What Bush Left Out

Brian Wingfield and Josh Zumbrun write for Forbes that "some of the most basic details" of the plan, "including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"'It's not based on any particular data point,' a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. 'We just wanted to choose a really large number.'"

Paul Krugman blogs for the New York Times: "My sneaking suspicion is that they started with a determination to throw money at the financial industry, and everything else is just an excuse."

Torture Watch

Mark Mazzetti writes in the New York Times: "Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.

"In meetings during that period, the officials debated specific interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had proposed to use on Qaeda operatives held at secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, the documents show. The meetings were led by Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and attended by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top administration officials. . . .

"The documents are a list of answers provided by Ms. Rice and John B. Bellinger III, the former top lawyer at the National Security Council, to detailed questions by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is investigating the abuse of detainees in American custody. . . .

" ABC News first reported on the White House meetings in a broadcast earlier this year."

Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post: "The details of the controversial program were discussed in multiple meetings inside the White House over a two-year period, triggering concerns among several officials who worried that the agency's methods might be illegal or violate anti-torture treaties, according to separate statements signed by Rice and her top legal adviser. . . .

"Rice and [John B. Bellinger III, legal adviser to Rice at the State Department and formerly her top legal aide at the National Security Council,] both said they recalled related discussions inside the White House of an obscure Army survival training program that subjected military trainees to waterboarding -- a technique that simulates drowning -- and other harsh tactics to prepare them for conditions they might face if captured. The survival program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, was the inspiration for several of the interrogation methods later used at both CIA and Defense Department detention camps. . . .

"Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) has been investigating the origins of the decision to use harsh interrogation tactics on high-level detainees held by the Pentagon and CIA. Many congressional Democrats and some Republicans have equated some of the techniques to torture. Levin has linked the decision to use SERE methods to the abuse that occurred at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

"'These discussions took place at the highest levels of the White House,' Levin said in an interview. The documents belie administration claims that abuse of detainees was 'the work of a few bad apples,' he said.

"Levin noted that the SERE methods themselves -- which included not only waterboarding but also exposure to temperature extremes, forced nudity and sensory deprivation -- were designed by Chinese communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen.

"'The validity of the confessions they didn't care about; they just wanted the confessions so they could put them on TV,' Levin said."

I wrote about the ABC report in my April 10 column. Discussions were so detailed, ABC's sources said, that some interrogation sessions were virtually choreographed by a White House advisory group.

And in my April 14 column, I wrote about how Bush said he was aware of the meetings, and said they were no big deal. I made the point that if you consider what the government did to be torture, which is a crime according to U.S. and international law, Bush's statement shifted his role -- and that of his top advisors -- from being accessories after the fact to being part of a conspiracy to commit.

Deposing Addington

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington announced yesterday that a federal court had granted its request to take a deposition from David Addington, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, about record-preserving practices in that office.

CREW reports: "The court rejected the government's arguments that no discovery is warranted because they have demonstrated full compliance with the Presidential Records Act. Based on three White house declarations, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly questioned whether the vice president is preserving all vice presidential records, or only two subsets of records. The depositions must take place by October 6, 2008.

"Anne Weismann, CREW's chief counsel said today, 'With this decision, there is now nowhere for the White House to duck and hide. We are hopeful that these depositions will allow us to finally uncover whether these important records are being preserved or deliberately lost to future generations.'"

The Houston Chronicle editorial board writes: " Saturday a federal judge ordered Cheney to preserve a wide range of official papers from his time in office, because of concerns by an advocacy group that Cheney might otherwise destroy or withhold important documents. . . .

"As the Bush administration winds down, it would be foolhardy to expect Cheney to cooperate freely with efforts to shed light on the scope of his major role in this administration and his influence in shaping U.S. policy. But this ruling puts him on notice that he will be held accountable, and that's a good, if somewhat belated, precedent to set."

India Watch

Demetri Sevastopulo and James Lamont write in the Financial Times: "Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, will meet George W. Bush in Washington on Thursday as both leaders watch anxiously to see whether the US Congress will approve a landmark US-India nuclear deal.

"The deal, which would pave the way for the US to provide India with civilian nuclear technology, is seen as vital to both men."

Legacy Watch

Timothy Garton Ash writes in the Guardian: "As the two men who would succeed him train like Olympic athletes for tomorrow's foreign policy debate, pause for a moment to complete your final report on the 43rd president of the United States. What would you say?

"I would sum up his two terms in four words: hubris followed by nemesis. . . .

"The irony of the Bush years is that a man who came into office committed to both celebrating and reinforcing sovereign, unbridled national power has presided over the weakening of that power in all three dimensions: military, economic and soft. . . .

"The massive, culpable distraction of Iraq, Bush's war of choice, leaves the US - and with it the rest of the west - on the verge of losing the war of necessity. Here, resurgent in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are the jihadist enemies who attacked the US on September 11 2001. By misusing military power, Bush has weakened it.

"Economically, the Bush presidency ends with a financial meltdown on a scale not seen for 70 years. The proud conservative deregulators (John McCain long among them) now oversee a partial nationalisation of the American economy that would make even a French socialist blush. . . .

"As for the decline in American soft power, . . . [h]is arrogance, his unilateralism, his insensitivity, his long-time denial of the need for urgent action on climate change: all fed directly into the plummeting credit of the US around the world. It would have been a different story with a different president.

"For years now, we have seen those who hate the US abusing and burning effigies of Bush. The truth is, the anti-Americans should be building gilded monuments to him. For no one has done more to serve the cause of anti-Americanism than GW Bush. It is we who like and admire the US who should, by rights, be burning effigies."

Cartoon Watch

Jim Borgman on another Bush pig in a poke, Pat Bagley on Bush's puppet masters, Tom Toles on Bush's credibility problem, Steve Sack on Bush and the taxpayers, Rex Babin on Bush's hole, Lee Judge on Bush's idea of checks (not balances), Jim Morin on Bush's team, Rob Rogers on the new "Che W", and John Sherffius on Bush's core message.