And
that's understated. What Bush
Now Here's an Understatement:“Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way
that minimizes discrepancy with policy goals.”
Iraq Study Group
We're weathering a Class Five Brouhaha regarding "who knew what and when" about Bush era torture policy. Bush administration Enhanced Bullsh
*t Techniques (EBT) are gradually unraveling. It'll take time. For eight years we'd become accustomed to "all bullsh
*t all the time." It's surprisingly hard work to reacquaint ourselves with "truth" even as a concept, much less an ethic that ought to drive government relations with its citizens.& Comp. did to truth regarding most everything is still understated, and it needs to be
overstated. As a country, we're in repair truthiness-wise.
In 2004, Ron Suskind famously reported about Bush-time attacks against the very concept of "truth," or "fact." Suskind captured a seminal moment, a time when an unnamed White House aide told the truth, accidentally to be sure, while simultaneously revealing the opening of the age of truth's nonexistence and immateriality:
The aide said that guys like me [writer Ron Suskind] were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' [Emphasis added]
Truth and reality, he's saying, proceed from action, not from
"studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will." Not from, for example, reference to history of the Middle East and its many sad, final resting places for soldiers and empires. No, Bush
acted first and created the monstrous reality that we now try to "just study" in order to subdue it and disengage. Did Bush era advisers like Wolfowitz, Perle, and other neoconservatives learn from history that the region is a poor fit for western concepts of "democracy," or that, in fact, westerners
themselves disagree mightily about its meaning? No. These neoconservative thinkers valued neither fact, nor history, nor reality. They acted at will and willed to action. Everything normally associated with foreign policy was subordinated to an overarching urge to action, to the use of power to settle arguments and realize dreams. All else was immaterial, irrelevant.
Jay Rosen wrote brilliantly about this in
Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop:
The alternative to facts on the ground is to act, regardless of the facts on the ground. When you act you make new facts. You clear new ground. And when you roll over or roll back the people who have a duty to report the situation as it is—people in the press, the military, the bureaucracy, your own cabinet, or right down the hall—then right there you have demonstrated your might. . .
Believe Me Now, Bury Me Later. In place of empiricism or informed thought, they valued dreams and beliefs and acted upon those dreams and beliefs. As that White House aide said so well, "
you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' Because "study" is what
we do;
act is what
they do; act it what
empires do. Their dreams of Middle East dominance therefore
required, philosophically, that they feed the "reality-based community" the mass of information that it desired, so-called "facts." Since the "truth" they respected resided only within the unexamined force of their dreams and beliefs, neoconservative philosophy permitted them, in a sense, to honestly and ethically distort all that they considered of no value,
i.e. history, fact, truth. To them, those mundane things, if relevant at all,
follow action. These are not the bailiwick of powerful men and empires. They are the secondary - essentially meaningless - hobbies of the reality-based community. Lying became a driving ethic, and in their minds, an ethical activity and a legitimate way to order the world.
I'm certainly not going to argue that "fact" or "reality" are matters of agreement in any "reality-based" community. All of us interpret history differently, yet we - most of us -
value history, or, more philosophically, we
value the
search for truth
before we act, even though we agree about the overarching difficulty of the process. It's
work. Also, we attach humanistic or religious ethical considerations to those deliberations,
prior to action, even though we thereby invite argument and resistance. Contrarily, as we know, if one pushed back in the Bush administration, one was pushed out . . .
So, What's All That Got To Do With The Price Of A Waterboard? Give me a minute, I'll try to get there. . . Basically, the storm over whether Speaker Pelosi, or Senator Shelby, or Senator Rockefeller, or anyone else in Congress "knew or should have known" about torture, including waterboarding, threatens to move the inquiry into that murky area that defined "truth" in the Bush era. In a sense, we're still recovering from their consistent lying and propaganda, so we might, out of habit, bite this bait on the GOP hook.
We simply cannot afford to allow them to cause us to believe that what the Democrats knew is a more important question than what the Bush administration did. Nor can we let them change the essential questions to hide the fact that the GOP was the majority party during six of the eight years of Bush's stupendancy.
** Torture, as conceived, condoned, and practiced is the question here. When Nancy Pelosi knew, or what Senator Shelby knew, pales in significance. It's of interest, to be sure, but a matter of national obsession it is not. We have to keep our eye on the ball.
Peeking Over the Hedge. So, here we have a portion of the cover letter accompanying CIA Director Leon Paneta's torture briefing list:
This letter presents the most thorough information we have on dates, locations, and names of all Members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA on enhanced interrogation techniques. This information, however, is drawn from the past files of the CIA and represents MFRs [Memorandum For the Records] completed at the time and notes that summarized the best recollections of those individuals. In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened. We can make the MFRs available at CIA for staff review. [Colors added]
That's not exactly the most ringing of endorsements of the veracity of
the CIA or the list. I've hedged my bets before, and
that wording is
primo hedging. In the cover letter. Good start.
Now, admittedly, one of my nightmares is that there is truth in the GOP accusations flying around that my mostly beloved Democrats
were informed
in detail about waterboarding and other torture techniques. It's only a nightmare, though, since the truthfulness of any Bush era CIA documentation is doubtful, at best, particularly their contemporaneous briefing notes that will likely be released soon. Let's remember the context: the wild and woolly run-up to the Iraq invasion. Remember the political climate then. Recall the pressure exerted on the CIA and others by the Cheney Forward Headquarters, the Bush White House, and Field Marshal Rumsfeld. Remember that the first casualty of the Bush administration was truth.
So, the veracity of the briefers' notes would be particularly doubtful, especially during the periods they were under enormous executive branch pressure to keep certain nastiness hidden, or were pushed to misinform. In that context, of course their notes on briefings would claim that Congressional leaders were informed. I don't believe, especially, that possibly strong adversaries like Pelosi were informed fully. How they slipped up and actually informed Rep. Jane Harman to the point that in February 2003 she wrote
a letter of objection to the CIA's General Counsel was probably viewed as a major
faux pas.
Graham's No Cracker. Moreover, already, just a week after the release of the briefing list, Senator Bob Graham (D-FL)
has proved in his case that the CIA list itself was highly inaccurate, to put it kindly. In other words, the simplest of documents,
a list of meetings, for God's sake, is grossly inaccurate. So, we're to believe, according to Republicans like Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), that the briefers' notes, will be accurate? How about their notes for the three of four meetings they calim with Senator Graham when he has proved he was
not present?
Graham also recalls the war drums of the time, and the extreme White House pressure on the intelligence agencies:
This was the same time within the same week [September 26, 2002] , in fact, that the CIA was submitting its National Intelligence Estimate on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which proves so erroneous that we went to war, have had thousands of persons killed and injured as a result of misinformation.
Misinformation Was the Philosophy, the Strategy, and the Tactic of the Day. Republicans now expect us to believe the CIA's notes and lists produced during that time. A time when heads were rolling under Cheney's axe whenever a contrary CIA analyst disagreed with the Bush gang's propaganda. Remember the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Graham referred to above? We learned long ago that it was systematically ravaged by the administration, especially Cheney's office, to remove
any contrary opinions or alternative analyzes by pesky -
i.e. skeptical or truthful, in the old-fashioned sense - intelligence analysts. NIE's are
supposed to include contrary analyzes and opinions of intel experts.
In any event, Senator Graham remembers the substance of that one briefing that actually
did occur:
Nothing very remarkable. They were discussing the fact that they had detainees and that they were interrogating detainees. But nothing such as that they were using these extreme torture techniques that would have made it a surprising briefing.
Someone's fibbing, obviously. My guess? The C.I.A. And, as I wrote at the outset, this was consistent with the Bush administration's trashing of the concept and practice of truth. It was replaced by a philosophy that raised "the ends justify the means" from a prohibition to a sacrament; a sacrament in service of their beliefs and dreams; the dreams that now bring nightmares to those who have suffered because of them.
For our future as a nation, for our grandchildrens' history books, the Democratic majority must
definitively put aside this GOP-engineered distraction and proceed full speed ahead with investigations.They must also urge Attorney General Holder to appoint a special prosecutor. We must pursue the answers to the
real questions about Bush era torture policies that, pardon the expression, continue to torture our country.
*******************************
* = "i"
** Stupendancy,
stoo-PEN-dahn-see, a word coined here,
stupendancy refers to an individual's achievement of his or her highest sustained period of utter and complete willful stupidity, as in "George W. Bush reached his stupendancy during the years January 2o, 2001, Noon (RST) - January 20, 2009, Noon (EST)."
Stupendarchy,
stoo-PEN-darkee, a word coined here and related to stupendancy,
stupendarchy describes a government that is dominated by the willfully stupid, as in "the stupendarchy of the Congressional GOP from 2001 to 2007 and the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009) was mind numbing even to Rhesus monkeys."
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