Just Trust Us
By PAUL KRUGMAN / NY Times / Published: May 11, 2004
Didn't you know, in your gut, that something like Abu Ghraib would eventually
come to light?
When the world first learned about the abuse of prisoners, President
Bush said that it "does not reflect the nature of the American people." He's
right, of course: a great majority of Americans are decent and good. But so are
a great majority of people everywhere. If America's record is better than that
of most countries — and it is — it's because of our system: our
tradition of openness, and checks and balances.
Yet Mr. Bush, despite all his talk of good and evil, doesn't believe
in that system. From the day his administration took office, its slogan has
been "just
trust us." No administration since Nixon has been so insistent that
it has the right to operate without oversight or accountability, and no
administration since Nixon has shown itself to be so little deserving of
that trust. Out
of
a misplaced sense of patriotism, Congress has deferred to the administration's
demands. Sooner or later, a moral catastrophe was inevitable.
Just trust us, John Ashcroft said, as he demanded that Congress pass
the Patriot Act, no questions asked. After two and a half years, during which
he arrested
and secretly detained more than a thousand people, Mr. Ashcroft has yet
to convict any actual terrorists. (Look at the actual trials of what
Dahlia
Lithwick of
Slate calls "disaffected bozos who watch cheesy training videos," and
you'll see what I mean.)
Just trust us, George Bush said, as he insisted that Iraq, which hadn't attacked
us and posed no obvious threat, was the place to go in the war on terror. When
we got there, we found no weapons of mass destruction and no new evidence of
links to Al Qaeda.
Just trust us, Paul Bremer said, as he took over in Iraq. What is
the legal basis for Mr. Bremer's authority? You may imagine that the Coalition
Provisional
Authority
is an arm of the government, subject to U.S. law. But it turns out
that no law or presidential directive has ever established the authority's
status. Mr. Bremer,
as far as we can tell, answers to nobody except Mr. Bush, which makes
Iraq a sort of personal fief. In that fief, there has been nothing
that
Americans
would
recognize as the rule of law. For example, Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's
erstwhile favorite, was allowed to gain control of Saddam's files — the
better to blackmail his potential rivals.
And finally: Just trust us, Donald Rumsfeld said early in 2002, when
he declared that "enemy combatants" — a term that turned out to mean anyone,
including American citizens, the administration chose to so designate — don't
have rights under the Geneva Convention. Now people around the world talk of
an "American gulag," and Seymour Hersh is exposing My
Lai all over again.
Did top officials order the use of torture? It depends on the meaning
of the words "order" and "torture." Last August Mr. Rumsfeld's top
intelligence official sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantánamo
prison, to Iraq. General Miller recommended that the guards help interrogators,
including private contractors, by handling prisoners in a way that "sets
the conditions" for "successful interrogation and exploitation." What
did he and his superiors think would happen?
To their credit, some supporters of the administration are speaking
out. "This
is about system failure," said Senator Lindsey Graham,
a Republican from South Carolina. But do Mr. Graham, John McCain
and other appalled
lawmakers understand their own role in that failure? By deferring
to the administration
at every step,
by blocking every effort to make officials accountable, they
set the nation up for this disaster. You can't prevent any
serious
inquiry into why George
Bush
led us to war to eliminate W.M.D. that didn't exist and to
punish Saddam
for
imaginary ties to Al Qaeda, then express shock when Mr. Bush's
administration fails to follow the rules on other matters.
Meanwhile, Abu Ghraib will remain in use, under its new commander: General Miller of Guantánamo. Donald Rumsfeld has "accepted responsibility" — an action that apparently does not mean paying any price at all. And Dick Cheney says, "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had. . . . People should get off his case and let him do his job." In other words: Just trust us.