Bush pushes Persian Gulf nuclear agreement

But critics say the US should go slowly on a deal that would help Iran's biggest trading partner.

The Bush administration is quietly advancing a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), raising concerns in Congress and among nonproliferation experts about the deal's repercussions in a volatile region. The deal to provide the small but strategically located country with the means to generate electricity through nuclear technology could be signed by President Bush before he leaves office, thus making the accord – similar to the much higherprofile nuclear pact the administration reached with India – part of his legacy.

But that would leave the incoming Obama administration with the task of taking the agreement to Congress, where objections over the UAE's close trade relations with Iran – and over the Emirates' history of serving as a transshipment point for sensitive materials – are already rising. A more recent wrinkle in the brewing controversy around the agreement is the revelation by the foundation of former president Bill Clinton that the ruling Zayed family of the UAE was one of about a dozen governments among the Clinton Foundation's hundreds of thousands of donors. With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton picked by President-elect Obama for secretary of State, some observers are citing the UAE agreement as an example of the kinds of conflicts Mrs. Clinton will face as she seeks to further national interests in a world where her husband has extensive personal and business relations.

"Some Republicans for sure will want to seize on anything they can to make life rough for the new secretary of State, and this is exactly the kind of connection involving the former president and his foreign ties that will not go unnoticed," says Michael Hudson, director of Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. "It would be a complication," he adds, "But it also seems implausible that because Bill has got quite a lot of money from the Zayed family and others in the Gulf, that's going to alter judgments that will be made in the government on the grounds of national security and other interests."

Indeed, it is the potential for harming US national security that congressional critics are citing to oppose the accord. And they are ringing the alarm bells the loudest over the UAE's close trade relations with Iran – and evidence that technology and parts used against US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan follow a path back to Iran that involves transshipment through the UAE. "Any [nuclear cooperation] agreement between the United States and the UAE should not be submitted to Congress until, at a minimum, the UAE has addressed the critical issue of transshipments and diversion of sensitive technologies to Iran," says Rep. Brad Sherman (D) of Calif., who chairs the House foreign affairs subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation, and trade. Citing evidence that American-made electronics equipment following this path has been used to make some of the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) targeting US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Sherman says the deal should not even be considered "until the UAE government has cracked down on Iranian procurement networks." The UAE is Iran's top trading partner, with less than 100 miles separating the two and the Emirates' port of Dubai just across the Persian Gulf from Iran.

The Bush administration only reviewed the provisions of the accord with key congressional committees in a hastily called briefing last month. The plan had been for the two countries to sign the accord when Abu Dhabi's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, met with Mr. Bush at Camp David in November. But since then the UAE government has backed off from signing the deal as it gauges congressional and Obama administration reaction.

Since the congressional briefing, one member of Congress has introduced legislation requiring certification that the UAE had taken concrete steps to close off the flow of sensitive materials and financing to Iran before Congress could approve it. Noting the Bush administration is touting the agreement as a model for future nuclear pacts with other interested Middle Eastern countries, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says the reasons for getting the UAE agreement right are all the more compelling.

"We've been told by the State Department that the UAE has already reformed and put in all kinds of oversights and controls, but we'd like to see a track record before even thinking about a nuclear cooperation deal with them," says a Republican congressional aide involved in the issue who could only discuss it on condition of anonymity. The Bush administration, which has been in initial discussions on nuclear cooperation with other countries in the region including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, argues the UAE deal would serve as a model since it includes tight controls on the use and disposal of nuclear fuel and stipulates intrusive international inspections of facilities. But the region's volatility and Iran's growing influence dictate a more cautious approach, the congressional aide says.

"Nuclearizing the Persian Gulf is not something we should be rushing into," he says.

Georgetown's Mr. Hudson says that as worrisome as prospects for a nuclearized Gulf may seem, the incoming Obama administration might also consider how a tightly controlled nuclear power deal with the UAE, exchanging nuclear energy know-how for strict international oversight, could serve as an example to Iran. Right now, the Iranian government has adopted a very nationalist and uncompromising stance over its nuclear program, he notes, but a more moderate government resulting from elections next June could see things differently.

"In a way the [UAE] agreement presents itself as an attractive alternative path for nuclear development plans," Hudson says. "The Iranians could look over and see that the US and international agencies are OK with this technology coming to the Gulf, as long as it's under the right controls. It could offer a way to get beyond how this has become a core national issue for them." But others say that before promoting an agreement that, once signed by Bush could not be renegotiated, the US should press the UAE for a tougher stance toward its powerful neighbor. "We need to remember that everything the Iranian regime needs to hold on to power goes through the UAE," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. "We shouldn't just give up the opportunity to put the squeeze on Iran and to make some headway on a nuclear problem in the region that is everyone's concern."

Cheney, Biden Spar In TV Appearances

Dick Cheney's unique gift for making hard questions easy and vice versa. by Dahlia Lithwick
In an ever-escalating game of chicken between the executive branch and the rest of the world, Vice President Dick Cheney wants you to understand that he has done nothing wrong over the past eight years. In fact, to hear him tell it to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday yesterday, we are all safer for his infallibility in the face of our own complacency. His liberal critics, for their part, answer Cheney's moral certainty by continuing to vigorously debate all the reasons to let him off the hook. What other possible response can there be to all that bristling manliness? History will remember Dick Cheney as the man who managed to make President George W. Bush look like a wimp.
One hesitates to waste too much time deconstructing Cheney's last-minute debater's tricks. The threats and insults stopped being impressive a long time ago. But the vice president's greatest rhetorical sleight of hand may be that he has completely inverted settled and open legal questions. As he snarks his way through his final exit interviews, he takes the position that the thorniest legal questions are the easy ones and the settled ones are still open.
First there's Cheney on the efficacy of torture. In his ABC interview last week he swaggered, "I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the No. 3 man in al-Qaida, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information. There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al-Qaida came from that one source."

Could this be a close call? In fact, the debate ended years ago, almost as soon as it began. You may remember back in 2002, some of us were actually engaged in discussing this issue. Alan Dershowitz at Harvard was poking at the possibility of judge-sanctioned torture warrants. Those charged with setting interrogation policy at Guantanamo were seeking inspiration from Jack Bauer. And boneheads like me were positing fascinating hypotheticals about the possible efficacy of abusing our prisoners.

Well, guess what? The efficacy of torture is not a close question anywhere outside of Fox television anymore. Darius Rejali has definitively studied the question and showed that torture does not elicit truthful confessions. In his book How To Break a Terrorist, former interrogator Matthew Alexander agrees that abusive interrogation techniques don't work and endanger Americans. FBI Director Robert Mueller recently told Vanity Fair's David Rose that he doesn't "believe it to be the case" that enhanced interrogation stopped any attacks on America. And the stunning bipartisan report issued earlier this month by the Senate armed services committee confirms that lawyers in every branch of the military consistently warned top Bush officials that torture wasn't effective. The handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who are still blathering about how well torture works do so in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

What about the legality of torture? That's an easy one, says Cheney, again in his ABC interview. "On the question of so-called torture, we don't do torture. We never have. It's not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross." Yet just a few moments later, when asked whether water-boarding a prisoner was appropriate, he said yes, adding that he was even involved in clearing the technique as part of the interrogation program.
Cheney says water-boarding is not torture. That question has been resolved as a legal matter for centuries and is not actually open to relitigation on ABC News. Water-boarding has been deemed torture and prosecuted as a war crime in this country. It violates, among other things, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the U.S. anti-torture statute. Its illegality is neither an open question nor a close one. Yet again, the handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who maintain that torture is completely legal corresponds almost perfectly to the number of people who could be prosecuted for war crimes because it is not.
Just as Cheney is able to sow legal doubt where none exists, he is adept at issuing blanket legal proclamations about questions that are open-ended and theoretical. Some of his finest overstatements of this past week include the assertion that those prisoners still left at Guantanamo Bay represent "the hard-core." Oh good grief. Even the CIA stopped believing that hooey six years ago. Which brings us to Cheney's biggest whopper of the week. In yesterday's interview with Chris Wallace, he was as blunt as anyone can be in articulating the Nutty Version of the Unitary Executive Theory:

The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.

The claim that "the nature of the world we live in" warrants a perennially unchecked executive branch can be delivered with all the gravitas in the world, and it still amounts to constitutional nonsense. To this end it's well worth reading Absolute Power, in which distinguished legal journalist John MacKenzie takes a close look at claims about the unitary executive. MacKenzie shows how a scholarly constitutional claim about the right of executive branch officials to interpret the Constitution morphed into the aggressively ahistorical interpretation of executive power that Cheney parrots with such perfect confidence. As MacKenzie writes: "The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution."
None of this will matter if President Bush issues blanket pardons in the coming weeks. Nor will it matter if the rest of us continue to invent reasons to neither investigate nor—if appropriate—prosecute wrongdoing by the highest-level officials in the Bush administration. Dick Cheney is counting on one or both of those outcomes when he obfuscates the easy legal questions and oversimplifies the complicated ones. If we choose to be bulldozed into living in his topsy-turvy legal universe, we really are as complacent as he believes.

Prius: It’s Not Just a Car, It’s an Emergency Generator

By Kate Galbraith and Pointer.
The Prius has a new use, and it does not involve driving. The Harvard Press — which serves the Massachusetts town of Harvard as opposed to the university — reported that the car’s battery helped keep the lights on for some locals during the recent ice storms.
The newspaper reports that John Sweeney, a resident who lost power, “ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas.”
Said Mr. Sweeney, in an e-mail message to The Press: “When it looked like we were going to be without power for awhile, I dug out an inverter (which takes 12v DC and creates 120v AC from it) and wired it into our Prius.”

According to the newspaper, “the device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power.” (The Times reported on a similar venture last year.)
In fact, this development, which comes at a tough time for Toyota, which makes the Prius, may not be as strange as it sounds. Mr. Sweeney’s tinkering is along the lines of the “smart grid” technology that many utility executives and other experts say lies in our future. The idea is that the battery of an electric car — a plug-in, in most smart-grid scenarios — can feed power to the electricity grid when the grid needs it.
Even President-elect Barack Obama has endorsed this idea, as seen toward the end of this YouTube clip in which he said: “We’re going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids — then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that’s generated.”
O yes, Rachel Maddow is great, Barack Obama is greater and where do you get them both together? Simpel, watch this:

Mr. Sweeney, out of necessity, got there first. But Pointer has with part 2 of the Rachel and Obama talk the last blast of a hit:
Sometimes you need some inspiring talk to energize.