[Okay, it's nothing new to us, and it's years late, but geez -- for the country's leading paper, which usually reads like tepid bathwater, this reads remarkably like a bill of indictment.]
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12sun1.html
The New York Times
February 12, 2006
Lead Editorial
The Trust Gap
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.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company