No Closer to Success in Iraq

"Col. Gentile is giving voice to an idea that previously few in the military dared mention: Perhaps the Petraeus doctrine isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's a big controversy within a military that has embraced counterinsurgency tactics as a path to victory in Iraq. The debate, sparked by a short essay written by Col. Gentile titled ' Misreading the Surge,' has been raging in military circles for months."

Bush to Speak Thursday?

Ed Henry reports for CNN: "President Bush is planning to address the nation Thursday morning about the Iraq war, according to sources in the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill. . . .

"After delivering his speech, Bush is scheduled to head to Texas for a few days of rest at his Crawford ranch."

The Snippy President

Faced with the seminal question about what he tried to spin as a breakthrough agreement on missile defense with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bush got snippy yesterday. Real snippy.

Here's the exchange, with Reuters reporter Matt Spetalnick, at yesterday's joint press availability:

Q: "Thank you. Mr. President, your joint statement on missile defense is still far short of a deal for Russian support or even acquiescence on this project. Isn't this just a matter of kicking the can down the road, in the twilight of both of your terms, to a new U.S. administration that may or may not even support it?"

Bush's response: "Now, you can cynically say it's kicking the can down the road. I don't appreciate that because this is an important part of my belief that it's necessary to protect ourselves. And I have worked -- reached out to Vladimir Putin. I knew this was of concern to him, and I have used my relationship with him to try to get something in place that causes Russia to be comfortable with it.

"Is it going to happen immediately? No, it's not going to happen immediately. But is this a good opportunity to work together? You bet it is. For the common good. And so I feel comfortable with it, and I think it is -- you know, I happen to believe it is a significant breakthrough, simply because I've been very much involved with this issue and know how far it's come."

Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "Bush was visibly agitated by the question and afterward decided not to invite reporters for a roundtable discussion on Air Force One on the flight back to Washington as he has done at the end of other overseas trips. Instead, senior Bush advisers made four trips back to the press cabin to argue the importance of the declaration."

Terence Hunt writes for the Associated Press: "White House officials waged an extraordinary campaign during an 11-hour Air Force One flight to put a positive spin on the outcome of Sunday's summit talks between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Four times on the long flight back to Washington from Sochi, Russia, Bush aides trooped back to the press cabin to make the case that the summit had turned out well, particularly on missile defenses.

"It was the heaviest lobbying campaign veteran reporters could recall ever occurring on the president's plane. Press accounts of the summit had been sent to Bush's plane and administration officials thought they were too negative. Clearly, Bush's aides were disappointed.

"Some of the officials' statements were on the record. Some of them were off-the-record -- not to be used -- or on 'deep background' -- not to be attributed to anyone in the administration. Some were on 'background' -- to be attributed to a senior administration official. It was hard keeping track of the conditions."

Some reporters remained unspun, however.

Tom Lasseter writes for McClatchy Newspapers: "President Bush made little, if any, progress with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a hastily arranged summit Sunday, dashing any near-term hopes of mending the strained relations between the two nuclear powers.

"While Bush and Putin were friendly in their last meeting as heads of state, the day ended much as it began. The Russians remain firmly opposed to American efforts to expand NATO into the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine and to deploy a ballistic missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, both former Soviet satellites.

"The conference was capped by the release of a strategic framework, a roadmap of sorts, signed by Putin and Bush. The document was largely a series of previously agreed upon points."

Hunt writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to overcome sharp differences over a U.S. missile defense system, closing their seven-year relationship Sunday still far apart on an issue that has separated them from the beginning.

"'Our fundamental attitude toward the American plan has not changed,' Putin said at a news conference with Bush at his vacation house at this Black Sea resort. 'Obviously we've got a lot of work to do,' Bush said. Despite the impasse, the two leaders agreed that Moscow and Washington would work together closely in the future on missile defense and other difficult issues."

Susan Cornwell and Oleg Shchedrov write for Reuters: "U.S. President George W. Bush and Russia's Vladimir Putin ended their last face-to-face meeting as heads of state on Sunday with warm words for each other but no solution to their row over missile defense.

"With Putin to step down next month and Bush in the twilight of his presidency, both leaders stressed the strong personal rapport which they say has helped keep relations between their countries on an even keel.

"But differences over U.S. plans for a missile defense shield in eastern Europe, which have helped drive diplomatic ties to a post-Cold War low, meant their summit on the Black Sea coast ended with no firm agreements."

Here's the transcript of Hadley's first and second on-the-record briefings.

Torture Memo Watch

Dan Eggen writes in The Washington Post: "Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out?

"Or, for that matter, could he have 'scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance' thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?

"These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which 'body part the statute specifies.'

"But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief. . . .

"'You have to draw the line,' Yoo said in an Esquire magazine interview posted online this past week. 'What the government is doing is unpleasant. It's the use of violence. I don't disagree with that. But I also think part of the job unfortunately of being a lawyer sometimes is you have to draw those lines. I think I could have written it in a much more -- we could have written it in a much more palatable way, but it would have been vague.'...

"'Having 81 pages of legal analysis with its footnotes and respectable-sounding language makes the reader lose sight of what this is all about,' said Dawn Johnsen, an OLC chief during the Clinton administration who is now a law professor at Indiana University. 'He is saying that poking people's eyes out and pouring acid on them is beyond Congress's ability to limit a president. It is an unconscionable document.'"

Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: "Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days: 'Yoo and torture' - 102; 'Mukasey and 9/11' -- 73'; 'Yoo and Fourth Amendment' -- 16; 'Obama and bowling' -- 1,043; 'Obama and Wright' -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted); 'Obama and patriotism' - 1,607; 'Clinton and Lewinsky' -- 1,079."

Michael Isikoff writes for Newsweek that former Pentagon general counsel William Haynes "remains a key figure in a sweeping Senate probe into allegations of abuses to detainees in Defense Department custody. . . .

"Haynes requested the memo (which was written by the then Justice Department lawyer John Yoo) and he and his boss, the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, later used it to justify harsh interrogation practices on terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay. The memo's disclosure raises new questions about the role that Haynes and other Bush-administration lawyers played in crafting legal policies that critics say led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

"It's a role that the Senate Armed Services Committee, overseen by Sen. Carl Levin and its ranking Republican member, Sen. John McCain, has been quietly but aggressively scrutinizing during a two-year investigation. Two sources familiar with the probe, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, say the panel's investigators have grilled a number of key players--including Special Forces operatives and FBI agents--who were never previously questioned. The panel notified the Pentagon in early February that it wanted to question Haynes. Before receiving any response, investigators learned on Feb. 25 that Haynes was leaving for Chevron in San Francisco. 'How often does somebody like that give two weeks' notice and leave town?' said one government source familiar with the sequence of events."

Bush's Democracy Backfire

Joel Brinkley writes in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed: "Freedom, President Bush likes to say, 'is a gift of the Almighty.' But much of the world now believes America's true view is that democracy should be imposed with the muzzle of a gun."

Brinkley writes that an "impressive phalanx of government-funded organizations charged with promoting democracy around the world" have "discovered to their dismay that Bush's democracy initiative was pulling the rug out from under their feet. Their workers were evicted from some countries, harassed and shut out in others.

"'We've been targeted somehow as advocates of regime change through a militaristic approach,' Kenneth Wallach, president of the National Democratic Institute, told me. In many countries, 'democracy has become a pejorative word.' . . .

"Freedom House, a private nonpartisan group dedicated to democracy promotion, publishes an annual report on democracy around the world. This year's report, just out, says 'the year 2007 was marked by a notable setback for global freedom' that is 'reflected in reversals in one-fifth of the world's countries' including Russia, Kenya, Nigeria, Venezuela and Egypt.

"The report concludes that the 'rationale for push-back policies' in many countries where democracy is in retreat 'is that they are necessary to prevent outside forces, primarily the United States, from meddling in their sovereign affairs.' . . .

"All of this leads to a paradoxical conclusion: For all his devotion to this issue, Bush has poisoned the brand."

Bush's War on the Net

Elizabeth Jensen writes in the New York Times that PBS Frontline's four-and-a-half hour documentary " Bush's War" is a big hit online, "with more than 1.5 million views of all or part of the program, which was streamed in 26 segments."

Cartoon Watch

Tom Toles on Bush and the "R" word; Ann Telnaes on the right track; Steve Sack on the wrong track; Mike Luckovich on Bush's legal enablers.