President Bush failed the country in its hour of greatest need, according to his administration’s top anti-terrorism advisor during the crisis. Richard Clarke, who served every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan before resigning last May, has leveled a powerful charge that must be answered with something more than the usual White House smears.
“Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism,” Clarke said on “60 Minutes.” “He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe he could have done something to stop 9/11.”
Clarke’s critique of Bush’s leadership in a time of crisis is documented in a new book, “Against All Enemies,” and will be amplified in testimony before the national commission on the 9/11 attacks.
And just in time, too. Bush’s “I am the war president” speeches have made it clear that terrorism will be the central theme in his campaign. This is not surprising, since opinion polls suggest that Americans are unimpressed with the administration except when it comes to its response to 9/11.
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.
So now that the Spanish people have spoken, voting out of office the party that led them to war in Iraq, will President Bush give the back of the hand to Spain, as he did last year to our democratic allies in Germany and France? Since Spaniards have decided that invading Iraq under an Anglo-American banner has made them tragically less safe and voted to break with the American diktat, will right-wing radio screamers now call for a boycott of Spanish olives?
The Spanish people, like most of the world, knew all along that the Bush policy of preemptive war against Iraq, which had nothing to do with the terrorist attack of 9/11, was all wrong, but their craven leaders were browbeaten by Bush to ignore their own constituents and instead join the farcically named “coalition of the willing.”
Upward of 90 percent of the Spanish public had told pollsters that the invasion of Iraq was an irrational response to 9/11, but their good sense was betrayed by the ruling party. In his first statement as the prime minister-elect of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero declared his intention to extract Spanish troops from Iraq, stating the obvious: “The war in Iraq was a disaster. The occupation of Iraq is a disaster.”
Before reflexive Europe bashers rush to toss Spain into their bulging “coward” bin, they should remember that the Spanish, like our German and French critics, did not come to this position because they lacked a will to fight terrorism. In fact, they speak from much raw and painful experience as colonial powers. As Rodriguez Zapatero put it, “Wars such as those which have occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence and terror to proliferate.”
That is the most serious charge that can be leveled at the Bush foreign policy, which has weakened our security as well as that of the rest of the world. Instead of facing up to the threat posed by Islamic extremists and their sponsors and apologists in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the United States sent 200,000 young Americans to overthrow an already defanged dictator in Iraq — a secular nationalist who was himself high on Osama bin Laden’s hit lists — leaving the United States bogged down in a state of near-total disarray and chaos.
What Bush has never grasped is that when it comes to fighting terrorists, the United States’ democratic allies are in an excellent position to be mentors. They have a much better understanding of the Muslim world, for example, and have better intelligence assets there. Yet the hawks in the administration continue to belittle democracies when they dare to disagree with us while embracing military dictators who pretend to do our bidding.
To give just one egregious example of the lack of logic, clarity of goals or consistent methodology in Bush’s version of the war on terror: Before 9/11, the United States had wisely imposed sanctions on Pakistan for being an active proliferator of nuclear weapons technology. Yet, after the attacks, Bush lifted those sanctions to buy Pakistan’s nominal support for coming wars. In recent weeks, however, we have learned that Pakistan’s role in nuclear proliferation was our nation’s worst nightmare: It was selling kits for making uranium-based bombs to such rogue nations as North Korea, Iran and Libya.
Throughout the three years of this Bush administration, foreign policy has degenerated into a deadly incoherence of purpose. The United States undermined the democratically elected leaders of Haiti and Venezuela while continuing to reward any dictator who paid homage to Bush’s lies.
Enough! It is high time for the president to return to the wisdom of his father and rid his administration of the unilateralist adventurers who have left this nation isolated from world opinion, ensnared in the foreign entanglements that George Washington warned us about.
Failing such a sharp reversal, even the elder Bush’s top advisors and other moderate Republicans might find it difficult, in the privacy of the polling booth, to not vote for John Kerry.
How perfect the irony, how sordid the scam. The president, who ignored the al-Qaida threat before 9/11, who diverted public attention in that horror’s aftermath to the nonexistent threat from Iraq, and who has stonewalled the investigation of 9/11, now seeks to exploit that tragedy as a reelection gimmick.
George W. Bush avoids being photographed with the dead and injured from his folly in Iraq, but hey, those flag-draped coffins of 9/11 victims make great TV ads. What a grisly low in political exploitation.
That’s why the ads were condemned by a firefighters union and many of the 9/11 victims’ relatives, whose various Web sites contain an impressive list of the unanswered questions concerning the tragedy. As Bob McIlvaine, whose son was killed in the Twin Towers disaster, put it: “Instead of playing on people’s emotions with images of that day, the president would do right to cooperate more with the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks so we can learn the truth about what happened on that day and why.”
But uncovering the truth about 9/11 has never been Bush’s intention. Instead, the president has used that tragedy for his own political ambitions — to draw attention away from his lies about Iraq, the unprecedented national debt, the disappointing jobless recovery, and the attacks on civil liberty. What’s mind-boggling is the cynicism of Bush’s electoral ploy when one considers that he never showed any interest in terrorism before 9/11. He had focused instead on the war on drugs and trying to one-up his father on Iraq. His abysmal failure to heed the Clinton administration’s warnings regarding the threat posed by Osama bin Laden may be one reason for Bush’s extreme reluctance to permit an unimpeded bipartisan public investigation of 9/11.
Never before in our national history has such a major event been so unexamined by the government while being so effectively hyped for political advantage. The obfuscation has been deliberate and executed with a passion that suggests Bush may have some dreadful truth to hide. Why else would he initially oppose the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the origins and lessons of 9/11?
Bush allowed the commission to form only after the enormous public pressure initiated by the victims’ families, who demanded an accounting of what had led to the loss of their loved ones. Bush then sought to undermine an honest investigation by appointing Henry Kissinger, international grand master of mendacity, to be chairman. That gambit failed when Kissinger refused to make public his murky financial entanglements with the very regimes most likely to have links to the 9/11 terrorists.
After a more independent commission finally was allowed to form, Bush set about to systematically undermine its work by refusing to turn over documents essential to the investigation or permit the full committee to interview the top officials in his administration, from himself on down.
This is a president whose immediate response to 9/11 was to protect the al-Qaida terrorists’ known sponsors in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan while planning a sideshow war against bin Laden’s sworn enemy in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein. In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster, a Saudi plane was allowed to land in the United States and whisk bin Laden relatives and certain Saudis out of the country before intelligence agencies could fully question them, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals who had been allowed to enter the U.S. under suspicious circumstances, suggesting the connivance of the Saudi government.
Bush turned his sights on Iraq’s illusory weapons of mass destruction while lifting the sanctions imposed on Pakistan, a known possessor and proliferator of nuclear weapons. Nor have any of those sanctions been restored even now, when Pakistan admits that its top scientific institute was the source of nuclear weapons technology sold to North Korea, Libya and Iran. Bush defends his exploitation of 9/11 with these words: “How this administration handled that day, as well as the war on terror, is worthy of discussion.” Yes indeed, but it is an administration that delights in discussions in which it monopolizes all of the crucial information and cherry-picks, fabricates and otherwise distorts evidence, mocking the sacred notion of representative democracy.
It took me a while to realize what they were saying. “You kilt our Lord,” the guys looking for a fight would snarl, just before landing a punch on my nose. This was in the New York City of my childhood, where the accents were heavy and the theology more than a bit crude when you wandered into the wrong neighborhood.
When I finally got the drift of what the true-believer hoodlums were saying, I was tempted to utter in plaintive defense, “No, only half of me did it!” — meaning that my father was born in Germany and raised Protestant. But my father would have taken his belt to me had I employed that cop-out because of his intense shame over the genocide perpetrated by his Christian countrymen against my Jewish mother’s people in Eastern Europe.
Unlike Mel Gibson’s father, mine never underestimated the horror of the Holocaust. Nor do my Christian relatives in Germany, who have underscored the depth of wartime Germany’s depravity by pointing out to me that the local minister had been one of the town’s leading Nazi enthusiasts, even wearing his Nazi uniform under his clerical garb.
Old wounds, I know, but I just saw Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” and it is a blood libel against the Jewish people that should have every prominent Christian minister and priest speaking out in opposition. All they have to do is look to the pope’s apology for the Catholic Church’s sins against Jews.
It requires a deeply felt anti-Semitism on Gibson’s part to depict the community that nurtured Jesus as nothing more than a venal mob that forced an eminently reasonable and kind Roman overlord to crucify Jesus. Even the beastly lower-level Roman legionnaires who whip Jesus for most of the movie’s duration are engaged in this orgy of sadism not to please Caesar but rather to mollify the rabbis.
Of course, the movie should not be censored, nor can it be totally dismissed.
I found it useful to be reminded of the suffering that Christ endured for his convictions, and even the sadomasochistic preoccupation of the film could not obscure the fact that Christ never endorsed vengeance or departed from his message of universal love. Ultimately, however, this is just an exploitation flick that serves up the body of Christ as an object of continuous sick torture while ignoring his life and thoughts.
As soon as I got home from the movie theater, I opened my King James version of the Bible, one that has the statements directly attributable to Jesus conveniently printed in red type. Opening it at random, I read in the Gospel according to St. Matthew a clear reassurance that Gibson has it all wrong: When Christ “opened his mouth,” which he rarely does in the movie, he told his disciples all of those things that super-militant Christians who seek to divide us never want to hear: “Blessed are the poor … Blessed are the meek … Blessed are the merciful … Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
That’s the Jesus we need in our lives, and I say this as one who self-identifies very much as a Jew. But I am as uncomfortable with the dogmatists of Jewish theology as I am with all others this side of the deism or Unitarianism that commonly marked the philosophies of a number of leading authors of our Constitution.
Religious mythology of all sorts is valuable when it informs and enlightens rather than seeks to displace scientific and other rational thought.
Admittedly, I am not in Gibson’s target audience, and I do not begrudge others finding solace and meaning in the scriptures of their choice. What I fear is hatred spawned of religious fundamentalism, the same type that tore apart the world of my childhood and continues to be an enormous producer of pain, warfare and division. Despite our pretensions of modernity and humanitarianism, the world is currently plagued by Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists who seem more passionate about employing their holy books as weapons than as instruments of peace.
Sadly, that is the essence of Gibson’s movie. But the good news is that the actual words of Christ that have been passed down to us do not lend themselves to such a mean-spirited enterprise.
No, not Nader again. In an act of pure egotism, Ralph Nader — who has been largely silent on the main issues of the day, nursing his wounds since the last time he messed up an election — insists on another chance to play at electoral politics on the national stage. Does he have no sense of accountability or shame?
Yes, Al Gore shares responsibility with the U.S. Supreme Court for the fact that George W. Bush ended up as president. But without Nader in the picture in 2000, Bush’s narrow Electoral College victory would have been impossible to scam. The arguments that Nader made last time around seem absurd this time, when it is all too clear that there are significant differences between the Democrats and Republicans on the issues Nader has spent a lifetime effectively raising. The Republican Party marches lock step in a campaign against the environment, working people, the poor, civil liberties and world peace.
The vital issue in this election is that a Republican sweep may make permanent the damage to the constitutional principle of checks and balances. How dare Nader ignore the reactionary cast of Bush’s judicial appointments and the refusal of a Republican-controlled Congress to challenge the mendacity of this president on issues as varied and important as global warming and the preemptive, deceit-driven invasion of Iraq?
The two-party system has its shortcomings, but we are up against one-party domination. For Nader to cavalierly dismiss this concentration of power in the hands of right-wing ideologues attempting to roll back the clock on the bipartisan accomplishments of the last 50 years is dangerous nonsense. How glib to grade the difference between the two parties as that of a D-plus and a D-minus.
Like some faded chanteuse in a dingy nightclub, Nader played the old songs on “Meet the Press,” even hitting some of the high notes with his warnings about the obvious power of corporations. But he played it cheaper than he ever has, promising to appeal to conservative voters by attacking “corporate pornography directed toward children” and trade with “the despotic communist regime in China.” Was the first reference Nader’s obscene attempt to join pro-censorship forces in using the Super Bowl halftime-show controversy to return to the good old puritanical days of the 1950s, when “sex” was a dirty word? The reference to China was a pathetic attempt to revive the imagery of the Cold War, which is hardly relevant to America’s trade problems but does play into the hands of the neo-imperialists determined to redraw the map of the world.
Nader is not responding to a grass-roots demand that he run but rather is stoking his celebrity as a media curiosity. He has no mandate from those who care deeply about the causes he has championed. His sudden cameo appearance over the objections of many who have followed him, bypassing existing Green Party organizations, smacks of overwhelming elitism. Nader has done nothing of significance since the last election to organize popular opposition to the disasters of the Bush government, yet he now deigns to assert that he alone can save us.
His base is not among the people who have suffered most these last three years but rather in the mass media that finds him a diverting sideshow. He announced his candidacy on “Meet the Press,” rather than at a people’s convention of supporters, because he would not have been able to obtain, let alone survive politically, an invitation to such a venue.
His fans, and I once was one, know that too much is at stake in this next election to allow this out-of-touch old warrior to stumble into the fray determined to play leader. But play he will, and the Republicans will delight in his ability to blur the lines at a time of all-too-important electoral divisions. Sadly, Nader, like the products of those auto companies he did so much to expose, is now unsafe at any speed.
Quack, quack. So much for the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.
Quack, quack. Say goodbye to judicial integrity. Quack, quack. Forget about holding the nation’s vice president accountable for his dealings. Quack, quack. Trash the right of citizens to transparent government. Quack, quack.
Bizarre as it sounds, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia quacked like a duck last week during his defensive denial that a duck-hunting trip with Vice President Dick Cheney was improper. According to Scalia, the visit of the two men to the private game reserve of a top oil executive was merely a pleasant social engagement.
But Scalia’s glib response was disingenuous, coming shortly before the Supremes will rule on a White House appeal in a case involving private meetings of Cheney’s energy task force. It’s outrageous that he does not intend to recuse himself.
“It did not involve a lawsuit against Dick Cheney as a private individual,” Scalia said of the appeal while speaking at Amherst College last Tuesday. “This was a government issue. It’s acceptable practice to socialize with executive branch officials when there are not personal claims against them. That’s all I’m going to say for now. Quack, quack.”
The case in question is not a legalistic quibble, and Scalia seems determined to vote in what may be a hotly contested decision with enormous political effect. His Louisiana outing with Cheney came three weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Cheney’s appeal of a lower court order that he turn over records of the closed task force meetings he held with executives of the oil, coal, gas and nuclear companies in 2001. Those meetings became the basis for the president’s national energy policy, which is chockablock with tax breaks and subsidies for these same industries. This all has particular resonance for Californians, who, during the manufactured “energy crisis,” saw our state and household budgets go up in flames. Many of the same companies represented at Cheney’s meetings, such as Kenneth Lay’s Enron, had “gamed,” or manipulated, electricity prices using federal loopholes created by previous GOP administrations under the broad banner of “deregulation.”
Unfortunately for us, the Constitution has a glaring loophole: If a Supreme Court justice doesn’t have the moral fiber or humility to do the right thing in a case like this — federal rules instruct a judge to disqualify himself “in any proceeding in which his impartiality might be questioned” — there is no check or balance whereby that decision can be reviewed or rebuked.
According to an Amherst official, Scalia — with his waterfowl impression — may have been trying to preempt protesters he thought were going to perform their own impromptu noises. Nevertheless, by arrogantly trying to make a joke out of his unethical behavior, Scalia has again made a mockery of the enormous responsibility the Constitution places on our highest court. After all, it was Scalia who led the Supreme Court with flimsy legal logic to validate the dubious 2000 Florida election results that were the difference in placing the current president in power. This time he may have gone too far in shredding the Supreme Court’s vaunted reputation of impartiality.
“I’m surprised he’s sticking by his guns. I would hope he does see the light,” Georgetown University law professor Paul Rothstein said of Scalia’s stubbornness to acknowledge what is simple common sense: If you are a longtime friend of the vice president and are accepting free junket flights from him, you’d best remove yourself from the fray when it comes time to rule on a decision that may damage his career.
Finally, we should remember what the legal case in question is about: transparency in government, which is one of the taproots of democracy. While Scalia twists and turns to avoid the obvious appearance of a conflict of interest, the case’s co-plaintiffs — the liberal Sierra Club and the conservative Judicial Watch — have joined forces to demand accountability in government, so that we might see how corporate interests wield disproportionate power in the halls of government. The Scalia-Cheney hunting tryst shows that the old-boy network is still scamming the public.
