quite the opposite Roxxanne.. in fact Brown has been invited on a luxury vacation junket all expenses paid.... first stop... a hunting trip with Dick Cheney.....
Would you buy a car from this man?
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 long been a central flaw of Bush's presidency. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.
Domestic spying: After 9/11, Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of people 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 Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it.
According to 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 U.S. 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. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. 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, Gonzales knew Bush was doing just that.
The prison camps: It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the abuses at U.S. military prison camps. There have been congressional hearings, court rulings and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. 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.
Last week, The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune reported that U.S. military authorities had taken to force-feeding prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes 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 Guantánamo. 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 Guantánamo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. 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 Guantánamo is filled with dangerous terrorists.
The war in Iraq: One of 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 forthcoming 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 Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion.
When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, 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 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.
