1 Boring Old Man

Another Falsehood Exposed
By Dan Froomkin

When and if the curtain is fully pulled back on President Bush’s "war on terror," how much of what he said will turn out to be true, and how much of it will turn out to be fantasy and lies? The more we learn, the more it seems the appeals to fear that Bush used to rally the nation behind him were unfounded.

The latest example came yesterday in a federal courtroom in Washington, where a Bush-appointed judge ordered the release of five Algerian men who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for almost seven years. The president showcased the men in his seminal, bellicose 2002 State of the Union speech as part of a litany of alleged threats – some averted, some not – facing the nation. "Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy," Bush said at the time…

"For a judge like Leon to order their release from detention is significant because the government has long maintained the evidence it had was more than sufficient to justify the detentions,’ said Scott L. Silliman, a national security law professor at Duke University. ‘This is a clear warning shot to the government… These are probably not the last detainees to be ordered released."

David G. Savage writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Civil libertarians said Thursday’s decision confirmed what the Bush administration’s critics had long assumed – that the cases against the Guantanamo prisoners would not stand up if they were examined by an independent judge. "’For seven years, the Bush administration sought to avoid the courts because it had no evidence and sought instead to create a lawless prison,’ said Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. ‘We must note that justice here, however, comes seven years too late.’"

It’s also worth noting that just last month, Laura Rozen blogged for Mother Jones about what she called a "potentially explosive" court filing by the lawyers for the Algerians, suggesting "that the Bush administration ordered the Bosnian government to arrest and hold the men after an exhaustive Bosnian investigation had found them innocent of any terrorism related activity and had ordered their release, in order to use them as props in Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union speech."

Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: "The five men ordered released today have been imprisoned in a cage by the Bush administration for 7 straight years without being charged with any crimes and without there being any credible evidence that they did anything wrong"…

"Enough," says the Washington Post editorial board. "Judge Leon … delivered a forceful indictment of the administration’s detention decisions and provided indisputable proof of the importance of allowing federal judges to evaluate the secret evidence the government used to justify detentions… "What Judge Leon revealed in his ruling is the utter travesty that is holding people with virtually no evidence – and certainly no evidence that can reasonably be considered reliable"…

After the attack on the World Trade Towers, there was a great national impatience. Something had to be done, pronto. So, we went to war in Afghanistan; we started a Department of Homeland Security; we got naked at airports; and we worried. Then there was a prison in Cuba [I thought it was in Cuba, so al Qaeda wouldn’t have another target in the U.S., but that wasn’t right].

Having missed Bin Laden in Tora Bora, we waited impatiently for a year, shrouding our cars in magnetic flags, supporting our troops. Guantanamo filled with Terrorists. Sabers were rattled. And then came the news, Saddam Hussein was building atom bombs again and storing Anthrax. He’d been involved with Bin Laden and al Qaeda. He was a State Sponsor of Terrorism, sure enough. There was a campaign for war, and we bought more magnets and glued ourselves to the television for our second march across Iraq. This time we meant business.

I felt impatient back then too. Something horrible had happened, and we needed to do something. Invading Iraq seemed like the wrong something, but I watched the Invasion – hoping my intuition was wrong. It wasn’t. The whole bungled operation was wrong – Gitmo, the campaign for war, the Iraq Invasion. We went along with it because we needed something concrete to help us deal with our impatience, so we drank the poisoned Kool-aid. Impatience is like that. It calls for action.

Now, it’s much later and we are finally confirming that much of what happened back then was a fabrication. Iraq was no threat to us – had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. The prisoners in Gitmo weren’t the real bad guys. As much as we venerate John McCain for his P.O.W. experience, he was at least an enemy combatant. It appears that we’ve done worse to people, some of whom were just plain caught up in our impatience.

Now, something even bigger than the Twin Trade Towers is falling down in New York – the Stock Market. This time, we know who did it – financial terrorists buying and selling bad mortgages as if they had real value, buying and selling insurance on those mortgages as if they carried no real risk. Something had to be done. First, a stimulus package; then, a mammoth bail-out; neither any more effective than our invasion of Iraq. And we’re getting impatient because our 401K Plans have been cut in half. Some think we should move up the Inauguration so we can be rescued sooner.

Paul Krugman writes in his New York Times opinion column about the "power vacuum" at the height of a serious economic crisis — the product of an outgoing administration with "no credibility," and incoming administration with "no authority" and an "ideological chasm between the two sides … too great to allow concerted action…

"How much can go wrong in the two months before Mr. Obama takes the oath of office? The answer, unfortunately, is: a lot. Consider how much darker the economic picture has grown since the failure of Lehman Brothers, which took place just over two months ago. And the pace of deterioration seems to be accelerating…

Joe Klein blogs for Time: "The problem is that nothing of significance can or will happen until the new President takes office in January, even though there is – finally – a great appetite for action in Washington. This is going to be a very frustrating few months. All of a sudden we understand how our grandparents felt in the winter of 1932-3, waiting for Franklin Roosevelt – and why the inauguration was moved up from March 4 to January 20 thereafter"…

William Neikirk blogs for Tribune: "The time has come to take another look at the 20th amendment to the U.S. constitution that established Jan. 20 as the date for newly elected presidents to take office"…