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Martin Wolff's List: Bush administration
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Iraq isn’t George W. Bush’s only devastating legacy. Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz tallies the damage to the U.S. economy.
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To understand why the true costs of the war are so much higher than the official estimates, we can start by looking at America’s veterans. No one has suffered more from the administration’s blindness and stinginess. To date, more than 1.6 million American troops have been deployed in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations. More than 4,000 have been killed. More than 65,000 have been wounded or injured, or have contracted a disease. Of the 750,000 troops who have been discharged so far, some 260,000 have been treated at veterans’ medical facilities. Nearly 100,000 have been diagnosed as having mental-health conditions. Because a greater number of the injured are surviving today, the relative costs of long-term care will be greater than for any previous war. This is the surge the administration doesn’t talk about.
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David Wurmser, avowed neoconservative, resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup. Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas] with victory.†He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,†Wurmser says. The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,†he says. “It directly contradicts it.â€
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The abuse, rising to the level of torture, of those captured and detained in the war on terror is a defining feature of the presidency of George W. Bush. Its military beginnings, however, lie not in Abu Ghraib, as is commonly thought, or in the “rendition†of prisoners to other countries for questioning, but in the treatment of the very first prisoners at Guantánamo. Starting in late 2002 a detainee bearing the number 063 was tortured over a period of more than seven weeks. In his story lies the answer to a crucial question: How was the decision made to let the U.S. military start using coercive interrogations at Guantánamo?
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Guantánamo is bustling. Although the number of detainees has fallen from a high of around six hundred and eighty to around two hundred and seventy-five, the base is gearing up for what could become a series of military commissions—criminal trials of detainees. The first is scheduled to begin in May 2008. On a dusty plaza surrounded by barbed wire on an abandoned airfield, contractors are finishing a metal warehouse-type building, which will house a new, highly secure courtroom. On the former runways, more than a hundred semi-permanent tents have been erected, in which lawyers, journalists, and support staffs will work and sleep (six to a tent) during the trials. The tent city has been named Camp Justice. The Bush Administration, instead of closing Guantánamo, is trying to re-brand it—as a successor to Nuremberg rather than as a twin of Abu Ghraib.
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The emphasis on spy programs also is starting to give pause to some members of Congress who fear the government is investing too much in anti-terrorism programs at the expense of traditional crime-fighting. Other lawmakers are raising questions about how well the FBI is performing its counter-terrorism mission. The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the bureau was far behind in making internal changes to keep the nation safe from terrorist threats. These concerns come as the Bush administration has been seeking to expand its ability to gather intelligence without prior court approval. It has asked Congress for amendments to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it clear that eavesdropping on foreign telecommunications signals routed through the U.S. does not require a warrant.
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Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary. A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preemptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.†Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.â€
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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 is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrived in July 2008 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, to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution... 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 al-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 in the summer of 2001, 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!â€
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Late in 2007, top Bush administration officials decided to take a step they had long resisted. They drafted a secret plan to make it easier for the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces to launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda. Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies. The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington’s risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Mr. bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive. But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate... Inside the C.I.A., the fights included clashes between the agency’s outposts in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad. There were also battles between field officers and the Counterterrorist Center at C.I.A. headquarters, whose preference for carrying out raids remotely, via Predator missile strikes, was derided by officers in the Islamabad station as the work of “boys with toys.â€
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The president had accepted Cheney's diagnosis that the sluggish economy needed a jolt, overruling senior economic advisers who forecast dangerous budget deficits. But Bush rejected one of Cheney's remedies: deep reductions in the capital gains tax on investments. The vice president "was just hot on that," said Cesar Conda, then Cheney's domestic policy adviser. "It goes to show you: He wins and he loses, and he lost on that one." Not for long.
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The Justice Department is pressuring 10 states to purge their voter rolls, while states are ignoring laws to help low-income Americans register to vote.
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“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,†one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002â€â€”the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.â€
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Aug 17, 07
All three parts of this series can be accessed through the link to this article.
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Jose Padilla had no history of mental illness when President Bush ordered him detained in 2002 as a suspected al-Qaeda operative. But he does now. The Muslim convert was subjected to prison conditions and interrogation techniques that took him past the breaking point, mental health experts say.
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No one was surprised when he was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.
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There was no question of the government’s desire to keep the information secret. Six months earlier, the Supreme Court rocked the Bush administration by upholding the Guantánamo prisoners’ right to challenge their detention in habeas corpus proceedings. But the administration fought on, taking the narrow view that while the detainees might have been granted their day in federal court, they still had no “legal rights†— and specifically no right to counsel. Pentagon officials said that they were withholding the prisoners’ names for their own safety. But keeping the names secret made it harder for volunteer lawyers to file petitions on the prisoners’ behalf and for critics to dispute official claims that virtually all the men were terrorists.
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