By Nat Parry
June 29, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The liberal rehabilitation
of George W. Bush is now virtually complete, with his
successor Barack Obama declaring this week that the 43rd
president was committed to the rule of law, despite all
evidence to the contrary. In an
online fundraiser for presumptive Democratic nominee
Joe Biden Tuesday night, Obama stated that Bush “had a
basic regard for the rule of law and the importance of
our institutions of democracy.”
Obama, who ran for president in 2008 with promises to
restore habeas corpus and uphold the rule of law, went
on to claim that when Bush was president, “we cared
about human rights” and were committed to “core
principles around the rule of law and the universal
dignity of people.”
Obama’s comments surely came as a shock to anyone who
still has a functioning memory of the Bush years and
hasn’t succumbed entirely to the effects of Trump
Derangement Syndrome. Rather than being a champion of
democratic principles, when Bush left office, he left
behind a shameful legacy of upended human rights norms
including due process and the legal prohibition against
torture.
If 2008 Obama could speak today with 2020 Obama, he
might remind himself that Bush had started a “dumb war”
in Iraq in violation of the UN Charter, launched a
warrantless surveillance program of Americans and that
he had established a penal colony in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
As Obama himself said in
said in 2013, during the Bush years, “we compromised
our basic values – by using torture to interrogate our
enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran
counter to the rule of law.”
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At the heart of Bush’s approach to the “rule of
law” was the rejection of any independent court
evaluation of its detentions. Without judicial
review, the U.S. government didn’t need to present
any evidence to show that a person actually had ties
to al-Qaeda or was otherwise guilty of a crime. The
Bush position also held that once designated as
al-Qaeda members, individuals have no legal
protections against torture.
He dismissed provisions
of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and offered legal
rationales that justify torture in cases of “military
necessity.”
Bush’s approach to the “war on terror” was in fact a
steady descent into the “dark side,” as Vice President
Dick Cheney had called it. A subsequent
Senate investigation found that the torture program
instituted by the Bush administration following 9/11
employed gruesome techniques such as near drowning,
forcing detainees to stand on broken legs, threatening
to kill or rape detainees’ family members, forced
“rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration.” It also offered
disturbing details on a medieval “black site” prison in
Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit, where at least one
detainee froze to death.
The brutal interrogation sessions lasted in many
cases non-stop for days or weeks at a time, leading to
effects such as “hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and
attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation,” and produced
little to no useful information. CIA agents had
illegally detained 26 of the 119 individuals in CIA
custody, and the interrogation techniques used on
detainees went beyond
the methods that had been approved by the Bush Justice
Department or CIA’s headquarters (guidelines that were
likely overly permissive in the first place).
When the Senate torture report was released in late
2014, it was met with calls for accountability from
around the world. The United Nations, the European
Union, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as
well as numerous governments, all demanded that those
responsible for the illegal torture program face
justice. The U.S. was reminded that as a matter of
international law, it was legally obligated to prosecute
the perpetrators of the torture program.
Some of the strongest words came from the UN Special
Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism Ben
Emmerson,
who stated unequivocally that senior officials from
the Bush administration who sanctioned crimes, as well
as the CIA and U.S. government officials who carried
them out, must be brought to justice. “It is now time to
take action,” the UN rapporteur said.
Needless to say, no one was ever prosecuted by the
Obama administration’s Justice Department. And now,
Obama not only excuses these abuses, but he actually
claims that Bush was committed to “the rule of law and
the universal dignity of people.” A charitable
explanation for Obama’s comments is that he was trying
to draw a distinction between the Trump administration
and every other president, and to draw this distinction,
he made a clumsy attempt to draw an exaggerated
contrast.
But considering that six in 10 Americans now
have a favorable view of Bush, almost twice as much
as the 33% who gave him a favorable mark when he left
office in 2009, it should be appreciated how
impressionable Americans are and how damaging comments
such as Obama’s can be. Much of Bush’s ascent to
popularity has come from Democrats, 54% of whom now
approve of the Bush presidency. Democrats’ change of
heart appears to be primarily motivated by Bush’s
opposition to Trump, which apparently has absolved him
of his many failings while president.
This historic shift in attitudes was abetted by many
liberals who have helped refurbish Bush’s image,
including daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and
former First Lady Michelle Obama.
To hear Barack Obama now making the claim that Bush
was committed to the rule of law and human rights is
just the latest betrayal of a Democratic Party that has
systematically prevented a reckoning for the crimes of
the 43rd president, a party that is clearly uninterested
in truth or accountability, and is more than willing to
rewrite history to advance its political goals.
Only time will tell how America is affected in the
long term by this rewriting of history.
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