July 15, 2009--"Safe For Eight Years"

The obvious needs restating—The Bush administration did not “keep us safe for eight years.” This requires restatement because his vice president, Dick Cheney, and his daughter, Liz Cheney, among others, have been scampering about the media again lately making that bogus claim.

Rather than the full eight-year assertion, if you exclude the thousands of those killed and maimed in two wars of choice, at best they kept us safe seven years, four months, and two weeks. This was a good thing, of course, but they failed to protect America during their first seven and a half months in office. And that counts. Big time.

To say, as Bush administration officials continue to claim that they did what they did to keep us safe for all of the eight years they were in office is to forget September 11, 2001. By that time they had been in office for many months, had been adequately warned that we were about to be attacked by al Qaeda, but then failed to keep at least 3,000 of us safe. The ones murdered on that fateful day.

The Cheneys are now running around attempting to revise history because the former VP is above the fold again (see linked New York Times article) since Leon Panetta, the CIA director, recently disclosed that Dick Cheney himself ordered the CIA not to inform Congress about a secret assassination project that he wanted the CIA to carry out. An operation that would allow them, in spite of the U.S. law that forbids covert operations of this kind, to track down and kill suspected terrorists.

This is not just a headline because of the content of the CIA unit’s assignment, assignations—an assignment they apparently bungled the way John Kennedy and his brother Bobby failed to have the CIA murder Fidel Castro—this is an important story because the CIA by U.S. law is required to inform Congress about operations of this kind. Thus, Dick Cheney, if all of this is true, may have violated the law.

The Cheneys frantic defense is that we were in continuous imminent danger and that the Bush administration needed to do all sorts of extraordinary things to protect us. Thus they got Congress to authorize quasi-constitutional surveillance programs, held so-called “enemy combatants” without trial in Guantánamo, tortured prisoners, and who knows what else. All were required, they say, to keep us safe. Again, failing totally to mention how we were not kept safe during the first eight months of their administration.

We can argue reasonably about the need to listen into cell phone and email traffic among the bad guys, or what rights detainees at Gitmo should have, and even about the alleged need to employ “enhanced interrogation techniques” to gather real-time information about soon-to-be-carried-out acts of terrorism. And, I’ll grant you, it may, reluctantly, be appropriate at times to keep certain things from a leaky Congress.

But, and it is an enormous but, though Americans have a short attention span, and seem to have little interest in even recent history, one thing we know, and about which there is no dispute, hard as it may have been to protect us on 9/11, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Liz did not then keep us safe.

Consider the obvious restated.