Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: NYT. Pillar chiude la bara di Bush

http://www.unknownnews.org/060214a-MrChuckles.html
Editorial, The New York Times
Feb. 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 Guantánamo 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.

 
...ma solo nel mondo dei suoi sogni :)
-Stefano

 Feb. 12, 2006
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bell'articolo. 
ma resta la domanda : alla luce di tutto cio' (e imho l'articolista non ha
calcato troppo la mano sulla vicenda 9/11 dove molte sono le zone d'ombra
sul come ha operato l'amministrazione) come e' possibile che i democratici
non chiedono le dimissioni di Bush?
-- 
 
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