- Responding to the most serious questions we confront
as a nation, the Bush administration can routinely be expected to hide,
obfuscate and deceive. If credible information indicates that high-ranking
government and military officials permitted and even encouraged the horrific
abuse of foreign detainees, the administration assures us that a few bad
soldiers can be blamed. If honest statistics indicate that the "war
on terror" is achieving less than advertised, the administration buries
the report in which those numbers are traditionally published.
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- Twice within a single week, in a telling coincidence,
the administration displayed its dogged commitment to concealment. On April
15, the State Department admitted that it plans to withhold the data on
terrorist incidents compiled for the annual, Congressionally mandated report,
Patterns of Global Terrorism, which the department must release at the
end of the month. And on April 22, the Army celebrated the first anniversary
of the exposure of the Abu Ghraib scandal by announcing that an internal
investigation had "exonerated" four senior officers responsible
for military prisons in Iraq, despite previous findings of culpability.
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- In neither instance was the government's soothing voice
believable. In both instances, independent voices spoke out almost instantly
to discredit the government's bland assurances. In a free society, lying
still incurs at least that much risk.
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- The Army's effort to limit prosecution to a group of
enlisted personnel -- and to discipline only a single officer, Brig. Gen.
Janis Karpinski -- was thoroughly rebutted by a new report from the diligent,
nonpartisan monitors at Human Rights Watch. Their detailed, 95-page report
-- titled Getting Away with Torture? -- was released on April 24. It's
well worth reading in its entirety (hrw.org reports/2005/us0405), but its
essential message is that while justice is brought to bear on the miscreants
at the bottom, a "wall of impunity" protects those at the top.
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- "Evidence is mounting that high-ranking U.S. civilian
and military leaders -- including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
former CIA Director George Tenet, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, formerly
the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the
former commander of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- made decisions
and issued policies that facilitated serious and widespread violations
of the law," the report charges. "The circumstances strongly
suggest that they either knew or should have known that such violations
took place as a result of their actions. There is also mounting data that,
when presented with evidence that abuse was in fact taking place, they
failed to act to stem the abuse."
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- Generals Sanchez and Miller are among the officers whom
the Army inspector general just exonerated; and, of course, the President
has publicly praised (and rehired) Mr. Rumsfeld, while awarding the Medal
of Freedom to Mr. Tenet. To restore honor and integrity, Human Rights Watch
recommends appointment of a special counsel and independent commission
to investigate torture, apportion responsibility, report findings and prosecute
when warranted.
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- As for State's annual terrorism report, which has been
issued every year for decades, the department's spokespersons insist that
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice omitted the usual numbers about incidents
and casualties for purely bureaucratic reasons. Those numbers will henceforth
be compiled and analyzed by the National Counterterrorism Center. But the
spokespersons couldn't say when or whether those figures will ever be released
to the public and the press.
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- The real reason for withholding the numbers, according
to independent experts, is that they don't support the boasts of the Bush
administration. Larry C. Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at
the C.I.A. and the State Department, reported on his Web log that the raw
data already has leaked out -- and didn't look very good.
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- What the State Department terms "significant incidents"
rose from 175 attacks in 2003 to 655 in 2004. Nearly one-third of those
incidents occurred in Iraq, but that total only includes attacks on foreign
aid workers and American civilians -- not on Iraqi civilians or U.S. military
personnel.
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- As Mr. Johnson explained, the State Department "didn't
want to have to explain to the press why they're 'winning' the war on terror,
but the numbers are the highest ever in the 37 years since they've been
reporting the data. If terrorist incidents had dropped 50 per cent, do
you think they'd be eliminating the report?"
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- Last year, the same State Department report hailed the
administration's triumphs against terrorism. Ranking officials held a special
press conference, with colorful charts and graphs, to announce its cheery
findings. Unfortunately, the report turned out to be so badly marred by
wrong statistics and false conclusions that then-Secretary Colin Powell
withdrew the document and had it rewritten. The real numbers were considerably
less uplifting -- which seems to be true this year, too. So now the government
will simply withhold the data.
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- The Bush administration clearly doesn't believe that
the American public can handle the truth about terror and torture. What
we have to ask ourselves is why they're so confident that we will accept
anything less. Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer and Salon.com,
and is the author of Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How
It Distorts the Truth.
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- COPYRIGHT (c) 2005 THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
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- http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18963
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