When Matt Lauer asked George W. Bush about waterboarding, he glibly said that lawyers had told him that it was legal, it had saved lives, and that was the end of it. When Lauer asked Bush about Abu Ghraib, Bush told him something different:
LAUER: It was the spring of 2004 when you first learned that American soldiers operating as guards at a prison called Abu Gharib had terribly mistreated prisoners. Can you just give me your first reaction, your first emotions when you heard the--
BUSH: Yeah, I--
LAUER: --news?
BUSH: Sick to my stomach. Not only have they mistreated prisoners, they had disgraced the U.S. military and stained our good name.
LAUER: You said you felt blindsided?
BUSH: Yeah. I-- because I wasn't aware of the graphic nature of the pictures until later on. And some people in the White House expressed that (laughs) my view into the newspapers, which then caused Secretary Rumsfeld to come in and offer his resignation.
Either Bush is being dishonest here, or he's got a weak stomach for his own policies. Last year's Senate Armed Services Committee report made clear those iconic pictures at Abu Ghraib reflected interrogation practices established by his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld:
In his report of his investigation into Abu Ghraib, Major General George Fay said that interrogation techniques developed for GTMO became "confused" and were implemented at Abu Ghraib. For example, Major General Fay said that removal of clothing, while not included in CJTF-Ts SOP, was "imported" to Abu Ghraib, could be ''traced through Afghanistan and GTMO," and contributed to an environment at Abu Ghraib that appeared "to condone depravity and degradation rather than humane treatment of detainees." Major General Fay said that the policy approved by the Secretary of Defense on December 2, 2002 contributed to the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib in late 2003.
The facts beg a very obvious question -- why was torturing detainees at Gitmo an act of heroism, while torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib an act of moral depravity, a disgrace to America's good name?
The answer seems obvious -- in the case of Abu Ghraib, Americans, faced with visual evidence of torture, recoiled. Fortunately for Bush, the CIA destroyed the visual documentation of their torturous interrogations, and those responsible will never be held to account. But there's no genuine moral distinction here between what happened at Abu Ghraib and what happened at the black sites, or at Gitmo, that would justify being horrified by one and not the others. The lesson that was learned, by that administration and this one, is that the crime is worse than the cover-up. So cover it up.
Bush's obsession with Kanye West's admittedly misguided remarks is a reminder of the former presidents' sheer callousness -- having presided over the worst foreign attack on American soil since the war of 1812, the moment of his presidency that occupies his thoughts years later is a verbal slight from an entertainer. But this moment is far more disturbing -- he lays the blame for America's disgrace at the feet of soldiers who adopted his interrogation policies, while eliding any responsibility for his administration having approved them in the first place. Then he brags about their effectiveness in a different context, expecting to be recognized as a hero. The overriding issue for Bush in both cases are his own feelings.
My objections to the national-security policies of the current White House are legion, but we should all be relieved this man is no longer there.
