As the Bush/Cheney presidency is about to end, it is important to consider its legacy with respect to its “War on Terrorism”, if for no other reason than that President Obama and our new Congress will inherit the results of that tragic legacy and have to decide what to do about it.
This post considers three major issues related to that legacy: 1) the numerous breaches of international and U.S. Constitutional and domestic law with respect to the Bush administration’s treatment of its prisoners, especially its torture policies and its insistence on indefinite and prolonged incarceration, while refusing to allow its prisoners even the most basic human right of habeas corpus – i.e. the right to challenge the justification for their incarceration; 2) the Iraq War and occupation; and 3) the consequences of their “War on Terror”.
I have discussed these issues in detail in several previous posts: I’ve detailed the
rotten core of the Bush/Cheney torture program. I’ve discussed the
major court decisions bearing on the many illegalities of the Bush/Cheney detainee policies. I’ve provided a
detailed timeline that illustrates the fraudulent basis for the Iraq War. I’ve discussed many of the tragic consequences of the Iraq War from the
point of view of the Iraqis. And I’ve discussed the many
overall failures of the Bush/Cheney “War on Terror”.
In this post I summarize many of these issues, mainly through quoting investigative journalists who have studied them extensively.
The loss of American’s soul by its abandonment of the rule of lawJane Mayer’s book, “
The Dark Side – The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals”, investigates the roots and consequences of the Bush/Cheney administration’s decision to abandon the rule of law in pursuit of its “War on Terror”. In the last few pages of her book, Mayer summarizes these issues:
What began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America’s security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country’s soul… Almost from the start, and at every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America’s interests in the world. These warnings came not just from political opponents, but also from… experts in the traditionally conservative military and the FBI… and a series of loyal Republican lawyers inside the administrations itself…
Instead of heeding this well-intentioned dissent, however, the Bush Administration invoked the fear flowing form the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty… In the name of protecting national security, the executive branch sanctioned coerced (through torture) confessions, extrajudicial detention, and other violations of individuals’ liberties that had been prohibited since the country’s founding. They turned the Justice Departments’s Office of Legal Counsel into a political instrument…
Seven years later, the Bush Administration’s counterterrorism policies remained largely frozen in place… The legal framework survives despite nearly universal bipartisan acceptance outside of the Bush Administration that Guantanamo should be shut down, that the military commission process was hopelessly flawed, and that the human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were not the work of a few “rotten apples” on the bottom, but rather the result of irresponsible leadership at the top. In fact torture… seemed in danger of becoming normalized…
Blatant corruption and immorality in the conduct of its illegal policiesThe administration’s detainee policies were not just illegal. I would say that the corruption and immorality of their policies were such as to shock the conscience of mankind. These excerpts are a continuation of Mayer’s last chapter summary:
The military commission process was clearly plagued by problems to the point of dysfunction. One stalwart official after another has stepped forward with astounding accusations of impropriety… For example, the former top prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions disclosed that the Pentagon had pressured him to time “sexy” prosecutions for political advantage, and to use evidence against the detainees that he considered tainted by torture. After resigning in protest, the prosecutor also disclosed that when he suggested to Jim Haynes, the General Counsel at the Pentagon, that a few acquittals might enhance Guantanamo’s reputation for fair treatment, as had been true of the war crimes trials of the Nazis in Nuremberg, Haynes was horrified. “We can’t have acquittals! We’ve got to have convictions! … If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?” …
Despite Bush’s vows to hold the perpetrators accountable after Abu Ghraib, as of the spring of 2008 no senior Bush Administration official had been prosecuted or removed from office in connection with the abuse of prisoners. By then… Human Rights Watch estimated that more than 600 U.S. military and civilian personnel were involved in abusing more than 460 detainees… If Bush or Cheney regretted the uncounted deaths, disappearances, and torment of prisoners in their administration’s custody, or the false intelligence and contaminated prosecutions that these tactics produced, they didn’t express it…. As Major General Antonio Taguba (who was tasked with investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal) told The New Yorker, “I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box”.
The Iraq WarThe Iraq War has been an integral part of the Bush/Cheney “War on Terror”. Though the Bush administration had begun planning for it well before the 9/11 attacks, those attacks allowed Bush and Cheney to manufacture the evidence they needed to justify their war.
Iraqi deathsJudith Coburn, in an article titled “
Unnamed and Unnoticed”, decries how the U.S. media has ignored Iraqi casualties caused by our invasion and occupation:
It’s hardly surprising that the Pentagon is loath to tell us how many innocent Iraqis it has killed. It’s a political issue. Early in the war, the Iraqi Health Ministry ordered morgues and hospitals to count the number of war dead and wounded coming in. … But the American Occupation’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) ordered them to stop counting…
Available figures, incomplete as they are, are staggering for a guerrilla war… Reliable sources …. Sources like… American epidemiologists… estimated in a study published in October 2004, in the British medical journal the
Lancet that 100,000 Iraqis might have died in the war by September 2004 (
More recent figures surpass a million dead Iraqis).
Why so many deaths?
American military tactics have inflicted unnecessary suffering on civilians… Human Rights Watch… has done two detailed research reports on some of these patterns. The October 2003 report “
Hearts and Minds” charged that American soldiers often used “indiscriminate force”, especially at checkpoints after insurgent bombings, and also in raids on civilian houses, causing many civilian casualties. Few of these injuries to civilians are investigated by the military...
Particularly vicious weapons (cluster munitions) which pepper victims with shrapnel so small that the shards shred flesh and are impossible to remove, are being used in Iraqi cities. They can maim long after their original use. The unexploded bomblets remain live and often go off in the hands of children…
Besides cluster munitions, a new and improved version of napalm, the Vietnam War's other most grisly weapon, and its chemical cousin white phosphorous, have been used by American forces in Iraq, a fact known to few Americans because our media has barely reported on the subject. The Pentagon has admitted that it
used napalm near the Kuwaiti border during the invasion, though the use seems to have been more widespread than the Pentagon said.
Tom Engelhardt, in an article titled “
Degrading Behavior – The Middle East and the Barbarism of War from the Air”, describes our air war against Iraq:
We have loosed our air power regularly on the countryside of Afghanistan, and especially on rebellious urban areas of Iraq in “targeted” and “precise” attacks on insurgent concentrations and “al Qaeda safe houses” largely without comment or criticism. In the process, significant parts of two cities in a country we occupied and supposedly “liberated” were reduced to rubble and everywhere civilians were blown away without our media paying much attention at all.
Destroying Iraq’s cultural patrimony Chalmers Johnson, in an article titled “
Robbing the Cradle of Civilization” describes the robbing and destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage:
In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as "the cradle of civilization," with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years… It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of writing.
Under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning…Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference – even the glee – shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as…
But why did this happen?
Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq… In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales…. All this was known to American commanders…
A more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003… met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws. Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq… Random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more…. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad…
As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watching vandals enter and torch the buildings… Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events… During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's oilfields…
The U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base… They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism…
The Iraqi refugee crisisAs Iraq has become a living hell (outside of the U.S. protected “Green Zone”, that is), it is not surprising that Iraqis by the millions have been displaced from their homes. Dahr Jamail describes this tragedy in an article titled “
The Iraqi Crisis that Has No Name”
Iraq is producing one of the – if not the – most severe refugee crises on the planet… Between 1 million and 1.2 million Iraqis have fled across the border into Syria; about 750,000 have crossed into Jordan; at least another 150,000 have made it to Lebanon; over 150,000 have emigrated to Egypt; and over 1.9 million are now estimated to have been internally displaced by civil war and sectarian cleansing within Iraq… The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) budget for Iraqis in Syria in 2006 was… less than one dollar per refugee crossing the border.
According to UNHCR’s best estimates about 12% of Iraq’s population, now assumed to be about 24 million people, will be displaced by the end of 2007… Add to that Iraq’s growing population of internal refugees and its spiraling civilian death tolls and you have the kind of decimation of a nation rarely seen – with undoubtedly more to come…
Yet President Bush and his top officials have taken no significant steps whatsoever to share in the resulting refugee burden. To date, the administration has issued only 466 visas to Iraqis…
A 46-year-old mother … told me her story, all too typical of civilian life in the Iraqi capital today. “I was injured”, she said, “because I was near a car bomb, which killed my daughter… America is the reason why Iraq was invaded, so we would like the American administration to give aid to us refugees… I would like people to read this and tell Bush to help us.”
A brief summary of the lasting results of the U.S. invasion and occupation of IraqJames Carroll’s “
House of War – The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power” is a history of the Pentagon. Although he doesn’t deal with Bush’s “War on Terror” until the last couple of chapters of his book, his summary of it is perhaps the best I’ve ever read. Here are some selected excerpts relating to the Iraq War:
Each of the reasons offered for the subsequent war against Iraq turned out, in succession, to be false. No weapons of mass destruction. No link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. No authentic U.S. concern for democracy… the ongoing American refusal to seriously reconsider its action, even as the justifications for the war were exposed, one after the other, as lies.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, new levels of sectarianism, ethnic conflict, warlordism, drug trafficking, and radical Islamism were all evident in the broader context of destroyed infrastructure, widespread malnourishment, and obliterated civil society. Bush administration officials crowed that girls could at last attend schools as equals, without acknowledging that, with rare exceptions… there were no schools for anyone to attend.
In Iraq, despite America’s overwhelming military might, there will be no winning, ever. Whether the U.S. occupation is terminated abruptly or is maintained for years, violence and mayhem will define Iraq indefinitely, while the rest of the Middle East copes with Iraqi-spawned waves of chaos. Radical Muslim holy warriors, meanwhile, have been
multiplied by the American war, empowered by it, trained by it, and dispatched around the globe. When
bombs went off in London in July 2005, subways and buses represented only another front in the unnecessary war George W. Bush began… Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest have on their hands the blood of those Londoners, the blood of each young American killed, and the blood of many thousands of Iraqis – all those who have died and will die in that misbegotten war…
The abdication of American leadership is a good place to start in summarizing the consequences of the “War on Terror”, since many of its other negative consequences stem from that one consequence.
David Rothkopf’s “
Running the World – The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power” is, in my opinion a rather dry recounting of U.S. NSC policy since its inception in 1947. But his writing suddenly becomes passionate in the last few pages of his book, as he discusses how George Bush’s “War on Terror” has virtually eliminated U.S. moral authority and therefore caused the
abdication of our leadership role in the world. Speaking of terrorists or of anyone else who would challenge American power, Rothkopf says:
Today they have the additional argument that America imposes its will on the world, that we have a double standard, that we do not require facts and resort to lies to undercut the international order, and that we act not in the interest of justice but… In short, through a series of bad judgments… we have undercut the moral authority of American global leadership… Damage has been done that will take years to repair.
In so doing, we have opened the door to a greater danger while pursuing a lesser one. We have called into question the legitimacy of our claim to leadership, and the reasons we have done so are rooted in a breakdown at the center of the decision-making processes that were developed to help ensure an opposite result….Paul Wolfowitz and his associates have written papers in the past about understanding, identifying, and eliminating threats to future U.S. supremacy in the world. They seem to have made the mistake of assuming that such threats would come in the form of the rise of rivals with measurable advantages economically or militarily, that is, traditional sources of power. What they have failed to acknowledge is that … our greatest vulnerability by far is linked to the legitimacy of our leadership. No nation is in a better position to undercut our legitimacy, and thus our ability to lead, than we are.
Jean Mayer makes similar points towards the end of her book:
According to one former official who traveled extensively through the Middle East, no subject was described by Muslims he spoke with as more deeply disturbing than American’s abuse of the detainees. The former top adviser on science and technology to the Director of National Intelligence worries that prisoner abuse has profoundly hurt what he defines as the most important battle in the war on terror – the struggle to win the support of the next generation of Arab youth…
By many estimates, by the end of the Bush years, America’s reputation as a lead defender of democracy and human rights was in tatters. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in June 2006, public opinion in two countries in the world supported the U.S. war on terror – India and Russia… Even the most dependable of U.S. allies, including … the European Union, by 2008 had all accused the United States of violating internationally accepted standards for humane treatment and due process. Canada went so far as to place American on its official list of rogue countries that torture…
Putting our own military personnel and leaders at risk of prosecutionJames Carroll makes the point that our abusive treatment of our prisoners puts our military and its leaders at risk of prosecution for war crimes:
The International Criminal Court (ICC), just coming into existence as America’s war on terrorism was mobilized, was an institutionalizing of ad hoc entities that had brought to justice genocidal culprits… The ICC, fulfilling the desire to replace revenge with adjudication, had its origin in the America-sponsored Nuremberg trials after World War II. Nothing embodied the genius of postwar American statesmanship more completely than this new court, and it would have been the best place to make world-historic cases against Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and anyone else who defied the norms of international order. George W. Bush, in one of his first acts as president, “
unsigned” the ICC Treaty…
That the Pentagon regarded itself as a ready target of ICC prosecution seemed paranoid until revelations that American soldiers routinely abused prisoners in Iraq and that high Pentagon officials unilaterally rejected norms for the treatment of prisoners of war that had been set by the Geneva Convention. The jails of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were emblems of a new Pentagon lawlessness, but those revelations barely scratched the surface of a system of legally dubious incarcerations that involved more than eleven thousand detainees held in mostly secret locations around the world, places referred to in
classified documents as “black sites”…
Isn’t it ironic that our “War on Terror” has greatly heightened our vulnerability to nuclear attack, when our main bogus excuse for invading Iraq was to preempt that risk? James Carroll explains how the Bush administration has greatly increased the likelihood of nuclear war:
Under Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon embarked in 2002 on the
stunning project of developing a new generation of nuclear weapons… The effect of all this… is to legitimize nuclear-based politics, giving other nations, friend and foe alike, compelling reasons to acquire a nuclear capacity, if only for deterrence, and prompting them to behave in similar ways. That pattern was fully evident in Iran and North Korea, beginning almost immediately after the launching of the Global War on Terror, and the pattern promises to show itself in “nuclear-capable states” like Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Australia, South Africa, and others that long ago renounced nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan are all
furiously adding to their nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon has become the engine of proliferation.
We come to what amounts to an ultimate betrayal by the national security establishment of its most solemn obligation, which is to provide for national security. The probing of questions about government failures before September 11, 2001, is meaningless when measured against the new jeopardy into which America was plunged by the war that Bush embarked upon… In late 2003, Donald
Rumsfeld said, in an internal Pentagon memo, “We lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the Global War on Terror.” This odd assessment from a Secretary of Defense… actually reflects the Pentagon’s interest in an open-ended war. Permanent war means permanent martial dominance…
Carroll explains how Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan failed to produce any positive results:
After 9/11… there were plausible reasons for targeted attacks against Al Qaeda training sites in Afghanistan, but they were superseded by the need for a bigger response… Instead of going after bin Laden’s cabal with an internationally coordinated law enforcement effort, nothing would do but a large-scale act of war… American bombers began raining destruction on the villages and towns of the most primitive country on the globe. Meanwhile, the elusive
Al Qaeda slipped away… The demonized bin Laden himself disappeared. George W. Bush, with a sledgehammer the only tool in his bag, had brought it down on the table, aiming at the mosquito. The mosquito got away, but the table was destroyed…
Jane Mayer discusses the ineffectiveness of Bush’s illegal and barbarous methods, their failure to produce anything of value, and the likelihood that these methods have made us
less, not more safe.
In 2006, a scientific advisory group to the U.S. intelligence agencies produced an exhaustive report on interrogation… which concluded that there was no scientific proof whatsoever that harsh techniques worked… Several of the experts involved in the study described the infliction of physical and psychological cruelty as outmoded, amateurish, and unreliable… Several of those with inside information about the NSA’s controversial Terrorist Surveillance Program have expressed similar disenchantment. As one of these former officials says of the ultra-secret program… “It’s produced nothing.”…
As of May 2008, both Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri remained at large. The government’s own statistics showed that both the number of terrorist attacks and the estimation of the threat posed by Al Qaeda were growing… If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide…
Seven years after the attacks of September 11, not a single terror suspect held outside of the U.S. criminal court system has been tried. Of the 759 detainees acknowledged to have been held in Guantanamo, approximately 340 remained there, only a handful of whom had been charged. Among these, not a single “enemy combatant” had yet had the opportunity to cross-examine the government or see the evidence on which he was being held…
An answer to the ridiculous right wing argument that Bush and Cheney kept us safe from terrorismDuring the Bush/Cheney presidency, a large assortment of right wing talking heads, including those who pretended to be neutral and unbiased, such as Tim Russert, made the ridiculous assertion to their guests that (I’m paraphrasing here) “Well, whether you agree with Bush’s policies or not, you have to admit that he’s done quite a job of keeping us safe from terrorism – We haven’t had a single attack on U.S. soil since 9/11”.
Yep, that’s right. That makes George Bush one of only 42 Presidents in U.S. history who did not allow a single major attack on U.S. soil on his watch since the last one that occurred on his watch. And furthermore, he is one of only 42 U.S. Presidents who did not allow more than a
single major attack on U.S. soil during his whole Presidency.
In fact, one could argue that he ranks 41st or 42nd among all U.S. presidents for preventing the occurrence of major attacks on U.S. soil. It all depends on which you consider a worse attack on our country: The British invasion of our nation’s capital of 1814 or the 9/11 attacks on our nation’s capital and New York City. Either way, anyone who tries to spin that as an impressive record is either not thinking straight or not being honest.
Yet it’s been repeated so many times that most Americans believe that George Bush’s record on protecting us against terrorism is his greatest achievement, and by extension they believe that Republicans are better than Democrats in protecting us against terrorism. When will that absurd myth ever be put to rest?
Who are the terrorists?I’ll conclude this post by bringing up an issue that I think is crucial for Americans to understand as a prerequisite for peace in our world, and yet which way too many Americans don’t understand.
Describing the Iraq War for what it is – a war of imperialism, supported by repeated acts of terrorism against the Iraqi people – carries the potential to steer the dialogue in a different direction. A different kind of dialogue is badly needed in order to help Americans to see both the “War on terrorism” and the occupation of Iraq for what they are – which would facilitate an end to both of those wars.
Edward Herman and David Peterson explain that concept like this, in their article, “
Who Terrorizes Whom?”:
By taking it as the starting premise that the United States is only a victim of terrorism, one loses the opportunity to educate people to a fundamental truth about terrorism and even implicitly denies that truth in order to be “practical”. We find that we can’t do that… We consider the idea of the United States as an anti-terrorist state a sick joke…
We believe it is of the utmost importance to contest the hegemonic agenda that makes the U.S. and its allies only the victims of terror, not terrorists and sponsors of terror. This is a matter of establishing basic truth, but also providing the long- run basis for systemic change that will help solve the problem of "terrorism"… Given the current trajectory of world events, we believe that we need a greater focus on ALL the terrorists and sponsors of terror.
In other words, parents can’t successfully teach their children not to be violent by violently abusing them for their transgressions. By the same token, a nation can’t combat terrorism by becoming the greatest source of terrorism in the world.
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