[Mb-civic] An Arrogance of Power - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

An Arrogance of Power

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; A21

There is a temptation that seeps into the souls of even the most 
righteous politicians and leads them to bend the rules, and eventually 
the truth, to suit the political needs of the moment. That arrogance of 
power is on display with the Bush administration.

The most vivid example is the long delay in informing the country that 
Vice President Cheney had accidentally shot a man last Saturday while 
hunting in Texas. For a White House that informs us about the smallest 
bumps and scrapes suffered by the president and vice president, the lag 
is inexplicable. But let us assume the obvious: It was an attempt to 
delay and perhaps suppress embarrassing news. We will never know whether 
the vice president's office would have announced the incident at all if 
the host of the hunting party, Katharine Armstrong, hadn't made her own 
decision Sunday morning to inform her local paper.

Nobody died at Armstrong Ranch, but this incident reminds me a bit of 
Sen. Edward Kennedy's delay in informing Massachusetts authorities about 
his role in the fatal automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969. 
That story, and dozens of others about the Kennedy family, illustrates 
how wealthy, powerful people can behave as if they are above the law. 
For my generation, the fall of Richard Nixon is the ultimate allegory 
about how power can corrupt and destroy. It begins not with venality but 
with a sense of God-given mission.

I would be inclined to leave Cheney to the mercy of Jon Stewart and Jay 
Leno if it weren't for other signs that this administration has jumped 
the tracks. What worries me most is the administration's misuse of 
intelligence information to advance its political agenda. For a country 
at war, this is truly dangerous.

The most recent example of politicized intelligence was President Bush's 
statement on Feb. 9 that the United States had "derailed" a 2002 plot to 
fly a plane into the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush spoke about 
four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs to blow open 
the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed knowledge of the 
intelligence scoffed at Bush's account, saying that the information 
obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as 
Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an aspiration to destroy 
the tallest building on the West Coast. When I asked a former high-level 
U.S. intelligence official about Bush's comment, he agreed that Bush had 
overstated the intelligence.

Perhaps the most outrageous example of misusing intelligence has been 
the administration's attempt to undercut Paul Pillar and other former 
CIA officials who tried to warn about the dangers ahead in Iraq. I'm not 
talking about the agency's botched job on weapons of mass destruction 
but about its warnings that postwar Iraq would be chaotic and dangerous. 
Pillar said so privately before the war, and he helped draft an August 
2004 national intelligence estimate warning, correctly, that the 
situation in Iraq was deteriorating and heading for "tenuous stability" 
at best.

Bush was unhappy at this naysaying, just as he has grumbled about 
pessimistic reports from the CIA station in Baghdad. When Pillar made 
similar warnings about Iraq at a private dinner in September 2004, the 
White House went ballistic -- seeing Pillar as part of a CIA conspiracy 
to undermine the president's policies. Soon after, Bush installed a 
former Republican congressman, Porter Goss, who began a purge at the 
agency that has driven out a generation of senior managers. Pillar and 
many, many others have retired, leaving the nation without some of its 
best intelligence officers when we need them most.

Bush and Cheney are in the bunker. That's the only way I can make sense 
of their actions. They are steaming in a broth of daily intelligence 
reports that highlight the grim terrorist threats facing America. They 
have sworn blood oaths that they will defend the United States from its 
adversaries -- no matter what . They have blown past the usual rules and 
restraints into territory where few presidents have ventured -- a region 
where the president conducts warrantless wiretaps against Americans in 
violation of a federal statute, where he authorizes harsh interrogation 
methods that amount to torture.

When critics question the legality of the administration's actions, Bush 
and Cheney assert the commander in chief's power under Article II of the 
Constitution. When Congress passes a law forbidding torture, the White 
House appends a signing statement insisting that Article II -- the power 
of the commander in chief -- trumps everything else. When the 
administration's Republican friends suggest amending the wiretapping law 
to make its program legal, the administration refuses. Let's say it 
plainly: This is the arrogance of power, and it has gone too far in the 
Bush White House.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/14/AR2006021401783.html
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