The coward dies a thousand deaths. The hero dies just once

> The debate, such as it is, about the Bush administration's "excesses"
> might be more productive if more leading officials simply came forward to
> say, "Look, there was a panic and we crossed lines we shouldn't have. Cooler heads
> should have prevailed, but didn't. For a short while, we lost our heads, but we
> eventually got back on track. It was a regrettable lapse of judgment,
> but our intentions were good, and we've all learned valuable lessons about
> what should and shouldn't be done during a crisis."

Even then, the "we panicked" excuse would only hold for actions taken in the first 48, maybe 72 hours. The notion that the shock and psychological trauma of 9/11 excuses actions taken months or years later is just asinine.

And Richard Clarke already laid it down in his book how they were already looking on Sept 12th for an excuse to invade Iraq, ordering intelligence to find links. Clark was there and I praise him for not allowing these C**KS**kers to rewrite history. They have no conscience, no morals no ethics. To beat Niell "Goddamn their shit filled souls to hell"

no, the insanity obviously wasn't temporary, and it obviously wasnt generated by Sept. 11.

These people are monsters and they were and still are ready to continue to do inhuman things if they are again in position to decide to do them.

Bush and Cheyney were a pair of amateurs (or draft dodgers, if you will) who found themselves not only on a battlefield, in the midst of a war, but, by way of the Constitution, IN CHARGE.

Panic, poor judgement, and a woeful ignorance of military matters led to the inevitable. . .

*

mhr, roosevelt didn't order japanese detainees tortured to produce false information about why he should invade the suez canal or something: that would have been monstrous and you may recognize the analogy.

what fdr did was wrong and has been recognized as so, and no one attempts to defend it today as a correct action.

which is the frickin' point at play here.

that said, to return to reality: what i believe is that as bush sat there on 9/11, what was going through his mind was "boy, i really fucked up this time."

and so i think the administration did two things: gave their own worst impulses unchecked authority and did everything in their power to suppress the story of how badly they had fucked up (with any luck, they could obscure the story altogether i suspect they felt).

A few years ago, my son flew back east to visit his then-girlfriend. I briefed him on what he should not wear or carry into the airport. It was a pretty ridiculous list by then. I concluded by telling him, "And all of this is so we can pretend we were paying attention before 9/11." Lo and behold, here's Richard Clarke saying much the same thing - more eloquently, of course. I'd really, really like to be wrong sometime when I make these offhandedly cynical remarks.

And Richard Clarke already laid it down in his book how they were already looking on Sept 12th for an excuse to invade Iraq...

Try January 31, 2001. According to Paul O'Neill, via Ron Suskind, invading Iraq was discussed at the very first cabinet meeting of the Bush "administration."

>"who found themselves not only on a battlefield, in the midst of a war,"

Yeah, 20 Saudi Arabian religous fanatics armed with box-cutters. Some army, some war. Biggest con job in history.

Someday americans my find out just 'who knew what and when' about the the plans for the 9-11 hijackings. Evidence certainly suggest at least one of our so-called 'allies' knew what was coming well in advance.

If and when that happens you can rest assured it won't be via american media. The one semi-serious investigative report that was done (by Fox of all networks) was pulled after only 1 episode was shown... and oddly, all traces of the existence of that time-slot have been purged... like it did not exist.

Go figure. Seriously.

Clarke should have been more thorough: Bush and Cheney had already started to alter the nature of executive power, ignoring precedence in favor of convenience, before 9/11. The terrorist attacks merely accelerate the process.

howard said:
what fdr did was wrong and has been recognized as so, and no one attempts to defend it today as a correct action.

Well, except for Michelle Malkin and her crazed minions;>

I believe cooler heads did prevail. The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and the administration knew it. The invasion was something cheney, rumsfeld, and the neocons had been wanting for years. 9/11 was their excuse, flimsy as it was. I believe they wanted to control the oil, but I also believe it was connected to Israel. The only terrorists Sadaam supported were Hamas and/or Hizbullah, groups that had never attacked the U.S.

There is another thing about that Richard Clarke op ed that the media frankly has never focused on when it comes to the torture debate. We all know how the Bush Administration led by Dick Cheney went to the trouble of getting the OLC to come up with reports to be able to falsely justify legally the torture techniques they were going to authorize. But what we have never heard and seemingly no one has ever asked is how Cheney et all decided on the notion that torture would work better than traditional methods. Why hasn't anyone who says torture worked and that it was useful ever pointed to any conversations inside the Administration about which interrogation methods were most effective and efficient. The only conversations that seemed to have happened is the CIA making requests and Cheney et al approving them. But Cheney and Rice couldn't have possibly known for sure how effective or ineffective torture was nor could they have known how effective or ineffective traditional methods were either. So why hasn't a single major mainstream media journalist ever asked how they came to that conclusion BEFORE ordering the torture. I understand that Cheney and nem are going to try to hide behind the "ends justifies the means" defense. But what information did they even ask for to prove that torture would yield any greater results.

Or did they, as I assume, just figure since it worked on Tee Vee that it would work in real life?

bush may have been panicked, and possibly rice, cheney, no way - he only saw opportunity:

* to invade Iraq
* to play "24" by torturing people
* to use wire taps to spy on people.

cheney is a thoroughly evil, rotten to the core, soulless person. 9/11 was his dream come true.

Rice too is a pretty evil person. She packs loads of incompetence to go with it, i.e., she is not even good at her rottenness.

Clarke's most important point, the one folks should apply to the future, isn't that 'we were scared so we should be excused'.

It's McSorley's point: They did bad things after, because they hadn't done the right things BEFORE.

One thing I wish (hope) the Obama people would think about, among others, is just what COULD the Bush people have done before 9-11, given that they were warned, but didn't believe the warnings.

I mean -- that's not exactly an uncommon circumstance.

Who among us hasn't been told something like "don't try to steal second, the catcher has a cannon", only to get thrown out cuz we didn't listen?

The Bush defense was that the warnings weren't explicit enough, or that nobody had connected the dots (which, naturally, was the Clinton administration's fault), but that's not near good enough... and, in truth, going that way is way too partisan, anyway: it really COULD have happened to anybody, even though Bush made it uniquely his own with the "you've covered your ass, now" smirk to the guy who told briefed him "Al Qaeda Determined to Strike in the US".

I just hope somebody in the Obama shop knows enough to assign somebody serious to WORK at it, when they get some preposterous, not part of our plan warning from some holdover bureaucrat who isn't on their team.

But Clarke's real point, I thought, is that the REASON the Bush guys did bad things after 9-11 is precisely the same reason they failed to do good things before 9-11: bad judgment coming and going.

What gets overlooked in this and similar discussions is that:

1) The Bush administration came into office looking for justification to attack Iraq
2) The Bush administration began the warrantless (illegal) wiretaps multiple months before 9/11

Yes - 9/11 changed everything! It provided excuses for the already started illegalities of the Bush Criminal Enterprise.

zeppo, I think you give Bush too much credit (in the category of basic humanity) for thinking he was panicked by 9/11. Remember what happened that night? There was an alert late that night at the White House, and when it came to nothing, Bush & his wife had a nice laugh about it.

I remember 9/11 quite well -- it hit my community very hard indeed -- and I do not remember finding anything to laugh about that evening. Anybody who did have the chuckles? Well -- the word "sociopath" comes to mind ...

If only it was a "White House 9/11 trauma defense". Not only is Cheney defending their actions as the right thing to do, but claiming the country is less safe because the current administration is repudiating those policies.

No, they simply committed crimes against humanity, and by continuing to demonstrate that they don't understand that they proclaim to the heavens their own lack of humanity.

is just what COULD the Bush people have done before 9-11, given that they were warned

Former Sen. Bob Graham wrote a book outlining 12 clues that might have prevented 9/11. Had the Bush administration simply put the FBI and other agencies on alert that they were specifically concerned about airplane hijackings, they might have connected a lot of dots. And as much as people complained about stovepiping, the key here is that stovepiping requires good leadership, and that was missing. When a daily briefer told Bush about the famous August PDB, Bush responded, "OK you've covered your ass now (paraphrasing)", but it was his job to ask his experts what could have been done to follow up. Not doing so was true failure of leadership.

Rice has said those of outside the administration "cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas" the president's team faced "unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11."

The thing is, more and more of us are getting the whole picture: they were in a position of responsibility before September 11, too. We're getting an ever clearing picture of failure on both sides of that point in time, a pattern of failure, so to speak, resulting from their tendency to focus on personal, covert, ideological political goals. Before the attack is was "don't bother us with that ninny stuff about terrorist attacks, we're busy with our own agenda, tax cuts and energy." Afterward? Well like I said, there's a pattern.

IMO, Cheney's "High Dudgeon Tour" is doing him more harm than good; he is, in fact, making Americans think and talk amoung ourselves.

Oh, and what TheAmericanist said.

I am so glad to read that Richard Clarke, who had an office in the White House, and attended many of those meetings, express this view. It does make me wonder how often he bothered to pipe up while he was in that position.

But mostly this just makes me even more curious why in hell the Repubilcans have the supposed lock on national security cred? What we see here is that when you put frat Boys into positions of power, and they are faced with a crisis, they just freak and react with their gonads instead of their brains. When we fully expect our leaders to let cooler heads prevail, these jerks just kept the hotheads calling the shots and ignoring any advice of better, more rational, and more long term reasonable options.

They have no excuses, and they should be prosecuted. If we don't bring justice into this whole mess, we will not have learned a damn thing. What we should have learned is, with these idiots in charge, the terrorists won.

Say what you will about conspiracy, but the same Cheney who authorized and planned a torture regime and lied us into an unnecessary war and invasion also was solely responsible for calling off our defenses when we were under attack...saying it was just an exercise. Too much coincidence...from Cheney???

He and Rumsfeld tied together in government power for decades thought nothing of torturing or killing anyone for political gain, like trying to justify an illegal war. Nothing 'shocks' these guys. They were cheering after 9/11 because it gave them the basis to realize their dreams. Only their paranoia made them appear 'troubled', neither losing a moments sleep over the torture or bloodshed. Maybe we'll get the chance to prove it...but only if we keep demanding and keep the pressure on.

"The coward dies a thousand deaths. The hero dies just once
Posted by: plschwartz on May 31, 2009 at 10:28 AM | PERMALINK

Only works if you have a conscience. Excludes sociopaths and psychopaths like the members of the torture regime.

Wacky librul: Re "...how often he (Clarke) bothered to pipe up..." A good question that Clarke should be asked if he hasn't been asked already. My impression is that he probably did some piping up and quickly figured out that it was pointless. Remember Paul O'Neill found little interest in anything of substance he was trying to discuss with Bush, if I remember correctly (it's been a while since I read the Suskind book). I believe he found there was no policy apparatus but only permanent campaign related meetings or something like that going on.
Anyway it would be interesting to hear from Clarke about the particulars of those kinds of experiences he had early in the Bush administration. I don't think he discussed exactly that in his book.
Speaking of dirt and Ms. Rice....I've written this several times before without any responses: She's an interesting case (black woman from the South, super acheiver, ending up lying distorting weasel in a stupid and criminal administration). I've read articles and books about her but the real stuff that would begin to explain such a character always seems to be missing. I've only seen a reference or two about her being a crappy provost or something like that. There must be people who were at Stanford etc. who have lots to say about her clawing her way to the top and so on.

Clarke wrote about his experience between Jan and Sep 2001 in his book, "Against All Enemies". He asked to have a high level meeting, and was rebuffed by Condi. Unlike with Clinton, he was pretty much relegated to dealing with aides. They eventually demoted (or transferred him) to cyber-terrorism. Clearly al Qaeda was not a big concern, even though the Cole incident happened shortly before the 2000 election.

What I find interesting about the "panic" argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeld, & Rice got their start during the Cold War. Remember all the charming MAD scenarios about millions of deaths & whole American cities wiped out (not to mention millions of dead Soviets)? If you spend all that time playing with such ideas, how do you PANIC when only 3000 people die (I'm not trying to make light of their deaths -- only contrast the number with the exponentially larger ones Cheney & Co. had played with for 30 years).

Also, the panic argument doesn't explain why you turn to a program (SERE) reverse engineered from one designed by the Chinese/North Koreans to get FALSE confessions if what you want is good intelligence.

& it doesn't explain, when the government of Canada turns to you & says "Hey, that Maher Arar guy we told you about -- turns out he's not who we said he was -- he's just an actual Canadian engineer," & the government of Syria sez "yep, that's who we think he is" -- why then, does panic make you bellow "Keep torturing him & never let him in this country again!" Canadians managed to say "Yikes, we lost our heads." Maybe arrogance and a bloodlust for revenge are involved... much?

& what panic explains shrugging off pursuit of our actual enemies on a quest for some other more fun targets elsewhere? Leaving Afghanistan to the Canadians we didn't bother torturing is as if the month after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had said "This isn't enough of a world war; let's conquer South America!"

What may be true is that at least some of the "journalists" who should have done a better job of questioning the administration really were panicked & so they are projecting. But I doubt the principals were.

Steve, this raises a point I'd like to see folks like you make more often in the national arena. It manifestly is NOT the job of wise leaders to lose their heads in a crisis; it manifestly IS the job of wise leaders to keep their cool and maintain (or, in some cases I guess, to begin) level-headed thinking. The book of Proverbs is absolutely chock-full of warnings on this topic. So, by claiming the "9/11 fever" defense, IMHO Cheney, et al. are admitting to a failure of leadership. At least in the way leadership is defined in Proverbs.

Temporary insanity doesn't hold if you kill your wife 18 months after you catch her in bed with your brother.

Another problem, in addition to the fact that they had been warned that bin Laden was likely to attack, is that between the military, CIA, NSA etc. those in government who were responsible for defending and responding probably had already war gamed a scenario close enough to the 9/11 attack to already have a plan that could have been followed.

If the Bushies panicked, and then ad libed their response, it just proves what incompetents they were.

I saw evidence on the web just weeks after Bush took office in Januray 2001 that invading Iraq had become official policy.

A key Washington lobby group that purported to be Israel's official voice in Washington presented a seminar in February, 2001, about the need to topple Iraq that was held at National Defense University at Fort Belvoir. You only give government-sponsored seminars on a topic like this with official White House and SecDef approval.

So the timing of the Administration's statements that the Iraqi-al Qaeda connection justified invasion, torture, indefinite imprisonment & domestic spying simply is not consistent with the timeline of their actions. Planning for the invasion of Iraq was already well under way when 9-11 occurred.

9-11 simply gave Bush and Cheney a pretext to accelerate their plans and couch them in terms of a non-existent Iraqi threat.

It was a pretext for lyin' SOBs.

I find it interesting to juxtapose the "You can't imagine if you weren't there" defense with the wingnut attack on Sotomayor's "wise Latina woman" remark.

I noticed in 2002 that Bush administration officials seemed awfully anxious to start a war with Iraq.

The diversion of military resources from Afghanistan (and the search for Osama bin Laden) to staging areas near Iraq...which was kept hidden from the public.

The AUMF rushed through Congress with certain stipulations in place, that if not acceded to by Saddam Hussein, would authorize Bush to launch his invasion. Going to the U.N. to try to get international backing for attacking Iraq.

My guess back then, as the winter of 2002-2003 neared, was that the Bush administration was hell-bent on starting the war during the cooler Iraqi winter months.

But then Saddam Hussein through a monkey wrench into the neo-con Republican's plans...he allowed the U.N. WMD inspectors back into Iraq. Months passed over the 2002-2003 winter in which the WMD inspectors didn't find any of the WMD in Iraq that the Bush officials said were there, nor any of the terrorist training facilities.

So, winter drew to a close in Iraq with warmer spring and hotter summer months almost upon our military forces staged on the border of Iraq.

One thing that struck me about when Bush ordered hostilities to begin against Iraq was that it happened on the first day of spring 2003, the third week of March. Coincidence? Hardly.

In the warped minds of neo-con Bush officials, time was wasting away. The cooler Iraqi winter months were over. Furthermore, each day that passed in which U.N. WMD inspectors found nothing gave strength to Saddam Hussein's government's claims that he had gotten rid of any WMD he once had (and wasn't producing anymore) and he had never conspired with al Qaeda to attack America.

So, Bush ordered the attack anyway...a spring 2003 offensive. Amid claims by Bush officials that any war with Iraq would pay for itself (via Iraqi oil) and would be over promptly (within just a few months at most). Special U.S. Army units were assigned to ferret out the Iraqi WMD that the U.N. WMD inspectors just couldn't seem to locate anywhere, even after months of searching. Embedded journalists like Judith Miller were reporting daily from inside Iraq on this WMD search effort, implying that at any moment the main justification used by BushCo to invade Iraq would be proven. Nada.

Anyway, I agree with Richard Clarke about the looming 2004 presidential election being a major factor in BushCo's rush to war, with BushCo's rationale being that the sooner the war was started, the sooner it would be over, leaving well over a year to prepare for the 2004 election. with George W. Bush still milking 9/11 for all that it wass worth, plus having a "successful" war under his belt to boast about during his reelection campaign. Iraq didn't work out the way BushCo planned, but Bush still got reelected, especially with BushCo working so hard to keep hidden so much of their first-term criminal activity, including torture.

I just thought I'd give this historical snapshot to help explain why BushCo resorted to torture of detainees to get false, but highly desired, answers from these prisoners during 2002 and beyond. Not only were Bush officials looking ahead to his reelection campaign in 2004, but they were also trying to meet their invasion timeline, which I believe involved their decision to take advantage of the cooler Iraqi winter months to attack.

With invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein as BushCo's highest priority during Bush's first term, then it becomes obvious why BushCo blew off interrogation techniques that elicited "wrong" answers from detainees (from BushCo's perspective), that is, answers that didn't link Iraq to al Qaeda to 9/11 nor revealed Saddam Hussein's presumed WMD weapon stashes. Harsh interrogation techniques (i.e. torture), on the other hand, got the "desired" results, which BushCo then exploited to raise the fear level and push normally sane Americans into backing war with Iraq. Mission accomplished.

In Bush World, torture worked, no matter what contradictory evidence keeps cropping up since. Being righteous right-wing ideologues, they'll never admit they were wrong. Hell, there are still rabid right-wingers who believe Saddam Hussein DID have massive WMD stockpiles (although not even small stockpiles were found) and that his secular Sunni Baathist government had intimate contacts with the fanatical right-wing al Qaeda religious fundamentalists (though no evidence of such an unlikely conspiracy has ever been found either).

And America (and the world) will be paying for decades for the delusional criminal insanity of BushCo...which makes one wonder if this weakening of America was part of BushCo's plan, or are we all just collateral damage?