Robert Scheer

Knowing this, the administration has launched a frontal attack on John Kerry’s ability to fight the war on terror, which the president again defined on Friday in apocalyptic terms. “There is no neutral ground, no neutral ground in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death,” said Bush, implying that anybody who differs with the administration on the best way to fight terrorism is basically in the camp of the “evildoers.”

The appalling indifference of the incoming Bush team in 2001 to the clear and present danger presented by Osama bin Laden’s organization has been noted before, perhaps most strikingly by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who reported that Bush and most of his Cabinet were obsessed with Iraq, not al-Qaida, from the first day of the administration. This, despite the fact that al-Qaida attacked the U.S. destroyer Cole just weeks before Bush’s election, killing 17 U.S. sailors. The outgoing Clinton national security team said it pleaded with the incoming Bush team to make al-Qaida its No. 1 security priority.

“We had a terrorist organization that was going after us!” Clarke told CBS’ Lesley Stahl. “That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.” Clarke was never invited to brief the president before 9/11, even after he says he wrote a memo to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice “asking for, urgently — underlined urgently — a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al-Qaida attack. And that urgent memo wasn’t acted on.”

After more than 3,000 people were killed on 9/11 by 19 hijackers, none of whom were Iraqi, Clarke said, “The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this,’” Clarke told CBS. “Now, he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We’ve looked at it with an open mind. There is no connection.’ He came back at me and said, ‘Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”

That report, based on all available intelligence evidence and cleared by both the CIA and the FBI, showed no Iraq connection to 9/11. However, Clarke said, “We sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the national security advisor or deputy. It got bounced and sent back, saying, ‘Wrong answer … Do it again.’”

If what Clarke says is true, the American people would be wise to bounce this president right out of office come November.

When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. “We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report,” she said. “We are very concerned.”

According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been “stalled.” First by acting CIA director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush.

The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.

“What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that,” said the intelligence official. “The report found very senior-level officials responsible.”

By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss nor McLaughlin has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.

“It surely does not involve issues of national security,” said the intelligence official.

“The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election,” the official continued. “No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress.”

None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration’s great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation into how the security of this nation was so easily breached. In Bush’s much ballyhooed war on terror, ignorance has been bliss.

The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain.

And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath, or on the record. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes. All in all, strange behavior for a man who seeks reelection to the top office in the land based on his handling of the so-called war on terror.

In September, the New York Times reported that several family members met with Goss privately to demand the release of the CIA inspector general’s report. “Three thousand people were killed on 9/11, and no one has been held accountable,” 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser told the paper.

The failure to furnish the report to Congress, said Harman, “fuels the perception that no one is being held accountable. It is unacceptable that we don’t have [the report]; it not only disrespects Congress but it disrespects the American people.”

The stonewalling by the Bush administration and the failure of Congress to gain release of the report have, said the intelligence source, “led the management of the CIA to believe it can engage in a cover-up with impunity. Unless the public demands an accounting, the administration and CIA’s leadership will have won and the nation will have lost.”

The Red Cross complaint — and a follow-up report that was made available to the administration in February and obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week — raises the sobering possibility that these low-level members of the military police in Iraq may be right in claiming that they were just following orders of their superiors.

According to the report, the organization’s delegates visited Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and witnessed “the practice of keeping persons deprived of their liberty completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness” for days.

“Upon witnessing such cases, the [Red Cross] interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities. The military intelligence officer in charge of interrogation explained that this practice was ‘part of the process.’” The report said that what Red Cross representatives saw “went beyond exceptional cases” and was “in some cases tantamount to torture.”

The Red Cross complained directly to the authorities at that time, two months before the now-infamous photographs were taken. The White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have for months stubbornly ignored and kept from the public the conclusions of both the Red Cross report and the even more damning internal report done by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba for the Pentagon in March.

The Taguba report clearly stated that the M.P.s had been instructed to “set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses” and were using sexual humiliation, attack dogs and beatings to break prisoners.

It would appear that the Pentagon still doesn’t want to admit the seriousness of the problem, having now assigned Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to run Abu Ghraib despite the fact that it was Miller who last summer officially reported on conditions in Abu Ghraib and seems to have enabled, if not authorized, the torture that ensued in the autumn. According to Taguba’s report, Miller “stated that detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation” and “it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.”

That would seem to support the contention of the accused M.P.s that they were just doing their duty. The Washington Post quotes an e-mail from Spc. Sabrina Harman in which she wrote: “If the prisoner was cooperating, then the prisoner was allowed to keep his jumpsuit, mattress, and was allowed cigarettes on request or even hot food. But if the prisoner didn’t give what they wanted, it was all taken away until [military intelligence] decided. The job of the M.P. was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk.”

On Monday, President Bush reiterated his unyielding support for Rumsfeld, even as the influential Army Times newspaper called for heads to roll “even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.” The abuses of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad are “a failure that ran straight to the top,” argued the newspaper.

And all of this does flow from the top. With the occupation itself built on a web of lies — that invading Iraq was part of the war on terror, that Iraq had threatening weapons of mass destruction, that anybody who resisted the occupation was a “terrorist” or “thug” — it can only be assumed that those interrogators dealing with the nearly 50,000 Iraqi detainees in the last year were under enormous pressure to produce statements that fit these phony “facts.”

“I’d like to know who was the one that was giving instructions to the military intelligence personnel to turn up the heat,” Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the nominal head of Abu Ghraib during the time in question, said in an interview on NBC. Unfortunately, that question needs to be addressed to the president of the United States.

The big lie that the United States is merely a selfless battler against terrorists, with no other agendas, opens the door for brutality against any who dare resist. Bush has exercised an arrogance unmatched by any U.S. president in a century and brandished God’s will as his carte blanche. His unilateral, preemptive “nation-building” — and the settling of old scores in the name of fighting terror — grants license to treat anybody, including U.S. citizens, in a barbaric manner that cavalierly sweeps aside all standards of due process.

“Military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. government agency interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses,” says the report. The report, completed in March and kept secret until it was revealed on the New Yorker Web site on Friday, also stated that a civilian contractor employed by a Virginia company called CACI “clearly knew his instructions” to the MPs called for physical abuse.

Furthermore, in a statement released Friday, Amnesty International reported that in its extensive investigations into human rights in post-invasion Iraq, it “has received frequent reports of torture or other ill treatment by coalition forces during the past year,” including during interrogations, and that “virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities.”

Recall that a key excuse for the U.S. invasion was to ensure the safety of Iraqi scientists and others in the know so that they might feel free to reveal the location of weapons of mass destruction or evidence of Saddam Hussein’s potential ties to al-Qaida. Shockingly, some of those scientists are now in coalition prisons, even though the weapons clearly don’t exist.

In this context, of course, it makes sense that U.S. interrogators would feel enormous pressure to use any means necessary to verify the absurd claims made so aggressively by the president and his Cabinet before the war. Far from the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system, they apparently felt quite free to approve techniques clearly banned by war crimes statutes.

Yet, astonishingly, weeks after the Pentagon’s own damning internal report on the torture at Abu Ghraib, and several days after CBS’s “60 Minutes II” broke open the story worldwide by showing those horrific photos, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld still had not been briefed on the report, a spokesman said Sunday. Similarly, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, admitted Sunday that he hadn’t yet bothered to read the 53-page report filed by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, even though he had successfully requested that CBS delay its “inflammatory” broadcast. This shows far more concern for public relations than for finding out the truth.

How could it be that the top officials responsible for the military were not themselves interested in keeping abreast of the investigation — even after the story had exploded into a global scandal? After all, an ambitious promise to bring democracy and the rule of law to Iraq became the ex post facto rationale for the invasion, once it became clear that the earlier claims of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s ties to al-Qaida were a fraud.

So it should have been a clear and high priority to make certain that Iraqi prisoners incarcerated in Saddam’s most infamous prison did not receive the same brand of “justice” the dictator had been doling out for decades. That they did is now a deep and dirty stain on the reputation of this nation.

Yes, it’s great that we are still worlds away from being Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or Saddam’s Iraq. We are a free society in which, it is hoped, truth eventually comes out, and thanks to what seems to be one brave whistle-blowing soldier and a responsible officer to whom he reported the torture, these crimes have come to light. Those are the acts of true heroes, and we should be proud of them.

Yet, before we go overboard in celebrating our virtues, let’s admit that Americans too can be “evildoers,” especially when we embrace, as the president consistently has done, the terribly dangerous idea that the ends justify the means.

The ultimate cost of a foreign policy based on blatant lies, and one that equates military might with what is right, is that the brute in all of us will not inevitably lie dormant.

In proposing a long-overdue appeal to the United Nations and NATO to make them real partners in the rebirth of Iraq and take — in his words — the “Made in America” label off what has become a very unpopular occupation, Kerry gets some things right that the president has gotten so wrong. Unfortunately, however, the Democrats’ heir apparent is still taking far too much solace in the conventional wisdom, which brought us the sorrows of the Vietnam War.

“Americans differ about whether and how we should have gone to war,” Kerry said in a national radio address April 17. “But it would be unthinkable now for us to retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals. All Americans are united in backing our troops and meeting our commitment to help the people of Iraq build a country that is stable, peaceful, tolerant and free.”

Wasn’t that our stated goal in Vietnam? The repetition of history here is tragic. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who wrote a searing acknowledgment of the folly of the Vietnam War in his own autobiography, deceived the U.N. last year in support of another ill-fated military adventure in the so-called developing world. We now see a similarly intelligent war veteran, Kerry, seeking to send more troops to a country that he must know, from his own war experience, will not stay pacified.

In the birthplace of civilization, we have again run aground on the rocky shoals of nationalism, this time augmented by a religious fervor that increases the danger. As with Vietnam, escalation is not the answer. But an orderly and timely withdrawal is — under U.N. supervision and with the firm goal of leaving Iraq to the Iraqis.

Beyond postulating “tactical” solutions in Iraq, like sending our troops more body armor, Kerry needs to take a huge step and acknowledge that his own support of this war was a terrible mistake.

Sure, he was lied to repeatedly by a president who told us a year ago under a “Mission Accomplished” banner that “we have defeated an ally of al-Qaida,” when he knew we had done no such thing. But Kerry had all the resources to know what many inside and outside the United States’ own family of intelligence agencies were saying long before last year’s invasion: Iraq no longer had a nuclear weapons program, had no ties to 9/11 and would be a nightmare to occupy.

Although Kerry claims “all Americans” would agree it is “unthinkable” to leave Iraq anytime soon, he fails to acknowledge that having more than 100,000 American troops hunkered down in the Middle East is not a force for stability in the region but rather a lightning rod for violence and chaos. He is even urging the government to send more U.S. troops to Iraq and keep them there until that country, which has little or no history of democracy, is “stable, peaceful, tolerant and free.”

Such rhetoric may sound good on the stump, but it utterly fails to acknowledge that we have no clue as to how long that would take or how many Americans and Iraqis would die in the experiment. In the Vietnam War, millions died before our hubris was exhausted.

In the end, if Kerry is not to become the next Al Gore — triangulating safe positions just this side of a Republican who is probably the most irresponsible American politician in a century — he must challenge President Bush’s entire vision, not just his tactics. What Bush is doing in the name of fighting terrorism has nothing to do with making us safer and everything to do with dressing up the grim goals of empire as a grand (and all-too-familiar) experiment in bringing enlightenment to so-called backward people at gunpoint.

To have a real choice in this election, we need to hear the voice of that young Navy hero who once warned us that murderous meddling in other countries’ affairs will never win the hearts and minds of the people. If Kerry fails to truly confront Bush and is elected, he may find himself answering his own awful question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

The Constitution reserves to Congress the authority to allocate funds and to declare war. Thus it would seem to be an impeachable offense to misappropriate $700 million that had been earmarked to restore order to Afghanistan and put it toward planning an invasion of Iraq — in a secret scheme hatched, according to Woodward, only 72 days after 9/11.

But not only has the president rejected the checks and balances installed by the nation’s founders to avoid the “foreign entanglements” George Washington warned us about, he again is shown to have pursued a foreign policy that stands as a sharp rebuke to his more worldly and cautious father. During the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush wisely heeded the concerns of Congress, as well as a broad coalition of regional and international allies, and kept to clear, limited and sound goals.

In contrast, the younger Bush vocally disdains world opinion and international bodies like the United Nations, seeming instead to relish his role as an avenging Christian crusader who seeks — under the guiding hand of the Almighty — to cleanse the Arab world of “evildoers.”

Asked by Woodward, an assistant managing editor at the Washington Post, if he had ever consulted the former president before ordering the invasion of Iraq, Bush replied, “He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength; there is a higher father that I appeal to.”

Reading the elder Bush’s books and even his speeches before the latest Iraq war, one finds that the former president at least seems to understand that diplomacy, international cooperation and patience are not just the tools of naive do-gooders but in fact are far more effective at advancing global stability and American aims than reckless adventures like the current quagmire in Mesopotamia. Religious crusades are often counterproductive; they tend to end up in unsustainable occupations of people who — surprise! — believe they have their own pipeline to the Almighty.

Thus, if George W. had consulted his father, he probably would have heard the message that he didn’t want to hear from Secretary of State Colin Powell about the “Pottery Barn rule”– the idea that you own what you break. What Powell meant is not that you own Iraq’s oil and the lucrative contracts that you parcel out to your friends at Halliburton and Bechtel. Rather, it is that if you occupy a failed state, you are stuck with the difficult, costly and lengthy task of nation building.

That Powell and the first President Bush did not break more forcefully with the current president over their apparent differences on Iraq is not excusable, despite their party and familial ties. As both men seem to have expected, what we have now is a deadly mess that has weakened us in the war on terror, both as a distraction and by inflaming the Muslim world’s latent mistrust of the West.

After the bloodiest month of the entire war and occupation, we are told by the nation’s media and political elites that we must “stay the course,” “get it right” and, in the words of the president himself, “honor the fallen.” How do we honor the fallen by sending more soldiers to die in a war based on lies now amply documented by insiders?

Surely the best way to honor them is to right our course and turn to the United Nations, not as a fig leaf to conceal an ongoing disaster but to admit that it was wrong to undermine the best mechanism we have for international cooperation. An honorable retreat from this calamity requires U.N. supervision of an orderly withdrawal.

The president conceded to Woodward that he had the good sense not to “justify war based upon God” but would ask for forgiveness if he took the wrong path. It is time he found God’s grace in the exercise of humility rather than plunging deeper into this madness.