OP-ED; BUSH IS A LIAR

Bush Implicitly Admits He’s A Liar

The President finally came around and admitted to the American people, and to the world, that he has lied to them, albeit in a roundabout way. It took damn long enough.

The President had never previously discussed the existence of secret prisons around the world in which American and foreign interrogators tortured suspected terrorists, including the alleged mastermind of September 11, 2001, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. However, he left it to his subordinates to neither confirm nor deny its existence to the American and world newsmedia. In a speech to families impacted by the attacks of September 11, he admitted their existence, arguing that they were vital in the War on Terror.

President Bush took this action because of a ruling by the Supreme Court, which stated that the procedures used by the administration in incarcerating, interrogating, and trying detainees violated both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. The ruling, as David Sanger writes in his news analysis in the September 7, 2006 New York Times, “visibly angered [the President].” The court finally held the President accountable to his policies, and now President Bush is about to try the Jacksonian role of defying other branches of government.

Further, President Bush said that he was moving the detainees from around the world to the compound in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they are to wait to stand on a military tribunal, with terms for the trial dictated by the President, including the inability for defendants to see or hear the evidence against them. These terms aggravated even the most loyal of Republicans, including former military prosecutor Senator Lindsey Graham (R-NC).

By implicitly admitting that his administration had lied about the secret prisons, President Bush also put Congress on the defensive, forcing their collective hands to vote for his concept of a military tribunal before the midterm elections. The minority Democrats cannot be seen as coddling terrorists, and Republicans do not want to be viewed as weakening their position on terror. This action can also have its downsides, however.

By admitting the fact that the CIA held detainees in secret undisclosed locations, the President opens himself up to the allegation of torture. He has vehemently denied such accusations, but he (and Donald Rumsfeld) also called the Abu-Ghraib scandal the “work of a few bad apples.”

Torture was authorized by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez in a memo dated August 2002. In the memo, al-Qaeda terrorists, and anyone else captured in the War on Terror, are not considered Prisoners of War, and thus not entitled to the protections provided by the Geneva Conventions. In a related memo signed by the President(!) the same concept is reiterated.

So why did he lie? Why keep these prisoners held in secret? Why torture them? The justification given by the administration is that this was the only way to get timely intelligence in a new war. They say that these tactics have saved the lives of Americans and those of their allies. But they miss an important point. The lies of the administration have led to the deaths of more people, rather than fewer.

President Bush, and his advisers and subordinates in his administration, lied to the American people, and the world. Men captured on the battlefields in Afghanistan and around the world were held in secret underground prisons in which they were tortured, degraded, and humiliated. Admission of said lying would further tarnish the already ruined American image around the world, so the President had to own up to his lies in a circular fashion.

Mr. President, didn’t your mother ever teach you that liars never win?