Last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a joint report accusing Bush Administration officials of creating an atmosphere that permitted torture by U.S. military and intelligence officials and that led to the institutionalization of grave prisoner abuse.
The joint bi-partison report confirmed findings by a number of administration critics and also journalists (most notably Jane Meyer in her book, "The Dark Side: How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals") who contended that high-ranking officials in the Bush White House, at the Pentagon and State Department actively promoted torture as a means of fighting terrorism despite solid evidence that it doesn't work. I wrote about this issue last month.
Unfortunately, it seems the Senate report has sparked little mainstream interest of the American public.
But in today's New York Times, the newspaper's editorial staff published a searing, 1200-word editorial that lays out a compelling case for bringing the chief architects of the Bush Administration torture policies to justice, namely Donald Rumsfeld, William J. Haynes and David Addington.
It's a start, but more must be done. If our ideals are as sacred as we claim them to be, then the most important statement we can make as Americans is to police ourselves. The actions of this administration has severely damaged our standing in the world and it's time we set things right again. A good start would be to show that we know the difference between right and wrong.
Below are excerpts from the Times' editorial. The rest of it can be found here. You can also find links to downloading the Senate report here.
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.
The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.
It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.
The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions...
...One page of the report lists the repeated objections that President Bush and his aides so blithely and arrogantly ignored: The Air Force had “serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques”; the chief legal adviser to the military’s criminal investigative task force said they were of dubious value and may subject soldiers to prosecution; one of the Army’s top lawyers said some techniques that stopped well short of the horrifying practice of waterboarding “may violate the torture statute.” The Marines said they “arguably violate federal law.” The Navy pleaded for a real review.
The legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time started that review but told the Senate committee that her boss, Gen. Richard Myers, ordered her to stop on the instructions of Mr. Rumsfeld’s legal counsel, Mr. Haynes....
....We expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.
That job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel.
A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press In honor of Veteran's Day, I think it's important to reflect on what led us to invade Iraq and what a complete cluster fuck it became in the hands of an administration that was more concerned with ideology and fear-mongering.
The war is just one example of the Bush Administration's systematic and arrogant refusal to follow the international law or even the Constitution of the United States or accept any dissent, even from their own people.
One thing that should not be overlooked when examining the Bush Administration is to understand that its critics are not just left-wing radical crazies and Democrats. A good number of the Administration's critics -- especially the ones who spoke up against the secret detention and interrogation program and the black sites and Gitmo came from insider the Administration. They were Conservative lawyers who found themselves morally opposed to the Bush policies. A host of others spoke up as well, many at the risk of their careers in public service, including experienced military, intelligence and law-enforcement people. In fact, it is a fact that the upper levels of the White House, including Bush himself, were warned early on that what they were doing was not only wrong and politically stupid but possibly criminal. And yet, they pushed forward because they were convinced they were right.
It's curious for me to hear the Conservative wingnuts call President-elect Barack Obama (shown above embracing Iraq War Veteran Tammy Duckworth) a socialist, Marxist and a man who would endanger the rights of Americans. It's curious because this is exactly what's been happening under George W. Bush. I wonder what your average American might think if they discovered that since 9/11, the Bush White House has enacted laws, sometimes without any oversight or input from anyone who remotely disagreed with them, including consent or dissent from the American public, that would allow the President of the United States to kidnap, torture and indefinitely detain any person deemed an enemy of the United States, even American citizens.
I'm not making that up either. It's freaking true.
Consider for example, the 2003 so-called "Torture Memo" written by John Yoo. In this 81-page outrageous and amateurishly argued legal memo Yoo (pronounced You) -- a lawyer in the Bush White House’s Office of Legal Counsel (more on the OLC later) – contends without any sense of irony, the following (taken verbatim from the memo):
"Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of enemy combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President....Congress can no more interfere with the President's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield."
I know it’s hard to believe that a trained lawyer made this argument but there it is in black and white. The scope of the memo frightening -- for anyone who lives under a democratic government. Yoo matter-of-factly (and quite incorrectly) interprets the U.S. Constitution as giving the President virtually unlimited powers in wartime, saying that the President alone has the right to do whatever he wants even to enemies, whether they are inside the United States or not, and that said actions should be unfettered by any laws, domestic or international. Nor by any treaties even those signed by former Presidents, not by Congress, not even by the Constitution.
Unfortunately, this was not an isolated memo, a single error by a radical member of the Bush White House.
This theory, refined during the Reagan administration, is that where the Constitution vests power in the executive, especially power over foreign affairs and war, the president, as chief executive, is rightfully immune to legislative abridgements of his autonomy. Judicial abridgements are another matter. Those words were not spoke by what Addington might refer to as a "squishy" Liberal, but by Conservative columnist George Will, who also wrote in the same article condemning other righties belief in the theory:
"Because contemporary conservatism was born partly in reaction against two liberal presidents -- against FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society -- conservatives, who used to fear concentrations of unchecked power, valued Congress as a bridle on strong chief executives. But, disoriented by their reverence for Reagan, and sedated by Republican victories in seven of the last 10 presidential elections, many conservatives have not just become comfortable with the idea of a strong president, they have embraced the theory of the "unitary executive." The Yoo Memo and dozens of others issued by the White House OLC, were clear attempts by the Bush Administration to use the Unitary Executive Theory as a legal umbrella to justify giving the President unprecedented authority to, among other things, torture, secretly detain and deny basic legal rights to terrorism suspects, despite being in direct violation of U.S. and international law. (I highlighted suspects because in this country, being arrested and accused of a crime does not make you guilty of that crime. We actually take into account a person might actually be innocent, not something the Bushies dwelt on, apparently. And it should be understood as well that even American citizens could be classified as enemy combatants and treated as such, meaning they would have no rights under Habeas Corpus or any other such quaint legal protections.)
To put this stuff into the right perspective, consider the historical role and importance of the Office of Legal Counsel.
In Mayer's book, she explains:
"The OLC plays a unique role in the federal government. Sometimes referred to as the Attorney General’s law firm, its small but often brilliant staff of lawyers, many of whom are political appointees, issue opinions that are legally binding on the rest of the executive branch. If the OLC interprets the law in a certain way, unless the attorney general overrules it, the government must too. If the OLC says a previously outlawed practice, such as waterboarding, is legal, it is nearly impossible to prosecute U.S. Officials who followed that advice on good faith. As Jack Goldsmith, who headed the OLC in 2003, put it, OLC memos were virtual ‘golden shields.” The office wields “one of the momentous, and dangerous powers in the government: the power to dispense get-out-of-jail-free cards.” At the same time, OLC decisions also stripped dissenters of the ability to make opposing legal arguments ...”
The last part of this is significant because it goes to the heart of the way Bush governed this nation. These opinions were almost entirely made in secret by unelected officials -- five lawyers who called themselves “the War Counsel” – without for the most part the input or consent of Congress or even the Pentagon, CIA or FBI. These five men – Yoo, Addington, Timothy Flanigan, Alberto Gonzales and William Haynes had almost no experience in counterterrorism, law enforcement or even a rudimentary understanding of Islamic fundamentalism or the Muslim world. None of them had any real-world military experience. These were the men who were making post-9/11 policy – they were literally running the war on terror.
As Mayer goes on to argue, the policies of the Bush Administration were in direct conflict with the ideals set by men such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. These men were deeply influenced by the ideals of the European Enlightenment, the very ideals which inspired the first Americans to rise up against the tyranny of the British King. No sane person could argue that it was not the express and clear goal of the Founding Fathers to create a new kind of government that would ensure that the executive would not and could not claim sole power over the government and its people. And further, that he be limited by specific checks and balances those that reside in the hands of the judiciary (courts) and legislative (congress) branches. The single most important argument against the Unitary Executive Theory, which at its core is a direct assault on the very idea that is the United States of America.
The basis for the Bill of Rights can be found in the writings of Cesare Beccaria, specifically his groundbreaking work “On Crime and Punishments” which men such as Jefferson and Franklin had read and deeply admired. They saw its tenets as the building blocks of a democratic nation, on which it would have to stand to survive as a place that was truly free from tyranny and oppression. This is where they got the basis for the Fifth (against self-incrimination) and Eighth (a ban cruel and unusual punishment) amendments come from.
These are not mere ideals to be admired in history class or in a dusty document in the Library of Congress. They are time-tested principals that have set the standard for any nation hoping to be a true democracy.
Our belief in liberty has inspired not only the American people but other nations around the world. It was America, after all, that led the movement that championed the Geneva Conventions and later the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, or the CAT for short. There is no confusing legal mumbo jumbo about the CAT. It bans torture absolutely, under any circumstances. It leaves no question whatsoever as to the legality of torture, forbidding it completely and without reservation by any nation or nation’s representatives. There are no loopholes. The CAT was signed by the United States and it is therefore bound by its contents.
But Bush and Cheney, using their own lawyers and I say again WITHOUT THE CONSENT OR DISSENT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, signed and/or approved legally-binding documents. It’s significant that they did not allow or apparently trust the people who elected them, to have a frank, open dialogue on any of this shit. While other Presidents have been guilty of trying to expand their authority and of making policy in secret, it could be argued that none have gone so far or claimed as much unfettered, broad-reaching, unabated power as this administration. What they have done is criminal.
There is no mistaking their attempt to circumvent U.S. and International laws, no arguing they did it in secret and did not in many cases even accept input from Bush’s own cabinet. It is a fact that they not only authorized the capture, torture and secret detainment of suspected terrorists but they actually committed these barbaric acts in the name of the United States.
And even if you make the argument that terrorists deserve to be tortured, you must also note that many of the suspects tortured and detained secretly by the U.S. were later found to be innocent or were simple released, no charges ever having been filed against them.
Beyond the Bush Administration’s obvious disregard for basic human rights, the violations of the Geneva Conventions and the clear and secretive end run around the U.S. Constitution, the War on Terror has been an epic failure.
Worse, it has made the world less safe.
On Veteran's Day, let's consider those real-world consequences. If the United States of America, the shining example of freedom, tolerance and democratic ideals around the world, can torture suspected enemies, imprison them in secret, deny them basic human and legal rights without cause, even kill them, where exactly does that leave other nations? Why, for example, would our enemies follow the Geneva Conventions or the CAT, now that they know that our President doesn’t think it applies to him and by extension to anyone he deems as an enemy?
What do you suppose will happen, to U.S. military, intelligence or law enforcement personnel -- even innocent Americans abroad – when (not if) they are detained by a foreign country and accused of a crime?
What possible footing would the U.S. Government have to protest such an arrest by arguing that the treatment violates international law, the detainee's civil rights, habeas corpus and basic human decency -- when it denied those same rights to others, with impunity and without regard or consequence?
What then?
There is a standard for decency that has been championed by this nation from its first hours on Earth. And despite dark moments when we have abdicated our responsibility to uphold our core values of liberty and freedom, we have managed to hold onto our nation's soul. But Bush and Cheney and their lawyers, along with their legions of sychophants, sold our ideals down a river of fear and arrogance and in the name of national security, all while making us less secure and more like our enemy. They claimed to defend our most precious ideals, while at the same time believing they those ideals did not apply to them. These so-called patriots diminished America and everything it stood for.
Anyone who argues that Obama will take away our rights might want to take a look at the rights they lost over the past seven years.
Sounding like the historical brother of Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, President-elect Barack Hussein Obama sounded a siren call for change, unity and civic responsibility in his speech to his supporters last night in Chicago's Grant Park and to the millions listening on radio, TV and on the Internet.
It was a remarkable speech showing Obama's sense of history and perspective and acknowledging the debt he owes to a nation who rose up to support him and also reiterating that there is much work left to do. I've embedded the speech here, followed by the text as published by CNN on its website, because it's one everyone in America should hear.
Just to put it all into perspective, I'm including George W. Bush's acceptance speech from 2004, this was the day before he told reporters that he had earned "political capital" and he was going to spend it.
The fucker sure spent it. At the cost of American lives, the economy and the basic tenets of our Constitution. Even then, his promise of unity seemed empty but now, after four more years of divisive politics and backroom, shadowy governing, they are even more empty.
Without further ado, here are the two speeches so you can judge for yourself.
Hello, Chicago.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.
We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment change has come to America.
A little bit earlier this evening, I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Sen. McCain.
Sen. McCain fought long and hard in this campaign. And he's fought even longer and harder for the country that he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader.
I congratulate him; I congratulate Gov. Palin for all that they've achieved. And I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.
I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart, and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on the train home to Delaware, the vice president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation's next first lady Michelle Obama.
Sasha and Malia I love you both more than you can imagine. And you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the new White House.
And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother's watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight. I know that my debt to them is beyond measure.
To my sister Maya, my sister Alma, all my other brothers and sisters, thank you so much for all the support that you've given me. I am grateful to them.
And to my campaign manager, David Plouffe, the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best -- the best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America.
To my chief strategist David Axelrod who's been a partner with me every step of the way.
To the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.
I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.
It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep.
It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organized and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.
This is your victory.
And I know you didn't do this just to win an election. And I know you didn't do it for me.
You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime -- two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.
Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.
There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage or pay their doctors' bills or save enough for their child's college education.
There's new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.
I promise you, we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can't solve every problem.
But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it's been done in America for 221 years -- block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.
This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.
It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.
Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.
In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let's resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.
Let's remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.
Those are values that we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.
As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not
have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
To those -- to those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.
That's the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we've already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight's about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons -- because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America -- the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.
At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes
dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.
And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.
Yes we can.
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves -- if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.
This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.
Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.
(end of Obama's Election-night address).
Bush's Acceptance From Election-night 2004
Thank you all. Thank you all for coming. We had a long night -- and a great night. The voters turned out in record numbers and delivered an historic victory.
Earlier today, Senator Kerry called with his congratulations. We had a really good phone call, he was very gracious. Senator Kerry waged a spirited campaign, and he and his supporters can be proud of their efforts. (Applause.)
Laura and I wish Senator Kerry and Teresa and their whole family all our best wishes.
America has spoken, and I'm humbled by the trust and the confidence
of my fellow citizens.
With that trust comes a duty to serve all Americans, and I will do my best to fulfill that duty every day as your President.
There are many people to thank, and my family comes first. Laura is the love of my life. I'm glad you love her, too. I want to thank our daughters, who joined their dad for his last campaign. I appreciate the hard work of my sister and my brothers. I especially want to thank my parents for their loving support.
I'm grateful to the Vice President and Lynne and their daughters, who have worked so hard and been such a vital part of our team. The Vice President serves America with wisdom and honor, and I'm proud to serve beside him.
I want to thank my superb campaign team. I want to thank you all for your hard work. I was impressed every day by how hard and how skillful our team was. I want to thank Marc -- Chairman Marc Racicot and ---- the Campaign Manager, Ken Mehlman. And the architect, Karl Rove. I want to thank Ed Gillespie for leading our Party so well.
I want to thank the thousands of our supporters across our country. I want to thank you for your hugs on the rope lines; I want to thank you for your prayers on the rope lines; I want to thank you for your kind words on the rope lines. I want to thank you for everything you did to make the calls and to put up the signs, to talk to your neighbors and to get out the vote. And because you did the incredible work, we are celebrating today.
There's an old saying, "Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks." In four historic years, America has been given great tasks, and faced them with strength and courage. Our people have restored the vigor of this economy, and shown resolve and patience in a new kind of war. Our military has brought justice to the enemy, and honor to America. Our nation has defended itself, and served the freedom of all mankind. I'm proud to lead such an amazing country, and I'm proud to lead it forward.
Because we have done the hard work, we are entering a season of hope. We'll continue our economic progress. We'll reform our outdated tax code. We'll strengthen the Social Security for the next generation. We'll make public schools all they can be. And we will uphold our deepest values of family and faith.
We will help the emerging democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan so they can grow in strength and defend their freedom. And then our servicemen and women will come home with the honor they have earned. With good allies at our side, we will fight this war on terror with every resource of our national power so our children can live in freedom and in peace.
Reaching these goals will require the broad support of Americans. So today I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent: To make this nation stronger and better I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust. A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation. We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.
Let me close with a word to the people of the state of Texas. We have known each other the longest, and you started me on this journey. On the open plains of Texas, I first learned the character of our country: sturdy and honest, and as hopeful as the break of day. I will always be grateful to the good people of my state. And whatever the road that lies ahead, that road will take me home.
The campaign has ended, and the United States of America goes forward with confidence and faith. I see a great day coming for our country and I am eager for the work ahead. God bless you, and may God bless America.
Tony Snow died today. He was 53. For those of you who don't know why he's front-and-center on the NY Times obituary page, read about him here. When Jesse Helms left us on July 4, I knew a bad man was gone and I had no qualms about feeling glad that he could no longer pimp his flaming bigotry. But this one is different.
I knew Tony. He was a mentor and a friend when I was a young journalist at the Washington Times. We sparred about politics and life and religion and sports and he was a good, sweet-hearted man who I came to admire and respect. That doesn't mean knowing him is all that takes for me to be okay with the part he played in the Bush revolution.
I mean when he left to be Bush 1's speechwriter, I wasn't surprised -- he was a Republican, after all. But when he eventually ended up at Fox News, it was a weirder, because when we were debating over lunch in the Times' cafeteria, he seemed closer to the center than the other Conservatives I knew.
I never was able to comfortably reconcile the Tony Snow I knew with the man who was a Fox commentator or later, the mouthpiece for an administration whose policies led to the death and injury of so many young Americans and countless more Iraqis.
And it's even more complicated than that. I was working for the Times when I was diagnosed with lung cancer. I think Tony had left by that time but he somehow found out and contacted me. Believe me, when you're young and you have Cancer, it's not easy for some people and I had many friends who couldn't reach out to me, for whatever reason. I've come to believe it's hard for some people to be forced to consider their own mortality. But Tony knew about Cancer and his words that day were backed up by the authenticity of having gone through the darkness and come out of it. We were connected by it and he knew this long before I did.
So, I can't say Tony was a bad guy. And yes, his support of Bush at a time when it was pretty damn apparent to even the True Believers that the war and everything that came out of it was a royal fuck up, a cost measured in blood and human lives, is going to be part of his legacy. So I can't say he was a great man, either.
That he was there for me, and others, that he loved his family and was good to them, that he was a good and decent friend to folks on both sides of the political aisle, is also part of what he leaves behind, and it's that part I'll choose to remember about him.
S.O.L. Note: Please forgive the gaps in posts but S.O.L. has been felled by a very gnarly flu virus and has been recuperating by sleeping. All the time. Not since my college days have I slept so much during the daylight hours. I wanted to shoulder on as so many interesting things caught my attention in the last week or so, but I used up all my energy thinking about them. I’m still down for the count but the cleaning woman is here today so I had to get out of bed. So here I am sitting up at my computer, I might as well make a blog appearance. This was a blog I began last week after the news on the White House Press Secretary's cancer recurrence.
There's a darkly humor ous joke one of my Cancer doctors once told me they tell at the major hospital where I was treated. It goes something like this: A man runs in to the lobby off the street yelling "Help me! My wife is sick!" A kind nurse calmly asks him what's wrong. "She has cancer," he says. The nurse hands him a clipboard, "Everybody has Cancer here," he says.
Nobody ever explained the joke to me but they don't have to. It all makes perfect sense when you're a patient there and you've been told you might very die, that if you don't you'll lose your right lung and right there in the middle of your own private pity party, you meet your new roomie, the mother of two adorable kids under five too sweet for words whose hand-crayoned pictures are taped to her suitcase who whose husband has decided now is a good time to move out, arrives with a shaved head and a broad smile, the night before her fourth brain cancer operation in two years.
See, as bad as that word must have sounded when you first heard it, you're suddenly aware that not only aren't you a lone but chances are someone out there has it really bad. Oh, and you're in the right place because if anybody knows what to do with Cancer, it's a place where the very term has become rote. I like the idea of demystifying the Big C. The truth is we're curing it at higher rate than ever before and that there are something like 8 million people among us who are not only Cancer survivors but are living full and thriving lives. You might think Lance Armstrong as a superhuman exception but to a Cancer survivor, he is doing what the rest of us are doing, he's just doing it at a higher level.
Cancer has been in the news a lot the last two weeks. First Elizabeth Edwards' announcement (you go, girl) and then last week's revelation that White House spokesman Tony Snow's Colon cancer has returned and spread.
This blog isn't about cancer though. It's selfishly about me.
I knew Tony Snow back when we were both working for the Washington Times. He was the Editorial Page editor and I was a lowly staff writer. I always liked Tony. Truth is I sort of had a crush on him. He was just the sort of preppy Washington guy I used to go for and he was smart and funny and despite our wide political differences, we found common ground in the lunch room about issues that interested us, music, sports, stuff like that. I found him very human and even as he rose through the ranks along with a host of other conservative pundits, I watched his career with interest and, sometimes, rooted for him. It seemed to me that while he had right wing bonafides, he often seemed rational, like he'd thought stuff through, like he wasn't about spewing Karl Rove's talking points.
I'm not sure when that all changed, but it did. It wasn't a big surprise to me then when he ended up fronting for the Bush White House. I thought he would be different than the previous mouthpiece and in many ways he is. For one, he's brilliant and he can speak eloquently and there are times when I think reading between the lines, he has been less willing to lie outright, more understanding that even our current extremely gullible press corps. aren't going to swallow just anything.
But over time, I've seen a change in his demeanor, too. He's angrier and his attitude toward the White House press corps is more dismissive, like he's the schoolmaster and they're the unruly little rich kids who won't behave. Maybe this whole press secretary thing is just too soul-crushing for him. Maybe his humanity is taking a beating. Maybe he really is a good guy who is collapsing underneath the weight of so much ... twisting of the truth. Or maybe he's just he's a true believer now. Maybe he always was.
Should it matter to me now? It does and that's my problem here.
Back when I heard he had Cancer the first time, I sent a note to him (though I've no idea if he ever got it or even remembered me). I admit to feeling ambiguous about sending a letter now. Of course it sucks he's sick -- I wouldn't wish that on anybody. I truly hope he gets better but God help me, here's the rub. There's a part of me -- a big part of me -- that thinks sending him a get well card endorses what he does for a living, which I find morally reprehensible.
Politics morally reprehensible? I get it. It's all morally repugnant. Even I think Clinton was sleazy at his worst. I have friends who argue that all politics is like this, that almost none of them have any great ideas beyond those that help their re-election campaigns. That there's not much measurable difference between a Republican and a Democrat. Maybe he's right most of the time. But I say these particularly Republicans are different. They have changed the game in a way that sets them far apart from their counterparts (who I might add, let them change the freaking game but that is for another blog post). I say there comes moments in our history, personal and societal, when you/we have to make a choice between what is right and what is wrong. We have to cross a line, take a stand, call the bad people on their shit.
And let's be very clear here. This Administration is the most cynical of our generation. Whenever they got a chance to play dirty, reward a friend or punish an enemy, help a business crony or cover up the truth, the Bushies didn't hesitate. And think about this: if this is, as many experts claim, the most secretive administration in the history of this nation, then there's gotta be a whole lotta shit we haven't even heard about yet. That ought to help you sleep at night.
So I can feel bad about Tony Snow's Cancer and I can wish him well in my heart. But I'm not going to acknowledge it, I think. I don't know if I'm being rude or ridiculous or righteous but Snow made his choice and I'm making mine.
Dry Creek Road After the Rain, Feb. 2007 When I was 17 years old I discovered that Lee Hays, a member of the famed folk group The Weavers was living one town over from me. Being the daughter of what I like to call "Greenwich Village Liberals," Hays was sort of a hero of mine - a fine musician and a brave activist.
We had a good, if not particularly strong radio station at my high school and I managed to arrange an interview with him and edited into a special interview. I have the tapes somewhere but they are on reel-to-reel and I’ve yet to have them transferred. But when I do, I’ll have it transcribed.
Hays was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the son of a Methodist Preacher and became a union activist in the 1930s, finding his way to New York City where he met, performed and befriended Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter, Josh White and Burl Ives. He wrote a number of important pro-union songs, including "Which Side Are You On," and later, co-wrote (with the Weavers) songs like "Kisses Sweeter than Wine" and "If I Had a Hammer." The group was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
Hays lived in Croton-on-Hudson in a small house at the end of a long, narrow dusty road. I didn’t drive yet and my Mom dropped me off at his house and left me there at his front door. I knocked and heard this bellowing voice from inside telling me to come in.
In the Weavers’ old publicity shots, Hays stands out prominently. He was a big guy with the thick-rimmed glasses, more football player than folk singer who probably resembled in appearance anyway, the union-busting thugs that he and his fellow “agitators” faced off against when they were fighting for workers’ rights.
By the time I met him, he was in his late 60s and in failing health, still an impressive bear of men despite having lost both legs to a long battle with diabetes.
When I walked into that tiny, stuffy one-room house, Hays was still in bed, using his massive arms to grasp the metal bar hanging from the ceiling and pull himself into a wheelchair. We got situated, sitting outside on his small porch, which faced a wooded area. It was a beautiful spot but not so great for making a tape recording - the sound of birds and a barking dog in the background can be heard clearly on the tape, sometimes loud enough to where you couldn’t hear us talking.
The conversation covered his history as an activist and the music and politics, of course. I was already a believer. I grew up in a household where the heroes were people like Richard Wright, Pete Seeger and Martin Luther King, Edward R. Murrow, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, and blacklisted writers like Paddy Cheyevsky.
I felt like I was bridging a gap to an forgotten American history, to a place and people who had been bludgeoned under the pressure of the young and oh-so eager young Reagan Republicans who were in the process of turning the word “liberal” into a dirty word.
It was spring of 1981, right before Reagan was shot outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., when Alexander Haig stepped all over the Constitutional chain of power to claim he was in “control” of the White House.
That summer, I was working as a counselor in a summer camp in Connecticut and I was corresponding with Hays. He sent me a postcard about Haig that I’ve kept all these years, “Such men would be funny if they weren’t so ominous,” he wrote.
He never got to see how it all turned out. A few weeks after he wrote to me, Hays died. I don’t know what the cause was but the local newspaper wrote that he had taken several local kids under his wing and one he was particularly close to, who had just gone off to college in Florida, had been killed in a motorcycle accident. The implication was he died of a broken heart.
I’ve thought a lot about Hays since, more so than ever after 9/11 and did not have to wonder how he would have reacted to the way our nation responded to it. He would have been disappointed. He would have wondered how America could have gone so far backward so fast.
I did not support this war with Iraq. I had many reasons, some of which were romantic notions, I admit. I didn’t know that the Bush Administration was lying about WMD, though it was clear from what I was reading, however, that they made up the link between Saddam and the 9/11 hijackers and later, that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Niger.
I’m not a complete pacifist. I knew what Saddam Hussein was and that he needed to be ousted. But I read about the NeoCons and checked out their manifesto and I just didn't share their opinion of the world. It didn't seem rational to me.
I never made the connection between Al Qaeda and invading Iraq. Afghanistan, now that was a different matter altogether. That I got.
I wanted Osama Bin Laden to be brought to justice, his organization destroyed. Once that was accomplished, I wanted to see our nation ask the hard questions about how we had arrived at this point in history where we were so hated. I wanted to see a policy where we would find a way to reach the moderates in the Arab world, to find a bridge, a shared humanity.
I was called a traitor by my Republican “friends” who accused me of being soft, of not understanding the threat of not seeing that there were no “moderate” Arabs, that they all wanted us dead. They are, interestingly enough, not lining up to apologize for how wrong they were and how right I was. They are, interestingly enough, being very quiet these days.
I never doubted my point of view, in part because the people who seemed to share it were big thinkers who I respected, people like Joe Conason, Sidney Blumenthal, Seymour Hersh, Frank Rich and others. People who looked beyond the spin, the rhetoric, the blindly nationalistic post-9/11 call for blood, and asked difficult questions, shined a light on the truth.
The war progressed, mistake after mistake after mistake was made, lies were brought out into the open, the whole thing turned into a major political, military and geopolitical disaster, it occurred to me that we so-called weak, uninformed, unpatriotic, traitorous liberals were right after all.
The best book on Iraq I’ve read so far (and I’m going through them all) is “The Assassin’s Gate” by George Packer. It’s so brilliant on a number of levels, not the least of which because it is starkly honest, unflinchingly objective, searing and insightful.
Packer supported the invasion, if for different reasons than the Bush Administration. He spoke with American and foreign officials, military leaders and soldiers, American Iraqis, exiles and those who had lived under Saddam’s harsh rule. His book lays out in painful detail the manner in which the Bush Administration fucked up the war out of fundamentalist views, plain arrogance and outrageous negligence.
The errors the Administration made in the planning and handling of the war, and the post-war reconstruction efforts are horrendous all by themselves, but reading about them first hand, seeing the mistakes as they made them side-by-side with the obviousness of those errors, well it’s enough to make you sick to your stomach.
This isn’t, as some Administration supporters have argued, the result of unavoidable mistakes or bad luck or the residue of conditions and/or events that were unforeseen. They had all the information. They just ignored it. It's a clear example of a kind of hubris of historic proportions, the kind that has brought whole civilizations crashing to their knees.
And the beat goes on, unfettered, apparently.
A couple of weeks ago, there was this exchange at the White House press briefing as reported by Tim Grieve at salon.com:
Reporter: Slides from a prewar briefing show that by this point, the U.S. expected that the Iraqi army would be able to stabilize the country and there would be as few as 5,000 U.S. troops there. What went wrong?
Tony Snow: I'm not sure anything went wrong. At the beginning of the Civil War, people thought it would all be over at Manassas. It is very difficult -- no, Jessica, the fact is, a war is a big, complex thing. And what you're talking about is a 2002 assessment. We're now in the year 2007, and it is well known by anybody who has studied any war that war plans immediately become moot upon the first contact with the enemy. For instance, a lot of people did not think that we would have the success we had moving swiftly into Baghdad. All I'm saying is that -- what happens is, you're looking at a prewar assessment, and there have been constant assessments ever since. A war is not a situation where you can sit down and neatly predict what exactly is going to happen. You make your best estimates, but you also understand that there are going to continue to be challenges, there are going to be things that you don't anticipate, there are going to be things that the enemy doesn't anticipate. And the most important task, frankly, is to continue to try to assess near-term and midterm to figure out how best to address the situation.
Reporter: But this estimate was monumentally wrong. So would the president, knowing what he knows today, still have decided to go into Iraq?
We didn’t know. Things change. These are circular arguments that Bush officials throw out after anything goes wrong over there. Sure, it’s occasionally correct, but as Packer makes clear again and again in the pages of “The Assassin’s Gate,” the Administration rejected post-war planning, intelligence assessments, historical realities and expert analysis that didn’t conform to what they knew was going to happen. Worse, any little shred of evidence that supported their point of view, was given more weight then it deserved. It was a whole organization of sycophants.
This isn’t just policy errors that have damaged the United States’ reputation both with our friends and enemies, there are real world implications from the Iraq debacle.
- Iraq has descended into a civil war and become a breeding ground for terrorism.
- Al Qaeda, which was severely crippled in the military actions on Afghanistan after 9/11, has reportedly regrouped and encamped somewhere in the vast regions of Pakistan.
- Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s stubborn refusal to first send enough troops into Iraq and then later, when his own military and civilian authorities in Iraq were pleading for more troops, refusing to increase the numbers, damaged the military’s efforts at securing Iraq and, in part, led to the success of the insurgency.
- The Administration’s refusal to believe that guerilla war was possible, even though it was learned shortly into the war that this was exactly what Saddam had planned from the start, led to an unprepared military and, consequently, to the deaths of Americans.
- The Administration’s arrogant distaste for so-called ‘nation building” planning because it was favored by the Clinton Administration, led to a series of tragic blunders by post-war planning authorities, all of them either a direct result of Administration policy objectives that had no basis in reality, or from lack of good intelligence or analysis, most of which had gone unheeded or unread by key officials.
Packer makes a very strong case that the Iraq invasion was winnable had so many blunders not been committed by people more concerned with their view of the world, then with doing right by America and Iraq.
There is no question when looking at the overall picture of this war and what and who led us into it, that it was handled as badly as could be imagined. Some of this was just pure incompetence but most of this can only be attributed to a group of people in power who subscribed to a point of view with the kind of religious zeal that we’ve seen from the very people we are fighting.
The NeoCons wanted to spread Democracy throughout the Middle East, wanted them to be more like us. What they have wrought only make us seem more like them.
Like Lee Hays said so many years ago, it would be funny if it wasn’t so ominous.
"When all the flash and fury have turned to ash, here's what remains: our present system treats medicine as a profit center instead of a human need and public service.
