Rule of law? Screw it, says US president

Checking in with John Schwenkler's blog this morning, I learned that Jane Mayer's new book contains the following information (summarized by Glenn Greenwald):

-- "Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."

-- "A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."

-- "[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases . . .

'There will be no review,' the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. 'The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.'"

-- "[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."

-- [T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".

-- "[T]he Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"

That's the inevitable outcome when a country's political establishment decrees itself exempt from the rule of law. If the rule of law doesn't constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes. Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They're all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they're caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.

Now, think about this. Not only did the White House condone torture, in contravention of law, but it did not care to discover if the men it had rounded up and put into prison actually deserved to be there. A CIA analyst believed one-third of Gitmo detainees didn't deserve to be there, and the then-commander of the camp believed that number was probably 50 percent. And the Commander in Chief didn't care.

Larison has more:

The progression of apologists for the state is always more or less the same: to suggest that the government is doing something flatly illegal and immoral is disloyal, and then once it has been proved that the government has been doing something flatly illegal and immoral it is only soft-headed idealists who think that such things are unjustifiable. "We have to be pragmatic!" they tell us. This is where the logic of wanting to "get things done" takes you.

And here's Andrew Bacevich, the military veteran and conservative professor of international relations, reviewing the book today in the Washington Post:

With the appearance of this very fine book, Hillary Clinton can claim a belated vindication of sorts: A right-wing conspiracy does indeed exist, although she misapprehended its scope and nature. The conspiracy is not vast and does not consist of Clinton-haters. It is small, secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law.

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

Under the guise of "enhanced interrogation techniques," it has succeeded, in Mayer's words, in "making torture the official law of the land in all but name." Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, "hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system" and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.

The thing that gets to me is that it's possible, even probable, to make mistakes in a time of war. But in this case, the White House didn't even want to know if it had made mistakes, and innocents were suffering. That's not tragic; that's malicious.

Where do we go from here? Don't simply say, "Elect Obama." That might be part of the solution -- but how do we reverse the damage, moral and legal, that the Bush cabal has done? You read this stuff and it makes you sick. It ought to make us mad. Again: what can we do about this? Why has two years of Democratic control of Congress failed to stop it or reverse it?