It
is a fact startling in its
cynical simplicity and it
requires cynical and simple
words to be properly expressed:
The presidency of George W. Bush
has now devolved into a criminal
conspiracy to cover the ass of
George W. Bush.
Part 2
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Olbermann: On waterboarding and torture
Olbermann: Bush may not observe the rules, but the country
abides by them
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
updated 6:42 p.m. PT, Mon., Nov. 5, 2007
It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires
cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The
presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal
conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.
All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare
stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the
sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him
not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive
privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all
the verbal flatulence of his apologists...
All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently
clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of
the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward
keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and
this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the
others, from potential prosecution for having approved or
ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name
of this country.
"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel
Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking
politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin
was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.
Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time
when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.
Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday,
with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares
in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism
"Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest,
and the most honest, way to evaluate them ... was to have them
enacted upon himself.
Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be
waterboarded.
Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous?
Perhaps when you've gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the
maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and
determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?
Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you've
spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the
sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And
then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody
who disagreed with you, whether they were your own generals, or
Max Cleland, or Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, or Daniel Levin?
Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington
right now.
Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general
nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George
Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at
risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.
And they waterboarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew
those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue
him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he
would not die — still, with all that reassurance, he could not
stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell
the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each
of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we
strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love,
he could not convince his being that he wasn't drowning.
Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture!
Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he
wrote it down.
Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the
words of this country's 43rd president: "The United States of
America ... does not torture."
Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.
Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal,
Mr. Bush.
Waterboarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and
a couple of other men none of us really care about except for
the one detail you'd forgotten — that there are rules. And even
if we just make up these rules, this country observes them
anyway, because we're Americans and we're better than that.
We're better than you.
And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether
or not waterboarding was torture had decided, and not in some
phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty
poseur attire of flight suit and helmet.
He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.
So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append
an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn't
black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of
torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a
physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had
ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines.
And then when your people realized that even that was too
dangerous, Daniel Levin was branded "too independent" and
"someone who could (not) be counted on."
In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn't count on to lie
for you.
So, Levin was fired.
Because if it ever got out what he'd concluded, and the lengths
to which he went to validate that conclusion, anybody who had
sanctioned waterboarding and who-knows-what-else on anybody, you
yourself, you would have been screwed.
And screwed you are.
It can't be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should
emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a
presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the
newest attorney general nominee.
Another patriot somewhere listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like
he'd never heard of waterboarding and refused to answer in words
… that which Daniel Levin answered on a waterboard somewhere in
Maryland or Virginia three years ago.
And this someone also heard George Bush say, "The United States
of America does not torture," and realized either he was lying
or this wasn't the United States of America anymore, and either
way, he needed to do something about it.
Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a
brave way nonetheless.
We have U.S. senators who need to do something about it, too.
Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what
it is and said "enough."
Sen. Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle
piece in the New York political patronage system, and he has
failed.
What Sen. Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in
rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.
It is obvious that both those senators should look to the
meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support
for Mukasey's confirmation.
And they should look into their own committee's history and
recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even
from Richard Nixon a guarantee of a special prosecutor
(ultimately a special prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange
for their approval of his new attorney general, Elliott
Richardson.
If they could get that out of Nixon, before you confirm the
president's latest human echo on Tuesday, you had better be able
to get a "yes" or a "no" out of Michael Mukasey.
Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a
special prosecutor is appointed, or 50 of them, but I'm not
holding my breath. The "yes" or the "no" on waterboarding will
have to suffice.
Because, remember, if you can't get it, or you won't with the
time between tonight and the next presidential election likely
to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this
country, and all of us, to the waterboards, symbolic and
otherwise, of George W. Bush.
Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't who approved the
waterboarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two
others.
It is: Why were they waterboarded?
Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed
that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead,
torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to
tell the truth.
Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if
the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just
something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.
If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of
terrorist threats to keep a country scared.
If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast
about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the
threat he didn't interrupt.
If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good
ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the
Constitution,
Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an
actual terrorist?
He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most
horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto
the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.
Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because
you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you
tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really
authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you're going to need
all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn't just
mean impeachment, would it?
That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.
Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the
hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact
proportions, in their exact progressions.
Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently
patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to
vanish, and him with it.
Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an
old car trying to start on a freezing morning to undo eight
centuries of the forward march of law and government.
Thus Dick Cheney has to ridiculously assert that confirming we
do or do not use any particular interrogation technique would
somehow help the terrorists.
Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him
the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not
answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a
question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of
waterboarding as torture.
Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare
presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed.
From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the
lives and safety of the American people ... into the most
efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain
in this country's history ... and, then, to the giddying
prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in
Japan in the 1930s and remake a nation into a fascist state so
efficient and so self-sustaining that the fascism would be
nearly invisible.
But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected
crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you
might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried
to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still
people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of
America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of
schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.
And ultimately these men, these patriots, will defeat you and
they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to
its rightful owners, the people.
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