Nine Years After We Were Lied Into War With Iraq

Those Who Objected Deserve Some Praise

By Meteor Blades, cross-posted from Daily Kos

Rep. Pete Stark

Monday marks the ninth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war and occupation.

The rationale for that war was fabricated in the highest reaches of the U.S. leadership.

First came the lies, so many it was impossible to keep up. Then came the shock and awe, the crudely invented Iraqi jubilation, the torture, the renditions, the secret prisons, the indefinite detentions, the deluge of unaccounted-for cash, the no-bid contracts, the flaccid media, the spectacle of "mission accomplished," the smug claims that there was no insurgency, the lousy armor ...

The endless flow of blood.

There is now a long list of the dead who would not be dead were it not for this war initiated out of bravado, rancid ideology and doctored "evidence." Thousands of dead Americans and allied troops. And, at the very least, 120,000 dead Iraqis, perhaps several hundred thousand. Deaths in any war are terrible enough. Deaths in a war of choice, a concocted war, an illegal preventive war, count as nothing short of murder. The list of the maimed, the widowed, the orphaned is far longer, the list of the psychologically impaired longer still.

Before George W. Bush was voted 5-4 by the Supreme Court into the presidency, those who lied us into this war were already plotting their justification for sinking deeper military and economic roots into the Middle East—petropolitics and neo-imperialist sophistry interlaced with arrogant disdain for Iraqis and Americans alike. When they stepped into office in the footsteps of the mediocrity they had chosen to manipulate, terrorism gave them no worries, as Richard Clarke later explained to us. They focused, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later informed us, on finding the right excuse to persuade the American people to go to war with Saddam Hussein. This they perceived and planned as a prelude for going to war with some of his neighbors. Less than nine months later, the excuse dropped into their laps in the form of Osama bin Laden's kamikaze crews.

From that terrible day forward, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and their fellow rogues engineered the invasion with eager nods from Bush. They saw the chance to carry out their invasion plan and moved every obstacle—most especially the truth—out of their way to make it happen.

It didn't have to. They could have been blocked. Due diligence and some spinal fortitude in Congress might have stopped the war in its tracks. But in October 2002, the Senate and the House voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. Five months and one week later, the bombs began falling on Baghdad.

The blame for that is widespread. But we typically forget those who voted against it.

On this ninth anniversary of the beginning of that atrocity, that series of atrocities, the 156 Congresspeople and Senators who voted against the AUMF deserve to be remembered. This isn't meant as praise for everything they ever did, before or since, merely acknowledgment that, on this, they were right when so many were so very, very wrong.

 In the Senate:
^{Daniel Akaka (D-HI), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Robert Byrd (D-WV),  Jon Corzine (D-NJ), Kent Conrad D-ND), Mark Dayton (D-MN), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Bob Graham (D-FL), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jack Reed (D-RI), Paul Sarbanes (D-MD), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), Jim Jeffords (I-VT).}
In the House:
^{Neil Abercrombie (D-HI 1st), Tom Allen (D-ME 11st), Joe Baca (D-CA 42nd), Brian Baird (D-WA 3th), John Baldacci (D-ME 2nd), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI 2nd), Xavier Becerra (D-CA 30th), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR 3rd), David Bonoir (D-MI 10th), Robert Brady (D-PA 1st), Corrine Brown (D-FL 3rd), Sherrod Brown (D-OH 13th), Lois Capps (D-CA 22nd), Michael E. Capuano (D-MA 8th), Ben Cardin (D-MD 3rd), Julia Carson (D-IN 10th), William Lacy Clay, Jr. (D-MO 1st), Eva Clayton (D-NC 1st), James Clyburn (D-SC 6st), Gary Condit (D-CA 18th), John Conyers (D-MI 14st), Jerry Costello (D-IL 12th), William Coyne (D-PA 14th),  Elijah Cummings (D-MD 7st).
Susan Davis (D-CA 49th), Danny K. Davis (D-IL 7th), Peter DeFazio (D-OR 4th),  Diana DeGette (D-CO 1st), William Delahunt (D-MA 10th), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT 3rd),  John Dingell (D-MI) 15th, Lloyd Doggett (D-TX 25th), Mike Doyle (D-PA 18th), John James Duncan, Jr. (R-TN 2nd)Anna Eshoo (D-CA 14th), Lane Evans (D-IL 17th), Sam Farr (D-CA 17th), Chaka Fattah (D-PA 2nd), Bob Filner (D-CA 50th), Barney Frank (D-MA 4th), Charlie Gonzalez (D-TX 20th), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL 4th), Alcee Hastings (D-FL 23rd), Earl F. Hilliard (D-AL 7th), Maurice Hinchey (D-NY 22nd), Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX 15th), Rush Holt (D-NJ 12th), Mike Honda (D-CA 15th), Darlene Hooley (D-OR 5th), John Hostettler (R-IN 8th), Amo Houghton (R-NY 29th). 
Jay Inslee (D-WA 1st), Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL 2nd), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX 18th),  Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX 30th), Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH 11th), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH 9th), Dale E. Kildee (D-MI 5th), Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-MI 13th), Jerry Kleczka (D-WI 4th), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH 10th), John LaFalce (D-NY 29th), James R. Langevin (D-RI 2nd), Rick Larsen (D-WA 2nd), John Larson (D-CT 1st), Jim Leach (R-IA 1st), Barbara Lee (D-CA 9th), Sander Levin (D-MI 12th), John Lewis (D-GA 5th), William Lipinski (D-IL 3rd), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA 16th).
James H. Maloney (D-CT 5th), Robert Matsui (D-CA 5th), Karen McCarthy (D-MO 3rd),  Betty McCollum (D-MN 4th), Jim McDermott (D-WA 7th), James McGovern (D-MA 3rd),  Cynthia McKinney (D-GA 4th), Carrie P. Meek (D-FL 17th), Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY 6th), Bob Menendez (D-NJ 6th), Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA 37th), George Miller (D-CA 7th),  Alan Mollohan (D-WV 1st),  Jim Moran (D-VA 8th), Connie Morella (R-MD 8th), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY 8th), Grace Napolitano (D-CA 34th), Richard E. Neal (D-MA 2nd),  James Oberstar (D-MN 8th), David Obey (D-WI7th), John Olver (D-MA 1st), Major Owens (D-NY 11th), Frank Pallone (D-NJ 6th), Ed Pastor (D-AZ 2nd), Ron Paul (R-TX 14th).
Donald Payne (D-NJ 10th), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA 8th), David Price (D-NC 4th), Nick Rahall (D-WV 3rd), Charles Rangel (D-NY 15th), Silvestre Reyes (D-TX 16th), Lynn Nancy Rivers (D-MI 13th), Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX 23rd), Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA 33rd), Bobby Rush (D-IL 1st), Martin Olav Sabo (D-MN 5th), Loretta Sanchez (D-CA 46th), Bernie Sanders (I-VT At Large), Thomas C. Sawyer (D-OH 13th), Janice D. Schakowsky (D-IL 9th), Robert C. Scott (D-VA 3rd), José E. Serrano (D-NY 16th,  Louise Slaughter (D-NY 28th), Vic Snyder (D-AR 2nd), Hilda Solis (D-CA 31st).
Pete Stark (D-CA 13th), Ted Strickland (D-OH 6th), Bart Stupak (D-MI 1st), Mike Thompson (D-CA 1st), Bennie Thompson (D-MS 2nd), John Tierney (D-MA 6th),  Edolphus Towns (D-NY 10th), Mark Udall (D-CO 2nd), Tom Udall (D-NM 3rd), Nydia Velazquez (D-NY 12th), Peter Visclosky (D-IN 1st), Maxine Waters (D-CA 35th), Diane Watson (D-CA 32nd), Mel Watt (D-NC 12th), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA 6th), David Wu (D-OR 1st).}
Many good speeches were given in opposition to the resolution those Congresspeople opposed. On the day of the Senate vote, Oct. 11, 2002, the single post on the 5-month-old Daily Kos was given over to the entire speech that Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) had given in the House on Oct. 10. An excerpt:

It sets a precedent for our nation—or any nation—to exercise brute force anywhere in the world without regard to international law or international consensus. Congress must not walk in lockstep behind a President who has been so callous to proceed without reservation, as if war was of no real consequence.
You know, three years ago in December, Molly Ivins, an observer of Texas politics, wrote: "For an upper-class white boy, Bush comes on way too hard. At a guess, to make up for being an upper-class white boy."
"Somebody," she said, "should be worrying about how all this could affect his handling of future encounters with some Saddam Hussein." How prophetic, Ms. Ivins.
Let us not forget that our President—our Commander in Chief—has no experience with, or knowledge of, war. In fact, he admits that he was at best ambivalent about the Vietnam War. He skirted his own military service and then failed to serve out his time in the National Guard. And, he reported years later that at the height of that conflict in 1968 he didn’t notice "any heavy stuff going on."
So we have a President who thinks foreign territory is the opponent’s dugout and Kashmir is a sweater.
What is most unconscionable is that there is not a shred of evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this Administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?
Is the President’s need for revenge for the threat once posed to his father enough to justify the death of any American?
I submit the answer to these questions is no.
Aside from the wisdom of going to war as Bush wants, I am troubled by who pays for his capricious adventure into world domination. ...
The questions before the Members of this House and to all Americans are immense, but there are clear answers. America is not currently confronted by a genuine, proven, imminent threat from Iraq. The call for war is wrong.
And what greatly saddens me at this point in our history is my fear that this entire spectacle has not been planned for the well being of the world, but for the short-term political interest of our President.
Now, I am also greatly disturbed that many Democratic leaders have also put political calculation ahead of the President’s accountability to truth and reason by supporting this resolution.
But, I conclude that the only answer is to vote no on the resolution before us.”

To Congressman Stark, and the other 155, wherever you are, thank you.

Un-Cheating Justice: Two Years Left To Prosecute Bush

By David Swanson, cross-posted from War Is A Crime.org

Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the U.S. government.  She was a member of Congress and of the House Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973 required that "state secrets" claims be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky scandals.  She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice.  And she was an outspoken advocate for impeaching George W. Bush.

Holtzman's new book, coauthored with Cynthia Cooper, is called "Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution -- and What We Can Do About It."  Holtzman begins by recalling how widespread and mainstream was the speculation at the end of the Bush nightmare that Bush would pardon himself and his underlings.  The debate was over exactly how he would do it.  And then he didn't do it at all.

Holtzman ends her book by pointing out that legal accountability can come after many years, as in the case of various Nazis, or of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, or of the murderers of civil rights activists including Medgar Evers.

In between, for the bulk of the book, Holtzman, a former district attorney, lays out the prospects for a prosecution of Bush and others on charges of lying to Congress about the grounds for war, wiretapping Americans, and conspiring to torture.  This is an excellent sampling of the many horrors on the list of Bush's abuses, and clearly the three areas in which Holtzman believes a prosecution would stand the best chance of success.  Her analysis of the war lies parallels and builds on that of Elizabeth de la Vega, another former prosecutor who has written on the topic.  Holtzman adds an analysis of the steps Bush took to protect himself from prosecution in this and each other area.  She also examines his possible legal defenses, finding some of them strong and others easily overcome.

In each area Holtzman finds charges that would stick, if our laws were enforced.  She also finds charges that would have stuck, had the statute of limitations not elapsed, and others for which a couple of years yet remain.  Holtzman believes charges for conspiring to defraud the government with war lies could be brought until January 20, 2014.  She also believes that charges for violation of FISA could be brought until that same date, pointing out that changes made to the law have not provided immunity for prior violations of what the law used to be, and that immunity has been granted from civil suits but not from criminal prosecution.  Charges of torture, Holtzman concludes, could be brought at any time in the future.


Holtzman argues for lengthening the statutes of limitations for grave abuses of power, for creating a special prosecutor, restoring the War Crimes Act, reclaiming protection against unchecked surveillance, recovering missing records, pursuing civil cases, impeaching torture lawyer turned judge Jay Bybee, and looking abroad for hope and change.  She sees some chance of the International Criminal Court pursuing charges of torture.

This book is an ideal guide for a prosecutor with nerve and decency, although we haven't found one in this country in the past several years.  Other than Kurt Daims who is running for the office of Town Grand Juror in Brattleboro, Vermont, which voted to direct its police to indict Bush and Cheney four years ago, I'm not aware of any prosecutors in the United States with plans to pursue this kind of justice.

Glaringly absent from Holtzman's book, despite its 2012 publication date, is any significant mention of the approach that President Obama has taken.  There's not one word about "looking forward, not backward," not even so much as one tangential reference to Obama's public instructions to Attorney General Eric Holder, no analysis of the intense effort that the Justice Department, State Department, and White House have pursued to protect Bush and Cheney from accountability, no mention of the ways in which Obama has continued a similar pattern of criminality -- a state of affairs which, of course, might explain his reluctance to allow the enforcement of laws against his predecessor.

I don't think it's an unfair criticism to object that a book has left out a large but intimately related topic, one that apears to have been carefully avoided.  Partisan prosecution of crimes and non-crimes by Republicans under President Clinton has been aggravated by Republican defensiveness and Democratic spinelessness under Bush.  But it is the Democratic switch to defending all presidential wrongdoing since 2008 that has put the largest nails into the coffin of legitimate rule by law in this country.  Bush's crimes have been legitimized.  Obama has claimed the power to torture as he deems necessary, the power to imprison and rendition as he sees fit, the power to murder any human being including U.S. citizens and children as he and he alone declares necessary, and powers of state secrecy that Nixon and Cheney never dreamed of.  While Bush lied the Congress into a war that a reasonably intelligent 8 year old could have seen through, Obama has made the launching of wars a matter for the president alone.  And that's just fine with Democrats.  Surely Holtzman is aware that this partisanship is a cancer, that it has ruined the power of impeachment and done away with truly independent special prosecutors, and that the purpose of accountability is to halt the ongoing acceptance of crime.

I have to quibble as well with Holtzman's lowballing of the Iraq war death count by two orders of magnitude.  I know everybody does it, but I still find it grotesque.

And yet I have to strongly recommend that this book be read and presented to every prosecutor in this country, including the seemingly shameless Eric Holder.  We've got 23 months.

Republican Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

Being self reflective, expressing remorse, apologizing for causing harm.  These are characteristics of an evolved, mature person.  Right?  We certainly would want our political leaders to have the strength and confidence to be able to admit their own and the nation's mistakes, shoulder blame when warranted, and change course when necessary.  Wouldn't we?  Unfortunately, these qualities are not a part of the Republican DNA.  For them they are signs of weakness, hewing too close to what Jeanne Kirkpatrick criticized as the unforgivable sin of "blaming America first."

The last Republican Administration lied and manipulated us into a war based on grounds that proved illusory, approved torture and other human rights abuses, unnecessarily cost our country billions of dollars, caused untold numbers of casualties, and undermined their own avowed goal of thwarting the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Did they ever admit their mistakes much less apologize for their monumentally destructive conduct?

On the contrary, since leaving office Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice have bragged and boasted about their policies, and have tried to take credit for whatever success President Obama has had.  And when they were still in power we were treated to this, um, awkward moment:



It doesn't get any better with the current crop of Republican leaders.  Mitt Romney's book is actually called "No Apology," in which he falsely accuses President Obama of going around the world apologizing for America, a dubious claim he repeats often on the campaign trail.  ("Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined.")

President Obama did apologize for the burning of copies of the Koran by American personnel at a NATO military base in Afghanistan.  In the wake of increasing violence over the incident, Obama  expressed "deep regret," extended his "sincere apologies" to Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people, and promised "to take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those responsible."

This was too much for the GOP. 

Newt Gingrich is not one to apologize for anything.  (Recall his rationalization for an extra-marital affair -- that it was due to his excessive patriotism.)  He said Obama's apology was an “outrage,” and  later gave this advice to the Afghans, “You know, you’re going to have to figure out how to live your own miserable life… Because you clearly don’t want to learn from me how to be unmiserable."

Mitt Romney was also troubled, saying that for many people the apology "sticks in their throat."  According to Romney, since we have done so much for the Afghan people in helping them "achieve freedom," to "apologize at a time like this is something which is very difficult for the American people to countenance."

And then there was Rick Santorum, spewing his typically illogical and sanctimonious claptrap

I don’t think the president should apologize for something that was clearly inadvertent. What you should lay out is the president saying this was inadvertent. This was a mistake and there was no deliberate act, there was no meant to disrespect. This was something that, that occurred that, that should not have occurred, but it was an accident and leave it at that. I think you highlight it when you, when you apologize for it. You, you make it sound like it was something that you should apologize for. And there is not—there was no act that needed an apology. It was an inadvertent act and it should be left at that and I think the response has—needs to be apologized for by, by Karzai and the Afghan people of, of attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and, and overreacting to this, to this inadvertent mistake. That, that is, that is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did.

I'll leave it to Amy Davidson to expound:

Maybe Santorum and his fellow-candidates have been trapped in the kindergarten-delinquent classroom of the Republican primaries for so long that they think the same rules, and illogic, that help decide who the not-Romney of the week is apply everywhere. But Afghanistan is a real and dangerous place; more than two dozen people have died in the violence, including two Americans, who were assassinated in the Interior Ministry. (The Afghan government reportedly did apologize for that.) The senselessness of the response does not take away from the necessity of an apology, or from its grace.

U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, stated what should be obvious:  "We admit our mistake, we ask for forgiveness, we seek to move on."  And, as Amy Davidson concludes:  

In apologizing, we remind ourselves who we are. We also learn more about where we are, who we are talking to, and our circumstances. Having done so—done the right thing—we may reasonably conclude that we can make our apologies, and leave.

As We Leave Iraq, Remember How We Got In

By Eric Alterman.  This article was published by Center for American Progress

Two weeks ago in this space [at Center for American Progress], I employed the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to examine the unhappy precedent set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in failing to level with the American people about the level of conflict between the United States and the Axis Powers that preceded the attack.

Using this analogy, and speaking of the manner in which President Lyndon B. Johnson deliberately deceived the nation about the imaginary second Gulf of Tonkin incident and thereby entangled the nation in the unwinnable Vietnam War, I noted Sen. J. William Fulbright later remarked that “FDR’s deviousness in a good cause made it much easier for [LBJ] to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause.”

The consequences of President Johnson’s campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself. And while there is no reason to minimize either the level of lying or its consequences, one cannot be impressed by the refusal of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to learn from his mistake.

As we salute the final American soldiers leaving Iraq, we also remember the enormous costs paid not only by our soldiers and our nation but also denizens of the region, millions of whom were turned into refugees and injured, hundreds of thousands of whom were killed, and countless who were tortured or otherwise abused. But it behooves us to recall the underhanded manner in which President Bush and Vice President Cheney manipulated a quiescent press corps into making it appear as if an American invasion of a nation that had no intention of harming us (and next-to-no capacity to do so, regardless of intentions, as it turned out) was warranted.

At the same time, if we care about our nation’s ability to act as a democracy, we need to ask ourselves and our mainstream media hard questions about how it happened. To do so, I return to some of the research I undertook for When Presidents Lie (where specific citations for all of the quotes below can be found).

The almost ostentatious lack of concern for veracity was evident in almost every area of governance but was most prominent in the administration’s foreign policy pronouncements. Recall the famous (albeit anonymous) Bush press aide who, in response to a string of revelations of falsehoods relating to the president’s reasons for the invasion, replied, “The President of the United States is not a fact-checker.”

Yet the case President Bush made to convince the nation to embark on its first-ever “preventative” war was riddled with deception from start to finish. The examples of purposeful fraud in the Bush White House’s portrayal of the level of alleged threat to Americans’ safety and security posed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein are so extensive that only a few examples can be offered here.


For instance, in September 2002, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush claimed, “I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied—finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic—the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]—that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.” In fact, the estimate to which President Bush was referring was more than a decade old and was made before Iraq’s military capabilities were decimated in the Gulf War.

The president’s then-press secretary, Ari Fleischer, tried to claim in The Washington Post that “It was in fact the International Institute for Strategic Studies that issued the report concluding that Iraq could develop nuclear weapons in as few as six months.” But that report, which was unavailable at the time President Bush originally made his claim, did not support his statement either.

In a speech to the nation, President Bush also added, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,” an alliance that “could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” But this claim, too, was wholly unsupported and contradicted by CIA intelligence. The testimony, declassified after President Bush’s speech, rated the possibility as “low” that Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological weapons attack against the United States but might take the “extreme step” of assisting terrorists if provoked by a U.S. attack.

In the same speech President Bush warned the nation that Iraq possessed a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.” But a CIA report suggested that the fleet was more of an “experiment” and “attempt” and labeled it a “serious threat to Iraq’s neighbors and to international military forces in the region.” The report said nothing about the fleet having sufficient range to threaten the United States.

President Bush’s repeated acts of dishonesty did not become widely known to the public until the famous controversy regarding “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address, referring to the story he told about Iraq’s alleged purchase of “yellow-cake” uranium from the African nation of Niger. But the focus on the mere “16 words” by the media was most notable for the successful spin that the White House managed to put on the story.

It wasn’t that these 16 words alone in the president’s State of the Union message were false. Much of what was presented as evidence for the American attack on Iraq dissipated upon receiving postwar scrutiny. Some of these examples derived, no doubt, from honest errors, relating to the difficulty of accurately assessing decidedly murky intelligence. But President Bush and his staff could easily have communicated the communicated the complexity of this judgment to the country had honesty been among their primary concerns.

In fact, they purposely argued on exactly the opposite: certainty of knowledge where none was possible. The president and his advisers were virtually unanimous in insisting that the threat facing the United States from Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction was all but inarguable. Just a few examples suffice:

• “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” — President George W. Bush, address to the nation, March 17, 2003.
• “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, August 26, 2002.
• “We know they have weapons of mass destruction. … There isn’t any debate about it. [It is] beyond anyone’s imagination that U.N. inspectors would fail to find such weapons if they were given the opportunity.” — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, September 2002.
• “I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there, and the evidence will be forthcoming.” — Secretary of State Colin Powell, remarks to reporters, May 4, 2003.
• “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” September 6, 2002.

These statements are all demonstrably false, as the president’s own weapons inspections team judged them to be. While many in and out of government shared the misperception that Iraq might be in possession of such weaponry, only the Bush administration—supported by the Blair government in Britain—insisted that there could be no possible room for disagreement in assessing the conflicting shards of evidence. Indeed, a number of experts within the U.S. government itself were fully aware of how sketchy and incomplete were the government sources about Iraq’s WMD program, but these people were either ignored or purposely discredited.

For instance, a secret September 2002 report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency informed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has—or will—establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities,” according to U.S. officials interviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

Also, according to Patrick Lang, former head of human intelligence at the CIA, when Bruce Hardcastle, a defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and counterterrorism, explained to Bush officials that they were misreading the evidence, the Bush administration not only removed Hardcastle from his post:

They did away with his job. They wanted just liaison officers who were junior. They didn’t want a senior intelligence person who argued with them. Hardcastle said, ‘I couldn’t deal with these people.’ They are such ideologues that they knew what the outcome should be and when they didn’t get it from intelligence people they thought they were stupid. They start with an almost pseudo-religious faith. They wanted the intelligence agencies to produce material to show a threat, particularly an imminent threat. Then they worked back to prove their case. It was the opposite of what the process should have been like, that the evidence should prove the case.

Greg Thielman, the former head of the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, likewise observed, “What everyone in the intelligence community knew was that the White House couldn’t care less about any kind of information that there were no WMDs or that the U.N. inspectors were very effective. Everyone knew the White House was deaf to that input. It was worse than pressure; they didn’t care.”

Despite being disproven by its own experts, the Bush administration attempted to maintain the fiction that the president’s prewar arguments and warnings had been borne out with false claims of imaginary discoveries. When asked in the summer of 2003, “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?”, President Bush replied, “We found them.” Vice President Cheney, too, claimed months later, “Conclusive evidence now demonstrates that Saddam Hussein did in fact have weapons of mass destruction.”

Finally, when pressed by ABC News’s Diane Sawyer to address the disjunction between his prewar claims and his postwar discoveries, President Bush laughed off the reporter’s distinction between desire and capability. “What’s the difference?” he asked. Later, in his third State of the Union address, instead of acknowledging to the nation the misguided nature of his previous warnings following these revelations, President Bush attempted a rhetorical sleight of hand, speaking not of Hussein’s actual weaponry but of something he termed “weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program-activity.”

All of the information presented here was available in open, mainstream sources published by early 2004. How much happier and healthier the world would be if the media had simply carried out their collective responsibility and held the administration accountable for a simple matter such as truth. Who knows whether the Arab Spring might have made it to Iraq and deposed that dictator without the unending catastrophe caused by President Bush and Vice President Cheney’s hubris and dishonesty and the fecklessness of the people whose job it was to prevent its happening.

History may not repeat itself but it is a rule of thumb that the sequel is almost always worse than original. The consequences of LBJ’s deception were far worse than those of FDR’s. But sadly for everyone involved, President Bush’s trumps them all.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast. His newest book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama. This column won the 2011 Mirror Award for Best Digital Commentary.

Neocon Nightmare At The GOP Debate

David Addington

First the GOP audience cheered for executions, then for letting the uninsured die, and then for waterboarding.  At the most recent debate, they applauded panel member David Addington -- the alleged mastermind behind the Bush Administration's most extreme positions on executive power and the use of torture and other human rights violations.  Have they no shame?  And what about CNN?  Have they given up all pretense of being a mainstream media operation?  CNN refused to raise critical questions when these guys were running amok in the Bush Administration, and now they treat this sorry collection of discredited neo-conservatives, including Addington, Paul Wolfowitz, and, for old times sake, Ed Meese, as "experts," perfectly qualified to ask potential presidential candidates questions on national security.  Never mind that it is they who should be asked questions -- but in the dock, not on CNN.  RJ Eskow has the gory details below.  -- Lovechilde

Rogue's Gallery: CNN's Ideologically Rigid, Scandal Tainted, Ethics-Investigation-Haunted GOP Debate "Panel"

By Richard (RJ) Eskow, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

The story just won't die. People keep commenting on the near-Stalinist level of ideological purity displayed by CNN"s choice of "expert" questioners at last week's Republican national security debate. The network's Neocon Politburo then dutifully proceeded to interrogate the GOP candidates about their devotion to the Cause.

It was an emotional moment, a kind of Big Chill for the Project for a New American Century gang. After all, these characters hadn't been seen in public together since the Bush Days. It wouldn't have been surprising to see Ahmed Chalabi carrying a tray of hors d'ouevres.

Time and time again the neocons were proven spectacularly and tragically wrong. Remember "We'll be welcomed as liberators"? Or the claim that Iraq will be a "cakewalk"? Nobody has believed a word they've said since 2005. Nowhere on Earth are their words given an ounce of credence.
Nowhere, that is, except CNN. We haven't seen national security commentary with so little credibility since Judith Miller interviewed "Curveball."

People are understandably outraged by CNN's ideological extremism, and by its willingness to discard even the thinnest veneer of journalistic objectivity. But there's another cloud over this panel: a cloud of scandals, criminal investigations, and ethical lapses.

David Addington. Paul Wolfowitz. Ed Meese. It's a Rogue's Gallery of government officials gone wild, a motley crew of the short-sighted, the benighted, and the nearly-indicted.

Or, as CNN calls them, "experts."


CNN and the Right: Partners Again

CNN cosponsored one debate with the Tea Party, but maybe that group wasn't extreme enough. This time around CNN's cosponsors were the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, radical-right organizations that played an active role in misleading the American people into a bloody and costly war. They accomplished that mission. Now these groups are pushing new disinformation campaigns like the one that asserts that climate change is a hoax.

Steve Clemons says that CNN's choice of partners means that the old GOP foreign policy wing represented by Republicans like Lugar, Hagel, and even Kissinger is "an endangered species." Personally, I'd say it's deader than the dodo bird. CNN has all but officially declared its members "non-persons." If a Republican wants to get on CNN today, their résumé better include corruption or scandal.

The words "corruption" and "scandal" can only mean one thing: ladies and gentlemen, it's time to meet our panelists.

Meese the Honorable

The first question was asked by Ronald Reagan's former attorney general, a gentleman Wolf Blitzer described as "the honorable Ed Meese."

Honorable?   As one report put it:

No other member of the Reagan administration, with the exception of Oliver North, was as tainted by scandal as Edwin Meese III ... At one point in his tenure as attorney general Meese was under investigation by three special prosecutors, each inquiring into separate allegations of influence peddling, bribery, and cover-up in the Iran-Contra affair. Though Meese was never charged with any crime, the last of the special investigators said that Meese "had probably broken conflict of interest and income-tax laws, though none of the indictments were worthy of prosecution."

Meese was also investigated for possible bribery and influence peddling regarding an oil pipeline... in Iraq. He was deeply involved in the Iran/Contra scandal. Documents were destroyed during Meese's own purported 'investigation' of those crimes, and Meese refused a request for help from the FBI. Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh later called his actions "an effort to obstruct a congressional inquiry.”

Several other investigations noted probable crimes committed by Reagan Administration officials but inexplicably deemed them, like Meese's, "unworthy of prosecution." Others found evidence of criminality that was outside the scope of their investigations. Still, even the most indifferent investigation from those years is an improvement over today's Justice Department, which prefers to simply ignore evidence of criminal wrongdoing by government officials.

The "honorable" Mr. Meese asked the candidates, "Shouldn't we have a long-range extension of the investigative powers contained in the PATRIOT act so that our law enforcement officers can have the tools that they need?"

Objection! Leading the witness! That's always unacceptable, especially from someone who should've been in the dock. Needless to say, Meese's mini-brief for continued suspension of our civil liberties was received with appropriate warmth and enthusiasm by candidates and broadcasters alike.

Torture Man

Chris Hayes was understandably outraged at the inclusion of David Addington, the lawyer employed by Dick Cheney to build specious arguments for deceptive war and illegal torture. Addington's even guiltier of promoting torture than the much-criticized John Yoo, who wrote his now-infamous memo under Addington's supervision.

Addington also pushed for illegal and unconstitutional actions such as "black bag" detentions, warrantless surveillance, and impeding Congressional oversight of intelligence. Colin Powell reportedly remarked that Addington "doesn't care about the Constitution" -- and it shows.

Mr. Addington would undoubtedly have been investigated for criminal violations of law and abuse of power at any other point in our history. Addington repeatedly advised other government officials to ignore both the law and their Constitutional obligations in order to pursue the agenda of his immediate boss, Dick Cheney.

This week he emerged from a long public silence to ask the candidates about "U.S. interests" in the Middle East.

Puppetry of the Panelist

Compared to the unethical and potentially illegal actions of panelists Meese and Addington, a questioner like the American Enterprise Institute's Fred Kagan comes across like a beacon of moral rectitude. Kagan's merely been wrong about Iraq war policy, consistently and repeatedly, while displaying no signs of remorse for his errors.

Kagan helped lead a pseudo-Iraq Study Group for the American Enterprise Institute, after the one created by Washington's leaders displayed insufficient ideological purity. He also seems to have a propensity for letting himself be used as a media puppet for generals who are trying to undermine their civilian leadership by pushing their own preferred strategies in the press.

Kagan stands head and shoulders above some of his co-questioners, if only because he's never been investigated by a special prosecutor or special panel. He's never been charged with wrongdoing, but he's sure been wrong.

A lot.

Call Them Irresponsible

Although the panel was well-stocked with the mendacious, the error-prone, and the scandal-ridden, it still seemed strangely incomplete. Where was Curveball?

CNN violated journalistic ethics by allowing these biased and tainted questioners to participate in the debate. But, on the plus side, it was thoughtful of them to pick people whose records would put current Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich at ease.

As the Washington Post reported in 1997, Gingrich's own ethics scandal led to his unprecedented punishment, a $300,000 fine to settle charges of Federal tax law violations and lying to Congressional investigators.

The Wolf Pack

Our last panelist is none other than Paul Wolfowitz, that key architect of Bush's disastrous Iraq war who was immortalized on camera licking his comb and then using it to flatten a cowlick. Apparently the shampoo that washes away conscience and moral legitimacy also leaves you with split ends and flyaway hair.

Wolfowitz capped his mismanagement of the Iraq war by leaving the Bush administration to serve as President of the World Bank. There he became embroiled in scandal after giving preferential treatment to his then-girlfriend, an employee of the Bank. An Ad Hoc Group found that Wolfowitz had violated a number of internal Bank rules, as well as its ethical Code of Conduct, with his favoritism toward his lady friend and his public attacks on the investigation into his behavior.

The panel found that Wolfowitz "placed his own personal interests in opposition to that of the institution," and in so doing "undermined ... legal safeguards." It concluded that he "did not agree" with the advice of competent lawyers, so he "instead sought an inadequate review ... after the fact." (Where's Addington when you need him?)

Most of all, the panel concluded that Wolfowitz "saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards do not apply." They concluded that Wolfowitz had "questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self-interest."

Sound familiar?

The investigators also expressed concern about "one central theme" that ran through Wolfowitz's self-justifications: his repeated and unfounded assertions that "blame for the current situation lies with others."

Neocons never take responsibility for their own behavior. But then, why should they? They never get indicted. These days they're not even investigated. They know the only "time" they're ever going to serve is onscreen, in the warm glow of CNN's lights. And when the lights go down and the cameras are off, they're ushered back to the green room to munch on snacks and sip coffee while their makeup's being removed.

May I offer you an hors d'ouevre, Mr. Wolfowitz?

Questions For Cheney

As Dick Cheney does the book tour circuit, unencumbered by any fear of legal liability (see Author of "In My Time" Should Be Doing Time), reporters should use their access to confront him about the more controversial aspects of his legacy.

Dan Froomkin provides a helpful list of questions he needs to be asked:

• How Can You Possibly Not Call It Torture? And Just How Involved In It Were You? 
• Why Torture Detainees If, On Top Of Everything Else, It Doesn't Even Work?
• What Do You Consider A Violation Of Human Dignity, Exactly?
• At What Precise Moment Did You Conclude That War With Iraq Was Inevitable?
• Did You Tell Scooter Libby To Leak Valerie Plame's Identity As A CIA Agent To The Press? 
• Just How Much Surveillance Do You Think The Government Can Do Without A Warrant?
• What About All The Spectacular Blunders You Don't Mention In Your Book?  
• Who Was Really In Charge The Morning Of 9/11?
•  Are You Familiar With A Man By The Name Of Karl Rove?
• How Much Had You Had To Drink Before You Shot Your Friend In The Face?
• How Much Did You Know About Halliburton's Massive Bribery Scheme In Nigeria?

[Related post:  My Submission To The George Bush Facebook Contest]

Author Of "In My Time" Should Be Doing Time

It is unfortunate, indeed unforgivable, that the current administration is so determined to look forward, not backward, that we have to endure yet another self-congratulatory account of the criminal conspiracy known as the Bush Administration.  (See previously, Bush Rehab; Known Knowns.)

Dick Cheney, like the other members of the cabal, is not only free to write a memoir that admits torture, wiretapping and other high crimes, without any fear of investigation, much less prosecution, but he has the temerity to promote sales by insisting that it would have been "unethical and immoral" not to have done these things, and to insist that he would unhesitatingly do it again.  Instead of a meaningful reckoning that would have quashed such arrogant, offensive and dangerous claptrap, we get a book tour.

Glenn Greenwald sums it up well:

Less than three years ago, Dick Cheney was presiding over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from a war of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law, all of which resulted in his leaving office as one of the most reviled political figures in decades. But thanks to the decision to block all legal investigations into his chronic criminality, those matters have been relegated to mere pedestrian partisan disputes, and Cheney is thus now preparing to be feted -- and further enriched -- as a Wise and Serious Statesman with the release of his memoirs this week: one in which he proudly boasts (yet again) of the very crimes for which he was immunized.  As he embarks on his massive publicity-generating media tour of interviews, Cheney faces no indictments or criminal juries, but rather reverent, rehabilitative tributes.

How Washington Lost Faith In America's Courts

By Karen J. Greenberg, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus.  The event that “changed everything” did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most people realize.  On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts.

If, in fact, we are a “nation of laws,” you wouldn’t know it from Washington’s actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country’s increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.

Clearly, a key factor in that decision was a growing belief, widely shared within the national-security establishment, that none of our traditional or even newly created tribunals, civilian or military, could have handled a bin Laden trial.  Washington’s faith went solely to Navy SEALs zooming into another country’s sovereign airspace on a moonless night on a mission to assassinate bin Laden, whether he offered the slightest resistance or not.  It evidently seemed so much easier to the top officials overseeing the operation -- and so much less messy -- than bringing a confessed mass murderer into a courtroom in, or even anywhere near, the United States.

The decision to kill bin Laden on sight rather than capture him and bring him to trial followed hard on the heels of an ignominious Obama administration climb-down on its plan to try the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, in a federal court in New York City.  Captured in Pakistan in May 2003 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, his proposed trial was, under political pressure, returned to a military venue earlier this year.

Given the extraordinary record of underperformance by the military commissions system -- only six convictions in 10 years -- it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the United States has little faith in its ability to put on trial a man assumedly responsible for murdering thousands.

And don’t assume that these high-level examples of avoiding the court system are just knotty exceptions that prove the rule.  There is evidence that the administration’s skepticism and faint-heartedness when it comes to using the judicial system risks becoming pervasive.


Pushing Guilt Before Trial

Needless to say, this backing away from courts of law as institutions appropriate for handling terrorism suspects began in the Bush-Cheney years.  Top officials in the Bush administration believed civilian courts to be far too weak for the Global War on Terror they had declared.  This, as they saw it, was largely because those courts would supposedly gift foreign terrorist suspects with a slew of American legal rights that might act as so many get-out-of-jail-free cards.

As a result, despite a shining record of terrorism convictions in civilian courts in the 1990s -- including the prosecutions of those responsible for the 1993 attempt to take down a tower of the World Trade Center -- President Bush issued a military order on November 13, 2001, that established the court-less contours of public debate to come.  It mandated that non-American terrorists captured abroad would be put under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon, not the federal court system. This was “war,” after all, and the enemy had to be confronted by fighting men, not those sticklers for due process, civilian judges and juries.

The federal courts have, of course, continued to try American citizens and residents (and even, in a few cases, individuals captured abroad) in terror cases of all sorts -- with an 87% conviction rate for both violent and non-violent crimes.  In fact, 2010 was a banner year for terrorism prosecutions when it came to American citizens and residents, and 2011 is following suit.  As could have been predicted, in the vast majority of these cases -- all the ones that mattered -- there were convictions.

You might think, then, that the courts had proved their mettle against mounting criticism and distrust of a system said to be insufficiently harsh. And initially, Obama's Department of Justice defended civilian courts as resilient and flexible enough to try terror cases.

But that didn’t last.  Recently, the Obama administration has reinforced a policy (begun under President Bush) which offers an ominous new twist on American justice: punishment before trial.  It has, for example, relied upon various extreme methods of pre-trial isolation -- including a version of restrictive orders known as Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs -- that reek of punitiveness and have often caused severe psychological deterioration in suspects awaiting trial on terrorism charges.

The most noteworthy case of this is Syed Fahad Hashmi’s.  An American citizen arrested while studying in England, Hashmi had allowed an acquaintance, Mohammed Junaid Babar, to stay in his apartment for two weeks. Babar, who testified against Hashmi and was later released, allegedly had socks, ponchos, and raingear intended for al-Qaeda in his luggage and allegedly used Hashmi’s cell phone to call terrorist conspirators. Hashmi, accused of “material support” for al-Qaeda, was kept under SAMs for three years without trial -- until he finally pled guilty.

The urge to punish before a verdict comes in reflects the same deep-seated conviction that the U.S. court system is simply not to be trusted to do its job.  Two recent cases -- that of whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Bradley Manning -- illustrate how, in cases where national security is believed to be at stake, Obama-era pre-trial treatment has taken up the distrust of the courts, civilian or military, that characterized the Bush years.

Drake, an executive for the National Security Agency (NSA), became a whistleblower over what he considered mistaken policy decisions about an ill-performing data-sifting program which, among other things, he thought squandered taxpayer money. Subsequently, he revealed his disagreement with the agency’s warrantless wire-tapping program, which he believed overstepped legal boundaries. Charged initially with violating the Espionage Act and threatened with a draconian 35-year jail sentence, Drake finally pled this past June to a misdemeanor count of “exceeding the authorized use of a government computer.”

In Drake’s four-year saga, his pre-punishment took the form not of pre-trial detention but of the destruction of his livelihood. He was initially fired from the NSA and from the National Defense University position to which the NSA had assigned him. Once indicted in 2010, he was forced to resign from a subsequent teaching post at Strayer University. All told, the formal and informal hounding of Drake resulted in the loss of his jobs and pension, as well as $82,000 in legal costs.

Ultimately, Drake was sentenced to a year’s probation and 240 hours of mandatory community service. By that time, he had been ruined financially and professionally, thanks to the government’s disparagement of him and the multi-year delay between its accusations and the lodging of formal charges against him. Drake now works at an Apple Store. In other words, well before the government took its chances in court, Thomas Drake was punished.

Another highly publicized case where punishment preceded trial has been the mistreatment of Army Private Bradley Manning while in military custody in a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, awaiting charges.  The Obama administration believes he turned over a trove of secret military and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks.  Following his arrest, Manning was kept in subhuman conditions.  He was forced to sleep naked and to strip for daily inspections, though as news about his situation generated bad publicity, he was eventually allowed to sleep in a “tear-proof” gown.
There is something deeply disturbing about the very different ways Manning and Drake were pre-punished by the government -- both directly in the case of Manning and indirectly in the case of Drake -- before being given due process of any kind.  Like bin Laden’s killing, both cases reflect an unspoken worry in Washington that our courts will prove insufficiently ruthless and so incapable of giving the “obviously guilty” what they “obviously” deserve.

The Courts Take Notice

As it turns out, the judicial system hasn’t taken the government’s new attitude lying down.  Various judges and juries have, in fact, shown themselves to be unfazed by both public and governmental pressures and have, in terror and national security cases, demonstrated signs of balance and of a concern for justice, rather than being driven by a blind sense of revenge.

In the past year, there has been an unprecedented number of high-profile terrorism trials. All have resulted in convictions, which have nonetheless not reflected the unstinting harshness that critics of court-centered counterterrorism insist upon.  In the case of Ahmed Ghailani, the sole Guantanamo detainee to face trial in the nation’s criminal justice system, the jury, having done its work of assessing the evidence, acquitted the defendant on 284 of 285 counts, including all the murder charges associated with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.  On the single count on which he was convicted, however, Ghailani was given a life sentence without parole.

Meanwhile, a high-profile terrorism case -- that of Tagawwur Rana -- ended in a jury acquittal on its most serious charge.  Rana had been accused of cooperating in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, which resulted in the deaths of more than 160 individuals. The jury found Rana guilty of material support, but not of helping to coordinate the attack.

These cases and others like them have, of course, been fodder for all the usual critics who consider anything but a 100% conviction rate on all charges in all cases to be a sure sign not of the justice system’s strength, but of its fundamental weakness.  And yet, such cases have showcased just how effectively the system still works, in a more nuanced way than in the previous near-decade, as well as in a subtler and more just way than Washington has managed to approximate over that same period.  Despite the fears, pressures, and scare tactics that are entangled with all such terror cases, we now have living proof that juries can think for themselves, and guilt can be a partial matter, rather than a Washington slam-dunk.

Of late, federal judges on such cases also seem to have been signaling to the government’s representatives that they must be more restrained in their approach to national security cases, both in and out of court. In late June, for instance, during the sentencing of three of the men convicted of conspiring to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale, New York, and to launch a Stinger missile aimed at aircraft over Newburgh’s Air National Guard Base, Judge Colleen McMahon struck back at the government’s case.  “I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt,” she said, “that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it, and brought it to fruition.  That does not mean that there was no crime. The jury concluded that you were not entrapped, and I see no basis to overturn their verdict.”

In the Drake case, Judge Richard Bennett was similarly distraught about the evident excesses in the government’s approach. At sentencing for the single minor count to which Drake agreed to plead, the judge bluntly refused to impose the $50,000 fine the prosecution was pushing for on the grounds that punishment had already been administered -- prior to the court process. “There has been financial devastation wrought upon this defendant,” said Bennett, “that far exceeds any fine that can be imposed by me.  And I'm not going to add to that in any way.  And it's very obvious to me in terms of some of the irritation I've expressed… not only my concern over the delay in this case… [but also the prosecution’s] inability to explain … the delay in this case… I think that somebody somewhere in the U.S. government has to say… that the American public deserves better than this."

In the recent jury decisions, as in the growing expressions of judicial dissatisfaction, an optimist might find signs that the system is finally starting to right itself.  On the other hand, a pessimist might come to the conclusion that the government will, in the future, simply put even more energy into avoiding the court system.

The bottom line is that the Obama administration, like its predecessor, defines success in terrorism prosecutions not by assessing whether or not due process and fair verdicts are administered, but solely in terms of what they deem proper punishment for those accused of violating national security -- especially when doing so minimizes partisan political clashes. By refusing to rein in its evident distrust of the judicial system when it comes to national security, the government is perpetuating a legal landscape that, to this day, lies in the shadow of Osama bin Laden.

Karen Greenberg is the executive director of the New York University Center on Law and Security, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days, as well as the editor of The Torture Debate in America.

Getting Away With Torture: The Ill Treatment Of Detainees

By Stephen Rohde, cross-posted from Truthout.

Should the U.S. government officials most responsible for setting interrogation and detention policies following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks be investigated, and if warranted prosecuted, under United States and international law?

In a new comprehensive 107-page report entitled "Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees," Human Rights Watch (HRW) concludes that "there is sufficient basis for the U.S. government to order a broad criminal investigation into alleged crimes committed in connection with the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the CIA secret detention program, and the rendition of detainees to torture" focusing on alleged criminal conduct by "former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet."

HRW also recommends investigating former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales (counsel to the president and later attorney general), Jay Bybee (head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)), John Rizzo (acting CIA general counsel), David Addington (counsel to the vice president), William J. Haynes II (Department of Defense general counsel), and John Yoo (deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC).

HRW found that "there is enough strong evidence from the information made public over the past five years to not only suggest these officials authorized and oversaw widespread and serious violations of US and international law, but that they failed to act to stop mistreatment, or punish those responsible after they became aware of serious abuses."

Moreover, although Bush administration officials have claimed that detention and interrogation operations were only authorized after extensive discussion and legal review by Department of Justice attorneys, HRW concludes that "substantial evidence that civilian leaders requested that politically appointed government lawyers create legal justifications to support abusive interrogation techniques, in the face of opposition from career legal officers."

Although HRW expressed no opinion about the ultimate guilt or innocence of any officials under U.S. law, the report provides a narrative summarizing Bush administration policies and practices on detention and interrogation, and details the case for individual criminal responsibility of several key administration officials.

The report documents how the Bush administration authorized coercive interrogation practices by the CIA and the military that amounted to torture, and instituted an illegal secret CIA detention program in which detainees were held in undisclosed locations without notifying their families, allowing access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, or providing for oversight of their treatment. Detainees were also unlawfully transferred to countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, where they were likely to be tortured.

We now know that as a direct result of Bush administration decisions, detainees in U.S. custody were beaten, thrown into walls, forced into small boxes, and waterboarded, an ancient method of torture where victims are subjected to mock executions in which they endured the sensation of drowning. Two alleged senior al-Qaida prisoners, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were waterboarded 183 and 83 times respectively.

The report documents how detainees in U.S.-run facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay endured prolonged mistreatment, sometimes for weeks and even months, including "painful 'stress' positions; prolonged nudity; sleep, food, and water deprivation; exposure to extreme cold or heat; and total darkness with loud music blaring for weeks at a time." In Iraq, the abuses included "beatings, near suffocation, sexual abuse, and mock executions;" at Guantanamo Bay, "detainees were forced to sit in their own excrement, and some were sexually humiliated by female interrogators." In Afghanistan, "prisoners were chained to walls and shackled in a manner that made it impossible to lie down or sleep, with restraints that caused their hands and wrists to swell up or bruise."

The report makes clear that Bush administration officials "developed and expanded their initial decisions and authorizations on detainee operations even in the face of internal and external dissent, including warnings that many of their actions violated international and domestic law." And "when illegal interrogation techniques on detainees spread broadly beyond what had been explicitly authorized, these officials turned a blind eye, making no effort to stop the practices."

HRW also points out that the CIA's use of torture, enforced disappearance, and secret prisons was counterproductive and "tainted the U.S. government's reputation and standing in combating terrorism, negatively affected foreign intelligence cooperation, and sparked anger and resentment among Muslim communities, whose assistance is crucial to uncovering and preventing future global terrorist threats."

To date, President Barack Obama has failed to heed the call to initiate a full and fair investigation of these allegations. As a presidential candidate, Obama spoke of the need for a "thorough investigation" of detainee mistreatment. After his election, he said there should be prosecutions if "somebody has blatantly broken the law," but later backed off and said "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

HRW points out that "without real accountability for these crimes, those who commit abuses in the name of counterterrorism will point to the U.S. mistreatment of detainees to deflect criticism of their own conduct" and that "when a government as dominant and influential as that of the United States openly defies laws prohibiting torture, a bedrock principle of human rights, it virtually invites others to do the same. The U.S. government's much-needed credibility as a proponent of human rights was damaged by the torture revelations and continues to be damaged by the complete impunity for the policymakers implicated in criminal offenses."

The report responds to the claim that any effort to address past abuses would be politically divisive, and might hinder the Obama administration's ability to achieve pressing policy objectives. "Any failure to carry out an investigation into torture will be understood globally as purposeful toleration of illegal activity, and as a way to leave the door open to future abuses. The U.S. cannot convincingly claim to have rejected these egregious human rights violations until they are treated as crimes rather than as 'policy options.'"

But the benefits of conducting a credible and impartial criminal investigation are numerous. The U.S. government "would send the clearest possible signal that it is committed to repudiating the use of torture," which "would boost U.S. moral authority on human rights in counterterrorism in a more concrete and persuasive way than any initiative to date; set a compelling example for governments that the U.S. has criticized for committing human rights abuses and for the populations that suffer from such abuses; and might reveal legal and institutional failings that led to the use of torture, pointing to ways to improve the government's effectiveness in fighting terrorism."

Today, substantial evidence has been placed on the public record regarding illegal detention policies and the torture and ill-treatment of detainees in US custody. FOIA lawsuits brought by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have yielded over 100,000 pages of government documents. Extensive information was also uncovered in an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Department of Justice inspector general issued a report about FBI involvement in detention abuse in 2008, and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility issued a report on the role of department lawyers in crafting legal memoranda which justified abusive interrogations.  A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross also describes the treatment of “high-value” detainees in CIA custody. In addition, former detainees and whistleblowers have come forward to tell their stories, and many of the principals have spoken about their roles.

Based on compelling evidence, HRW believes criminal investigations of the following individuals are warranted:

President George W. Bush "authorized the CIA renditions program, which he knew or should have known would result in torture," "has publicly admitted that he approved CIA use of torture, specifically the waterboarding of two detainees," and "never exerted his authority to stop the ill-treatment or punish those responsible."

Vice President Dick Cheney "chaired or attended numerous meetings at which specific CIA operations were discussed, beginning with the waterboarding of detainee Abu Zubaydah in 2002," "was a member of the National Security Council (NSC) 'Principals Committee,' which approved and later reauthorized the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture and ill-treatment in the CIA interrogation program" and "has publicly admitted that he was aware of the use of waterboarding."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "approved illegal interrogation methods that facilitated the use of torture and ill-treatment by US military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq," "closely followed the interrogation of Guantanamo detainee Mohamed al-Qahtani who was subjected to a six-week regime of coercive interrogation that cumulatively amounted to torture," "was a member of the NSC Principals Committee, which approved the use of torture for CIA detainees," and "never exerted his authority to stop the torture and ill-treatment of detainees even after he became aware of evidence of abuse over a three-year period beginning in early 2002."

CIA Director George Tenet "authorized and oversaw the CIA’s use of waterboarding, near suffocation, stress positions, light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture and ill-treatment," "was a member of the NSC Principals Committee," and under his direction, "the CIA also 'disappeared' detainees by holding them in long-term incommunicado detention in secret locations, and rendered detainees to countries in which they were likely to be tortured and were tortured."

In addition, HRW concludes there should be criminal investigations of the government lawyers who wrote legal memoranda seeking to justify torture, which were the basis for authorizing the CIA secret detention program, including Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, John Rizzo, David Addington, William J. Haynes II, and John Yoo.

Will President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder take the Human Rights Watch report seriously?  Will they fulfill U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture to investigate these documented allegations of torture? Or will they look the other way, becoming accomplices after-the-fact and risking the condemnation of history.

 Stephen Rohde, a constitutional lawyer and Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, is author of  American Words of Freedom and Freedom of Assembly.

Obama's Bush-League World

By Tom Engelhardt, originally published at TomDispatch, July 12, 2011.

George W. who?  I mean, the guy is so over.  He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a footnote in the news.  And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick.  Condoleezza Rice?  She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it's as if she's been wiped from history, too?  As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February and it hit the bestseller lists, but a few months later, where is he?

And can anyone be surprised?  They were wrong about Afghanistan.  They were wrong about Iraq.  They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.  They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing.  The country imploded economically while they were at the helm.  Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff.  In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren’t they wrong about?

Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies.  (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.)  Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you’re being honest, you'll have to admit that one thing didn’t happen: they didn’t turn the page on us.

They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn’t.  It’s not just the Department of Homeland Security or that un-American word “homeland,” both of which are undoubtedly embedded in our lives forever; or the Patriot Act, now as American as apple pie; or Guantanamo which, despite a presidential promise, may never close; or all the wild, overblown fears of terrorism and the new security world that goes with them, neither of which shows the slightest sign of abating; or the National Security Agency’s surveillance and spying on Americans which, as far as we can tell, is ongoing.  No, it's scores of Bush policies and positions that will clearly be with us until hell freezes over.  Among them all, consider the Obama administration’s updated version of that signature Bush invention, the Global War on Terror.


Yes, Obama’s national security officials threw that term to the dogs back in 2009, and now pursue a no-name global strategy that’s meant not to remind you of the Bush era.  Recently, the White House released an unclassified summary of its 2011 “National Strategy for Counterterrorism,” a 19-page document in prose only a giant bureaucracy with a desire to be impenetrable could produce.  (Don’t bother to read it.  I read it for you.)  If it makes a feeble attempt to put a little rhetorical space between Obama-style counterterrorism and what the Bush administration was doing, it still manages to send one overwhelming message: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., are still striding amongst us, carrying big sticks and with that same crazed look in their eyes.

The Global War on Terror (or GWOT in acronym-crazed Washington) was the bastard spawn of the disorientation and soaring hubris of the days after the 9/11 attacks, which set afire the delusional geopolitical dreams of Bush, Cheney, their top national security officials, and their neocon supporters.  And here’s the saddest thing: the Bush administration’s most extreme ideas when it comes to GWOT are now the humdrum norm of Obama administration policies -- and hardly anyone thinks it’s worth a comment.

A History Lesson from Hell

It’s easy to forget just how quickly GWOT was upon us or how strange it really was.  On the night of September 11, 2001, addressing the nation, President Bush first spoke of winning "the war against terrorism."  Nine days later, in an address to a joint session of Congress, the phrase “war on terror” was already being expanded.  "Our war on terror,” Bush said, “begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.  It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."

In those early days, there were already clues aplenty as to which way the wind was gusting in Washington.  Top administration officials immediately made it plain that a single yardstick was to measure planetary behavior from then on: Were you “with us or against us”?  From the Gulf of Guinea to Central Asia, that question would reveal everything worth knowing, and terror would be its measure. 

As the New York Times reported on September 14th, Bush’s top officials had “cast aside diplomatic niceties” and were giving Arab countries and “the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism or face the certain prospect of death and destruction."  According to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage took that message directly to his country’s intelligence director: either ally with Washington in the fight against al-Qaeda, or prepare to be bombed “back to the Stone Age,” as Armitage reportedly put it.

Global War on Terror?  They weren’t exaggerating.  These were people shocked by what had happened to iconic buildings in “the homeland” and overawed by what they imagined to be the all-conquering power of the U.S. military.  In their fever dreams, they thought that this was their moment and the apocalyptic winds of history were at their backs.  And they weren’t hiding where they wanted it to blow them either.  That was why they tried to come up with names to replace GWOT -- World War IV (the third was the Cold War) and the Long War being two of them -- that would be even blunter about their desire to plunge us into a situation from which none of us would emerge in our lifetimes.  But to the extent anything stuck, GWOT did.

And if everything is in a name, then the significance of that one wasn’t hard to grasp.  Bush’s national security folks focused on an area that they termed “the arc of instability.”  It stretched from North Africa to the Chinese border, conveniently sweeping through the major oil lands of the planet.  They would later dub it “The Greater Middle East.”  In that vast region, they were ready to declare hunting season open and they would be the ones to hand out the hunting licenses.

Within weeks of 9/11, top administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were speaking of this vast region as a global “swamp,” an earthly miasma that they were going to “drain” of terrorists.  As the U.S. military had declared whole areas of enemy-controled rural Vietnam “free fire zones” in the 1960s, so they were going to turn much of the planet into such a zone, a region where no national boundary, no claim of sovereignty would stop them from taking out whomever (or whatever government) they cared to.

Within days of 9/11, administration officials let it be known that, in their war, they were preparing to target terrorist groups in at least 60 countries.  And if they were that blunt in public, in private they were exuberantly extreme.  Top officials spoke with gusto about “taking off the gloves” or “the shackles” (the ones, as they saw it, that Congress had placed on the executive branch and the intelligence community in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair).

As journalist Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine, in a “Presidential Finding” on September 17, 2011, only six days after the World Trade Center towers went down, Bush granted the CIA an unprecedented license to wage war globally.  By then, the CIA had presented him with a plan whose name was worthy of a sci-fi film: the “Worldwide Attack Matrix.”  According to Suskind, it already “detailed operations [to come] against terrorists in 80 countries.”

In other words, with less than 200 countries on the planet, the president had declared open season on nearly half of them.  Of course, the Pentagon wasn’t about to be left out while the CIA was given the run of the globe.  Soon enough, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld began building up an enormous CIA-style secret army of elite special operations forces within the military.  By the end of the Bush years, these had reportedly been deployed in -- don’t be surprised -- 60 countries. In the Obama era, that number expanded to 75 -- mighty close to the 80 in the Worldwide Attack Matrix.

And one more thing, there was a new weapon in the world, the perfect weapon to make mincemeat of all boundaries and a mockery of national sovereignty and international law (with little obvious danger to us): the pilotless drone.  Surveillance drones already in existence were quickly armed with missiles and bombs and, in November 2002, one of these was sent out on the first CIA robot assassination mission -- to Yemen, where six al-Qaeda suspects in a vehicle were obliterated without a by-your-leave to anyone.

CT to the Horizon

That CIA strike launched the drone wars, which are now a perfectly humdrum part of our American world of war.  Only recently, the Obama administration leaked news that it was intensifying its military-run war against al-Qaeda in Yemen by bringing the CIA into the action.  The Agency is now to build a base for its drone air wing somewhere in the Middle East to hunt Yemeni terrorists (and assumedly those elsewhere in the region as well).  Yemen functionally has no government to cooperate with, but in pure Bushian fashion, who cares?
Similarly, as June ended, unnamed American officials leaked the news that, for the first time, a U.S. military drone had conducted a strike against al-Shabab militants in Somalia, with the implication that this was a “war” that would also be intensifying.  At about the same time, curious reports emerged from Pakistan, where the CIA has been conducting an escalating drone war since 2004 (strikes viewed “negatively” by 97% of Pakistanis, according to a recent Pew poll).  Top Pakistani officials were threatening to shut down the Agency’s drone operations at Shamsi air base in Baluchistan.  Shamsi is the biggest of the three borrowed Pakistani bases from which the CIA secretly launches its drones.  The Obama administration responded bluntly.  White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan insisted that, whatever happened, the U.S. would continue to "deliver precise and overwhelming force against al-Qaida" in the Pakistani tribal areas.
As Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog summed things up, “The harsh truth is that the Pakistanis can’t stop the drone war on their soil. But they can shift its launching points over the Afghan border. And the United States is already working on a backup plan for a long-term drone war, all without the Pakistanis’ help.”  In other words, permission from a beleaguered local ally might be nice, but it isn’t a conceptual necessity.  (And in any case, CIA flights from Shamsi still evidently continue uninterrupted.)

In other words, if Bush’s crew is long gone, the world they willed us is alive and well.  After all, there are reasonable odds that, on the day you read this piece, somewhere in the free-fire zone of the Greater Middle East, a drone “piloted” from an air base in the western United States or perhaps a secret “suburban facility” near Langley, Virginia, will act as judge, jury, and executioner somewhere in the "arc of instability."  It will take out a terrorist suspect or suspects, or a set of civilians mistaken for terrorists, or a “target” someone in Washington didn’t like, or that one of our allies-cum-intelligence-assets had it in for, or perhaps a mix of all of the above.  We can't be sure how many countries American drones, military or CIA, are patrolling, but in at least six of them -- Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Iraq -- they have launched strikes in recent years that have killed more “suspects” than ever died in the 9/11 attacks.

And there is more -- possibly much more -- to come.  In late June, the Obama administration posted that unclassified summary of its 2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism at the White House website.  It's a document that carefully avoids using the the term “war on terror,” even though counterterrorism advisor Brennan did admit that the document “tracked closely with the goals” of the Bush administration.

The document tries to argue that, when it comes to counterterrorism (or CT), the Obama administration has actually pulled back somewhat from the expansiveness of Bush-era GWOT thinking.  We are now, it insists, only going after “al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents,” not every “terror group" on the planet.   But here’s the curious thing: when you check out its “areas of focus,” other than “the Homeland” (always capitalized as if our country were the United States of Homeland), what you find is an expanded version of the Bush global target zone, including the Maghreb and Sahel (northern Africa), East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, South Asia, Central Asia, and -- thrown in for good measure -- Southeast Asia.  In most of those areas, Bush-style hunting season is evidently still open.

If you consider deeds, not words, when it comes to drones the arc of instability is expanding; and based on the new counterterrorism document, the next place for our robotic assassins to cross borders in search of targets could be the Maghreb and Sahel.  There, we’re told, al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), with roots in Algeria, but operatives in northern Mali, among other places, potentially threatens “U.S. citizens and interests in the region.”

Here’s how the document puts the matter in its classically bureaucratese version of English:

“[W]e must therefore pursue near-term efforts and at times more targeted approaches that directly counter AQIM and its enabling elements.  We must work actively to contain, disrupt, degrade, and dismantle AQIM as logical steps on the path to defeating the group.  As appropriate, the United States will use its CT tools, weighing the costs and benefits of its approach in the context of regional dynamics and perceptions and the actions and capabilities of its partners in the region...”

That may not sound so ominous, but best guess: the Global War on Terror is soon likely to be on the march across North Africa, heading south.  And recent Obama national security appointments only emphasize how much the drone wars are on Washington’s future agenda.  After all, Leon Panetta, the man who, since 2009, ran the CIA’s drone wars, has moved over to the Pentagon as secretary of defense; while Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus, the war commander who loosed American air power (including drone power) in a massive way in Afghanistan, is moving on to the CIA.

On his first visit to South Asia as secretary of defense, Panetta made the claim that Washington was “within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.”  Perhaps it won’t surprise you that such news signals not a winding down, but a ratcheting up, of the Global War on Terror.  Panetta, as Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported, “hinted of more to come, saying he would redouble efforts by the military and the spy agency to work together on counterterrorism missions outside the traditional war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
More to come, as two men switching their “civilian” and military roles partner up.  Count on drone-factory assembly lines to rev up as well, and the military’s special operations forces to be in expansion mode.  And note that by the penultimate page of that CT strategy summary, the administration has left al-Qaeda behind and is muttering in bureau-speak about Hizballah and Hamas, Iran and Syria (“active sponsors of terrorism”), and even the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

On the Bush administration's watch, the U.S. blew a gasket, American power went into decline, and the everyday security of everyday Americans took a major hit.  Still, give them credit.  They were successful on at least one count: they made sure that we’d never stop fighting their war on terror.  In this sense, Obama and his top officials are a drone national security team, carrying out the dreams and fantasies of their predecessors, while Bush and his men (and woman) give lucrative speeches and write books, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).