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The Trust Gap
New York Times (NY) , Late Edition - Final ed , p13 , Sunday , February 12, 2006
We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers -- and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.
This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.
DOMESTIC SPYING -- After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it.
According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn't work that way. It's not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel.
THE PRISON CAMPS -- It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do.
On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantanamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world.
According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings.
And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president's whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous terrorists.
THE WAR IN IRAQ -- One of Mr. Bush's biggest "trust me" moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies.
But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.
When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before.
Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.
Copyright (c) 2006 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
２月１５日付「しんぶん赤旗」が要約記事を掲載しているので以下に転載しておく。
ＮＹタイムズ紙社説 “彼は信頼できない”
米ニューヨーク・タイムズ紙十二日付は、歴代大統領のなかでブッシュ氏ほど信頼できない大統領はいないと、米政権を痛烈に批判する社説を掲げました。
「信頼の断絶」と題する社説は、次のような書き出しです。「ジョージ・W・ブツシュほど頻繁に民主主義、司法手続き、(行政、司法、立法の)三権分立を忘れてくれ、ただ大統領を信用してくれと国民に求める大統領を知らない。彼ほど信頼できない大統領は思い出せない」
このような結論に達したのは、▽違法な盗聴を「合憲だ」と主張し、継続していく意思を表明した▽米グアンタナモ基地でテロ容疑者への虐待が継続されていた▽都合のいい情報だけを集めてイラク侵略を決定した ― ことが先週、相次いで明らかになったからだとしています。
盗聴問題では、六日の上院公聴会でゴンザレス司法長官が「国家の安全と市民の自由とは一線を画して」盗聴をしていると主張したことに対し、社説はその「一線」があいまいだと疑問を投げかけています。テロ容疑者への虐待については、ハンスト中の収容者を縛り付けたり、食べ物を無理やり食べさせていたことが九日、報道されました。社説は、「世界中から米国の信頼を損ねる暴挙だ」と言いきります。
社説はブッシュ政権の「都合のいい情報だけを集める」姿勢については『フォーリン・アフェアース』誌最新号の論評(別項)を紹介しました。
最後に社説は、ブッシュ政権が失態をごまかす手段として、「一つは常態化した情報操作。もう一つは、米国民主主義の中心である市民の自由、正当な法手続き、三権分立への攻撃」を挙げています。
【参考】
ＣＩＡ元分析官のポール・ピラー氏が「イラク開戦のために気に入った情報だけをつまみ食いした」と暴露した『フォーリン・アフェアーズ』（３・４月号）の電子版の冒頭部分
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85202-p0/paul-r-pillar/intelligence-policy-and-the-war-in-iraq.html
Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq
Paul R. Pillar
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006
Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.
PAUL R. PILLAR is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. Concluding a long career in the Central Intelligence Agency, he served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。