The Hill reports that Waters had originally considered holding a press conference on Tuesday, then later cancelled — placing her in sharp contrast with Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y), who delivered a 37-minute floor speech about his own ethics investigation the day the House was back in session.

Waters did draw parallels between the two investigations on Tom Joyner’s radio show, however:

“The OCE [Office of Congressional Ethics] is poorly constructed,” Waters said. “You don’t know who is charging you with what or brought a claim against you or who brought the information to the OCE … of all the information claimed or accusations brought to them, they think that African-Americans are the only ones who they move further with investigation on.”

In truth, the OCE has recommended that a number of congressmen, both black and white, be further investigated, but the House Ethics Committee has chosen only to pursue those cases against Reps. Rangel and Waters. Waters’ attacks against the OCE reflected a general distaste that members of Congress share for the independent ethics body. In this case, however, it seems her indignation would be better directed against her peers on the ethics committee.

“We have concluded that allegations of improper conduct rest on factual errors and lack a basis in the law,” the memo reads.

First, it addresses the rumor that the administration offered Sestak the position of Secretary of the Navy. “The President announced his intent to nominate Ray Mabus to be Secretary of the Navy on March 26, 2009, over a month before Senator Specter announced that he was becoming a member of the Democratic Party in late April. Mabus was confirmed in May. At no time was Congressman Sestak offered, nor did he seek, the position of Secretary of the Navy.”

Then, it confirms that, as reported this morning by Greg Sargent, the White House enlisted Bill Clinton to see if Sestak would be interested in an uncompensated advisory role in the executive branch, on top of his congressional duties.

“It has been suggested that discussions of alternatives to the Senate campaign were improperly raised with the Congressman,” the memo continues. “There was no such impropriety. The Democratic Party leadership had a legitimate interest in averting a divisive primary fight and a similarly legitimate concern about the Congressman vacating his seat in the House. … There have been numerous, reported instances in the past when prior Administrations — both Democratic and Republican, and motivated by the same goals — discussed alternative paths to service for qualified individuals also considering campaigns for public office. Such discussions are fully consistent with the relevant law and ethical requirements.”

Full memo here. (h/t Marc Ambinder)

This is something of a meta-story, an insight into how confident the RNC is about the health care debate. What gets reported at The Huffington Post as a “document obtained from a Democratic source” gets reported at the Examiner as a sneak peak inside the RNC, complete with a quote from an anonymous “strategist.” Of course, in both cases the RNC is getting reporters to write about what a crackerjack job it’s doing of framing the health care debate. Dana Milbank gets at the really interesting part of this, the man-behind-the-curtain message discipline, in his column about Michael Steele’s speech yesterday.

Anyway, here’s the memo:

To:  GOP Health Care Advocates

Re:  GOP Health Care Strategy

Fr:   Alex Castellanos

July 7, 2009

_____________________________________________________________

The research Chairman Steele has conducted at the RNC on health care has produced some significant new insights allowing us to advance GOP interests in the health care debate.

Following are a few observations based on that work, understanding these views do not necessarily reflect those of the Republican National Committee.

Where We Start

We are fighting something bigger than policies or plans.  The President and the Democrats are selling a cause.  Never mind that their plans will actually increase costs for individuals and the country:

Their cause is reducing health care costs.

To the public, reducing health care costs is health care reform.

Quality:  As Wes Anderson has noted, people are satisfied with the quality of their health care.  Quality is not driving this debate.

Access:  While everyone favors increasing access, access is only seen as a problem because of cost.  Access alone, unrelated to cost, is not driving this debate.

Choice:  Americans believe they have choice; so much so that it makes health care anarchic, confusing, and chaotic.  Choice confusion, they tell us, allows the system to take advantage of them. Though more choice may be a solution, Americans do not perceive the lack of it as a problem.  If anything, they perceive the abundance of choice as a problem. Choice is not driving this debate.

Cost is driving this debate.

We cannot compete with their cause v. our policies.  We must compete with their cause v. our cause.

Our cause must be about what is driving this debate as well.  Our cause must also be bringing down health care costs.

The good news is that reducing costs consistent with free-market principles is not only the GOP mission, it is also a different and better way of doing it than the Administration is proposing.  We only need to congeal what have become our talking points into a cause.   This cup needs a handle.

Language

We need to bring new language to this debate.  If we paint the house the same color, no one will notice anything has changed:

We will still be the same, outdated Republicans who have no new ideas and oppose everything.  We have to bring something new to the game.

We tested new language on the survey.

The GOP Cause

“Republicans are here today for a cause:  We want to help families and businesses get a hold of health care costs and bring them down.  Health care costs every family and every business too much. We all know that and we have to fix that.  Republicans see a new and better way of doing it.

“That’s why we are excited to join the growing number of Americans supporting the patient-centered health care reform movement.

“We believe the patient-centered health care movement offers the best way to reduce health care costs, bottom-up, with patients and doctors in control.

“The old, top-down Washington-centered system the Democrats propose will empower Washington to restrict the cures and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you.

“Their Washington-centered system will end up costing trillions more, not less, and bankrupting the country.  This is what they do – a trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon, our country ends up owing real money.

“It’s time to look at health care reform in a new way.

“The President sees the problem.  So do we.  He talks of making health care more affordable.  So do we.  But we have a completely different vision of how to fix it.

• “They want a Washington-centered plan.
• “We support patient-centered reforms.

• “They want a big Washington Experiment with our health.

• “We want common-sense simple fixes that will yield real results.

• “They want to start building a closed health care system where Washington decides how much money will be saved on health care by controlling the doctors you can see and limiting the treatments and cures your doctor can prescribe.

• “The patient-centered health care movement supports an open health-care system where patients and doctors make those decisions.

• “They want a top-down system where bureaucrats far away end up deciding what health care is worth paying for and what isn’t, and for whom.
• “We want a bottom-up, patient-centered system where control remains with your doctor and with you.
• “They want political and artificial cost-reductions from Washington.
• “We want to get politics out of health care not put more politics in.  We want common sense fixes not politically driven experiments.

• “They want to empower a big Washington-run monopoly to control your health care.

• “We say monopolies are just not natural.  Big monopolies are bad no matter who runs them, whether it is big government or big insurance businesses.

“Ultimately, with their Washington-centered plan, you won’t be able to keep the things you like about your health care:

• “Obama’s plan will put government in charge of the doctors you can see and the types of treatment you can receive.

• “Obama’s plan will cut hundreds of millions of dollars from seniors on Medicare.

• “Obama’s plan will further bankrupt the country with trillions more in deficit spending.

• “Obama’s plan will raise a lot of taxes on middle class families and businesses.  Taxing insurance, taxing sodas, even taxing health care benefits.  It doesn’t matter if your insurance charges you more through the front door in higher premiums or President Obama charges you more through the back door in higher taxes.  It’s the same thing.  You are going to pay a lot more.

• “Obama’s plan will tempt your employer to dump you into a cheaper, government-run health care program.  End of the day, it doesn’t matter who takes your private coverage away, whether it’s your insurance company, the government or your employer:  When it’s gone it’s gone. You are going to lose your health coverage, and then you will see a reduction in the quality of your health care.

“In a nutshell, getting government more involved is not going to reduce costs. It will extend wait times, limit what you can get, cost you coverage; raise your taxes and the deficit.

“They tell us more Washington will make health care cost less.  Really?  Can we stop for a second and ask when Washington has made anything cost less?

“The truth is the Obama-Pelosi plan doesn’t save money.  Their Washington-centered plan, from Day One, costs a trillion more dollars.

“Common sense tells us, something is wrong here: Saving money on health care shouldn’t be more expensive.”

Slow Down, Mr. President

“The Obama Experiment with our health could change everything we like about our health care — and our economy.

“This big a risk, that risky an experiment is not something leaders on either side should rush through Congress in a few days or weeks.

“This is 20% of our economy.  This is our health care and our future. If we screw this up, it could last for generations.  And Congress is trying to do this in two months!  This should scare the living daylights out of all of us.

“Slow down, Mr. President.  We can’t afford to get health care wrong.

“President Obama is experimenting with America, too much, too soon, and too fast.”

Key Message Point:

Even voters who support a “public plan” think Obama and Congress are moving too fast, with reckless speed, risking a huge part of our economy and our health care, when they don’t know what reform would really bring.

If we slow this sausage-making process down, we can defeat it, and advance real reform that will actually help.

Key Message Point:  We’ve got to “SLOW DOWN the OBAMA EXPERIMENT WITH OUR HEALTH.”

Reforms

The following is a menu of other bottom-up, common sense fixes (policy ideas) and new language that the patient-centered health care reform movement might support:

• We support requiring/incentivizing doctors and hospitals to post pricing and outcomes.  In this day and age, why aren’t the cost of all tests, treatments, procedures and office visits — as well as effectiveness of treatments posted openly on the Internet?

• We believe health insurance companies should compete with each other with simple, one-page contracts/summaries so insurance is simpler, cheaper, and fairer.  (Like many banks are doing w/ car or home loans).  And how about incentivizing insurance companies to have simple, one page reimbursement forms?

• We believe doctors should be protected from frivolous, expensive lawsuits so they can work together with other doctors and patients in their communities to reduce unnecessary and expensive tests and procedures.

• We want to change the law so you can take your health insurance with you if you have to change jobs (eliminating expensive and unnecessary insurance turnover).

• We want to change the law so insurance companies can’t deny you coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

• We want to cut out the “Washington health care middle-man,” reducing expensive bureaucracy to produce big health care savings.

• We support (tax incentives?) new paperless, computer-age health care IT systems to reduce the cost of health care management as well as reduce medical mistakes.

• Every American should have equal opportunity to get the best value and buy the cheapest insurance no matter where he lives or whom he works for. We want to change the law so any American can buy the lowest cost insurance available nationwide, not just in their states — whether from insurance companies, businesses, church groups, college alumni associations, or groups like the AARP, who often provide it less expensively.

• The Wall-Mart way to bring costs down is better than the Washington way.  So we want to use consumer-buying power, also called “group buying power,” not Washington price-controls, to bring health care costs down.

• We support effective prevention, wellness, and disease management programs because they will improve our health and save money.

• We support bold new tax deductions for companies that develop new treatments and cures because that is smarter than paying for chronic long-term illnesses we can’t cure today.

• We believe in bottom-up health care savings:  every American should get a tax deduction for their health insurance premiums.

• We believe the working poor should get a refundable, advanceable tax credit to help them get health insurance.

• We want to incentivize and expand practical, down-to-earth reforms that are already working and reducing health care costs all across America.  Safeway’s plan, which gives employees a stake in holding down health care costs, is a model.  Instead of cutting care or shifting costs to employees, Safeway has held health care costs flat the last 4 years, while it’s up 40% for the rest of corporate America.

• We support special “too much paperwork” tax credits for small businesses, so they don’t have to bear the intolerable costs of filling out insurance forms or meeting government mandates and regulations.

• We want to give small businesses the same cost-saving breaks big businesses get by helping them form small business health plans and small business health co-ops.

• And no lifetime health care benefits and insurance for Congressmen who leave their jobs — unless and until everybody else in America has the same.

And From Here…

“… and as I said throughout the campaign, change never begins from the top down. It begins from the bottom up.”  President Obama, Feb. 9, 2009

Unfortunately, what President Obama promised during the campaign, he has abandoned as President.  Instead of putting his faith in the American people and bringing change from the bottom up, he has put his trust in Washington and given us more, old, trickle-down big government. In health care and everywhere else, our President has given us nothing new.  It’s the same old thing, just bigger and more expensive:  One federal pill for every ill.

Such old thinking from such a young President is a disappointment and it is time to put it behind us.  The future belongs to those who really believe change comes from the bottom up — from the American people and not Washington, DC.

You remember Malcolm Nance, right? He’s a longtime counterterrorist who taught Navy Special Forces in the ways of SERE and testified before Congress in 2007 about what waterboarding was and wasn’t. (His short answer: it’s unambiguously torture.) I asked him in an email how the SERE subjected its students to sleep deprivation. “By definition,” Nance said, “SERE is sleep deprivation” because “we are wailing on you nonstop.” When it came to the technique itself, he continued, “We used simple sleep deprivation techniques like lights, music, horrible noise, work and, if we need[ed] to, hold[ing] a student up.” Not stress positions — unless you define the entire program as sleep deprivation.

SERE training wouldn’t involve subjecting a soldier, sailor or airman to these techniques for prolonged periods. “Stress positions were designed to bring a student to a self induced pain and to get them to understand what prolonged standing and physical contortion was like,” Nance said. “None one did it for any length of time. That’s not the purpose of SERE.”

What’s more, sleep deprivation in SERE is a technique for troops to beat their interrogations, not become more compliant for them. “We want the student to feign an inability to stay awake,” Nance said. “We want sleep deprivation to occur so one cannot be subjected to questioning.” Why? Because when someone is forced to stay awake for too long, “he will say anything or gibberish,” which “really hurts the interrogator.” For the SERE program — which, remember, is about training U.S. troops how to defy their captors and torturers — that’s victory.

None of that proves that SERE wasn’t the basis for CIA’s stress-positions-as-sleep-deprivation regimen. But if SERE instructors and officials reverse-engineered their program to keep someone awake for extended periods, either they didn’t understand that sleep deprivation is bad for acquiring information or they were interested in extracting false confessions. This is all back to the point that SERE trainers are not interrogators, and considering SERE training to be about extracting quality intelligence is to commit a category error. And apparently the CIA committed it.

This is the final paragraph of what Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told the International Committee of the Red Cross:

During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told the interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.

President George W. Bush (WDCpix)

The release last week of Bush-era legal memoranda justifying the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of extreme interrogation methods has opened a window on what former Vice President Dick Cheney famously called “the dark side” of the war on terrorism. But despite President Obama’s declaration that releasing the four Justice Department memos disclosed Friday would end “a dark and painful chapter in our history,” at least one other memorandum on CIA interrogations remains undisclosed: a 2007 opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel on what a new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3 meant for the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A former senior intelligence official, who would not speak for the record, said that in 2007, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury, issued a still-secret memorandum authorizing an updated CIA interrogation regimen. The Justice Department issued the document after months of internal Bush administration debate, a Supreme Court decision in 2006 that extended protections from Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to enemy combatants in U.S. custody, a piece of new legislation responding to the Court’s decision and a presidential executive order on interrogations.

“The CIA still seems to want to get authority to interrogate people outside of what would be found to be a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the law,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who cautioned that he had not previously known about the 2007 memorandum.

The still-unreleased Office of Legal Counsel memo spelled out for the CIA what interrogation practices were considered lawful after President Bush issued an executive order on July 20, 2007 that sought to reconcile the CIA’s interrogation program with the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3, which prohibits inflicting “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” upon wartime detainees.” The Supreme Court, in 2006′s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, ruled that Common Article 3 protections applied to enemy combatants in U.S. custody, a determination that the Bush administration had resisted since creating its post-9/11 detention and interrogation policies. Congress in 2006 responded by passing the Military Commissions Act, which reserved for the president the right to define the applicability of Common Article 3 protections for detainees in the war on terrorism. Bush’s order, known as Executive Order 13440, determined that the the CIA’s interrogation program fit within Common Article 3, provided that it met certain criteria, such as the exclusion of practices like “murder, torture, cruel or inhuman treatment, mutilation or maiming.”

But the order did not define which interrogation techniques it now considered legal. Anonymous Bush administration officials told reporters on the day of the order’s release, “it would be very wrong to assume that the program of the past would move into the future unchanged.” As a result, according to the former senior intelligence official, after Bush issued the order, the CIA again asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to review the techniques listed in the revised interrogation program in order to determine their legality, just as the Office of Legal Counsel had done in 2002 and 2005, after previous periods of challenge to the post-9/11 interrogation program.

“The agency repeatedly sought and repeatedly received written assurances from the Department of Justice that its interrogation practices were lawful,” said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. “As others have noted, the detention and interrogation program changed over the years as changes arose in the legal landscape. That included the interpretation of Common Article 3. CIA was proactive in requesting guidance and it was proactive in making changes.”

Hannah August, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said the department had no comment on the 2007 memo.

The Washington Independent has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the 2007 Office of Legal Counsel document and is awaiting word from the Justice Department about the status of the request. FOIA requests can take years to fulfill. In January, President Obama issued an executive order instructing federal agencies to comply expeditiously with such requests. He also withdrew Executive Order 13440 that same month — while he ordered a year-long review of interrogation and detention practices and restricted all interrogations to occur in compliance with the Geneva Conventions-compliant Army field manual.

The former senior intelligence official would not describe what the 2007-era interrogation regimen contained, nor would the ex-official characterize the Office of Legal Counsel’s advice. In the past, according to the newly disclosed memos written in 2002 and 2005, the Office of Legal Counsel relied on claims that the president has inherent constitutional authority in a time of war to order enhanced interrogations; that techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and 18-hour placement in a “confinement box” were not torture; and that use of such techniques in combination with each other still fell short of statutory prohibitions on “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

A statement from Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), then the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on the day of Executive Order 13440′s release demanded that “the Department of Justice provide the Committee with its full legal analysis” of the order. Rockefeller appears to be the only public official to issue a statement indicating the Justice Department conducted such an analysis.

Several aspects of Bush’s 2007 order were not defined precisely in the text. Executive Order 13440 prohibited “willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse” only if they were conducted “for the purpose of humiliating or degrading” a detainee, but was agnostic about whether humiliation or degradation occurring as a side effect of such acts was permissible. It similarly prohibited “acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of the individual” but did not specify what these acts were, nor whether it was permissible to engage in an interrogation technique whereby religious denigration occurred but was not a specific goal of the technique.

In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2007, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden defended the CIA’s re-authorized interrogation program as legal. “I don‘t know of anyone who has looked at the Army Field Manual who could make the claim that what’s contained in there exhausts the universe of lawful interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Convention,” Hayden said.

Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights said the 2007 Office of Legal Counsel memo raised questions about why the CIA felt it needed expanded authorities for interrogation by 2007. “What we don’t know is whether, after Hamdan, that 2007 memo modifies what the CIA is able to do in interrogation techniques,” he said. “But what’s more interesting is why the CIA thinks it needs to use those interrogation techniques,” he said, noting that the Bush administration released 14 detainees from its network of secret detention facilities months before the 2007 memo was issued.

“Who are they interrogating in 2007?” Ratner said. “Who are they torturing in 2007? Is that they’re nervous about going beyond what OLC has said? These are secret-site people. Who are they? What happened to them?”

It is unclear if the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which opened an investigation last month into the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs, has seen the memorandum. A Hill source familiar with the investigation and not cleared to speak with the press did not specify what documents the committee has viewed, but said, “What we haven’t seen to date, we’re likely to see in our study.” That committee is expected to complete its review in the “next six to eight months,” chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a letter to President Obama on Monday.

I am also concerned that the Administration has been inconsistent with the way they have dealt with each crisis. Taxpayer money was used for Bear Stearns, it was not used for Lehman Brothers and now it is used again for AIG. The American people need to know the thinking and the standards behind using taxpayers money to support these private sector institutions. American workers see their businesses suffering and many are going out of business but there is no bailout for them. We also should know why the Administration did not deal with the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sooner.

When the campaign released an official statement Wednesday morning, this passage was removed, as was some other strong criticism of senior management at Wall Street firms. In today’s speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, McCain again made no reference to Bush, and only a passing reference to the “administration” when he says he warned Washington two years ago about the impending doom at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The McCain campaign appears to have a blanket policy of not mentioning Bush. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews made this painfully obvious during a recent interview with McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer, when she refused to say who she voted for in 2004. With Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin at his side, McCain has less concern about angering the conservative base — many of whom seem ready to follow her to the end of the Earth — by being overly critical of Bush.

But McCain still can’t, or won’t, attack Bush, for fear that it will give the Obama campaign an opportunity to link McCain to his own party, by pointing out that McCain has voted with Bush 90 percent of the time. Obama has a free pass to criticize the administration and to run ads showing McCain and Bush together, and McCain has essentially cut himself off from benefiting from the wealth of anti-Bush sentiment in this country. Obviously, nothing I’m saying is new or original, but the fact that we have such a clear illustration of McCain’s predicament is worth acknowledging.