfeld likely saw the Scriptures as a way of making a personal connection with a president who frequently quoted the Bible. No matter that, if leaked, the images would reinforce impressions that the administration was embarking on a religious war and could escalate tensions with the Muslim world. The sheets were not Rumsfeld's direct invention -- and he could thus distance himself from them, should that prove necessary."

Gosh: who could possibly think that something like this could make people think that we were on a crusade against Islam?

The full slideshow is here. I also very much liked the one that said: "Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed" (from Proverbs). In view of Rumsfeld's actual record on this point, it would have been more accurate to say: "Plans? We Don't Need No Stinking Plans!"

Drum: Congress and the CIA

The CIA says Nancy Pelosi was briefed about its interrogation methods. Pelosi says they're lying. Bob Graham, the former Senator with an anal retentive habit of tracking his movements to the minute in a spiral notebook, says they're lying too: the CIA claims they briefed him on four occasions, but Graham's notebook says different — and after he confronted them about this, they caved. There was only one briefing, and Graham says waterboarding was never mentioned. Jim Fallows:

Part of the payoff of reaching age 72 and having spent 38 years in public office, as Graham has, is that people have had a chance to judge your reputation. Graham has a general reputation for honesty....If he says he never got the briefing, he didn't. And if the CIA or anyone acting on its behalf challenges him, they are stupid and incompetent as well as being untrustworthy. This doesn't prove that the accounts of briefing Pelosi are also inaccurate. But it shifts the burden of proof.

Agreed. If the CIA could screw up — or lie, or whatever — that badly in Graham's case, obviously they could have done it in Pelosi's case too. DougJ has an optimistic view of what this all means:

To me, though, the big take away here is that the right is losing the torture debate. It started with “Dick Cheney was just keeping us safe from teh terrorists, don’t you libtards watch ‘24’?”. Then it became “mistakes were made, but it was a difficult time.” And now it’s “okay, maybe the whole thing was fucked up, but Pelosi knew about it so it’s her fault.” It’s just another variation on “Clinton did it too” and it’s essentially a defensive posture.

I'm not sure I believe this, but it's a nice thought. Anybody else feel like the good guys are finally making some progress on the torture debate?

Josh Marshall: Cheney's Big Speech

Next Thursday, former Vice President Cheney will give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute making a global case for the Bush administration's use of torture and indefinite detainment of suspected terrorists as core parts of its War on Terror.

Here's AEI's description of the event ...

In April 2009, almost eight years after the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, the Obama administration released four memos from the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel. These memos, which justified the use of harsh interrogation techniques against high-level al Qaeda detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, have reignited a fierce debate about the United States' counterterrorism strategy.

Amid claims that the interrogation methods amount to torture and that those who approved them should be prosecuted or censured, it is clear that we know surprisingly little about the scope and efficacy of the Bush administration's national security policy. Many questions linger: What type of information did enhanced interrogation methods yield? Were lives saved as a result? Could that intelligence have been effectively collected by other means? How effective was the terrorist surveillance program in detecting the threat of al Qaeda and its operatives in the post-9/11 period? Will inhibiting these procedures cost more American lives?

On May 21, former vice president Dick Cheney will speak at AEI to address these critical issues and provide a blueprint for keeping America safe in the future.