DETROIT -- Here's your mission. Support and nurture the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks. Foster a new generation of Islamic radicals. Enrage the Muslim world. Anger and isolate our allies. Kill thousands in the name of spreading democracy. Use fear to gain political support. Trample on human rights and civil liberties. Erode and endanger domestic security.
He's done it. At last, President George W. Bush can truly proclaim "Mission accomplished."
By every objective measurement, Bush has brought our nation deep into this horrible mess and it will take decades to undo the disasters he's created in a remarkably short span of time. In half a decade, Bush has squandered America's moral authority, thumbed his nose at the decency of our national traditions and made us an outcast in the family of nations.
While most of the mainstream media was focusing on Vice President Dick Cheney's poor aim -- no doubt he had more than "a beer at lunch," his friends covered up for him and his lawyer told him to hide from the sheriff for a day -- previously unseen photographs and video of the horrors at Abu Ghraib prison were broadcast on Australian TV. A report on the Special Broadcasting Service aired last week, showing the new evidence of abuses at the prison outside Baghdad.
The images -- while not getting nearly as much play as the Lynndie England poses -- are more brutal and horrific than the first batch. You can see a handcuffed man banging his head against a metal cell door. Other images show the man naked and dangling upside down from a bunk, smeared in his own feces. The documentary notes the man was mentally ill and the guards treated him as a "plaything." Amnesty International says the new evidence shows the abuses were more far-reaching than the Pentagon has admitted.
William Schultz, executive director of the human rights organization, told The New York Times, "The repulsive images released today give a clear picture of the scope of the abuses perpetrated at Abu Ghraib and raise the question of what other abuses occurred there and elsewhere when the cameras weren't present."
Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld encourage torture and argue that even Congress and the courts cannot prevent them from abusing prisoners. When Bush signed the McCain torture-ban amendment to the defense appropriations bill, he attached a statement declaring he would interpret the law "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch and as commander in chief and consistent with constitutional limits on judicial power." Read: I can order torture as I damn well please and no one can stop me.
In a case of deadly torture, the soldier who did the killing got a slap on the wrist like he was a naughty little boy. Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer stuffed an Iraqi army general head first into a sleeping bag and sat on his chest during an interrogation. Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush suffocated. Welshofer and two other soldiers, based at Fort Carson, Colo., were charged with murder for their conduct at a detention camp in western Iraq in 2003.
The other two soldiers were given immunity and only Welshofer went to trial. He was found guilty of negligent homicide and negligent dereliction of duty. During the trial, an e-mail Welshofer sent to a commander was read to the six Army officers hearing the case. In it, Welshofer complained that restrictions on interrogation techniques were impeding his ability to gather intelligence, arguing, "Our enemy understands force, not psychological mind games." The commander replied to Welshofer to "take a deep breath and remember who we are."
Tragically, far too many in the military that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have molded have forgotten "who we are."
Testifying on his behalf, Lt. Col. Paul Calvert claimed that, when word of Mowhoush's death spread in the region, Iraqi insurgent attacks "went to practically none." The logic of that justification for brutality is that all we have to do is round up a few people in every corner of Iraq, murder them during interrogations and the insurgency will go poof.
During his sentencing hearing, Welshofer never expressed a word of regret for what he did, nor did he offer an apology to Mowhoush's family. No, this manly man would only say, "I deeply apologize if my actions tarnished the soldiers serving in Iraq." How noble.
Sentenced for his crimes in January, Welshofer -- who once faced life in prison -- was given a letter of reprimand, ordered to forfeit $6,000 in pay and was restricted to work, church services and his barracks for 60 days. That'll teach him and be a warning to other would-be killer-torturers. Mowhoush's son told the Washington Post, "His punishment is not justice."
The tolerance of torture and the images of Abu Ghraib reverberate throughout Iraq, fuel Islamic extremism and provide al-Qaeda with more recruits than it can use. The prison has now become the West Point for terrorists, where they fine-tune skills in violence.
More than 4,800 Iraqi detainees are now stuffed into Abu Ghraib. Many of them are innocent young men rounded up in "usual suspects" sweeps and placed in prison with no charges.
The New York Times reports American commanders are "expressing grave concerns" that the overcrowded prison "has become a breeding ground for extremist leaders and a school for terrorist foot soldiers." One U.S. commander said, "Abu Ghraib is a graduate-level training ground for the insurgency." Prisoners at Abu Ghraib network and "forge relationships and exchange lessons of combat against the United States and the new Iraqi government."
And then there is the hellhole at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where "enemy combatants" are held without charges and scant legal representation, outside the scope of international law. The United Nations Human Rights Commission is calling for closing the prison "without further delay," and either releasing the inmates or bringing them to trial before an impartial tribunal. A report -- based on interviews with former detainees at Gitmo -- concludes treatment of the prisoners there amounts to torture.
"The apparent attempts by the U.S. administration to reinterpret certain interrogation techniques as not reaching the threshold of torture in the framework of the struggle against terrorism are of utmost concern," U.N. investigators stated. U.S. officials shrugged off the report, calling it "largely without merit." The U.S. liaison to the Human Rights Commission chided the investigators for refusing to visit Guantanamo. The reason they didn't is that they were denied their request to interview prisoners. The report ended by demanding that the United Nations be granted full access to the prison, including private interviews with detainees.
Besides helping terrorist recruitment and alienating the world, Bush's abyss in Iraq comes with a price tag of at least a trillion dollars. How much safer would we be spending that money protecting and defending our domestic infrastructure -- especially ports, bridges and power and chemical plants?
Our intelligence capabilities in the Islamic world are still shamefully inadequate. With more than 34,000 employees in the State Department, fewer than 100 speak and understand Arabic.
In the more than four years since the 9/11 attacks, we could have trained thousands of American children to speak the language, if only the Busheviks had the will and smarts to use our resources creatively. They only turn to military solutions in the misnamed "war on terror."
The threat cannot be fought by traditional military means. It's too decentralized and globalized and the target is constantly moving. That's one of the themes Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon advance in their new book, "The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right." Benjamin and Simon were counterterrorism experts at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.
In an insightful essay in the "New York Review of Books," David Cole examines their arguments and how clear it is that the Bushevik approach to the terrorist threat is monstrously off the mark. Cole, a Georgetown Law Center professor and legal correspondent for "The Nation" magazine, writes that Benjamin and Simon's work exposes the futility of the Bush administration's numbskull approach to terror, especially "the erroneous venture in Iraq."
"In their view, the Iraq war is a symptom of the Bush administration's obsession with fighting an offensive 'war on terror,' an obsession that has caused the administration to disregard the less glamorous but more crucial task of shoring up America's defenses against future attacks," Cole says.
He supports Benjamin and Simon's argument that we should reject the military model in dealing with terrorism and instead "adopt an intelligence-based approach." That strategy for getting it right requires a government "that (1) seeks to identify, capture, and disrupt terrorists; (2) safeguards the most dangerous weapons to keep them out of terrorists' hands; (3) identifies and protects the most vulnerable targets in the US; and (4) reduces the creation of new terrorists by addressing the grievances that drive people to extreme violence in the first place."
Cole says Bush's "outmoded thinking and dangerous new ideas" have created an unprecedented distrust toward the United States within the Arab and Muslim communities. Targeting innocent people, using coercion and disregarding human rights and the fundamental rule of law will come back to haunt us, Cole argues, saying, "In the long run the resentment provoked by these measures is the greatest threat to our national security, and the most likely source of the next attack."
The greatest lie in our supreme liar's arsenal is Bush's claim that his war in Iraq and radical policies make our nation "safer." In fact, he imperils the American people while bringing great solace to Osama bin Laden, who sits in his cave thinking, "Thanks, Bush, I couldn't have done this without you."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Feb. 21 2006 |