Bush's State of Exception
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Danner: The icebergs are floating by. I've used the phrase to indicate that a process of scandal we've come to know, with an expected series of steps, has come to an end. Before, you had, as step one, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step two would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra, and others. And finally, step three would be expiation -- the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, look we've corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we've got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows.
TE: You get revelation and repetition.
Danner: Yes, R and R. It's been three years since the invasion and occupation of Iraq and there's been no official investigation of how the administration made use of intelligence to suggest that the intelligence agencies were certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, the consequence of this is that we live with the knowledge of these scandals, published in newspapers, magazines, books, but we get no official acknowledgement of wrongdoing and no punishment. Perhaps in the end a handful of people will be punished…
TE: …minor figures…
Danner: …who were silly enough to get themselves caught -- for example, the military police whose images appear in the Abu Ghraib digital pictures. The actual policymakers responsible for the change in interrogation policy will suffer no punishment whatsoever. In fact, they're still in their jobs. None of the investigations has reached them. Even the people who actually carried on the interrogations themselves we know very little about.
TE: You've interviewed some interrogators, haven't you?
Danner: Indeed, and I've had from them accounts of some of the things that were done. The great problem in the Age of Frozen Scandal is that it's as if we're this spinning wheel, constantly confirming facts that we already knew, so the revelations become less and less effective in causing public outrage. The public begins to become inured to it, corrupted in its turn.
TE: I'm going to suggest something grimmer. In what's likely to be the dirtiest election any of us has experienced, if the Democrats actually took one house of Congress in November 2006 and begin to investigate, I think you'd enter the era of frozen investigation. The administration will claim commander-in-chief rights.
Danner: That's a good prediction. The Bush administration is already stonewalling extremely timid Republican-led committees when it comes to the response to Hurricane Katrina or NSA eavesdropping. If the Democrats do take control of a house of Congress and mount real investigations, on the one hand, they'll be very circumspect because they'll be concerned about jeopardizing their chances in the elections of 2008. On the other hand, you'll have the overwhelming claim of commander-in-chief power which could completely handcuff investigations.
