Torture' and Other Funny Stories

Torture' and Other Funny Stories

November 13, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
By FRANK RICH

IF it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon.
The president of the United States, in the final stop
of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the
world, "We do not torture." Even as he spoke, the
administration's flagrant embrace of torture was as
hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper.

The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had
already been implicated in four detainee deaths,
was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a
green light to commit torture in the future. Dana
Priest of The Washington Post, having first
uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons two years ago, was
uncovering new "black sites" in Eastern Europe,
where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown
interrogation methods redolent of the region's
Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had
been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to
cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress
didn't scrap a spending bill amendment, written by
John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate,
banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment
of prisoners.

So when you watch the president stand there with a
straight face and say, "We do not torture" - a full
year and a half after the first photos from Abu
Ghraib - you have to wonder how we arrived at this
ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated.
When people in power get away with telling bigger
and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep
getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush
and his cronies did. Not anymore.

The fallout from the Scooter Libby indictment
reveals that the administration's credibility, having
passed the tipping point with Katrina, is flat-lining.
For two weeks, the White House's talking-point
monkeys in the press and Congress had been
dismissing Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation as
much ado about nothing except politics and as an
exoneration of everyone except Mr. Libby. Now the
American people have rendered their verdict: they're
not buying it. Last week two major polls came up
with the identical finding, that roughly 8 in 10
Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter.
One of the polls (The Wall Street Journal/NBC
News) also found that 57 percent of Americans
believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country
into war in Iraq and that only 33 percent now find
him "honest and straightforward," down from 50
percent in January.

The Bush loyalists' push to discredit the Libby
indictment failed because Americans don't see it as
a stand-alone scandal but as the petri dish for a
wider culture of lying that becomes more visible
every day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr.
Bush on Veterans Day in his latest stay-the-course
speech - that Democrats, too, endorsed dead-
wrong W.M.D. intelligence - is more of the same.
Sure, many Democrats (and others) did believe that
Saddam had an arsenal before the war, but only the
White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear
weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq's
supposed W.M.D.'s, to whip up public fears of an
imminent doomsday.

There was also an entire other set of lies in the
administration's prewar propaganda blitzkrieg that
had nothing to do with W.M.D.'s, African uranium or
the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its finite
resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein
rather than keep its focus on the war against radical
Islamic terrorists, the White House had to cook up
not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack us,
but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us,
on 9/11. Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl
Levin, who last weekend released a previously
classified intelligence document, we now have
conclusive evidence that the administration's
disinformation campaign implying a link connecting
Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 was even more
duplicitous and manipulative than its relentless
flogging of nuclear Armageddon.

Senator Levin's smoking gun is a widely circulated
Defense Intelligence Agency document from
February 2002 that was probably seen by the
National Security Council. It warned that a captured
Qaeda terrorist in American custody was in all
likelihood "intentionally misleading" interrogators
when he claimed that Iraq had trained Qaeda
members to use illicit weapons. The report also
made the point that an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration
was absurd on its face: "Saddam's regime is
intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary
movements." But just like any other evidence that
disputed the administration's fictional story lines,
this intelligence was promptly disregarded.

So much so that eight months later - in October
2002, as the White House was officially rolling out
its new war and Congress was on the eve of
authorizing it - Mr. Bush gave a major address in
Cincinnati intermingling the usual mushroom clouds
with information from that discredited, "intentionally
misleading" Qaeda informant. "We've learned that
Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-
making and poisons and deadly gases," he said. It
was the most important, if hardly the only, example
of repeated semantic sleights of hand that the
administration used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq. Dick
Cheney was fond of brandishing a nonexistent April
2001 "meeting" between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi
intelligence officer in Prague long after Czech and
American intelligence analysts had dismissed it.

The power of these lies was considerable. In a CBS
News/New York Times poll released on Sept. 25,
2001, 60 percent of Americans thought Osama bin
Laden had been the culprit in the attacks of two
weeks earlier, either alone or in league with
unnamed "others" or with the Taliban; only 6 percent
thought bin Laden had collaborated with Saddam;
and only 2 percent thought Saddam had been the
sole instigator. By the time we invaded Iraq in 2003,
however, CBS News found that 53 percent believed
Saddam had been "personally involved" in 9/11;
other polls showed that a similar percentage of
Americans had even convinced themselves that the
hijackers were Iraqis.

There is still much more to learn about our
government's duplicity in the run-up to the war, just
as there is much more to learn about what has gone
on since, whether with torture or billions of Iraq
reconstruction dollars. That is why the White House
and its allies, having failed to discredit the Fitzgerald
investigation, are now so desperate to slow or block
every other inquiry. Exhibit A is the Senate
Intelligence Committee, whose Republican
chairman, Pat Roberts, is proving a major farceur
with his efforts to sidestep any serious investigation
of White House prewar subterfuge. Last Sunday, the
same day that newspapers reported Carl Levin's
revelation about the "intentionally misleading"
Qaeda informant, Senator Roberts could be found
on "Face the Nation" saying he had found no
evidence of "political manipulation or pressure" in
the use of prewar intelligence.

His brazenness is not anomalous. After more than
two years of looking into the forged documents
used by the White House to help support its bogus
claims of Saddam's Niger uranium, the F.B.I. ended
its investigation without resolving the identity of the
forgers. Last week, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker
reported that an investigation into the November
2003 death of an Abu Ghraib detainee, labeled a
homicide by the U.S. government, has been, in the
words of a lawyer familiar with the case, "lying kind
of fallow." The Wall Street Journal similarly reported
that 17 months after Condoleezza Rice promised a
full investigation into Ahmad Chalabi's alleged
leaking of American intelligence to Iran, F.B.I.
investigators had yet to interview Mr. Chalabi - who
was being welcomed in Washington last week as an
honored guest by none other than Ms. Rice.

The Times, meanwhile, discovered that Mr. Libby
had set up a legal defense fund to be underwritten
by donors who don't have to be publicly disclosed
but who may well have a vested interest in the
direction of his defense. It's all too eerily
reminiscent of the secret fund set up by Richard
Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, to pay
the legal fees of Watergate defendants.

THERE'S so much to stonewall at the White House
that last week Scott McClellan was reduced to
beating up on the octogenarian Helen Thomas. "You
don't want the American people to hear what the
facts are, Helen," he said, "and I'm going to tell
them the facts." Coming from the press secretary
who vowed that neither Mr. Libby nor Karl Rove had
any involvement in the C.I.A. leak, this scene was
almost as funny as his boss's "We do not torture"
charade.

Not that it matters now. The facts the American
people are listening to at this point come not from
an administration that they no longer find credible,
but from the far more reality-based theater of war.
The Qaeda suicide bombings of three hotels in
Amman on 11/9, like the terrorist attacks in Madrid
and London before them, speak louder than
anything else of the price we are paying for the lies
that diverted us from the war against the suicide
bombers of 9/11 to the war in Iraq.


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