The bullshit. The lying. The yowling incompetence.
Heh, so it turns out that Karl Rove was behind the leak about Valerie Plame's identity to the Washington press corps back in 2003 (at least to TIME's Matt Cooper if not to Robert Novak). And even though Bush swore up and down that he'd fire the White House leaker if ever it came to light who it was, Rove is still very much on the White House payroll.
And, huh, now it seems that the interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib weren't the work of a few wayward soldiers so much as they were the fruit of one Major General Miller:
Interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forced a stubborn detainee to wear women's underwear on his head, confronted him with snarling military working dogs and attached a leash to his chains, according to a newly released military investigation that shows the tactics were employed there months before military police used them on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The techniques, approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use in interrogating Mohamed Qahtani -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- were used at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking down the silent detainee.
...A central figure in the investigation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and later helped set up U.S. operations at Abu Ghraib, was accused of failing to properly supervise Qahtani's interrogation plan and was recommended for reprimand by investigators. Miller would have been the highest-ranking officer to face discipline for detainee abuses so far, but Gen. Bantz Craddock, head of the U.S. Southern Command, declined to follow the recommendation.
Miller traveled to Iraq in September 2003 to assist in Abu Ghraib's startup, and he later sent in "Tiger Teams" of Guantanamo Bay interrogators and analysts as advisers and trainers. Within weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.
Miller declined to respond to questions posed through a Defense Department liaison. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said it is not appropriate to link the interrogation of Qahtani -- an important al Qaeda operative captured shortly after the terrorist attacks -- and events at Abu Ghraib. Whitman said interrogation tactics in the Army's field manual are the same worldwide but MPs at Abu Ghraib were not authorized to apply them, regardless of how they learned about them. [emphasis mine]
...The abuses at Abu Ghraib included military police taking photos of themselves mimicking the tactics used at Guantanamo Bay. Several photographs taken in late 2003 at the prison outside Baghdad show detainees wearing women's underwear on their heads, detainees shackled to their cell doors or beds in awkward positions, and naked detainees standing before female soldiers. Perhaps the most famous image is of Pfc. Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a detainee's neck.
Qahtani, according to the investigative report, was once attached to a leash and made to walk around the room and "perform a series of dog tricks." The report also notes the use of "gender coercion," in which women straddle a detainee or get too close to them, violating prohibitions for devout Muslim men on contact with women. Interrogators also threatened to tell other detainees that an individual is gay, according to the report. Detainees at Abu Ghraib were posed in mock homosexual positions and photographed.
Pathetic. Yes, the military claims, probably correctly, that "the military achieved "solid intelligence gains," by interrogating Qahtani". But there's a difference between "the twentieth hijacker" and a bunch of schmoes, who might or not be Sunni geurillas, being held in an Iraqi prison during the US occupation of the country. And it's clearly not a difference the US military gave a shit about in practice. When you codify certain practices in your military handbooks; then you put a bunch of redneck kids from "the backwoods of West Virginia" (quoting the Human Rights Watch official in the article) in positions of responsibility under conditions of enormous stress, constant threat, and pathetic supervision like those at Abu Ghraib (and note that much of what was revealed today is foreshadowed in that Post piece from over a year ago); then you have them (under-)trained by the same people who oversaw coercive interrogation techniques of al Qaeda members (and think they got results using those techniques) you're going to wind up with an international embarrassment.
And when the Bush White House smells an international embarrassment, it does the only thing it knows how to do: it lies. Actually, it doesn't lie so much as it bullshits. Bullshitting is distinct from lying in that the bullshitter sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth, but does so randomly, depending on whether the lie or the truth is more likely to make the problem go away, at least for a little while. The tactic also has the advantage of allowing White House defenders to fish out the little bits of truth and hold them up as examples of Bushie integrity.
Anyway, in the midst of the spin and the bullshit, the White House lied about Karl Rove and Valerie Plame (either that Rove wasn't involved when they knew he had been, or that they cared enough to fire the leaker when his identity became known). And it lied about the conditions and protocols and "chain of command" breakdowns that led up to Abu Ghraib. Just as a refresher, here's a taste of what Rumsfeld said in his May 4, 2004 press conference on the subject:
The system works. The system works. There were some allegations of abuse in a detention facility in Iraq. It was reported in the chain of command. Immediately it was announced to the public. Immediately an investigation was initiated. Six separate investigations have been undertaken over a period of months since January.
Investigations that might eventually turn up something that would refute statements like this?:
There's no question but that it has been my conviction that all of our rules, all of our procedures, all of our training is against abuse of people that are detained. You know that. I know that. I've been over it in detail.
And the fact that it happens -- notwithstanding the fact that it's against everything that they're taught, against everything that we believe, it's also against anything that any individual on their own ought to believe is right. And so there's -- all I can say is what I've said.
In the meantime, there's the more generic oh-this-is-tragic-but-hardly-our-fault bullshit:
The United States of America is a wonderful country. And the overwhelming majority of the people in this country are wonderful people. And certainly the men and women who serve in uniform are doing a superb job for our country. And does it mean that our country's perfect? No. Does it mean that everyone in uniform is perfect? No. And the world has seen problems of this type before, and I regret to say I'm afraid that people do things that they ought not to do, and that are harmful, and that are disappointing and are, in many instances, disgraceful.
This sort of thing (Hugh Hewitt might call it "talking in code to the hard right base") prompted the Weekly Standard, among many others, to editorialize on the White House's behalf on May 17, 2004:
...Neither are we sympathetic to the arguments of defense lawyers for the accused, echoed by friendly reporters, who want to point the finger of blame anywhere except at their clients. The prison guards were badly trained, we hear; they thought they were doing what the interrogators/contractors/CIA wanted them to do; they were cogs in a corrupt military machine. We might say something like that if we were being paid to defend these lowlifes. And, yes, there do seem to have been lamentable weaknesses in training and command. But "sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light" is evidence of a lack of humanity, not a lack of training. And consider this lovely detail: The Washington Post reports that there is "a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago [which include] pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers." Did the CIA encourage them to do that, too?
Well, maybe not the CIA...
The bullshitting, especially the lying parts of it, is upsetting. But what's really upsetting is the incompetence that underlies and enables the bullshitting and the resultant lying. It's the alarmingly myopic idea that, with enough spin, bad things will just blow over, be forgotten. For instance, did the Bushies really think the Plame investigation wouldn't eventually force those background sources to be made public, implicating Karl Rove in the affair? By the same token, did they not realise that some of those military investigations Rumsfeld talked about might well overturn the unfortunate "lowlifes" argument the pro-Bush-Rumsfeld forces were depending on?
The Bushies didn't invent bullshit. They're not the first administration in US history to lie, even about war. But spin is supposed to work; it's supposed to have some kind of structure, some kind of method. Otherwise it's just immoral and embarrassing. Like the Bush Administration.
And, huh, now it seems that the interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib weren't the work of a few wayward soldiers so much as they were the fruit of one Major General Miller:
Interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forced a stubborn detainee to wear women's underwear on his head, confronted him with snarling military working dogs and attached a leash to his chains, according to a newly released military investigation that shows the tactics were employed there months before military police used them on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The techniques, approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use in interrogating Mohamed Qahtani -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- were used at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking down the silent detainee.
...A central figure in the investigation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and later helped set up U.S. operations at Abu Ghraib, was accused of failing to properly supervise Qahtani's interrogation plan and was recommended for reprimand by investigators. Miller would have been the highest-ranking officer to face discipline for detainee abuses so far, but Gen. Bantz Craddock, head of the U.S. Southern Command, declined to follow the recommendation.
Miller traveled to Iraq in September 2003 to assist in Abu Ghraib's startup, and he later sent in "Tiger Teams" of Guantanamo Bay interrogators and analysts as advisers and trainers. Within weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.
Miller declined to respond to questions posed through a Defense Department liaison. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said it is not appropriate to link the interrogation of Qahtani -- an important al Qaeda operative captured shortly after the terrorist attacks -- and events at Abu Ghraib. Whitman said interrogation tactics in the Army's field manual are the same worldwide but MPs at Abu Ghraib were not authorized to apply them, regardless of how they learned about them. [emphasis mine]
...The abuses at Abu Ghraib included military police taking photos of themselves mimicking the tactics used at Guantanamo Bay. Several photographs taken in late 2003 at the prison outside Baghdad show detainees wearing women's underwear on their heads, detainees shackled to their cell doors or beds in awkward positions, and naked detainees standing before female soldiers. Perhaps the most famous image is of Pfc. Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a detainee's neck.
Qahtani, according to the investigative report, was once attached to a leash and made to walk around the room and "perform a series of dog tricks." The report also notes the use of "gender coercion," in which women straddle a detainee or get too close to them, violating prohibitions for devout Muslim men on contact with women. Interrogators also threatened to tell other detainees that an individual is gay, according to the report. Detainees at Abu Ghraib were posed in mock homosexual positions and photographed.
Pathetic. Yes, the military claims, probably correctly, that "the military achieved "solid intelligence gains," by interrogating Qahtani". But there's a difference between "the twentieth hijacker" and a bunch of schmoes, who might or not be Sunni geurillas, being held in an Iraqi prison during the US occupation of the country. And it's clearly not a difference the US military gave a shit about in practice. When you codify certain practices in your military handbooks; then you put a bunch of redneck kids from "the backwoods of West Virginia" (quoting the Human Rights Watch official in the article) in positions of responsibility under conditions of enormous stress, constant threat, and pathetic supervision like those at Abu Ghraib (and note that much of what was revealed today is foreshadowed in that Post piece from over a year ago); then you have them (under-)trained by the same people who oversaw coercive interrogation techniques of al Qaeda members (and think they got results using those techniques) you're going to wind up with an international embarrassment.
And when the Bush White House smells an international embarrassment, it does the only thing it knows how to do: it lies. Actually, it doesn't lie so much as it bullshits. Bullshitting is distinct from lying in that the bullshitter sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth, but does so randomly, depending on whether the lie or the truth is more likely to make the problem go away, at least for a little while. The tactic also has the advantage of allowing White House defenders to fish out the little bits of truth and hold them up as examples of Bushie integrity.
Anyway, in the midst of the spin and the bullshit, the White House lied about Karl Rove and Valerie Plame (either that Rove wasn't involved when they knew he had been, or that they cared enough to fire the leaker when his identity became known). And it lied about the conditions and protocols and "chain of command" breakdowns that led up to Abu Ghraib. Just as a refresher, here's a taste of what Rumsfeld said in his May 4, 2004 press conference on the subject:
The system works. The system works. There were some allegations of abuse in a detention facility in Iraq. It was reported in the chain of command. Immediately it was announced to the public. Immediately an investigation was initiated. Six separate investigations have been undertaken over a period of months since January.
Investigations that might eventually turn up something that would refute statements like this?:
There's no question but that it has been my conviction that all of our rules, all of our procedures, all of our training is against abuse of people that are detained. You know that. I know that. I've been over it in detail.
And the fact that it happens -- notwithstanding the fact that it's against everything that they're taught, against everything that we believe, it's also against anything that any individual on their own ought to believe is right. And so there's -- all I can say is what I've said.
In the meantime, there's the more generic oh-this-is-tragic-but-hardly-our-fault bullshit:
The United States of America is a wonderful country. And the overwhelming majority of the people in this country are wonderful people. And certainly the men and women who serve in uniform are doing a superb job for our country. And does it mean that our country's perfect? No. Does it mean that everyone in uniform is perfect? No. And the world has seen problems of this type before, and I regret to say I'm afraid that people do things that they ought not to do, and that are harmful, and that are disappointing and are, in many instances, disgraceful.
This sort of thing (Hugh Hewitt might call it "talking in code to the hard right base") prompted the Weekly Standard, among many others, to editorialize on the White House's behalf on May 17, 2004:
...Neither are we sympathetic to the arguments of defense lawyers for the accused, echoed by friendly reporters, who want to point the finger of blame anywhere except at their clients. The prison guards were badly trained, we hear; they thought they were doing what the interrogators/contractors/CIA wanted them to do; they were cogs in a corrupt military machine. We might say something like that if we were being paid to defend these lowlifes. And, yes, there do seem to have been lamentable weaknesses in training and command. But "sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light" is evidence of a lack of humanity, not a lack of training. And consider this lovely detail: The Washington Post reports that there is "a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago [which include] pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers." Did the CIA encourage them to do that, too?
Well, maybe not the CIA...
The bullshitting, especially the lying parts of it, is upsetting. But what's really upsetting is the incompetence that underlies and enables the bullshitting and the resultant lying. It's the alarmingly myopic idea that, with enough spin, bad things will just blow over, be forgotten. For instance, did the Bushies really think the Plame investigation wouldn't eventually force those background sources to be made public, implicating Karl Rove in the affair? By the same token, did they not realise that some of those military investigations Rumsfeld talked about might well overturn the unfortunate "lowlifes" argument the pro-Bush-Rumsfeld forces were depending on?
The Bushies didn't invent bullshit. They're not the first administration in US history to lie, even about war. But spin is supposed to work; it's supposed to have some kind of structure, some kind of method. Otherwise it's just immoral and embarrassing. Like the Bush Administration.
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