The Book of Bastards

by Brian Thornton

  BASTARD PARDONING … BASTARDS?

  The more controversial recipients of Clinton's pardons included his half-brother, Roger Clinton. The younger Clinton had served time in prison some ten years earlier on cocaine trafficking charges. Whitewater figure Susan McDougal was also pardoned, having spent more than a year-and-a-half in prison; she had refused to testify before Kenneth Starr's grand jury about Clinton's involvement in Whitewater. Two political allies of Clinton — former Illinois Congressmen Dan Rostenkowski and Mel Reynolds — also received pardons. Reynolds had been convicted of obstruction of justice, bank fraud, and sex crimes including solicitation of child pornography. Clinton reduced his sentence on the sex charges and allowed Reynolds to serve the rest of his time in a halfway house instead of prison.

  Rich's pardon raised eyebrows because of his large donations to the Democratic National Committee and to Clinton's presidential library foundation over the years. Clinton justified the pardon on the grounds that charges like those against Rich were typically dealt with in a civil not criminal court. Clinton made Rich agree that he would not use the pardon as a defense to any civil actions that may be brought against him in the United States should he choose to return.

  For all that, Clinton was still remarkably tone-deaf on this issue compared to his presidential peers. When the end of his own presidency drew near, George W. Bush did not pardon political donors petitioning for relief; he also did very little to protect his own office-holders facing their own looming legal problems. Bush even went so far as rebuffing Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated nagging about a possible pardon for one of his aides. Cheney hoped for a reprieve for his former Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, who was convicted on perjury charges.

  As of the time this book was written, Rich has not returned to the United States.

  88

  DICK CHENEY

  Torturer-in-Chief (1941– )

  “9/11 changed everything.”

  — Dick Cheney

  Longtime politician Dick Cheney has been the secretary of defense, the White House chief of staff, and the U.S. vice president. Cheney has also been a draftdodger, a liar, a warmonger, and a would-be demolisher of the U.S. Constitution.

  To say that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 “changed everything” is a gross understatement. 9/11 ushered in a new era of shoeless inspections, pat-down searches, bans of fingernail clippers, and even excessive liquids on flights. But far more worrisome for many Americans were other government responses to foreign terrorism: secret “no-fly lists,” extrajudicial detention and interrogation of terror suspects in secret CIA prisons and the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and stories of the government spying on its own citizens without a warrant. Talk of “enhanced interrogation methods” and “extraordinary renditions” has flooded the news. United States citizens have been held incommunicado on military bases as “unlawful enemy combatants,” and a host of other atrocities that most Americans consider abhorrent to their view of the Constitution have occurred in the years since 9/11. All of these factors have helped strain America's relationships with her allies at a time when she can ill-afford to do so.

  And all of them can be laid directly at Cheney's doorstep.

  As bad as these things are, however, none of them can compare to Cheney's attempted power-grab in the months that followed 9/11. Cheney did not merely try to circumvent the system of checks and balances put into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers. In fact the vice president tried to assume for himself the powers of a dictator; he wanted to be a man accountable to no one and subject to no one's oversight. If he had succeeded, he could have kept whatever secrets he wanted for as long as he damn well pleased.

  In 2003 Cheney began refusing to disclose the secrets his office was keeping to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). This directly violated an Executive Order issued by former President Bill Clinton in 1995 and reissued by President George W. Bush. The order required all offices within the executive branch to make their papers available to the NARA; it promoted transparency and allowed thorough public oversight of the government's actions.

  Cheney refused on the grounds that the orders did not apply to him; he was, after all, both vice president and president of the Senate, which placed him outside of the executive branch. If Cheney had his way, records of his involvement in many Bush administration scandals — from warrantless wiretapping to the administration's involvement, if any, in the Enron debacle — would never see the light of day.

  BASTARD TONGUE

  Cheney has been notoriously guarded and taciturn during most of his career. But he is also known for making blunt statements that the media loved to convert into sound bites, especially ones like “Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.” He even once told Senate Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont to “fuck off” right on the Senate floor.

  An open government watchdog group eventually sued in federal court to force Cheney's office to turn over its records. United States District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted the group's motion. She required Cheney's office to save its records and to turn them over to the NARA in due course. There's no telling what Cheney had already ordered shredded before Kollar-Kotelly's ruling.

  When John McCain lost the 2008 election, it was seen in part as a public vote against Cheney. People were fed up with his actions as vice president, his involvement in the Plame/Libby scandal, and his repeated executive branch power grabs. After leaving office the once-hard-to-pin-down Cheney has done a one-eighty. The former vice president has been all over the news, offering harsh criticism of his boss's successor, Barack Obama.

  “Dick Cheney is one of the most divisive — and disliked — political officials in memory … he just presided over the virtual collapse of the American economy and is directly implicated in severe war crimes and other pervasive criminality.”

  — Glenn Greenwald

  89

  COLIN POWELL

  “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and the Selling of the Iraq War (1937– )

  “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction. If biological weapons seem too terrible to contemplate, chemical weapons are equally chilling.”

  — Colin Powell

  Born in New York City to Jamaican immigrant parents, Colin Luther Powell is in many ways the embodiment of the American dream. He was the first African American to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to serve as both national security advisor and U.S. Secretary of State. A veteran with combat experience in Vietnam, he is also the architect of the Powell Doctrine, a view advocating the need for the use of overwhelming force in war. However, Powell will likely be best remembered by history for selling the need for the invasion of Iraq to the American public and to the United Nations.

  After the 9/11 attacks in 2001 the Bush administration set about recasting the Middle East in its preferred image. Invading Afghanistan and defeating Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies was not enough for the Bushies. They wanted another crack at Iraq, so they could “finish the job” that Dubya's “daddy,” the first President George Bush, started with the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

  How, then, to sell the American public on an invasion of Iraq?

  That task fell to U.S. Secretary of State Powell. He had chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Powell enjoyed enormous prestige as a result of his tour as chairman of the Joint Chiefs and was nothing if not knowledgeable about the region. Widely seen as a moderating influence in the administration, Powell did not share its hawkish view on Iraq. In fact, he felt that the economic sanctions against Iraq were already working to keep Saddam in check. Still, Bush's team sought support for an invasion and worked to assemble an international coalition to conduct it. So they twisted Powell's arm. Hard. />
  And on February 5, 2003, speaking before the UN Security Council, Colin L. Powell sold himself out. Relying on intelligence data that was later revealed to be untrustworthy at best and blatantly fabricated at worst, Powell told the UN Security Council:

  “We know from Iraq's past admissions that it has successfully weaponised not only anthrax, but also other biological agents, including botulinum toxin, aflatoxin, and ricin.

  But Iraq's research efforts did not stop there. Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox, and hemorrhagic fever, and he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox.”

  All of these claims were false. In its final report, the Iraq Survey Group said that Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs were destroyed in 1991. In fact, the report said, Saddam was first and foremost concerned with ending the UN sanctions; he maintained those programs as an afterthought.

  The speech cost Powell all of his considerable credibility, and it turned out to be for nothing. When the UN Security Council refused to pass such a resolution despite Powell's speech to them, America invaded anyway.

  About a year later, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card asked Powell to resign. Bush replaced him with the more “compliant” Condoleezza Rice.

  Powell has since distanced himself from the Bush administration, with mixed results. In 2008 he crossed party lines and endorsed Barack Obama for president; he continues to advocate on behalf of the troops he once represented as Joint Chiefs chair. However, that does not change the fact that his speech to the UN in 2003 helped put these same troops in harm's way.

  “You didn't tell the truth about the war in the Gulf, general!”

  — Ron Kovic

  90

  GEORGE W. BUSH

  The Rush to Judgment (1946– )

  “There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”

  — George W. Bush

  The grandson of a senator, descended from two blue-blooded New England families, and the son of a president, George Walker Bush grew up sucking a Texas-sized silver spoon. Early in life Bush was the picture of the wastrel son of privilege, a failure in business, and initially in politics. During the 1990s Bush used part-ownership of a major league baseball team to pave his way into the governorship of Texas. Less than a decade later, after one of the closest and most bitterly divisive campaigns in American history, he won the presidential election of 2000.

  Once in office, Bush set about making radical changes to the U.S. government. He cut taxes several times and relaxed government regulation of everything from environmental protection to lobbying. After the terror attacks of 2001, he and his supporters decided it was time to begin making equally radical changes overseas.

  In order to do this, the Bushies reasoned, a rogue nation in the heart of the Arab world needed to be conquered and converted into a showpiece of representative democracy. There seemed no other choice than Iraq, especially since invading that country would be an opportunity to “finish” what Bush's father had started with Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

  Team Bush began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq at the beginning of 2002. Over the summer, news reports about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs kept trickling in. Ultimately, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. It cited the WMDs, Saddam's alleged harboring of Al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as his sorry human rights record as justification. The die was cast. Whether or not the UN agreed to go along, America was going to invade Iraq.

  Seven years later, the Iraq War has cost the United States billions in treasure and thousands of lives, not to mention over 100,000 Iraqi lives as well. Although he has many sins to answer for, this one is surely the darkest stain on the stunted soul of George Walker Bush.

  So why didn't he back out when he had the chance? According to former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Bush was “a leader unable to acknowledge that he got it wrong, and unwilling to grow in office by learning from his mistake — too stubborn to change and grow.” McClellan identified several roots of the problem:

  “[Bush]'s fear of appearing weak … a more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure.”

  “The personal pain he would have suffered if he'd had to acknowledge that the war against Saddam may have been unnecessary…. [He] was not one to look back once a decision was made. Rather than suffer any sense of guilt and anguish, Bush chose not to go down the road of self-doubt or take on the difficult task of honest evaluation and reassessment.”

  “[A]nother motive for Bush to avoid acknowledging mistakes was his determination to win the political game at virtually any cost.”

  “Bush's insistence on remaining true to his base…. As far as Bush and his advisers (especially Karl Rove) were concerned, being open and forthright in such circumstances was a recipe for trouble.”

  “You start to pity [Bush] until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.”

  — Frank Rich

  91

  JOHN YOO

  A Torquemada for All Americans (1967– )

  “Congress's definition of torture … the infliction of severe mental or physical pain — leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation.”

  — John Yoo

  “A lawyer in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Korean-born and Pennsylvania-raised John Choon Yoo was the principal author of the Bybee Memos. More formally known as the Interrogation Opinion, the collection of letters to the CIA was named for their signatory, Bush administration lawyer and now U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee.

  Yoo wrote them in response to a CIA request for advice on how far interrogators could legally go in their questioning of terrorism suspects. What he wrote was a fifty page memo that claimed to define “torture,” under both United States and international law:

  “Acts inflicting, and that are specifically intended to inflict, severe pain or suffering, whether mental or physical … [w]e further conclude that certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to [constitute torture].

  Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture … it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years. We conclude that mental harm also must result from one of the predicate acts listed in the statute, namely: threats of imminent death; threats of infliction of the kinds of pain that would amount to physical torture; infliction of such physical pain as a means of psychological torture; use of drugs or other procedures designed to deeply disrupt the senses, or fundamentally alter an individual's personality; or threatening to do any of these things to a third party …. We conclude that the statute, taken as a whole, makes plain that it prohibits only extreme acts.”

  In a later Bybee memo, the OLC expressed its opinion on ten techniques to be used to question “high value detainee” Abu Zubaydah as part of an “increased pressure phase.” These techniques included face slapping; slamming against a wall; sleep deprivation for up to seventy-two hours; stress positions designed to cause muscle fatigue; confinement in a dark box with insects; and waterboarding. The memo concluded that none of the techniques constituted torture.

  The memos prompted an investigation by the Justice Department's Professional Respons
ibility division into whether they could be considered competent legal advice. Many believe they only served to enable the administration to cover itself for actions it had already decided to take. Further, the memos could prove problematic for their authors when they travel abroad. Spain has already launched a war crimes investigation against those involved; it is expected to ask the United States for their extradition.

  Yeah. Good luck with that.

  As for John Yoo, where the terror memos don't seem to have hurt his former boss's career, his enthusiastic embrace of the legal “rebranding” of the notion of “torture” put a capper on his own career path in the Justice Department. He resigned in disgust at his being passed over repeatedly for promotion, and went back to teaching law.

  He continues to argue for the legality of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

  “This is the scum whose enthusiasm for torture and zeal for unfettered executive power is so extreme, he once responded to the theoretical question ‘If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?’ with ‘I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.’”