Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the 26th in his new series on the Obama era.
‘…the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporal advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief’
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
It’s diverting to watch the felons who occupied the White House during the Bush administration, breaking all manner of US and international law, scrambling now to avoid prosecution.
Bush himself, and Rumsfeld, have sought cover in silence, hoping thereby (not very realistically) to stay under the radar of investigators prying into their abandonment of habeas corpus and their erection of a far-flung gulag of torture camps. Condoleezza Rice has been trying to tiptoe away into academia (though last week Stanford students cornered her and elicited from her several blurted out lies about her administration’s torture programme). Colin Powell has been assiduously courting Obama.
No so Dick Cheney.
The ex-Vice-President has clearly placed his hope of avoiding prosecution in another successful terrorist attack on US soil – and soon! If that would only happen, Cheney thinks (perhaps accurately), a newly-terrified US electorate will lose its appetite for the current ‘carping’ about ‘enhanced interrogation’ by Congressional Democrats and the liberal media; and in fact, directed by him, Cheney, will blame Obama for having made America vulnerable.
To this end, the famously uncommunicative Cheney has been appearing on the airwaves, as regularly as rain flies after rain, to insist that ‘his’ administration kept America safe for seven years after 9/11 (no mention of the fact that it was also his administration that blatantly ignored dire CIA warnings, in the months before 9/11, that a major terrorist attack on US soil was imminent); that his administration’s torture programme (which was never ‘really’ torture) produced vital intelligence that saved “thousands” of American lives; and that by dismantling elements of that programme, Obama is “putting American lives at risk.”
All this should be laughably dismissible. Cheney has a record of consistently lying to the American people (Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, eg) and of being dead wrong in his predictions concerning the Iraq war (“We’ll be greeted as liberators,” etc), the latter error at a cost, so far, of over 4,000 real American lives (and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives as well; not that those matter, of course).
Instead, strange things have been happening.
One is that Cheney’s hyper-visibility now has retroactively elevated him, in the consciousness of most Americans, to the status of ex-President rather than Vice. When, last Thursday, Obama gave a major speech, eloquently pressing his view that America’s security needn’t be bought at the price of America’s ideals (yet dropping a bombshell of lawless intent right in the middle of those pious words, as we shall see), Cheney was repeating his attacks, in the sharpest terms yet, on Obama’s “dangerous weakness” to a neo-con audience. And when the US television media reporting on these speeches resorted to split screens, a fiction crucial to the success of Cheney’s gambit was visually established. These were no longer the current elected President of the US and the unelected ex-vice-president of a former regime. These were two men, two voices, on a par!
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you President Obama on the left, and President Cheney on the right! Now you decide between them!
It was an astonishing piece of contrived theatre. The ex-Vice-Presi-dent was more important now than he had ever been under Bush!
Even more ominously, Cheney’s dogged fear-mongering has been working. Polls show that most Ameri-cans now think waterboarding and other forms of torture should be retained by the Obama administration if America is to be kept safe. It’s hard to think of a more depressing proof of how short the shelf-life of America’s ‘new mood of idealism’ has turned out to be.
But here’s the dreariest fact of all: Cheney’s passionate fear-mongering has also been working on Obama himself!
In no time at all, it’s clear, the new President, who till recently saw rescuing the US economy as both his overriding concern and the effort by which he would be judged by the electorate in 2012, has had his mind re-focused (by Dick Cheney!) on the mortal threat which another terrorist attack on US soil would pose to his administration. And in his efforts to contain this new threat, not just to Americans but to his own political fortunes, lies an appalling tale of woe for Obama supporters.
In a word, Obama has reversed himself and decided to retain so many elements of the lawless Bush-Cheney programmes and policies that Republicans have been able both to praise him for ‘coming to his senses’ and, at the same time, to jeer at him for being ‘weak.’
Obama continues to oppose the investigation of the Bush regime’s torture programme, though all this has resulted in so far is him losing control of the debate. He has invoked the Bush ‘state secrets’ policy; retained its warrantless wiretapping; announced last week that Guantanamo’s military trials of suspected terrorists will resume; and reneged on his pledge to release thousands more photos of Iraqis’ abuse at the hands of their US jailors.
Last Thursday, in the midst of his eloquent paean to re-establishing America’s respect for the law, he announced a new policy that shocked liberals and human rights’ watch groups alike: a policy of preemptive detention; snatching and incarcerating (indefinitely, without trial) anyone, anywhere, suspected of planning hostile acts towards the US.
Understand: we are not talking here about a ‘conspiracy’ to attack the US, a crime for which adequate legal remedies exist (and which four black and Arab New Yorkers were charged with last week). Obama is talking about a radical expansion of the Bush practice of ‘disappearing’ suspected terrorists; radical because, while the Bush policy at least claimed to interdict suspected terrorists after they’d committed their terrorist acts, Obama now wants to seize them (and to hold them indefinitely, without recourse to trial) before they’ve done anything illegal.
(As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pointed out, this was in fact the plot of the Tom Cruise thriller, Minority Report.)
It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the dream of restitution of the US to the community of law-abiding nations, a dream which Candidate Obama claimed to embody, is now dead. The ugly, Bush America has come slamming back; and, for all his hi-falutin’ words, its new pied piper (pushed into a corner by the Darth Vader of American politics, Dick Cheney!) is none other than the Golden Boy.
