Tim Griffin, Barbara Comstock and Karl Rove (Tim Griffin for Congress, Comstock for Delegate, White House photo)

For a candidate making his first bid for office, Tim Griffin couldn’t be in better shape. One week after announcing his campaign against Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.), the incumbent in Arkansas’s most Democratic-leaning district, Griffin had raised $130,000. A Public Policy Polling survey released last week found Griffin only one point behind Snyder, a statistical tie with a congressman who did not even draw a challenger last year.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“When I go around the district here in Arkansas,” Griffin told TWI before attending a D.C. fundraiser last week, “what I hear about is jobs, private sector versus the government, the national debt, and this health care bill.”

Asked again if his experience working the Bush administration ever comes up with voters, Griffin was insistent. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

Griffin’s experience isn’t unique. Nearly a year after George W. Bush left office, some of the Republican strategists who built their reputations on his campaigns, or in his White House, have re-emerged as prominent pundits, legal thinkers and strategists, and some have made the move back into the electoral arena. So far, they’ve had considerable success in winning and in setting up credible operations for 2010. In Minnesota, Sara Taylor, Bush’s former director of the Office of Political Affairs, is advising Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s (R-Minn.) PAC. In Virginia, Republican lawyer Barbara Comstock — who worked for John Ashcroft’s Justice Department and who helped defend I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby — won a tight election for a seat in the House of Delegates. That was a victory that some Democrats see as a prelude to a run for Congress when Comstock’s mentor Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) retires.

It’s a perplexing situation for Democrats. Bush’s presidency had staggered to an end. His approval rating did not rise above 50 percent for the last three years of his tenure; he did not hit the campaign trail for his party’s national ticket in 2008, and only addressed the Republican National Convention via a satellite feed. Democrats felled Republican after Republican in 2008 by putting their headshots next to Bush’s. In the year that’s followed, though, Democrats have watched former Vice President Dick Cheney (and his daughter Liz) resurface as a conversation-driving critic of their foreign policy. Bush Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee have thrived in their perches in academia and on the federal bench, respectively. In this year’s race for governor in New Jersey, Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine attacked his Republican opponent, Chris Christie, for having political conversations with Karl Rove while still serving as a U.S. attorney. Christie won the election anyway.

If there’s a way to turn service under Bush into a losing issue for Republican candidates, Democrats haven’t figured it out. Comstock’s upset victory in Virginia, in a race where both candidates spent nearly $1 million, came after months of attacks on her political service. Democrats went after the candidate’s ties with gimmicks like “Barbara Comstock’s lost resume” — experience like “initiated negative campaigning ’storyline’ against Al Gore,” references like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. TV ads and direct mail portrayed Comstock alongside the likes of Cheney and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. And Comstock didn’t wilt under the pressure. She welcomed backing from Republican allies up to and including Rove, who appeared at a September fundraiser on her behalf.

“Elections are always about the future and responding to what people are doing in their everyday lives,” Comstock told TWI, while also saying that she did not want to dwell too much on the attacks against her. “When you don’t do that, well, you look at some of these past elections for Republicans when people didn’t feel we were responding on those economic issues and we lost. In Virginia, we dealt with those real kitchen table issues.”

Democrats viewed Comstock’s win as insult added to an already injurious election night, a defeat that could have been prevented if she hadn’t been allowed to re-make her image. “Comstock ran an effective race,” said Matt Mansell, executive director of the Virginia House Democratic caucus. “She started communicating early and got the best of both worlds by presenting herself as a solutions-oriented moderate candidate while still getting fund-raising help from Ted Olsen and Mitt Romney and Karl Rove.” The party’s mistake, said Mansell, was not “to define her earlier as a Bush political hack.”

Not surprisingly, Comstock’s success has given a little bit of cheer to other veterans of the Bush administration who have been tarred by the association. Hans van Spakovsky, who was pilloried by Democrats over his work as voting section counsel to the assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division, told TWI that his career options were limited by those attacks.

“They were so effectively able to ruin my professional reputation as a lawyer,” said Spakovsky, who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “despite the fact that they were wrong on all of these issues. I couldn’t get confirmed to the FEC. When I was looking for jobs last year, it was very clear to me that at least one of the law firms I talked to in town blackballed me because I was in the Bush administration. It’s a real problem in Washington today that people on the left side of the aisle can’t seem to disagree with people without going after that.”

Tim Griffin’s re-entry into politics, said Spakovsky, was a source of new optimism. “I wish Tim Griffin the best of luck,” he said. “I’m happy to see people who are determined, like him, start to fight back.”

If local Democrats have their way, Griffin’s comeback won’t take him all the way to Congress. “If he’s the nominee against Vic Snyder,” said Mariah Hattah, executive director of Arkansas Democratic Party, “it would pit a proven public servant against a campaign operative who worked for Karl Rove, the master of the dark arts of campaigning.” Hattah getting into a striking degree of specificity for a campaign that is still taking shape, suggested that state Democrats would make voters aware of the “caging” scandal that dogged Griffin before he left the U.S. attorney’s office. “No one likes likes voter suppression,” she said.

David Wasserman, the House race editor of the Cook Political Report, said that Democrats’ chances at making Griffin toxic depend wholly on the political environment. “In any other year that line on the resume would be a huge vulnerability,” said Wasserman. ‘But when the environment is good, it’s like Democrats are wearing velcro, and the Republicans are wearing teflon.”

In the meantime, Griffin is keeping his head down, raising funds and leaving aside much talk of his resume in the Bush years.

“I’ve done a lot of things in my career,” Griffin told TWI. “I’ve been in the army for 13 years. I’m a major. I went to Iraq. I’ve been an army prosecutor, and I’ve done a lot of things. And whatever I’ve done, I’ve just tried to do a really good job. Look — that’s politics. I don’t expect anything different. I’d say that if you get an opportunity to serve your president and your country, you take it.”

Coll:

In an essay entitled “Reading the Taliban,” Joanna Nathan of the International Crisis Group updates some of her work on Taliban propaganda and communications strategies. Her analysis of the repetitious themes in Taliban magazines and DVDs—the recapitulation of Guantánamo imprisonment stories as folk culture narrative; the amplification of Pashtun grievances around ethnic revenge killings and notoriously corrupt figures such as the Uzbek commander General Dostum—is particularly chilling.

Hmm, so, uh, Guantanamo Bay, eh? Perhaps former Vice President Dick Cheney will want to retract this:

Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a “recruitment tool” for the enemy. On this theory, by the tough questioning of killers, we have supposedly fallen short of our own values. This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the President himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the Left, “We brought it on ourselves.”

I’m sure he’ll get right on that.

The BAU, explained elsewhere in documents released on Friday, is “comprised of Supervisory Special Agents with an average of 18 years of experience in criminal and counterintelligence investigations.”

The memo lays out clearly and simply what the interrogation experts at the FBI knew about interrogations of terror suspects, what would or would not work on them, and what sort of conduct was illegal. And it reads much like the sorts of arguments we’re now hearing from the America Civil Liberties Union and other civil and human rights organizations arguing that senior defense department officials and lawyers who approved abusive techniques ought to be criminally investigated.

“Central to the gathering of reliable, admissible evidence is the manner in which it is obtained,” the authors write to the General. “Interrogation techniques used by the DHS [Defense Human Intelligence Services, part of DoD] are designed specifically for short term use in combat environments where the immediate retrieval of tactical intelligence is critical. Many of DHS’s methods are considered coercive by Federal Law Enforcement and [Uniform Code of Military Justice] standards. Not only this, but reports from those knowledgeable about the use of these coercive techniques are highly skeptical as to their effectiveness and reliability.”

Most of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay had already been interviewed repeatedly overseas by the DHS, so the FBI recommended a different approach be taken at Guantanamo.

The FBI favors the use of less coercive techniques — ones carefully designed for long-term use in which rapport-building skills are carefully combined with a purposeful and incremental manipulation of a detainee’s environment and perceptions.

The BAU staff explain:

FBI/CITF agents are well trained, highly experienced and very successful in overcoming suspect resistance in order to obtain valuable information in complex criminal cases, including the investigations of terrorist bombings in East Africa and the USS Cole, etc. FBI/CRT interview strategies are most effective when tailored specifically to suit a suspect’s  or detainee’s needs or vulnerabilities. Contrary to popular belief, these vulnerabilities are more likely to reveal themselves through the employment of individually designed and sustained interview strategies rather than through the haphazard use of prescriptive, time-driven approaches. The FBI/CITF strongly believes that the continued use of diametrically opposed interrogation strategies in GTMO will  only weaken our efforts to obtain valuable information.

The memo goes on to list the interrogation techniques being used, and then to list which ones are “not permitted by the U.S. Constitution.” Those include: the use of stress positions for more than four hours; hooding; 20-hour interrogation segments; stripping a detainee of all clothing; and exploiting individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress. They also include the use of scenarios designed to convince a detainee that death or severe pain is imminent for him or his family; waterboarding (here called “use of wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of drowning”); and exposure to cold weather or water.

All of those techniques, we now know, continued to be used by the Defense Department.

The FBI also warned that the use of such techniques would make any evidence derived inadmissible in federal court and if admissible in a military commission, likely to be given “little or no weight.”

The FBI drafters of the memo further explained that most of those techniques, particularly the last four, would also violate the U.S. anti-torture statute. It recommended that they not be used.

We know that the Pentagon and CIA went ahead and used them anyway. Instead of relying on their top experts in the FBI, they relied on a plan developed by a couple of private psychologists with no experience whatsoever in interrogating terror suspects and who cribbed much of their plan from a study of Chinese Communist techniques used to obtain false confessions from American prisoners during the Korean war. Senior U.S. officials then sought legal opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel that would tell them that these techniques, contrary to the FBI’s opinions, were not illegal. Conveniently, those opinions did cast the techniques described in a completely different light.

The most recently released memos have not gotten much attention, as torture fatigue sets in and the Bush torture program becomes old news. But the FBI memo is important because it adds to the growing body of evidence that senior defense department and CIA officials deliberately ignored the opinions of the best trained and most experienced people in the government about interrogations that abusive interrogations would not work and were not legal. Add that to the rest of the evidence that senior Bush administration officials did not act in good faith in relying on the Office of Legal Counsel memos that justified the techniques the Defense Department and CIA were using, and this latest declassified memo adds weight to the argument that something fishy was going on at the highest ranks of government that demands further investigation.

This latest memo also sheds light on why some in the Defense Department and some Republicans are now so eager to try Guantanamo detainees in military commissions rather than in Article III federal courts. They know that the evidence extracted from the prisoners under the “enhanced” methods Cheney is still defending doesn’t stand a chance in front of an independent U.S. federal court judge.

Now, not disputing that Biden’s favorable ratings have fallen more than one might expect — and not disputing that this might inspire a “will Obama dump Biden in 2012″ pseudo-news narrative that is going to be sort of excruciating for three years — it’s got to be noted that Gallup’s average includes the massive popularity/approval surge that Cheney, and everyone else in the administration, received after the events of 9/11. A look back at pre-9/11 polls finds that Cheney’s popularity started in the high 50s and low 60s and fell as low as the high 40s — although in those days, when he was known more for battling some heart problems than for pushing for neoconservative foreign policies, he often outpaced President Bush.

What’s the meaning of all this for the White House? Nothing, really — being less popular means being less popular. But the massive shift in public opinion after 9/11 is going to have a distorting effect on presidential polling — I think it saves Bush from having the lowest average ratings during his entire presidency since Truman — and that’s worth remembering.

Scarborough made a sort of out-of-character attack.

There aren’t a lot of polls that ask for public opinion of both Nancy Pelosi  and Dick Cheney, as the former vice president is a has-been who only makes news when launching dishonest attacks about foreign policy. But the June NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll — in other words, the poll produced by the company Scarborough works for — found that only 26 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Cheney, while 48 percent had a negative opinion of him. The same poll found that 27 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Pelosi, while 44 percent viewed her negatively.

So: Cheney’s net negative rating is -22, while Pelosi’s is -17. The answer to Scarborough’s question is “Cheney.”

The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for 7 years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it.  2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11.

The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy ‘experts’ have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. Simply put, Mr. Cheney sees history throughout extremely myopic and partisan eyes.

“Think tanks develop into a more mature institution when they are willing to say unpleasant things about their friends. But CNAS hasn’t done that yet, and they haven’t really had the opportunity to,” said American Enterprise Institute defense studies head Tom Donnelly. “That’s a benchmark of whether they can withstand the test of time.”

Yeah, like the time Donnelly said the surge didn’t achieve its objectives with regard to Iraqi politics; or denounced Dick Cheney’s conceptions of national security; or called out John McCain’s presidential campaign for, I don’t know, saying McCain wouldn’t meet with the Spanish prime minister. There’s a good point to be made about the Center for a New American Security having yet to critique, for instance, the counterinsurgents in the Obama administration, many of whom matriculated from the think tank. But there’s an unfortunate tendency in Washington to measure intellectual honesty by the willingness to attack your friends, rather than, say, the merits of a particular critique.

“They’ve made it really clear that the president right now is not supportive of a public commission of inquiry,” Killmer said in a phone conversation this morning.

Killmer has had better luck in Congress, where at least some Representatives support creating a House Select Committee to investigate torture. Although that would be more political than an independent commission, he said, at least it’s something. “There are a significant number of members of the House who know this isn’t done,” says Killmer, whose group has had more than 60 meetings with House members on the issue since June.

The religious campaign has made some headway on related issues, working with Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), chair of the House Select Intelligence Oversight panel, to convince Congress to pass a bill that would require the taping of all interrogations of detainees in U.S. military custody. The House passed the bill last week as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Act. It could be voted on by the full Congress next week.”Our constituents understand the need for videotaping interrogations,” says Kilmer, “and the videotapes have to be protected so they’re an ongoing part of our history. It’s one way of making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

The religious groups also hope to achieve a codification of the terms of President Obama’s executive order mandating that all interrogations follow the rules of the Army Field Manual, and that the U.S. basically follows the “Golden Rule” when it comes to interrogations: we don’t do to others what we wouldn’t want them to do to our soldiers.

Still, Killmer said, codifying this for the future isn’t enough. After all, we had a Convention Against Torture and that still didn’t stop the U.S. government from torturing people.

In addition to a commission that would expose everything that happened and why, Killmer and other religious leaders are exploring the possibility of asking the government for an apology.”I think it’s extremely important,” says Killmer. Other countries have taken that step, such as Canada, which apologized — and paid $10 million – to Canadian citizen Maher Arar who, with the help of bad intelligence from Canada, was sent by U.S. authorities to Syria for interrogation under torture.

“This was wrong behavior,” says Killmer of the entire U.S. “enhanced interrogation” practice. And an apology “would help grow the moral consensus that torture is wrong,” he says, something he assumed existed before 2001, but now isn’t sure.

“Dick Cheney gets more credence than I would have imagined,” says Killmer. “The American people are still wrestling with this stuff.”

Killmer and his colleagues were dismayed when a Pew Research Center poll last spring found that a majority of Catholics and even evangelicals believe that torture is sometimes necessary. “That says we have a lot to do,” says Killmer. His group has put together this short interfaith video on U.S.-sponsored torture which they plan to show at churches, synagogues and mosques across the country, in part to explain that yes, torture really is a violation of all the dominant religions in the United States, and to encourage believers to join the anti-torture campaign.

Whether religious support is ever going to be strong enough to get that official apology is another matter. Although the U.S. has apologized for some things in the past — the Japanese internment during WWII, and slavery — in both cases, it came many decades after the deed. Killmer is cautiously hopeful: “It would be terrific if this could happen much more quickly.”

[W]e never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas — and his scare tactics.

We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America’s disastrous trip to “the dark side” continue to assert — against all evidence — that torture “worked” and that our country is better off for having gone there.

Read the whole thing.

In March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the legal architects of the Bush detention and interrogation policies, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Office of Legal Counsel attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee, former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, and former Pentagon general counsel William Haynes. But he dropped that investigation on the advice of the Spanish Attorney General.

Now, though, according to Público, Judge Garzón has agreed to move forward with a lawsuit against the same six lawyers brought by several Spanish legal and human rights organizations and three former Guantanamo detainees.

Still, political pressures could force Garzon to back down. As Worthington reports, the Spanish Parliament in June passed a law aimed at “ending the practice of letting its magistrates seek war-crime indictments against officials from any foreign country, including the United States,” on the basis that Spanish courts should not judge foreign countries’ officials unless the victims are Spanish or the crimes were committed in Spain.