Tomgram: George Does Ethics in the White House

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: We are in such an age of extremity that perfectly sane people can mistake satire for reality. I've run into this before in my modest attempts at humor (with angry or confused letters to follow), and yet the absurd bubble-extremity of the Bush administration sometimes cries out -- at least so it seems to me -- for a less than sober and analytic response. As today. So consider yourself warned. Tom]


The White House Ethics Lesson
From the Hope Springs Eternal Department
By Tom Engelhardt

We are at -- for the time being at least -- the bargain-basement, fire-sale moment in Bush administration fortunes. The President's approval ratings have entered something close to free-fall; as the least popular U.S. president in Latin American history, he was harried across the Southern continent last week by crowds of protestors and various heads of state who insisted on beginning formal dinners after his normal bedtime; his Vice President is beleaguered; the Vice-Presidential chief of staff indicted; Karl Rove, the President's "architect," under investigation; Tom DeLay part-way down the tubes; Social Security "reform" crumpled in the corner; Senate Majority Leader Frist blindsided by a one-eyed trust; W! hite House counsel Harriet Miers shot down by trusted allies; a seamy lobbying scandal spreading fast; the President coattail-less in Virginia; and uppity Republican Senators insisting on a no-torture amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill -- and that's just where the list begins.

The question for Washington insiders is this: Has the administration reached a "tipping point"? After all these dark months, is there a gleam of light at tunnel's end? As it happens, the first faint glow may have appeared in a story, Pentagon Plans Tighter Control of Interrogation, on the front page of my morning New York Times. Reporters Eric Schmitt and Tim Golden inform us that the Pentagon has suddenly approved a "policy directive governing interrogations as part of an effort to tighten controls over the questioning of terror suspects and other prisoners by American soldiers" -- a decision that will "allow the Army to issue a long-delayed field manual for interrogators that is supposed to incorporate the lessons gleaned from the prisoner-abuse scandals last year."

Some might imagine that, in its timing, a directive issued under the pressure of Vice President Cheney's image-cracking campaign to derail any Geneva Convention-style language in Pentagon documents, fight off Senator McCain's anti-torture amendment, and (at the very least) retain a torture exemption for the CIA might have been purely cosmetic. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman insisted otherwise to the Times, and in this case the Pentagon should be given the benefit of the doubt.

After all, it takes time to "glean" hard lessons from complex reality, especially when your top officials are out of the information loop. Striking evidence of this came only the other day from Knight Ridder columnist Joseph Galloway (awarded a bronze star for his service in Vietnam), who has regularly attacked Defense Secretary Rumsfeld for his handling of the war in Iraq. Invited to lunch with the Donald and various generals, Galloway found himself besieged by a Pentagon chief eager to get at the hidden truth of things. Rumsfeld almost immediately confronted him. "I'm not hearing anything like the things you are writing about," he told the columnist. What he wanted to know was "why he himself wasn't hearing all the negative st! uff about the lack of progress in Iraq and the military grumblings that the writer was picking up on." Those of us outside Washington's Beltway world are at a disadvantage in gauging the depth of Rumsfeld's problems because we can read about "lack of progress in Iraq" any day of the week. Not so him.

It's not surprising then that "lessons gleaned" from the twelve official investigations the Pentagon has launched into the Abu Ghraib scandal and the abuse of prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantanamo were slow to rise to the highest levels of government. Remember, these investigations also represented a documentary traffic jam of monumental proportions, leaving the busy Rumsfeld with the near-impossible task of reading thousands upon thousands of pages of none-too-relaxing reports.

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