How does the George W. Bush presidency most resemble that of his father, George H.W. Bush? It may be best to wait to the last, agonizing days of reign of Bush the Lesser before making any call. Recall that Bush 41 left office with a flurry of highly controversial pardons, affecting a large number of individuals who were caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal. In December 1992, while Americans focused on the incoming Clinton Administration, Bush 41 wielded the pardon power to free former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others who had been convicted for crimes committed in connection with the Iran-Contra affair. Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel handling the matter, had been gradually closing the circle on the affair, and increasingly the evidence was suggesting that Bush 41 himself had been at the center of it. He had, Walsh learned, withheld his personal diaries from investigators and made statements which were at least seriously misleading. By issuing the Iran-Contra pardons, Bush threw up a roadblock…on a road that headed straight to himself.

True to form, the Democrats hardly raised a serious objection to the pardons. They were focused on the incoming administration and eager to avoid anything that would distract from the coup with which Clinton hoped to launch his presidency: a major healthcare initiative. [MORE . . .]

This week, I’ve been reading essays by French Writer Henry de Montherlant. I admit to a comprehensive ignorance of his body of work, but find the collection into which I’ve dipped–an out-of-print Pléiade edition of his Essais–compelling: conversational, clear, rich in reference and wit. I’ll try to translate a little piece of what I liked in the coming weeks, because there’s pretty much nothing of his available in English online, with the exception of a largely unexceptional (though exceptionally self-regarding) essay on Henri Matisse.

Better still might be to take a peek at Louis Begley’s old piece on Montherlant from the dear departed New York Sun. It gives a more compelling reason to try to track down Montherlant’s work than Wikipedia can muster, and contains this bit of interesting news: [MORE . . .]

For years, lawyers representing Guantánamo detainees have dreaded getting notice from the District Court in Washington that their case had been assigned to Judge Richard J. Leon. A conservative Republican appointed to the bench by George W. Bush in 2002, Judge Leon was seen as an almost reflexive supporter of the Bush Administration’s positions with respect to Guantánamo. But today things changed. Leon took up the habeas corpus petitions of six Guantánamo detainees on remand from the Supreme Court following its landmark decision in Boumediene–a decision in which the Court had reversed Judge Leon. In his opinion for the Court, Judge Kennedy had stressed that the system crafted by the Bush Administration was “fraught with grave risk of injustice” because it allowed the government to detain people indefinitely without any showing of evidence to back its claims that the detainees were combatants who posed a risk to the United States. And as Judge Leon rendered his decision in a packed courtroom, Kennedy’s core thesis was fully vindicated. The Leon decision is very straightforward: either the government has evidence that the persons held are combatants and there is a risk that they will battle the United States if released, or it does not. In this case, Judge Leon found that in five of six cases, the Bush Administration had no meaningful or corroborated evidence to sustain its claims. Rendering his decision, Judge Leon admonished the Bush Administration lawyers against taking appeals and further protracting the injustice visited upon the five petitioners whose freedom he ordered. “Seven years is enough!” he said, with a fixed gaze directed at the Justice Department lawyers.

For years, the Bush Administration had touted their capture of the Boumediene petitioners as a triumph of counterterrorism policy. The prisoners were not captured on or near a battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather they were Algerians who had resettled in Bosnia, where they came under suspicion of involvement in a plot to bomb the American embassy. After their case progressed through the Bosnian legal system, both the Bosnian Supreme Court and Attorney General concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support the charges against them. It ordered their release. But then through a curious sleight of hand orchestrated by U.S. intelligence officials, the petitioners were seized, turned over to the Americans and flown out to Guantánamo, where they have been incarcerated in tough and at times brutal conditions for seven years. President Bush personally proclaimed them terrorists and called their capture and imprisonment a victory in the war on terror. Today, the Bush Administration’s claims about the prisoners were revealed to be a sham not backed by serious evidence. The Bush Administration’s incarceration of five of the six petitioners was pronounced an unlawful, and indeed possibly criminal act. [MORE . . .]

Reports are circulating this week that President-Elect Obama has interviewed Defense Secretary Robert Gates with a view towards inviting him to stay on in the Obama cabinet. This provides an opportunity to gauge Gates’s performance as secretary of defense for two years. In the eyes of many, the position of secretary of defense is the most powerful post in government after the presidency. The “secdef” commands resources that, in monetary terms alone ($439.3 billion in 2007), dwarf those of any other agency of the federal government—indeed, U.S. defense spending accounts for half or more of the total defense spending on the planet and a still larger portion of the spending on intelligence gathering. The secretary’s authority over the uniformed personnel and civilians who work for him is strong, owing to military discipline and a rigorous command-authority culture. Like no other figure in the cabinet, the secretary of defense carries the nation’s national security and defense burdens. Making the office of secretary a spoil of political victory, thus, is dangerous.

Robert Gates came to the office shortly after the 2006 midterm election, when voters issued a stern rebuke to President Bush due largely to his military misadventures. Leaders of the uniformed services were at the time issuing stern admonitions that the most powerful military apparatus in human history was “broken,” or very close to that, largely as a result of planning that dramatically underestimated the manpower and matériel costs needed to sustain a two-theater war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates was given the thankless task of turning this around in an administration hell-bent on politicizing military strategy and performance and committed to no principle more firm than that it never made mistakes. It’s hard to see how a cabinet officer could perform well in such an environment. Yet Robert Gates did, quickly winning the respect of defense experts on both sides of the aisle and of the men and women who served under him. In my mind, Gates has proven himself as the most successful cabinet appointee in the eight years of the Bush presidency. He may well be one of the very best secretaries of defense, just as Rumsfeld has locked in his title as the worst since the office was founded. [MORE . . .]

“Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.” I have read this sentence a number of times since I found a copy of the book it initiates, a novel called A Canticle for Leibowitz, by the gas-station pump where I filled up this morning. Perhaps it is, in part, a function of the disorientation that claims me when paying less than two dollars a gallon, but I find myself disturbingly attracted to this sentence, as if to a leering stranger at a low-lit bar. I am compelled by it in complicated ways.

What attracts me to it, other than serendipity, is the purity of its awfulness… coupled with its naked, flailing whorish ambition to seduce. It is working so very hard, and so very transparently, to solicit readerly enthusiasm that one can only love it for how earnest it is in its hapless badness. Lure after lure is cast: “the blessed documents,” for example, is deployed in the hope that deep in the reader’s quiet soul, a voice will shout Hang on–did someone just say blessed documents? What documents? There’s also “the pilgrim with girded loins,” and a “Lenten fast in the desert.” And let us end where it begins: for we failed to acknowledge that most potent enticement of all: Brother Francis Gerard hails, after all, from Utah. [MORE . . .]

Ken Silverstein is on assignment and will return next week.

God help me, but I had to laugh when I heard the news that Barack Obama had named Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff. What else could I do? Without even so much as a symbolic gesture in support of reform, the great agent of “change” immediately selected as his chief political enforcer a figure who epitomizes the Washington consensus of the past two decades—pro-“free trade,” pro-Iraq invasion/occupation and, perhaps most importantly, pro-pork barrel. [MORE . . .]

Lord Bingham, one of the English-speaking world’s most famous judges, just went into retirement, and used the occasion of his first public speech to lambast the Bush and Blair Administrations over their joint decision to invade Iraq. The Guardian reports:

Contradicting head-on [the advice of Lord Peter Goldsmith, Blair’s attorney general] that the invasion was lawful, Bingham stated: “It was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had.” Adding his weight to the body of international legal opinion opposed to the invasion, Bingham said that to argue, as the British government had done, that Britain and the US could unilaterally decide that Iraq had broken UN resolutions “passes belief”.

Governments were bound by international law as much as by their domestic laws, he said. “The current ministerial code,” he added “binding on British ministers, requires them as an overarching duty to ‘comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations’.”

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No this is not a hoax. The indictment was handed down by a South Texas grand jury in Willacy County, the scene of some recent bizarre federal prison projects which have been hounded by serious corruption allegations. AP reports:

A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County’s federal detention centers. The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra’s tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

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What do journalists do when they have no news to report? They focus on speculation about what might happen. Most of the speculation in transition time focuses on candidates in the inside-the-Beltway quadrennial personnel shuffle. And this is politics as usual: rivals usually connive to plant stories about one another, attempting to get a leg up in the competition. The media routinely floats their stories attributed to unnamed sources. But the latest entry in this series is peculiar. AP reports that two unnamed Obama advisors have stated that there will be no war crimes investigations or prosecutions relating to the Bush Administration’s torture policies.

To start with, the AP piece revolves around a question that is almost insulting in the way it is presented. What president would enter office pledging not to prosecute war criminals, or pledging to prosecute figures from the former administration? Any president who did such a thing would not be worthy of holding the nation’s highest office. Prosecutions should not begin or end on a signal transmitted from the White House. The criminal justice system is supposed to be administered in a fashion that stresses detachment from politics. One of the biggest complaints about the last eight years is that the veneer of political detachment has worn very thin. One thing the voters expect of Barack Obama is that he will rebuild the wall that separates the political side of the government from the law-enforcement side. [MORE . . .]

Doctors in Berlin announced that they had cured a man of AIDS by giving him transplanted blood stem cells from a donor naturally resistant to the virus; other researchers cautioned that the treatment was of little immediate use, and justified in this case only because the patient had leukemia. “Frankly,” said Dr. Robert C. Gallo of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, “I'd rather take the medicine.”¹ A German shoplifter with no arms stole a 24-inch television. “It's hard to believe,” said a police officer, “that the sight of an armless man walking along with a giant TV clamped to his body did not get anyone's attention.”² A man in a motorized wheelchair robbed a Space Coast Credit Union branch in Merritt Island, Florida, telling employees that he was rigged with explosives; police caught him ten minutes later and recovered the stolen money from his prosthetic leg.³ Huseyin Kalkan, the mayor of Batman, Turkey, said that the town would sue Warner Bros. for a portion of the royalties from the movie The Dark Knight .“ ”There is,“ said Kalkan, ”only one Batman."⁴ A sixth severed foot washed ashore in Canada,⁵ and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who is expected to sign a $7 million book deal, was asked if she planned to run for president in 2012. “I'm like, okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, Don't let me miss the open door,” she said. “I'll plow through that door.”⁶ The Secret Service assigned official code names to President-elect Barack Obama (“Renegade”), First Lady Michelle Obama (“Renaissance”), and their daughters Malia (“Radiance”) and Sasha (“Rosebud”).^{7 8} In Chicago, a relaxed-looking Obama, who gained 700,000 Facebook friends since his election, met with Senator John McCain, who has lost 1,000 Facebook friends,^{9 10} and astronomers in Canada and the United States, observing the constellations Piscis Austrinus and Pegasus, captured the first images of distant, dusty planets orbiting young, bright stars.¹¹ [MORE . . .]

A bold prediction from James Pethokoukis of U.S. News & World Report (a double major in Soviet politics and American history and 2002 Jeopardy! champion, according to his bio), in a column titled “Why Obama Looks Like a One Termer”:

That’s right, the “O” in “Obama” may stand for “One Term.” For starters, there’s a strong chance that when voters head to the polls on Nov. 2, 2010, they likely will still think the economy is awful. Not much debate about that. (Good chance the Democrats’ two-election winning streak comes to an end.) And while voters may be somewhat patient for two years, patient for four years? Really unlikely. If history is any guide at all, voters may still be terribly cranky about the economy when they cast their ballots on Nov. 6, 2012 and thus likely choose the 45th president of the United States — be it Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal or some other Republican without “Bush” for a last name. Once again a “change” election for an impatient America. The same bad economy that doomed John McCain in 2008 will have sunk Obama, as well.

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Here’s a great investigative story about someone you’ve never heard of, but should know about. From Laura Rozen at Mother Jones:

It’s the story of a man with a habit of popping up, Zelig-like, at the nexus of foreign policy and the kinds of businesses that thrive in times of war—security contracting, infrastructure development and postwar reconstruction, influence and intelligence brokering…The trajectory of Shlomi Michaels is testament not only to one man’s driven intensity, but also to the opportunities the war on terror has presented to those with the information, connections, and ambition to seize them.

Why does Michael B. Mukasey have a portrait of George Orwell hanging in his office? Today I read a document that suggests that the spirit of Orwell–or more precisely Orwell’s nightmare–is indeed alive at the Department of Justice. Last week a whistleblower leaked a series of highly incriminating documents about the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman. The documents showed that aggressive claims made by the U.S. Attorney who brought the case–and who is close to Karl Rove–were “less than candid.” Indeed, the documents may be more damaging than that.

These documents should have been turned over to Congress, which issued a subpoena requiring their production. But today we see that notwithstanding the damage done to its credibility by the leaks, the Bush Justice Department is intent on stonewalling Congress for every day of their two remaining months. The problem is that they have no legal basis for denying the subpoena. And this is where Orwell gets useful–and where the soulless bureaucrat that Orwell despised knows just what to do. Craft some senseless lines that sound good and principled but are actually devoid of meaning. In a letter responding to the subpoena, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Keith B. Nelson states: [MORE . . .]

“The frequent references to Max Brod, Prague, insomnia, headache, have not been included in the Index.” So runs the inadvertently hilarious advisory sentence to the index of I Am a Memory Come Alive, a gathering and sequencing of Kafka’s so-called “autobiographical writings” put out by Schocken in 1974. I like a list that takes a friend, a city, a condition, and a pain and, by eliding them, equalizes them. Taken together, the quartet conspires to a kind of story. Throw a conjunction or two in there and you have a thumbnail biography: Max Brod and Prague, but insomnia and headache. [MORE . . .]

Over the last week, the American press has been filled with drip after drip from smug, generally anonymous Bush Administration clones who promise that when Barack Obama is saddled with the responsibilities of government he will “get real” about the threats presented by terrorists at Guantánamo and will tack away from his promise to shut the infamous prison camp down. But in a remarkable interview with CBS’s Sixty Minutes last night, the president-elect made clear that his commitment to clear, affirmative action was unwavering:

I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.

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From the New York Times:

When Dan Rather filed suit against CBS 14 months ago — claiming, among other things, that his former employer had commissioned a politically biased investigation into his work on a “60 Minutes” segment about President Bush’s National Guard service — the network predicted the quick and favorable dismissal of the case, which it derided as “old news.”

So far, Mr. Rather has spent more than $2 million of his own money on the suit. And according to documents filed recently in court, he may be getting something for his money. Using tools unavailable to him as a reporter — including the power of subpoena and the threat of punishment against witnesses who lie under oath — he has unearthed evidence that would seem to support his assertion that CBS intended its investigation, at least in part, to quell Republican criticism of the network.