[NYTr] Olbermann: Presidency has devolved into a criminal conspiracy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

MSNBC - Nov 5, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21644133

SPECIAL COMMENT

By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires
cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency
of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to
cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare
stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic
questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop,
all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all
the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence
of his apologists...

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently
clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of
the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping
this mock president and this unstable vice president and this
departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others,
from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal
torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin
was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician.
He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly
patriotic American and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when
that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.

Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with
assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the
Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced
Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most
honest, way to evaluate them ... was to have them enacted upon
himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be
waterboarded.

Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous?

Perhaps when you've gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the
maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and
determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?

Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you've
spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the
sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And
then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who
disagreed with you, whether they were your own generals, or Max
Cleland, or Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, or Daniel Levin?

Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right
now.

Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general
nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George
Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at risk
for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.

And they waterboarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew
those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him
at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not
die  still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror
screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not
convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who
exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like
purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his
being that he wasn't drowning.

Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture!
Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote
it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words
of this country's 43rd president: "The United States of America ...
does not torture."

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal,
Mr. Bush.

Waterboarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a
couple of other men none of us really care about except for the one
detail you'd forgotten  that there are rules. And even if we just
make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because
we're Americans and we're better than that.

We're better than you.

And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or
not waterboarding was torture had decided, and not in some phony
academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire
of flight suit and helmet.

He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.

So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append
an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn't
black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of
torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician
entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to
set any rules or any guidelines.

And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous,
Daniel Levin was branded "too independent" and "someone who could
(not) be counted on."

In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn't count on to lie for
you.

So, Levin was fired.

Because if it ever got out what he'd concluded, and the lengths to
which he went to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned
waterboarding and who-knows-what-else on anybody, you yourself, you
would have been screwed.

And screwed you are.

It can't be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge
from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at
the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest attorney general
nominee.

Another patriot somewhere listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like
he'd never heard of waterboarding and refused to answer in words
that which Daniel Levin answered on a waterboard somewhere in
Maryland or Virginia three years ago.

And this someone also heard George Bush say, "The United States of
America does not torture," and realized either he was lying or this
wasn't the United States of America anymore, and either way, he
needed to do something about it.

Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave
way nonetheless.

We have U.S. senators who need to do something about it, too.

Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what
it is and said "enough."

Sen. Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece
in the New York political patronage system, and he has failed.

What Sen. Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in
rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.

It is obvious that both those senators should look to the meaning
of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey's
confirmation.

And they should look into their own committee's history and recall
that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard
Nixon a guarantee of a special prosecutor (ultimately a special
prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of
his new attorney general, Elliott Richardson.

If they could get that out of Nixon, before you confirm the president's
latest human echo on Tuesday, you had better be able to get a "yes"
or a "no" out of Michael Mukasey.

Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a
special prosecutor is appointed, or 50 of them, but I'm not holding
my breath. The "yes" or the "no" on waterboarding will have to
suffice.

Because, remember, if you can't get it, or you won't with the time
between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the
longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all
of us, to the waterboards, symbolic and otherwise, of George W.
Bush.

Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't who approved the
waterboarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.

It is: Why were they waterboarded?

Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed
that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead,
torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell
the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the
terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something
to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist
threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast
about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat
he didn't interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good
ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,

Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual
terrorist?

He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most
horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto
the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.

Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because
you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you
tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really
authentic-sounding fiction  well, then, you're going to need all
the lawyers you can find  because that crime wouldn't just mean
impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden
explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in
their exact progressions.

Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently
patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to vanish,
and him with it.

Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old
car trying to start on a freezing morning to undo eight centuries
of the forward march of law and government.

Thus Dick Cheney has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do
or do not use any particular interrogation technique would somehow
help the terrorists.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the
high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a
question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which
merely concerns the theoretical definition of waterboarding as
torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency,
this whole string of events has been transformed.

>From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the
lives and safety of the American people ... into the most efficient
and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this
country's history ... and, then, to the giddying prospect that you
could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930s and
remake a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining
that the fascism would be nearly invisible.

But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash,
the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try
to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand
disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like
Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true
freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but
because of dreams and morals.

And ultimately these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they
will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its
rightful owners, the people.

 2007 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21644133/

 2007 MSNBC.com