I meant to get to this yesterday (damn internet connection), but if you haven’t seen the WaPo’s review of [tag]Ron Suskind[/tag]’s “[tag]The One Percent Doctrine[/tag],” there are some stunning observations that makes one wonder if Bush is merely incompetent or genuinely dangerous.
The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed [tag]CIA[/tag] briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending [tag]al-Qaeda[/tag] attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “[tag]Bin Ladin[/tag] [tag]Determined to Strike in US[/tag].” [tag]Bush[/tag] reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”
Think about that for a second. Top intelligence officials — [tag]George Tenet[/tag], Richard Clarke, and others — were running around with their “hair on fire,” warning that al Queda was about to unleash a monumental attack. Bush not only wouldn’t cut his month-long vacation short, he also never picked up the phone to chat with his CIA director or National Security Advisor. Worse, he seems to have treated intelligence briefings about Osama [tag]bin Laden[/tag] as perfunctory chores that he had to endure. Based on the “covered your ass” comment, it was almost as if the president was humoring the CIA briefer.
This from the man who believes his greatest strength is keeping the United States safe.
As if that weren’t disconcerting enough, consider the fate of [tag]Abu Zubaydah[/tag], captured in Pakistan in March 2002, and described, by Bush, as al Queda’s chief of operations.
Abu [tag]Zubaydah[/tag], his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3” — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”
Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. […]
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
It’s almost overwhelming to wrap one’s head around this anecdote. The [tag]president[/tag] not only lied to the public about the significance of Zubaydah’s capture, he also appears to have given the CIA a green light to [tag]torture[/tag] him. Making matters considerably worse, Zubaydah was mentally ill and the torture, in addition to being morally repugnant and illegal, didn’t (and couldn’t) produce anything of value.
Michael Froomkin raised a very compelling point.
Impeachment, the nuclear bomb of politics, is a terrible idea, one which, whether it succeeded or failed, would be very bad for the country both in the short term (the kleptocratic wing of the GOP will fight it like a rat in a box) and in the long term (too many impeachment attempts in a short period of time make it seem too available). And were impeachment to succeed, it would only replace one bad man with another bad (worse?) man.
Yet, regrettably, the time has come where we must search our consciences and ask if any lesser remedy than impeachment can be sufficient for this sort of behavior. Is anything less a form of implicit complicity, or at least acquiescence? What is the right way to not just protest but punish torturing someone in order to justify lies told to the American public?
I know [tag]impeachment[/tag] isn’t going to happen, but that’s a question that deserves a serious and honest answer.