The Trust Gap
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, 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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