I Like to Listen

I had NPR going on in the car on the way home from the CT scan of my chest (very fast, not quite as huge as the ginormous machine they use on House and definitely not as noisy or claustrophobic) and got to listen to two interesting segments. The first was on David Addington, Big Time's new chief of staff (replacing Scooter Libby), and there wasn't a lot of revealing info, but I liked this bit:

If Vice President Cheney is an aggressive, loyal defender of President Bush, then Addington is an aggressive loyal defender of Cheney.

"He's very much a reflection of his boss," says Bradford Berenson, who worked with Addington in the White House Counsel's office. "The same kinds of adjectives that you would think of in conjunction with the vice president -- smart, loyal, discreet, tough – are precisely the adjectives that anyone would apply to David Addington."

There have also been less positive adjectives used to describe Addington. One former colleague who would not speak on tape dubbed him, "Keyser Soze," after the shadowy, ruthless villain in the movie The Usual Suspects.

And with this being the unofficial week of Torture, there's also this bit to keep in mind:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, when Addington was counsel to the vice president, he had a chance to implement some of his views on executive power. People involved in White House policy discussions are not allowed to talk publicly about decision making. But they say Addington had a hand in nearly every controversial executive legal declaration related to the war on terror. Addington helped draft the policy that said terror suspects would be tried before military commissions. And he worked on a now-repudiated Justice Department memo that offered a narrow definition of torture.

The second segment furthers Old Fogey's post from last weekend about questions surrounding whether Karl Rove should maintain his security clearance.

Laura Sullivan: There are all sorts of reasons people lose their classified clearance. Attorney Mark Zade (sp?) has handled more than a hundred such cases.

Mark Zade: They have foreign relatives, they hold dual citizenship, they got pulled over for a DWI, you got into road rage, you threw your cat against the wall--I've had that) [ed. note - maybe we can start coming with rumours involving Rove and cats]--you had an ex-boyfriend write in a letter saying I don't think that this person is entitled to a clearance.

Sullivan: But none of that compares to actually leaking information like the identity of a CIA operative.

Zade: The seriousness to which these agencies take the leaking of classified information is up in the stratosphere.

Sullivan: So learning that Karl Rove can confirm the employment of a covert CIA officer to two reporters but isn't losing his clearance doesn't seem fair to Zade.

Zade: That many federal employees that are far beaneath them in rank suffer consequences for far less damaging and perhaps far less breaching conduct sends clearly the wrong message and just reaks of hypocrisy.
[...]
Sullivan: In the end, though, there's only one person who has the final word on who gets to have and keep a security clearance--and that person occupies the Oval Office.