You definitely do not have to hand it to George W. Bush.
He may still be the worst president of the 21st century and a candidate for the worst president we’ve ever had. And if his most immediate Republican successor weren’t Donald Trump, there wouldn’t be much debate. But like Trump, George W. Bush was aided in his horribleness by the failures of his predecessors to tackle some of America’s—to use a term Trump now loves—worst “unforced errors.”
W. inherited a broken immigration system and a precedent for detention at Guantánamo Bay from his predecessors. As stipulated, you definitely do not have to hand it to George W. Bush, but he did, at least, attempt some repair of our immigration system. His attempt at reforming our purposely broken path to citizenship was doomed by the Nativist wing of the party that now leads the GOP. It was still one of his two good moves, along with President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)—the remarkably successful humanitarian effort that has saved some 20 million lives from AIDS that Donald Trump is currently intentionally screwing up.
But at Guantánamo, W. opened a festering wound in democracy that Donald Trump now hopes to turn into one of the worst stains on our soul in recent American history.
More than 24 years ago in November of 2001, as he bumbled into the inexcusable bungling of America’s response to the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed an order for indefinite detention at prison at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, best known as Gitmo. Of the more than 700 souls interned at that forsaken prison, a handful remain at the base. They currently have more rights than Bush and Cheney ever intended them to have but fewer as Trump’s Justices have hit the bench. But they’re waiting to be sent to some authoritarian country that will also hold them indefinitely without any hope for mercy.
Since its opening, Gitmo has been a disaster for the rule of law and America’s pretensions of moral authority. Barack Obama and Joe Biden put considerable efforts into closing the prison. Still, Republicans—mostly—in Congress, which used to have some power under the Constitution, put an even more considerable effort into not letting that happen.
So just days after Trump reentered the White House he made this statement:
The statement offers a cartoon version of the lawlessness that Bush, directed by Dick Cheney, offered, bragging about this “loophole” that allows for the United States to maintain its own purgatory on earth. And he wants to expand this horrific waiting room for hell by several orders of magnitude, creating the worst internment camp in American history and an inevitable travesty that will linger for most if not all of this century.
In the new Next Comes What above, Andrea Pitzer uses two stories from her time at Gitmo to offer a history of how this mess manifested along with insights into how authoritarianism can be undermined by some of the most basic systems of accountability. I’d say it’s the best drama set in a courtroom on Guantánamo since A Few Good Men. It’s a clarifying history of this this generation-long barbarity. And it should be a wake up call that we must call upon our country
As bad as Bush/Cheney were—and we must never forget how bad they were—at least you can acknowledge they were responding to an actual emergency. 9/11 happened. Thousands died and nearly every American felt in some way personally traumatized. Obama referenced the stupor the attacks when he responded to the noble Senate report that called out torture regime under Bush/Cheney:
With respect to the larger point of the RDI report itself, even before I came into office I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.
I’m not sure what the things we did right were! But the attacks were a shock, a shock that seemed to portend greater disasters.
Today, as we consider Trump’s ambitions for Gitmo, we must remember that there is an emergency today. And that’s the power of Donald Trump to do horrible things with almost no check on his power to do so, except the people.
The Constitution put an end to George W. Bush’s regime. And if it hadn’t, the people would have. In retrospect, we didn’t know how easy we had it then. So as Trump aims to clarify his position as the worst president of the century, we must remember that any wound we let fester is one Trump will infect. And any delay just gives that infection time to sink deeper and deeper and deeper.
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