Increasingly, Americans are awakening to the fact that the Bush administration's political and constitutional philosophy is monarchical in nature. -- It is therefore fundamentally un-American, in that it overrides all constitutional checks and balances affecting the executive by invoking putative commander-in-chief war powers that supposedly make legal every secret, authoritarian action of the president and his agents, however criminal they may appear to be under existing statutes and international conventions and treaties. -- That the raison d'être of these actions is said to be preservation of the constitutional republic is irrelevant, since the war being waged is against a tactic ("terror" or "terrorism") rather than an enemy that can de located and defeated, and is therefore a war that will continue in perpetuity; in fact, since technologies few understand lie close to the heart of the threat, and these technologies are rapidly developing, it is safe to say that the war on terror will inevitably be a permanent war. -- Thus should George W. Bush's views prevail, the U.S. Constitution will no longer apply to the executive branch. -- Although George W. Bush continually evokes his supposed constitutional duty to "protect the country," his real (i.e. legally binding, and enforceable by the United States Senate, sitting as a court of Impeachment) constitutional duty -- the one he swore on a Bible to uphold on Jan. 20, 2001, and on Jan. 20, 2005 -- is "to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States,and . . . to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" (U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Clause 9). -- It is encouraging to see more and more influential voices expressing these truths, like Joseph Galloway, senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder,[1] and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post,[2] below. -- On these matters, see also some related UFPPC statements: "On Iraq and the 'War on Terrorism'" (March 25, 2004), "Statement on the Abu Ghraib Prison Abuses and a Pattern of Illegal Conduct" (May 13, 2004), "On War and the Corruption of Language" (July 8, 2004), "Call for the Impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney" (April 21, 2005), "Statement on the Downing Street Memorandum, with a Further Call for the Impeachment of the President and the Vice President" (May 19, 2005), "Enact the McCain Amendment, Then Investigate the Abuse and Torture Scandals" (October 20, 2005), "On the Indictment of I.Lewis 'Scooter' Libby (November 3, 2005), and On Giving the Lie to Bush and Cheney" (November 17, 2005)....
1.
Opinion
HE'S A PRESIDENT, NOT A MONARCH
By Joseph Galloway
Knight Ridder
December 26, 2005
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/13480323.htm
WASHINGTON -- Our forefathers created a system of government built on checks and balances that they envisioned would protect a free people from abuses of their privacy, their property, and their liberty at the hands of anyone, especially anyone in public office.
They never intended for an imperial presidency to rise above the legislative and judicial branches of government, for they had had their fill of kings and emperors who ruled with absolute power. They knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
They wanted none of this, and wrote a Constitution and Bill of Rights to enshrine the protections they knew were needed to keep Americans free and democracy healthy.
They crafted a system of government rooted in the principle that citizens have rights and presidents violate those rights at their own peril.
Let us review the bidding as the dark year 2005 fades:
President Bush admits that he secretly ordered the government to eavesdrop on American citizens, without recourse to the established legal methods of doing that. He declares that he had and has the right to do so. Says who? Well, he says so, and Vice President Cheney says so, and his attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, says so too.
Some legal scholars beg to differ, arguing that the president has violated federal law and has opened himself to impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. They contend that he trampled the Constitution in a bid to expand the powers of the executive branch and conduct the war on terrorism.
This is the same president, the same administration, that under cover of the same wartime power grab declared their right to detain prisoners outside the courts in secret foreign prisons and the right to use inhumane, degrading measures in interrogating those prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
In ordering the National Security Agency to intercept phone and e-mail traffic of American citizens, members of the administration chose not to avail themselves of a secret federal court established nearly 30 years ago to provide the government the means to secretly investigate anyone believed to have ties to foreign governments or movements that threaten the United States.
They say it is too cumbersome and slow to seek warrants from that court -- even though the court has granted such warrants in more than 17,400 cases and rejected them only four times. They say they must move more swiftly -- even though the law permits them to eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant that is routinely and quickly granted.
Some suggest that the Bush administration's real reason for cutting the secret court out of the loop is that some of the information it is basing the secret wiretaps on was gotten through torture. The court warned early on that it would not permit information gotten through extra-legal or illegal methods to pervert the American courts.
Congress passed the law creating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court precisely because another president, Richard Nixon, bent the intelligence agencies and the entire government to his will in pursuing those he considered his enemies. If you made the Nixon enemies list, your phones were tapped, your comings and goings watched, your tax returns audited.
How big a leap is it from ignoring the rule of law in pursuing foreign enemies to pursuing and punishing domestic enemies, those Americans who for political reasons or reasons of principle oppose your aims?
The president, his vice president, and his attorney general are saying, essentially, trust us. We won't use our extra-legal powers against ordinary Americans. We just want to protect you from further terrorist attacks. Trust us. We are honorable men who have nothing but your well being at heart.
Sorry. That won't cut it. They have all the legal tools any president needs already on the books for our protection. Congress makes the laws. The judiciary interprets them. The president and all the rest of us live by them.
George W. Bush is not the emperor of America or the king of the 50 states of the union. He, like us, must live by the rule of law. He is bound by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the end, he works for us.
As Ben Franklin wrote more than two centuries ago: "Those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security."
2.
Columns
Op-Ed Columnist
POWER THAT BUSH JUST CAN'T TAKE
By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post
December 27, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/26/AR2005122600516.html
or
http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051228/EDIT/512280309/1003> (as BUSH CROSSED THE LINE)
Since the holiday season is a time of generosity and goodwill toward all -- even those who torture the Constitution and hoodwink the nation into ill-advised wars -- let's do a little thought experiment.
Let's assume that George W. Bush's claim of virtually unfettered presidential power is not just an exercise in reclaiming executive perks that Dick Cheney believes were wrongly surrendered after Watergate. Let's assume that Bush genuinely believes he needs the right to blanket the nation with electronic surveillance, detain indefinitely anyone he considers a terrorist suspect, make those detainees disappear into secret, CIA-run prisons, and subject them to "waterboarding" and other degradations. Let's assume for the moment that the president's only desperate motivation is to prevent another day like Sept. 11, 2001.
Let's go even further and assume he decided to invade Iraq for the same reason. Even in a thought experiment, we can't forgive the way he snowed the country into believing there was some connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks; nor can we forget the way he hyped the flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction -- we're being generous here, not stupid. But let's assume that however calculated and cynical the machinations, and however wrongheaded the decision to go to war, the underlying motive was purely to avoid another catastrophic terrorist attack.
All right: Given these overly kind assumptions, can this administration's usurpation of power somehow be justified?
Every time I work it through, the answer I come up with is no. The president has no right to ignore the rule of law as if it were a mere nuisance.
The problem is that if the president really were determined to do anything it takes to prevent another terrorist strike, why not suspend habeas corpus, as Lincoln did during the Civil War? That way you could arrest everyone who could possibly be a terrorist, or who once lived next door to a suspected terrorist's uncle, and you could hold those people as long as you wanted. Why stop at surveillance of international telephone calls and e-mails? Why not listen in on, say, all interstate calls as well? Or just go for it and scarf up all the domestic communications the National Security Agency's copious computers can hold?
Why stop at waterboarding? Why not go all the way and pull out some fingernails, if that would give Americans another tiny increment of security? Wouldn't electric shocks make us safer still? Just order the White House lawyers to draw up yet another thumb-on-the-scale legal opinion explaining how torture isn't really torture, and have at it.
If potential terrorists may be walking among us, why not have police officers stand on street corners all day and subject anyone who looks "suspicious" to questioning and a search? That's what Fidel Castro does in Cuba, and believe me, Cuba is an extremely safe country.
In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. In this war on terrorism, why not go ahead and destroy our freedoms in order to save them?
The reason we don't do these absurd things, of course, is that we see a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. That bright line is the law, drawn by Congress and regularly surveyed by the judiciary. It can be shifted, but the president has no right to shift it on his own authority. His constitutional war powers give him wide latitude, but those powers are not unlimited.
If you go along with my experiment and assume that the president has the best of motives, then the problem is that he wants to protect the American people but doesn't trust us.
There can be no freedom without some measure of risk. We guarantee freedom of the press, which means that newspapers sometimes print things the government doesn't want printed. We guarantee that defendants cannot be forced to incriminate themselves, which means that sometimes bad guys go free. We accept these risks as the price of liberty.
The president would probably respond that in an era of loose-knit terrorist groups and suitcase nukes, the risks are exponentially greater than those his predecessors faced. Even if you agree, the answer is not to act unilaterally but to go to Congress and the courts and ask them to redraw that line between state power and individual freedom.
These are not tactical decisions about where a tank division should cross the Rhone. They are fundamental questions that go to the nature of this union, and the president is required to trust the American people to decide them.
End of experiment. Please return your rose-colored safety glasses to the front of the class.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
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