The Trust Gap
NY Times
NY Times Editorial
February 12, 2006
We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often
than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy,
judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also
can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.
This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But
last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.
DOMESTIC SPYING After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency
to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the
United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to
review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable
doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the
slightest intention of changing it.
According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police
itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its
own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn't work that
way. It's not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less
that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth
is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last
year, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a question about whether he believed the
president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr.
Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White
House counsel.
THE PRISON CAMPS It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal
illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States
military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings
imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners
to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear
that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his
internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do.
On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military
authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone
on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held
without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials
were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism
of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is
a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the
world.
According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are
neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in
Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over
to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others
were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism.
Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham
proceedings.
And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run
these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president's whim who is to
be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous
terrorists.
THE WAR IN IRAQ One of Mr. Bush's biggest "trust me" moments was when he
told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed
dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has
blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the
intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was
based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies.
But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by
the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who
said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to
invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who
produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an
assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the
invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and
forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.
When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr.
Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the
brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert
Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be
trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a
story we have heard before.
Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles
clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White
House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans
had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due
process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is
another.
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