NYT : Trial’s Focus to Suit Bush

Trial’s Focus to Suit Bush

By STEVEN LEE MYERS | Published: February 12, 2008

WASHINGTON — Harsh interrogations and Guantánamo Bay, secret prisons and warrantless eavesdropping, the war against Al Qaeda and the one in Iraq. On issue after issue, President Bush has showed little indication that he will shrink from the most controversial decisions of his tenure.

With the decision to charge six Guantánamo detainees with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to seek the death penalty for the crimes, many of those issues will now be back in the spotlight. In an election year, that appears to be exactly where Mr. Bush wants the focus to be.

The White House said on Monday that Mr. Bush had no role in the decision to file charges now against the six detainees, leaving the strategy for prosecuting them to the military.

Still, the cases soon to be put before military tribunals — including that against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks — represent a major part of “the unfinished business” that Mr. Bush and his aides talk about when they vow “to sprint to the finish,” as one aide did again on Monday.

Mr. Bush never sounds surer of himself than when the subject is Sept. 11, even when his critics argue that he has squandered the country’s moral authority, violated American and international law, and led the United States into the foolhardy distraction of Iraq.

“Six and a half years ago, our country faced the worst attack in our history,” Mr. Bush said late last week, speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I understood immediately that we would have to act boldly to protect the American people. So we’ve gone on the offense against these extremists. We’re staying on the offense, and we will not relent until we bring them to justice.”

The 9/11 candidate, Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, may have dropped his bid for the White House. But the 9/11 presidency is far from over.

On the question of warrantless wiretapping, widely expanded after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush is pushing to make permanent legislation that last year made a once-secret program legal, despite a storm of protest that has reverberated since 2005, when the program was disclosed.

Only a year ago, Iraq appeared to have deflated the president’s popularity and eroded his standing even among Republicans and the Pentagon’s generals. But Mr. Bush now appears to have laid a foundation to keep more than 130,000 American troops on the ground in a mission he has justified as part of a broader fight against terrorism, despite an overwhelming groundswell against an unpopular conflict. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on Monday essentially endorsed a “pause” in further troop withdrawals once those troops sent in last year as part of a temporary buildup go home.

In each of these cases — the military tribunals, the wiretapping legislation, Iraq — the White House seems eager to lock in as many of the president’s policies as possible before he leaves office in 11 months. And as it looks ahead to the November elections, the White House seems to have concluded that each is politically sustainable and even favorable for a Republican candidate and Mr. Bush’s own legacy.

Whether the White House will succeed — and November will certainly be the measure — remains to be seen.

Democrats have battled before, with mixed success, against Republican efforts to portray them as weak on defense. This time, the Democrats sound determined to fight back more forcefully.

“I wish they had as coherent a strategy for fighting the war on terror as they do for politicizing the war on terror,” Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said on Monday.

The legality of military tribunals has been in dispute since the days immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. It is possible that the trials could backfire by underscoring the administration’s failures as well as any successes in bringing some of America’s most-wanted to justice.

“The American public doesn’t need to put them on trial at this point to prove we got the bad guys,” said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch in Washington. “I think the focus is going to be on the unfairness of the trials and the use of highly abusive interrogations.”

Just last week, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, became the first government official to acknowledge publicly that those interrogations, in three cases, included the technique known as waterboarding, which simulates drowning and is regarded by many as torture.

Mr. Bush’s administration, however, appears to have calculated that many Americans, if not most, do not necessarily object to harsh interrogations or eavesdropping if they were used to prevent further attacks.

At a fund-raiser on Friday in Pennsylvania, hardly the most conservative state, Vice President Dick Cheney vigorously defended the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, referring to them as “a tougher program for a very few tougher customers.”

“He and others were questioned at a time when another attack on this country was believed to be imminent,” Mr. Cheney said of Mr. Mohammed and other Qaeda members. “It’s a good thing we had them in custody, and it is a good thing that we found out what they knew.”

Of the six men charged on Monday, Mr. Mohammed and four others were held for as long as three years in the secret C.I.A. prisons that were part of what the agency calls its “high-value terrorist interrogation program.” The prisons were established in 2002, but the administration did not publicly reveal their existence until 2006, when Mr. Mohammed and other detainees were moved from the C.I.A. facilities to the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In a statement to C.I.A. employees on Monday, General Hayden called the filing of charges “a crucial milestone on the road to justice for the victims of 9/11.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.