It All Came Back To Iraq

Frank Rich discovers journalism again (and it is a glorious thing, truly) as somebody in the Village finally writes the torture memo column that needed to be written. Rich makes two excellent points on the torture of Abu Zubaydah:

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Indeed, in the end, everything was about selling the Iraq War to America and the world. Should we be surprised that an administration that made lies up wholesale to get us into war with a country that didn't attack us, wasn't capable of hurting us, and will now hate us for generations?

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

From Frank Rich's computer to America's ears. Not everybody in the Village is completely corrupt, it turns out. Some of them still believe in America.

I only hope that Obama and Eric Holder are willing to do what has to be done. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, but America has taken the easy way out once too many times. It's high time we started acting like America again.

"But Zandar," you say, "Rasmussen says 58% of Americans don't want further investigations of Bush. How can you possibly justify doing so? It will destroy the country!"

To which I say "We are either a country ultimately ruled by laws, or ruled by men. Choose wisely."