Treading Hot Water
'Fat' Food Bill Falls Flat

By Al Kamen
Friday, February 8, 2008

The 2008 Loop Award for Water Ballet goes to . . . drumroll, please . . . Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.

McConnell was selected for his excellent performance Tuesday, when he explained to the Senate intelligence committee that he didn't really tell the New Yorker that waterboarding is torture.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked him whether his quoted statements indicated that "for yourself, if used, waterboarding would, in fact, constitute torture. Is that correct?"

"No, ma'am, it's not correct," said McConnell, who had talked to reporter Lawrence Wright, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Looming Tower." "The discussion was about something entirely different. It was a personal discussion about when I grew up and what I was doing as a youngster," which was "being a water-safety instructor," he said.

McConnell told Feinstein that he talked about how he was one of those people who "have difficulty putting my head underwater," adding: "If my head goes underwater, I ingest water in my nose."

Wright, McConnell said, asked " 'Well, what about when water goes up your nose?' And I said, 'That would be torture.' I said, 'It would be very painful for me.' Then it turned into a discussion of waterboarding."

So the quote "'Whether it's torture by anyone else's definition, for me it would be torture,' is not correct?" Feinstein asked.

"I said it," McConnell acknowledged, but what "I was talking about was water going into my nose, given the context of swimming and teaching people to swim. So it's out of context," he explained.

McConnell said that when Wright called later to check facts, he asked him "not to put that in the article. We argued for 90 minutes." (Hmm . . . so the DNI, in a time of war, has 90 minutes to wrassle about such things?)

Wright sharply disagreed.

"No, we weren't talking about swimming," he told us yesterday, "we were talking about his military training and I asked him if waterboarding was part of that training. The context was how awful it would be if it were done to him," Wright said. It was then that McConnell "brought up his experience as a water-safety instructor."

Wright said that after the interview last summer, "I sent him an e-mail with his comments on torture [and] told him it strongly implied that he condemned waterboarding as torture. He didn't respond."

This one should be pretty easy to resolve. Wright said the DNI's office and the New Yorker, have transcripts of the conversation. "Ask the DNI office to please release the transcript," he said.

"The public affairs office is not authorized to release the transcript," spokeswoman Vanee Vines said. "It's not something we do for an interview with a given reporter and an ODNI officer."

McConnell recalled another thing he told Wright on the phone: "I said to him, 'I will be sitting in front of a committee having this discussion.' "

Sure got that right.

A Weatherization Storm

It was a classic Washington ambush. The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming had invited Energy Secretary Sam uel W. Bodman up to chat yesterday.

Seems the Energy Department's Web site used to say that the Weatherization Assistance Program -- which helps low-income folks reduce their energy costs by weatherproofing their homes -- "is this country's longest running, and perhaps most successful energy efficiency program."

That's how things stood on Monday, when President Bush's budget was released and the program was eliminated. By Wednesday, an alert Energy Department aide had cut the "most successful" sentence. But committee staffers already had taken a screen grab of the old text and compared the two versions on a large graphic.

Committee Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) held up the graphic at the hearing, telling Bodman it seemed that the department "instead of insulating the poor against high energy costs . . . is more concerned with insulating themselves against embarrassment."

Bodman said other programs simply "had higher rates of return" than that one.

Maybe if they'd just changed the "is" to "was" no one would have noticed?

A Big Push for Bush

Senior-circuit fisticuffs! Seems former Puerto Rico governor Carlos Romero Barcel¿, 75, and five other folks were having dinner on Super Tuesday, watching the returns at the tony Pelayo restaurant in San Juan.

Next thing you know, Romero Barcel¿ calls President Bush"an idiot," greatly upsetting Hato Rey mortgage banker Raymond Molina, 72, and they're up and having words.

Fellow diners apparently calmed the men down. But Romero Barcel¿'s daughter told the San Juan Star that her dad got "sucker-punched" as he was backing down. A police superintendent said the former governor grabbed Molina's hands, but Molina broke free and swung.

Romero Barcel¿ was hospitalized with a fractured bone around his left eye, a broken nose and a detached left retina, the newspaper reported Wednesday.

Good news from Mississippi. A bill introduced last week that would ban restaurants from serving food to obese customers -- that would be more than 30 percent of the state -- has died in the state House's public health committee.

Rep. John Read (R), one of the measure's sponsors, had acknowledged that the bill had little chance of becoming law, but he backed it to call attention to Mississippi's ranking as the most obese state in the country.

It worked, drawing howls of protest from restaurant owners, nutritionists and other lawmakers who found it remarkably absurd and unenforceable.

Even if passed by the legislature, the proposal surely would have been vetoed by Gov. Haley Barbour (R), no stranger to fine food and drink, whose "Let's Go Walking" program has a much better chance of success.