Earlier today, CSPAN television re-broadcast a discussion panel, videotaped on February28. Appearing on "The Bush Administration and September 11" were Douglas Feith, Andrew Card, Michael Chertoff, Timothy Flanigan and Ari Fleisher, who took questions from journalists in the live audience about decision making and Constitutional issues following the attacks.

Some of the defenses offered by panelists were startling. Using a Haitian refugee situation as an analogy, Card suggested that Guantanamo was a "safe haven" for prisoners forcibly taken from Afghanistan. Other defenses were simply wrong, like Feith's claim that the 9/11 attacks represented the "first successful act of terrorism mass destruction" on US soil. Like a traffic accident, the video is both fascinating and appalling.

The Rationale for Guantanamo

In describing the Bush administration's decision to take prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantanamo for 'interrogation' (read: torture), Andrew Card cited an incident that occurred, he said, during the transition from George H.W. Bush's administration to Bill Clinton's. At that time, Card was Secretary of the Department of Transportation, which includes the Coast Guard.

The "Coast Guard has an obligation called the 'safety of lives at sea' to pick up people who are in boats or rafts that would cause them to be at significant risk," said Card. On that basis, the Coast Guard scooped up thousands of refuges trying to escape Haiti in "rickety boats and rafts." The Coast Guard could not return the Haitians to possible death in their homeland nor could it bring them to our shores, he claimed, because that would give them immigration rights.

"The solution was Guantanamo," Card said. The US created a tent city there for "about 10,000" intercepted Haitians, and there they remained while the US negotiated a change in the Haitian government so the refugees could return.

"It was a safe haven for these refugees," Card said. "The same argument [emphasis added] was made with regard to these illegal combatants taken from the battlefield who were not wearing uniforms of a nation; they had Geneva rights but they were rights...as "illegal combatants." And, that was "how they ended up getting there," said Card, as if an accident were the cause, not the deliberations of officials like himself.

Card description of living conditions provided for the Haitian refugees left out many important details, including all accounts of deplorable conditions there.

The Haitians were denied access to lawyers and held in leaky barracks behind razor wire. Their protests were met with harsh military crackdowns. Some refugees were confined for months in tiny pens; others languished in the naval brig. And although Guantánamo lacked the medical facilities to treat the sickest of the Haitians, federal immigration authorities refused to release some refugees who badly needed better care. As government spokesman Duke Austin explained to the media: “They’re going to die anyway, aren’t they?” (Brandt Goldstein)

Law Enforcement Optional

Douglas Feith provided the explanation for the Bush administration's decision not to rely on existing law enforcement and judicial structures to investigate and prosecute the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

The 9/11 attacks, Feith alleged, were the “first successful act of terrorism mass destruction.” Prior to that, he said, terrorists had traditionally gone after "small targets."

Even in comparison with 9/11 attacks, the 968 people injured or killed in the 1995 bombing and destruction of a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City can hardly be labeled a "small target." From the viewpoint of a terrorist, the attack that shocked the nation unquestionably was "successful."

Feith went on to say that the President's "single most significant" decision" was when he said that "the purpose of our reaction to 9/11 was to prevent the next attack.” In saying that, Feith proposed, the President was “also broadening the focus of the government beyond the specific people and group that had perpetrated the 9/11 attack."

“It immediately lifted you out of law enforcement.” Feith insisted.

The two ends of Feith's argument have a yawning chasm in the middle, where there is no evidence to support the conclusion. Feith cites no incident prior to 9/11 that provides a basis for fearing a follow-up attack by a nation or terrorist consortium. Rather, the administration quickly attributed the 9/11 attacks to a specific group, Al Qaeda. By the time the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and took the first prisoners there, the U.S. was basking in worldwide support. In short, there was no evidence of an "imminent threat" beyond Al Qaeda that would buttress Feith's claim.

Conclusion

As Dick Cheney demonstrated following CSPAN's filming of this program, the architects of disaster are determined to build the nation to their specifications, seemingly convinced that only a complete collapse of the country will disprove their theories. And, as long as journalists and others stand to applaud a performance like this, probably not even then.