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The Times sets its WMD record straight

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Stay up late on the West Coast and you get tomorrow’s New York Times today. Tonight brings a long “From the Editors” note that reconsiders the WMD hysteria that marked some of its prewar coverage and marred its reputation:

“It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers.”

“We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.”

For the Times, this transparency thing is still very new. And admitting that major stories that helped launch an ill-conceived war were at best careless and at worst fraudulent is a painful thing for any journalistic enterprise. But admitting mistakes is the first step toward preventing their recurrence.

Now if we can only get our president to understand that principle. Instead, here he is solemnly announcing, in his speech last night, that “Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror.” Sure it is. How did it get that way? It wasn’t such a front before we invaded. Our mistakes — Bush’s mistakes — opened another front for bin Ladenism to exploit.

Will Saletan in Slate has a smart deconstruction of the strange rhetoric in Bush’s speech that omits any acknowledgment of missteps and all reference to his own agency in the unfolding Iraq disaster. Bush hasn’t done anything; instead, “history is moving.” It would be funny if there weren’t so many lives already lost, and more on the line.

PATRIOT Act: The last refuge of scoundrels

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One of the more remarkable news stories to break in the past month, a time of many remarkable stories, told of the strange saga of the ACLU’s challenge to the PATRIOT act. It turned out that, under a provision of the PATRIOT Act itself, the ACLU had been barred even from telling anyone about its challenge to the PATRIOT Act, and had to fight the Bush administration just to be able to announce its suit.

This bit of Kafkaesque logic may seem positively un-American. But it makes sense within the increasingly divorced-from-reality, driven-by-images, shoot-the-messenger world of the Bush administration. Here, a secretary of defense get really steamed not about the fact of torture in a U.S.-run prison (hey, shit happens!) but about losing control of the flow of images about that torture. Here, in the wake of the worst geopolitical strategic mistakes committed by a U.S. leader since Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam escalation, a president decides that his first priority must be — a P.R. offensive!

(Sorry for the digression: it’s hard to stay on track when the news provides so many sidings into bitter absurdity.)

Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief in the ACLU’s case, and Salon — on behalf, in particular, of The WELL, which is a Salon subsidiary — is proud to be among the signers. They also include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the U.S. Internet Industry Association, and the Online Policy Group.

What’s at issue here, chiefly, is a provision of the PATRIOT Act that (to quote from the EFF brief) “authorizes the FBI to compel the production of subscriber and communications records in the possession of a broad range of Internet-related communications service providers, potentially covering billions of records from tens of thousands of entities. These demands, known as National Security Letters (NSLs), are issued without judicial oversight of any kind, yet allow the FBI to obrain a vast amount of constitutionally protected information.” The brief — a “friend of the court” filing in which parties who feel they have interests at stake in a proceeding offer legal arguments that complement those of the plaintiffs — argues that the Act is not only constitutionally overbroad but also “not cabined by any intelligible standard”: in other words, there’s no way to make sense of it in terms of the realities of the Internet today.

The WELL has a long history of helping define the shape of Internet users’ rights and responsibilities. As the Bush administration continues to push beyond the edges of reasonable legal means in its conduct of the “war on terror,” we’ll keep doing what we can to fight back and protect the privacy of our users, customers and community members.

(I will post a link to the brief as soon as it’s online.)

War Rooming

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If you haven’t been reading Salon’s War Room blog, here’s an example of what you’ve been missing. Geraldine Sealey notes Tom DeLay’s complaint that Nancy Pelosi, in criticizing President Bush, was endangering American lives, and offers a catalog of recent harsh criticisms of Bush from the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Mark Helprin, Bill Kristol, George Will and a handful of Republican Senators. All “dangerous” statements, according to DeLay.

Beyond the Green Zone

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Jeff Jarvis echoes Howard Kurtz’s observation that most U.S. reporters in Iraq aren’t daring to venture outside the Green Zone. Given the chaos there and the danger of being taken hostage or worse, it’s hard to second-guess the decisions these journalists are making. But there’s no question we won’t get the full picture from Iraq this way.

Jarvis suggests we read Iraqi bloggers (and provides a set of links to them). That’s certainly good advice.

But it’s also worth pointing out that Salon’s coverage from Iraq was not “embedded” during the invasion and is not embedded in the Green Zone today. Our correspondent Phillip Robertson has been courageously, and independently, traveling the country, offering eyewitness accounts from the siege of Najaf and Kufa, escaping a thankfully brief detainment by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Al-Mehdi Army, and providing another angle on the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Phillip is a fine writer and a great observer. If you want to read reporting that’s not hunkered down behind the barricades, here it is.

CIA blows whistle on Rummy’s “bullshit”

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Seymour Hersh’s piece in the new New Yorker, “The Gray Zone,” begins thus:

  The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

Hersh’s report, which seems too detailed and credible for the administration simply to dismiss (though no doubt they will try), suggests that the testimony Rumsfeld offered Congress last week was at best a patchwork of outrageous omissions and at worst a passel of outright lies.

It’s also clear that Hersh’s sources are intelligence officials who decided to step forward with this tale only after Rumsfeld’s testimony. (Otherwise, presumably this material would have appeared in one of the reporter’s previous dispatches.) According to Hersh, the “black budget” operations his piece describes were top secret, and Rumsfeld could not have talked about them in public hearings. But clearly, something about the definitive nature of the Defense Secretary’s insistence on the “handful of loose cannons” line enraged someone at the CIA who knew a different story — enraged him enough to spill the beans to Hersh, using words like “bullshit” to describe Rumsfeld’s testimony.

It’s no secret that the CIA and the Bush administration are fighting their own war with each other, one that dates back at least to the buildup to the Iraq war, when the intelligence service kept telling the Bush team that there was no evidence Saddam still possessed weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush team kept throwing away the CIA’s info and seizing anything that looked like an excuse to invade. In each of the two biggest screwups of Bush foreign policy — the failure to anticipate 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq — Bush’s people have pointed fingers at the CIA and declared the problem to be a “failure of intelligence.” (Given this interpretation of history, you’d think Bush would have given George Tenet the boot long ago. But Tenet is loyal, and that’s all that seems to matter in this administration.)

Now the CIA is firing back. And that’s perfectly understandable. But you get the depressing feeling that, as all this bureaucratic crossfire ricochets, the biggest casualty will be the “war on terror” itself. Which is why the mistreatment and torture of the people we were supposed to be liberating is not only a moral calamity but a strategic disaster.

Our broken-record president

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It’s always seemed as if President Bush had a bizarrely inhuman ability to latch onto a single idea or phrase or message and stick to it regardless of changes in circumstantial reality that discredited the idea. We saw this in action with his tax cuts, which, as Paul Krugman bore witness, began life as a way of disposing of the federal budget surplus and then got repurposed into an antidote to the recession after the economy went south. One policy — fits all events!

Now Will Saletan of Slate has prepared a remarkable chronological record of presidential quotations that demonstrates this phenomenon at its most damningly, painfully extreme. We’ve all heard, one time or another, Bush’s boilerplate rhetoric about “Saddam’s torture chambers and rape rooms.” As the other rationales for the Iraq war evaporated, this one, at least, seemed rock-solid: the U.S. invasion had shut down those torture chambers and rape rooms. This sounded great, until we learned to our horror and disgrace that in fact those enterprises had simply undergone a change of ownership.

Go read Saletan’s quotes, in which Bush and his men keep parroting the line about torture chambers even as the scandal of American-sponsored torture in Saddam’s notorious old prison was grabbing headlines worldwide. No matter — the old message just kept on trucking.

On April 30 — two days after CBS had broadcast its photos of Abu Ghraib — Bush, like some malfunctioning android, was still saying: “And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq.” Again, on May 3, he says essentially the same thing. The images that have much of the globe reeling were apparently unable to dislodge this message-of-the-day formulation from the president’s cranium.

In a struggle against a global enemy that demands the utmost of nimble flexibility on our part, we are cursed: our leader has a brain of clay. Once the mold is baked, the mind is set, there’s no give.

The going gets weird

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Two gems from this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The first requires no comment at all:

  Republicans’ exasperation with the administration and the president himself was evident in a private meeting of Republican Senate committee chairmen this week in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s office. Mr. Frist at one point said he’d like to sit down with Mr. Bush and ask which two or three people in the administration could tell him what’s really going on with Iraq, according to one person in the room. “I don’t think he knows who could do that,” replied Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar.

In the second, Newt Gingrich rides to Don Rumsfeld’s defense in a piece headlined “Double Standards on Abu Ghraib,” arguing that we should discount outrage abroad at the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners because Arab governments and media failed to denounce previous Mideast atrocities:

  Some have called for Donald Rumsfeld to resign. However, he has led the process of exposing the wrongdoing and investigating the charges. Moreover, he will see to it that the accused get a fair and honest trial, where there is a presumption of innocence until guilt is proven and the guilty are punished. That due process is something we as Americans should be proud of, and unequival about… While we publicly uncover and explicitly demonstrate our commitment to punish the guilty for their crimes under our rule of law, we should not play into any double standard where America is allowed to be condemned by anyone who accepts Arab viciousness, terrorism, mutilation and barbarism as normal behavior.

So let’s put aside the small matters here — like that Rumsfeld’s “leading the process” didn’t seem to involve actually finishing reading the Pentagon’s own report on the prison torture. Let’s not waste too much time pointing out that, whatever the historical record, the war for the trust of the Iraqi people has become our fight, and Abu Ghraib was a disastrous, perhaps decisive defeat, and on that ground alone, before you even begin to weigh justice and morality, you have to judge this as Rumsfeld’s failure.

The heart of this is simple: Yes, Newt, there is a double standard here. The double standard is that, on the one hand, our leaders steadfastly insist (all the way up to the Supreme Court) that their treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror” is and must be outside the law — and on the other, the moment that we learn that awful things have happened in our lawless prisons, we suddenly get religion and invoke “due process.”

The soldiers, contractors and commanders responsible for the Abu Ghraib horrors deserve “due process,” for sure. So does every single human being incarcerated by the U.S. government. These are not disconnected matters — something to keep in mind as we hear Abu Ghraib written off as an isolated case, a few loose cannons, a handful of bad apples who rolled off the reservation. As Sidney Blumenthal argued earlier this week, and Anthony Lewis points out in today’s New York Times, when you set up a prison system and explicitly declare that it is beyond all legal oversight, you can hardly be surprised when the atrocities start.

Ghosts

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It’s hard to talk with your jaw dropped, and that is the position I — along, I imagine, with vast numbers of other people around the world — find myself in as the revelations of U.S. mistreatment, humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners continue to emerge.

One aspect of this fiasco that I haven’t seen much noted, though I’m sure it must have been observed by many, is the location. Why on earth did the U.S. ever choose Saddam’s most notorious prison — a scene of so much of the abuse and torture by the old regime that President Bush has taken so much credit for ending — as its own jail? Don’t some places become so tainted by their past that you just don’t recycle them? Would you take a concentration camp and reuse it as an interrogation center? Doesn’t anyone in the Bush administration understands the power of symbolism?

The U.S. employment of Abu Ghraib as a prison was iffy enough before we knew that Iraqis were being tortured within its walls on our watch. It was of a piece with the American occupation’s setting up camp in Saddam’s old palaces. From the beginning we have displayed an unfathomably tone-deaf approach to the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis in the post-Saddam era. With the pictures from Abu Ghraib, it’s hard not to sense that we have now lost the whole psychological war. (From today’s New York Times: “Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, has told one Bush adviser that he believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world.”)

Tom Friedman yesterday argued that the only way the Bush administration could begin to change things at this point would be to “finally screw up the courage to admit its failures and dramatically change course.” Good advice that we will never see acted on: it’s simply not in Bush’s nature (just now he’s emphatically saying that Rumsfeld will stay). There is no example in Bush’s life or career of “admitting failures and dramatically changing course.” (Yes, he kicked drinking, but as friends who have experience with alcoholism have pointed out to me, he has never taken the key step of acknowledging and naming his condition.)

That means that the only real way to achieve the goal Friedman identifies would be for Bush himself to resign — like the stand-up, take-responsiblity “CEO president” he’s supposed to be. It’ll never happen — we’re going to have show Bush the door instead. But we can dream.

Times Magazine failure of intelligence?

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The New York Times Magazine had to have closed out its cover story for yesterday well before the stories about torture in Abu Ghraib prison broke. So chalk one up to its editors’ prescience for running Michael Ignatieff’s “Lesser Evils,” which all but predicts the scandal:

  Torture, our founding fathers said, was the vice of tyrannies and its absolute exclusion the mark of free government. At the same time, keeping torture, or at least what used to be called “the third degree,” from creeping back into our police squad rooms at home has required constant vigilance by D.A.’s and honest cops. Now it may be creeping into our war on terror. There is some evidence that the United States has handed key suspects over to Middle Eastern governments for torture. In the metal containers stacked up behind rings of razor wire on Bagram air base in Afghanistan, beatings are reportedly routine, and at least two suspects have died during secret interrogations. It is possible that similar physical methods have been used against detainees from the Hussein regime at Baghdad airport.

It’s a smart piece, overall, but I do have one bone to pick: In his discussion of intelligence, Ignatieff writes, “The United States appears, for example, to have had almost no one on the ground in Iraq after 1998, hence the catastrophic misjudgment by U.S. intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Now, he’s obviously right that U.S. intelligence could have used some agents “on the ground” in Iraq after 1998. But surely everything we’ve learned about the interplay between the Bush administration and its intelligence operation in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq — from the creation of the Wolfowitz/Perle skunkworks to the stovepiping of unvetted reports — has demonstrated that the U.S. intelligence rank-and-file basically got it right before the war: They told the Bush administration that there really was no conclusive evidence supporting either the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the much-hunted link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

The problem wasn’t with the intelligence. The problem was with the Bush administration. It didn’t like the intelligence it got. (Maybe it didn’t believe the intelligence it got, since it was listening to “friends” like Ahmed Chalabi.) So it ordered up some new intelligence.

Let’s not allow the Bush administration’s rewriting of this important bit of history to stand. The fiasco of the missing WMDs was not primarily a failure of intelligence; it was a failure of presidential management and leadership. Such failures are all too common in an administration that stubbornly — even “catastrophically” — refuses to recalibrate its preconceptions when they get bruised by reality.

Service broken record

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Wesley Clark fires back at the Republican campaign to discredit Kerry’s war record, most recently highlighted by Dick Cheney’s speech at Westminster College (where Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech) attacking Kerry’s record in national security.

Meanwhile, Bush ads featuring a “disappearing act” with tanks and aircraft suggest that Kerry’s votes on some military spending bills mean that he wanted to leave the U.S. defenseless.

Clark writes: “After risking his life in Vietnam to save others, John Kerry earned the right to speak out against a war he believed was wrong. Make no mistake: it is that bravery these Republicans are now attacking. Although President Bush has not engaged personally in such accusations, he has done nothing to stop others from making them. I believe those who didn’t serve, or didn’t show up for service, should have the decency to respect those who did serve.”

Here’s the scene, then: A president who pulled family strings to get a berth in the Texas Air National Guard, and then couldn’t even show up for that cushy job, sends out a vice president who won multiple draft deferments and candidly admits he had “other priorities” more important than fighting under U.S. colors, to attack the “judgment” of a Democratic candidate who both fought for his country and had the guts to turn against the war when its folly became evident.

Observing all this, I see real judgment on one side — and outrageous chutzpah on the other.