Minimizing Bushism

Defenses of George W. Bush’s incompetence and lawbreaking have frequently relied on specious arguments about the “continuity” between his administration and those of his predecessors. According to this formula, Bush’s misconceptions about Iraqi WMD, for instance, are supposed to have been acceptable given similar assumptions by Clinton-era officials; its invasion of Iraq is supposed to have been acceptable given Clinton’s signature of the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998; the doctrine of preventive war is supposed to have been acceptable because — well, primarily because neoconservatives obfuscate the distinction between “preventive” and “preemptive” war, the latter of which the US has always been claimed as a prerogative.

The policy of extraordinary rendition is another such example of the Clinton-did-it-too argument that will forever be a staple for Bush apologists. Here, Bill Kristol’s pool boy, Michael Goldfarb, accuses “the left” of “imagin[ing] that the Bush administration represents a clean break with the previously lawful and humane history of the executive branch of government,” when in fact — or so he suggests — there’s no meaningful difference between the rendition program under Clinton and the proliferation of renditions under Cheney-Bush. I don’t know who on “the left” would actually make such an argument — I thought, for example, that we were the ones who supposedly crapped ourselves over the human costs of the sanctions regime during the 1990s — but I can’t pretend to understand the extraordinarily sharp intellect of Michael Goldfarb.

Nevertheless, I’ve been reading Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, and it’s hard to get through it without realizing several things about rendition. First, it was a terrible, illegal policy under Clinton that resulted in people being tortured at the hands of (mostly) thugs in the employ of the Egyptian government. Legal and human rights safeguards were ignored. It was pretty fucked up stuff that became, as Mayer describes it, bureaucratized and routine over time. That said, it was an extremely limited technique by comparison with the transformation it took after 9/11. It was employed against individuals who had already been convicted in abstentia, and as part of a broader anti-terrorism policy, it was accompanied by — and this is significant — investigative work by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that actually bore results that were usable in American courts. Rendition was not, in other words, used to apprehend suspects who would be transferred to sites under US control, to develop information that might lead to convictions. It was not used as a dragnet to bring Pakistani Koran-readers to Guantanamo Bay for half a decade without charge or trial.

It was a bad policy that did nothing to improve US national security, and there’s a genealogical relationship between Clinton-era rendition and Bush-era rendition that’s worth bearing in mind. But as with so much in the Bush years, where rendition is concerned, differences of degree became differences of kind.