That’s my new alliterative motto designed to annoy some of my Republican friends. The day before Abu Ghraib broke, I wrote:
And yet, compared with the adamant refusal of Bush and his cabinet officials to take any responsibility at all for anything having to do with 9/11 or the Iraq war, Clinton’s substance-free brand of apology is beginning to look better and better. Even an acknowledgement that “mistakes were made”–a notorious passive-voice, bureaucratic quasi-evasion of responsibility–would be music to our ears just about now.
Presidents and their subordinates basically have three options in these situations: They can accept responsibility by resigning or firing those more directly responsible; they can apologize in a way that prevents them from having to incur any penalty; or they can refuse to apologize at all. Clinton took the second option; Bush has taken the third.[…]I’m one of those cranks who still nurses a grudge against Janet Reno for the deaths at Waco, and for its aftermath. I can still elevate my blood pressure just by calling to mind her statement–“I made the decisions; I’m accountable; the buck stops with me”–and the accompanying adulation she received from the media. Because, you see, she didn’t take responsibility. She performed a three-step dance. First, she insisted that everything that happened was the Branch Davidians’s fault. Second, she said that no one under her ought to be fired or otherwise held accountable, because the responsibility was hers. Then she did nothing. She didn’t resign. She didn’t offer a resignation. She didn’t so much as apologize. She mouthed the word “responsibility” in order to deflect accountability from her subordinates and allow it to land … nowhere in particular. And she was treated as a hero for having said the word “accountable.” The siege of the Branch Davidian compound of course began before she took office; but she inherited somebody else’s mess and turned it into a disaster. It seems to me that one cannot take responsibility for having forced a confrontation and contributing to 80 deaths without that “responsibility” having some consequence. In the absence of such a consequence, the statement is a lie.
Rumsfeld has now, of course, taken responsibility for the events at Abu Ghraib… and not resigned. He has risen from level 3 (deny that anything wrong was ever committed) to level 2 (a consequence-free claim of responsibility, accountability that does not involve calling anyone to account).
But it seems to me that one cannot take responsibility for acts of torture under one’s command without that “responsibility” having some consequence. In the absence of such a consequence, the statement is a lie. I hope that everyone who, like me, spent years complaining about Reno’s consequence-free pseudo-responsibility will notice that Rumsfeld has now joined her company.
[An aside about group-blogging. This is my third post on this topic in two days. Solo bloggers can and sometimes do “flood the zone” with a lot more posts than that in a shorter time period; and it can be an effective blogging style. It feels… impolite to do so on a group blog– impolite to my co-bloggers and to the blog’s readers, and especially so when I strongly suspect that some of my co-bloggers disagree with me. But I can’t promise that I’m going to shut up about it in the immeidate future. So: remember that the Conspiracy is configured to allow readers to exclude particular co-Conspirators, kind of like a killfile on Usenet. If you want to guarantee that you won’t read any of my stuff when you come here, the link is https://volokh.com/?exclude=jacob.]
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