Hurry Up and Wait: The Torture Legislation and the November '06 Elections
*Cross-posted from The Huffington Post
Two weeks ago, the White House led a chorus baying for the blood of
anyone who stood in the way of the President's Military Commission Act
stood in the way of defending America. After five years' inaction on
detainees and interrogation issues, the White House discovered a need
for speedy action. But a week after the House and Senate voted on the
bill, the enrolled bill is still sitting on President Bush's desk... No
law has changed--yet. As thousands hit the streets to protest
Congress's endorsement of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques,
and detention without end, it's worth asking: Why the delay? What does
it tell us about the legislation, or the upcoming election campaign?
First and foremost,
the delay illustrates a simple fact: There was no pressing need to act.
The only pressing need driving enactment of the Military Commissions
Act--with its frontal assault on rules against torture, indefinite
detention, and fair trials--was the prospect of November elections.
The Administration pointed to two pressing needs in its campaign for
the legislation: First, it wanted President Bush's "program" of
coercive interrogations in secret CIA prisons around the world to go
forward. Second, it wanted trials by new military commissions for those
held at the Guantánamo Bay to begin again.
But were either of these needs in fact pressing? The Administration's own behavior suggests not.
A senior intelligence official quoted in the Washington Post
explained that "there is no one in CIA custody today" who could be
subject to the coercive techniques allowed by the Act. Setting aside
the question whether torture works as a means of securing accurate
intelligence--it doesn't--it thus appears that the CIA is not now
holding anyone who might have information to prevent an incipient
attack. Like many previous announcement about incipient terrorist
threats, the timing of the White House's warnings had more to do with
politics than threat predication.
The idea that there's a pressing need to begin military commissions
is even more transparently false. According to Defense Department
spokesman Bryan Whitman, no trials are imminent. It will take at least
until next year to rewrite rules, assign judges, and make the necessary arrangements for trials.
This legislation, in other words, had nothing to do with an
immediate need. Instead, we now have repeated confirmation that the
Administration, when confronted by real evidence of threats to American
civilians, has simply failed to act. From the aching minutes that
President Bush first took to register and respond to the news of the
9/11 attacks to the painful and disastrously inadequate response to
Katrina, this Administration's record speaks for itself.
Recent revelations confirm this. Bob Woodward's new book State of
Denial thus exposed the fact that CIA chief George Tenet and Cofer
Black (who faced off against bin Laden in Sudan) warned Condoleezza
Rice in the starkest terms of the looming assault--in a meeting the
Secretary of State cannot even recall.
Woodward's revelation echoes Ron Suskind's account in The One-Percent
Solution of the CIA's desperate effort to warn President Bush in August
2001 of the impending crisis--only to be completely blown off by the
vacationing Chief Executive.
Repeatedly, we learn that our leaders failed to respond to the
threats. Repeatedly, these same leaders are all too ready to conjure
those same threats for narrow, partisan purposes untethered from the
true security needs of the nation.
This year's election season will bring a slew of claims and
counter-claims about who is "toughest" on national security. But
there's little point in hanging tough if you are facing the wrong way.
The Military Commissions Act that sits on President Bush's desk is the
worst sort of political showmanship: For reasons I have explained earlier,
it will do little to keep us safer in the face of any imminent threat.
It is rather a naked attempt to distract us from the gamut of real
problems that today go unaddressed by haphazard, heavy-handed, and
ineffectual executive branch approaches to national security.
Aziz Huq: "Hurry Up and Wait: The Torture Legislation and the November Elections" (pdf)
