Froomkin's own original take on the aforementioned bipartisan report, back in December began thus:
Pack of Liars
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, December 12, 2008; 12:48 PM
Yesterday's bipartisan Senate report on the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere doesn't just lay out a clear line of responsibility starting with President Bush, it also exposes the administration's repeated explanation for what happened as a pack of lies.
"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the report finds. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."
....
And the report concludes: "The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantanamo]. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely."
Froomkin went to offer evidence of Bush's direct involvement in lying to cover up what had happened:
Bush himself repeatedly and sanctimoniously blamed Abu Ghraib on a small number of low-level perpetrators, even while trying to get credit for what he insisted was a transparent system that held those who were responsible accountable.
Bush, on May 24, 2004, described what happened at Abu Ghraib as "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values."
On June 1, 2004, he told a reporter: "Obviously, it was a shameful moment when we saw on our TV screens that soldiers took it upon themselves to humiliate Iraqi prisoners -- because it doesn't reflect the nature of the American people, or the nature of the men and women in our uniform. And what the world will see is that we will handle this matter in a very transparent way, that there will be rule of law -- which is an important part of any democracy. And there will be transparency, which is a second important part of a democracy. And people who have done wrong will be held to account for the world to see.
"That will stand -- this process will stand in stark contrast to what would happen under a tyrant. You would never know about the abuses in the first place. And if you did know about the abuses, you certainly wouldn't see any process to correct them."
In a May 18, 2004, interview, Bush told an Iraqi journalist: "I want to know the truth, too. . . . [Y]ou've just got to know that I'm interested in the truth, as well, just like you're interested in the truth."
And by April 6, 2006, after seven soldiers had been convicted, Bush made it clear that his quest was over: "I'm proud to report that the people who made that decision are being brought to justice, and there was a full investigation over why something like that could have happened."
By contrast, yesterday's Senate report suggests that those responsible for the abuse have emphatically not been brought to justice, and that there's more investigating to be done. Among the issues still to be addressed: the CIA interrogation program, which even more overtly included techniques commonly considered to be torture, such as waterboarding. There's also the obvious question that comes to mind after considering the sequence of events: How are these not war crimes?
The evidence was much more widespread than this however. For example, by sheer accident, looking for something entirely different this morning, I came across this entry in Washington Monthly's Poliotical Animal, back on May 7, 2004:
BROKEN PROCESS OR OFFICIAL POLICY?....Apparently everyone's been trying to warn Bush and Rumsfeld about possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq for months now. And not just the usual bleeding hearts:
- David Kay: "I was there and I kept saying the interrogation process is broken. The prison process is broken. And no one wanted to deal with it. It was too, too distasteful. This is a known problem, and the military refuses to deal with it."
- Paul Bremer: "Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall - both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as 'kicking and screaming' about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained."
- Colin Powell: "According to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration...whenever Powell or [Richard] Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as 'around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners....'"
Well, maybe these folks really did try to get everyone to pay attention to this issue or maybe they're just covering their own asses after the fact. Who knows?
But I think it misses the point anyway. Everyone is desperately trying to dismiss Abu Ghraib as an "aberration," nothing more than a "broken process" and a few rogue soldiers who are now being taken care of by the military justice system. But it just ain't so.
This kind of thing doesn't just happen. It happens because people order it to happen. So who gave the orders?
May 7, 2004 was right around the time that Zogby wrote that the 2004 election was "Kerry's to lose," and while Zogby himself has fallen in well-deserved disrepute since then, his work up to that time wasn't that far from the norm, and the overall polling data from that from that period supports his conclusion. Indeed, Kerry continued to solidify his position up until about 2 weeks before the convention in late July when he started to freeze up into the ineptly defensive posture that would eventually cripple his campaign.
Kerry would not aggressively go after the Bush Administration for promoting such a horrific policy and then blaming low-level personnel, who were thus victimized twice, even as they victimized Iraqi prisoners in turn. Instead, he acquiessed in the standard imperial narrative that uncritically links all levels of command together in one big happy military family--and drafts the civilian population into service as well, in the role of cheerleader corps.
And now that so much more information has come out, and the story has grown monstrously worse, Obama is continuing the same fatal moral, as well as political mistake that Kerry made back in the summer of 2004, when only Michael Moore, it seemed, was willing to speak out loudly against the dominant hegemonic narrative of the time. We are now at the point where the Democrats should be consolidating control over the political system for the next 36 years or so (the typical period between realigning elections), but Obama's moral and political cowardice, echoing Kerry's own fear to break with the once-dominant power that has now been twice defeated at the polls, is precisely the sort of fatal failure that could actually enable the Republicans to come back, when they have nothing whatsoever to offer except the thoroughly discredited policies that have brought our country to a state of ruin unparalleled since they last held power in dark days of the early Great Depression.
The point here is that Obama's embrace of the discredited BushCo "few bad apples" narrative is not an isolated act, but rather part of a much more sweeping, much more widespread pattern. Faced with the choice between blanket imperial coverup and democratic truth-telling that discriminates not just between the honorable and dishonorable, but also between the powerful and relatively powerless, Obama has decided to go with the imperial coverup.
This is fully compatible with his other efforts to protect the guilty elites in virtually every sector, while passing on the pain to the relatively innocent--or even entirely innocent average Americans who are being asked to shoulder by far the greatest burden.
This form of "socialization" of pain and suffering, while privatizing benefits out the wazoo is the preferred pattern of Obama Administration, in almost lock-step conformity with the Bush Administration before it. It embraces the logic of the conservative welfare state in it's American form, a logic whose primary aim is to strengthen the power of elites over the masses, and to use state power to mobilize a unified people behind the leadership of unaccountable elite institutions and individuals. There are, of course, differences between Bush and Obama--the stylistic ones are overwhelming, in fact. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that the substantive differences are merely a matter of how much more efficiently and comprehensively the Obama Administration can carry out policies that Bush struggled with and bumbled.
Prime example: Bush drew enormous heat, and only barely managed to pass a Medicare drug benefit that provided a mighty windfall for the drug companies. Obama, in contrast, is about to shepard through a massive "health care reform" that will force tens of millions of Americans to pour money that most of them really don't have into the coffers of the health insurance industry. It's the same exact form of state-forced special interest benefit, but Obama's packaging is so far superior to Bush's that the comparison is simply not believable to most observers. The packaging is just too shiny for anyone to actually see what's inside.
And so we go, continuing, for most part, in the same exact direction that we've been headed for the past 30+ years, but with a much steadier hand on the helm than we've had for the past 8.
And this is "change we can believe in." But the reality is that it falls so far short of what people are expecting that we may well experience a severe backlash, and a sudden return to the most incompetent version of what we've been experiencing for the past 30+ years.
Those are the two choices we're now be given. And from a big-picture point of view--or from a getting-evicted-from-your-house point of view--that's really no choice at all. |
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