Show and TellCan we believe Bush this time?
By John DickersonPosted Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2006, at 7:42 PM ETListen to John Dickerson's weekly Political Gabfest program here, or sign up for Slate's free daily podcast on iTunes.
After the 9/11 attacks George Bush kept a facebook in his desk drawer. It contained the pictures, where possible, of the key al-Qaida leaders. CIA Director George Tenet gave it to him not long after the attack. When one terrorist would get killed or captured, the president would cross him off. Wednesday, with the five-year anniversary of the attack approaching, the president hauled out the facebook again. In announcing that he was bringing 14 of the world's most dangerous terrorists out of their secret prisons, he reminded the world how many bad guys we've caught.
The Supreme Court may have forced George Bush to change his policies on terrorist detainees, as his aides insist, but the political calendar surely dictated when and how he would announce it. It's not just the post-Labor Day timing that suggests the political intent. The speech occurred in the middle of a concerted administration-wide effort to reframe the national debate about the Iraq war as a larger debate about the global war on terror. The public gives the president and Republicans bad marks on the former but still trusts them when it comes to protecting them from the latter.
The president tries to make the case that he and the Republicans are the only ones who understand the nature of the terrorist threat and how to combat it. In today's speech, he produced the best evidence to date to back up that assertion. While the Democrats complain about inattention and drift, he can say: Here's what we've been up to. And he's given Congress an assignment as well—to codify his proposal for handling detainees—in their few remaining days before members return home to campaign.
It's one thing to say you're on the hunt for terrorists. It's more powerful to offer graphic details. The president went on at some length giving descriptions of the work necessary to capture these men. He offered lots of hard-to-pronounce names that he might normally steer away form because in this context, granularity trumps his normal love of generalizations. He outlined several al-Qaida plots foiled as a result of the secret prisons and countless others quashed in their infancy. At the same time, the White House provided a catalog of the crimes committed by the terrorists in custody.
Bush further explained the lengths to which CIA interrogators go to follow the law, or at least the administration's reading of it. (His assurance that the CIA and Justice Department had vetted the detainee program was a stretch given their penchant for rubber-stamping his requests.) This was an effort to head off protests that his administration used torture in its secret prisons. But it was also part of the larger effort to show how careful, thoughtful, and methodical his administration can be. With chaos in Iraq and a bookshelf groaning with texts about incompetence in the planning and execution of that war, the president needed a chance to offer a new image of aptitude, thoroughness and, most of all, results.
Of course we have to take the president's word for it that all of this happened as he describes it. In the end, whether the president gets political credit for changing his detainee policy will depend largely on whether voters still trust him. The failure to find WMD or connections between Saddam and al-Qaida undermined the president's trustworthiness. As the Iraq war has gotten worse, and the administration's spin has gotten heavier, Bush's credibility has suffered more damage. Katrina compounded this problem. Now Bush is offering lots of extraordinary detail and tales of competency no one can really challenge. Will the public discount this as more spin and exaggeration? Or will it buy his story about how hard his administration has been working to protect the country behind the scenes? I thought the details Bush offered today sounded fairly persuasive. But for him to ask us to simply trust him about anything at this point is a hard sell.
John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter. Remarks from the Fray:
Bush's disclosure of real information helped his case: we have indeed caught some bad guys and doing so has led to other arrests. Here's what's unsaid: how many others have we had in detention who are absolutely, utterly useless to us as sources of information? Several years ago a career Army guy, a military intelligence specialist, went to Guantanamo. He said then that the people still being detained had little of value to offer and that the people who were working these sources were not trained well enough to either recognize that fact or to get what might have been the few nuggets of good information existed. He served as the source for a book, and then quietly retired. By moving 14 unquestioned real sources down to Guantanamo, Bush is just covering his ass on all the horrific violations going on there. Courts and Democrats want to change the system? Hell no! We have valuable informants there.
In the meantime, the people who remain grow more bitter and despondent. Our status as an "internment nation" grows and Abu Gharib starts to look like standard practice instead of the kind of thing reserved for the worst of the worst.
In other words, it may help the GOP internally, but the continued use of Guantanamo to hold targets of questionable value cements our status as bully, and therefore target, to the rest of the world.
--rundeep
(To reply, click here.)
The thing that guys like Rumsfeld and President Bush say they understand – and deplore that so many of the rest of us do not – is that September 11 "changed everything" for this country. They urge a "return to normality" but they get frustrated when we do not understand that "normality" – like a lot of other concepts – does not mean the same thing that it once did.
Therefore, as a public service, I now proudly present the Donald Rumsfeld Complete and Unabridged Pre-September 11 / Post-September 11 Patriotic Dictionary. [...]
--The_Bell
(To read more, click here.)
President Bush's speech yesterday was a minor masterpiece of opportunism. Mounting a strong defense of Guantanamo, CIA prisons overseas, rendition of suspects to foreign countries, and the use of torture to interrogate suspects, President Bush argued that all of those illegal procedures had been important in heading off further terrorist attacks after 9-11. The President capped off the performance by demanding that Congress pass legislation to legitimate military tribunals that used evidence gained through torture and deprived suspects of the right to know much of the evidence being used against them.
What made the speech masterful was that Bush and his team knows that most Americans support the extra-legal apparatus for dealing with terror suspects. As a result, Bush was able to remind voters of their bedrock support for prior Administration initiatives in the war on terror and then demand that the Democrats in Congress either affirm Bush's defiance of the Constitution, American law, and international law as valid or engage in their own defiance of American public opinion. Either way, the Democrats will end up looking weak--weak and ineffective in their opposition to the President or weak in their determination to fight terrorism.
It's all very clever. It's a bold stroke at a time when the Bush administration has looked increasingly inept in its efforts to cope with the deteriorating situation in Iraq. [...] Yesterday's speech by President Bush was more of the same. Although effective in the short term, it has to be seen as yet another example of the Bush administration's disastrous prioritizing of short-term political maneuvering over effective policy.
--RedStateImpressions
(To reply, click here.)
I do believe the president on one point. When he says we're fighting them over there, meaning Iraq, so we don't have to fight them at home, he is correct. He made it that way, and he's making it more and more that way with the passage of time.
Iraq is a golden opportunity for terrorists. There are weapons and explosives all over the place. Iraq's government and society are unstable, with all sorts of thuggery and religious strife to provide cover for anyone wanting to kill a few people. It's a target-rich environment, with US military personnel, Iraqi police and soldiers, and ordinary civilians. [...]
Meanwhile, all this keeps us extremely busy. Our military forces are stretched thin, while our business and social fabric are disrupted by the strain on National Guard personnel and their families. We're spending tens of millions of dollars a day to stay the course in Iraq, while our domestic security programs falter from lack of attention and chronic underfunding.
We're doing this because we regard a 9/11 style attack on our own soil as unthinkable. We don't mind the long, slow attrition of Iraq because it's drawn out, a few deaths at a time. We regard it as a fair price to pay for avoiding another disastrous attack here at home. [...]
--Arlington2
(To reply, click here.)
(9/16)
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Remarks from the Fray:
Bush's disclosure of real information helped his case: we have indeed caught some bad guys and doing so has led to other arrests. Here's what's unsaid: how many others have we had in detention who are absolutely, utterly useless to us as sources of information? Several years ago a career Army guy, a military intelligence specialist, went to Guantanamo. He said then that the people still being detained had little of value to offer and that the people who were working these sources were not trained well enough to either recognize that fact or to get what might have been the few nuggets of good information existed. He served as the source for a book, and then quietly retired. By moving 14 unquestioned real sources down to Guantanamo, Bush is just covering his ass on all the horrific violations going on there. Courts and Democrats want to change the system? Hell no! We have valuable informants there.
In the meantime, the people who remain grow more bitter and despondent. Our status as an "internment nation" grows and Abu Gharib starts to look like standard practice instead of the kind of thing reserved for the worst of the worst.
In other words, it may help the GOP internally, but the continued use of Guantanamo to hold targets of questionable value cements our status as bully, and therefore target, to the rest of the world.
--rundeep
(To reply, click here.)
The thing that guys like Rumsfeld and President Bush say they understand – and deplore that so many of the rest of us do not – is that September 11 "changed everything" for this country. They urge a "return to normality" but they get frustrated when we do not understand that "normality" – like a lot of other concepts – does not mean the same thing that it once did.
Therefore, as a public service, I now proudly present the Donald Rumsfeld Complete and Unabridged Pre-September 11 / Post-September 11 Patriotic Dictionary. [...]
--The_Bell
(To read more, click here.)
President Bush's speech yesterday was a minor masterpiece of opportunism. Mounting a strong defense of Guantanamo, CIA prisons overseas, rendition of suspects to foreign countries, and the use of torture to interrogate suspects, President Bush argued that all of those illegal procedures had been important in heading off further terrorist attacks after 9-11. The President capped off the performance by demanding that Congress pass legislation to legitimate military tribunals that used evidence gained through torture and deprived suspects of the right to know much of the evidence being used against them.
What made the speech masterful was that Bush and his team knows that most Americans support the extra-legal apparatus for dealing with terror suspects. As a result, Bush was able to remind voters of their bedrock support for prior Administration initiatives in the war on terror and then demand that the Democrats in Congress either affirm Bush's defiance of the Constitution, American law, and international law as valid or engage in their own defiance of American public opinion. Either way, the Democrats will end up looking weak--weak and ineffective in their opposition to the President or weak in their determination to fight terrorism.
It's all very clever. It's a bold stroke at a time when the Bush administration has looked increasingly inept in its efforts to cope with the deteriorating situation in Iraq. [...] Yesterday's speech by President Bush was more of the same. Although effective in the short term, it has to be seen as yet another example of the Bush administration's disastrous prioritizing of short-term political maneuvering over effective policy.
--RedStateImpressions
(To reply, click here.)
I do believe the president on one point. When he says we're fighting them over there, meaning Iraq, so we don't have to fight them at home, he is correct. He made it that way, and he's making it more and more that way with the passage of time.
Iraq is a golden opportunity for terrorists. There are weapons and explosives all over the place. Iraq's government and society are unstable, with all sorts of thuggery and religious strife to provide cover for anyone wanting to kill a few people. It's a target-rich environment, with US military personnel, Iraqi police and soldiers, and ordinary civilians. [...]
Meanwhile, all this keeps us extremely busy. Our military forces are stretched thin, while our business and social fabric are disrupted by the strain on National Guard personnel and their families. We're spending tens of millions of dollars a day to stay the course in Iraq, while our domestic security programs falter from lack of attention and chronic underfunding.
We're doing this because we regard a 9/11 style attack on our own soil as unthinkable. We don't mind the long, slow attrition of Iraq because it's drawn out, a few deaths at a time. We regard it as a fair price to pay for avoiding another disastrous attack here at home. [...]
--Arlington2
(To reply, click here.)
(9/16)