George W. Bush Lives Among (and Tortures) Us

Once upon a time there was a president named George W. Bush. And, to tell the truth, there still is. In some ways, he’s more alive now than ever before. He’s here, and in recent days he has spectacularly returned to the spotlight — like a terrible but unforgettable memory, or better, like a poorly suppressed sense of guilt — from the semi-obscurity into which he had sunk over the past five years. The reason for Bush’s much-publicized return to the headlines is the inauguration of an enormous library/museum dedicated to him (every ex-president receives one), erected for the modest sum of $250 million on the campus of the Southern Methodist University of Dallas in his beloved state of Texas.

The traditional protocol for the opening ceremony requires that all of the predecessors and successors of the guest of honor attend, in addition to a large number of high-ranking politicians and diplomats. That means that Barack Obama was present: In 2008, he won the race for the White House because he was considered the most radical alternative to a president smeared by two wars — both of which were part of a global strategy defined by “endless war” — and by the worst economic crisis in the period following World War II. Every surviving president — including Jimmy Carter, who today is more politically and philosophically different from Bush than any of the others — had good words to say for America’s 43rd president. Every one of them praised his character traits — Obama did so by saying, “he’s certainly a good man” — and all of them (as the ceremony requires) avoided talking about the reasons for which, during the last two years of his presidency, he became the most unpopular president alive since the invention of surveys. Is it only a question of good political manners? Yes, but not really or only just that; rather, there are two terms that explain the deafening silences that consumed parts of the opening ceremony of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum much better than “good manners.” These words are complicity and continuity.

News reports claim that the new library boasts an exhibition of more than 43,000 relics. The most important, located exactly in the center, is naturally “the bullhorn,” the megaphone that “Dubya” used 48 hours after the 9/11 attack. With his hand on the shoulder of an elderly fireman, he spoke from the ashes of the World Trade Center. There is no trace, however, of the other objects that — more than the megaphone and the words that came from it — defined life after Sept. 11, 2001. The book “My Little Pet Goat,” which Bush read to a group of children at a Florida elementary school, is not there — the book that, astonishingly, he continued to read after his chief of staff whispered to him the news of the attacks (before he went into hiding for the following two days). There isn’t the vial of anthrax that Colin Powell, then secretary of state, waved in front of the United Nations Security Council to justify war, or rather, as a type of proof of the weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s possession …. There aren’t many things in this museum. The most important, certainly the most enduring, are those that show not only what was, but what remains from the “George W. Bush era.”

Charles Krauthammer, one of the most seasoned and brilliant conservative columnists in America, explained things very well in his op-ed for The Washington Post, significantly entitled “Bush Legacy.” Citing Clare Boothe Luce, Krauthammer wrote that the greatest political legacies are those that can be summarized in a single sentence. In Bush’s case, the sentence is this: “He kept us safe.” Safe, obviously, from subsequent attacks analogous to those of Sept. 11.

False. Bush’s wars — and all the collateral damage that these wars have caused — have given neither America nor the world any security. They have had the opposite effect. It’s true, however — as Krauthammer ruthlessly notes — that all of the enhanced security measures that Bush took to support his politics and wars are today still triumphantly in place and considered integral. The authorized use of torture — which Bush backed under the hypocritical cover of a macabre linguistic reform, calling it “enhanced interrogation techniques” — remains. Another legacy that remains is torture by commission, which, under the name of “extraordinary rendition,” sends terrorist suspects to specialized centers in foreign countries — all good friends of the U.S. — in which torture is practiced without problems or interference. And from Bush there also remains — more than ever before — the Guantanamo Bay prison, nobody’s legal ground, a place where not even the Geneva Convention rights extend, but where only limitless detainment exists…. According to a New York Times editorial, at the same time that the presidents were in Texas praising George W. Bush as “the good man,” in Guantanamo Bay (an embarrassment that Obama had promised to close during the first months of his first term) there were 133 desperate prisoners on a hunger strike.

To paraphrase an old slogan that accompanied the upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s, Bush lives among (and tortures) us. His real legacy is this: an open wound that continues to bleed …