Re: FOOLS INC (Perle, Wolfowitz, et al) Bush supplied no factual material for answering these questions.
- From: "Chuck Hearts Foley" <lymeqweentoo@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 4 Dec 2006 03:46:20 -0800
Chuck Hearts Foley wrote:
The Nation - Nov 13, 2006 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20061113&s=schell
The Torture Election
by JONATHAN SCHELL
The Congressional campaign of 2006 slouches toward election day through
a grotesque landscape of torture and excuses for torture, scabrous
messages from a Congressman to young boys, a Congressional cover-up of
the same, murder and countermurder every day in Iraq (a heart-stopping
655,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion, according to a Johns
Hopkins study), and nuclear fallout from North Korea (of the political
if not the literal kind).
The stakes, as President Bush likes to say--and on this point he is
correct--could scarcely be higher. But they include one stake he never
mentions: the future of constitutional government in the United States,
which his presidency and his party have put in serious jeopardy. The
old (lower case) republican system of checks and balances and popular
liberties, you might say, is in danger of replacement by a new (upper
case) Republican system of arbitrary one-party rule organized around an
all-powerful presidency. That many-sided danger, of course, is the
subject of this series of articles. It is simply impossible to know in
advance when, in a great constitutional crisis, the decisive turning
point--the irrevocable capsizing--might come. We are left wondering
whether we are witnessing just one more swing of the familiar old
American political "pendulum," bound by its own weight to swing back in
the opposite direction, or whether this time the pendulum is about to
fly off its hinge and land us with a crash in territory that we have
never visited before. There are strong arguments on both sides of the
question. Yet there can be little doubt that the election on November 7
will be an event of the first importance in the story. If, by handing
one or both houses of Congress to the Democrats--something that current
polls say is likely--the public breaks the Republican Party's current
monopoly on government power, an important beachhead of resistance will
have been gained. But if the public assents to the status
quo--confirming and deepening the ratification of Republican one-party
rule already conferred in 2002 and 2004 (we cannot count the election
of 2000, since Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote that year),
it will be hard to see where the path away from the precipice lies.
As the decision has neared, every important institution of the
republican system--the Supreme Court, the presidency, the Congress, the
press--has been swept into the crisis. Also critical is the President's
bid to achieve global military dominance by the United States,
presented to the public as a kind of colossal footnote to the war on
terror. The interplay, enacted on the electoral stage, between the
attempt at dominance abroad and one-party rule at home is probably the
most important specific mechanism of the crisis. Its evolution so far
has had many surprising twists, turns, sudden spurts forward and
reversals; and some recent events, though each perhaps familiar in
itself, reveal a striking new pattern. Of special note is a remarkable
yearlong, step-by-step process of trial and error in which the
Administration, far from concealing its abuses of power, including the
torture of prisoners, wound up giving them top billing in its electoral
strategy.
A Political Problem
For some time, the Republican Party has been aware that it has a
political problem. All year, Bush has gotten unfavorable marks in the
opinion polls on every issue but one--dealing with the terrorist
threat. (In the most recent polls, even this measure has turned
negative.) On everything else--for example, the state of the economy,
healthcare, the environment, even "trust"--a majority or plurality of
the public has consistently rated the Democrats higher. In such a
situation the standard counsel of today's political technicians, whose
unalloyed cynicism few scarcely bother even to notice anymore, is to
attempt to "elevate" the single issue favorable to one's party at the
expense of the other issues, thus "framing the election," or
"controlling the agenda," as it is variously put. The aim is not to
persuade the public that your party is right on any particular issue
but to choose among many issues the one on which the election will
turn. The technique is available mainly to the party in charge of the
White House, possessor of a PR megaphone that all but drowns out
opposition voices, leaving them to sputter in impotence or waste their
energies battling on tilted rhetorical battlefields of the
Administration's choosing.
As early as January White House chief strategist Karl Rove issued the
template for the campaign to come in a speech to the Republican
National Committee. "The United States," he said, "faces a ruthless
enemy--and we need a Commander in Chief and a Congress who understand
the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment....
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats." (He should
have said "fortunately," for he planned to use his
accusation--amplified and distorted--to renew the Republicans' lease on
power in the fall elections.) As evidence of the President's successes,
he cited the Iraq War. He stated, "This past year, we have seen three
successful elections in Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces are increasing
in size and capability. Iraq's economy is growing.... In the words of
the Commander of the Multinational Corps in Iraq: '2005 has been a
historic year in Iraq, and it marks the rebirth of an ancient nation.'"
He added, "To retreat before victory has been won would be a reckless
act--and this President will not allow it." And the Democrats? "We now
hear a loud chorus of Democrats who want us to cut and run in Iraq." It
was not the last time we would hear this expression.
The tactic was hardly new. As Rove noted in his speech, it had led to
success in 2002 and 2004. But a new problem arose and grew more acute
during the year. The public turned, slowly but decisively, against the
Iraq War. In January, when Rove spoke, polls showed on average that
some 50 percent thought the war was a "mistake." By midsummer the
number was up to 54. The words of the Commander of the "Multinational"
Corps in Iraq had not been persuasive to the American electorate. Civil
war was breaking out in the country, and the "rebirth of an ancient
nation" was drowning in blood. (In the most recent round of polls,
approval of the war has sunk to 40 percent.) Nevertheless, as the
campaign season began, the public's support for Bush's handling of
terror generally was still at 55 percent. This was the political gold
that had to be refined from the slag heaps of low poll numbers on other
issues.
Fighting the Caliphate
Clearly, a tactical if not a strategic shift in the election plan was
needed. The political riddle that now needed an answer was how to
exploit the war on terror when its alleged main front, the war in Iraq,
was rejected by the public as a mistake.
A first answer to the riddle was found: Define the general, global war
on terror so sweepingly that the specific war in Iraq dwindled to just
one front on the epic battlefield. Around Labor Day the Administration
rolled out its new political line.
The centerpiece of the campaign was a series of speeches by Bush.
Billed as stock-taking on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks,
they were in fact campaign speeches. The most eye-popping one was given
to the Military Officers Association September 5, the day after Labor
Day, the traditional beginning of election campaigns. Too strange to be
captured in soundbites (although many of these, too, were supplied and
recycled in the media), much of the substance of the speech curiously
eluded coverage. For one thing, Bush couldn't stop citing Osama bin
Laden, devoting four paragraphs to direct quotations from him and
another dozen to paraphrases and citations of his words. The result for
listeners was a queer impression that one had stumbled into an Al Qaeda
videotape statement that somehow was being read out by the President.
One almost expected to see Ayman Al Zawahiri sitting cross-legged
beside him. (And, in fact, a recently released GOP ad actually does
show bin Laden making his threats.)
In effect, Bush took Osama's evaluation of his own powers at face
value. In his words, "America and our coalition partners have made our
choice. We're taking the words of the enemy seriously." Bin Laden was
aiming, Bush said in his own voice, at a "radical empire," a
"totalitarian nightmare." Then, quoting bin Laden, he intoned, "'The
whole world is an open field for us.'" If the United States didn't stop
them, the President said, again speaking in his own, concurring voice,
Sunni extremists would "remake the entire Muslim world in their radical
image." They would do it in four stages. First, they would "expel the
Americans from Iraq"; second, "establish an Islamic authority...and
support it until it achieves the level of caliphate"; third, "extend
the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq"; and, fourth,
initiate "the clash with Israel." And that was not all: "This caliphate
would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and
former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle
East and Southeast Asia."
But the Shiites were busy, too, in the President's portrait. The leader
of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, made a cameo appearance with an
anti-American speech, also amply quoted by Bush. Iran and its nuclear
program were brought into the ranks of America's Shiite enemies by this
route.
But could Al Qaeda and/or Hezbollah actually accomplish all--or even
any--of this? There are a multitude of evils that might befall Iraq if
American troops withdraw (and an equal or greater number if they stay),
but no reputable Middle East scholar thinks the conquest of the country
by Al Qaeda is one of them. Experts assess the current fighting
strength of Al Qaeda at several thousand at most. The serious
contenders for power in non-Kurdish Iraq are the Shiite majority and
the Sunni minority. As for an Al Qaeda-led totalitarian caliphate
stretching from Baghdad to Jakarta, the idea was so outlandish that for
days after the speech it went almost undiscussed, pro or con. What is
more, the Shiites and the Sunnis, blurred into one menace by the
President, are historic rivals and, in Iraq right now, mortal enemies
(with the United States weirdly fighting on the Shiite side). Would a
globe-spanning Sunni "caliphate" have the bomb? Or would it be the
rival, Shiite, Iranian empire? Or maybe both?
Bush supplied no factual material for answering these questions.
Instead, he summoned the ghosts of Hitler and Lenin back onto the
historical stage. Hadn't the world "ignored Hitler's words" and wound
up with "millions in the gas chambers" and a "world aflame"? And hadn't
the world overlooked the pronouncements of Lenin in Zurich, and let him
"establish an empire" that "killed tens of millions and brought the
world to the brink of thermonuclear war"? So it would be with Osama,
who now implicitly was menacing the world not only with a multinational
totalitarian empire, genocide and world war but also with a
thermonuclear holocaust.
With these stakes on the table, who would bother to take notice of the
deaths of a few thousand American soldiers or even some few hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis killed in Iraq? Shortly, indeed, in a phrase that
summed up the new strategy, Bush described that war as "just a comma"
in history's grand sweep.
Such was the fare that the Bush Administration was offering as the
election season began in September. The strategy had a historical
pedigree that certainly was much on the minds of both parties. In 1972
Senator George McGovern had run against Richard Nixon on an
anti-Vietnam War platform. At that time, too, a constitutional crisis
was brewing--the one that turned into Watergate and Nixon's resignation
of the presidency. The public agreed with McGovern about the war, yet
returned Nixon to office in a landslide. It seemed that even as voters
understood that the war at hand was a disaster, they didn't want to
apply any lessons from the war to foreign policy as a whole. And so
McGovern was successfully labeled "weak" and "soft"--a stain that the
Democratic Party has tried to rub off for the past thirty-four years
and still has not adequately dealt with. Indeed, calling Democrats weak
and soft on this, that or the other thing became the stock in trade of
Republicans for this entire period, including, of course, the 2002 and
2004 elections, and arguably was the chief reason for their successes.
Searching for a Rallying Point
Still, the unpopularity of the war in Iraq had left a gap in the
formula that needed to be filled. For electoral purposes, the
President's "caliphate" speech (he returned to the bizarre theme a few
times in later statements, then dropped it) amounted to a framework
without a content, a kind of splendid platter with no food on it.
("Stop the caliphate!" would make a bewildering bumper sticker.) Some
specific rallying point for the campaign was needed, some concrete
proposal related to the war on terror, but not to Iraq, on which
Republicans would vote yea, the Democrats nay and the voters would side
with the Republicans. Two candidates were found. One was the disclosure
by the New York Times of the warrantless wiretapping of calls between
Americans and foreigners, a program Bush had ordered in secret. This
was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed
by Congress in 1978, which set up a system requiring warrants for all
such taps. Before the order's disclosure, Bush had flatly lied to the
public about its existence. In April 2004 he had said, "Now, by the
way, any time you hear the United States government talking about
wiretap, it requires--a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has
changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,
we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's
important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot
Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what
is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the
Constitution." But when his new program was revealed and he was caught
out in his lie, Bush, instead of expressing contrition, went on the
offensive, asserting that it was not his act but the Times's decision
to reveal it that was "shameful" and announcing that he had not only
ordered the warrantless wiretapping program but renewed the order some
thirty times. The Administration's political calculation was that any
public concern about his lying and secret lawbreaking would be trumped
by its fear of terrorism. Karl Rove duly included a defense of the
warrantless wiretapping in his election-year blueprint in January.
A pattern had been established. Actions taken in pursuit of the war on
terror but in violation of the law would be exploited for political
advantage.
The second and more significant candidate concerned the handling of
detainees, including their abuse and torture. In the unfolding
constitutional struggle, the Supreme Court, though containing a
majority of Republican-appointed Justices, had struck out on an
independent course in a series of decisions. In the case of Hamdi v.
Rumsfeld, the Court ruled that the President had no right to designate
someone an "enemy combatant" on his own authority but must accept the
participation of courts in the matter. It was this decision that
produced Sandra Day O'Connor's memorable declaration that "a state of
war is not a blank check for the President." In Rasul v. Bush, the
Court ruled that detainees at Guantánamo must be granted habeas corpus
rights. Finally, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the most important and sweeping
of the decisions, the Court ruled that military tribunals that Bush had
set up on his own, self-granted authority were unconstitutional. In
arriving at this decision, the Court set forth a wholesale rejection of
Bush's aggrandizement of his own powers. The Bush order had placed the
detainees outside any existing framework of law, domestic or
international. Now the Court ruled that he had no authority to set up
the tribunals independent of Congress--thus restoring a traditional
check on executive power. Second, it declared that, contrary to
Administration claims, the rules for treatment of detainees contained
in the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees in the war on terror. In
other words, international law applied. Third, it ruled that "the
Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this
jurisdiction," including the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which
forbids torture as well as "cruel and unusual punishments." So domestic
law applied too. It was by now well-known that in a program ordered by
Bush, the CIA had used waterboarding and other tortures and abuses, all
of which, though not mentioned specifically by the Court, now had
presumably been forbidden by its decision.
When the Hamdan decision came down, many liberal hats were thrown in
the air. But where liberals saw judicial rout, the White House again
saw political opportunity. (Others, including David Brooks of the New
York Times, agreed that the abuse issue could be used by the
Republicans to gain advantage.) Now an extraordinary chapter in
American politics began to unfold. According to the Supreme Court, the
President had committed grossly unconstitutional acts. If anyone cared
to notice, he had almost certainly committed impeachable offenses as
well.
Constitutional rulings, not impeachments, are the business of the
Supreme Court, but in the wake of its rulings, it was clear that the
case that the President, even if judged by the strictest standards, has
committed impeachable offenses was greatly strengthened. Articles of
impeachment were drawn up against President Richard Nixon for illegal
wiretapping and for lying to the public. Ordering torture and other
abuses in secret, with self-given authority, would appear to fall even
more clearly into the category of impeachable "high crimes and
misdemeanors." The legality of a war based on false evidence of danger,
though not addressed by the Court, must be considered another prime
candidate. But impeachment is a political process par excellence, and
the fact is that a will to impeach President Bush, though increasing
among the public, is still very weak in Congress, where impeachment
must take place. Certainly one of the prime reasons for this is that
the less drastic remedy for abuses, an election, is at hand. And one of
the peculiarities of the present moment is that abuses for which
impeachment of the President is the logical response are now to be
faced by the oblique method of an election of members of Congress.
Yet once again, Bush, rather than expressing regret, or even defending
himself, went on the attack. In obedience to the strategy of drawing a
distinction between Republicans and Democrats on a non-Iraq issue
relating to terrorism, he sought to make just these abuses, including
the practice of torture, the core of his party's appeal in the
Congressional election. If successful, it would be as if when President
Nixon had been accused of illegal wiretapping, lying and obstruction of
justice, he had, instead of being subjected to articles of impeachment
and thrown out of office, beaten the charge by muscling Congress into
legislative complicity with his high crimes and then gone on to lead
his party to victory in the next Congressional elections. (In
actuality, of course, the Democrats won in a landslide in 1974.)
Torture as Politics
Bush placed the detainee issue, with its de facto defense of torture,
at the center of his attack. The White House hastened to send a bill to
Congress before its adjournment so that the necessary distinction
between the parties' votes could be dramatized in the campaign. In a
press conference, the President pinpointed the heart of the issue.
Whatever Congress did, it must protect "the program." The program was
the CIA program he had ordered in which forms of torture, such as
waterboarding, had been practiced. ("Unfortunately," he said, "the
recent Supreme Court decision put the future of this program in
question. That's another reason I went to Congress. We need this
legislation to save it.")
If anyone doubted that Bush was standing up for the practice of torture
(though of course without embracing the word "torture"), those doubts
should have been put to rest by the following infamous exchange between
him and NBC journalist Matt Lauer.
Lauer: But it's been reported that with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, he was
what they call waterboarded. Bush: Um, I'm not going to talk about
techniques that we use on people. One reason why is because we don't
want the enemy to adjust. The American people need to know we are using
techniques within the law to protect 'em.
The President of the United States, given a chance to repudiate the
practice of a form of torture, refused to comment. Apparently, the need
to keep suspects confused regarding the degradations that awaited them
was more important than the American people's right to know what
outrages were being committed in their name.
But were the White House political strategists right? Would de facto
advocacy of torture be an election-year winner? A debate followed. A
phalanx of retired military leaders came out in favor of continued
observance of the Geneva Conventions and against the abuses. So did
Colin Powell. Unexpectedly, a trio of gallant-seeming Republican
senators--Lindsey Graham, John Warner and John McCain--put up a fight
against the White House. That resistance temporarily spoiled the
political strategy, for a wedge between Republicans and Democrats had
been wanted, not a wedge between two Republican camps. But as all the
world knows, the trio folded, and the bills that passed in Congress,
with the support of a sizable minority of Democrats in both houses
(apparently fearful that Rove's electoral strategy would succeed), gave
the White House almost all it wanted. Habeas corpus was denied to
detainees; no appeal by prisoners to federal courts would be allowed.
(Senator Arlen Specter said the denial of habeas corpus set back the
rule of law "900 years," to the time before the signing of the Magna
Carta. Then he voted for the bill.) No citation of the Geneva
Conventions as a defense against abuses would be permitted. Violations
of the law committed by officials, including the President, would be
forgiven retroactively.
No sooner had this torture-baited electoral trap been set by the
Congressional vote than it was sprung. The Republican Party stood up as
one to accuse the Democrats of being soft on terrorists. Speaker of the
House Denny Hastert charged that the Democrats were "in favor of more
rights for terrorists," whom they wanted "coddled." (What the Democrats
who voted for the bill were really soft on, really coddling, was the
Bush Administration.) Republican House majority leader John Boehner
found it "outrageous" that the Democrats "continue to oppose giving
President Bush the tools he needs to protect our country." Soon Bush
joined the chorus, charging that "five years after 9/11, Democrats
offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless
second-guessing." Then he once again sounded the familiar refrain that
the Democrats were the "party of cut and run."
Acampaign fought out on this ground would at least have had the virtue
of revolving around the questions that are actually the most important
this year. For the torture question really does, in addition to its
immense intrinsic importance, roll into one package many or most of the
key features of the crisis of the Republic. There is the establishment
of a globe-spanning system of secret offshore concentration camps,
including those in "the program," serviced by CIA Gulfstream jets
ferrying sedated, hogtied abductees from one place to another--say,
from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Guantánamo, or, as in one case,
from Stockholm to Cairo. There was also the concentration of power in
the executive, already mentioned. There was the abdication by Congress
of its checking and balancing in obedience to Republican Party fiat,
leaving the executive to do what it wanted unhampered or, when Congress
was called on to act by the Supreme Court, passing compliant
legislation. There was the many-sided assault on the rule of law,
domestic and international. There was the assault on basic rights and
the separation of powers in the name of the war on terror. There was
the brutalization and the flouting of ordinary human decency by the
highest officials, exemplified by the torture itself--and, to give just
one other example, by the President's comments on the Geneva
Conventions' prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity." "It's
very vague," he said in a mocking tone. "What does that mean, 'outrages
upon human [sic] dignity'?"
In the form of the Congressional detainee bill, the crisis of the
Republic thus did in fact move, just it should have, to the center of
the election of 2006. But the opposition, still cowed by Rove's
strategy, had scarcely dared to raise the issue. The malefactors had
done so.
As it happened, however, at just the moment that this crucial debate
was about to be joined (or might have been joined if the Democrats had
been ready to take a stand), the media kaleidoscope twirled, and an
item that Rove never wanted to see anywhere near the "agenda" flooded
the media. This of course was the story of Congressman Mark Foley's
salacious messages to House pages and the House Republican leadership's
history of failure to stop the abuse. And then the kaleidoscope twirled
again, and in a replacement of the trivial with the apocalyptic, North
Korea's atomic test eclipsed Foley's follies. Everyone started saying
that the President's voice had grown inaudible. For the time being,
events had jostled the big megaphone from his hands.
By now, what is uppermost in the minds of the voters--as distinct from
the news media--or what will be uppermost by election day, is hard to
say. But let the record show that as the election season began, the
leaders of the Republican Party, in charge of both the presidency and
Congress, were trying to turn the election into a referendum on
torture, which they favored. And let voters remember that record on
November 7, when by pulling the right lever in the voting booth they
can throw this party out of office.
*
.
- Prev by Date: Re: More SmithKline Crime
- Next by Date: Re: u r really gonna laugh at this
- Previous by thread: Re: More SmithKline Crime
- Next by thread: Re: FOOLS INC (Perle, Wolfowitz, et al) Bush supplied no factual material for answering these questions.
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
