Karl Rove has a reputation as a political genius. There’s a very good argument that this is absurd. Under his guidance an incumbent war-president with a strong economy won a bare 51% of the vote against a weak opponent, and is now facing a mid-term electoral rout. But no one need doubt Rove is tough and, when necessary, scruple-free.
One of his signature methods is taking a weakness of his own candidate and proclaiming it a strength. He pulls an Orwell. So in 2004 the presidential candidate who avoided Vietnam — George Bush — ran on being a military hero and the candidate with the war medals — John Kerry — found himself trashed as a coward and a fraud.
Last week we saw the classic Rovian contours for the November campaign. The Republicans are going to run on Guantanamo Bay. No, I’m not hallucinating. The evidence was in the president’s speech last Wednesday. The headlines trumpeted that Bush had finally admitted the existence of secret CIA black sites in eastern Europe, and that the American military would henceforth be barred from using any coercive interrogation techniques. That is all true.
But the real news was something different. The president simultaneously sent to Capitol Hill a bill that would legalise the military tribunals the Supreme Court had found unconstitutional in June, allow an elite squad of the CIA to continue Geneva-banned coercive interrogations, and grant retroactive legal impunity to all civilian officials who had authorised torture and war crimes since 9/11.
Among the techniques now banned in the military, used against prisoners in the “black sites” and still reserved for potential use by the CIA are the following: “waterboarding”, that is, tying a prisoner to a plank and pouring water through a cloth over his face so he feels as if he is drowning; induced hypothermia by keeping prisoners naked in cold cells and covering them in water; forcing prisoners to stand indefinitely by tying their wrists to ceilings or posts; and sleep deprivation for up to two months.
How does this help the Republican campaign? Without describing them, Bush’s speech essentially said that without these interrogation techniques thousands of Americans would have been murdered, and so they have to be retained as options by the CIA. Wouldn’t this violate the Geneva conventions and American law, as the Supreme Court found? Under any rational interpretation, yes. But Bush has asserted that these techniques are not “torture” as he defines it and if Congress goes along with this, such techniques become legal with the president’s signature.
The push for passage in the months before the election is intense. Last Thursday Bill Frist, the Republican leader of the Senate, even threatened to bypass a committee of three resistant, constitutionalist Republican senators (John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham) to get the measure to the Senate floor and force the Democrats to “side with the terrorists”.
The rationale is clear. In the week of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 the president wants to change the debate from Iraq, from Iran, from the past and position himself once again as the indispensable protector. It’s territory he knows and feels secure on: goading the opposition as appeasers and terror lovers.
But Bush had one more ace to play. Here’s the critical quote from the speech: “We’re now approaching the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — and the families of those murdered that day have waited patiently for justice. They should have to wait no longer. So I’m announcing today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and 11 other terrorists in CIA custody have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay . . . As soon as Congress acts to authorise the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans can face justice.”
So any congressional resistance to Bush’s war crimes and military tribunal bill will be depicted as delaying justice for the perpetrators of 9/11. The choice in the November elections will be described as being between breaching the Geneva conventions or backing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Will it work? That remains to be seen — but what was striking last week was how strong the opposition was from leading Republicans and the military. That doesn’t make for the kind of partisan split Rove wants to exploit. Well, no one said he was smart. Just brutal.
It is, of course, a phoney choice. In reality the detention policies pursued by Bush have made prosecution of many of the 9/11 perpetrators much more difficult.
Evidence procured by torture cannot be permitted in a trial without destroying centuries of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. Moreover, most American military lawyers believe the long-established procedures under the code of military justice are far preferable to the kangaroo courts devised by Bush.
As for the torture techniques, the army deputy chief of staff for intelligence testified last week that “no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that”. Who are we to believe? The president or the army? It’s also clear Bush’s policy is a PR disaster. The trial of monsters like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could be a great propaganda weapon for the West. But only if the trials are seen to be fair and open and in line with Anglo-American justice. If the trials violate the Geneva conventions then the PR victory goes to Al-Qaeda.
Surely the president knows this. The most generous interpretation is that he believes that torture has worked in getting intelligence from suspected terrorists; and that interrogation techniques perfected by Stalin’s secret police are not violations of the Geneva conventions. He may simply have persuaded himself that he hasn’t authorised what he has plainly authorised. I’m not sure what level of psychological denial this amounts to; but it is unnerving in a president of the most powerful country on earth.
The more realistic interpretation is more depressing. It is that Bush knows exactly what he’s doing, believes torture works, wants to cement it in law and simultaneously wants to declare the US is still in compliance with Geneva. Squaring this circle requires that his semantic distinction between “coercive interrogation techniques” and “torture” will become conventional wisdom.
For good measure, he must also see this as a political gamble. He has seen the polls — and they are grim for the Republicans. The only way to turn this around is a striking initiative — and returning to the prosecution of the 9/11 criminals is about as good as it gets.
The stakes are high. If the Democrats gain the House or Senate in November, congressional investigations into the torture policy could begin, and no one knows where that might lead. So Bush’s war crimes bill is designed to do two things: recast the campaign as one in which only the Republicans are serious about terrorism, and pass legislation that can retroactively protect Bush officials from any future war crime prosecutions.
In the next two months the president is fighting for what remains of his political life. This much we now know: he is not going down without a struggle.
