"Washington Post" spills more detail on intra-regime politics

Barton Gellman
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
NY: Penguin, 2008 483 pp. hb

September 18 2008

Penguin released Angler on the 16th. "Washington Post" author Gellman adds more depth to the intra-regime picture of the Bush administration. "Washington Post" colleague Bob Woodward had already presented the picture for the handling of the Iraq War.

Formal networks as conducting electricity

In the "Washington Post" picture of the executive branch, we see individuals pushing in different directions despite working for the same boss, George W. Bush. The reasons could be persynal background or the interests of the specific department one is working in.

If incorrectly wired or connected together, a network will fail to conduct electricity and break down. The social world is the same way with respect to communications.

Liberals picture a government network's breaking down for only one reason--a bad attitude toward dissent. The Marxist picture sees the networks breaking down for reasons of family, nation and class--various self-interests, which Marxists say need eliminating while Liberals stress toleration of those interests.

If we picture individuals who we give things to but who turn around and never say anything or do anything, obviously such people fail to do the equivalent of conduct electricity in a network. In a highly responsible position, we may require highly courageous and direct people if a network is to conduct electricity at all.

We Maoists can picture Redstockings leader Kathie Sarachild in such a position, because she wrote in an accountable way. Someone like Catharine MacKinnon who half-way practices subjectivism in a conscious way is harder to picture in a formal structure. Another one we can picture speaking directly enough to conduct electricity is the crackpot Tani Jantsang. Everybody knows other people who just cannot be pictured in a situation where they would have to conduct social or political current.

In 2004 and early 2005, Condoleeza Rice attempted to chair three consecutive meetings of the National Security Council, which includes certain cabinet heads and the then CIA Director Tenet. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld reportedly played a passive-aggressive role in not attending, the kind of tactics we would expect from pseudo-feminists not believing in structure at all. Rumsfeld failed to conduct electricity and as a result a formal network broke down. Apparently the issue would have been pushing for trials at Gitmo.(pp. 341-2)

So the point is that Rice had the formal authority, but a white male took power from both Rice and Powell, two Blacks. Because Rumsfeld did not attend, the meetings ended cancelled three times. Holding the meetings as formally required disclosed the problem, but did not change the fact of who had power. Rumsfeld and Cheney were a tag team. To his credit, Cheney's aide Libby had openly proposed that Rice be stripped of half her role from the very beginning.(p. 53)

A perverse effect of such blatantly informal networking is that the government gets to have things both ways. In this case it may actually protect the political careers of Powell and Rice to be sidelined as iffy things went on. So for example, Rice apparently condoned torture but then turned against it. She and Powell recommended that certain legal opinions justifying torture be ditched.(p. 190) In the case of a hot potato like military trials, we can also imagine that dropping the potato could serve any of a number of goals for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Rice finally had to work with Powell to let Gonzales know that secret laws on international and national security would no longer be allowed.(p. 173) On the whole though, it means that even if some people are in power, they might not hold actual power because of informal networks. Rice says that her State Department despite successive leaderships by Powell and Rice, still does not have many Black employees.(1) That sort of discrimination problem is usually the result of unclear and hence informal or biased hiring and performance criteria.

While Amerikans are killing Afghans and Iraqis, MIM does not have much concern whether the united $tates prettifies its image with more diversity of bourgeois employees. Rather we continue to paint the picture of the 'ole boys' network in Washington as it has manifested itself in recent reporters' books.

An informal network does not have adverse racist or chauvinist effects in every interaction. Such a standard of proof is the empiricist's trap. Nonetheless, we should generally think of such informal networks as structural racism. Many things will go on without observation by the naked eye. An example would be Cheney lawyer Addington's visit to the prison at U.$. occupied Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, September 25, 2002.(pp. 184-6)

The context is racist, because it is territory in Cuba that the united $tates took from the Cuban people. Although the united $tates also occupies bases in Germany, such occupations fall disproportionately on Third World people and the Cuban majority would like the territory back. Addington and his other lawyer friends sidestepped the four star general in charge at Gitmo, not because the goal of racism was so much aimed at General James T. Hill. Rather the goal was how to oppress Islamic prisoners from the Third World more by using security clearances in a political but informal way:

"'Something of that magnitude should have been known by the guy in charge of the whole area, which was me,' he [Gen. Hill] said.

"'Because those are policy decisions. . . the guy in charge of the policy in that area--me--should have known about it, and should have been asked about it. . . . Would I have sent my lawyer down there to be with them? Answer's yes.'"(pp. 186-7)

Others have argued that torturing prisoners has made them more difficult to convict in courts. Bush and Cheney often like to push matters to the political edge where there would have to be repercussions.

Another Watergate

In Gellman's account the stress is not on the Iraq War but how domestic surveillance controversy nearly brought down the government in 2004 and 2005. At the last minute, Bush stepped back from Watergate failure brought about by Cheney according to Gellman. The popular image of Darth Vader at the time conducting the surveillance from his own offices turns out to be true. Senator Graham said Cheney had the intelligence portfolio.(p. 153)

Several layers of the government were ready to resign, even before the 2004 election. The first lawyer to cause significant trouble was Goldsmith, a man with a step-father possibly connected to the mafia.(p. 285) (Comey and Townsend on the other hand had experience prosecuting the mafia.) (p. 297)

As in any intelligence situation, whoever is in the door first can benefit most. If a mafia mole found a perch in the Bush administration in the midst of a botched operation, the mafia might be able to exert pressure on the Bush administration.

Watergate itself was supposed to be a crime that united a country in disapproval. Yet here again the government was claiming the right to bug political opponents. The FBI is supposed to be breaking up conspiracies against civil rights. Instead the Justice Department certified them for years. The conspiracy was so thick that Gellman says even Karl Rove did not get clearance for information on the program.(p. 309)

Capitalism leaves in place family, black market and legal profit motivations for corrupting the government. So the idea that the united $tates can "reverse engineer" from Stalin or Mao is false. We now learn that techniques at Gitmo came from the Soviet Union and Mao.

Lincoln undertook repression to remove an underlying problem. Watergate type activity has no such justification. In addition, Stalin came to power in a revolution replacing a monarch with divine power. Stalin's cult of power was less accountable than more advanced governments but more accountable than a monarchy. Stalin and Mao also took concrete steps to remove motivations for corrupt abuse of power. Mao in particular virtually eliminated large sums of cash for most localities. Commodities one could purchase with corrupt money were also scant. In such a situation, one could have abuse of state power, but what one could abuse it for would be severely limited. In the united $tates, a few federal government connections can easily mean a nine or ten digit sum of dollars. One could take repressive techniques from other countries, but the underlying motivations of both the repressed and repressor would differ in the united $tates.

The persynality cult

Compared with people waiting for Jesus or Allah, people for waiting for Stalin or Mao or Kim Il Sung to do something had more basis for hope. MIM continues to defend persynality cults relative to feudal monarchies. Cheney did not have a persynality cult. His style was more in the other direction, closer to hit-and-run. People wondered if his hand was behind more things than one would expect from a vice-president.

Cheney's persuasion of then House Majority leader Dick Armey to back the Iraq War caused Armey later regrets. Cheney tried to snow Armey on a number of points including an Al-Qaeda connection to Saddam Hussein. Armey caved. He eventually realized he was wrong, (p. 222) but the public in general never did, because it does not care that much. Cheney has argued, like Mussolini, that war is innate to the species. (p. 250)

Cheney was a strong reader, even deemed intelligent and nuanced in Gellman's book. According to Alan Greenspan, Nixon and Clinton were Cheney's equal, but Cheney was the best at coming up with operational plans for a goal. (p. 15) In contrast to the situation where people doubt a vice-president should have had so much responsibility, the Mao or Stalin-style cult claims more responsibility than humynly possible.

The Mao or Stalin-style cult is not perfect, because it is an oversimplification that results in a reduced flow of political current. On the plus side, such a cult names someone concrete who bears responsibility. The people know who to blame.

On the downside, Stalin and Mao could not exactly be as persynally responsible as depicted by their cults, where they are as powerful as the sun. When someone has too many responsibilities, informal networks again sprout in the cracks. This comes up when we read Liberal extremists discussing how Stalin was responsible for reviewing millions of names for execution for persynally insulting him with "dissent." Obviously that was not really happening either. Stalin was the head of a government shaped by larger social forces.

MIM has suggested that leaders need to be weeded out so that there is a shortage of people willing to do a government job. Then there needs to be aid from the people to help leaders do their jobs. Leaders should be self-sacrificing but not to the point where they claim godly powers and corresponding responsibilities. Too little or too much responsibility claiming gives rise to informal networks and a corresponding degradation of the people and various racist and chauvinist ills. Correcting the problem strictly within the united $tates is hopeless; however, if the Third World sees how Amerikans treat informal networks among themselves, then the Third World can be better prepared to handle U.$. imperialism generally.

Notes:
1. http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/08/rice.blacks.state/