Not Following the Script

President Bush’s ardent defenders like to complain about how roughly he’s supposedly treated by that classic conservative bugaboo, the Liberal Media. In fact, Bush is apparently so scarred by all these terrible media types that he brags about not reading newspapers or watching the news.

Of course, the reality is that the White House press corps tends to be so farcically deferential to the President that they refuse to call him on even wildly bizarre or false statements. Watch Bush’s next press conference and you’ll see how the supposedly Bush-hating press corps tosses softballs instead of actual questions.

It is therefore particularly instructive to take note of the White House’s reaction to Bush’s June 24 interview with Radio and Television Ireland. Irish reporter Carole Coleman, you see, apparently committed the sin of wanting actual answers instead of scripted responses.

For example:

COLEMAN: Mr. President, you’re going to arrive in Ireland in about 24 hours’ time, and no doubt you will be welcomed by our political leaders. Unfortunately, the majority of our public do not welcome your visit because they’re angry over Iraq, they’re angry over Abu Ghraib. Are you bothered by what Irish people think?

BUSH: Listen, I hope the Irish people understand the great values of our country. And if they think that a few soldiers represents [sic] the entirety of America, they don’t really understand America then. There have been great ties between Ireland and America, and we’ve got a lot of Irish Americans here that are very proud of their heritage and their country. But, you know, they must not understand if they’re angry over Abu Ghraib – if they say, this is what America represents, they don’t understand our country, because we don’t represent that. We are a compassionate country. We’re a strong country, and we’ll defend ourselves – but we help people. And we’ve helped the Irish and we’ll continue to do so. We’ve got a good relationship with Ireland.

COLEMAN: And they’re angry over Iraq, as well, and particularly the continuing death toll there.

BUSH: Well, I can understand that. People don’t like war. But what they should be angry about is the fact that there was a brutal dictator there that had destroyed lives and put them in mass graves and had torture rooms. Listen, I wish they could have seen the seven men that came to see me in the Oval Office – they had their right hands cut off by Saddam Hussein because the currency had devalued when he was the leader. And guess what happened? An American saw the fact that they had had their hands cut off and crosses – or Xs carved in their forehead. And he flew them to America. And they came to my office with a new hand, grateful for the generosity of America, and with Saddam Hussein’s brutality in their mind. Look, Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, against the neighborhood. He was a brutal dictator who posed a threat – such a threat that the United Nations voted unanimously to say, Mr. Saddam Hussein –

COLEMAN: Indeed, Mr. President, but you didn’t find the weapons of mass destruction.

BUSH: Let me finish. Let me finish. May I finish? He said – the United Nations said, disarm or face serious consequences. That’s what the United Nations said. And guess what? He didn’t disarm. He didn’t disclose his arms. And, therefore, he faced serious consequences. But we have found a capacity for him to make a weapon. See, he had the capacity to make weapons. He was dangerous. And no one can argue that the world is better off with Saddam – if Saddam Hussein were in power.

COLEMAN: But, Mr. President, the world is a more dangerous place today. I don’t know whether you can see that or not.

BUSH: Why do you say that?

COLEMAN: There are terrorist bombings every single day. It’s now a daily event. It wasn’t like that two years ago.

BUSH: What was it like September the 11th, 2001? It was a – there was a relative calm, we –

COLEMAN: But it’s your response to Iraq that’s considered –

BUSH: Let me finish. Let me finish, please. Please. You ask the questions and I’ll answer them, if you don’t mind. On September the 11th, 2001, we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion. Everybody thought the world was calm. And then there have been bombings since then – not because of my response to Iraq. There were bombings in Madrid. There were bombings in Istanbul. There were bombings in Bali. There were killings in Pakistan.

COLEMAN: Indeed, Mr. President, and I think Irish people understand that. But I think there is a feeling that the world has become a more dangerous place because you have taken the focus off al Qaeda and diverted into Iraq. Do you not see that the world is a more dangerous place? I saw four of your soldiers lying dead on the television the other day, a picture of four soldiers just lying there without their flight jackets.

BUSH: Listen, nobody cares more about the death than I do –

COLEMAN: Is there a point or place –

BUSH: Let me finish, please. Please. Let me finish, and then you can follow up, if you don’t mind. Nobody cares more about the deaths than I do. I care about it a lot. But I do believe the world is a safer place and becoming a safer place. I know that a free Iraq is going to be a necessary part of changing the world. Listen, people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope and there’s no chance to raise their families in a peaceful world where there is not freedom. And so the idea is to promote freedom, and at the same time protect our security. And I do believe the world is becoming a better place, absolutely.

(The interview and a transcript are available online.)

Horrors! How dare Coleman take her job as a journalist seriously and refuse to swallow unquestioningly what the President deigns to allow her to have? How dare she disrespect the leader of the free world by actually seeking answers to her questions instead of being satisfied with canned responses?

The White House reacted swiftly, canceling a planned interview Coleman was going to have with Laura Bush and generally acting like a spoiled brat.

But wait, there’s more: Coleman was required to submit her questions in advance. Bush refused to give the interview at all unless he knew exactly what she was going to ask. He fully expected her to simply roll over as do so many American reporters so infuriatingly, and was completely unprepared when she acted like a real journalist instead of a stenographer.

We now know this is standard operating procedure for the Bush Administration. In The Price of Loyalty, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill revealed that Cabinet meetings are scripted down to the last detail, with White House political apparatchiks telling participants in advance what they will talk about, what position they will take, for how long they will speak, and so on. Any deviation from the script was frowned upon most severely.

Take a moment to consider the implications of the President of the United States – the most powerful man in the world – being utterly unable to function without a script.

Every week or two, C-SPAN broadcasts Prime Minister’s Questions from the British House of Commons, where the Prime Minister is required to answer questions from other Members of Parliament. Whenever Tony Blair is shown thinking on his feet, without resorting to evasion, stock comebacks or double-talk, it becomes painfully obvious that Bush wouldn’t last ten seconds in there. Likewise, the European media would never let a national leader get away with the sort of drivel that the American media so exasperatingly allows from Bush.

In the meantime, I have a request for Coleman: please quit your job in Ireland and come to work in America. We desperately need a journalist on the White House beat who actually practices journalism.

The Rule of Law

Almost, but not quite, lost in the hoopla over yesterday’s “transfer of sovereignty” in Iraq from the United States to a handpicked interim government (whose Prime Minister was incidentally a CIA asset in the 1990s and reportedly helped orchestrate a bombing campaign in Baghdad) was a pair of Supreme Court decisions reminding us that government’s wartime powers are not infinite.

One case concerned the 600-odd detainees at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who were accused of being connected with al Qaeda or the Taliban, while the other concerned an American citizen arrested in Afghanistan. All were declared “enemy combatants” by the Government and locked away without charges, without a trial, and without any access to an attorney. (A third case, concerning an American citizen arrested in Chicago and declared an enemy combatant, was punted back to the lower courts on procedural grounds. The case of Jose Padilla is not over.) President Bush, through the Justice Department, claimed the unilateral and unlimited power to lock up anyone at any time as part of the “War on Terror,” and told the courts to butt out by barring detainee access to judicial review.

But whoa! Not so fast, the Court said. Even in wartime, even under military jurisdiction, defendants have the right to their day in court. The Court rejected the Administration claim that detainees have no access to American courts as Guantanamo Bay is not in the United States, pointing out that the Government has “complete jurisdiction and control” over the base. So from a legal standpoint, detainees at the base are in the US and thus have access to the courts.

The Court, however, reserved its sharpest rebuke for the case of an American citizen arrested in Afghanistan and locked up as an enemy combatant. By an 8-1 vote, the Court ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi cannot be held indefinitely without a fair opportunity to rebut the charges against him. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.” Even Justice Antonin Scalia, not normally known for being a strong advocate of individual rights against government power, said that “the very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.” Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, saying that “this detention falls squarely within the Federal Government’s war powers, and we lack the expertise and capacity to second-guess that decision.” (In other words, we should trust the Administration with blind faith and shut up, despite the fact that most thinking adults have a problem with “because I say so” reasoning coming from the President.)

Some may scream that the Court has blocked the ability of the President as Commander in Chief to conduct war operations. But what the Court has actually done is remind us that when anyone is accused of wrongdoing, the Government has to prove its case in a public trial; it cannot just declare someone guilty and lock them up without any chance for the accused to challenge it. Even in wartime – especially in wartime – our basic freedoms do not go out the window, and for the Administration to claim the unlimited power to toss anyone into a legal black hole shows a frightening arrogance. After all, Americans have historically held a dim view of a President who claims the unchecked power to do anything without answering to anyone.

“It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation’s commitment to due process is most severely tested,” the Court said in its ruling, “and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad.” Well put.

Prove It

Last week, the 9/11 commission released a report saying in plain English that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, especially on 9/11. Since this was one of the Bush Administration’s favorite propaganda lines, the report simply could not go unchallenged, and the White House promptly marshaled its media allies to hammer away at the commission’s findings.

Said hammering is taking three forms:

1. This conclusion was reached by lower-level staffers and not the commissioners themselves. This one didn’t fly for very long; after all, one would think that said staffers would be unable to release a paper under the commission’s name and on the commission’s website without the commissioners’ approval.

2. 9/11 connection? We never said there was a 9/11 connection. Oh, please – don’t insult our intelligence. For months before and after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others said ad nauseum that Iraq and al Qaeda were two peas in a pod, and repeatedly insinuated (and sometimes more) that Iraq was behind 9/11. For example:
a. “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” (Bush, 9/25/02)
b. Invading Iraq “is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” (Bush’s official war notification letter to Congress, 4/19/03)
c. “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda.” (Bush, 5/1/03)
d. “If we’re successful in Iraq, we will have struck a blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” (Cheney, 9/14/03)
e. “Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged.” (Condoleezza Rice, 9/17/03)

3. All right, so maybe Iraq wasn’t involved with 9/11, but they were still involved with al Qaeda. This one doesn’t wash either. The commission release clearly said that Baghdad ignored al Qaeda’s repeated attempts to procure training camps and weapons from Iraq.

As one aspect of the Administration’s PR counterattack, the arch-conservative Washington Times trumpeted an unconfirmed – and very obviously planted – allegation that a senior official in Saddam’s militia was also a member of al Qaeda, but the story fell apart just hours later with the realization that there were actually two different people with similar names. Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to help out by claiming he personally warned Bush soon after 9/11 that Saddam was planning terrorist attacks within the US, but that also went nowhere when the White House sheepishly admitted that the story was groundless and no such warning was ever given.

Most ludicrously, Cheney was trotted out on CNBC Thursday night to mutter darkly that the White House “probably” held back evidence from the 9/11 commission proving that Saddam collaborated with al Qaeda and that – again – he just might have had a hand in 9/11 after all.

Putting aside the question of whether or not the Administration deliberately withheld very relevant facts from the commission, I say to Cheney: Prove it. Release your evidence. If it supports what you claim, then you should have no problem with making it public. After all, your Administration has in the past leaked sensitive information for political purposes, so this shouldn’t be such a big deal. (Remember Valerie Plame, the CIA operative whose cover was blown in retaliation for her husband publicly saying the African uranium story was a crock?) But it seems infinitely more likely that if there were such a smoking gun, it would have been loudly publicized long before now. Instead, it seems that any new “evidence” would be just more of the same: more rumors, more conjecture, and more speculation.

The Administration ideologues, hell-bent on war with Iraq no matter what, saw only what they wanted to see and took unsupported allegations to be gospel truth. They ignored everyone who told them it wasn’t true. They knowingly poured deceptive garbage into the public consciousness to scare Americans into going along with their schemes. And now that they’ve been caught red-handed, they are completely incapable of doing anything other than spouting the same nonsense. How pathetic.

Don’t Bother Me with the Facts

It has become standard operating procedure in the Bush Administration that if the facts don’t jibe with the ideology, one just ignores the facts and keeps plowing on straight ahead. Such is the Administration’s response to the 9/11 commission’s discrediting of one of its favorite canards: that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were partners in mayhem, that the invasion of Iraq was part of the War on Terror, and there was no substantive difference between Iraq’s secular dictatorship and al Qaeda’s theocratic terrorism.

“We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States,” the commission reported in direct contradiction to the standard Administration line. “Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded.”

In any other Administration, it would quickly be realized that this particular dog no longer hunts and a proven-wrong sales pitch would be abandoned. But after three years of this Administration, we know better.

Proving himself to be utterly unable to step outside his ideological box, President Bush responded to the report by flatly denying it and just repeating the same thing. “There was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” he insisted somewhat peevishly. (In his defense, perhaps he was never told of the commission’s findings. After all, he has bragged on the record that he doesn’t bother to keep up with world events from any independent sources, preferring instead to be spoon-fed by his staff.)

Not content simply to give the impression of being disconnected from reality, Bush went on to deliver a real whopper: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

Oh, really? That will be a surprise to millions of Americans who were intentionally deceived by White House rhetoric, both specific and general, into thinking just such a connection existed. Vice President Cheney kept mentioning the mythical Prague meeting between lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent long after it was debunked by American and Czech intelligence. Other officials, including Bush himself, were a little more careful, choosing instead to use buzzwords such as “Saddam,” “September 11” and “al Qaeda” endlessly in the same sentences to plant the impression of a connection without actually saying so. Either way, Bush’s statement comes off as either shamelessly dishonest or utterly idiotic.

Some say that the White House’s staying “on message” no matter what shows resolve and steadfastness. But when you keep on using the same lines long after they’ve repeatedly been exposed as false, that’s not resolve, that’s arrogant stupidity. Whether it’s deliberate or delusional, the thought of such blatant deceit coming from the most powerful people in the world is not a comforting one.

Once More, with Feeling

How many times must it be said?

Iraq was not involved with al Qaeda.

Iraq was not involved with al Qaeda.

IRAQ WAS NOT INVOLVED WITH AL QAEDA!

For two years, an unvarying drumbeat of misinformation has poured out of the White House claiming that Iraq and al Qaeda were thick as thieves. Combined with the constant insinuation that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, it was a major selling point in the campaign to scare Americans into supporting the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. This was done over the protests of State Department and CIA analysts pointing out that no such connections have been shown to exist, and the secular Saddam Hussein and the Islamist Osama bin Laden were well known to loathe each other. Since the fall of Baghdad, no evidence of such a link has been discovered.

This minor inconvenience has failed to slow down the propaganda machine in any way. Indeed, as recently as this week, Vice President Cheney claimed that Hussein “had long established ties with al Qaeda.” President Bush dutifully backed him up, saying that the alleged post-invasion presence in Iraq of al Qaeda deputy Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi constitutes “the best evidence of [Iraqi] connection to al Qaeda affiliates and al Qaeda.” The conservative media, especially William Kristol’s Weekly Standard magazine and the NewsMax.com website, have valiantly attempted to flog this particular dead horse, insisting that Hussein and bin Laden were bosom buddies.

Now the 9/11 commission, aided by testimony from senior FBI and CIA analysts, has added its weight to this debunking, having failed to uncover any credible evidence of Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration. While finding that al Qaeda did make overtures to Iraq (among other countries, including Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan) asking for training camps and weapons, those overtures were ignored. The supposed and much-ballyhooed April 2001 meeting in Prague between lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent never happened. Iraq was not involved with 9/11 in any way.

So a central pillar of the Bush Administration’s argument for invading Iraq has been discredited – again. Every time Bush or Cheney insists, in the face of all logic and facts, that Hussein and bin Laden were partners in jihad, they are further exposed as self-deluded liars who are utterly unable to deviate from a proven-false party line. The rationales to justify the war and the chaos which followed have grown fewer and fewer. But don’t expect any realization of that fact in the White House.

Remembering Reagan

When Ronald Reagan left the White House and retired from public life back in 1989, it was well known that at 78, he would not be as active an ex-President as others, from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter. When he announced in 1994 that he was suffering from the disease sadly nicknamed the Long Goodbye, Alzheimer’s sprang to the forefront of the public consciousness. And now that he is gone, we find ourselves looking back collectively.

Known as the Great Communicator, Reagan brought an almost royal classiness to the White House unseen since the days of JFK. Everything was white-tie, the finest china, the fanciest guest list. Reagan’s cheerful what-me-worry optimism was a decided change from Jimmy Carter’s often dour seriousness. He could always be counted upon to deliver a stern face or a comforting expression when called for, and as we are constantly reminded, he made America "feel good about itself again."

Unfortunately, that's not all he did.

Reagan also brought an air of selfishness and utter insensitivity to many issues. Whether it was declaring that ketchup was good enough as a vegetable for school lunches, announcing on Thanksgiving Day that unemployment benefits would be taxed, or never offering anything close to a balanced budget then blaming Congress for fiscal excess, the Reagan Administration too often displayed the uglier aspects of the “Me Decade.”

Reagan ignored the early years of the AIDS epidemic while cutting social spending to the bone and beyond, crippling health care, education, housing and other public services. His tax policies recklessly redistributed wealth upwards, increasing the number of families below the poverty line by a full third. His mania for deregulation paved the way for the savings and loan scandal, the bill for which you and I are still paying through our tax dollars.

He brought about an end to the Cold War by embarking on an uncontrolled arms race, forcing the Soviets to bankrupt their economy in a vain effort to keep up – and it was revealed only after the Soviet Union collapsed that its military was nowhere near the fearsome beast he claimed it was.

For someone who claimed to champion freedom across the globe, it should be noted that Reagan winked and said nothing when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians -- the very same atrocities which George W. Bush exhumed fifteen years later to justify invading Iraq. He was Our Man in Baghdad at the time, you see, and thus could do no wrong. It will be interesting to see how the commentators who now rush to heap posthumous praise on Reagan handle this little matter...but it's more likely that it will be simply ignored.

His anti-Communist “evil empire” rhetoric made its way into the popular culture of the 1980s, emerging in such gratuitously Soviet-bashing movies as Red Dawn, Invasion USA and Rocky IV as well as the TV miniseries Amerika. (It’s not like this was new to him. Back when he was head of the Screen Actors Guild, he was an FBI informer, ratting on his fellow thespians at the first hint of any political thought deemed unorthodox.)

But Reagan’s most lasting impact may well be not the tripling of the national debt nor the relentless government-is-the-enemy GOP mindset, but rather the transformation of the Presidency into an endless PR campaign. His handlers knew all too well that since Reagan the man was a genuinely nice guy, looked good on TV and could deflect inconvenient questions with a smile and a wave, Reagan the President could get away with almost anything. And so Reagan the President was able to push through policies that hurt children, the disabled, the sick, and the elderly – people who were usually incapable of fighting back – while Reagan the man stood above it all, untouchable.

Reagan was the Teflon President; nothing stuck to him. No matter how many policy disasters came about, from the secret wars of El Salvador and Nicaragua to the constitutional morass of Iran-Contra, he personally was never held accountable for anything. As House Speaker Tip O’Neill recounted in his memoirs, a constituent whose disability benefits had been cut came to him for help. As they discussed the problem, the constituent told O’Neill he was being too tough on Reagan and asked him to lay off. “Who do you think is cutting your benefits?” O’Neill asked, stunned. “It’s not him,” came the confident reply, “it’s the people around him.”

Reagan was the perfect figurehead President, delegating the actual responsibility to his staff while reserving the TV appearances for himself. No one else could have gotten away with blundering his way through a press conference with one misstatement and gaffe after another; no one else could have gotten away with looking strongly into the camera and blaming other people for his own mistakes.

And because of his personal appeal and charisma, he got away with it all. Once, in an inadvertently aired microphone test, he chose to quip, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” In the face of queasy public reaction, Reagan’s response, instead of admitting that nuclear annihilation might not be such a laughing matter after all, was to blame the media for reporting it in the first place. And people agreed, brushing it off as a tempest in a teapot rather than as a disturbing insight into the most powerful man on Earth.

After he left office, the conservative movement transformed him from a mere mortal into a full-fledged political saint, determined to name monuments and buildings after him in all fifty states, even trying to get his face added to Mt. Rushmore. The invocation of his name and memory was so powerful that when the conservative media pounced on rumors that CBS’ planned miniseries The Reagans was insufficiently worshipful, the network was scared into yanking it.

Reagan’s death has hastened this transformation, and the current media coverage tends to overlook the dark side of his Administration. Part of this is simply what normally happens when anyone dies: accentuate the positive while glossing over the bumpy parts. But we should not let this prevent a full and honest appraisal of his Presidency, no matter who it offends ideologically.

Back to the Gulag

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, the Communist government maintained the Gulag, a network of prisons and labor camps across the country (but mainly in the frozen tundra of Siberia) to hold anyone even remotely suspected of insufficient support for the Revolution, having the wrong ethnic identity, and other supposed offenses. (For a vivid depiction of life in the camps, from the endless cold and hunger to the helpless dread one felt at falling into this legal nowhere, I recommend Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.)

A half-century after Josef Stalin’s death, the United States is in grave danger of creating a Gulag of its own. Not in terms of below-freezing prisons in Alaska, but in terms of a legal black hole.

Two years ago, an American citizen and former gang member named Jose Padilla was arrested by federal agents after stepping off a plane in Chicago. In tandem with the White House, the Justice Department said he was an al Qaeda agent, unilaterally declared him to be an “enemy combatant,” and ordered him locked up in a Navy brig in North Carolina. Since then, he has been forbidden to see anyone, from his family to his lawyers, and has been under deep interrogation. He was never charged with any crime and was never put on trial for anything. He was just pronounced guilty and was made to disappear. (It takes a wry sense of irony to note that Padilla’s arrest and enemy-combatant designation was demagogically announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft in, of all places, Moscow.)

Now, the Justice Department has defended its handling of the Padilla case for the first time, and the way in which it has done so is astonishing. Deputy Attorney General James Comey held a press conference the other day at which he announced that Padilla planned to blow up apartment buildings and commit other crimes. Anticipating reporters’ questions, Comey freely said that if Padilla had been put on trial instead of being declared an enemy combatant, “he would very likely have followed his lawyer’s advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right. He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and hope – pray, really – that we didn’t lose him.” He also ominously said that “we’ll figure out down the road what we do with Jose Padilla.”

So the only way to deal with an American citizen who may or may not have been in league with al Qaeda was to make him disappear, that the right of any accused person not to be forced to testify against himself is little more than a technicality, and that Padilla would probably have been acquitted had he claimed that right? To me, this sounds an awful lot like an admission that a court case would likely have been painfully weak. But having invested a lot of political capital in proclaiming him to be a terrorist – especially by blaring accusations in a full press conference without ever bothering to give him any chance to respond – the Justice Department cannot now back away from it.

This is not, of course, to say that Padilla is without doubt an innocent victim of circumstance, blameless and pure. Far from it; we do not know for sure whether he actually committed any of the offenses of which he has been accused. All we have is the government’s claims that he did – and they refuse to put those claims to the test in court.

The American system of justice is based on the notion that anyone accused of wrongdoing is entitled to a fair trial at which the government would have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Dispensing with all that and just declaring someone to be guilty without even charging him with anything is, quite simply, un-American. The concept that the government has the unchallengeable power to take anyone, particularly an American citizen, and throw them in jail without charges, without a trial, and without end is nothing short of scary.

After two years in a legal limbo, Jose Padilla deserves a trial. If he is found guilty of being an al Qaeda terrorist-in-training, lock him up and throw away the key. If he is found innocent, set him free and allow him to get back to his life. But we will never know the truth unless the government is willing to make an actual case instead of just announcing him to be guilty. Doing anything else is a mockery of justice, plain and simple.

Busted!

Two months before America invaded Iraq last year, a particularly massive contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil infrastructure was awarded to Halliburton by the Army Corps of Engineers. The award was under most unusual circumstances: there was no competitive bidding and no ceiling to the payment amount, both of which were contrary to the usual process. In a nutshell, a multi-billion dollar contract was simply given away.

By a staggering coincidence, Halliburton’s CEO had left the company in 2000 to become Vice President of the United States. Despite Dick Cheney’s repeated denials that he had anything to do with the deal, there has always been more than a whiff of cronyism about it. (It did not help that since becoming Vice President, Cheney has annually received hundreds of thousands of dollars in “deferred compensation” from Halliburton.) It was blatantly obvious that Halliburton could never have gotten the contract under such conditions in a million years without its former boss now being VP, but it could never be proved.

Until now.

Time is now reporting that Cheney, far from keeping his old company at arm’s length, actively coordinated the sweetheart deal. The magazine obtained a copy of an internal E-mail message, dated March 5, 2003 and written by a Corps of Engineers official, saying that the contract had been approved and that the White House would be officially informed the next day.

“We anticipate no issue,” the message goes on to say, “since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP’s office.”

Cheney’s spokesman Kevin Kellems responded to the article by claiming the E-mail was just “a heads-up...in anticipation of controversy over the award of a sole-source contract to Halliburton.” This does not, however, sound like much of a heads-up to me. Rather, it says loud and clear that the deal was engineered to benefit Cheney’s old cronies, ethics be damned.

Anyone else would instantly recognize that it’s just plain wrong for a government official to be actively involved in the awarding of a contract to one’s former colleagues. The fact that the contract was awarded under such ludicrously favorable terms makes it all the more clear that Cheney simply doesn’t get it. Does he really believe that the rules don’t apply to him, that the normal ethics laws are, to steal a phrase from Leona Helmsley, “for little people?”

As the fiascos keep piling up with no end in sight, Cheney has become a major liability to the Bush re-election effort. But since this Administration never holds anyone in power accountable for anything, don’t expect any consequences.