New York Times: Looking at America

Editorial
Looking at America
Published: December 31, 2007 – The New York Times
There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.
The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

The Abominable No-Man and Mr. 9/11

The Abominable No-Man and Mr. 9/11
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Our good president has been making his political rounds with pronounced zest in what appears to be a valiant effort to prove he is still relevant. One day he is Bush the Adventurer, the man who blundered into Iraq -- talking up the evils of Iran and the possibility of World War III. The next day he is Bush the Abominable No-Man, keeping health care out of the greedy hands of poor kids.

These are but two of the horrifying personas of this president. There is also the mortifying "I can’t believe he’s my president" persona. This president is the backslapper, the one who calls himself "the decider", the fellow who drops his dog on its head. He’s the one who opened the conference of the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) by thanking Australian prime minister John Howard "for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit" -- OPEC being the cartel of mostly Middle Eastern oil producers. This president then thanked Howard for the presence of his "Austrian" troops in Iraq and marched confidently offstage -- in the wrong direction.

A few weeks later the same president attended an elementary school in New York in order to crow about higher national test scores. "Childrens do learn!" he proclaimed, creating a Norm Crosby-ish bookend for his infamous "Is our children learning?" anguish of a few years ago.

I wouldn’t want to draw conclusions as to the cause of this recent spate of malapropisms, but a new book by former British foreign secretary Lord Owen may supply a clue. In 'The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair, and the Intoxication of Power', Owen recalls the time in 2002 when the commander in chief collapsed while sitting on a sofa watching a football game. (Official cause: he’d choked on a pretzel.) The presidential head hit a table on the way to the floor, he suffered an abrasion on the left side of his face and a blood sample was rushed to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. Owen says he was told by a British doctor who had visited Johns Hopkins that lab technicians there found that the blood contained significant amounts of alcohol -- this in the body of a man who claims he hasn’t had a drop in more than 20 years.

The president stayed on message in Washington last November when he gave Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird", the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. First he quoted an early review of the book: "A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of a new fiction bearing the title "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Beautiful words. Stirring.

Then Bush went on to say, in his own words, "We’re moved by the story of a man falsely accused -- with old prejudice massed against him, and an old sense of honor that rises to his defense."

Am I the only one who found these sentiments an outrage, inasmuch as they came from the mouth of a man who has endorsed acts of extraordinary rendition and torture often based on slim evidence and racial profiling? I can only imagine what was going through Harper Lee’s mind at the time.

With regard to the president’s favorite pastime -- namely, wondering what his place in history will be -- historians should heed the counsel of fans of our national pastime, who are uniquely equipped to assess the commander in chief’s judgment and fore sight. Back in the mid-90s, professional baseball owners were deciding whether to enact a wild-card rule, which would allow a second-place team in each league the chance to get into the playoffs. When the 28 owners came to decide on the new rule, only one voted against it -- only one -- and that was our very own president, then the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers.

Since then, nearly a third of World Series champions have been wild-card teams, and the rule change is credited with helping baseball regain its standing following the brutal seven-month players’ strike that began in 1994. "History will prove me right," Bush bellowed at the time of the vote. "This is an exercise in folly."

One of the people who think they can do a better job than the president let me correct that: one of the people who *think* they can do a better job than the president, and are actively chasing the position is New York’s own banty visionary Rudolph Giuliani, Mr. 9/11 himself. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: one second before that first plane flew into the World Trade Center tower, Giuliani was one of the most disliked mayors in New York history. Grasping, petty, and vengeful, he was the sort of politician who runs for higher office not so much because he can, then reward those who helped him along, but because he can then punish those who didn’t.

It could reasonably be said that Giuliani shone on 9/11 and during its aftermath. And he’s been shining that 9/11 badge ever since. Indeed, with the possible exception of Osama bin Laden, nobody has cashed in more on that fateful day. As Michael Shnayerson illustrates so clearly in "A Tale of Two Giulianis", his unflinching look at the former mayor’s professional dealings, the post-9/l1 Giuliani has gone into business with a number of companies of less than stellar reputation. This is all legal, if a bit tawdry, for a former mayor. But it’s not really what you go looking for in a future head of state.

-GRAYDON CARTER -- Vanity Fair Editor