Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
despotism →
secrecy, contempt, dishonesty, Commander-in-Chief override
“Iraq had a weapons program.
Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons program.
I am absolutely convinced that with time, we’ll find out they did have a weapons program.”
Thus spoke Bush to reporters today.
I’ve noticed this tic of repeating a phrase before.
It’s a technique for controlling the story, similar to the phrase-laden backdrops that accompany Bush on his media stops.
In this case, the theory behind it seems to be this:
Try to make it sound like the argument is over whether Iraq had a “weapons program” or not.
But of course, Bush didn’t stir up war fever in the United States by painting a picture of a “weapons program” in Iraq.
He said that “Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons” and “has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas” and that “Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons” and “continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
It’s almost as if people took him seriously.
Matthew Yglesias points out that the White House press office’s transcript of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s U.N. Security Council testimony about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction “has the text running under a banner reading ‘Iraq: Denial and Deception.’
A refreshing dose of candor in an unintended kind of way.”
This was the testimony in which Powell set out the evidence the Bush administration had for Iraq’s continuing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons threat, and is famous for statements like:
“Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent.
That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.
Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly 5 times the size of Manhattan.
Let me remind you that, of the 122 millimeter chemical warheads, that the U.N. inspectors found recently, this discovery could very well be, as has been noted, the tip of the submerged iceberg.
The question before us, all my friends, is when will we see the rest of the submerged iceberg?”
And the answer, all my friends, is “when pigs fly.”
It was that Dubya told the world:
“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
Now Henry Waxman, congresscritter, has put a database of such deceptive statements on-line — with a handy interface that allows you to search by speaker (Dubya, Dick, Rice, Powell, or Rumsfeld), subject (nukes, chemical/biological weapons, urgent threat, and al Qaeda links), keyword, and date.
That should be mighty convenient for the blogger or letter-to-the-editor writer.
It’s important to remember, though, that there is nothing unusual about a government enlisting an army of lies to help it fight a war.
That’s standard practice.
This “I’m shocked that you’d lie to us!” pose that the Democrats are using in is either disingenuous or stupid, and implies that they think the norm is for war fever to be accompanied by studied decision-making and solemn truth-telling.
It’s a cover-your-ass move — they’d like to make believe that they had no idea they were pulling a cart of manure when they helped pass the resolution authorizing Dubya to invade (a measure that, thanks to Democrats like Waxman, passed by wider margins than the one Dubya’s father got for Desert Storm Ⅰ).
The Senate Judiciary Committee had a chance to grill Attorney General Ashcroft yesterday about the notorious torture-is-legal memo.
This would have been a good opportunity for the Dubya Squad to repudiate the memo’s conclusions about the power of the president to nullify laws and treaties, and about the legality of torture, if they cared to.
When asked whether the administration had decided that torture was legal and had approved of its use, the closest thing to a denial that Ashcroft came up with was this: “I want to confirm that the president has not directed or ordered any conduct that would violate the Constitution of the United States, that would violate any one of these enactments of the United States Congress or that would violate the provisions of any of the treaties as they have been entered into by the United States, the president, the administration and this government.”
All of which sounds good… until you realize that the memo in question was arguing that torture, when done with presidential approval, did not violate the Constitution, United States law, or any of the country’s treaty obligations because the president’s directives in the conduct of war are a higher law than any of these.
So instead of being denials, Ashcroft’s remarks are really just slippery.
When asked whether his department will prosecute Americans who commit torture, Ashcroft responds: “The Department of Justice will both investigate and prosecute individuals who violate the law” (emphasis mine), again begging the same question.
(However, he did say directly at one point that the president had not issued an order immunizing interrogators of Al Qaeda suspects from prosecution “based on the tactics they use.”)
Ashcroft even gave a strange back-door defense of the core argument of the memo: that the commander-in-chief’s war-conducting mandate puts him and those under his command above the law.
This happened when Ashcroft was defending his decision not to release the text of the memos to Congress.
In the course of this defense he read a quote* that he’d brought along from Frank Murphy, whom Franklin Roosevelt appointed as his Attorney General in .
Ashcroft:
He [Murphy] explained in part refusing to give his opinion to the Senate, citing what was already long-established practice of attorneys general in .
He put it this way.
And I’m quoting.
While the constitutional powers of the president in time of war, now the quote starts, “have never been specifically defined and, in fact, cannot be, since their extent and limitations are largely dependent on conditions and circumstances.
The right to take specific action might not exist under one state of facts, while under another it might be the absolute duty of the executive to take such action.”
I’m not doing anything other than to say that there is a long-established policy reason grounded in national security that indicates that the development and the debate of hypotheses and practice of what can and can’t be done by a president in time of war is not good government.
And so it goes for the length of Ashcroft’s answers — denials that the administration is doing anything outside the law, in the shadow of a memo that has concluded that nothing the president does or orders done in the furtherance of his war-conducting mandate can be outside the law.
The Committee’s chair, Senator Hatch, gave Ashcroft a little verbal wink in his concluding remarks: “You’ve had to be very careful with what you’ve said here today,” Hatch said.
“And I fully understand why.
And I think any reasonable person who looks at it understands why, too.”
I think I understand.
Apparently, the decision to go to war also involves the decision to engage in torture, though perhaps Americans could be forgiven for not suspecting this right from the get-go.
On the torture front, this from ’s The New York Times:
Several former high-ranking military lawyers say they are discussing ways to oppose President Bush’s nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be attorney general, asserting that Mr. Gonzales’s supervision of legal memorandums that appeared to sanction harsh treatment of detainees, even torture, showed unsound legal judgment.…
A memorandum prepared under Mr. Gonzales’s supervision by a legal task force concluded that Mr. Bush was not bound either by an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation.
