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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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July 24th,
2009 - Inside Bush and Cheney’s Final Days |
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Inside Bush and Cheney’s
Final Days By Massimo Calabresi & Michael Weisskopf Time Magazine July 24, 2009 Hours before they were to
leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney
had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. For over a month
Cheney had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President's
former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Libby had been convicted
nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a
covert CIA officer's identity by senior White House officials. The Libby
pardon, aides reported, had become something of a crusade for Cheney, who
seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship with Bush to the
breaking point - and perhaps past it - over the fate of his former aide.
"We don't want to leave anyone on the battlefield," Cheney argued. Bush had already decided the
week before that Libby was undeserving and told Cheney so, only to see the
question raised again. A top adviser to Bush says he had never seen the Vice
President focused so single-mindedly on anything over two terms. And so, on
his last full day in office, Jan. 19, 2009, Bush would give Cheney his final
decision. These last hours represent a
climactic chapter in the mysterious and mostly opaque relationship at the
center of a tumultuous period in American history. It reveals how one
question - whether to grant a presidential pardon to a top vice-presidential
aide - strained the bonds between Bush and his deputy and closest counselor.
It reveals a gap in the two men's views of crime and punishment. And in a
broader way, it uncovers a fundamental difference in how the two men regarded
the legacy of the Bush years. As a Cheney confidant puts it, the Vice
President believed he and the President could claim the war on terrorism as
his greatest legacy only if they defended at all costs the men and women who
fought in the trenches. When it came to Libby, Bush felt he had done enough. But the fight over the
pardon was also a prelude to the difficult questions about justice and
national security inherited by the Obama Administration: How closely should
the nation examine the actions of government officials who took steps - legal
or possibly illegal - to defend the nation's security during the war on
terrorism? The Libby investigation, which began nearly six years ago, went to
the heart of whether the Bush Administration misled the public in making its
case to invade Iraq. But other Bush-era policies are still coming under legal
scrutiny. Who, for example, should be held accountable in one of the darkest
corners of the war on terrorism - the interrogators who may have tortured
detainees? Or the men who conceived and crafted the policies that led to
those secret sessions in the first place? How far back - and how high up the
chain of command - should these inquiries go? As Attorney General Eric
Holder weighs whether to name a special prosecutor to probe reports of
detainee abuse during the Bush era, Democratic lawmakers are trying to
determine why Cheney demanded that Congress be kept in the dark about some
covert CIA plans after 9/11. There is no guarantee that these and other
probes won't at some point require the testimony of the former President and
Vice President. While Bush has retired to Texas to write his memoirs and
secure his legacy by other means, Cheney is settling in for a long siege in
Washington, where he will soon be installed in a conservative think tank and
where, Republicans say, he will pull levers on Capitol Hill to make his voice
heard. Above all, Cheney will continue to insist that the Commander in Chief
and his lieutenants had almost limitless power in the war on terrorism and
deserved a measure of immunity for taking part in that fight. That's a
conviction Cheney made clear to all those involved in the Libby affair -
including, in his final hours in power, the President himself. The Commutation Fail-Safe This Libby-pardon fight - an
account pieced together from dozens of interviews with former officials who
agreed to speak only without attribution - began two years earlier, in the federal
district courthouse in Washington. In a case that gripped the capital but
often mystified the rest of the country, Cheney's former top aide on domestic
and foreign policy stood accused of obstructing a federal investigation into
the source of an egregious media leak: the identity of an undercover CIA
officer named Valerie Plame. Her husband Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat,
had written an Op-Ed for the New York Times in July 2003 claiming to have
evidence that the Administration had lied to bolster the case for war in
Iraq. Within days, in an effort to discredit Wilson's story, a conservative
columnist had revealed the identify of Wilson's wife. Plame's
"outing" was seen by her husband and his fellow Democrats as an act
of revenge orchestrated by Cheney himself - and the most extreme example of
how far an Administration would go to cover its tracks in a war gone bad. Libby maintained his
innocence throughout his trial, claiming that any false statements he had
made to investigators resulted from bad memory, not deception. But Libby had
reason to lie: his job was at stake, and his boss's was on the line too. Bush
had declared that anyone involved in leaking Plame's identity would be fired.
Cheney had personally assured Bush early on that his aide wasn't involved,
even persuading the President to exonerate Libby publicly through a
spokesman. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who prosecuted the case, said
Libby's obstruction had prevented investigators from uncovering the truth
about Cheney's role. "There is a cloud over the Vice President,"
Fitzgerald said in his closing arguments. (Matthew Cooper, then a TIME
correspondent, was a witness in the case against Libby. Cooper had spoken to
both Libby and Bush aide Karl Rove in July 2003 about Wilson's relationship
to Plame. Time Inc. turned Cooper's notes over to Fitzgerald after fighting
the subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear Time
Inc.'s appeal. Rove was not indicted.) After a seven-week trial,
Libby was found guilty on March 6, 2007, of obstructing justice, perjury and
lying to investigators. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison and a
$250,000 fine, a precipitous fall for a man known as the Vice President's
alter ego and formerly a prestigious lawyer at a premier Washington firm. He
fought the verdict, his legal bills paid by a defense fund that raised $5
million, but a federal appeals court ruled on July 2, 2007, that Libby had to
report to jail. The White House was prepared
for the ruling, in part because after six years in Washington, Bush had
finally found himself a White House counsel who was up to the job. Fred
Fielding, a genial, white-haired, slightly stooped figure in his late 60s,
had cut his teeth as an assistant to John Dean in Richard Nixon's counsel's office
and served as Ronald Reagan's top lawyer as well. He had unrivaled experience
managing allegations of White House misconduct. He also was one of the few
people in Washington who had served in as many Republican Administrations as
Cheney had, which meant he had uncommon stature in the West Wing. And he was
everything Bush's two previous counsels, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers,
hadn't been: strong-willed, independent and fearless. Says an old friend:
"Freddy isn't afraid of anyone. He will slit your throat with a razor
blade while he is yawning." Fielding's arrival in early
2007 was one of several signs that the balance of power in the Administration
had shifted against the Vice President. Fielding reviewed the Libby case
before the appellate verdict came down and recommended against a presidential
pardon. Cheney's longtime aide hadn't met the criteria: accepting
responsibility for the crime, doing time and demonstrating remorse.
"Pardons tend to be for the repentant," says a senior
Administration official familiar with the 2007 pardon review, "not for
those who think the system was politicized or they were unfairly
targeted." The verdict was one thing.
Libby's sentence was another matter. Fielding told Bush that the President
had wide discretion to determine its fairness. And within hours of the
appeals-court ruling, Bush pronounced the jail time "excessive,"
commuting Libby's prison term while leaving in place the fine and, most
important, the guilty verdict - which meant Libby would probably never
practice law again. Fielding's recommendation was widely circulated in the
White House before it was announced, and there is no evidence of
disagreement. If Cheney and his allies were disappointed with Bush's
decision, they did not show it, several former officials say, in part because
they were, as one put it, "so happy that [Scooter] wasn't going to
jail." The response was
predictable: conservatives cheered the commutation; liberals deplored it. But
among Bush aides, the presidential statement was seen as a fail-safe, a
device that would prevent a backtrack later on. Fielding crafted the
commutation in a way that would make it harder for Bush to revisit it in the
future. Bush not only noted his "respect for the jury verdict" and
the prosecutor, he also emphasized the "harsh punishment" Libby
still faced, including a "forever damaged" professional reputation
and the "long-lasting" consequences of a felony conviction. And there were these two
sentences: "Our entire system of justice relies on people telling the
truth," Bush said. "And if a person does not tell the truth,
particularly if he serves in government and holds the public trust, he must
be held accountable." Particularly if he serves in government. Bush's
allies would say later that the language was intended to send an unmistakable
message, internally as well as externally: No one is above the law. The Special Relationship A former White House chief
of staff, Congressman and Pentagon boss, Cheney had an uncanny ability to
guide Bush's decisions. Even as he claimed expansive Executive powers for the
President, Cheney salted the bureaucracy with allies who could alert him in
advance about policy disagreements, help him influence internal debates at key
moments and give him a leg up in framing issues for the President. He was
always deferential to Bush, often waiting with head down and hands clasped
behind his back to address the President. Both by habit and by design, he
cultivated a relationship that suited Bush's view of their roles: the
President as the "decider" and Cheney as the éminence grise who
counseled him. In reality, by wiring the bureaucracy and being the last
person Bush spoke with on many key decisions, Cheney became a "sounding
board for advice he originated himself," as biographer Barton Gellman
put it. Plamegate, as the leak
scandal was dubbed, tested the trust between the two men like nothing before.
Bush had promised high ethical standards after the Clinton era and a
"fresh start after a season of cynicism," a veiled reference to
Clinton's troubles with truth-telling under oath in the Monica Lewinsky
scandal. In the Plame investigation, a prosecutor with broad authority jarred
Bush's White House by issuing deposition orders and demands for documents.
Bush himself was interviewed by Fitzgerald on June 24, 2004, as was Cheney
some four months later. The investigation also
coincided with the darkest period of the Administration: the Iraq war's
dramatic downturn, the absence of WMD and festering problems in Afghanistan.
And it unfolded as Bush was launching a wholesale course correction of his
presidency in his second term. The pivot was hard to miss. Where Cheney had
urged unilateral U.S. action in the first term, "in the second term
we're going to be doing more diplomacy," Bush told top aides. Where
Cheney had orchestrated a secret push to embrace the "dark side" in
the war on terrorism, Bush instructed aides in 2005 to begin to seek
congressional approval for some of the Administration's most controversial
programs, such as its terrorist-detention policies. At the State Department,
Bush installed Condoleezza Rice, for whom some Cheney allies had open
contempt. As Secretary of State she would spend the next several years trying
to repair damaged relations with allies around the globe and opening
diplomatic initiatives that Cheney and his team had spent several years
shutting down. Longtime Cheney ally Donald
Rumsfeld was eased out as Pentagon chief in late 2006, and Bush replaced him
with Robert Gates, a former CIA director and Bush-family ally. Gates was as
effective a bureaucratic player as Cheney - and much more of a pragmatist. "Bush
was persuaded that the day of the neoconservatives had to be over, because
the direction of his presidency had become politically unsustainable,"
says a well-informed adviser. "It wasn't so much a repudiation of Cheney
or Cheneyism but a practical judgment that the previous approach simply
wasn't working." Cheney fought some of these
initiatives all the way, "taking it upon himself," as a top adviser
put it, to make the hard-line national-security case to the President. Cheney
didn't lose every fight, but he was no longer winning them all either. And
his backup vanished. Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz moved to the World Bank
in early 2005. Libby was indicted in October of that year and left the
government. John Bolton resigned his post as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. the
same month Rumsfeld left the Pentagon in 2006. Cheney's allies no longer
manned the key points in the national-security flow chart.
"Cheney," says an ally, "had to fight much harder to
win." The Pardon Book The final days of the Bush
White House were dominated by worries about the gasping economy, farewell
interviews by senior officials and plenty of stories about Bush's dismal
approval ratings as he prepared to leave town. But the "elephant in the
room," as an adviser puts it, was the still unresolved case of Libby.
Many in the West Wing feared that the matter threatened to rend Bush and
Cheney's relationship because of the intensity of Cheney's campaign for a
full and final pardon. Bush had long approached
pardons with suspicion. As Texas governor, he granted them sparingly. His
reluctance stemmed not from a lack of mercy but from his sense that pardons
were a rigged game, tilted in favor of offenders with political connections.
"He thought the whole pardon system was completely corrupt," says a
top Bush adviser. Bush had a textbook illustration in one of his
predecessor's last acts: Bill Clinton's eleventh-hour pardon of fugitive
financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife had contributed heavily to his campaigns
and presidential library, created a firestorm that consumed Clinton as he
left the stage - and overshadowed the first days of the Bush Administration.
As President, Bush was often annoyed when guests at holiday parties
buttonholed him in photo lines and pleaded for pardons for friends or
clients. "Talk to Fred," he'd say coolly, steering them to
Fielding. On Dec. 23, 2008, Bush
announced 19 pardons. No big names. No apparent political sponsors. But one
planned pardon went to a Brooklyn, N.Y., developer who had pleaded guilty in
the early 2000s to lying to federal housing authorities. After news accounts
surfaced that his father had given nearly $30,000 to the Republican Party
earlier that year, the White House backpedaled. It didn't help that one of
the lawyers who had sought the pardon had once worked in Bush's own counsel's
office - exactly the kind of inside favoritism Bush despised. Bush, who had
retreated to Camp David for a last family holiday, spent Christmas Eve
fielding phone calls about the case. By day's end, he decided to kill the
developer's pardon. The experience left him, aides say, even more wary of the
process than he was before. Petitions for pardons are
usually sent in writing to the White House counsel's office or a specially designated
attorney at the Department of Justice. In Libby's case, Cheney simply carried
the message directly to Bush, as he had with so many other issues in the
past, pressing the President in one-on-one meetings or in larger settings. A
White House veteran was struck by his "extraordinary level of
attention" to the case. Cheney's persistence became nearly as big an
issue as the pardon itself. "Cheney really got in the President's
face," says a longtime Bush-family source. "He just wouldn't give
it up." And there was a darker
possibility. As a former Bush senior aide explains, "I'm sure the
President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that
somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up." It had been an article
of faith among Cheney's critics that the Vice President wanted a pardon for
Libby because Libby had taken the fall for him in the Fitzgerald probe. In
his grand-jury testimony reviewed by TIME, Libby denied three times that
Cheney had directed him to leak Plame's CIA identity in mid-2003. Though his
recollection of other events in the same time frame was lucid and detailed,
on at least 20 occasions, Libby could not recall details of his talks with
Cheney about Plame's place of employment or questions the Vice President
raised privately about Wilson's credibility. Some Bush officials wondered
whether Libby was covering up for Cheney's involvement in the leak of Plame's
identity. That meant taking up the
pardon question again was, as a West Wing veteran put it later, like passing
a kidney stone - for the second time. Bolten declined to take a stand,
according to several associates. Instead, he lateraled the issue to Fielding,
claiming that a legal, not a political, call was required. If the counsel's
office decided a pardon wasn't merited, says an official involved in the
discussions, everyone else would have cover with Cheney. "They could
say, Our hands are tied - our lawyers said the guy was guilty." And so again the job fell to
Fielding. The counsel knew that only one legitimate reason for a pardon
remained: if the case against him had been a miscarriage of justice. Because
that kind of judgment required a thorough review, Fielding plowed through a
thick transcript of the trial himself, examining the evidence supporting each
charge. It took Fielding a full week. He prepared his brief for an expected
showdown at a pardon meeting in mid-January 2009. The Vice President argued
the case in that Oval Office session, which was attended by the President and
his top aides. He made his points in a calm, lawyerly style, saying Libby was
a fall guy for critics of the Iraq war, a loyal team player caught up in a
political dispute that never should have turned into a legal matter. They
went after Scooter, Cheney would say, because they couldn't get his boss. But
Bush pushed past the political dimension. "Did the jury get it right or
wrong?" he asked. Cheney replied that the
conviction for obstruction of justice was based on what amounted to a case of
"he said, he said," a disagreement between his longtime aide and a
journalist. Libby had told the grand jury he remembered first hearing Plame's
name from NBC's Tim Russert. But notes obtained by prosecutors indicated that
Cheney had been the first to identify her to Libby. And Russert denied at
Libby's trial that he had mentioned Plame to the defendant. The jury sided
with Russert. Cheney, however, considered it an open question. "Who do
you believe, Scooter or Russert?" he asked Bush. And Cheney went further.
Even if Russert was right, Libby may have honestly forgotten what was said
during a single conversation in a typically busy day. Memories are fallible.
Only an overzealous prosecutor and a liberal Washington jury would
criminalize a bad one, he argued. For his part, Fielding laid
out most of his findings in a document called the pardon book, a compendium
of evidence for anyone seeking clemency. The book on Libby lengthened the
odds on a pardon. "You might disagree with the fact that the case had been
brought and that prosecutorial discretion had been used in this way,"
says a source familiar with the review. "But the question of whether
there had been materially misleading statements made by Scooter - on the
facts, on the evidence, it was pretty clear." As far as Fielding was
concerned, Libby had lied under oath. And then there was the
commutation of 2007. Fielding told Bush that justice had been done in
commuting Libby's harsh sentence nearly two years before. Bush had no moral
obligation to do more. "You've done enough," he told the President.
Presidential counselor Ed Gillespie, without passing judgment on the legal
merits, told Bush a pardon would have political costs: it would be seen as an
about-face or a sign that he hadn't been forthright two years earlier in
declaring that a commutation was the fairest result. No Surrender Bush would decide alone. In
private, he was bothered by Libby's lack of repentance. But he seemed more
riveted by the central issue of the trial: truthfulness. Did Libby lie to prosecutors?
The President had been told by private lawyers in the case that Libby never
should have testified before the grand jury and instead should have invoked
his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. Prosecutors can accept
that. But lie to them, and it gets personal. "It's the difference
between making mistakes, which everybody does, and making up a story," a
lawyer told Bush. "That is a sin that prosecutors are not going to
forgive." A few days later, about a
week before they would become private citizens, Bush pulled Cheney aside
after a morning meeting and told him there would be no pardon. Cheney looked
stricken. Most officials respond to a presidential rebuff with a polite
thanks for considering the request in the first place. But Cheney, an
observer says, "expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the
decision ... He didn't take it well." Two days after that, Libby,
who hadn't previously lobbied on his own behalf, telephoned Bolten's office.
He wanted an audience with Bush to argue his case in person. To Libby, a
presidential pardon was a practical as well as symbolic prize: among other
things, it would allow him to practice law again. Bolten once more kicked the
matter to the lawyers, agreeing to arrange a meeting with Fielding. On
Saturday, Jan. 17, with less than 72 hours left in the Bush presidency, Libby
and Fielding and a deputy met for lunch at a seafood restaurant three blocks
from the White House. Again Libby insisted on his innocence. No one's memory
is perfect, he argued; to convict me for not remembering something precisely
was unfair. Fielding kept listening for signs of remorse. But none came.
Fielding reported the conversation to Bush. Meanwhile, Bush was running
his own traps. He called Jim Sharp, his personal attorney in the Plame case,
who had been present when he was interviewed by Fitzgerald in 2004. Sharp was
known in Washington as one of the best lawyers nobody knew. A savvy raconteur
from Oklahoma who had represented a long list of colorful clients - from
Nixon pal Charles G. (Bebe) Rebozo to Sammy Sosa - Sharp had worked quietly
for the President for a while before anyone even knew about it. In the
meantime, the two men had become friends, spending hours chatting over cigars
and near beer. On the Sunday before he left office, Bush invited Sharp to the
executive mansion for a farewell cigar. While packing boxes in the
upstairs residence, according to his associates, Bush noted that he was again
under pressure from Cheney to pardon Libby. He characterized Cheney as a
friend and a good Vice President but said his pardon request had little
internal support. If the presidential staff were polled, the result would be
100 to 1 against a pardon, Bush joked. Then he turned to Sharp. "What's
the bottom line here? Did this guy lie or not?" The lawyer, who had followed
the case very closely, replied affirmatively. Bush indicated that he had
already come to that conclusion too. "O.K., that's it,"
Bush said. Their Separate Ways With one day to go before
both men left office, Bush informed Cheney that Libby would not get a pardon.
On Inauguration Day, the outgoing Vice President gave a warm tribute to Bush
in a private ceremony as the President prepared to leave Andrews Air Force
Base for Texas. A day later, Cheney gave an interview to a conservative
magazine, saying he disagreed with the President's decision on the Libby
pardon. Other Libby backers were quoted in the article, calling Bush
"dishonorable" and saying he had left a soldier on the battlefield,
language Cheney had used throughout the debate over the pardon. Bush believes
that his Vice President was "probably blinded by his personal loyalty to
Scooter," a White House aide says. Cheney had pressed the issue as far
as he could but finally conceded. "The Vice President knew there was a
line out there that he was getting very close to but couldn't cross,"
says a former senior official. "The President knew that he needed to
help make sure that Cheney didn't cross that line either." Bush and Cheney remain
friends but have gone in different directions since leaving office. Bush
returned to Texas, where he is raising millions for his presidential library
and writing a book about his most pivotal decisions as President. Bush
believes he put the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq on solid footings
and will let history speak for his presidency. And Barack Obama? He
"deserves my silence," Bush has said. For Cheney, the fight goes
on. Working from a transition office in McLean, Va., he immediately
re-entered the fray. He gave a number of high-profile TV interviews in which
he decried the closing of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay and
defended what the Bush team called "enhanced interrogations," including
waterboarding, as necessary intelligence tools to safeguard the nation. He
also warned of another terrorist attack if Obama's policies were left
unchecked. He assumed the role of opposition leader on May 21, challenging
Obama's antiterrorism policies in a televised speech. Only minutes earlier,
Obama had given an address defending his plans for detaining and trying
al-Qaeda members on U.S. soil. Cheney is writing a book as well. Former Bush aides say
Cheney's behavior needlessly stoked anti-Bush sentiment, which had only just
begun to subside in voters. For Cheney, however, the ongoing battles are an
extension of the fight he waged for several years on behalf of Libby. Cheney,
says an ally, believes that the true legacy of the Bush years is the uncompromising
way he and the President waged the war on terrorism. But Cheney also believes
that Bush cannot claim that as a legacy if he fails to protect the aides and
officials who carried out the dirty work. It is an increasingly lonely
fight. But as Democrats edge closer to probing the Bush-era practices,
perhaps including CIA interrogators, Justice Department lawyers and Cheney's
closest aides, it appears his darkest fears may be coming true. Since Cheney
was often the man responsible for the policies that are now under scrutiny,
it is perhaps no surprise that he is leading the counterrevolt. "I think
it is very, very important that we have a clear understanding that what
happened here was an honorable approach to defending the nation," Cheney
said on May 10. "There was nothing devious or deceitful or dishonest or
illegal about what was done." This is the case Dick Cheney
made for years in the Bush White House, prevailing for a long time, until he
was outnumbered and outgunned. And it is one he seems prepared to make,
without Bush at his side, for a long time to come. External link: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1912297,00.html |