AP's Past in Print » george w bush

t r u t h o u t ~ Ex-Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent

AP — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:16:20 +0000

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report ~ Orignially Published, 9 April 2010

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: amarine88, Bebopsmile,ImageAbstraction, JoesSistah...)

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the “worst of the worst.”

During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, “all of whom were captured on a battlefield,” are “terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden's] body guards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th hijacker, 9/11 hijacker.”

Click here to listen to Truthout’s Jason Leopold discuss this story on The Peter B. Collins show (mp3).

But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.

And so did then Vice President Dick Cheney when he said, also in 2002 and in dozens of public statements thereafter, that Guantanamo prisoners “are the worst of a very bad lot” and “dangerous” and “devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort.”

Now, in a sworn declaration obtained exclusively by Truthout, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush’s first term in office, said Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld knew the “vast majority” of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.

“By late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review,” Wilkerson’s declaration says. “Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantánamo. By that time, I also understood that the deliberate choice to send detainees to Guantánamo was an attempt to place them outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system.”

He added that it became “more and more clear many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military.”

For Cheney and Rumsfeld, and “others,” Wilkerson said, “the primary issue was to gain more intelligence as quickly as possible, both on Al Qaeda and its current and future plans and operations but increasingly also, in 2002-2003, on contacts between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s intelligence and secret police forces in Iraq.”

“Their view was that innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader war on terror and the capture of the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks, or other acts of terrorism,” Wilkerson added. “Moreover, their detention was deemed acceptable if it led to a more complete and satisfactory intelligence picture with regard to Iraq, thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country.”

Documents have been released over the past year that showed how in 2002 several high-value detainees were tortured and forced to make statements that linked Iraq to al-Qaeda and 9/11, which the Bush administration cited as intelligence to support its invasion of the country in March 2003. But the confessions were utterly false.

Wilkerson’s declaration was made in support of a lawsuit filed by Adel Hassan Hamad, a 52-year-old former Guantanamo detainee who is suing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Joint Chief of Staff Richard Myers, and a slew of other Bush administration officials for wrongfully imprisoning and torturing him.

Hamad was arrested in his apartment in Pakistan in July 2002, rendered to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan for three months, where he says he was tortured, and then transferred to Guantanamo, where he was interrogated daily and subjected to even more torture by US military personnel.

At Bagram, according to Hamad’s lawsuit, “dogs were set upon [him] while watching United States military personnel laughed and mocked him.” Moreover, he was forced to stand for three days without “sleep or food” and eventually collapsed. He was then sent to a hospital where it took him two weeks to recover.

“Mr. Hamad was not given notice of the basis for his detention until more than two years after first being detained, when a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) was convened in November 2004,” according to the lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle earlier this week. “Not until March 2005, nearly three full years after initially being detained, was Mr. Hamad officially labeled an ‘enemy Combatant’ by the flawed CSRT process,” according to the lawsuit.

“However, this determination drew a rare dissenting opinion that acknowledged his enemy combatant status determination was unwarranted and, as such, would have ‘unconscionable results,’” the lawsuit states. “The basis for Mr. Hamad’s enemy combatant determination was simply because of his association as an employee of two organizations for whom he had done humanitarian and charity work (one of which he had left years before), and nothing more.

“In fact, a second CSRT was ordered for Mr. Hamad in November of 2007, one month before he was ultimately released to the Sudan. This was unusual, and indicates that the government recognized that the initial CSRT determination of Mr. Hamad was not accurate.”

While Hamad was detained, his wife gave birth to a daughter who died some time later because the family did not have any money to pay for medical care. He has five other children.

Since he has been released, Hamad says he suffers from emotional, physical and psychological injuries and he is seeking undisclosed compensatory and punitive damages. Similar lawsuits against former Bush administration officials, however, have been dismissed in other jurisidictions.

Wilkerson said he “made a personal choice to come forward and discuss the abuses that occurred because knowledge that I served in an Administration that tortured and abused those it detained at the facilities at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere and indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons has marked a low point in my professional career and I wish to make the record clear on what occurred.”

“I am also extremely concerned that the Armed Forces of the United States, where I spent 31 years of my professional life, were deeply involved in these tragic mistakes. I am willing to testify in person regarding the content of this declaration, should that be necessary,” he added.

Gwynne Skinner, an assistant professor of clinical law at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon and a member of Hamad’s legal team, said WIlkerson’s declaration was originally intended to be filed in support of Hamad’s habeas corpus case, which was still pending in federal court in Washington, DC, along with more than 100 others, even though Hamad and the other former Guantanamo prisoners have already been released.

But US District Court Judge Thomas Hogan dismissed the cases, stating the former prisoners’ transfers rendered their habeas lawsuits moot. Attorneys for the detainees were upset because they had hoped the court would make a decision that would ultimately clear the peitioners’ names, lift travel restrictions, and the stigma that comes from being detained at Guantanamo.

Still, Skinner said Wilkerson’s declaration is signficant because it marks the first time a Bush administration official is willing to state, under oath, that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others knew many of the prisoners were innocent when they were sent to Guantanamo.

Wilkerson said detainees like Hamad were of little concern to Cheney.

The Office of Vice President Dick Cheney “had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them,” Wilkerson said in the 9-page declaration. Cheney’s position, Wilkerson asserted, “could be summed up as ‘the end justifies the means.’”

Cheney, and his daughter Liz, have been vocal critics of President Obama’s efforts to shut down Guantanamo. Obama signed an executive order immediately after he was sworn into office and set a one-year deadline to close the facility. But he missed the date, due in part, to Congress’ refusal to earmark funds that would have allowed the administration to close the prison and move some detainees to a supermax prison in Illinois.

Cheney said last year that the only alternative the Bush administration had to setting up Guantanamo was to kill the prisoners detained there.

“If you don’t have a place where you can hold these people, the only other option is to kill them, and we don’t operate that way,” Cheney said.

It is not news that the majority of the initial 742 prisoners who were detained at Guantanamo were innocent of the crimes that they were accused of.

Indeed, in February of 2006, the National Journal reviewed the case files of 132 prisoners who filed habeas corpus petitions and the redacted CSRT transcripts of 314 others and concluded that “most of the ‘enemy combatants’ held at Guantanamo… are simply not the worst of the worst of the terrorist world” as Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush had claimed.

“Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies,” according to an investigative report published by the National Journal. “Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence — even the classified evidence — gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It’s based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.”

The Journal noted that a common thread among many of the detainees is that a majority of them “were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”

That’s a point Wilkerson made in his declaration and said it likely applied to Hamad’s case as well.

“With respect to the assertions by Mr. Hamad that he was wrongfully seized and detained, it became apparent to me as early as August 2002, and probably earlier to other State Department personnel who were focused on these issues, that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all,” Wilkerson said in his declaration. “I soon realized from my conversations with military colleagues as well as foreign service officers in the field that many of the detainees were, in fact, victims of incompetent battlefield vetting.

“There was no meaningful way to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory of another state such as Pakistan. The vetting problem, in my opinion, was directly related to the initial decision not to send sufficient regular army troops at the outset of the war in Afghanistan, and instead, to rely on the forces of the Northern Alliance and the extremely few US Special Operations Forces (SOF) who did not have the necessary training or personnel to deal with battlefield detention questions or even the inclination to want to deal with the issue.

“A related problem with the initial detention was that predominantly US forces were not the ones who were taking the prisoners in the first place. Instead, we relied upon Afghans, such as General [Abdul Rashid] Dostums forces, and upon Pakistanis, to hand over prisoners whom they had apprehended, or who had been turned over to them for bounties, sometimes as much as $5,000 per head.

“Such practices meant that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to US forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money. I recall conversations with serving military officers at the time, who told me that many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.”

In Hamad’s case, Wilkerson said that he has “no reason to believe that any more thorough process was used to determine whether his seizure or transfer to Guantanamo was justified.”

Wilkerson said that he discussed the Guantanamo detainees issue regularly with Powell and, based on those discussions, Wilkerson discovered that “President Bush was involved in all of the Guantanamo decision-making.”

“My own view is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so,” Wilkerson said. “Moreover, by exploiting what Secretary Powell called the president’s ‘cowboy instincts,’ Vice President Cheney could more often than not gain the President’s acquiescence.”

Wilkerson said issues revolving around efforts to repatriate individuals wrongfully detained at Guantanamo came up during the morning briefings chaired by Powell that he and about 50 to 55 senior State Department officials attended beginning in August 2002 after the prison facility was opened.

“At the briefing, Secretary Powell would question Ambassador Pierre Prosper (Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes), Cofer Black (Coordinator for Counter Terrorism), and Beth Jones (Assistant Secretary for Eurasia), or other senior personnel for information about specific progress in negotiating detainee releases,” Wilkerson said. “A number of these conversations arose because Secretary Powell received frequent phone calls from British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who had consulted with Secretary Powell frequently about repatriating the British Guantánamo detainees …

“I also know that several other foreign ministers spoke with Secretary Powell urging him to repatriate their countries’ citizens. During these morning briefings, Secretary Powell would express frustration that more progress had not been made with detainee releases.”

During one particular meeting, Wilkerson said, Ambassador Prosper, the point person on negotiating the transfer of detainees to other countries, “would discuss the difficulty he encountered in dealing with the Department of Defense, and specifically Donald Rumsfeld, who just refused to let detainees go.”

Wilkerson said it was “politically impossible” to release detainees, even the ones Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other senior officials knew were innocent.

“The concern expressed was that if they were released to another country, even an ally such as the United Kingdom, the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people, whether the released detainee was subsequently found to be innocent by the receiving country, or whether the detainee was truly a terrorist and, upon release were it to then occur, would return to the war against the US,” he said. “Another concern was that the detention efforts at Guantánamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were. Such results were not acceptable to the
Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DOD.”

A spokesman for Rumsfeld said Wilkerson’s claims are untrue. Peggy Cifrino, Powell’s spokeswoman, said the former Secretary of State, “has not seen Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration and, therefore, cannot provide a comment.”

Still, what Wilkerson described may have very well been an issue in Hamad’s case, although as Jim White pointed out in a blog post, the Pentagon appears to have had a policy in place to “justify the long-term detention and interrogation of innocent civilians.”

According to Hamad’s lawsuit, the Pentagon had cleared him for release in November 2005, according to a redacted copy of his clearance decision his attorneys cited in their complaint.

But he was not freed from Guantanamo until December 2007. His attorneys said they were notified via email in March 2007 that Hamad was eligible to be sent back home to Sudan and it was during negotiations with the Sudanese government that they discovered he was eligible for release a full two years earlier.

About 183 detainees, many of whom have already been cleared for release, remain at Guantanamo. A majority of them have never been charged with a crime.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Karl Rove’s Historically Useless Memoir

AP — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:52:16 +0000

I imagine that some folks are anxious to get their hands on Karl Rove’s memoir. As I’ve previously mentioned, I am not one of those folks.

I gather from the numerous previews and reviews, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” is around 600 pages of Rove taking whacks at his critics, attempting to spin the Bush administration’s legacy out of pit for which it is destined. If you’re curious about Rove’s memoir, but you’re not in the market for a new doorstop, here are a few places to look:

Stephen Levingston, book reviewer for The Washington Post, writes, “Rove has fashioned a portrait of the Bush presidency that aims to shape history in his boss’s favor.”
Also at WaPo, Dana Milbank offers “… what he learned from Karl Rove’s book” within a Q&A chat with readers.
The Huffington Post features “The 13 Must-Read Passages From ‘Courage And Consequence’” along with a slide show presentation of relevant material.
The Daily Beast narrows it down to the “10 best revelations” within Rove’s book, sans the slideshow.

All of the above mention a couple of assertions made by Rove which demand further scrutiny.

Rove posits that his biggest regret from the Bush years was that he didn’t push back harder on accusations suggesting Bush misled the nation into war with Iraq. Further, Rove maintains the tired conservative meme, proclaiming an intelligence community consensus on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as proof of Bush’s honesty.

You can almost hear the incredulous sigh from David Corn — Washington Bureau Chief for Mother Jones and author/coauthor of two books on the subject – as he writes:

Here we go again: Did Bush grease the way to war with lies?..

Let’s cut to the bottom line: prior to the Iraq war, US intelligence generally produced faulty information overstating Saddam Hussein’s WMD capabilities, which were actually nonexistent. But Bush and his crew purposefully and callously overstated these overstatements—and made dramatic and untrue assertions unconnected to the flawed intelligence—in order to whip up popular support for the invasion of Iraq.

Corn suggests checking out Mother Jones‘ extensive timeline of “the false Bush administration assertions. I would add that Sam Smith’s “The revision thing,” originally published by Harper’s Magazine in Oct. 2003, should be required reading for anyone considering Rove’s, or any other Bush lackey’s memoir broaching this topic. Smith’s treatment is remarkable for its being composed entirely from false statements made by Bush administration officials.

Rove also attempts to spin away Bush administration statements connecting al Qaida and Saddam Hussein.

From “Courage and Consequence”:

Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda and about Iraq’s support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda “were substantiated by intelligence information,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee 2004 report.

But, Rove is leaving out some important information.

From Media Matters Research (emphasis added):

Rove is presumably referring to a June 5, 2008, Senate Intelligence Committee report examining government officials’ pre-war statements about Iraq. (…) Rove is correct that the committee found that some Bush claims — specifically, “[s]tatements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda and about Iraq’s support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda” — were substantiated by the intelligence at the time. But the committee also concluded that Bush’s allegations suggesting “that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership” were “not substantiated by the intelligence”; and that Bush’s statements indicating Saddam was prepared to give WMD to terrorists were “contradicted by available intelligence.”

Should you decide to subject yourself to “Courage and Consequence,” keep in mind that Karl Rove was, and is, in essence, a BS artist. This designation is implied in Bush’s nickname for him: Turd Blossom. His entire professional life has been spent crafting favorable public perceptions for his employers, often emphasizing, even creating negative memes to hang around the necks of those candidates and critics who happened to be in the way.

The “elections” of George W. Bush are the twin pinnacle achievements of Karl Rove’s life. He has a vested interest in Bush’s historical legacy. And as a professional BS artist, Rove will buff that turd to a fine shimmering shine before conceding anything to his critics.

Knowing full well that Rove’s self interest is woven throughout the pages of “Courage and Consequences” — His positions, crafted for the purpose of propping up the Bush legacy, informed by a lifetime of BS artistry – has the effect of rendering his memoir historically worthless. Put another way, if those responsible for rendering judgment on the Bush presidency are to find Rove’s memoir useful as a source, it will be when they discredit it with other, more objective, sources.

Thus, I see no reason for creating space in my library for it.

Crossposted from Care2.com ~ “Rove’s ‘Courage and Consequence’ Short on Both,” originally published 10 March 2010

DownWithTyranny!: Family Of Secrets– All Your Worst Fears About The Bushs Were True

AP — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:40:34 +0000

From DownWithTyranny! 3 January 2010:

I don’t know which single book I liked most in 2009. The DWT Bookstore has pages of my faves– the ones Ken and I are always referring to– from Idiot America, Nixonland, Dateline Havana, Bloggers on the Bus and Turkmeniscam to The Progressive Revolution, The Eliminationists and, of course, Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets, a 600 page thriller that digs more deeply into the Bush Family than anyone has ever done. The paperback is now in its third edition and I’ve been urging Russ to work with someone on doing a synopsis that we could use to turn people on who are intimidated by books with hundreds of pages. Yesterday he finally sent me something that can be used here at DWT. He starts with the questions many of us have asked over and over again: “How did the spectacularly unqualified George W. Bush come to be the President of the United States, and arguably the most powerful person in the world? What lay behind his improbable rise and disastrous policies? Was there more to his controversial reign than the pundits’ standard bromides?”…

Read more, including excerpts from the book at the below link.

via DownWithTyranny!: Family Of Secrets– All Your Worst Fears About The Bushs Were True.

Bush: War Crimes Will Be Prosecuted…It Will Be No Defense To Say, I Was Just Following Orders

AP — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:17:54 +0000

Of course, he’s referring to Iraq in 2003, but it’s still wicked ironic.

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Expect Congress to Look Backward as Obama Moves Forward

AP — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:31:24 +0000

Originally Published @ Care2.com, 18 February 2009, by Aaron D. Pendell

The first month of the Obama administration has been a whirlwind. The president signed the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act–the most comprehensive (and most expensive) legislation in American history–into law on Tuesday in Denver. The following day, Obama began to implement the economic recovery package, no doubt continuing the frenetic pace established since his inauguration. Congress, however, will likely set about getting some answers out of the Bush administration.

That the Congress and the President will be traveling separate paths is inconsequential and should be expected. As Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com perceptively posted on Sunday, the liberal, or progressive, electorate is by no means a homogeneous bunch. He describes progressives as being divided into “rational” and “radical” contingents with countless individual members falling somewhere between the two.

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Conservative media peddle a raw deal

AP — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:39:33 +0000

The conservative punditocracy that has spent the past eight years propping up a president who gave us an illegitimate war and leaves us with an almost unimaginably bad economic crisis apparently grows weary of defending this spectacular failure of a president. And so they’re trying to bring Franklin Roosevelt down to George W. Bush’s level.

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ProPublica: Agencies Move to Restrict FOIA Access in Last-Minute Regs

AP — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:53:19 +0000

From ProPublica.org, 5 January 2009 post, by Jennifer LaFleur:

'I've got yur infurmation right here.'

As one of the most secretive presidential administrations in history gets ready to close up shop, it’s closing a few more things — records. Over the past few months, some federal agencies have issued rules that would eliminate public disclosure of information — or, in some cases, make it more difficult for requesters to get information.

While the federal Freedom of Information Act regulates what government information may be withheld from the public, internal rules determine how that law is carried out at the agency level. Those rules also may restrict access to information…

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Krugman: Bigger Than Bush

AP — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:59:50 +0000

B'bye GOP...

Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash.

And everything that has happened in recent years is a consequence of that decision.

From the New York Times, 1 January 2009 post, by Paul Krugman:

So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.

That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation…

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Raw Story | Olbermann: 'The president is just full of crap'

AP — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:14:39 +0000

As George W. Bush prepares to leave office, he and his staff appear to be attempting to rewrite history to cast him in a more favorable light — but it seems that history may have the last laugh.

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Watchdog group: Depth of Bush failures surprised even us

AP — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:07:27 +0000

The most comprehensive guide to the Bush administration’s failures is a new list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity.

From The Raw Story, 10 December 2008 post, by Muriel Kane:

…Working from government investigations, news stories, and suggestions from experts and government employees, the team compiled a list of 250 failures, which it then narrowed down to just 128 “that attracted bipartisan criticism and had major impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans.”

The results of the investigation, which are summarized at CPI’s PaperTrail blog and presented in full at its Broken Government project, are stunning in their scope even for those who have been following the scandals of the last eight years.

According to the CPI, “Some of these problems were in place well before George W. Bush’s inauguration, but were exacerbated by his policies or worsened by his administration’s actions (or inactions). Many of the failings are tied to Bush appointees who appear to have been selected primarily on the basis of ideology and loyalty, rather than competence.”…

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History 1 – Bush Legacy Project 0

AP — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:07:57 +0000

Rachel Maddow takes aim at George W. Bush’s history re-writing efforts.

Maddow aptly assesses that the ‘Bush Legacy Project’ is on a fools errand. Thanks, in part, to the “Google Machine” and the “Internets,” it will be extremely difficult for the administration to polish the turd that was the Bush presidency.

Rachel is such a gem. If you’ve got about ten minutes to spare, view the below clip.

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Bush wants history to see him as a liberator of millions

AP — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:38:32 +0000

George W. Bush hopes history will see him as a president who liberated millions of Iraqis and Afghans, who worked towards peace and who never sold his soul for political ends. Seriously…

From The Raw Story, 28 November 2008 post, by way of Agence France-Presse:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — George W. Bush hopes history will see him as a president who liberated millions of Iraqis and Afghans, who worked towards peace and who never sold his soul for political ends.

“I’d like to be a president (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,” Bush said in excerpts of a recent interview released by the White House Friday.

“I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values.”…

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Archives unsure how many White House e-mails will be saved

AP — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:28:05 +0000

More could be lost

From The Raw Story, 24 November 2008 post, by Nick Juliano:

The plans to retain and store records from George W. Bush’s eight years in office is lacking in specifics and raises the possibility that millions of missing White House e-mails will be lost permanently, a independent government watchdog warned Monday.[snip]

…”The American people are at risk of losing the Bush administration’s electronic records,” warned Anne Weismann, CREW’s top lawyer. “It is appalling that less than two months before the administration ends, the agency entrusted with preserving our nation’s historical records still has very little information about what records it will be receiving. True to form, the White House is keeping both NARA and the public in the dark up to the very end.”…

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TNR: Bush Is No Hoover

AP — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:59:01 +0000

Historian & presidential biographer, William E. Leuchtenburg, weighs in on the perceived similarities between George W. Bush & Herbert Hoover.

Leuchtenburg takes issue with the numerous public comparisons of George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover. These comparisons are unfair – to Hoover – and they represent, in Leuchtenburg’s enlightened opinion, “… a grossly distorted view of history.”

President Herbert Hoover

From The New Republic, tnr.com, Oct. 21, 2008 post, by William E. Leuchtenburg:

In contrast to George W. Bush, who, as the Yale historian Beverly Gage has said, “stood by and didn’t forge a clear direction” as the housing market collapsed around him, President Hoover moved in unprecedented ways to cope with economic calamity. Two days after entering the White House in March 1929, Hoover, who for years had been warning about “the fever of speculation,” exhorted Federal Reserve officials to rein in brokers and investment bankers…

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Woodward's 'secret history' of Bush admin. to debut Sept. 8

AP — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:33:21 +0000

From Rawstory’s August 19, 2008 post, by way of the AP :

“There has not been such an authoritative and intimate account of presidential decision making since the Nixon tapes and the Pentagon Papers,” Woodward’s longtime editor, Alice Mayhew, said Tuesday in a statement. “This is the declassification of what went on in secret, behind the scenes…”

According to Simon & Schuster, Woodward’s book “takes readers deep inside the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq.

“Based on extensive interviews with participants, contemporaneous notes and secret documents, the book traces the internal debates, tensions and critical turning points in the Iraq War during an extraordinary two-year period.”

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5 Years Ago Today: Fateful 'NYT' Op-Ed Kicked off Plamegate

AP — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:09:35 +0000

5 years since Joe Wilson’s op-ed and the only one to have done time was a journalist. Strangely, it wasn’t Bob Novak.

From Wilson’s July 6, 2003 NYT op-ed:

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Wilson wrote the above only after hearing George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address which spouted the now infamous 16 words:

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Original Post from Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell, 6 July 2008. Also see FactCheck.org post from 2004.

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Outing Bush: Rationale for Iraq Invasion Smells Worse and Worse

AP — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 07:43:52 +0000

Since the Republican Party lost control of Congress in 2006, it was only a matter of time before proper oversight would yield some answers regarding the Bush Administration’s run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The following AlterNet.org link is one of many (here’s another) that are presently circulating, inspired by the release of Phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about Bush’s use of pre-war intelligence.
From the June 6, 2008, AlterNet post:

“Let’s not sugarcoat it: This president is a liar. A shameless bold-face liar. And that is to our eternal shame.”

Harsh, but true. It is articles like this that provide me with at least some validation for having the arguments that I have had with close friends who maintain beliefs contrary to the facts laid out in the post, which are ones that I’ve long held.

…that this president betrayed the trust of the American people in a way no other president has done in my lifetime — not even Nixon.

I don’t expect that those with whom I’ve argued with will come around anytime soon, despite the evidence. It is not easy for anyone to admit that he or she is wrong. Particularly when the issue is of such magnitude. For now I must take solace in that articles like this one, and the links contained within it, will provide plenty of fodder for today’s historians to sort it all out for future generations.

Original Post came to Alternet.org by way of Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast at 8:34 AM on June 6, 2008.

History's Judgement of George W. Bush

AP — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:41:50 +0000

I came across a US News & World Report Blog article this evening, and its title caught my attention: “The First Draft of History Looks a Bit Rough on Bush.” Strangely, what struck me had nothing to do with my wholehearted concurrence with the title’s assessment; rather, I immediately pondered whether or not historians can really make that judgement just yet.

Posted 11 April 2008, Kenneth T. Walsh wrote:

President Bush often argues that history will vindicate him. So he can’t be pleased with an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted by the History News Network. It found that 98 percent of them believe that Bush’s presidency has been a failure, while only about 2 percent see it as a success. Not only that, more than 61 percent of the historians say the current presidency is the worst in American history. In 2004, only 11.6 percent of the historians rated Bush’s presidency in last place. Among the reasons given for his low ratings: invading Iraq, “tax breaks for the rich,” and alienating many nations around the world. Bush supporters counter that professional historians today tend to be liberal and that it’s too early to assess how his policies will turn out.

Again, I must tell you that I have no problem with the results of above mentioned survey. Indeed, one of the Bush Administration’s most devious actions, infesting the Justice Department with political hacks, should be tacked on to the above listed reasons for Bush’s ratings. The chance that history will “vindicate” Bush are exteemly small.

That being said, there are too many variables involved in the historical assessement of George W. Bush’s presidency. Most would say that his historical verdict is dependant upon the outcome in Iraq, which is something we won’t know for some time. Other issues, in the not-so-distant-future, will also need to be resolved.

Consider the Huffington Post article, “Obama Would “Immediately Review” Potential Of Crimes In Bush White House.” Of course, this depends upon the outcome of the Democratic nomination and the election in November. However, an intense investigation into the treatment of detainees or pre-war intelligence manipulation, just to name a couple of issues, may well turn out to be criminal offenses. Then again, it may turn out that such lapses were due to managerial ineptitude. Only time will tell.

Of course, there are many other issues that need to be resolved before the Bush administration can be properly judged by historians. Most contemporary assessments are damning, indeed; however, they can only serve to inform future historical treatments of George W. Bush. However it turns out, I look forward to reading it. Until then, survey administrators may ask their questions and contemplate their results; but, should they ask how history will judge Bush, the answer they receive, from historians anyway, should be: Yet to be determined.

If you’re interested in a pro’s assessment of this issue, be sure to check out Robert S. McElvaine’s post on HNN.