http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/o...fdc67af47&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss Editorial The Trust Gap 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.
No kidding. I would never trust any administration to police itself, and listen in on American citizens' private phone conversations and e-mails. But this president in particular has proven himself untrustworthy in such matters. I am totally baffeled that people want this man and his administration to have that power with absolutely nobody or no institution to provide oversight, and just make sure they are handling it properly. I mean isn't that what the checks and balances of this nation are all about? I've asked before, and I guess I'll keep on asking until I get an answer... What has this president done to earn that kind of trust? When and how has he proven himself to be trustworthy?
Can you substantiate what you are talking about? The non-FISAed wiretapping cases must amount to .0000000000000000000001 of the Administration's activity. Where else has the Administration asked for or received no oversight?
giddy realy! Did you not read the article? WMDs? The prisons? Do you see any accountability there from the administration? Do you se any oversight? Maureen Dowd (I know, laugh if you want too) nailed the administration with this article yesterday. Trust? That is soooo 2001... Smoking Dutch Cleanser By MAUREEN DOWD Published: February 11, 2006 Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly complains that national security leaks are endangering America. Unless, of course, he's doing the leaking, tapping Scooter Libby to reveal national security information to punish a political critic. President Bush says he will not talk about specific security threats to America. Unless, of course, he needs to talk about a specific threat to Los Angeles to confuse the public and gain some cheap political advantage. The White House says it has done everything possible to protect the homeland. Unless, of course, it hasn't. Then it can lie to hide the callous portrait of Incurious George in Crawford as New Orleans drowned. The attorney general can claim that torture and warrantless wiretapping are legal, and can mislead Congress. Unless, of course, enough Republicans stand up and say, as Arlen Specter told The Washington Post, that if that lickspittle lawyer thinks all this is legal, "he's smoking Dutch Cleanser." The president doesn't know the Indian Taker Jack Abramoff. Unless, of course, W. has met with him a dozen times, invited him to Crawford and joked with him about his kids. The Bushies can continue to claim that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was a threat to our security. Unless, of course, he wasn't, and the Cheney cabal was simply abusing the trust of Americans to push a wild-eyed political scheme. At the Bush White House, the mere evocation of the word "terror" justifies breaking any law, contravening any convention, despoiling any ideal, electing any Republican and brushing off any failure to govern. Asked yesterday by Senator Susan Collins why the administration had reacted in slo-mo on Katrina, with "people dying, people waiting to be rescued," Michael Brown replied that if FEMA had declared that a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, "then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could." Instead of just going after the 9/11 fiends, as W. promised with his bullhorn, the president and Vice President Strangelove have cynically played the terror card to accrue power and sidestep blame. They have twisted our values, mismanaged crises, fueled fundamentalist successes and violence around the world, and magnified a clash of civilizations. It used to take an Israeli incursion to inflame the Arab world. Now all it takes is a cartoon in Denmark. W. and Vice have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, turning Iraq into a terrorist training ground, leaving the 9/11 villains at large, and letting cronies and losers botch the job of homeland security. Brownie, one of the biggest boneheads in U.S. history, considered the homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, so useless that he deliberately didn't call him right away about the suffering in New Orleans. "The culture was such that I didn't think that would have been effective and would have exacerbated the problem, quite frankly," Brownie told the Republican senator Bob Bennett, who called the statement "staggering." A telephone call to his boss, Brownie said, "would have wasted my time." The doofus who frittered away lives e-mailing colleagues about being a "fashion god" and wondering how he looked on television may have just been engaged in self-protective spin. Or has the Homeland Security Department simply created another set of paralyzing turf battles? The most dysfunctional man in government is calling the government dysfunctional. W.'s sophomoric "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" line makes even Brownie cringe. "Unfortunately," the former FEMA chief complained, "he called me 'Brownie' at the wrong time. Thanks a lot, sir." In the new Foreign Affairs, Paul Pillar, who was a senior C.I.A. official overseeing Middle East intelligence assessments until October, says the obvious conclusion that should have been drawn from the intelligence on Iraq was that war was unnecessary. He says the White House "went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq." He calls the relationship between the intelligence community and the policy makers — you guessed it — politicized, damaged by bureaucratic rivalries and dysfunctional. A final absurd junction of dysfunction was reached on Wednesday, when Republican Party leaders awarded Tom DeLay with a seat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, which is investigating Jack Abramoff, including his connections to Tom DeLay. Perfect. http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/1...rials and Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Maureen Dowd
There are two issues here: trust and oversight. I replied to FB's comment about lack of oversight. Where is there lack of oversight with regard to WMD's or prisons? Your idea of accountability is self-sacrifice! Can somebody pull up that list of all those prominent Democrats who agreed that Iraq had sufficient WMDs for us to be worried. Can that one be about trust?
So the hair you are splitting is the difference normal oversight and partial, purposedly ineffective oversight? For example, Congress looked into the intelligence failure in the buildup to the Iraq War, but did not look into the intellignece abuse by the WH (ignoring the stronger intell that disagreed with their political objective and promoting weak intell as proof without saying it was weak).
The wiretapping cases are what I am referring to. The trust he hasn't built up I replied to in the Gonzalez thread and this one. Like I said I would never trust any administration with those kinds of powers without some type of oversight. But because of the things I mentioned in the other thread and this thread... the rest of the administration's activity, I don't trust him on this .0000000001 percent. I can't believe anybody else would either. Yes he has had oversight on the other parts, and it turned out he was dishonest. Thank goodness we had oversight or people might still believe he was trustworthy. He has shown us that he doesn't deserve to act without oversight. He was dishonest when he said how many hundreds of Iraq forces were ready for action. Later we found it was only 1. He was dishonest when his administration told people it was safe to go back and work near the WTC after 9/11, but it turns out that it wasn't He was dishonest when he said that he fire anybody involved in the Plame leak. Then he changed that to just being convicted. He was dishonest when he claimed that he hoped the Iraq conflict could be solved peacefully prior to the war. Then we find the documents that show he wanted to disguise a plane as a UN plane and get the Iraqis to attack it so that we could go to war with their blessing. He was dishonest when he claimed that he had informed and received approval from the Senate Intel committee on the warrantless wiretaps. Then we find actual letters from members of that committee raising questions and objections to the whitehouse about the activity, which were never answered. Luckily all of those things had oversight, and we found out the president was dishonest. Now some people are arguing as hard as they can for this same dishonest person to be able to invade the privacy of American citizens without any oversight whatsoever. Are we just supposed to take his word, that he will only use that on known Al-Qaeda? That is a stupid argument anyway, because the fact that a known al-Qaeda person is involved alone, would be enough for FISA to grant a warrant. That is the problem. I am willing for this president to wiretap on American citizens, but there must be some form of oversight. This president has shown he hasn't earned that kind of trust.
I wasn't hair-splitting on the kind of oversight; I was disputing the implied amount of oversight. I thought his remarks made it sound like the Administration was running amuck-- which I don't think is the case at all.
You'll never know what they are doing unless there is some type of oversight. That is the point. We have know way of knowing what they are doing, and they have shown they shouldn't be trusted to tell the truth about what they are doing. Just ask the workers who were told it was safe to go back to work after 9/11 despite the fact that the administration knew the air quality was not safe. And some of those workers have since suffered from the air quality and now have possibly life threatening health problems. Luckily there was some type of oversight that let us know, or you might not have believd they were running amuck there either. Unless there is a check or a balance, no president, and especially this president should have the right to invade people's privacy, violate the 4th amendement, or spy on U.S. citizens. As is we have one court that is extremely friendly and disposed towards granting these types of warrants standing being us, and an administration that has done little to nothing to earn our trust. I ask you, what has this administration done to earn the kind of trust? There has been plenty shown to show what they have done to earn distrust.
He is the Chief Executive. I'm just glad that Aaron listened to Jack and defied orders from the WH Chief of Staff and did what needed to be done to protect the President... (24 Reference ).
I am too in that fictional television series. You are correct that Bush is the chief executive. Under this nation's governing document the chief executive is subject to checks and balances, and oversight.
I always knew you were Jack Bauer... On a serious note: I once heard a guy at the UVA Law School who was part of a think tank on National Security Issues-- the first in the US as I recall the story. He talked about the criticisms of the President and could arguably justify the Administrations decisions and actions based on his status as the Chief of the Executive Branch. I know that that won't satisfy you, but I tried to find it before (when it was even fresh) and couldn't.
The president went before the UN and asked the world trust them that they had sufficent super-secret evidence that rendered no doubt that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. It was so secret according to them that they couldn't present the absolute proof to the world to allow it to decide for itself. Whether they proved they can't be trusted because of incompitence or malace is beyond the point. FISA exists to maintain the secrecy that the president claims prevents him from revealing the details of the spying program. I have yet to see anybody provide a clear and cognizent reason why going to FISA would have been untenable unless the president was: doing things that they felt stood a good chance of being regarded as unconstitutional. or simply philosophically in favor of establishing precident for a stronger Executive branch, and no matter how you feel about him I dare you to claim that you think of the President as being deeply interested in abstract philosophical concepts.
President as Pragmatist... Again, I ask someone to provide that list of all the prominent politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, who agree that Saddam had WMDs... At that point it was not a matter of trust but one of public record.
yes I have heard that, but I have heard other legal experts and professors say there is no way it justified. You are right I have my opinion on which side of that debate I come down on.
As I recall, the guy I heard described it as a pre- and post-Viet Nam distinction, but I can't elaborate more than that.
In general terms the Republican Congress has dropped the oversight ball, when the politics were not in favor of the WH. Stuff that did not get adequately "oversighted" includes extraordinary rendition why the President ignored the OBL warnings prior to 9/11 manipulation of intell leading into the Iraq War financial oversight of $$$ spent in Iraq post war torture at Gitmo and in Iraq suspension of the Geneva War Conventions violation of international law (that we wrote btw) when we pre-emptively invaded Iraq etc.
Red f'n herring. "Officer, I robbed this bank, but it only amounts to .0000000000000000000001 of my life's activity. Let me go!"
I find it funny that you guys get upset that Bush couldn't stop 9/11 based on a memo titled: Bin Laden Determined to Attack inside US. If you read a post titled: "Halfbreed determined to eat lunch in Houston tomorrow" would you know how to stop me?
