Ricks on Bergen on Bush
Bergen[, in his book The Longest War,] is evenhanded but ferocious in reviewing the failures of the Bush administration, noting that in the wake of the worst security failure in American history, no one was fired, no one resigned and no one took responsibility. It’s widely understood that the White House ceded the moral high ground by embracing torture and secret prisons, but Bergen highlights how flatly unprofessional these actions were: seasoned interrogators were shunted aside in favor of eager amateurs who thought the facts could be physically wrung from detainees. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times, yet told his torturers nothing more about the 9/11 attacks than he had already voluntarily spilled two years earlier to an interviewer from Al Jazeera. Similarly, Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, learned to bypass intelligence professionals and inject his fictions directly into the offices of his less knowledgeable allies in the Pentagon and White House.
Colin Powell comes off as a chump who should have resigned in November 2001, when he learned about the administration’s new policy on detainees from a news broadcast on television, and long before he delivered one of the most misleading speeches in American history, his rallying cry for war at the United Nations. Dick Cheney appears less a brooding presence and more a red-faced buffoon, which may well be how history comes to regard him. I was surprised, however, at how badly Condoleezza Rice appears in this historical record. Bergen makes it clear that she was at best misleading about the actions of the administration. For example, she testified that the White House was on high alert before 9/11, but, he dryly notes, “the historical record does not reflect this.” As secretary of state, Rice reassured us that “the United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured” — a statement that Bergen says we now know to have been “demonstrably false.”
Yet Rice hardly stands out in an administration that confected the rationale for the invasion of Iraq out of a few stray rumors, stale leads and discredited reports. The only evidence Bush ever offered for a nexus between Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda was based on information obtained though the interrogation of a Libyan militant that both the Defense Intelligence Agency and the C.I.A. had separately concluded was fabricated — well before the president used that information publicly.
[excerpt from Thomas E. Ricks, "Determined to Strike", New York Times, 11 January 2011, a review of The Longest War : The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda, by Peter L. Bergen.]
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Monday, 24 January 2011 at 00.57
Permalink
Oh yes, to the extent she was tuned in at all, Rice was fully complicit in the lack of preventative effort before 9-11 and the feckless attempts at COYA afterward.
In fact, looking at Bush & Co. in this matter and a host of others, I'm reminded of the punch line of an old joke: "You've got to marvel at the completeness of it." In this case, "it" would be described by a word I don't find in the English inventory. One signifying a symbiotic combination of incompetence, stupidity, selfishness and perversity.