Cheney Bombs in Afghanistan, America

Vice-President Dick Cheney, making an unannounced visit to Afghanistan, was almost killed in a suicide bombing likely aimed at Afghan civlians earlier this week. Sidney Blumenthal at Salon says it’s the least of his problems now:

The questions raised by the would-be assassination of Cheney highlight the counterproductive incoherence and impotence of administration policy. Before the bombing, Cheney was gleefully using his foreign travels as a platform for partisan strafing. After he declared that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of the administration’s Iraq policy aided and abetted al-Qaida, she called President Bush to register her objection to having her patriotism smeared. Cheney’s remark, she said, was “beneath the dignity of his office.” On Feb. 26, a reporter from ABC News asked Cheney if he stood by his statement. Cheney was only too happy to repeat it. “If we adopt the Pelosi policy, then we will validate the strategy of al-Qaida. I said it and I meant it,” he said. The pool reporter noted that Cheney “looks pretty chipper, near the end of a weeklong odyssey.” But after the bombing, Cheney fell uncharacteristically silent.

Well, not exactly silent:

The reporters traveling with Vice President Cheney as he flew from Afghanistan to Oman yesterday were granted an interview with someone who would be identified only as a “senior administration official.” But the official’s identity would not remain a state secret for long.

“Let me just make one editorial comment here,” the SAO said about the vice president’s talks with Pakistan’s leader. “I’ve seen some press reporting says, ‘Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.’ That’s not the way I work. I don’t know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn’t know what I’m doing, or isn’t involved in it. But the idea that I’d go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.”

The SAO also said that “I was very careful” in choosing words to criticize House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Iraq strategy.

The first-person pronoun gave away the game. But it also raised the question: Why did Cheney feel the need to speak on a not-for-attribution basis, and why did the seven journalists on the trip go along?

Lee Anne McBride, Cheney’s press secretary, could not, under the ground rules, confirm the obvious. But, she said, “it was important to provide the press and public with briefings on these meetings, and it was determined that a more comprehensive readout could be provided on a background basis.”

Administration officials concluded that, for diplomatic reasons, Cheney could not publicly discuss private conversations with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Mark Silva, a Chicago Tribune reporter who made the trip, was among those pressing Cheney’s staff for an on-the-record briefing, saying the vice president has been elected twice.

“At the start of our meeting with a senior administration official, in which he advised us that he insisted this talk be on background, we asked him, too, to go on the record,” Silva said. Cheney agreed to be identified only while discussing the suicide bombing at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that occurred while he was there.

Silva credited the White House with releasing an accurate transcript despite numerous “I” references. “But it’s also a measure of how absurd the entire business of speaking as an SAO is.”

Holly Bailey, a Newsweek correspondent, said she was “very surprised at how quickly the SAO laid out the ground rules,” adding that “it was done so quickly that we didn’t have a lot of chance to object.” She said the trip was frustrating because reporters had no more than 20 minutes’ access to the vice president on the nine-day trip.

Cheney’s backgrounder took place as a federal jury is weighing perjury charges against his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, related to his role in telling reporters about covert CIA operative Valerie Plame without being identified. Libby testified that the vice president directed him to conduct the background discussions with Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter.

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