Imagine, For a Moment, What Might Have Been

Shortly after 2 AM, I turned on the television, and learned that Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for “for spreading awareness of man-made climate change and laying the foundations for counteracting it.” Gore has announced that he will donate all of the $1.5 million prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection. Josh Marshall has written a particularly touching tribute to Gore:

There are several layers of irony and poetic justice wrapped into this honor. The first is that the greatest step for world peace would simply have been for Gore not to have had the presidency stolen from him in November 2000. By every just measure, Gore won the presidency in 2000 only to have George W. Bush steal it from him with the critical assistance of the US Supreme Court. It’s worth taking a few moments today to consider where the country and world would be without that original sin of this corrupt presidency.

Marshall continues:

And yet this is a fitting bookend, with Gore receiving this accolade while the sitting president grows daily an object of greater disapproval, disapprobation and collective shame. And let’s not discount another benefit: watching the rump of the American right detail the liberal bias of the Nobel Committee and at this point I guess the entire world. Fox News vs. the world. … Read all.

I’d like your thoughts on “where the country and world would be without that original sin of this corrupt presidency.”

Would 9/11 have occurred in a Gore presidency? It’s very possible. But what would have happened had highly knowledgeable terrorism specialists like Richard Clarke still had influence as he did during the Clinton administration? (Surely Gore would have kept Clarke on and not kicked him upstairs, as Bush did.) How would Gore have reacted to the attack? What immediate actions would he have taken? Could he have tamped down his VP Joe Lieberman?

How would the media have reacted to 9/11 under a Gore presidency? Faux News and Rush Limbaugh would surely have gone into non-stop attack mode, blaming Gore’s administration for failing to keep the country safe, for failing to strengthen intelligence, for allowing the hijackers into the country, and on and on. Of course — if I may point out the obvious — they didn’t lay a finger on Bush for 9/11.

There are so many more possible differences to consider. One is the Department of Justice, which Bush has decimated and politicized. Then there’s the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Beyond the “theft” of the election in 2000, there are many troubling questions about the fairness of the 2004 election. I bring that up because today’s TPMMucker has a particularly good story on “Bush’s Legacy on Voting Rights: A Story from Ohio.”

In June of 2005, John Tanner, the chief of the voting rights section, wrote Columbus, Ohio’s election officials to publicly assure them that the Justice Department had found no evidence of intentional African-American voter disenfranchisement in the 2004 election.

Not only was that an unprecedented move, former Department lawyers say, but the letter is another, and particularly galling, example of Tanner using the force of the Department to further Republican aims — in this case, to hamper future lawsuits or investigations concerning the problems in Columbus.

“It really looked like the Civil Rights Division was used to run interference for Republican election officials in Ohio,” former voting rights section deputy chief Bob Kengle told me.

At issue was the experience of thousands of voters in Franklin County, Ohio, in the 2004 election. Voters in mostly African-American precincts were forced to wait hours in long lines to vote. An investigation by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) found that voters often waited as many as four to five hours, some as many as seven, deep into the night. The Washington Post reported that “bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots.” The culprit, of course, was a scarcity of voting machines in those districts, one that seemed to follow a suspicious trend: “27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush” and “six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.”

But Tanner, who’s due to appear in a Congressional hearing, launched an investigation (more on that below) and found that “Franklin County assigned voting machines in a non-discriminatory manner,” …

[...]

Tanner seemed eager to poison the well. “It reads like a defense brief,” Kengle told me.

“Tanner bent over backwards to rule that black voters did not have a right to the same number of machines as white registered voters, and then went out of his way to make that ruling public,” said David Becker, a former attorney with the section, currently with People for the American Way. “It’s one of the most remarkably disconcerting things to come out of the voting section in a long time.”

For his part, Moore said that he doesn’t think that the evidence shows that Franklin County officials conspired to disenfranchise African-American voters. “Election officials are almost always more likely to be incompetent than venal,” he told me. “On the other hand, was it all because of different voting patterns? Or did black precincts get neglected? I know we didn’t try very hard to find out.” (Read all.)

I don’t think I’ll ever forget how shocking it was to see the videos of the long, long lines of black voters in Ohio. It is a national embarrassment. One of many since 2000.

Then there’s extraordinary rendition. Rendition began under the Clinton Administration, but in a different form — which I wrote about in “Outsourcing Torture: Secret History (FBI v. CIA).” I quoted Jane Mayer’s story for The New Yorker. Mayer interviewed CIA terrorism specialist Michael Scheuer on the changes in rendition procedures:

[Michael] Scheuer claimed that “there was a legal process” undergirding these early renditions. Every suspect who was apprehended, he said, had been convicted in absentia.

Since September 11th, as the number of renditions has grown, and hundreds of terrorist suspects have been deposited indefinitely in places like Guantánamo Bay, the shortcomings of this approach have become manifest. “Are we going to hold these people forever?” Scheuer asked. …

As unpalatable as rendition is — it was “begun in desperation,” Michael Scheuer told Jane Mayer, and approved by Richard Clarke (follow the link to find out why, because it’s not a simple issue) — UPI intelligence reporter Richard Sale points out that, as the Clinton administration set it up, it was intended as a way to try suspects in a U.S. court, with all the protections afforded U.S. citizens:

Although current news accounts almost without exception picture rendition as negative, in fact it has a positive side: It is used by the CIA and FBI to gain custody of major suspects from countries that do not have an extradition treaty with the United States, thus enabling U.S. intelligence agencies to interrogate them and bring them to the United States for a fair trial and imprisonment if convicted, several serving and former U.S. intelligence officials said.

All of those legal protections have been abandoned by the Bush administration. And the interrogations? Back then, the interrogations were led by experts like the FBI’s Dan Coleman, who never used torture but instead gained the trust of suspects and treated them like human beings:

Coleman was angry that lawyers in Washington were redefining the parameters of counter-terrorism interrogations. “Have any of these guys ever tried to talk to someone who’s been deprived of his clothes?” he asked. “He’s going to be ashamed, and humiliated, and cold. He’ll tell you anything you want to hear to get his clothes back. There’s no value in it.”

Coleman said that he had learned to treat even the most despicable suspects as if there were “a personal relationship, even if you can’t stand them.” He said that many of the suspects he had interrogated expected to be tortured, and were stunned to learn that they had rights under the American system. Due process made detainees more compliant, not less, Coleman said.

He had also found that a defendant’s right to legal counsel was beneficial not only to suspects but also to law-enforcement officers. Defense lawyers frequently persuaded detainees to coöperate with prosecutors, in exchange for plea agreements.

“The lawyers show these guys there’s a way out,” Coleman said. “It’s human nature. People don’t coöperate with you unless they have some reason to.”

He added, “Brutalization doesn’t work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul.” [WELL, only if you have one to begin with.]

That was then. Back then, in the “quaint” days of the Clinton/Gore administration. I am fairly confident that President Gore would have perpetuated those legal measures to bring terrorists to justice, maintained the FBI’s method of interrogating prisoners and not found it necessary to resort to torture, and that there’d be no Guantanamo.

Richard Sale concluded his UPI article by quoting Larry Johnson:

“I think the greatest mistake of this administration has been that they have ignored the expertise of the FBI in these matters,” said [former CIA and State Department official Larry Johnson]. “The FBI is enormously skilled in extracting information from people in a non-threatening way.

“Instead, this administration has given control to U.S. Special Forces and the U.S. military, who frankly don’t have a clue. Look at Abu Ghraib. It’s dispiriting.”

What a difference a stolen election can make.

Again: I’d like your thoughts on “where the country and world would be without that original sin of this corrupt presidency.”