Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush
By FRANK RICH
NY Times Op-Ed: May 16, 2009
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in "Godfather III," just when we thought we were
out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No
matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous
administration, he can't. Until there is true transparency and true
accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will
keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration's high
ambitions.
That's why the president's flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse
photos - whatever his motivation - is a fool's errand. The pictures will
eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven't started
already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their
release remains in force. And here's a bet: These images will not prove the
most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This
Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details
to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld's corrupt and incompetent
Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security.
The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert
Draper, author of "Dead Certain," the 2007 Bush biography that had the
blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It
draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld's monomaniacal determination to protect his
Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America's most willing allies
in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But
Draper's biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld
approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a
highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the
president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense
secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal
color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11
of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock
and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky
Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of
Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2,
Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central
Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had
sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for
April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: "Have I not commanded you? Be strong
and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD
your God will be with you wherever you go." (Including, as it happened, into
a quagmire.)
What's up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for
ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle
to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But
the secretary's actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with
national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like
messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the
Muslim world's apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As
one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout "would be as bad as Abu
Ghraib."
The GQ article isn't the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense
Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama
Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the
Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year - just six days before Bush left
office. This strange incident - reported in The Times but largely ignored by
Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner - deserves far
more attention and follow-up.
What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon's
internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response
to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter
for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a
clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to
spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while
posing as objective "military analysts." Many of these propagandists worked
for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in
Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special
briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told
of these conflicts of interest when these "analysts" appeared on the evening
news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call "the real
situation on the ground in Iraq."
When Barstow's story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an
inquiry. The Pentagon's inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14
report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when
Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld's current spokesman
cited the inspector general's "exoneration" to attack the Times articles as
fiction.
But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May
5 that the inspector general's report, not The Times's reporting, was
fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and
included little actual investigation of Barstow's charges. The inspector
general's office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that
Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed
analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon
officially rescinded it - an almost unprecedented step - and even removed it
from its Web site.
Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush
Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles - surely not
because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is
actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon
inspector general's office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it
whitewash?
In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how
Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and
ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John
Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn't buy
the heavily redacted report's claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called "the most significant defense
procurement mismanagement in contemporary history." The Pentagon inspector
general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive
at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.
But the new administration doesn't want to revisit this history any more
than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general's report on
the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter
closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41
speechwriter Peggy Noonan. "Sometimes I think just keep walking," she said
on ABC's "This Week" as the torture memos surfaced. "Some of life has to be
mysterious." Imagine if she'd been at Nuremberg!
The administration can't "just keep walking" because it is losing control of
the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the
A.C.L.U. and the president's "left-wing base" want accountability, but
that's
not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation
in last month's Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees - that
torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into "confirming" a bogus Al
Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war - is finally attracting
attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan
and voluble the call for full transparency has become.
And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture
"worked," and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture,
have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo
this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the
wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases,
including appeals by the "bad apples" made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will
yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present
officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.
It will soon be every man for himself. "Did President Bush know everything
you knew?" Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on "Face the Nation" last Sunday. The
former vice president's uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified
answer - "I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew..." -
suggests that the Bush White House's once-united front is starting to crack
under pressure.
I'm not a fan of Washington's blue-ribbon commissions, where political
compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate
how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled "Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S.," 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and
Cheney's watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the
dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law
enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
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