[CitizensTruth] The Real-Life 24 of Summer 2008

[Walterb306 at cs.com]

All,

Looks like some analysts are digging deeper into the realities of the 9/11 
cover-up.

Still focusing on the premise of "incompetence" leading to the "failure" to 
prevent the attack - though clues right under their noses.

Highlights mine.

Beverley

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13rich.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&
oref=slogin

Op-Ed Columnist 
The Real-Life ‘24’ of Summer 2008 

By FRANK RICH Published: July 13, 2008 


WE know what a criminal White House looks like from "The Final Days," Bob 
Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic account of Richard Nixon’s unraveling. The 
cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was 
finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their 
reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.


"The Final Days" was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in 
disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House 
memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most 
chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a 
relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her book "The Dark 
Side" connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier 
colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray 
a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as 
ferociously as it did the Constitution.

Some of "The Dark Side" seems right out of "The Final Days," minus Nixon’s 
operatic boozing and weeping. We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two 
conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become "so paranoid" that 
"they actually thought they might be in physical danger." The fear of being 
wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.

The men were John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an 
assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White 
House’s don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David 
Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert 
law of the land. Mr. Comey and Mr. Goldsmith failed to stop the "torture 
memos" and are long gone from the White House. But Vice President Cheney and Mr. 
Addington remain enabled by a president, attorney general (Michael Mukasey) and 
C.I.A. director (Michael Hayden) who won’t shut the door firmly on torture 
even now.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. "The Dark Side" is scarier than 
"The Final Days" because these final days aren’t over yet and because the 
stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s 
narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of 
the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and 
the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are 
theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s 
"24," all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

So what if they cut corners, the administration’s last defenders argue. While 
prissy lawyers insist on habeas corpus and court-issued wiretap warrants, the 
rest of us are being kept safe by the Cheney posse.

But are we safe? As Al Qaeda and the Taliban surge this summer, that single 
question is even more urgent than the moral and legal issues attending torture.

On those larger issues, the evidence is in, merely awaiting adjudication. Mr. 
Bush’s 2005 proclamation that "we do not torture" was long ago revealed as a 
lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse 
for the Army, concluded that "there is no longer any doubt" that "war crimes 
were committed." Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross 
investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture 
and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their 
fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel 
may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore. 

No wonder the former Rumsfeld capo, Douglas Feith, is trying to discredit a 
damaging interview he gave to the British lawyer Philippe Sands for another 
recent and essential book on what happened, "Torture Team." After Mr. Sands 
previewed his findings in the May issue of Vanity Fair, Mr. Feith protested he had 
been misquoted — apparently forgetting that Mr. Sands had taped the interview. 
Mr. Feith and Mr. Sands are scheduled to square off in a House hearing this 
Tuesday.

So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in 
foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former 
chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto 
Gonzales, among others, to "never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi 
Arabia and Israel." But while we wait for the wheels of justice to grind 
slowly, there are immediate fears to tend. Ms. Mayer’s book helps cement the case 
that America’s use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our 
national security, right to the present day. 

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side 
was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat 
in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit 
until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was "all preventable." By March 2000, 
according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, "50 or 60 individuals" in the 
agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. 
But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. 
director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda 
threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, "I don’t want to hear 
about that anymore!" 

After 9/11, our government emphasized "interrogation over due process," Ms. 
Mayer writes, "to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized." But in 
reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just because Abu 
Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by jihadists. No less 
destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured 
detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, 
allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose 
chases. The coerced "confession" to the murder of the Wall Street Journal 
reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may 
have been invented to protect the real murderer. 

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. 
Exhibit A, revisited in "The Dark Side," is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused 
Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His 
fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent 
links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful 
Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subs
equent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials 
told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: "They were 
killing me. I had to tell them something."

That "something" was crucial in sending us into the quagmire that, five years 
later, has empowered Iran and compromised our ability to counter the very 
terrorists that torture was supposed to thwart. As The Times reported two weeks 
ago, Iraq has monopolized our military and intelligence resources to the point 
where we don’t have enough predator drones or expert C.I.A. field agents to 
survey the tribal areas where terrorists are amassing in Pakistan. Meanwhile, 
the threat to America from Al Qaeda is "comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 
2001," said Seth Jones, a RAND Corporation terrorism expert and Pentagon 
consultant. The difference between now and then is simply that the base of 
operations has moved, "roughly the difference from New York to Philadelphia."

Yet once again terrorism has fallen off America’s map, landing at or near the 
bottom of voters’ concerns in recent polls. There were major attacks in rapid 
succession last week in Pakistan, Afghanistan (the deadliest in Kabul since 
we "defeated" the Taliban in 2001) and at the American consulate in Turkey . 
Who listened to this ticking time bomb? It’s reminiscent of July 2001, when few 
noticed that the Algerian convicted of trying to bomb Los Angeles 
International Airport on the eve of the millennium testified that he had been trained in 
bin Laden’s Afghanistan camps as part of a larger plot against America. 
In last Sunday’s Washington Post, the national security expert Daniel 
Benjamin sounded an alarm about the "chronic" indecisiveness and poor execution of 
Bush national security policy as well as the continuing inadequacies of the 
Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Benjamin must feel a sinking sense of déjà 
vu. Exactly seven years ago in the same newspaper, just two months before 9/11, 
he co-wrote an article headlined "Defusing a Time Bomb" imploring the Bush 
administration in vain to pay attention to Afghanistan because that country’s 
terrorists "continue to pose the most dangerous threat to American lives." 

And so we’re back where we started in the summer of 2001, with even shark 
attacks and Chandra Levy’s murder (courtesy of a new Washington Post 
investigation) returning to the news . We are once again distracted and unprepared while 
the Taliban and bin Laden’s minions multiply in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This, 
no less than the defiling of the Constitution, is the legacy of an 
administration that not merely rationalized the immorality of torture but shackled our 
national security to the absurdity that torture could easily fix the terrorist 
threat. 

That’s why the Bush White House’s corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. 
We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was 
worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the 
punishment could rain down on us all.

   
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