Hypocrisy, thy name is Bush

The people who claimed that Dana Priest, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who broke the story about the existence of the "black prisons", was either guilty of either making the whole thing up, or guilty of having committed treason are strangely silent now that GWB has acknowledged (no doubt for political reasons) that the prisons do in fact exist and that fourteen inmates are about to be transferred to Gitmo. *cricket* *cricket*

Digby says:

According to Pete Williams on MSNBC, Bush's announcement that they are moving the 14 terrorists we've had holed up in secret prisons to Guantanamo is a political ploy to force Democrats to have to give "rights" to Khalid Sheik Mohammed if they want to challenge his Guantanamo policies. It's quite clever.

Might I suggest that since they've just spent the last week shrieking about fascists and Nazi's and comparing the GWOT to WWII, that Democrats simply remind them that the gold standard for trials of fascists is the Nuremberg trials? Perhaps we could settle this whole thing by simply saying that Nuremberg should serve as the basis for these new "Islamo-fascist" trials and put an end to the controversy.

Of course, that means the trials would have to be public.

Not to be outdone in the great hypocrisy challenge, let's turn to the furor surrounding the broadcast of the ABC miniseries, Path to 9/11. I am struck by hypocrisy which underlies virtually all the right-wing charges. Apparently, the series makers are trying to portray the Clinton administration as ineffectual enablers of the 9/11 terrorists. However, the most apparently damning scenes never happened, according to the people who were actually there at the time (Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright and Sandy Berger).

Let's not forget who got the PDB on August 6th 2001 with the title "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" and decided not to interrupt his vacation. Yup, that's right, Mr. Pet Goat, President Asleep-at-the-Switch himself.

Glenn Greenwald points out that

it is rank, deceitful revisionism to attempt to blame the Clinton administration for failing to be insufficiently aggressive with regard to Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism generally. To make this argument with any plausibility, Bush supporters would have to be able to point to complaints made by Republicans at the time -- and especially during the 2000 election -- that the Clinton administration should have been more attentive or aggressive towards Islamic terrorists. The threat posed by Al Qaeda and bin Laden was well known throughout the 1990s. To pretend that Republicans wanted a more aggressive stance than Clinton took is blatant revisionism.

Read his whole post because he lays out what Bush and the Republican were saying and doing in real time and it had nothing at all to do with terrorists. It was mostly about blow jobs and to the extent that anything was said about external threats, it was about Iraq. This was pre-9/11, when it still could have made a difference. So, in 2000, while Richard Clarke was trying to impress upon the incoming Bush White House team the importance of the threat posed by OBL and al-Qaeda, BushCo would hear nothing of it. In fact, the Republicans were critical of Clinton for being too aggressive militarily.

George Bush's 2000 Republican National Convention acceptance speech contained a slew of specific criticisms of the Clinton administration, along with a series of specific foreign policy goals. He never mentioned or even alluded to the threat of terrorism, Islamic extremism, or the need for increased aggression against Middle Eastern supporters of terrorism. In fact, to the extent Bush criticized the use of military force at all, it was to imply that it was not used sparingly or discriminatingly enough:

A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming.

[...]

Not a word about terrorism, Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. In the same debate, Bush again said: "I'm worried about overcommitting our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use. . . . It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious." It is in that debate where he also famously said: "And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war."

How is it justifiable for Bush supporters now to claim that the Clinton administration was insufficiently attentive to, or aggressive against, Al Qaeda when they said nothing of the sort at the time? They didn't spend the 1990s criticizing Clinton for failing to confront the terrorist threat. Quite the contrary; if anyone was attempting to urge the country to take the threat of Al Qeada more seriously, it was the Clinton administration.

Here is what James Bennett reported in The New York Times on August 21, 1998, the day after President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on what the CIA believed were Al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan and the Sudan in retaliation for the bombings, two weeks earlier, of two American embassies in Africa:

In his speech Mr. Clinton warned Americans that the strike would by no means put an end to terrorism. ''This will be a long, ongoing struggle,'' he said. ''America is and will remain a target of terrorists.'' . . . Repeatedly he said Mr. bin Laden presented an imminent threat, quoting his pledge this week to wage a war in which Americans were ''all targets.''

[...]

The notion that Republicans wanted a more aggressive posture against Al Qaeda and terrorism during the Clinton administration is pure, unadulterated fantasy. And, by definition, any narrative which lends support to that myth -- as Bush supporters claim Path to 9/11 does -- is (in addition to its other factual inaccuracies) pure fiction.

The hits just keep coming... Glenn also found these quotes from the GOP 2000 Platform
which should embarrass the hell out of BushCo for the hypocrites it exposes them as being.

* When presidents fail to make hard choices, those who serve must make them instead. Soldiers must choose whether to stay with their families or to stay in the armed forces at all. Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness.

* Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments. A Republican administration working with the Congress will respect the needs and quiet sacrifices of these public servants as it strengthens America’s intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities and reorients them toward the dangers of the future.

* The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down. An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice.