Yesterday’s bipartisan Senate report on the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere doesn’t just lay out a clear line of responsibility starting with President Bush, it also exposes the administration’s repeated explanation for what happened as a pack of lies.
"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own," the report finds. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."
The report notes that in early 2002, not long after the Defense Department legal counsel’s office started exploring the application of the sorts of abhorrent practices later documented at Abu Ghraib, Bush signed a memo exempting war-on-terror detainees from the Geneva Conventions. "[T]he decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody," the report states.
And the report concludes: "The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantanamo]. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely"…
But Levin could have gone much higher. Bush himself repeatedly and sanctimoniously blamed Abu Ghraib on a small number of low-level perpetrators,…
With the deceit involved in the Invasion of Iraq, Bush dismisses it as bad intelligence. We now know that is untrue. With the inadequacies he’s shown as a commander-in-chief, Bush has repeatedly told us he’s following the lead of the commanders on the ground. We now know that is untrue. When the identity of a C.I.A. Agent was leaked, he told us that he’d fire any leaker and that we would never know who did it. Both things were untrue. In this case, he blamed Abu Ghraib on ‘bad apples.’ We now know that is untrue. George Bush has lead A Pack of Liars, as Froomkin says.One of the consequences of his lying [and I expect Clinton’s and Nixon’s lying] is that we don’t believe anyone in government much. In the current Governor Blagojevich Scandal, Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel are under attack, not for being rats like Blagojevich, but for not revealing every single contact they had with the Governor immediately. Rahm Emanuel looks bad because he talked to the Governor, though what he most likely said was "Hell no." I suppose it’s okay to have every deep breath scrutinized for a lie, but it hardly does much for the National Psyche to have such a hermeneutic of suspicion in the air.
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her·me·neu·tic hÉ™r-mÉ™-ˈnü-tik
noun 1 the study of the methodological principles of interpretation (as of the Bible) 2 a method or principle of interpretation |
I used that $100 phrase [hermaneutic of suspicion] because it really isn’t fair to say we’re paranoid, even if that’s how we sound and look. We’ve been lied to by the President, the Vice President, all four of his Press Secretaries, the majority of his Cabinet, and a slew of others. Paranoia is a suspiciousness based on fantasy, not fact. We’ve been bombarded with facts. None of us are surprised by Rod Blagojevich. We’re used to it. I wish that Obama et al weren’t going to have to wade through all of the suspiciousness that’s coming down the road for them. I’m not talking about the professionals like Fox News, Rush, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc. I’m talking about the everyday people, even Democrats, who suspiciously hermeneuticize about everything. But that’s the fate that George W. Bush is leaving them –
Now you’re getting to one of my (many) pet peeves: the awful state of journalism in the MSM. They have come so close to emulating TV “news reporters” who simply repeat what they’ve heard and don’t do any evaluation; and then they have to present “balanced” news, so they wind up with “this side says this” and “the other side says that,” when it’s obvious that one side is dead wrong, distorted, or spinning.
It’s even beginning to affect the news reporting on Huffington Post, especially whoever writes their headlines. They are starting to go for the sensational. Like just a couple of days ago, a headline screamed “Obama tainted by links to Blagojavich.” In fact, what they should have emphasized was that he had NOT talked to him, and the only “taint” was what the right-wing nuts were saying about it. That’s not taint; that’s slander.
Our government needs to be purged of evil-doers and journalism needs to be purged of its hacks who don’t know what good reporting means. I don’t mean censorship; I mean policing your own shop. But I supposed that’s all tied up in who owns the papers and TV stations and what sells advertising. If people want to listen to Rush, that’s what will sell ads.
At least it shouldn’t spread to the blogosphere !!! Take note, Arianna.
To this day I am utterly mystified as to how anyone in the administration including the cheerleader guy kept a job for a week beyond the Abu Ghraib debacle. I may be mistaken here in recalling that Rummy may have offered to resign and he damn well should have been “allowed” to do just that. Any thinking person who regarded that fiasco as anything more than an abysmal failure of leadership at the “top” of the house – from W’s abandoning our commitment to the Geneva Conventions to the laissez faire concretist running the Dept. of Defense – might ought to hit the books and gather some sense for how leadership in organizations work. The emotional tone and climate, the rules and mores, get established at the highest concentrations of power in any organization. Everyone else takes their cues from observing the behavior and response probabilities of the leadership cadre. The idiosyncratic interpretation of “accepted” (not apt to be sanctioned) behavior will become manifest in particular events like the girl soldier riding a nude, hooded detainee as if it were a fun and proper thing to be doing. The real failure was where the buck stops. It should have stopped hard and fast and damn the perps should every last one of them still be brought up on charges – maybe the judiciary in The Hague will get the job done if we can’t muster the will or the way.