Olbermann @ MindSay 
Transcript
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the President’s cataclysmic deception about Iran.
There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.
We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three
about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible
hyperbole —
or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked —
at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so —
whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.
A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief.
It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction:
A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer,
a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency:
an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.
After Ms Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night,
the timeline is inescapable and clear now.
In August, the President was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence,
Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always
see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might be,
in essence, crap.
Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president, Ahmadinejad:
“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III,
it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have
the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”
And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric
was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.
Or was it, sir, to scare the Americans?
Does Iran not really fit into the equation here?
Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the
same template you used to scare us about Iraq?
In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, sir,
would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.
A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing
that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged,
irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria
and his own delusions of omniscience.
Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Bush.
The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, sir, that you see in the mirror.
And the mind reels at the thought of a Vice President fully briefed on the revised intel \
as long as two weeks ago — briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit
of this imminent threat four years ago — who never bothered to mention it to his boss.
It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan’s presidency,
it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed,
behind-the-scenes string-puller.
Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance,
it is inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president’s evil ventriloquist,
or he thinks he is.
What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information
of this urgency and this gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning,
instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation — or a criminal one?
Mr Bush — if you can still hear us — if you did not previously agree to this scenario
in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you’re the Remington Steele —
you must disenthrall yourself: Mr Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers,
cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented
presidency in which the facts have become optional, the intel is valued less than the hunch,
and the assistant runs the store.
The problem is, sir, your assistant is robbing you — and your country — blind.
Not merely in monetary terms, Mr. Bush, but more importantly, robbing you
of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk,
for centuries: Honesty, Law, Moral Force.
Mr. Cheney has helped, sir, to make your administration into the kind our ancestors
saw in the 1860’s and 1870’s and 1880’s — the ones that abandoned Reconstruction,
and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland…
Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr. Bush.
Presidents who will be remembered as functions only of those who opposed them —
the opponents whom history proved right.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland… Bush.
Would that we could let this President off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.
But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it,
he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian, snake-oil salesman.
The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post’s website.
It is staggering.
March 31st: “Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon…”
June 5th: Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons…”
June 19th: “consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon…”
July 12th: “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons…”
August 6th: “this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon…”
Notice a pattern?
Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out,
so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the President,
not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror —
but there may not even be a tree there…
McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.
August 9th: “They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium,
which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program…”
August 28th: “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons…”
October 4th: “you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon…”
October 17th: “until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren’t
real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon.”
Before August 9th, it’s: “Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.”
After August 9th, it’s: “Desire, pursuit, want… knowledge, technology, know-how to enrich uranium.”
And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003…And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th…
And that term suspending is just a coincidence?
And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?
Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true —
something like “what the definition of ‘is’ is” —
but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.
Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial…
but ethically, it is a lie.
It is indefensible.
You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months,
after the guy on the other end had already hung up.
You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.
And more over, you must have realized that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz,
and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.
We are to believe that the Intel Community, or maybe the State Department,
cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?
And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?
You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August, but you also knew it was all accurate.
And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent,
you merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside,
while you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of —
as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote “nuclear holocaust” —
and, as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: “World War III.”
My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase
“George Bush has no business being president.”
Well, guess what?
Tonight: hanged by your own words and convicted by your own deliberate lies…
You, sir, have no business being president.
Good night, and good luck.
to not only keep an eye out for illegal materials in the course
of their duties, but even to report back any expression of
discontent with the government.
A year ago, Homeland Security gave security clearances to
nine New York City fire chiefs and began sharing intelligence
with them.
Even before that, fire department personnel were being taught
"to identify material or behavior that may indicate "terrorist activities"
and were also "told to be alert for a person who is hostile, uncooperative
or expressing hate or discontent with the United States."
Unlike law enforcement officials, firemen can go onto private property
without a warrant, not only while fighting fires but also for inspections
. "It's the evolution of the fire service," said a Phoenix, AZ fire chief of
his information-sharing arrangement with law enforcement.
Keith Olbermann raised the alarm about the program on his show Wednesday,
noting that "if the information-sharing program works in New York, the
department says it will extend it to other major metropolitan areas, unless
we stop them."
He then asked Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now with the ACLU,
"This program seems to be turning [firefighters], essentially, into legally protected
domestic spies, does it not?"
"That's the entire intent," German replied, noting the serious legal issues involved.
"There is actually still a fourth amendment," he pointed out, "and what makes a
firefighter's search reasonable is that it's done to prevent a fire. If now firefighters
are going in with this secondary purpose, that end run around the fourth amendment
won't work, and it's likely that they will find themselves in legal trouble."
Olbermann, however, was most strongly concerned about the implications for
civil liberties. "Is what disturbs you and the ACLU the same thing that just jumped
off the page for me?" he asked. "That one phrase, 'look for people who are expressing
hatred of or discontent with the United States?' Discontent?"
German agreed that there are serious first amendment issues raised by the focus
of the program on constitutionally-protected literature, such as books that might
be considered "terrorist propaganda."
Olbermann asked in conclusion whether firefighters could be used under this program
to plant evidence. German agreed that the way it is defined "really plays to people's
prejudices and gives them the opportunity to do damage to someone."
This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast on November 28, 2007.
Why should we have impeachment?
The framers of the constitution of the constitution knew that someday there was going to be
a Richard Nixon who was president of the United States and someday there was going to
be a George Bush who was going to be president of the United States, and they gave us
the power of impeachment to revoke them.
They put in the impeachment clause because they said that we know that there will be presidents
who will commit grave and dangerous offenses that would subvert the constitution.
They knew that subverting that constitution was the greatest danger that could
befall our country. So all of us here have to be soldiers in that cause.
For example
The act that constituted the basis for the Nixon impeachment started with the illegal bombing
of Cambodia. Why? Because it was illegal and it was secret, and when the press began to
find out about it,
Richard Nixon said, "That can't happen. I don't want the American people to know about this.
I don't want the congress to know. So we're going to wiretap... illegally." And that then led to
all the rest of the illegalities, because he thought, as president, he could do whatever he wanted,
and started out the course of keeping that war going and depriving the American people of the
truth. Not too different from today.
President Nixon fired the special prosecutor who was trying to get information about him and
the American people said, "that's it. Enough is enough.
We can't have a president who is above the law.
We can't have a president stop investigations.
We are the United States of America. congress, you have to act."
And they forced the congress to act.
The American people get it now on the war in Iraq
and they get it on the culture of corruption
and arrogance in Washington. We're going to have
to change. and if you think this change
should not include impeachment, you're wrong.
The constitution doesn't require the minimum. It requires the maximum.
We can't have a president of the United States who puts himself above
the rule of law if we want to continue with this republic.
It's not about revenge. The effort against Richard Nixon was not about revenge
Far from it. It is because this man is shredding the constitution.
It's a matter of setting the right standards and holding those accountable who lied
and deceived the American people and who want to shred the constitution still.
Why did the president drive us into war on the basis of deception?
And how did he do it and document what he knew and when he knew it.
That's critical, because no American should have
to give one drop of blood for a lie, ever.
What exactly did the president know about the
torture and the mistreatment of detainees?
What was he told and when was he told it?
Why didn't he ever follow the law and bring to
punishment and bring to accountability, those,
even up to the top, who ordered or engaged in torture?
Today, to assure the framers of the constitution,
for all who fought in our wars
and the prior generations who brought us to where we are today,
that we are going to hold up our end of the bargain and
preserve the constitution for future generations
That's it. No ifs ands or buts.
By Naomi Wolf
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Is America still America if millions of us
no longer know how democracy works?
When I speak on college campuses, I find
that students are either baffled by democracy's
workings or that they don't see any point in
engaging in the democratic process. Sometimes both.
Not long ago, I gave a talk at a major university
in the Midwest. "They're going to raze our meadows
and put in a shopping mall!"
a young woman in the audience wailed.
"And there's nothing we can do!"
she said, to the nods of young and old alike.
I stared at her in amazement and asked how old she was.
When she said 26, I suggested that she run for city council.
Then she stared at me-- with complete incomprehension.
It took me a long time to convince her and her peers in
the audience that what I'd suggested was possible,
even if she didn't have money, a major media outlet
of her own or a political "machine" behind her.
This lack of understanding about how democracy works is
disturbing enough. But at a time when our system of government
is under assault from an administration that ignores traditional
checks and balances, engages in illegal wiretapping and writes
secret laws on torture, it means that we're facing
an unprecedented crisis.
As the Founders knew, if citizens are ignorant of or complacent
about the proper workings of a republic "of laws not of men,"
then any leader of any party -- or any tyrannical Congress or even
a tyrannical majority -- can abuse the power they hold.
But at this moment of threat to the system the Framers set in place,
a third of young Americans don't really understand what they were up to.
According to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics,
only 47 percent of high school seniors have mastered a minimum level
of U.S. history and civics, while only 14 percent performed at or above
the "proficient" level.
Middle schoolers in many states are no longer required to take classes
in civics or government. Only 29 states require high school students to
take a government or civics course, leaving millions of young Americans
in the dark about why democracy matters.
A survey released by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in September
found that U.S. high school students missed almost half the questions
on a civic literacy test.
Only 45.9 percent of those surveyed knew that the sentence
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
is in the Declaration of Independence. Yet these same students can probably
name the winner of "American Idol" in a heartbeat.
The study also found that the more students increase their civic knowledge
during college, the more likely they are to vote and engage in other civic
activities. And vice versa -- civic illiteracy equals civic inaction.
Here are some actual quotes from otherwise smart, well-meaning young Americans:
"I show my true convictions by refusing to vote."
"The two parties are exactly the same."
"Congress is bought and paid for."
"Elections are just a front for corporations."
"My teacher says you shouldn't believe anything you read
in the newspapers at all," a 16-year-old from affluent
Menlo Park, Calif., told me last week.
Even those who are politically engaged don't have much faith in
our system's potential. "I was taught that it's set up for the elites
and for old white men and that there's not much you can do about it,"
said Christopher Le, 28, who works at a suicide hotline in Austin.
Le's mother was a "boat person" who fled Vietnam with her 4-month-old son
so that he could be raised in freedom.
But few Americans in the under-30 set have her kind of faith in the
United States. As Le put it, "No one taught us that democracy was
this shining, inspiring thing."
The United States has been blessed with more than 200 years of a strong
democracy, so it's easy to yield to a comforting -- and lazy -- conviction
that it's magically self-sustaining and doesn't need to be defended,
an idea that would have horrified the Founders, who knew that
our democracy would be a fragile thing.
In recent years, the trend away from teaching democracy to young Americans
has been at least partly a consequence of the trend of teaching to the
standardized tests introduced by the Bush administration.
Mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the tests assess chiefly
math and reading comprehension. Basic civics and history have suffered.
As a result, teenagers and young adults often have no clue why the United States
is different from, say, Egypt or Russia; they have little idea what liberty is.
Few young Americans understand that the Second Amendment keeps their homes safe
from the kind of government intrusion that other citizens suffer around the world;
few realize that "due process" means that they can't be locked up in a dungeon
by the state and left to languish indefinitely.
This dangerous ignorance is confirmed by the Knight Foundation, which has found
an alarming decline in student support for the First Amendment.
In a 2004 survey, more than a third of the student respondents thought
that the First Amendment went too far in guaranteeing freedom of speech
and of the press. By 2006, the number who held that view had swelled to half.
In the absence of strong civics training and in the presence of a
"war on terror" that insistently portrays freedom and checks and balances
as threats to national security, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
have become controversial for today's young people.
But this distressing situation isn't just George W. Bush's fault.
Young Americans have also inherited some strains of thought from the left
that have undermined their awareness of and respect for democracy.
When New Left activists of the 1960s started the antiwar and free speech
student movements, they didn't get their intellectual framework from
Montesquieu or Thomas Paine: They looked to Marx, Lenin and Mao.
It became fashionable to employ Marxist ways of thinking about social change:
not "reform" but "dialectic"; not "citizen engagement" but "ideological correctness";
not working for change but "fighting the man."
During the Vietnam War, the left further weakened itself by abandoning
the notion of patriotism. Young antiwar leaders burned the flag instead
of invoking the ideals of the republic it represents.
By turning their backs on the idea of patriotism -- and even on the brave men
who were fighting the unpopular war -- the left abandoned the field to the right
to "brand" patriotism as it own, often in a way that means uncritical support
for anything the executive branch decides to do.
In the Reagan era, when the Iran-contra scandal showed a disregard
for the rule of law, college students were preoccupied with
the fashionable theories of post-structuralism and deconstructionism,
critical language and psychoanalytic theories developed by French philosophers
Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida that were often applied to the political world,
with disastrous consequences.
These theories were often presented to students as an argument that the state --
even in the United States -- is only a network of power structures.
This also helped confine to the attic of unfashionable ideas the notion that
the state could be a platform for freedom; so much for the fusty old Rights of Man.
In the 1990s and the early years of this century, theories that globalization
is the ultimate evil found their ascendancy on college campuses.
Young people, informed by movements against sweatshops and the World Trade Organization,
have come to see democracy as a mere cosmetic gloss on the rapacious monolith of global capitalism.
All of these legacies have left the young feeling depressed, cynical and powerless.
And yet our democracy needs them more than ever now. Young people are always in the
vanguard of any movement to sustain or advance liberty.
Students led the charge for freedom in Prague and Mexico City in 1968,
in Chile in 1973, in Beijing and throughout Eastern Europe in 1989.
Young people helped lead the way in the U.S. civil rights movement,
white college students joining with African Americans to sign up voters
in the Freedom Summer of 1964.
The feminist movement was revived after half a century of dormancy by a cadre of young,
idealistic and politically savvy women. Same for the antiwar movement: Abbie Hoffman,
Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden of the Chicago Seven were ages 17 to 22 when they were charged
with conspiracy and inciting to riot while protesting at the 1968
Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
When I ask young people today whether they've been taught that immense positive changes
have come about because small groups of people engaged in democratic practices, many
look at me with puzzlement.
They need a crash course in democracy -- and a crash course in how easy it is
to close down an open society if steps are taken such as those we see our government taking now.
Earlier this year, I helped co-found the American Freedom Campaign to call for a
national democracy movement to restore the rule of law.
In response, some citizens called a national strike this month on behalf of the Constitution.
It was a shaky beginning -- people showed up with their flags and their petitions, but the
groups were sparse and shy and out of practice.
In New York's Union Square, the sound system failed to carry one new young freedom activist's
reading of the Bill of Rights very far. And yet it didn't matter.
"For the first time in a long time," said Barbara Martinez as the wind whipped her scarf,
"I feel hopeful."
Keith Olbermann - Special Comment: Rudy Guiliani
Part Two
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 Three, 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 re-focusing of our entire nation, towards keeping this mock president, and this unstable vice president, and this departed wildly self-over-rating 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 protestor.
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 water-boarded.
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 water-boarded 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.
Water-boarding, 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.
Water-boarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about — except, Sir, 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, sir, and we’re better than that.
We’re better than you.
And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not water-boarding 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 water-boarding, and who-knows-what-else… anybody — you yourself, sir — 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 water-boarding, and refuse to answer in words that which Daniel Levin answered on a water-board 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 any more, 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 United States 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.”
Senator Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system and he has failed.
What Senator 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, you — before you confirm the President’s latest human echo tomorrow — you 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 fifty of them — but I’m not holding my breath. The “yes” or the “no” on water-boarding 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 water-boards — symbolic and otherwise — of George W. Bush.
Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn’t who approved the water-boarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.
It is: why were they water-boarded?
Study after study for generation after generation, sir, 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, heck, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you… than an actual terrorist?
He’ll tell you every thing 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, sir?
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 water-boarding 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 1930’s and re-make 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, sir, these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people.
Good night, and good luck.
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