WASHINGTON -
"The reason I keep insisting that there was a
relationship between Iraq and Saddam [Hussein] and
al-Qaeda," US President George W Bush told reporters
last week, is "because there was a relationship between
Iraq and al-Qaeda".
This is what logicians call
a tautology - a "useless repetition" - but it is also an
indication of how the Bush administration is defending
itself against a growing number of scandals and
deceptions in which it is enmeshed.
Repetition
and blaming the media, an old standby - of which Vice
President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld
are particularly fond, dating back to their service
under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford 30 years
ago - are back in vogue.
Thus it was that
Cheney, the most aggressive administration proponent of
the theory that Saddam had not only been working hand in
glove with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for years,
but that he was also behind the bombing of the World
Trade Center in New York in 1993, complained that the
New York Times' coverage of the 9-11 Commission's
finding that no such link existed was "outrageous" and
probably "malicious".
And thus it was that
Rumsfeld charged that media coverage of the abuses of
detainees held by the US in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and
elsewhere was not only wrong, but dangerous.
"The implication that's out there is the United
States government is engaging in torture as a matter of
policy, and that's not true," he declared, despite the
cascading leaks of Pentagon, Justice Department and
White House memoranda suggesting ways in which domestic
and international bans on torture can be circumvented or
ignored in the "war on terror".
And, in a
distinct echo of the charges leveled by diehard hawks
over the US withdrawal from Vietnam under the Nixon-Ford
watch, Rumsfeld suggested that reporters and editors,
"sitting in an air-conditioned room some place", not the
military (and certainly not the policymakers) would be
to blame if Washington lost in Iraq.
"This much
is certain," Cheney said. "Coalition forces cannot be
defeated on the battlefield. The only way this effort
could fail is if people were to be persuaded that the
cause is lost, or that it's not worth the pain - or if
those who seem to measure progress in Iraq against a
more perfect world convince others to throw in the
towel."
The tactic the administration appears to
have chosen to deal with what is clearly an unraveling
of whatever shred of credibility it retains is simply to
insist - as it has for so long anyway - that it never
made mistakes or exaggerated or misrepresented or lied
about anything in any way, and to hope that if it
repeats itself sufficiently loudly and often, people
will come to believe it.
"At this point, the
White House position is just frankly bizarre," Daniel
Benjamin, a senior counter-terrorism official in the
administration of Bush's predecessor Clinton told the
Los Angeles Times in response to Bush's declaration
about al-Qaeda and Saddam. "They're just repeating
themselves, rather than admit they were wrong."
Bush, of course, was responding to the finding
by the bipartisan 9-11 Commission that while bin Laden
"explored possible cooperation with Iraq" when he was
based in Sudan through 1994, "Iraq apparently never
responded", and no "collaborative relationship" was ever
established.
Proceeding from his tautology, Bush
insisted "this administration never said that the 9-11
attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda."
That rendition, of
course, raises a host of questions, among them
definitional - does the existence of "numerous contacts"
amount to a "relationship", particularly when one side
fails to respond to the other?
"When I was 15
and kept asking Mary Beth for a date, and she would
always politely refuse, I think I would have been hard
put to describe that as a 'relationship' as much as I
wanted to brag about one," suggested one congressional
aide.
But more important, Bush's statement
simply flies in the face of the record. Just before
invading Iraq, for example, the president asserted that
Iraq had sent bomb-making and document-forgery experts
to "work with al-Qaeda" and also "provided al-Qaeda with
chemical and biological weapons training" - a
relationship that goes far beyond mere "contacts".
And although he denied his administration had
ever suggested Saddam's connivance in the September 11
attacks themselves, his March 19, 2003 letter to
Congress officially informing it that hostilities had
begun asserted that the war was permitted under
legislation authorizing force against those who
"planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001".
Cheney, always the most aggressive in asserting
a link between Saddam and both al-Qaeda and September
11, repeatedly made similar charges, and last fall
endorsed the contents of an article in the
neo-conservative Weekly Standard - consisting largely of
excerpts of a classified document prepared by the
Pentagon's shady Office of Special Plans as "the best
source of information" - that concluded: "Osama bin
Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship
from the early 1990s to 2003."
Under pressure
from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon later
issued a release describing the article's conclusions as
"inaccurate".
Cheney, along with
neo-conservative members of the Defense Policy Board,
Wall Street Journal editorial writers and the Weekly
Standard, also has been the administration's biggest
champion of the single-sourced Czech intelligence report
of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi
intelligence official and the ringleader of the
September 11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, five months
before the attacks.
The meeting, according to
the commission, which had access to contemporaneous
video shots of Atta, his cell phone records and the
testimony of the Iraqi official, who has been in US
custody since last July, never took place.
Yet
Cheney said last Thursday that he was still not
convinced, suggesting cryptically that he may have
access to intelligence the commission was not able to
see. "That's never been proven," he said. "It's never
been refuted."
The 9-11 commission co-chairs,
Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, have challenged Cheney to
come forward with evidence relevant to Atta and the
Saddam-al-Qaeda connection he alleges. They also said
that they had asked Cheney about the connection when
they interviewed him, so the implication is that he had
a chance to inform the commission about his special
insights, but declined to do so for whatever reason.
Of course, Cheney's treatment of this issue gets
us right into the epistemological puzzles in which
Rumsfeld specializes - that "there are known unknowns"
and "unknown unknowns", which are those "we don't know,
we don't know'' - speculations that seemed increasingly
appropriate in light of revelations by the group Human
Rights First that Washington is holding an unknown
number of detainees in as many as a dozen facilities in
the Middle East, South Asia, aboard naval vessels in the
Indian Ocean and elsewhere, whose existence has not been
disclosed to either the International Committee of the
Red Cross or to Congress.
Indeed, Rumsfeld's
angry admonitions against the dangers of media coverage
of torture and abuses in US-run prisons came at a press
conference in which he admitted that one Iraqi prisoner
- one of 13 so-called "ghost detainees" tracked by Human
Rights Watch - had been kept off prison rosters for some
seven months, apparently to keep the Red Cross in the
dark about his whereabouts.
If true, that would
constitute a clear violation of Article 75 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, according to Deborah Pearlstein of
Human Rights First. Rumsfeld assured reporters the
detainee in question had been treated "humanely" at all
times.
Pressed by the White House, the
Republican leadership in Congress prevented Democratic
lawmakers from issuing subpoenas for some of the
administration's memoranda on its interrogation and
detention policies and its contention, in at least two
leaked memos, that the president can overrule
international conventions, US laws and even the US
constitution in his war-making powers as
commander-in-chief.
Such unconstrained power is,
of course, entirely consistent with the notion that a
relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam existed because
the president says so.
