Wake Up America

The Bush administration burned one more bridge last week, and although it was arguably in the service of waging America’s war on terror, this country is fast becoming an island nation.

On May 7, 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld went before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to explain his department’s role in the prisoner abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib. In his testimony, he made the pledge that “everyone in Iraq who was a military person” would be “treated subject to the Geneva Conventions.”

Little did the American public or Congress know, but a March 2004 memo circulated by the Justice Department was already trying to establish a legal basis for non-Iraqi prisoners seized in Iraq to be secretly transported out of the country, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. According to the Washington Post, the Central Intelligence Agency removed a dozen non-Iraqis over the past 18 months in this way.

Rumsfeld was lying, or at least bending the truth. The Bush administration has long held—much to the dismay of the world—that militants fighting for international terror organizations such as Al Qaeda, are unlawful combatants, and thus not subject to the protections of any international agreements. Indeed, of the dozen non-Iraqis removed from Iraq, all of them reportedly had links to terror groups or had entered Iraq after the invasion in March 2003 to engage in terror or aid the insurgency. But defining fighters as unlawful combatants is a slippery slope to descend. And for the sake of America’s standing—the strengthening of which is a vital component in the war on terror itself—and for the sake of America’s soldiers—who may someday be declared unlawful combatants themselves—the Bush administration should stop bending the Geneva Conventions to suit its own ends.

This recent incident has in many ways cemented the reputation of the Bush administration: not as a strong and capable wager of the war on terror, but as a dishonorable rule-breaker that chooses to deceive the entire country and jeopardize the seriousness of America’s signatory status to the Geneva Conventions in order to wage a wrong-headed war against the wrong country.

Most frightening of all is that this incident is nothing new for the Bush administration. It took us into Iraq on the false pretense that Iraq harbored terrorists and was developing weapons of mass destruction; it misled lawmakers and the American public about the costs of adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare; it condemned the Abu Ghraib abuses yet didn’t see fit to fire anyone behind it; and it took no measures to distance itself from the sensational and false accusations about Sen. Kerry’s war record leveled by the disingenuously-named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth;

In light of all this deception, we wonder when the American people are going to wake up. Will it be once this country succeeds in burning all its bridges with other nations, when the president of the United States is taken as seriously as the president of Syria? Will it be once this country finally hacks down the bridges necessary for checks-and-balances, when the trust placed in the executive branch by Congress finally evaporates? Or will it be when Americans look around a few years from now and realize that they don’t even trust their government to tell the truth—ever—anymore?