Friday, May 15, 2009

MS. IFILL: The week’s twists and turns on health care, Social Security, torture tactics, and Dick Cheney, we talk about it all tonight on “Washington Week,” a week of full-throated, old-fashioned Washington debate about torture – when it was used and who knew about it.

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): The CIA briefed me only once on enhanced interrogation techniques in September, 2002. We also now know that techniques, including waterboarding, had already been employed, and that those briefing me in September, 2002, gave me inaccurate and incomplete information.

REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH): We just ought to know, what did she know, when did she know it, and what did she do about it.

MR. IFILL: About transparency, accountability, and a secret stash of photos.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: The most direct consequence of releasing them I believe would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put out troops in greater danger.

AMRIT SINGH: This decision makes a mockery of President Obama’s promise of transparency and accountability.

MS. IFILL: And about the administration’s number one domestic priority – health care reform.

MS. IFILL: The Obama administration discovers promises are hard to keep. We discuss why with John Harwood of CNBC and the “New York Times,” John Dickerson of “Slate” Magazine and CBS News, Michael Duffy of “Time” Magazine, and Ceci Connolly of the “Washington Post.”

(Station announcements.)

ANNOUNCER: Once again, live from Washington, moderator Gwen Ifill.

MS. IFILL: Good evening. At times it seemed as if everyone in Washington was on the defensive this week. What did they know? What do they believe? What’s a promise and what’s pie in the sky? President Obama faced all those questions this week, but so did Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was forced to explain whether she in fact knew and approved of illegal harsh interrogation tactics that she has deemed torture. John Harwood asked her about it yesterday.

REP. PELOSI: The CIA misled the Congress in how it briefed us. They did not tell us that – they specifically said waterboarding wasn’t being used when they knew that it was.

MS. IFILL: As Pelosi was defending herself on Capitol Hill, the president was reversing course on an earlier decision to release explosive unseen photos that promised to revive memories of Abu Ghraib. Many Democrats and civil libertarians complained. Many Republicans supported him.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): I think the president really took to heart of the idea am I doing more harm than good? Now the ACLU has a job to do and I certainly respect that, but the commander-in-chief is a unique job in our society and he basically stood up to his political base.

MS. IFILL: So did the ground shift for the Democrats on matters of national security this week, John?

MR. HARWOOD: Well, I think it did and I think we saw a couple of things happening at the same time. First of all, a difference in the politics of the House of Representatives and in the politics of the presidency. Nancy Pelosi picked a very big high-profile fight with the national security establishment in the form of the CIA. President Obama did the opposite. He backed away on the photos and he also, later in the week, preserved the military commissions that he’d criticized during the campaign. I think we also had a lesson in both cases that it’s more complicated – governing is more complicated than campaigning. And accountability is more complicated than simply taking over the government and going after the other side because Nancy Pelosi is now getting bit by the issue of what she knew, as we were talking about. She’s got a credibility challenge that she has tried to rebut fairly forcefully. She says that it weakened her. I think there’s those signs that she’s in trouble of losing her speakership, but this is not a discussion that Democrats want to prolong.

MS. IFILL: So John – the other John – why did they – why did Nancy Pelosi decide to pick this fight? It seemed like picking a fight with the bear or something.

MR. DICKERSON: Well, that’s right. As we all know about – the last administration, the Bush administration spent a good – several years in a big fight with the CIA over the leaking of the name of a CIA agent. And one of the Bush administration officials, when this fight started, said, we came to a gunfight with a knife. And that’s what fighting the CIA was like. Why didn’t she do it? She was on the defensive and she was on the defensive about this meeting. And they weren’t a lot of other people in that meeting. And so she had to say, look, I wasn’t told what the CIA said I was told. And it was really her only target. Now – but she didn’t just say they were wrong about that meeting. They said that – she said that they were wrong across the board at many times and that they often mislead. And she’s on her own. The White House – I talked to some officials there and they basically said she’s going to have to get herself out of this and one of them characterized it as trying to undo a knot by pulling on both ends of the rope.

MS. CONNOLLY: Well, you mentioned the White House, John, and I’m wondering if they’re not terribly inclined to help her out. Can they count on her as we get into a pretty busy legislative session?

MR. DICKERSON: Well, that’s the problem for them is they hope she’ll take care of it because the president’s in a bit of a pickle. If he comes to her aid, then he offends the CIA, who she’s criticized. And the president has a bit of a tender relationship with the CIA because one of the other things he learned when he released these memos from the Bush administration was the CIA was against releasing those memos. So he’s got his own relationship with them. Of course, if he backs the CIA, he’s not backing the Democratic leader of the House. So if she doesn’t get herself out of this problem, they’re going to have to come to her aid because they need her for the inside game. And that’s on these crucial issues that the president wants to move forward on: health care and energy and education.

MS. IFILL: Except that Republicans seem to be kind of – for the first time in a couple of months, at least, kicking their heels with glee. Finally Nancy Pelosi has given them something to beat over the head with.

MR. HARWOOD: She’s a great target for them. They don’t want to go after Obama. Obama’s very popular. Nancy Pelosi – they can try to make a symbol of liberalism and hypocrisy and partisanship out of control. I do think that – and I know some of my colleagues may disagree with me. I think this accelerates the idea that we are not going to have a truth commission because Democrats can see this is a mess if you get into it. You can make the argument that the extension of this discussion, the raising it to a higher plane makes it more likely that everybody’s going to say, okay, we’ve got to get everything on the table. Barack Obama does not want that to happen because of that domestic agenda you were just asking, John, about a moment ago. Nancy Pelosi still has the capacity to deliver the left edge of the Democratic agenda, get through the House what Barack Obama wants. They’ll compromise in the Senate and anything that extends this conversation is going to weaken her ability to do that.

MR. DUFFY: The president changed his mind about releasing more photos of interrogations at Abu Ghraib and perhaps other places. We’re not sure. What do we know about what’s in those photographs that made them do it? And is there any real cost to not doing this, given what happened the last time some of these photographs were released?

MR. DICKERSON: These are photographs of detainees in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The president was going to release these photos and then the commanders started to call him and say –

MS. IFILL: Just three weeks ago he said he was going to release it.

MR. DICKERSON: – yes and in the last 10 days or so commanders said, look, the situation is very hairy in Iraq and in Afghanistan, particularly in Afghanistan. And the problem is a lot of – I talked to one captain, who’s fighting in Iraq, but he said a lot of the insurgents – we’ve just turned them. These were guys who wanted to kill us not long ago. These pictures come out and they’re going to inflame them once again. What’s in the pictures? The pictures, as they were described to me by people – it’s in their interest to make these pictures not seem too inflammatory, but they are of two kinds. One is a kind of frat boy photo with detainees in shackles with somebody maybe pointing a gun at them or taking a sort of a mug shot next to them. But in some of the pictures, they are hooded. Now, we remember how powerful the Abu Ghraib pictures were because some of the abuse took place with people with hoods on. So if you see a picture now coming out, even if it’s a hooded person standing next to a U.S. soldier, it has a real power.

MS. IFILL: Except we survived the release of the last round of photographs. I wonder what it is about these photographs. I guess when you balance out the risk, the risk is maybe this would have stirred up bad feelings all over again. The other risk is that the president looks like he is caving in to the military. Every time they say, oh, no, don’t do that, or every time they say, we want another commander in Afghanistan, for instance.

MR. HARWOOD: Yes, but look how he did not do that on the torture memos a few weeks ago. I think Barack Obama does not want to establish the principle that on a series of close calls he’s always going to take the side that the military doesn’t want him to take. I think this is a political statement on the part of the president that may serve him well down the road. He doesn’t necessarily mind incoming from the left saying, oh, you’re compromising transparency for the name of national security. He doesn’t mind embracing that fight.

MR. DICKERSON: He described it this way, first meeting with Gates at the Pentagon. He said, I see myself as a parallel parker. If I were coming into town, the streets were clear, I can put myself wherever I want, but the fact is there are two live wars. There’re series of things going on there. And I’m just going to try and fit myself in between what’s already there. And that’s what we’ve seen him do.

MR. DUFFY: In fact, when they released those memos a few weeks ago, they said, we’re going to give these out now because we know there’re some coming that we are not going to be able to give up. So is there any cost politically for the decisions the president made this week, do you think?

MR. HARWOOD: He gets a little bit of flack from his base, but I don’t think that’s especially costly. Look, you cannot be more popular than Barack Obama is right now among Democrats and liberals. So he gets some criticism from the left. And we heard the sound bite earlier – this makes a mockery of the promises of transparency. Yes, there’s a little nick you get from that, but I think that’s – in the president’s mind worth the cost.

MS. IFILL: What about the decision today to decide to have military tribunals after all, something he has said during the campaign – go ahead.

MS. CONNOLLY: I’m just wondering doesn’t it start feeling a little bit like switching positions here pretty often?

MR. DICKERSON: On the photos he did a full 180. On the military commissions – it’s a slightly more plausible case. He had voted once for a bill in support of military commissions, though he did campaign –

MR. HARWOOD: Is that making a 90? (Laughter.)

MR. DICKERSON: – that makes it – right, exactly.

MS. IFILL: But a sharp right turn or a left turn.

MR. DICKERSON: And by the way, the constituency at play here doesn’t care. They see a 90 as a 180. Now, the way the White House sees it is they say the following, which is basically liberals in the Democratic Party aren’t what conservatives are to the Republican Party. It’s a smaller group. Where’re they going to go? And finally they basically say, people – when you lose 500,000 jobs a month, people out in the country, they don’t care about torture. And so we’re trying to focus on what people care about and this group is kind of still fighting the war against the Bush administration and we get that, but we’re not going to get too worked up about it.

MR. HARWOOD: I think we also have to point out that when the president took office and very quickly tried to signal a break – very sharp break – with the Bush administration, outlaw some of the practices that had taken place, said he was going to move ahead on closing Guantanamo. They acknowledged at the time that there were hard cases that they didn’t know how they were going to handle. People hear what they want to hear at any particular point in time. People were embracing the change at that point. But now we’re seeing how Barack Obama is handling some of those hard cases and he’s not willing to go where the left wants him to go.

MS. IFILL: When you step back and you look at what the administration seems to be – drives them on this, which is, we don’t want to look back, we want to look forward – you touched on this briefly – when you look at this week, how much is it possible for him to continue to do that? Everything that he’s – every tough decision he’s had to make this week is about looking backward one way or the other.

MR. DICKERSON: Well, they keep popping in his lap because in a lot of these cases there’re court cases that are ongoing that he can’t control. And the Nancy Pelosi thing is a problem because what they do is they look at the Nancy Pelosi issue and they say this is what we wanted to avoid, this kind of back and forth. And basically the problem, also they say, is that normally what you can say is, look, we want to move forward and deal with the problems of the American people, except Nancy Pelosi, who’s in the middle of this, was one of the ones advocating for a look back. And so that’s another problem here, but –

MR. HARWOOD: But her support for that sounded awfully conditional and tentative this week. So she’s nominally still in support of a truth commission, but I would not be at all surprised if very quickly this thing gets pushed into the relevant congressional committee, Senate Intelligence, for example.

MS. IFILL: I can hear the White House phone call to the speaker saying, okay, you got us in enough trouble last week, now we need something for you for us. Okay, while all of this was playing out along Pennsylvania Avenue, one prominent figure in the last administration was stepping up his game, claiming a role for himself as the administration’s chief critic. That man is former Vice President Dick Cheney. He’s been everywhere and his critique never varies. President Obama’s policies, he says, are endangering the nation. This is what he told Fox News this week: “I don’t think we should just roll over when the new administration says – accuses us of committing torture, which we did not, or somehow violating the law, which we did not. I think you need to stand up and respond to that, and that’s what I've done.” So is Dick Cheney the new voice of a demoralized party, Michael.

MR. DUFFY: Listening to this conversation, it did make me think that this week was the best week the Bush White House had had in three years. (Laughter.) But having Dick Cheney out in public right now, talking about the merits of waterboarding is not the best practice by any political standard at all. Normally, when they leave office, presidents – former presidents, former vice presidents go away to write history or more accurately to sometimes rewrite history. Cheney hasn’t done that. He’s stayed in Washington where his grandkids are he’s made something of a regular feature himself. And compared to the months in which he was completely invisible on the final year and a half of the Bush administration, he’s become by comparison a public personality criticizing Obama in this week, saying – he claimed a couple of things. He said because of the way they had rolled back some of the things you guys were talking about prior to this week, they had shortened the odds on another attack, which was quite a claim. And then he made an even more amazing claim. He said, the country really can’t judge the merits of waterboarding interrogation technique that they invented and Bush – not invented, but promoted and Obama has now banned until you really see the results, the intelligence take, what we got. And he called on the CIA to release the memos that would show that. And then he said, if you saw that stuff, you would know that – and he said this, quote, “thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people’s lives have been saved.” Now, even by the standards of Cheney, who has something of a storied record for exaggerating intelligence, this was quite a claim. And I think what’s really going on here is not so much about the past, Gwen, but about the future in very much the context John was talking about. Cheney does not want to have any kind of look back here. He doesn’t want the current administration to be investigated and the previous one. And he’s against it because (he thinks it’s ?) corrosive. He’s against it, I think, in part because he was at the center of most of those things that would be investigated. He was present at the conception and pushed most of them alone. I think he’s loyal to his policies and to the people he ordered to promulgate those policies. And he’s just trying to protect them. But he also knows it might happen and he’s laying down some markers saying, if you go there, guys, and the evidence is not as clear-cut as you think and you won’t like what you’ll find. So this was very much best defense is a strong offense.

MS. IFILL: But who’s he speaking for – interesting question, Republican Party. Our partners at “National Journal” asked more than 200 political insiders, roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans whether the former vice president has hurt or helped his party since leaving office. Ninety two percent of Democrats say he’s hurt it, of course, but a majority of Republicans, 57 percent, said the same thing, Michael. What does that mean?

MR. DUFFY: Well, he’s not doing this for the party’s sake. That’s for sure.

MS. IFILL: No.

MR. DUFFY: In fact, one Republican said to me, here we are trying to turn the page and he’s reaching back from the grave. This is just the worst possible thing that could happen. I talked to someone who’s close to Cheney this week and said, this isn’t about money. It’s not about the party. This is just about the fact that he has one – totally focused on national security of the country. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think he’s trying to make sure that where things go in the future, whether it’s in a truth commission or some – another kind of committee that this will be a mixed bag at best.

MR. HARWOOD: Well, Michael, what does it say about his relationship with the president he served? What do we know that President George W. Bush thinks about what he’s saying? Does he approve it? And is this Dick Cheney’s way of himself controlling the narrative of what happened in that administration?

MR. DUFFY: Well, like I said, they all start to rewrite – to write their histories or rewrite them and the story that George W. Bush may want to tell now is very different from the one Dick Cheney seems to want to tell. We know that the last days, last weeks, last months, these two men had very different attitudes about what should be emphasized. This is one of the reasons, I think, we didn’t see Cheney in the final months because the Bush team felt, okay, enough, Mr. Vice President. You had your thing. We’re going a different way.

MR. HARWOOD: I guess they can’t do that anymore.

MR. DUFFY: Right, well, it’s harder when they’re not all on the same building, right. And I think also going forward their stories are very different. Obviously Bush 43, who’s building his library and writing his book, wants to emphasize the broader aspects of his presidency, including domestic policy, which you almost never hear the vice president talk about – the vice president not so much.

MS. CONNOLLY: I’m wondering, Michael, you mentioned that certainly Republicans are not thrilled and not directing this by any means. It appears to be Dick Cheney solo.

MR. DUFFY: Right.

MS. CONNOLLY: But how potentially bad is it for the Republican Party? Will they be able to kind of brush this off as that’s just Dick Cheney being Dick Cheney or does it become more serious?

MR. DUFFY: Well, we’re going to find out because he’s going to keep speaking about this. I don’t expect him to go away. There are people who are close to Cheney who think this is a bad idea, who have written him and said, don’t do this. This is not respectful. This is unbecoming of your office. You should follow the footsteps of your predecessors. And that he has not taken that advice. Cheney was someone who rarely took anyone else’s political advice, even when it was good. And he doesn’t have great political instincts of his own. We’ve seen that too. So they may say it. I don’t expect him to listen.

MR. DICKERSON: Is there any way, okay, that it might somehow be good for Republicans? Can anybody squeeze some good out of this?

MR. DUFFY: I’ve been trying to. I keep doing the calculation. The only thing I saw was a White House official, Obama official said to me this week, he’s laying down a predicate in case there is another attack, he can say I told you so. And that’s a paranoid view, but it’s there.

MR. DICKERSON: Another White House official called him a dead ender, comparing him to what Rumsfeld used to call Iraqis insurgents.

MS. IFILL: Paranoia, dead enders, my goodness, and there’s yet another uphill battle for the Obama administration – health care. The president says it’s now or never. His Health and Human Services Secretary says she thinks the chances are 75-25 that sweeping reform will be enacted this year. Well, Tom Daschle, who was the first person up for that job, put it at 50-50. But – and there always seems to be a but – the deficit shot up again. Medicare trustees predicted the government’s medical program could be bankrupt in eight years and opponents are beginning to object to the huge expense involved in the government health care solution. The president talked about this issue for three straight days this week, Ceci. I assume he had a plan.

MS. CONNOLLY: (Laughs.) Oh, we think that he did have a plan and in fact, Gwen, there’s going to be more over the weekend because his radio address is going to come back again to the subject of health care. A little bit of what’s going on with all of this talking and events at the White House around health care right now is that the White House realized that there had been a bit of a vacuum and that Republicans and some conservatives were starting to get in and fill that vacuum. They were starting to criticize a plan that doesn’t yet exist, but already developing quite a bit of fear out there in the country about concepts like rationing, socialism, you won’t have a choice of a doctor. So they were able to criticize it before it was even out there. So this is the old politics 101: you’d better get out and shape your message, or else somebody else is going to start shaping it for you. Now, you mentioned the Medicare and social security trustees’ report. That was certainly a bit of bad news this week, but not surprising by any means. These two trust funds have been heading in the wrong direction for some time. It’s demographics. We have more and more people who are getting older and starting to or preparing to collect those benefits as they reach 65 in most cases, and we have fewer people paying into it. But the reason that it got a little worse this time around is really the economy: because so many people are out of work, they’re not paying payroll taxes and payroll taxes go in and pay for those programs.

MR. DICKERSON: Ceci, one of the things that happened this week was there was a big meeting of all the various stakeholders. There was a lot of to-do. A lot of people made a big deal about how they’re going to save $2 trillion. How real of a claim is that and nevertheless how big of a deal was this meeting?

MS. CONNOLLY: Well, this has been a fascinating one. The behind the scenes was that you had some of these major industry players – the insurers, the hospitals, the major doctor groups – who for a long time – they noted in 1993-’94 most of them were opposed to reform. And they are determined to be for something this time around. So they had been working very hard to try to come up with something with the White House to show that they’re willing to make some sacrifice. Now, the interesting thing is that there’re all sorts of caveats in this big announcement of saving $2 trillion and it’s hard to say that it’s very real.

MR. HARWOOD: We shouldn’t bank that money?

MS. CONNOLLY: No, you should not bank a penny of that unfortunately, John, but it keeps them at the bargaining table.

MR. DUFFY: And after they announced it, on Sunday or Monday, they walked it back four or five days later. What happened? Did it just – was this a smoke-and-mirrors thing or just for a fact in the show or was it real?

MS. CONNOLLY: Well, a couple of things happened. One was that the White House – and this is a sophisticated political operation – I think that the White House probably made more fanfare out of this thing than the industry realized was going to occur. Suddenly you had President Obama getting big headlines for extracting this agreement – so-called agreement, and a lot of those trade groups started hearing from their members. So individual hospitals around the country, calling in and saying, wait a second; I’m not willing to sacrifice that much revenue over the next decade.

MR. HARWOOD: Well, Ceci, here’s a thing I don’t understand. You talked about the fear that was being spread, that vacuum that had been filled by some of the critics. I thought this was supposed to be the year that Harry and Louise were defanged, that they didn’t have the same ability to derail this. Business was wanting a deal and some of the affected groups – insurers – wanted to play ball. Is that not really true and are we actually walking into the same kind of a buzz-saw situation that Bill Clinton ran into?

MS. IFILL: Especially with those words, “government run health plan.”

MR. HARWOOD: Right.

MS. CONNOLLY: It’s entirely possible, but the buzz saw might be controlled by a few different players this time around. So while you’ve got some of those major industry groups that are trying very hard to participate in this, you still have some smaller players that are very uncomfortable. Keep in mind – saving money, reducing the rate of growth means taking money away from somebody. Every cost savings is lost revenue for some industry –

MR. HARWOOD: Or taking health care away from somebody.

MS. CONNOLLY: – or taking health care potentially away from somebody. Even if you believe that it’s a system with a lot of waste and inefficiency, in will be a painful process to get to the more efficient system.

MS. IFILL: Quick answer, do we think it will ever be such a thing as an Obama health care plan or is he leaving this to other people to figure out?

MS. IFILL: Okay. Well, we’ll wait and see if anybody else steps up to the plate. Thank you, everyone. We’re done here, but the conversation continues online, your questions, our answers on the “Washington Week Q&A Webcast.” Keep up with daily developments on the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” And we’ll see you around the table next week on “Washington Week.” Goodnight.

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