Perhaps the most depressing thing about the CIA leak investigation consuming official Washington is that — regardless of whether crimes have been committed — so many of the principal players on all sides have been guilty of petty, ignoble and (in some cases) less-than-honest conduct.
In this time of terrorism, the most important marks to be made by John Roberts and President Bush’s next Supreme Court nominee on our law and society may not involve abortion, gay rights, women’s rights, privacy, affirmative action, religion, or crime. Instead, they may involve claims by Bush, and perhaps his successors, of extraordinary powers as commander-in-chief — at home as well as abroad — to fight the war against terrorism.
"When the Bush administration says it wants to make permanent the freedom-stealing provisions of the PATRIOT Act, they’re telling those of us who believe in privacy, due process, and the right to dissent that it’s time to surrender our freedom."
So screams the first sentence of a recent fundraising letter from the American Civil Liberties Union. This and countless other overheated attacks — from conservative libertarians and gun-rights activists as well as liberal groups — have scared some 375 local governments and five states into passing anti-PATRIOT Act measures, while sending earnest librarians into a panic about Big Brother snooping into library borrowers’ reading habits.
But consider what the ACLU says when it is seeking to be taken seriously by people who know something about the issues: "Most of the voluminous PATRIOT Act is actually unobjectionable from a civil-liberties point of view, and … the law makes important changes that give law enforcement agents the tools they need to protect against terrorist attacks."
That’s right: That was the ACLU talking, in an April 5 press release. To be sure, the release goes on to stress that "a few provisions … unnecessarily trample civil liberties, and must be revised." Well, perhaps. And with 16 provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act scheduled to sunset on December 31, it is surely time to give the entire 342-page, 156-section law the careful scrutiny that it has not received from most of the legislators who passed it in October 2001.
I was guardedly in favor of invading Iraq, because I believed our president’s confident claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his collaboration with Al Qaeda.
Amid the uproar over the possible responsibility of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in the abuse of many "enemy combatants," a substantial consensus on the need for congressional rules to govern the detention of such people is quietly emerging among experts, including moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, and even some strong libertarians.
"Kerry and his advisers have behaved disgracefully" in some recent public comments, writes William Kristol in the current issue of The Weekly Standard.
On June 22, top Bush appointees beat an undignified retreat from the administration’s previous claims — in classified memos that have been leaked recently — of virtually unlimited presidential power to authorize use of torture in wartime interrogations. Six days later, the Supreme Court rejected by 6-3 President Bush’s claim of total power to detain non-Americans at Guantanamo Bay without answering to any court. And eight justices rejected Bush’s denial of due process to Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen whom he has held virtually incommunicado in Navy brigs for more than two years, including 21 months without seeing a lawyer.
"The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons," President Bush vowed in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union address. Two and a half years later, one member of the "axis of evil" that Bush denounced in the same speech, North Korea, may have as many as eight nuclear bombs and be on its way to making about a dozen a year, with every intention of selling them to terrorists and other willing bidders.
With his occupation of Iraq teetering on the brink of strategic catastrophe and his reasons for invading discredited, President Bush has offered us no sign that he has learned from his mistakes, no course correction, and all too much robotic repetition of rhetorical platitudes.
My original headline posed a different question: "Presuming Guilt: Did Bush Set the Stage for Abu Ghraib?" Then came the videotaped beheading of 26-year-old American civilian Nicholas Berg. That ghastly demonstration of our enemies’ thirst for American blood may, a hard-line friend suggests, lead many Americans to "see Abu Ghraib as an ugly fraternity hazing." Be that as it may, the whole horrible tableau of news from Iraq wrenched my attention to the question posed by my revised headline.
