The Washington Post lead story today,
taking up the right two columns just below the mast, is a
piece by Dana Priest and Robin Wright detailing conflicts within the White House on detainee policy. Ostensibly, the article sets up a conflict between the vice president's office and saner heads within the White House, especially Condi Rice, over whether the US should continue torturing suspected al Qaeda detainees. Skilled Kremlin watchers, however, recognize within it the classic signals of a fall from grace, telegraphing an imminent departure from the corridors of power.
In other words, Cheney is being set up as the fall guy for a policy gone bad, in a desperate effort to save the administration and the careers of the people within it.
More on the flip.
According to the article lead, Cheney has waged "an intense and largely unpublicized campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects." This is news, of course, only to those of us who don't read the newspapers, and especially to those of us who haven't happened to read the Washington Post itself at least since the 9-11 attacks themselves. But now the Post has unnamed sources within the Defense and State Departments, as well as officials in Congress and the intelligence community to confirm Cheney's role.
It turns out, according to the Post, that Cheney is practically obsessed with the need to torture prisoners but he has finally met the resolute opposition of none other than Condaleezza Rice herself, who finally may be successful in putting an end to the despicable practice. After all,
unconventional measures -- harsh interrogation tactics, prisoner abuse and the "ghosting" and covert detention of CIA-held prisoners -- have so damaged world support for the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign that they have hurt the U.S. cause.
Secondarily, the Post adds:
these measures have tainted core American values such as human rights and the rule of law.
We should not fear, because Condi while in Canada last month actually:
interrupted a packed itinerary to hold a secure video-teleconference with Cheney on detainee policy to make sure no decisions were made without her input.
Another resolute defender of America's image abroad is none other Elliot Abrams, who has stepped up from paid liar in the Reagan administration to his current position of "deputy national security adviser for democracy" in the Newspeak Bush White House. "Officials familiar with his role" tell us that Abrams is "among the most persistent advocates of changing detainee policy."
In the money quote, Priest and Wright tell us that:
Cheney's camp is a "shrinking island," said one State Department official who, like other administration officials quoted in this article, asked not to be identified because public dissent is strongly discouraged by the White House.
Now, it certainly is true that the WH has maintained a fairly effective degree of discipline ever since Bush got elected. It's also true that discipline has been breaking down this year to an unprecedented degree, and some people have been leaking against the president's interests in order to save their own skins.
But this leak serves the president's interests by distancing him from an increasingly unpopular and frankly failed policy. It also is sourced to multiple individuals, all of them on message, in many different government agencies. In other words, this looks like a coordinated campaign, giving Cheney the shaft and attempting to leave Bush smelling like roses.
The White House is getting desperate. They must be thinking that if they can contain the Fitzmas damage to the vice president's office, they might be able to get out of this alive. But the scales have fallen from the American public's eyes, Bush has lost his credibility, and the bad news about how he lied us into war just keeps piling up. Even if Fitz doesn't indict Rove -- and all the evidence indicates that he probably will -- Bush is going down.
The question is whether he will recognize that his is a failed presidency, and resign gracefully as Nixon did. Or, will he attempt to hold onto power at all costs, and provoke a serious crisis of governability in the United States?