Descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed Qaeda threat

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13rich.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin



Frank Rich: "Top Bush Hands Starting to Get Sweaty About Where They Left Their Fingerprints."
Some of “The Dark Side” seems right out of “The Final Days,” minus Nixon’s operatic boozing and weeping. We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become “so paranoid” that “they actually thought they might be in physical danger.” The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.

The men were John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White House’s don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert law of the land. Mr. Comey and Mr. Goldsmith failed to stop the “torture memos” and are long gone from the White House. But Vice President Cheney and Mr. Addington remain enabled by a president, attorney general (Michael Mukasey) and C.I.A. director (Michael Hayden) who won’t shut the door firmly on torture even now.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s “24,” all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

SNIP

Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.

SNIP

So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to “never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel.” But while we wait for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, there are immediate fears to tend. Ms. Mayer’s book helps cement the case that America’s use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our national security, right to the present day.

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.” By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, “50 or 60 individuals” in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore!”

SNIP

That’s why the Bush White House’s corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.











http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3609473

[noise]

1. Watered down journalism

It's been over six years since 9/11. Rich and Mayer still seem to accept the good faith argument. That is the torture--though illegal and not considered a method for attaining reliable intel--was implemented to prevent more attacks.

If the Bush team wasn't interested in al Qaeda terrorism despite urgent warnings from CIA and Clarke then why did FBI investigations get shut down and why did CIA withhold intel from the FBI Cole investigators? That doesn't sound like anything in the ballpark of disinterest. Rather, it sounds like someone in the US government going out of their way (again nothing close to disinterest) to make sure that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar weren't surveiled and/or apprehended.

ETA: Some may suggest this is more Monday morning quarterbacking and 20/20 hindsight. Most people understand that people make mistakes. The issue here is that people seemed to have acted in bad faith. Bad faith should not be confused with well intentioned mistakes.

[noise]

2. Rich and Mayer seem to buy the ad-hoc desperate measures narrative

A dramatic and damning narrative account of how America has fought the "War on Terror" In the days immediately following September 11th, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken.

The radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long held agenda to enhance Presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment.

Link

For crying out loud the two countries (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) with the closest links to al Qaeda were considered allies in the WoT! I guess that doesn't matter.

[CJCRANE]

3. Cover-up of foreknowledge

or complicity.

What better way to muddy the waters than with inadmissable garbage confessions (necessarily extracted under torture).