Society Issues Talk

Sid9 · Guest

July 13, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

The Real-Life '24' of Summer 2008

By FRANK RICH

WE know what a criminal White House looks like from "The Final Days," Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein's classic account of Richard Nixon's unraveling.
The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until
it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to
save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.

"The Final Days" was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in
disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House
memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and
perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New
Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her
book "The Dark Side" connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of
her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New
York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its
enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution.

Some of "The Dark Side" seems right out of "The Final Days," minus Nixon's
operatic boozing and weeping. We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two
conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become "so
paranoid" that "they actually thought they might be in physical danger."
The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.

The men were John Ashcroft's deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an
assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the
White House's don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff
David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make
torture the covert law of the land. Mr. Comey and Mr. Goldsmith failed to
stop the "torture memos" and are long gone from the White House. But Vice
President Cheney and Mr. Addington remain enabled by a president, attorney
general (Michael Mukasey) and C.I.A. director (Michael Hayden) who won't
shut the door firmly on torture even now.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. "The Dark Side" is scarier
than "The Final Days" because these final days aren't over yet and because
the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president's
narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer's
portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even
passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore
Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the
ticking-bomb scenarios of television's "24," all they want to do is protect
America from further terrorist strikes.

So what if they cut corners, the administration's last defenders argue.
While prissy lawyers insist on habeas corpus and court-issued wiretap
warrants, the rest of us are being kept safe by the Cheney posse.

But are we safe? As Al Qaeda and the Taliban surge this summer, that single
question is even more urgent than the moral and legal issues attending
torture.

On those larger issues, the evidence is in, merely awaiting adjudication.
Mr. Bush's 2005 proclamation that "we do not torture" was long ago revealed
as a lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated
detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that "there is no longer any doubt"
that "war crimes were committed." Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning
verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that
America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their
fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military's
barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.

No wonder the former Rumsfeld capo, Douglas Feith, is trying to discredit a
damaging interview he gave to the British lawyer Philippe Sands for another
recent and essential book on what happened, "Torture Team." After Mr. Sands
previewed his findings in the May issue of Vanity Fair, Mr. Feith protested
he had been misquoted - apparently forgetting that Mr. Sands had taped the
interview. Mr. Feith and Mr. Sands are scheduled to square off in a House
hearing this Tuesday.

So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in
foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's
former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and
Alberto Gonzales, among others, to "never travel outside the U.S., except
perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel." But while we wait for the wheels of
justice to grind slowly, there are immediate fears to tend. Ms. Mayer's book
helps cement the case that America's use of torture has betrayed not just
American values but our national security, right to the present day.

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney's descent into the dark
side was to cover up for the Bush White House's failure to heed the Qaeda
threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.'s Osama bin
Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was "all preventable."
By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.'s inspector general, "50 or 60
individuals" in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects - soon to be
hijackers - were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas
Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he
expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney
general snapped, "I don't want to hear about that anymore!"

After 9/11, our government emphasized "interrogation over due process," Ms.
Mayer writes, "to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized." But in
reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just
because Abu Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by
jihadists. No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited
from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has
compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the
American military on wild-goose chases. The coerced "confession" to the
murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect
the real murderer.

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq.
Exhibit A, revisited in "The Dark Side," is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an
accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt.
His fabricated tales of Saddam's biological and chemical W.M.D. - and of
nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda - were cited by President Bush
in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr.
Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two
F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by
saying: "They were killing me. I had to tell them something."

That "something" was crucial in sending us into the quagmire that, five
years later, has empowered Iran and compromised our ability to counter the
very terrorists that torture was supposed to thwart. As The Times reported
two weeks ago, Iraq has monopolized our military and intelligence resources
to the point where we don't have enough predator drones or expert C.I.A.
field agents to survey the tribal areas where terrorists are amassing in
Pakistan. Meanwhile, the threat to America from Al Qaeda is "comparable to
what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001," said Seth Jones, a RAND Corporation
terrorism expert and Pentagon consultant. The difference between now and
then is simply that the base of operations has moved, "roughly the
difference from New York to Philadelphia."

Yet once again terrorism has fallen off America's map, landing at or near
the bottom of voters' concerns in recent polls. There were major attacks in
rapid succession last week in Pakistan, Afghanistan (the deadliest in Kabul
since we "defeated" the Taliban in 2001) and at the American consulate in
Turkey. Who listened to this ticking time bomb? It's reminiscent of July
2001, when few noticed that the Algerian convicted of trying to bomb Los
Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium testified that he
had been trained in bin Laden's Afghanistan camps as part of a larger plot
against America.

In last Sunday's Washington Post, the national security expert Daniel
Benjamin sounded an alarm about the "chronic" indecisiveness and poor
execution of Bush national security policy as well as the continuing
inadequacies of the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Benjamin must feel
a sinking sense of déjà vu. Exactly seven years ago in the same newspaper,
just two months before 9/11, he co-wrote an article headlined "Defusing a
Time Bomb" imploring the Bush administration in vain to pay attention to
Afghanistan because that country's terrorists "continue to pose the most
dangerous threat to American lives."

And so we're back where we started in the summer of 2001, with even shark
attacks and Chandra Levy's murder (courtesy of a new Washington Post
investigation) returning to the news. We are once again distracted and
unprepared while the Taliban and bin Laden's minions multiply in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. This, no less than the defiling of the Constitution, is the
legacy of an administration that not merely rationalized the immorality of
torture but shackled our national security to the absurdity that torture
could easily fix the terrorist threat.

That's why the Bush White House's corruption in the end surpasses Nixon's.
We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up
was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up,
and the punishment could rain down on us all.