[Mb-civic] Frank Rich

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111305Z.shtml

'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 13 November 2005

    If it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker
cartoon. The president of the United States, in
the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour
last week, told the world, "We do not torture."
Even as he spoke, the administration's flagrant
embrace of torture was as hard to escape as
publicity for Anderson Cooper.

    The vice president, not satisfied that the
C.I.A. had already been implicated in four
detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to
give the agency a green light to commit torture
in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington
Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A.
prisons two years ago, was uncovering new "black
sites" in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees
are subjected to unknown interrogation methods
redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before
heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own
bit for torture by threatening to cast the first
veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a
spending bill amendment, written by John McCain
and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the
"cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of
prisoners.

    So when you watch the president stand there
with a straight face and say, "We do not torture"
- a full year and a half after the first photos
from Abu Ghraib - you have to wonder how we
arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is
not complicated. When people in power get away
with telling bigger and bigger lies, they
naturally think they can keep getting away with
it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies
did. Not anymore.

    The fallout from the Scooter Libby indictment
reveals that the administration's credibility,
having passed the tipping point with Katrina, is
flat-lining. For two weeks, the White House's
talking-point monkeys in the press and Congress
had been dismissing Patrick Fitzgerald's leak
investigation as much ado about nothing except
politics and as an exoneration of everyone except
Mr. Libby. Now the American people have rendered
their verdict: they're not buying it. Last week
two major polls came up with the identical
finding, that roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard
the leak case as a serious matter. One of the
polls (The Wall Street Journal/NBC News) also
found that 57 percent of Americans believe that
Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country into war
in Iraq and that only 33 percent now find him
"honest and straightforward," down from 50
percent in January.

    The Bush loyalists' push to discredit the
Libby indictment failed because Americans don't
see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the petri
dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes
more visible every day. The last-ditch argument
rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in his
latest stay-the-course speech - that Democrats,
too, endorsed dead-wrong W.M.D. intelligence - is
more of the same. Sure, many Democrats (and
others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal
before the war, but only the White House hyped
selective evidence for nuclear weapons, the most
ominous of all of Iraq's supposed W.M.D.'s, to
whip up public fears of an imminent doomsday.

    There was also an entire other set of lies in
the administration's prewar propaganda blitzkrieg
that had nothing to do with W.M.D.'s, African
uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to
redirect its finite resources to wage war against
Saddam Hussein rather than keep its focus on the
war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White
House had to cook up not only the fiction that
Iraq was about to attack us, but also the fiction
that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11.
Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who
last weekend released a previously classified
intelligence document, we now have conclusive
evidence that the administration's disinformation
campaign implying a link connecting Saddam to Al
Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous and
manipulative than its relentless flogging of
nuclear Armageddon.

    Senator Levin's smoking gun is a widely
circulated Defense Intelligence Agency document
from February 2002 that was probably seen by the
National Security Council. It warned that a
captured Qaeda terrorist in American custody was
in all likelihood "intentionally misleading"
interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had
trained Qaeda members to use illicit weapons. The
report also made the point that an Iraq-Qaeda
collaboration was absurd on its face: "Saddam's
regime is intensely secular and is wary of
Islamic revolutionary movements." But just like
any other evidence that disputed the
administration's fictional story lines, this
intelligence was promptly disregarded.

    So much so that eight months later - in
October 2002, as the White House was officially
rolling out its new war and Congress was on the
eve of authorizing it - Mr. Bush gave a major
address in Cincinnati intermingling the usual
mushroom clouds with information from that
discredited, "intentionally misleading" Qaeda
informant. "We've learned that Iraq has trained
Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and
deadly gases," he said. It was the most
important, if hardly the only, example of
repeated semantic sleights of hand that the
administration used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq.
Dick Cheney was fond of brandishing a nonexistent
April 2001 "meeting" between Mohamed Atta and an
Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague long after
Czech and American intelligence analysts had
dismissed it.

    The power of these lies was considerable. In
a CBS News/New York Times poll released on Sept.
25, 2001, 60 percent of Americans thought Osama
bin Laden had been the culprit in the attacks of
two weeks earlier, either alone or in league with
unnamed "others" or with the Taliban; only 6
percent thought bin Laden had collaborated with
Saddam; and only 2 percent thought Saddam had
been the sole instigator. By the time we invaded
Iraq in 2003, however, CBS News found that 53
percent believed Saddam had been "personally
involved" in 9/11; other polls showed that a
similar percentage of Americans had even
convinced themselves that the hijackers were
Iraqis.

    There is still much more to learn about our
government's duplicity in the run-up to the war,
just as there is much more to learn about what
has gone on since, whether with torture or
billions of Iraq reconstruction dollars. That is
why the White House and its allies, having failed
to discredit the Fitzgerald investigation, are
now so desperate to slow or block every other
inquiry. Exhibit A is the Senate Intelligence
Committee, whose Republican chairman, Pat
Roberts, is proving a major farceur with his
efforts to sidestep any serious investigation of
White House prewar subterfuge. Last Sunday, the
same day that newspapers reported Carl Levin's
revelation about the "intentionally misleading"
Qaeda informant, Senator Roberts could be found
on "Face the Nation" saying he had found no
evidence of "political manipulation or pressure"
in the use of prewar intelligence.

    His brazenness is not anomalous. After more
than two years of looking into the forged
documents used by the White House to help support
its bogus claims of Saddam's Niger uranium, the
F.B.I. ended its investigation without resolving
the identity of the forgers. Last week, Jane
Mayer of The New Yorker reported that an
investigation into the November 2003 death of an
Abu Ghraib detainee, labeled a homicide by the
U.S. government, has been, in the words of a
lawyer familiar with the case, "lying kind of
fallow." The Wall Street Journal similarly
reported that 17 months after Condoleezza Rice
promised a full investigation into Ahmad
Chalabi's alleged leaking of American
intelligence to Iran, F.B.I. investigators had
yet to interview Mr. Chalabi - who was being
welcomed in Washington last week as an honored
guest by none other than Ms. Rice.

    The Times, meanwhile, discovered that Mr.
Libby had set up a legal defense fund to be
underwritten by donors who don't have to be
publicly disclosed but who may well have a vested
interest in the direction of his defense. It's
all too eerily reminiscent of the secret fund set
up by Richard Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert
Kalmbach, to pay the legal fees of Watergate
defendants.

    There's so much to stonewall at the White
House that last week Scott McClellan was reduced
to beating up on the octogenarian Helen Thomas.
"You don't want the American people to hear what
the facts are, Helen," he said, "and I'm going to
tell them the facts." Coming from the press
secretary who vowed that neither Mr. Libby nor
Karl Rove had any involvement in the C.I.A. leak,
this scene was almost as funny as his boss's "We
do not torture" charade.

    Not that it matters now. The facts the
American people are listening to at this point
come not from an administration that they no
longer find credible, but from the far more
reality-based theater of war. The Qaeda suicide
bombings of three hotels in Amman on 11/9, like
the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London before
them, speak louder than anything else of the
price we are paying for the lies that diverted us
from the war against the suicide bombers of 9/11
to the war in Iraq.