Managing, or mismanaging, a myth
Thursday, February 14, 2008
A neighbor of mine on Manhattan’s Upper West Side heads a transatlantic partnership, along with a former editor from Rupert Murdoch’s Fleet Street tabloids stable, practicing what they neatly name “Reputation Management”. (In more workaday labeling, it’s what we usually call a PR firm.) A refined subdivision to this proclaimed specialty emerged full-blown this week from the Bush White House, and I suppose we have to call it “Legacy Management”.
It was certainly with an eye to how George W Bush will “go down” in history that the 9/11 prosecutions were finally announced. To be conducted under the Administration’s newly created Military Commissions, these are aimed at winning the death penalty for six alleged participants in the attack that brought down New York’s Twin Towers, part of the Pentagon, and a planeload of brave passengers and crew in rural Pennsylvania.
West Wing sources were whispering (oh, all right, crudely megaphoning) into reporters’ ears that “the unfinished business” had to be finished … and that the President is ready “to sprint to the finish”, all of which led to headline phrases like “Return of The 9/11 President” (Washington Post) and “Detainee Trial Likely to Suit Bush” (New York Times - this one prompting the question: would the trial be even happening if it DIDN’T suit Bush?)
Bush himself last week told the Conservative Political Action Conference that back in September 2001 “I understood immediately that we would have to act boldly to protect the American people” ( - I think that word “immediately” might look questionable when legacy-time comes). And he went on to claim “We’re staying on the offense, and we will not relent until we bring them to justice.”
Such a media-grabbing drumbeat during the last months of this presidency might just provoke the more impressionable among us to iconize once more the picture of a Fearless Leader vowing vengeance with a bullhorn amid the World Trade Center ruins (the famous image, above left). Well, it might.
The trouble is, legacy management is a very inexact science, and the whole thing might just backfire. Legal reporters, including those already familiar, or who have had to make themselves familiar, with US military justice are now scratching their heads about all the downside problems that will face the Administration as it pursues this course. Those anonymous eminences at The Economist magazine (never known to be "soft on terror") are listing this latest move as just another step in “the sorry mess of a legal system created by George Bush to deal with suspected terrorists [that] has lurched from one failure to the next”.
Attorney Charles Swift knows his way around these judicial thickets well enough – after all, he successfully argued before the US Supreme Court against the Administration’s previous efforts, in 2006, to use military tribunals to convict Guantanamo detainees, and had those insupportable panels rightly struck down. He foresees what he calls a "nightmare scenario" ahead. It would, rather than the Bush team's heroic pursuit of evildoers, instead be the sheer impossibility of a fair trial for the accused that comes to dominate any death-penalty 9/11 trial.
Prominent among the six defendants, the reputed “mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded to extract “evidence” which, it’s expected, will need to be ruled admissible in the Military Commission proceedings if the prosecution is to continue. Mohammed al-Qahtani, who might have been the “20th hijacker” but was sent out of US jurisdiction by an immigration officer, was subjected to abuse (or so the Defense Department officially found) at Guantánamo, abuse that included being led around on a leash and being forced to wear a bra – so it’s hard not to see such maltreatment becoming a focus of contentious attention.
These so-called high-value prisoners have so far had no access to lawyers, of course. And attorney Swift points out that the military system simply doesn’t have lawyers experienced in death penalty cases who could possibly serve as credible defense counsel.
More grist for the argument that the US is engaging in a show-trial without due process - which could prove an international public relations gift to Al Qaeda.
**A RADIO VERSION OF THIS COLUMN IS AIRED WEEKLY ON WHDD - ROBIN HOOD RADIO**
PODCAST available by clicking HERE
MEANWHILE, OTHER ITEMS ON THE LEGACY-LIST KEEP POPPING UP, notably indicators of how Bush’s particular ways of acting “boldly” have worsened, not improved matters.
In the deeply unsafe North West Frontier territory between Pakistan and Afghanistan - the country that Bush’s forces invaded to overturn its Taliban rulers, and hosts to Al Qaeda - an ambassador between the two countries has gone missing, feared abducted. Pakistani emissary Tariq Azizuddin is yet another individual to fall victim to the state of lawlessness that, in the wake of the US switching its major attention to Iraq, has permitted a Taliban resurgence all over again.
And in Iraq, the country that Bush’s forces invaded to … (oh, let’s not go over those war aims again) a British photo- and video-journalist and his Iraqi interpreter, working for CBS News, were abducted by Shiite paramilitaries from Basra’s Hotel Qasr al-Sultan (“The Sultan Palace”) - which once upon a time was a favored and safe place for the foreign press in Iraq to camp out.
Mercifully – and after a lot of senior militia pressure - the kidnappers released the interpreter and signs are, as I write, that the Briton may soon be free too. This same week, however, the bullet-riddled body of another abducted reporter, 27 year-old Hisham Muchawat Hamdan from Baghdad, was dumped at the city’s always-busy main morgue (above right, where an attendant wheels in one more corpse).
Hamdan, a father of two, brings the fatalities total released by the international Reporters Without Borders organization, also this week, up to 208 media workers killed while covering the Iraq war – many, many more than the 68 officially recorded during World War II.
I don’t imagine the families of Hamdan or of his 207 fallen journalistic colleagues, or of the thousands of slain soldiers and military contractors (whatever their nationality) ... or of the quite literally numberless Iraqi civilians killed over the last five years ... will be devoting much time to assessing George W Bush’s legacy.
Should we?