A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  The United States is currently holding at least fourteen thousand detainees in its custody around the world (former Clinton official Sidney Blumenthal has reported, based on interviews with Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, that the number is closer to thirty-five thousand, only an extremely small percentage of which have any connection to terrorism). Virtually none of those detainees is given a trial of any kind, and some—such as Padilla—are held in those circumstances not for fourteen months like Foshee, but for many years.

  On his Senate website, Martinez trumpets his heroic efforts to save Foshee from Communist tyranny in Vietnam by securing her release from prison even in the wake of her terrorism conviction. Yet also on Senator Martinez’s website is an October 17, 2006, press release, issued on the day the president signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, authorizing the U.S. president to detain “terrorist suspects” forever with no access to courts of any kind:

  U.S. Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) today applauded President Bush’s signing of S. 3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006….

  Senator Martinez said: “We must remember the detainees this law affects are terrorists engaged in an ongoing war against the United

  States.”

  Martinez, like every senator (other than Lincoln Chafee) in the Republican Party that he now chairs, voted in favor of the MCA. Martinez also voted against a proposed amendment to that bill which would have allowed terrorist suspects the right to challenge the accusations against them in court—the very right given to Foshee by the Communist regime in Vietnam. Additionally, throughout her incarceration, Foshee “had regular contact with the U.S. consul in Vietnam.” As was true for José Padilla, most terrorist suspects in U.S. custody are held for lengthy periods without any contact with the outside world at all. Some have been even held in secret prisons to ensure that not even international human rights groups such as the Red Cross would know of their existence. While Martinez voted to legalize such conduct in the U.S., he vigorously protested far less egregious abuses in the Foshee case.

  Similarly, whereas the U.S. was once a worldwide leader in protecting the rights of journalists, we have now become, in pursuit of George Bush’s battle against Evil, a systematic violator of such rights. Indeed, in the eyes of many international journalists, the U.S. is a genuine threat to their freedom to report on the conduct of our country.

  Bilal Hussein is a Pulitzer Prize–winning Associated Press photographer who was detained by the U.S. military in Iraq in April 2006. The U.S. continued to hold him through the remainder of the year without charging him with a single crime. The U.S. military has vaguely claimed that he has close ties with Iraqi insurgents, but steadfastly refuses to specify what he is alleged to have done, refuses to provide any hearing or process of any kind for him to learn of the charges or contest them, and refuses to respond to AP’s requests for information about why their photographer is imprisoned.

  Hussein’s detention was preceded by months of vicious complaints from Bush followers in the blogosphere and elsewhere that Hussein’s photojournalism was anti-American and suggestive of support for the insurgents. Before there were even any news reports anywhere about Hussein’s detention, right-wing blogger and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin learned of Hussein’s arrest—she claims “from an anonymous military source in Iraq”—and blogged about it. She asserted that “Hussein was captured earlier today by American forces in a building in Ramadi, Iraq, with a cache of weapons.”

  What is notable and encouraging in the Hussein case is that the Associated Press has become increasingly aggressive about defending press freedoms and objecting to the U.S. government’s lawless detention of one of its journalists. After first attempting unsuccessfully to negotiate with the U.S. military to obtain either formal charges against Hussein or his release, AP, with increasing passion, has been publicly complaining about the treatment of its photographer. Toward the end of 2006, they escalated their campaign by reporting aggressively on this incident, as exemplified by this article:

  The U.S. military’s indefinite detention of an Associated Press photographer in Iraq without charges is an outrage and should be seen as such by the journalistic community, AP editors said Friday.

  “We are angry, and we hope you are, too,” AP International Editor John Daniszewski told a gathering of the Associated Press Managing Editors.

  Given the irreplaceable function of journalists to expose and convey truth, especially in war zones, such lawless detentions pose extreme and obvious dangers that require safeguards. But the Bush administration has simply arrogated unto itself the power to detain whichever journalists it wants, while accounting to nobody. In the Hussein case, there are, at the very least, compelling grounds to believe that the Hussein detention was motivated by his legitimate work as a journalist, as noted in the AP article:

  Daniszewski said that when the news cooperative pressed for further details, the best it could learn was that Hussein was allegedly involved in the kidnapping of two journalists by insurgents in Ramadi.

  However, Daniszewski said the two journalists were asked by AP about the incident and that they recalled Hussein as a “hero,” who helped evacuate them from harm’s way.

  [AP director of photography Santiago] Lyon said he reviewed Hussein’s images and interviewed his colleagues and found nothing to suggest he was doing more than his job in a war zone. The vast majority of images depicts the realities of war, Lyon said, and “may be an inconvenient truth, but a truth nonetheless.”

  David Zeeck, president of ASNE and executive editor of The News Tribune, of Tacoma, Wash., called Hussein’s detention without charges “contrary to American values.”

  “This is how Saddam Hussein dealt with reporters; he would hold them incommunicado,” Zeeck said.

  This overt assault on press freedoms abroad is consistent with the administration’s incremental attacks on the American media domestically, including explicit threats to commence criminal prosecutions against reporters who reveal administration actions of dubious legality, such as James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times (who disclosed the president’s warrantless eavesdropping activities in violation of the law) and the Washington Post’s Dana Priest (who disclosed the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe). Strikingly, attacks of this sort have been met with virtual silence from most of the national media. In that regard, perhaps this exchange is the most revealing part of the AP’s article regarding Bilal Hussein:

  Rosemary Goudreau, editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune, asked AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll what papers like hers could do.

  “You run an editorial page, as I recall,” Carroll said.

  Just as astonishing as the Bush administration’s attack on the work of journalists is the almost total acquiescence of the American media to those attacks—so much so that AP is forced to beg their fellow journalists to editorialize against the administration’s lawless and dangerous detention of one of its journalists. If, as has been the case to an astonishing extent, American journalists are unwilling to defend their press freedoms, who is going to? The American media, like much of the country, seems willing to continue accepting the premise that in his battle with Evil, the president must be permitted to engage in behavior which the U.S. as a nation has previously condemned.

  In 2006, the international journalist group Reporters Without Borders conducted its annual rankings of countries as determined by their respect for press freedoms. As one representative international news report described:

  The press is freer in Mozambique than it is in the United States, according to the latest Worldwide Press Freedom Index, published by the Paris-based press freedom body, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF—Reporters without Borders).

  The RSF index gives each country a score, based on the degree of freedom for journalists and media organisations….But the United

  States has been falling steadily. In the first year the index was publish
ed it was in 17th position. Last year the US was in 44th position, and this year it is ranked as number 53 alongside Botswana, Croatia and Tonga.

  RSF explains that this decline arises from the deterioration in relations between the Bush administration and the media “after the President used the pretext of ‘national security’ to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his ‘war on terrorism.’” RSF also points out that US federal courts refuse to recognise journalists’ cherished right not to reveal their sources. This practice “even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.”

  RSF notes, in particular, the cases of freelance journalist Josh Wolf, imprisoned by the US authorities when he refused to hand over his video archive; of Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, held without trial at the US military base of Guantánamo since June 2002; and of an Associated Press photographer, Bilal Hussein, held by the US in Iraq since April this year.

  The RSF annual survey is widely respected and free of any serious bias. It cannot be dismissed as the work of some sort of left-wing, tyranny-blind internationalist group, since the bottom of the list—well below the U.S.—is filled with exactly the countries one would expect to find there, such as North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, and Iraq. And the United States has traditionally sat at or near the top of those rankings. In 2002, for instance, it was ranked 17. After six years of the Bush presidency, the U.S. falls below countries such as Ghana, El Salvador, Namibia, Chile, Israel, and virtually every European country.

  And it is always worth underscoring the fact that these observations are compelled by what we know. The Bush administration has been one of the most secretive in history, aided by a Congress controlled by loyal allies engaged in virtually no oversight of the executive branch. Those facts leave no doubt that there is a whole universe of Bush administration actions that remain concealed.

  Journalist Ron Suskind was interviewed in November 2006 by Der Spiegel, and was asked: “You quote former CIA director George Tenet in your book as saying after Sept. 11: ‘There is nothing we won’t do, nothing we won’t try.’ Are there any other dirty stories?”:

  Logically, I would have to say yes. You’re dealing with an oddity here, a secret war. Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches. This is a new conflict, fought largely in secret. The public is only informed on a kind of “need to know basis.” Based on that, I would assume that there remains something of an undiscovered country of activity in terms of what we have done over the past five years [emphasis added].

  Beyond our assault on journalists, since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. has been (and still is) a country that kidnaps other countries’ innocent citizens (including those of its own allies); brings them to Jordan, Syria, and Egypt to be tortured (sometimes for as long as a year); and lies to its allies about what it is doing with their citizens. Thereafter, when the innocent citizens are finally released and they seek redress in an American court for their disappearance and torture, the Bush administration tells the presiding federal judge that the case must be summarily dismissed because national security would be harmed if the administration were held accountable in a court (and the courts then comply).

  The case of Maher Arar—a Canadian citizen abducted by the U.S. and sent to Jordan for a year to be tortured despite having no terrorist ties of any kind—received moderate attention in 2006 because a Canadian government commission issued a report that “say[s] categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada.” The report also blasts the Bush administration, which abducted Arar during a layover at JFK Airport when he was flying home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia:

  On Oct. 8 [2002], he was flown to Jordan in an American government plane and taken overland to Syria, where he says he was held for 10 months in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable. He was freed in October 2003, after Syrian officials concluded that he had no connection to terrorism and returned him to Canada….

  Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials “believed—quite correctly—that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria.”

  Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar’s whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.

  Though extreme, there was nothing new about our government’s treatment of Arar. Khalid El-Masri is a German citizen who alleges—with the support of German prosecutors—that the U.S. government abducted him, drugged him, flew him to multiple torture-using countries (and shuttled him at least to Kabul, Baghdad, and Skopje, Macedonia) as part of the administration’s “rendition” program, only to then release him after five months when the U.S. realized it had abducted the wrong person (El-Masri has a name similar to a suspected terrorist’s). There is no dispute about El-Masri’s complete innocence, as a Washington Post article detailed:

  This year [2006], German investigators confirmed most of Masri’s allegations, which have received extensive publicity in Europe. In December, during a joint news conference with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Rice had admitted the mistake.

  Of course, complaints about all of this behavior are met with the accusation that one is “proterrorist” or concerned with “terrorist rights,” and that the imperatives of America’s battle against Evil justifies and even compels the most radical actions. Yet cases such as Arar’s and El-Masri’s demonstrate the core corruption that shapes that reasoning.

  It is impossible to imagine a more potent case than Arar’s to underscore the point that being detained by the Bush administration, or being accused by them of being a terrorist, does not mean that someone is, in fact, a terrorist. For years, Bush followers have deliberately ignored the principle that is central to our political system: the government’s accusation is not tantamount to guilt. That everyone apprehended and detained by the Bush administration is, by definition, “a terrorist” is a patent falsehood. Yet that myth is repeated endlessly.

  Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demonstrated this tactic when he explained why he expected Democrats as well as Republicans to vote in favor of a provision in the Military Commissions Act allowing accused terrorists at Guantánamo to be convicted on the basis of evidence that they are prohibited from examining: “For example, I imagine it would be awkward for many of my Democrat colleagues to go home and explain a vote to provide sensitive, classified information to terrorists” (emphasis added).

  Senator Mel Martinez said this about why he voted to deny habeas corpus to detainees in U.S. custody: “We must remember the detainees this law affects are terrorists….”

  The deceit here is manifest—and uniquely dangerous. The fact that someone is accused by the Bush administration of being a terrorist or suspected by the administration of working with terrorists does not, in fact, mean that they are a “terrorist.”

  Advocating minimal due process protections for military commissions before people are executed for being “terrorists” cannot honestly be described as “giving rights to terrorists” because they are not terrorists solely by being accused—and anyone who describes it as such is engaged in outright dishonesty, not merely “framing” techniques or political spin. The same is true of opposition to torture, warrantless eavesdropping, and every other related debate. Those who are subjected to such behavior are not “t
errorists,” but rather merely those who the government accuses, with no proof required, of terrorist connections. That is not a petty, legalistic distinction. It lies at the heart of our political system, and it is what distinguishes free societies from tyrannical ones.

  There are only two choices recognized by advocates of these radical policies: (1) support the War on Terrorism by endorsing the administration’s lawless imprisonment and treatment of detainees, or (2) side with the terrorists. To them, there is no third option (such as charge detainees with terrorism and then determine in a hearing, with due process, if the Bush administration’s accusation is true) because, to those inhabiting Bush’s Manichean world, the president’s accusation of terrorism is tantamount to proof. Anyone who objects to the Bush administration’s detention of any detainees is, by definition, objecting to the “detention of a terrorist.” Why wait to figure out if the detainee really is a terrorist? The Leader, who is Good and seeks to protect us, has said it is so. Thus it is so.

  This mindless belief in presidential infallibility repeats itself in almost every debate we have had over the Bush administration’s expansion of presidential power. The American founders viewed checks and limits on government power as vital for avoiding tyranny. The Bush movement sees such limits as “terrorist rights,” unnecessary interference with the Good Leaders’ efforts to protect us.

  Highly disturbing behavior by our government during the Bush presidency has become far too common to be considered an aberration. MSNBC’s Bill Dedman published an investigative report in late 2006 regarding the Guantánamo interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the currently alleged twentieth hijacker. Dedman described the treatment to which al-Qahtani was subjected in U.S. custody: