| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 7:06 pm Post subject: Are You an 'Unlawful Combatant'? |
| October 2, 2006
Are You an 'Unlawful Combatant'?
Maybe so…
by Justin Raimondo
There has been a great deal of discussion about the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [.pdf], recently passed by bothhouses of Congress, and most of it has to do with the provisions allowing torture of alien detainees, that is, of non-citizens apprehended in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq, and their treatment at the hands of their American captors. Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, all Republicans, grandstanded for weeks over the torture provisions, then capitulated. Another "Republican maverick," Arlen Specter, zeroed in on the real issue, however, when he said the bill would set us back 800 years by repealing the habeas corpus protections against arbitrary arrest and jailings – and then went ahead and voted for it, anyway.
Liberal opposition mainly centered around the morality – or, rather, immorality – of torture, but the debate largely ignored the ticking time-bomb at the heart of this legislation, scheduled to go off, perhaps, in tandem with some future crisis, e.g., another terrorist attack on American soil: the redefinition of the "unlawful combatant" concept that lays the foundations for this administration's reconstruction of the gulag. Here is the new, broadened definition, as enunciated in the legislation recently passed by the House:
"The term 'unlawful enemy combatant' means – (i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant (including a person who is part of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or associated forces); or (ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the president or the secretary of defense."
It doesn't say "alien" or "terrorist," although it specifically includes members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It says "person" – any person, including American citizens. As Bruce Ackerman, professor of law at Yale and author of Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism, puts it:
"Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."
Congress has now granted the president the powers of a dictator. The rest of the story of our slide into absolutism is merely a matter of filling in the details.
Our rulers will naturally continue to pretend that we live in a normal democratic country, that the Constitution still means something, and that nothing essential has really changed – but, of course, everything has changed, as the post-9/11 War Party has relentlessly argued, and we had better get used to it. Because if you very vocally and aggressively refuse to get used to it, they can and perhaps one day will come for you. As an Arab friend of mine puts it when describing the routine operations of Middle Eastern police states, "You will never see the light."
My Arab friend, a recent immigrant, lives in fear of arbitrary arrest, having been constantly exposed to the danger and possibility of it in his native land and during his travels through the Middle East, and it hasn't faded with his arrival in this country. He flinches every time he sees someone in uniform, glancing up fearfully as I open the door to a FedEx delivery guy, and tracks police cars out of the corner of his eye as they cruise down the street. He is forever posing hypothetical situations in which he becomes the victim of a policeman who confronts him – perhaps on grounds of looking "suspicious" – and the story invariably ends with his deportation. Or perhaps, he says, they will simply "take me" – and with this he simulates a cop grasping him by the neck – "and send me to Guantanamo. I will never see the light."
This kind of fear is understandable to Americans only on a very abstract level. We, after all, have no experience with a police state – not in the sense of a systematic totalitarian approach to repression – of which the European and Third World nations have plenty. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for all his elaborate and extensive wartime apparatus of political repression and propaganda, never even came close to the police-state methods of his European cousins-once-removed in Moscow, Berlin, and Rome. And the comic-opera machinations of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, while reprehensible, never approached the savage efficiency of the KGB – about the only efficient institution in Soviet society.
The closest we came was in 1798, with the imposition of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which legalized the deportation of alien residents and criminalized criticism of the government, particularly the president. The Acts were, in effect, a Federalist coup d'etat, in which the neo-royalists grouped around the Federalist Party sought to ditch the Constitution and repeal the American revolution.
The Federalist counter-revolution was carried out under the colors of "national security," of course, and in the shadow of war: as in the Bushian version, a fifth column of enemy aliens was a major target of the 1798 legislation. The Naturalization Act sought to limit support for the Jeffersonians by lengthening the residency requirements for immigrants: most new citizens of the youthful republic were instinctual Jeffersonians, drawn to the New World by the bright promise of liberty. The Alien Friends Act and the Alien Enemies Act, taken together, comprise a near-exact replica of the Military Commissions Act, mandating the seizure, detention, and deportation of male foreign nationals and resident aliens deemed hostile to the United States in wartime. The target: tens of thousands of French citizens residing in the U.S., who were unsympathetic to the Federalist cause. The real target of the coup leaders, however, wasn't a foreign-born fifth column, but a domestic one.
The Sedition Act made it illegal for anyone to write, print, publish, or speak against the government in a manner deemed "false, scandalous, and malicious" and designed to hold the authorities in "contempt or disrepute." In wartime, argued the Federalists, presaging our own red-state fascists, it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government, and several prominent journalists critical of the Federalists were tried, and some convicted. Opposition to the Sedition Act did much to fuel the subsequent Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1800.
I wonder if history will repeat itself, this time – or will we enter a timeline where the neo-Federalists finally succeed in their scheme to impose a dictatorship on American shores?
There is, of course, no equivalent of the Sedition Act of 1798 in the Military Commissions Act: only the seed of one, cited above. It establishes the principle that an American citizen may be seized and locked up in a military prison, stripped of the protections traditionally afforded him by the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, there is the question of how it will be enforced, and certainly there are numerous political factors to consider: repression without some degree of popular support is a risky business, as the Soviets came to understand only after it was too late. The administration must take all this into account before acting.
In the present legal and political atmosphere, however, it won't be long before this malignant seed sends its tendrils aboveground and blossoms into a full-grown and fearsome flower of evil. One has only to listen to the latest pronouncement from our Beloved Leader, out on the campaign trail, implying that the Democrats are dancing on the borderline between criticism and treason when they bring up the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Speaking to the Reserve Officers Association, he averred:
"Some have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that by fighting the terrorists – by fighting them in Iraq – we are making our people less secure here at home. This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we're provoking them."
Translation: A vote for the Democrats – or, rather, as the Great Decider would say, the "cut-and-run" Democrats – is a vote for al-Qaeda. Crude, and it remains to be seen how effective, yet this is not mere campaign rhetoric: Bush's equation of antiwar criticism with "the enemy's propaganda" is precisely the argument made by the radical ideologues who inhabit the fever swamps of organized neoconservatism. At their most feverish, the more excitable among them have theorized that the First Amendment is expendable when it comes to the "war on terrorism," and that speech that tends to "incite" violence in the form of terrorism can be legitimately curtailed. Certainly the Europeans – with recent legislation limiting speech in Britain, and "hate speech" laws endemic throughout the European Union – have made great strides along this road. In America, however, the new authoritarians have, until now, had a tougher row to hoe.
During the 1940s, the Justice Department – obeying the president's command to go after antiwar dissenters – launched a sedition trial that initially sought to indict prominent politicians and activists associated with the America First movement, but the radicals in the administration were reined in after the legal difficulties became all too apparent. The Justice Department wound up going after a group of 30 or so mostly harmless cranks, charging them with initiating a Nazi "conspiracy of ideas." Among the indicted was Lawrence Dennis, the noted writer and intellectual. The trial was a farce from beginning to end.
Under the Justice Department's legal theory, anyone who held views that in any way echoed or agreed with any aspect of Nazi ideology or pronouncements could be said to be engaged in "objectively" aiding the enemy. In this way, all the indicted individuals – many of whom had never laid eyes on their fellow "conspirators" – could be tied together, and then linked to an international network headquartered, naturally enough, in Berlin. These people had bought into "the enemy's propaganda" – and the Roosevelt administration was determined to jail them.
In the end, however, the drama of the trial petered out and descended into parody. Dragging on for months on end, with testimony mainly consisting of government attorneys reading the defendant's propagandistic efforts aloud, the Great Sedition Trial of 1940, which started with plenty of fanfare from the administration's amen corner, soon became a laughingstock, and then – fatally – a bore. When the judge died of a heart attack several months into the trial, the administration thought better of it and pulled in its horns.
One suspects, however, that this administration will not be so easily deterred. To begin with, they won't have to deal with a judge or bad publicity, because the "trial" will be conducted by a military tribunal, operating in secret. Secondly, the defendants will stand trial without benefit of constitutional protections normally afforded to all American citizens. I say "normally" because I am still living in the world before the passage of our modern-day Alien and Sedition Act, at least mentally. But it's a new world, now.
The exact contours of this strange new world are vague, but they are fast coming into painfully clear focus. As the president equates criticism of the Iraq war with "enemy propaganda," and the neocon media blares away at the theme of "dissent = treason" – or, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, "they're not antiwar, they're on the other side" – it isn't hard to imagine that we have a few sedition trials in our future.
My expectations are dire, although this could simply be my own subjective impression, a mood that will pass. I can't help feeling, however, a sense of gathering dread, attached not just to the Military Commissions Act but arising out of the political atmosphere surrounding its passage. I never could understand – in the sense of share – the fear of authority that emanates from my Arab friend every time he sees someone in uniform. Now, however, I am beginning to feel it myself – as we all will.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9779
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Rounding Up US Citizens:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/10/01/rounding-up-u-s-citizens.php
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/03/141259
Legal Group Challenges Military Commissions Act
The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed the first legal challenge to the new Military Commissions Act passed by Congress last week. The legal group has filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of 25 detainees held at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan. The petition demands that the men be released or be charged with a crime. Some of the detainees have been held for years without ever receiving a hearing. Under the new bill – prisoners have no right to challenge their detention. On Monday, Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, warned about the dangers of the new law.
Bill Goodman: “No one can be held indefinitely, and if they are, they have a right to go in front of a magistrate or a judge and demand that the judge make a determination as to whether they’re charged with a crime and whether there’s any real evidence to hold them. And if there is not, the magistrate, the judge, can order the king, the police, the FBI, or anyone, or George W. Bush, the President of the United States, to let him go. That’s what habeas corpus is. Without it, we are virtually slaves to a police state.”
Bill Goodman spoke last night in New York at a rally sponsored by the group World Can’t Wait. On Thursday, World Can’t Wait is organizing emergency protests in over 170 towns and cities to condemn the government’s sanctioning of torture.
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Dean On Neocon Authoritarianism
Tuesday October 03rd 2006, 8:06 am
During a July appearance on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, former White House counsel to Nixon, John Dean, comes within a hair’s breadth of declaring the neocons have specifically created terrorism in order to run roughshod over our former republic. Of course, as ample documentation reveals, this is precisely what the neocons have done.
Dean’s interview is interesting as well because he describes the neocons as dangerous authoritarians who will do anything to remain in power and aggressively foist their agenda on the nation, even if it ultimately destroys the nation.
As the so-called “detainee bill,” more accurately characterized as the Habeas Corpus Murder bill, reveals, the neocons will sacrifice our republic without a second thought in order to realize their forever war agenda.
The Habeas Corpus Murder Bill is an obvious attempt to remove all constitutional restraint prior to the coming authoritarian clamp-down, as dissent will not be tolerated after the neocons shock and awe (with nukes) Iran in the anticipated kick-off of World War Four, a catastrophe that will demand the sort of imperious society Straussian neocons have dreamed of implementing for decades.
John Dean Interview on Neocons as followers... must watch!
John Dean talks about administration using terrorism and capitalizing on it and using it for its advantage ---> 7mins into video.
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Oct 03, 2006 10:41 pm; edited 2 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 9:45 pm Post subject: |
| David Addington (who is a Jewish Zionist neocon who replaced fellow Jewish Zionist neocon and PNAC charter member Lewis 'Scooter Libby in Cheney's office) was behind HR 6166:
http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=24208
Bush Gets Smacked by Supremes
"This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. ... It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’" Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department
He's "more grandiose than Nixon," says Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The headline of this post says it all.
Led by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court told the president he "is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails in this jurisdiction." Bush's stuttering yesterday revealed that his shock was deep. We can only hope he still feels the sting on Saturday. As for the real man at the legal helm, I wouldn't allow him near objects not nailed down for at least a week. Who is that you may ask? Read on.
According to someone who knows Powell, his comment about the article was terse. “It’s Addington,” he said. “He doesn’t care about the Constitution.” Powell was referring to David S. Addington, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff and his longtime principal legal adviser. Powell’s office says that he does not recall making the statement. But his former top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, confirms that he and Powell shared this opinion of Addington.
Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration’s legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, “all Addington.” Another lawyer, Richard L. Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was “an unopposable force.”
The overarching intent of the New Paradigm, which was put in place after the attacks of September 11th, was to allow the Pentagon to bring terrorists to justice as swiftly as possible. Criminal courts and military courts, with their exacting standards of evidence and emphasis on protecting defendants’ rights, were deemed too cumbersome. Instead, the President authorized a system of detention and interrogation that operated outside the international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war established by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Terror suspects would be tried in a system of military commissions, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, devised by the executive branch. The Administration designated these suspects not as criminals or as prisoners of war but as “illegal enemy combatants,” whose treatment would be ultimately decided by the President. By emphasizing interrogation over due process, the government intended to preëmpt future attacks before they materialized. In November, 2001, Cheney said of the military commissions, “We think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve.”
THE HIDDEN POWER
by JANE MAYER
The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror.
But one of the main results of David Addington's rise to power is something that has made the Congress a joke. As has already been reported, it's David Addington who was the "leading architect" of Bush's use of signing statements. It's what makes our current president as close to a king as we've ever had.
David Addington is a satisfactory lawyer, Fein said, but a less than satisfactory student of American history, which, for a public servant of his influence, matters more. “If you read the Federalist Papers, you can see how rich in history they are,” he said. “The Founders really understood the history of what people did with power, going back to Greek and Roman and Biblical times. Our political heritage is to be skeptical of executive power, because, in particular, there was skepticism of King George III. But Cheney and Addington are not students of history. If they were, they’d know that the Founding Fathers would be shocked by what they’ve done.” (source)
Take the time to read Mayer's entire piece (included below). It's important.
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060703fa_fact1
THE HIDDEN POWER
by JANE MAYER
The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror.
Issue of 2006-07-03
Posted 2006-06-26
On December 18th, Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, joined other prominent Washington figures at FedEx Field, the Redskins’ stadium, in a skybox belonging to the team’s owner. During the game, between the Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys, Powell spoke of a recent report in the Times which revealed that President Bush, in his pursuit of terrorists, had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without first obtaining a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by federal law. This requirement, which was instituted by Congress in 1978, after the Watergate scandal, was designed to protect civil liberties and curb abuses of executive power, such as Nixon’s secret monitoring of political opponents and the F.B.I.’s eavesdropping on Martin Luther King, Jr. Nixon had claimed that as President he had the “inherent authority” to spy on people his Administration deemed enemies, such as the anti-Vietnam War activist Daniel Ellsberg. Both Nixon and the institution of the Presidency had paid a high price for this assumption. But, according to the Times, since 2002 the legal checks that Congress constructed to insure that no President would repeat Nixon’s actions had been secretly ignored.
According to someone who knows Powell, his comment about the article was terse. “It’s Addington,” he said. “He doesn’t care about the Constitution.” Powell was referring to David S. Addington, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff and his longtime principal legal adviser. Powell’s office says that he does not recall making the statement. But his former top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, confirms that he and Powell shared this opinion of Addington.
Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration’s legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, “all Addington.” Another lawyer, Richard L. Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was “an unopposable force.”
The overarching intent of the New Paradigm, which was put in place after the attacks of September 11th, was to allow the Pentagon to bring terrorists to justice as swiftly as possible. Criminal courts and military courts, with their exacting standards of evidence and emphasis on protecting defendants’ rights, were deemed too cumbersome. Instead, the President authorized a system of detention and interrogation that operated outside the international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war established by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Terror suspects would be tried in a system of military commissions, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, devised by the executive branch. The Administration designated these suspects not as criminals or as prisoners of war but as “illegal enemy combatants,” whose treatment would be ultimately decided by the President. By emphasizing interrogation over due process, the government intended to preëmpt future attacks before they materialized. In November, 2001, Cheney said of the military commissions, “We think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve.”
Yet, almost five years later, this improvised military model, which Addington was instrumental in creating, has achieved very limited results. Not a single terror suspect has been tried before a military commission. Only ten of the more than seven hundred men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo have been formally charged with any wrongdoing. Earlier this month, three detainees committed suicide in the camp. Germany and Denmark, along with the European Union and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, have called for the prison to be closed, accusing the United States of violating internationally accepted standards for humane treatment and due process. The New Paradigm has also come under serious challenge from the judicial branch. Two years ago, in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled against the Administration’s contention that the Guantánamo prisoners were beyond the reach of the U.S. court system and could not challenge their detention. And this week the Court is expected to deliver a decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a case that questions the legality of the military commissions.
For years, Addington has carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket; taped onto the back are photocopies of extra statutes that detail the legal procedures for Presidential succession in times of national emergency. Many constitutional experts, however, question his interpretation of the document, especially his views on Presidential power. Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School, and the head of the New York Bar Association’s International Law committee, said that Addington and a small group of Administration lawyers who share his views had attempted to “overturn two centuries of jurisprudence defining the limits of the executive branch. They’ve made war a matter of dictatorial power.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who defined Nixon as the extreme example of Presidential overreaching in his book “The Imperial Presidency” (1973), said he believes that Bush “is more grandiose than Nixon.” As for the Administration’s legal defense of torture, which Addington played a central role in formulating, Schlesinger said, “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world—ever.”
Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had “staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield—according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’ ” Richard A. Epstein, a prominent libertarian law professor at the University of Chicago, said, “The President doesn’t have the power of a king, or even that of state governors. He’s subject to the laws of Congress! The Administration’s lawyers are nuts on this issue.” He warned of an impending “constitutional crisis,” because “their talk of the inherent power of the Presidency seems to be saying that the courts can’t stop them, and neither can Congress.”
The former high-ranking lawyer for the Administration, who worked closely with Addington, and who shares his political conservatism, said that, in the aftermath of September 11th, “Addington was more like Cheney’s agent than like a lawyer. A lawyer sometimes says no.” He noted, “Addington never said, ‘There is a line you can’t cross.’ ” Although the lawyer supported the President, he felt that his Administration had been led astray. “George W. Bush has been damaged by incredibly bad legal advice,” he said.
David Addington is a tall, bespectacled man of forty-nine, who has a thickening middle, a thatch of gray hair, and a trim gray beard, which gives him the look of a sea captain. He is extremely private; he keeps the door of his office locked at all times, colleagues say, because of the national-security documents in his files. He has left almost no public paper trail, and he does not speak to the press or allow photographs to be taken for news stories. (He declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.)
In many ways, his influence in Washington defies conventional patterns. Addington doesn’t serve the President directly. He has never run for elected office. Although he has been a government lawyer for his entire career, he has never worked in the Justice Department. He is a hawk on defense issues, but he has never served in the military.
There are various plausible explanations for Addington’s power, including the force of his intellect and his personality, and his closeness to Cheney, whose political views he clearly shares. Addington has been an ally of Cheney’s since the nineteen-eighties, and has been referred to as “Cheney’s Cheney,” or, less charitably, as “Cheney’s hit man.” Addington’s talent for bureaucratic infighting is such that some of his supporters tend to invoke, with admiration, metaphors involving knives. Juleanna Glover Weiss, Cheney’s former press secretary, said, “David is efficient, discreet, loyal, sublimely brilliant, and, as anyone who works with him knows, someone who, in a knife fight, you want covering your back.” Bradford Berenson, a former White House lawyer, said, “He’s powerful because people know he speaks for the Vice-President, and because he’s an extremely smart, creative, and aggressive public official. Some engage in bureaucratic infighting using slaps. Some use knives. David falls into the latter category. You could make the argument that there are some costs. It introduces a little fear into the policymaking process. Views might be more candidly expressed without that fear. But David is like the Marines. No better friend—no worse enemy.” People who have sparred with him agree. “He’s utterly ruthless,” Lawrence Wilkerson said. A former top national-security lawyer said, “He takes a political litmus test of everyone. If you’re not sufficiently ideological, he would cut the ground out from under you.”
Another reason for Addington’s singular role after September 11th is that he offered legal certitude at a moment of great political and legal confusion, in an Administration in which neither the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, nor the national-security adviser was a lawyer. (In the Clinton Administration, all these posts, except for the Vice-Presidency, were held by lawyers at some point.) Neither the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, nor the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, had anything like Addington’s familiarity with national-security law. Moreover, Ashcroft’s relations with the White House were strained, and he was left out of the inner circle that decided the most radical legal strategies in the war on terror. Gonzales had more influence, because of his longtime ties to the President, but, as an Administration lawyer put it, “he was an empty suit. He was weak. And he doesn’t know shit about the Geneva Conventions.” Participants in meetings in the White House counsel’s office, in the days immediately after September 11th, have described Gonzales sitting in a wingback chair, asking questions, while Addington sat directly across from him and held forth. “Gonzales would call the meetings,” the former high-ranking lawyer recalled. “But Addington was always the force in the room.” Bruce Fein said that the Bush legal team was strikingly unsophisticated. “There is no one of legal stature, certainly no one like Bork, or Scalia, or Elliot Richardson, or Archibald Cox,” he said. “It’s frightening. No one knows the Constitution—certainly not Cheney.”
Conventional wisdom holds that September 11th changed everything, including the thinking of Cheney and Addington. Brent Scowcroft, the former national-security adviser, has said of Cheney that he barely recognizes the reasonable politician he knew in the past. But a close look at the twenty-year collaboration between Cheney and Addington suggests that in fact their ideology has not changed much. It seems clear that Addington was able to promote vast executive powers after September 11th in part because he and Cheney had been laying the political groundwork for years. “This preceded 9/11,” Fein, who has known both men professionally for decades, said. “I’m not saying that warrantless surveillance did. But the idea of reducing Congress to a cipher was already in play. It was Cheney and Addington’s political agenda.”
Addington’s admirers see him as a selfless patriot, a workaholic defender of a purist interpretation of Presidential power—the necessary answer to threatening times. In 1983, Steve Berry, a Republican lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, hired Addington to work with him as the legislative counsel to the House Intelligence Committee; he has been a career patron and close friend ever since. He said, “I know him well, and I know that if there’s a threat he will do everything in his power, within the law, to protect the United States.” Berry added that Addington is acutely aware of the legal tensions between liberty and security. “We fought ourselves every day about it,” he recalled. But, he said, they concluded that a “strong national security and defense” was the first priority, and that “without a strong defense, there’s not much expectation or hope of having other freedoms.” He said that there is no better defender of the country than Addington: “I’ve got a lot of respect for the guy. He’s probably the foremost expert on intelligence and national-security law in the nation right now.” Berry has a daughter who works in New York City, and he said that when he thinks of her safety he appreciates the efforts that Addington has made to strengthen the country’s security. He said, “For Dave, protecting America isn’t just a virtue. It’s a personal mission. I feel safer just knowing he’s where he is.”
Berry said of his friend, “He’s methodical, conscientious, analytical, and logical. And he’s as straight an arrow as they come.” He noted that Addington refuses to let Berry treat him to a hamburger because it might raise issues of influence-buying—instead, they split the check. Addington, he went on, has a dazzling ability to recall the past twenty-five years’ worth of intelligence and national-security legislation. For many years, he kept a vast collection of legal documents in a library in his modest brick-and-clapboard home, in Alexandria, Virginia. One evening several years ago, lightning struck a nearby power line and the house caught fire; much of the archive burned. The fire started at around nine in the evening, and Addington, typically, was still in his office. His wife, Cynthia, and their three daughters were fine, but the loss of his extraordinary collection of papers and political memorabilia, Berry said, “was very hard for him to accept. All you get in this work is memorabilia. There is no cash. But he’s the type of guy who gets psychic benefit from going to work every day, making a difference.”
Though few people doubt Addington’s knowledge of national-security law, even his admirers question his political instincts. “The only time I’ve seen him wrong is on his political judgment,” a former colleague said. “He has a tin ear for political issues. Sometimes the law says one thing, but you have to at least listen to the other side. He will cite case history, case after case. David doesn’t see why you have to compromise.” Even Berry offered a gentle criticism: “His political skills can be overshadowed by his pursuit of what he feels is legally correct.”
Addington has been a hawk on national defense since he was a teen-ager. Leonard Napolitano, an engineer who was one of Addington’s close childhood friends, and whose political leanings are more like those of his sister, Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, joked, “I don’t think that in high school David was a believer in the divine right of kings.” But, he said, Addington was “always conservative.”
The Addingtons were a traditional Catholic military family. They moved frequently; David’s father, Jerry, an electrical engineer in the Army, was assigned to a variety of posts, including Saudi Arabia and Washington, D.C., where he worked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a teen-ager, Addington told a friend that he hoped to live in Washington himself when he grew up. Jerry Addington, a 1940 graduate of West Point who won a Bronze Star during the Second World War, also served in Korea and at the North American Air Defense Command, in Colorado; he reached the rank of brigadier general before he retired, in 1970, when David was thirteen. David attended public high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his father began a second career, teaching middle-school math. His mother, Eleanore, was a housewife; the family lived in a ranch house in a middle-class subdivision. She still lives there; Jerry died in 1994. “We are an extremely close family,” one of Addington’s three older sisters, Linda, recalled recently. “Discipline was very important for us, and faith was very important. It was about being ethical—the right thing to do whether anyone else does it or not. I see that in Dave.” She was reluctant to say more. “Dave is most deliberate about his privacy,” she added.
Socially, Napolitano recalled, he and Addington were “the brains, or nerds.” Addington stood out for wearing black socks with shorts. He and his friends were not particularly athletic, and they liked to play poker all night on weekends, stopping early in the morning for breakfast. Their circle included some girls, until the boys found them “too distracting to our interest in cards,” Napolitano recalled.
When he and Addington were in high school, Napolitano said, the Vietnam War was in its final stages, and “there was a certain amount of ‘Challenge authority’ and alcohol and drugs, but they weren’t issues in our group.” Addington’s high-school history teacher, Irwin Hoffman, whom Napolitano recalled as wonderful, exacting, and “a flaming liberal,” said that Addington felt strongly that America “should have stayed and won the Vietnam War, despite the fact that we were losing.” Hoffman, who is retired, added, “The boy seemed terribly, terribly bright. He wrote well, and he was very verbal, not at all reluctant to express his opinions. He was pleasant and quite handsome. He also had a very strong sarcastic streak. He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable.”
Addington graduated in 1974, the year that Nixon resigned. In the aftermath of Watergate, liberal Democratic reformers imposed tighter restraints on the President and reined in the C.I.A., whose excesses were critiqued in congressional hearings, led by Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike, that exposed details of assassination plots, coup attempts, mind-control experiments, and domestic spying. Congress passed a series of measures aimed at reinvigorating the system of checks and balances, including an expanded Freedom of Information Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law requiring judicial review before foreign suspects inside the country could be wiretapped. It also created the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which oversee all covert C.I.A. activities.
After high school, Addington pursued an ambition that he had had for years: to join the military. Rather than attending West Point, as his father had, he enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis. But he dropped out before the end of his freshman year. He went home and, according to Napolitano, worked in a Long John Silver’s restaurant. “The academy wasn’t academically challenging enough for him,” Napolitano said.
Addington went to Georgetown University, graduating summa cum laude, in 1978, from the school of foreign service; he went on to earn honors at Duke Law School. After graduating, in 1981, he married Linda Werling, a graduate student in pharmacology. The marriage ended in divorce. His current wife, Cynthia, takes care of their three girls full-time.
Soon after leaving Duke, Addington started his first job, in the general counsel’s office at the C.I.A. A former top agency lawyer who later worked with Addington said that Addington strongly opposed the reform movements that followed Vietnam and Watergate. “Addington was too young to be fully affected by the Vietnam War,” the lawyer said. “He was shaped by the postwar, post-Watergate years instead. He thought the Presidency was too weakened. He’s a believer that in foreign policy the executive is meant to be quite powerful.”
These views were shared by Dick Cheney, who served as chief of staff in the Ford Administration. “On a range of executive-power issues, Cheney thought that Presidents from Nixon onward yielded too quickly,” Michael J. Malbin, a political scientist who has advised Cheney on the issue of executive power, said. Kenneth Adelman, who was a high-ranking Pentagon official under Ford, said that the fall of Saigon, in 1975, was “very painful for Dick. He believed that Vietnam could have been saved—maybe—if Congress hadn’t cut off funding. He was against that kind of interference.”
Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has spent considerable time working with Cheney and Addington in recent years, believes that they are still fighting Watergate. “They’re focussed on restoring the Nixon Presidency,” she said. “They’ve persuaded themselves that, following Nixon, things went all wrong.” She said that in meetings Addington is always courtly and pleasant. But when it comes to accommodating Congress “his answer is always no.”
In a revealing interview that Cheney gave last December to reporters travelling with him to Oman, he explained, “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of Presidential power and authority. . . . A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs.” Further, Cheney explained, it was his express aim to restore the balance of power. The President needed to be able to act as Alexander Hamilton had described it in the Federalist Papers, with “secrecy” and “despatch”—especially, Cheney said, “in the day and age we live in . . . with the threats we face.” He added, “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think the world we live in demands it.”
At the C.I.A., where Addington spent two years, he focussed on curtailing the ability of Congress to interfere in intelligence gathering. “He was a rookie, plenty bright,” Frederick Hitz, another C.I.A. lawyer, who later became Inspector General, recalled. After the Church and Pike hearings, legislators came up with hundreds of pages of oversight recommendations, he said. “Addington was very pro-agency. He was trying to figure out how to comply with government oversight without getting hog-tied.” Addington viewed the public airings of the C.I.A.’s covert activities as “an absolute disaster,” Berry recalled. “We both felt that Congress did great harm by flinging open the doors to operational secrets.”
When Addington joined the C.I.A., it was directed by William J. Casey, who also regarded congressional constraints on the agency as impediments to be circumvented. His sentiment about congressional overseers was best captured during a hearing about covert actions in Central America, when he responded to tough questioning by muttering the word “assholes.” After Reagan’s election in 1980, the executive branch was dominated by conservative Republicans, while the House was governed by liberal Democrats. The two parties fought intensely over Central America; the Reagan Administration was determined to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Using their constitutional authority over appropriations, the Democrats in Congress forbade the C.I.A. to spend federal funds to support the Contras, a rightist rebel group. But Casey’s attitude, as Berry recalled it, was “We’re gonna fund these freedom fighters whether Congress wants us to or not.” Berry, then the staff director for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, asked Casey for help in fighting the Democrats. Soon afterward, Addington joined Berry on Capitol Hill.
When the Iran-Contra scandal broke, in 1986, it exposed White House arms deals and foreign fund-raising designed to help the anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua. Members of Congress were furious. Summoned to Capitol Hill, Casey lied, denying that funds for the Contras had been solicited from any foreign governments, although he knew that the Saudis, among others, had agreed to give millions of dollars to the Contras, at the request of the White House. Even within the Reagan Administration, the foreign funding was controversial. Secretary of State George Shultz had warned Reagan that he might be committing an impeachable offense. But, under Casey’s guidance, the White House went ahead with the plan; Shultz, having expressed misgivings, was not told. It was a bureaucratic tactic that Addington reprised after September 11th, when Powell was left out of key deliberations about the treatment of detainees. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s aide, said that he was aware of Addington’s general strategy: “We had heard that, behind our backs, he was saying that Powell was ‘soft, but easy to get around.’ ”
The Iran-Contra scandal substantially weakened Reagan’s popularity and, eventually, seven people were convicted of seventeen felonies. Cheney, who was then a Republican congressman from Wyoming, worried that the scandal would further undercut Presidential authority. In late 1986, he became the ranking Republican on a House select committee that was investigating the scandal, and he commissioned a report on Reagan’s support of the Contras. Addington, who had become an expert in intelligence law, contributed legal research. The scholarly-sounding but politically outlandish Minority Report, released in 1987, argued that Congress—not the President—had overstepped its authority, by encroaching on the President’s foreign-policy powers. The President, the report said, had been driven by “a legitimate frustration with abuses of power and irresolution by the legislative branch.” The Minority Report sanctioned the President’s actions to a surprising degree, considering the number of criminal charges that resulted from the scandal. The report also defended the legality of ignoring congressional intelligence oversight, arguing that “the President has the Constitutional and statutory authority to withhold notifying Congress of covert actions under rare conditions.” And it condemned “legislative hostage taking,” noting that “Congress must realize . . . that the power of the purse does not make it supreme” in matters of war. In his December interview with reporters, Cheney proudly cited this document. “If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed in the Iran-Contra committee, the Iran-Contra report, in about 1987,” he said. “Part of the argument was whether the President had the authority to do what was done in the Reagan years.”
Addington and Cheney became a formidable team, but it was soon clear that Addington would not join Cheney as a politician. Adelman recalled Addington’s personality as “dour,” adding that, “unlike with Dick, I never saw much of a sense of humor. Cheney can be witty and funny. David is sober. I didn’t see him at social events much.” But, he added, “Dick wasn’t looking for friends at work. He was looking for performance. And David delivers. He’s efficient and dedicated. He’s a doer.” He went on, “Cheney’s not a lawyer, so he would defer to David on the law.”
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed Cheney Secretary of Defense. Cheney hired Addington first as his special assistant and, later, as the Pentagon’s general counsel. At the Pentagon, Addington became widely known as Cheney’s gatekeeper—a stickler for process who controlled the flow of documents to his boss. Using a red felt-tipped pen, he covered his colleagues’ memos with comments before returning them for rewrites. His editing invariably made arguments sharper, smarter, and more firm in their defense of Cheney’s executive powers, a former military official who worked with him said.
At the Pentagon, Addington took a particular interest in the covert actions of the Special Forces. A former colleague recalled that, after attending a demonstration by Special Forces officers, he mocked the C.I.A., which was constrained by oversight laws. “This is how real covert operations are done,” he said. (After September 11th, the Pentagon greatly expanded its covert intelligence operations; these programs have less congressional oversight than those of the C.I.A.) Cheney, throughout his tenure as Defense Secretary, shared with Addington a pessimistic view of the Soviet Union. Both remained skeptical of Gorbachev long after the State Department, the national-security adviser, and the C.I.A. had concluded that he was a reformer. “They were always, like, ‘Whoa—beware the Bear!’ ” Wilkerson recalled. They immersed themselves in “continuity of government exercises”—studying with unusual intensity how the government might survive a nuclear attack. According to “Rise of the Vulcans,” a history of the period by James Mann, Cheney, more than once, spent the night in an underground bunker.
A decade later, when hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Addington, perhaps more than anyone else in the U.S. government, was ready to act. During the Clinton Presidency, he had worked as a lawyer for various business interests, such as the American Trucking Associations, and in 1994 he had led an exploratory Presidential campaign for Cheney, who decided against running. Once Cheney became Vice-President, Addington helped oversee the transition, setting up the most powerful Vice-Presidency in America’s history. Addington’s high-school friend Leonard Napolitano said Addington told him that he and Cheney were merging the Vice-President’s office with the President’s into a single “Executive Office,” instead of having “two different camps.” Napolitano added, “David said that Cheney saw the Vice-President as the executive and implementer of the President.” Addington created a system to insure that virtually all important documents relating to national-security matters were seen by the Vice-President’s office. The former high-ranking Administration lawyer said that Addington regularly attended White House legal meetings with the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. He received copies of all National Security Council documents, including internal memos from the staff. And, as a former top official in the Defense Department, he exerted influence over the legal office at the Pentagon, helping his protégé William J. Haynes secure the position of general counsel. A former national-security lawyer, speaking of the Pentagon’s legal office, said, “It’s obvious that Addington runs the whole operation.”
In the days after September 11th, a half-dozen White House lawyers had heated discussions about how to frame the Administration’s legal response to the attacks. Bradford Berenson, one of the participants, recalled how “raw” feelings were at the time: “There were thousands of bereaved American families. Everyone was expecting additional attacks. The only planes in the air were military. At a moment like that, there’s an intense focus on responsibility and accountability. Preventing another attack should always be within the law. But if you have to err on the side of being too aggressive or not aggressive enough, you’d err by being too aggressive.”
Berry said that Addington felt this keenly. “I’ve talked to David about this a little. Psychologically, it’s really taxing to read every day not about one or two but about a dozen, or two dozen, legitimate reports about efforts to take out U.S. citizens. . . . There’s a little bit of a bunker mentality that set in among some of the national-security-policy officials after 9/11.”
Almost immediately, other Administration lawyers noticed that Addington dominated the internal debates. His assumption, shared by other hard-line lawyers in the White House counsel’s office and in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was that the criminal-justice system was insufficient to handle the threat from terrorism. The matter was settled without debate, Berenson recalled: “There was a consensus that we had to move from retribution and punishment to preëmption and prevention. Only a warfare model allows that approach.”
Richard Shiffrin, the former Pentagon lawyer, said that during a tense White House meeting held in the Situation Room just a few days after September 11th “all of us felt under a great deal of pressure to be willing to consider even the most extraordinary proposals. The C.I.A., the N.S.C., the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department all had people there. Addington was particularly strident. He’d sit, listen, and then say, ‘No, that’s not right.’ He was particularly doctrinaire and ideological. He didn’t recognize the wisdom of the other lawyers. He was always right. He didn’t listen. He knew the answers.” The details of the discussion are classified, Shiffrin said, but he left with the impression that Addington “doesn’t believe there should be co-equal branches.” Another participant recalled, “If you favored international law, you were in danger of being called ‘soft on terrorism’ by Addington.” He added that Addington’s manner in meetings was “very insistent and very loud.” Yet another participant said that, whenever he cautioned against executive-branch overreaching, Addington would respond brusquely, “There you go again, giving away the President’s power.”
Some of the protests from Democrats about the Administration’s legal arguments and some of the declarations of high principle from Republicans are mere partisan gestures. Both sides have changed their views about the need for a strong President, depending on whether they were in power. “It’s a matter of degree,” the liberal Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said. “War always expands the powers of the Presidency. And Presidents always overreach.” Lincoln infamously suspended habeas-corpus rights during the Civil War, locking up thousands of Confederate sympathizers without due process, and Franklin D. Roosevelt interned more than a hundred thousand innocent Japanese-Americans. “Someone said that this Administration is monarchical,” Wilentz added. “That’s just rhetoric. We’re not a dictatorship. At the same time, this White House has assumed powers for itself that no previous Administration has done.” Bush’s defenders frequently cite the example of Lincoln as a justification for placing national security above the rule of law. But Schlesinger, in his book “War and the American Presidency” (2004), points out that Lincoln never “claimed an inherent and routine right to do what [he] did.” The Bush White House, he told me, has seized on these historical aberrations and turned them into a doctrine of Presidential prerogative.
On September 25th, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo declaring that the President had inherent constitutional authority to take whatever military action he deemed necessary, not just in response to the September 11th attacks but also in the prevention of any future attacks from terrorist groups, whether they were linked to Al Qaeda or not. The memo’s broad definition of the enemy went beyond that of Congress, which, on September 14th, had passed legislation authorizing the President to use military force against “nations, organizations, or persons” directly linked to the attacks. The memo was written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel who worked closely with Addington, and said, in part, “The power of the President is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces, because the power of the Commander-in-Chief is assigned solely to the President.” The memo acknowledged that Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but argued that it was a misreading to assume that the article gives Congress the lead role in making war. Instead, the memo said, “it is beyond question that the President has the plenary Constitutional power to take such military actions as he deems necessary and appropriate to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on September 11, 2001.” It concluded, “These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.”
Another memo sanctioned torture when the President deems it necessary; yet another claimed that there were virtually no valid legal prohibitions against the inhumane treatment of foreign prisoners held by the C.I.A. outside the U.S. Most of these decisions, according to many Administration officials who were involved in the process, were made in secrecy, and the customary interagency debate and vetting procedures were sidestepped. Addington either drafted the memos himself or advised those who were drafting them. “Addington’s fingerprints were all over these policies,” said Wilkerson, who, as Powell’s top aide, later assembled for the Secretary a dossier of internal memos detailing the decision-making process.
On November 13, 2001, an executive order setting up the military commissions was issued under Bush’s signature. The decision stunned Powell; the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; the highest-ranking lawyer at the C.I.A.; and many judge advocate generals, or JAGs, the top lawyers in the military services. None of them had been consulted. Michael Chertoff, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, who had argued for trying terror suspects in the U.S. courts, was also bypassed. And the order surprised John Bellinger III, the National Security Council legal adviser and deputy White House counsel, who had been formally asked to help create a legal method for trying foreign terror suspects. According to multiple sources, Addington secretly usurped the process. He and a few hand-picked associates, including Bradford Berenson and Timothy Flanigan, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, wrote the executive order creating the commissions. Moreover, Addington did not show drafts of the order to Powell or Rice, who, the senior Administration lawyer said, was incensed when she learned about her exclusion.
The order proclaimed a state of “extraordinary emergency,” and announced that the rules for the military commissions would be dictated by the Secretary of Defense, without review by Congress or the courts. The commissions could try any foreign person the President or his representatives deemed to have “engaged in” or “abetted” or “conspired to commit” terrorism, without offering the right to seek an appeal from anyone but the President or the Secretary of Defense. Detainees would be treated “humanely,” and would be given “full and fair trials,” the order said. Yet the order continued that “it is not practicable” to apply “the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.” The death penalty, for example, could be imposed even if there was a split verdict. Moreover, in December, 2001, the Department of Defense circulated internal memos suggesting that, in the commission system, defendants would have only limited rights to confront their accusers, see all the evidence against them, or be present during their trials. There would be no right to remain silent, and hearsay evidence would be admissible, as would evidence obtained through physical coercion. Guilt did not need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The order firmly established that terrorism would henceforth be approached on a war footing, endowing the President with enhanced powers.
The precedent for the order was an arcane 1942 case, ex parte Quirin, in which Franklin Roosevelt created a military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had infiltrated the United States via submarines. The Supreme Court upheld the case, 8–0, but even the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has called it “not this Court’s finest hour.” Roosevelt was later criticized for creating a sham process. Moreover, while he used military commissions to try a handful of suspects who had already admitted their guilt, the Bush White House was proposing expanding the process to cover thousands of “enemy combatants.” It was also ignoring the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, having codified procedures for courts-martial in 1951, had rendered Quirin out of date.
Berenson said, “The legal foundation was very strong. F.D.R.’s order establishing military commissions had been upheld by the Supreme Court. This was almost identical. What we underestimated was the extent to which the culture had shifted beneath us since World War Two.” Concerns about civil liberties and human rights, and anger over Vietnam and Watergate, he said, had turned public opinion against a strong executive branch: “But Addington thought military commissions had to be a tool at the President’s disposal.”
Rear Admiral Donald Guter, who was the Navy’s chief JAG until June, 2002, said that he and the other JAGs, who were experts in the laws of war, tried unsuccessfully to amend parts of the military-commission plan when they learned of it, days before the order was formally signed by the President. “But we were marginalized,” he said. “We were warning them that we had this long tradition of military justice, and we didn’t want to tarnish it. The treatment of detainees was a huge issue. They didn’t want to hear it.” In a 2004 report in the Times, Guter said that when he and the other JAGs told Haynes that they needed more information, Haynes replied, “No, you don’t.” (Haynes’s office offered no comment.)
At the Defense Department, Shiffrin, the deputy general counsel for intelligence, and a career lawyer rather than a political appointee, was taken aback when Haynes showed him the order. Earlier in Shiffrin’s career, at the Justice Department, his office had been in the same room where the Nazi defendants were tried, and he had become interested in the case, which he said he regarded as “one of the worst Supreme Court cases ever.” He recalled informing Haynes that he was skeptical of the Administration’s invocation of Quirin. “Gee, this is problematic,” Shiffrin told him.
Marine Major Dan Mori, the uniformed lawyer who has been assigned to defend David Hicks, one of the ten terror suspects in Guantánamo who have been charged, said of the commissions, “It was a political stunt. The Administration clearly didn’t know anything about military law or the laws of war. I think they were clueless that there even was a U.C.M.J. and a Manual for Courts-Martial! The fundamental problem is that the rules were constructed by people with a vested interest in conviction.”
Mori said that the charges against the detainees reflected a profound legal confusion. “A military commission can try only violations of the laws of war,” he said. “But the Administration’s lawyers didn’t understand this.” Under federal criminal statutes, for example, conspiring to commit terrorist acts is a crime. But, as the Nuremburg trials that followed the Second World War established, under the laws of war it is not, since all soldiers could be charged with conspiring to fight for their side. Yet, Mori said, a charge of conspiracy “is the only thing there is in many cases at Guantánamo—guilt by association. So you’ve got this big problem.” He added, “I hope that nobody confuses military justice with these ‘military commissions.’ This is a political process, set up by the civilian leadership. It’s inept, incompetent, and improper.”
Under attack from defense lawyers like Mori, the military commissions have been tied up in the courts almost since the order was issued. Bellinger and others fought to make the commissions fairer, so that they could withstand court challenges, and the Pentagon gradually softened its rules. But Administration lawyers involved in the process said that Addington resisted at every turn. He insisted, for instance, on maintaining the admissibility of statements obtained through coercion, or even torture. In meetings, he argued that officials in charge of the military commissions should be given maximum flexibility to decide whether to include such evidence. “Torture isn’t important to Addington as a scientific matter, good or bad, or whether it works or not,” the Administration lawyer, who is familiar with these debates, said. “It’s more about his philosophy of Presidential power. He thinks that if the President wants torture he should get torture. He always argued for ‘maximum flexibility.’ ”
Last month, Addington lost this internal battle. The Administration rescinded the provision allowing coerced testimony, after even the military officials overseeing the commissions supported the reform. According to a senior Administration legal adviser who participated in discussions about the commissions, Addington remained opposed to the change. “He wanted no changes,” the lawyer said. “He said the rules were good, right from the start.” Addington accused officials who were trying to reform the rules of “giving away the President’s prerogatives.”
President Bush has blamed the legal challenges for the delays in prosecuting Guantánamo detainees. But many lawyers, even some inside the Administration, believe that the challenges were inevitable, considering the dubious constitutionality of the commissions. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hamdan case is expected to establish whether the commissions meet basic standards of due process. The Administration lawyer isn’t sanguine about the outcome. “It shows again that Addington overreached,” he said.
Meanwhile, Addington has fought tirelessly to stem reform of other controversial aspects of the New Paradigm, such as the detention and interrogation of terror suspects. Last year, he and Cheney led an unsuccessful campaign to defeat an amendment, proposed by Senator John McCain, to ban the abusive treatment of detainees held by the military or the C.I.A. Government officials who have worked closely with Addington say he insists that legal flexibility is necessary, because of the iniquity of the enemy; moreover, he does not believe that the legal positions taken by the Bush Administration in the war on terror have damaged the country’s international reputation. “He’s a very smart guy, but he gives no credibility to those who say these policies are hurting us around the world,” the senior Administration legal adviser said. “His feeling is that there are no costs. He’ll say people are just whining. He thinks most of them would be against us no matter what.” In Addington’s view, critics of the Administration’s aggressive legal policies are just political enemies of the President.
Yet, from the start, some of the sharpest critics of detainee-treatment policies have been military and law-enforcement officials inside the Bush Administration; people close to it, like McCain; and our foreign allies. Just a few months after the Guantánamo detention centers were established, members of the Administration began receiving reports that questioned whether all the prisoners there were really, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had labelled them, “the worst of the worst.” Guter said that the Pentagon had originally planned to screen the suspects individually on the battlefields in Afghanistan; such “Article 5 hearings” are a provision of the Geneva Conventions. But the White House cancelled the hearings, which had been standard protocol during the previous fifty years, including in the first Gulf War. In a January 25, 2002, legal memorandum, Administration lawyers dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “obsolete,” “quaint,” and irrelevant to the war on terror. The memo was signed by Gonzales, but the Administration lawyer said he believed that “Addington and Flanigan were behind it.” The memo argued that all Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees were illegal enemy combatants, which eliminated “any argument regarding the need for case-by-case determination of P.O.W. status.” Critics claim that the lack of a careful screening process led some innocent detainees to be imprisoned. “Article 5 hearings would have cost them nothing,” the Administration lawyer, who was involved in the process, said. “They just wanted to make a point on executive power—that the President can designate them all enemy combatants if he wants to.”
Guter, the Navy JAG, said that, before long, he and other military experts began to wonder whether the reason they weren’t getting much useful intelligence from Guantánamo was that, as he puts it, “it wasn’t there.” Guter, who was in the Pentagon on September 11th, said, “I don’t have a sympathetic bone in my body for the terrorists. But I just wanted to make sure we were getting the right people—the real terrorists. And I wanted to make sure we were doing it in a way consistent with our values.”
While the JAGs’ questions about the treatment of detainees went largely unheeded, he said, the C.I.A. was simultaneously raising similar concerns. In the summer of 2002, the agency had sent an Arabic-speaking analyst to Guantánamo to find out why more intelligence wasn’t being collected, and, after interviewing several dozen prisoners, he had come back with bad news: more than half the detainees, he believed, didn’t belong there. He wrote a devastating classified report, which reached General John Gordon, the deputy national-security adviser for combatting terrorism. In a series of meetings at the White House, Gordon, Bellinger, and other officials warned Addington and Gonzales that potentially innocent people had been locked up in Guantánamo and would be indefinitely. “This is a violation of basic notions of American fairness,” Gordon and Bellinger argued. “Isn’t that what we’re about as a country?” Addington’s response, sources familiar with the meetings said, was “These are ‘enemy combatants.’ Please use that term. They’ve all been through a screening process. We don’t have anything to talk about.”
A former Administration official said of Addington’s response, “It seemed illogical. How could you deny the possibility that one or more people were locked up who shouldn’t be? There were old people, sick people—why do we want to keep them?” At the meeting, Gordon and Bellinger argued, “The American public understands that wars are confusing and exceptional things happen. But the American public will expect some due process.”
Addington and Gonzales dismissed this concern. The former Administration official recalled that Addington was “the dominant voice. It was a non-debate, in his view.” The confrontation made clear, though, that Addington had been informed early that there were problems at Guantánamo. “There wasn’t a lack of knowledge or understanding,” the former official said.
Addington has proved deft at outmaneuvering his critics. Documents embarrassing to Addington’s opponents have been leaked to the press, if not necessarily by him. A top-secret N.S.C. memo describing Powell’s request to reconsider the suspension of the Geneva Conventions appeared in the Washington Times the day after it was circulated to the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Vice-President; the article cited unnamed sources who accused Powell of “bowing to pressure from the political left.” The Administration lawyer said, “The way Addington works, he controls the flow of information very tightly.” Addington chastised a Justice Department official who showed a legal opinion on the treatment of detainees to the State Department. He repeatedly directed Gonzales, the White House counsel, to keep Bellinger, the N.S.C. lawyer, out of meetings about national-security issues. “Lip-lock” is the word Addington’s old Pentagon colleague Sean O’Keefe, now the chancellor of Louisiana State University, used to describe his discretion. “He’s like Cheney,” O’Keefe said. “You can’t get anything out of him with a crowbar.” The Administration lawyer said, “He’s a bully, pure and simple.” Several talented top lawyers who challenged Addington on important legal matters concerning the war on terror, including Patrick Philbin, James Comey, and Jack Goldsmith, left the Administration under stressful circumstances. Other reform-minded government lawyers who clashed with Addington, including Bellinger and Matthew Waxman, both of whom were at the N.S.C. during Bush’s first term, have moved to the State Department.
Waxman, a young lawyer who headed the Pentagon’s office of detainee affairs, departed soon after he had a major confrontation with Addington over the issue of clarifying military rules for the treatment of prisoners. Waxman believed that international standards for the humane treatment of detainees should be followed, and argued for reforms in the Army Field Manual. He hoped to reinstate the basic standards that are specified in the Geneva Conventions. This meant the prohibition of torture, overt acts of violence, and “outrages on personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Although the Vice-President’s office is not part of the military chain of command, last September Addington summoned Waxman to his office and berated him. Waxman declined to comment on the incident, but a former colleague in the Pentagon, in whom Waxman confided, said that Addington accused Waxman of wanting to fight the war on terror his own way, rather than the President’s way. The Army Field Manual still hasn’t been revised, and, according to those involved, Addington and his protégé Haynes remain the major obstacles.
Last fall, Richard Shiffrin, the Pentagon lawyer who was left out of the Administration’s initial discussions of the military commissions, learned from the Times about the Administration’s decision to sanction warrantless domestic electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency. This was remarkable, because Shiffrin was the Pentagon lawyer in charge of supervising the N.S.A.’s legal advisers. “It was exceptional that I didn’t know about it—extraordinary,” Shiffrin said. “In the prior Administration, on anything involving N.S.A. legal issues I’d have been made aware. And I should have been in this one.”
Shortly after September 11th, Addington and Cheney, without alerting Shiffrin, held meetings with top N.S.A. lawyers in the Vice-President’s office and told them that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, had the authority to override the FISA statutes and not seek warrants from the special court. According to the Times, Addington and Cheney pushed the N.S.A. to engage in practices that the agency thought were illegal, such as the warrantless wiretapping of American suspects making domestic calls. General Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A., who was recently confirmed as director of the C.I.A., has denied being pressured. Shiffrin, however, doubted that the N.S.A. lawyers were expert enough in Article II of the Constitution, which defines the President’s powers, to argue back. He described the Administration’s legal arguments on wiretapping as “close calls.”
Others are more critical. Fourteen prominent constitutional scholars, representing a range of political views, recently wrote an open letter to Congress, claiming that the N.S.A. surveillance program “appears on its face to violate existing law.” The scholars noted that Bush had made no effort to amend the FISA law to suit national-security needs—he simply ignored it. The Republican legal activist Bruce Fein said, “What makes this so sinister is that the members of this Administration have unchecked power. They don’t care if the wiretapping is legal or not.” But the former high-ranking Administration lawyer suggested that the situation is more serious than an intentional infraction of the law. “It’s not that they think they’re skirting the law,” he said. “They think that this is the law.”
Fein suggested that the only way Congress will be able to reassert its power is by cutting off funds to the executive branch for programs that it thinks are illegal. But this approach has been tried, and here, too, Addington has had the last word. John Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, put a provision in the Pentagon’s appropriations bills for 2005 and 2006 forbidding the use of federal funds for any intelligence-gathering that violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of American citizens. The White House, however, took exception to Congress’s effort to cut off funds. When President Bush signed the appropriations bills into law, he appended “signing statements” asserting that the Commander-in-Chief had the right to collect intelligence in any way he deemed necessary. The signing statement for the 2005 budget, for instance, noted that the executive branch would “construe” the spending limit only “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief, including for the conduct of intelligence operations.”
According to the Boston Globe, Addington has been the “leading architect” of these signing statements, which have been added to more than seven hundred and fifty laws. He reportedly scrutinizes every bill before President Bush signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on Presidential power. These wars of words are yet another battlefront between Addington and Congress, and some constitutional scholars find them troubling. Few of the signing statements were noticed until one of them was slipped into Bush’s signing of the McCain amendment. The language was legal boilerplate, reserving the right to construe the legislation only as it was consistent with the Constitution. But, considering that Cheney’s office had waged, and lost, a public fight to defeat the McCain amendment democratically—the vote in the Senate was 90–9—the signing statement seemed sneaky and subversive.
Earlier this month, the American Bar Association voted to investigate whether President Bush had exceeded his constitutional authority by reserving the right to ignore portions of laws that he has signed. Richard Epstein, the University of Chicago law professor, said, “What’s frightening to me is that this Administration is always willing to push the conventions t | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 2:27 am Post subject: |
| From: "Roger Rancourt"
Subject: Re: ARE WE ENTERING AMERICA'S DARKEST HOUR?
DAVID ADDINGTON!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=24208
THIS GUY IS A SICK INSANE TALMUD ZIONIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THIS IS THE FREAK WHO IS WRITING AND LEGISLATING ALL THESE, RIDICULOUS, OBSSESSIVE, FASCIST BILLS EVERYWHERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
DAVID ADDINGTON!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A DISGRACE!!!!!! JEFF I BET YOU COULD TALK SOME WORDS TO THIS RIDICULOUS JEW, HE IS TOTALLY OBLIVIOUS TO THE WORLD BESIDES THE TALMUD!
Roger
On 10/2/06, Roger Rancourt <realcountscount@gmail.com> wrote:
And who wrote it?
DAVID ADDINGTON......
A VERY DISPICABLE ZIONIST
On 10/2/06, EvPeters8@aol.com <EvPeters8@aol.com> wrote:
ARE WE ENTERING AMERICA'S DARKEST HOUR?
BY: DR. RICHARD FRANKLIN
SOURCE: Published on 10/2/06 in Franklin's Focus.
URL: None (Franklin's Focus is an e-newsletter).
The passage of what can only be described as neofascist laws that
dramatically undermine the American system of jurisprudence strikes me as a momentous
bellwether. [1] On top of this stunning event in American history, Attorney
General Gonzales has issued a warning to all federal judges not to meddle with the
newly garnered dictatorial powers of the president. [2]
I BELIEVE THIS DIRECTIVE IS A SERIOUS WARNING.
So, you ask, what could happen to a judge snubbing his nose at this warning?
Here's what might happen: any judge ignoring such an implied threat of
retribution might find himself actually facing an 'in camera' hearing during which
the judge would find himself summarily impeached and removed from the bench.
'In camera' means 'in a chamber'. The term is applied to hearings held
secretly in a courtroom or judicial chambers. I absolutely do not put it past the
cabal to stamp out judicial opposition using this blunt fascist maneuver. Would
it be legal? Of course not, but legality long ago stopped being a
consideration for the ruling cabal. The PNAC ("Plan for a New American Century") gang
members almost certainly are feeling their oats after their stunning victories on
Capitol Hill.
They just might feel that now is the time to strike powerfully against what
they see as an annoying American jurisprudence, and to do so with stunning
forcefulness and secrecy before the country can even grasp what has happened. It
is now apparent that a namby pamby Congress would not stand in the way of a
move to crush the judiciary.
CONSIDER THAT BUSH WILL NOW HAVE THE POWER TO DECLARE ANY DEFENSE ATTORNEY
IN AMERICA AN 'ENEMY COMBATANT' AND THEN DISAPPEAR HIM OR HER FOREVER.
That fundamentally cripples justice in America. So where does the cabal go
from there? Use your imagination. A final trampling of the judicial branch
strikes me as likely, now that the cabal has steamrolled the legislative branch of
government.
BE HONEST ABOUT WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THIS COUNTRY
One can hardly overly inflate one's speculations at this time in American
history if as I suspect we now may be entering America's darkest hour. I know
this may seem like wild guessing, but it's about time we started being honest
about what has happened to this country.
Please understand that I'm not predicting anything. I'm only painting
possible scenarios that may have seemed totally mad not so long ago, but now seem
perilously close to being possible. This is an extraordinarily perilous moment in
American history. Anybody who can't see that is wearing blinders. We are now
all sitting on the deck of Lusitania, while an orchestra plays to calm our
fears.
I repeat, the Attorney General of the United States has warned federal judges
not to meddle with the new powers of the president. I cannot remember an AG
ever warning judges not to tamper with the expanding powers of a president.
That warning has to be characterized as ominous.
Keep in mind that the cabal killed three thousand citizens on 9/11 without a
twitching of moral conscience. Hence, the cabal that is now in control of this
nation quite possibly sees a complete transmuting of America into a fascist
state within their grasp.
They need only cross the Rubicon.
Think about it. [3]-[14]
Warmest Regards,
Richard Franklin
ENDNOTES:
[1] Jerry Mazza's 10/2/06 Online Journal essay, "Desperate Measure From
Desperate Men" [And I might add, for desperate times. I'm talking about the US
Senate passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that discards key human
rights protections. This is an act of a desperate president, seeking to rally
support for his failed and brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, by further rallying
the spineless and frightened Congress around the flag. The more Bush is
cornered by failure, the more he goes on the attack and flails fearful legislators
with the loss of their jobs if they're not "patriotic" enough.]:
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1266.shtml
[2] Michael Sniffen's 9/29/06 Truthout/AP article, "Gonzales Cautions Judges
On Interfering" [In an unprecedented public statement, U.S. Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales warned federal judges to neither oppose nor interfere with the
extra-constitutional expansion of George W. Bush's presidential powers.]:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/093006Y.shtml
[3] Marjorie Cohn's 10/1/06 CounterPunch essay, "A Constitutional Shredding:
Rounding Up US Citizens" [Because the Military Commissions Act of 2006
governing the treatment of detainees was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone
noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S.
citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."]:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cohn09302006.html
[4] Richard Kim's 10/1/06 The Nation essay, "RIP, Bill Of Rights, RIP" [The
US now holds 14,000 detainees in prisons in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan and
other undisclosed locations. 14,000 people who can be held indefinitely,
without a fair trial, by secret evidence they have no access or that may be obtained
by what most consider torture.]:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15
[5] Michael Duffy's 10/1/06 Time Magazine article, "Why Torture Is Still An
Option: The Compromise Terrorism Detainee Bill Limits Interrogation Abuses --
And Lets Bush Set The Limits" [Last week, both houses of Congress approved a
bill -- the Military Commissions Act -- that would permit the indefinite,
extrajudicial incarceration of terrorist suspects and their interrogation using
torture in all but name.]:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541238,00.html
[6] Robert Kuttner's 10/1/06 Common Dreams/Boston Globe essay, "The John
McCain Charade" [On the surface, it looks like U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is
the anti-Bush; underneath, he is clearly Bush's enabler. Just look at McCain's
self-contradictory words and actions in relation to the terrible compromises
the Senate reached last week on Bush's military commissions and warrantless
domestic spying.]: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1001-23.htm
[7] Ralph Nader's 9/30/06 Common Dreams essay, "Democracy As The Biggest
Loser On Habeus Corpus" [The messianic, authoritarian George W. Bush and the minds
of his cohorts have further collapsed the rule of law with his bulldozing
through a divided Congress more dictatorial powers in his increasingly
self-defined, self-serving and failing "war on terror."]:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0930-21.htm
[8] Ed Kinane's 9/30/06 Common Dreams essay, "On Torture" [It's frightening
and pathetic that, at this time and in this nation, torture must be discussed
as if it were a legitimate issue. What's next -- the pros and cons of child
molestation?]:
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views06/0930-20.htm
[9] Richard Behan's 9/29/06 Common Dreams essay, "How George Bush Admitted
His War Crimes" [Buried in the 94 pages of the Military Commissions Act of 2006
-- the "detainee act" or the "torture bill" -- the Bush Administration tacitly
admits it has committed war crimes.]:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0930-22.htm
[10] Molly Ivins' 9/29/06 Information Clearing House essay, "Habeus Corpus,
R.I.P. (1215-2006)" [With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to
wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a
cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.]:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article15163.htm | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 4:35 pm Post subject: Man jailed after comment to VP |
| Man jailed after comment to VP
By Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News
October 4, 2006
Steven Howards saw a news story one morning this summer reporting the latest casualty totals from Iraq, and a few hours later had the rare opportunity to voice his feelings to a man he considers directly responsible.
Doing so, Howards said, sent him to jail for allegedly harassing the vice president of the United States. And now he is responding with a federal lawsuit against the Secret Service agent who put him in handcuffs.
The suit filed Tuesday alleges that Howards was arrested in retaliation for having exercised his First Amendment right of free speech, and that his arrest also violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful arrest.
Howards' lawyer, David Lane, said at a Tuesday press conference that he believes it's possible the case could land Vice President Dick Cheney on the stand as a witness in the case, or even be added as a defendant.
The lawsuit stems from a chance meeting on an outdoors mall in Beaver Creek on June 16, when Howards and his wife were walking their two sons to a piano camp.
They were surprised to see Cheney there, posing for pictures and shaking hands with members of the public.
"Many of us fantasize what would we do if we had the opportunity to really tell Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney how we feel," said Howards, 54, of Golden.
"And to be honest, when I passed him, my initial thought was to keep walking. And then I said, I couldn't with a clear conscience let this opportunity pass."
So Howards approached the vice president and told him, " 'Your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.' And I moved on. I didn't want to give anybody any excuses to come after me."
But a few minutes later, according to Howards, he was walking back across the mall with his younger son, Jonah, then 8, when he was approached by an agent identified in the lawsuit as Virgil D. "Gus" Reichle Jr.
The agent, Howards said, "came out of the shadows and literally said, 'Did you assault the vice president?'
"If this had happened, I would think if they were doing their job, I would have been face-down in the concrete five or 10 minutes earlier," said Howards. "To me, this was just absolute, transparent harassment."
Howards denied touching Cheney, repeated for the agent what he had said to the vice president, and promptly found himself being handcuffed and taken to the Eagle County Jail, where he said he remained cuffed for three hours prior to being bailed out by his wife.
Howards' lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver and requesting unspecified damages and a jury trial, states that he was told by Reichle he would be charged federally with assaulting the vice president.
In fact, Howards was charged in state court with misdemeanor harassment, punishable by up to one year in jail. The harassment charge was then dismissed July 10 at the request of Eagle County District Attorney Mark Hurlbert.
Initially, Hurlbert said Tuesday, "We had information that . . . he had pushed the vice president. That was our original information.
"Later on, it appeared it was just essentially his disagreeing with the vice president's policies. That's not harassment."
Hurlbert said he has seen no information indicating that Howards' arrest came at Cheney's request or direction.
Lane said it's possible the agent's superiors, and those who trained him, could eventually join Reichle as defendants.
A Secret Service spokesman in Washington, D.C., declined comment on the suit. U.S. attorney's spokesman in Denver Jeff Dorschner said Reichle could elect to be defended either by the U.S. attorney's office or by a private attorney.
Reichle did not return a call left for him at his Denver office.
Howards is formerly the executive director of the Denver Metropolitan Air Quality Council. He currently works as a consultant to public and private sector organizations on environmental issues.
"This (lawsuit) is really about whether we in fact live in a free nation, whether we in fact still have the ability to speak freely in our opposition to government policies," Howards said. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 11:13 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/05/1429248
Thursday, October 5th, 2006
Denver Man Sues Secret Service for Arrest After He Criticized Cheney on Iraq War
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Steven Howards was arrested in a Denver mall after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney and denounced the war in Iraq. Secret Service agents accused him of assault and harassment. He's suing them now for violating his civil rights. Howards joins us to speak about his ordeal. [includes rush transcript]
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Yesterday, a federal lawsuit was filed against the U.S government alleging civil rights violations. The lawsuit was filed by Steven Howards - an environmental consultant in Colorado - who was arrested in June after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney and denounced the war in Iraq. The lawsuit is the third one that's been filed charging that Secret Service agents or White House staff members violated the law when they attempted to keep people with opposing views away from President Bush or Cheney. In another suit pending in Colorado, two people say they were kicked out of a public event where Bush was speaking because of an anti-war bumper sticker. And in West Virginia the ACLU has filed a lawsuit on behalf of two people who were arrested at an appearance by Bush because they were wearing anti-Bush t-shirts.
Steven Howards, was arrested in June on harassment charges after he approached Dick Cheney to denounce the Iraq War. He has filed a federal alleging civil rights violations.
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: Steven Howards joins us now from Denver, where he filed the suit on Wednesday in federal district court. Welcome to Democracy Now!
STEVEN HOWARDS: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Why don't you explain exactly what happened? What day was it?
STEVEN HOWARDS: I think it was the middle of June, and I was in Beaver Creek, Colorado, with my two kids, accompanying them to a piano camp. And that morning, I had read about the deaths, the rising death toll in Iraq. And who walks by me, but Mr. Cheney. And to be honest, I couldn't resist the temptation. So I approached Mr. Cheney and told him that I thought his policies in Iraq were absolutely reprehensible.
AMY GOODMAN: Just one sec. He, by himself, walked by you in a mall? Vice President Dick Cheney?
STEVEN HOWARDS: Well, you know, yes. There was apparently -- Gerald Ford has an annual kind of get-together of political VIPs, if you will, that -- I don't know -- discuss world issues. And I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to cross Mr. Cheney. Mr. Cheney was actually going across an outdoor mall, kind of a pedestrian mall, in Beaver Creek, Colorado. And there were lots of Secret Service agents, but he was walking through, taking some time, shaking hands. There were probably more Secret Service agents there than there were members of Joe Public. But I, you know, I waited my turn, and I walked up to Mr. Cheney, and I told him what I thought. And then I quickly exited, because I didn't want to create a scene or give anyone opportunity to cause me any problems.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what happened next?
STEVEN HOWARDS: Well, I then continued on, took my child to piano camp, came back about ten minutes later, because if you know this area, you've got to pass through the same area. And I was approached by a Secret Service agent, who accused me of assaulting the Vice President. My eight-year-old son was standing next to me at that point in time. His exact words were, “Did you assault the Vice President?” And I said, “No, I didn't. But I did tell him the way I felt about the war in Iraq, and if Mr. Cheney wanted to be shielded from public criticism, he should avoid public places.”
And I closed by telling the agent that if freedom of speech was against the law, he should arrest me, at which point he grabbed me, cuffed my hands behind my back and started carting me across the mall. I stopped and told him I could not abandon my eight-year-old son in the middle of a public mall, at which point he responded, “We'll call Social Services.” Fortunately, on the way out, we passed my wife, who -- my son was with my wife. He had run off in terror. He wouldn't even talk, he was so scared.
They took me to jail, with my hands cuffed behind my back for three hours. The Secret Service agent told my wife, myself and anyone else that would listen that I was being charged with assaulting the Vice President. Those charges were later reduced to harassment. And two weeks later or three weeks later, the charges were dismissed altogether.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened to you during that time? During that two weeks, did other people see you being arrested? Did they know who you were?
STEVEN HOWARDS: Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. No, it was a scene. I was treated as though I was a convict, like criminal. It was horrifying for my kids. And so we waited for a few weeks. Actually, we left. We were going on vacation. We left a few days later. This actually happened two days before Father's Day, so it was quite a memorable Father's Day, as you can imagine. We left a few days later for our vacation, and we got back. In the mail, there was a notice that the charges had been dismissed. Apparently, the Secret Service had come to my office and to try to see me, and they would not leave their names. It was very Gestapo-ish, I must say. But I never returned their calls, and I have no reason why they came to my place of work. And that's it.
AMY GOODMAN: And why have you decided to sue the government now?
STEVEN HOWARDS: You know, because it's such a transparent attempt to suppress free speech. You know, we view the suppression of free speech and -- my family, we view the suppression of free speech and the assault that this administration has made on our constitutional rights to free speech as a greater threat to the future of this country than Osama bin Laden ever will be. You know, first this administration argued that if you criticize their policies, you were in fact providing support to people like Osama bin Laden. You were boosting the threat to national security. Then they suggested that if you oppose their policies, you were actually equivalent to a Nazi sympathizer.
You know, the nation is united on the need to fight terror. That's not an issue. The question is, the issue is how this administration has gone about choosing to do that. And lots of people are very upset about that.
And now, the administration has forged the final link by suggesting that if you exercise your constitutional rights to free speech in opposing this administration's policies in Iraq, you are therefore posing a threat to national security and subject to arrest. And I don't know about the rest of America, but I find that thought and that logic, that twisted logic, absolutely terrifying. So we brought the lawsuit to really expose this issue and to raise the question of, do we in fact still live in a free nation, where people are free to express their opposition to government policies?
AMY GOODMAN: What are you asking for?
STEVEN HOWARDS: Right now, we're asking for a jury to -- we're actually deferring to a jury to decide what the resolution to this matter should be. We're asking for some acknowledgement by the Secret Service and by the administration that people have a right to free speech. We're asking for an apology to my kids for the wrongful arrest and search that occurred. And if any financial rewards or any financial settlement comes of this, that's great, but that's not the goal of the lawsuit. And if any financial rewards come, they'll go to a charitable organization. That's not our goal here. Our goal here is to prove a point.
AMY GOODMAN: Isn't the Vice President immune from prosecution as he sits in office?
STEVEN HOWARDS: Yeah, well, actually this is a civil suit. And it's against the Secret Service officer who did the arrest. After he arrested us and, again, threatened my wife and myself, saying he was going to spend all day Monday in the U.S. attorney's office ensuring that felony assault charges were brought against us, he then gave us his business card. So we know exactly who arrested us. And this is actually a civil suit against the Secret Service agent.
AMY GOODMAN: Steven Howards, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Again, arrested a few days before Father's Day on harassment charges, first on assault charges, then lowered to harassment charges, for approaching Dick Cheney in a mall in Colorado.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 11:29 pm Post subject: Inverted Totalitarianism |
| Inverted Totalitarianism
by SHELDON WOLIN
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030519&;s=wolin
[from the May 19, 2003 issue] THE NATION
The war on Iraq has so monopolized public attention as to obscure the regime change taking place in the Homeland. We may have invaded Iraq to bring in democracy and bring down a totalitarian regime, but in the process our own system may be moving closer to the latter and further weakening the former.
The change has been intimated by the sudden popularity of two political terms rarely applied earlier to the American political system. "Empire" and "superpower" both suggest that a new system of power, concentrated and expansive, has come into existence and supplanted the old terms.
"Empire" and "superpower" accurately symbolize the projection of American power abroad, but for that reason they obscure the internal consequences. Consider how odd it would sound if we were to refer to "the Constitution of the American Empire" or "superpower democracy." The reason they ring false is that "constitution" signifies limitations on power, while "democracy" commonly refers to the active involvement of citizens with their government and the responsiveness of government to its citizens.
For their part, "empire" and "superpower" stand for the surpassing of limits and the dwarfing of the citizenry.
The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The party system is a notorious example. The Republicans have emerged as a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority.
As Republicans have become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism and footnote the end of ideology.
In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home. Bear in mind that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking total power.
Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security.
Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.
No doubt these remarks will be dismissed by some as alarmist, but I want to go further and name the emergent political system "inverted totalitarianism." By inverted I mean that while the current system and its operatives share with Nazism the aspiration toward unlimited power and aggressive expansionism, their methods and actions seem upside down. For example, in Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took power, the"streets" were dominated by totalitarian-oriented gangs of toughs, and whatever there was of democracy was confined to the government. In the United States, however, it is the streets where democracy is most alive--while the real danger lies with an increasingly unbridled government.
Or another example of the inversion: Under Nazi rule there was never any doubt about "big business" being subordinated to the political regime. In the United States, however, it has been apparent for decades that corporate power has become so predominant in the political establishment, particularly in the Republican Party, and so dominant in its influence over policy, as to suggest a role inversion the exact opposite of the Nazis'.
At the same time, it is corporate power, as the representative of the dynamic of capitalism and of the ever-expanding power made available by the integration of science and technology with the structure of capitalism, that produces the totalizing drive that, under the Nazis, was supplied by ideological notions such as Lebensraum.
In rebuttal it will be said that there is no domestic equivalent to the Nazi regime of torture, concentration camps or other instruments of terror. But we should remember that for the most part, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally; rather, the aim was to promote a certain type of shadowy fear--rumors of torture--that would aid in managing and manipulating the populace. Stated positively, the Nazis wanted a mobilized society eager to support endless warfare, expansion and sacrifice for the nation.
While the Nazi totalitarianism strove to give the masses a sense of collective power and strength, Kraft durch Freude ("Strength through joy"), inverted totalitarianism promotes a sense of weakness, of collective futility. While the Nazis wanted a continuously mobilized society that would not only support the regime without complaint and enthusiastically vote "yes" at the periodic plebiscites, inverted totalitarianism wants a politically demobilized society that hardly votes at all.
Recall the President's words immediately after the horrendous events of September 11: "Unite, consume and fly," he told the anxious citizenry. Having assimilated terrorism to a "war," he avoided doing what democratic leaders customarily do during wartime: mobilize the citizenry, warn it of impending sacrifices and exhort all citizens to join the "war effort."
Instead, inverted totalitarianism has its own means of promoting generalized fear; not only by sudden "alerts" and periodic announcements about recently discovered terrorist cells or the arrest of shadowy figures or the publicized heavy-handed treatment of aliens and the Devil's Island that is Guantánamo Bay or the sudden fascination with interrogation methods that employ or border on torture, but by a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits available, especially to the poor.
With such instrumentalities for promoting uncertainty and dependence, it is almost overkill for inverted totalitarianism to employ a system of criminal justice that is punitive in the extreme, relishes the death penalty and is consistently biased against the powerless.
Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.
That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents.
What is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century. In that context, the elections of 2004 represent a crisis in its original meaning, a turning point. The question for citizens is: Which way? | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 7:16 am Post subject: |
| http://www.canadianactionparty.ca/temp/press_releases/USA_Detainee_Torture_Act.asp
RE: USA Detainee Torture Act, HR 6166 set to be signed by President Bush,
PRESS RELEASE October 1, 2006 For Immediate Release
October 2nd, 2006.
The Canadian Action Party demands that Canada formally condemn the new bill in the United States of America that grants the US president the right to torture, removes Habeus Corpus (a rule against arbitrary detention), defines as a terrorist anyone who questions or challenges the President or his government, removes civil trials, and otherwise purports to legalize crimes against humanity, and purports to extend into and apply in foreign jurisdictions against other nationals, as well as US citizens.
This new Bill is itself an act of terror.
Canadians are particularly at risk not just due to our physical proximity to the USA, but as a result of the unconstitutional agreements and arrangements being implemented secretly and/ or administratively such as the Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement, the Smart Border Plan, and others, which integrate Canada with the United States of America.
Further, Canada’s own antiterrorist legislation was enacted under a veil of panic arising out of a terrible act in a foreign country, the Unites States of America , which act to date has been inadequately investigated as to its real cause , and which cause may even be rooted in some of the proponents of torture legislation. Citizens have a right to know the truth.
This new US Bill finalizes the elimination of all citizen rights in the USA.
Canada must distance itself from such law.
On behalf of all Canadians, the Canadian Action Party/ Parti action canadienne demands that our government :
affirm our Rule of Law, and
assure Canadians that no such legislation will be tolerated in Canada, and
assert that any attempt by President Bush to arrest or detain any Canadian under this new Bill anywhere in the world will not be tolerated.
With grave concern,
Constance (Connie) Fogal, Leader, Canadian Action Party
Contact Connie Fogal at cell 778 891 4919
CANADIAN ACTION PARTY/PARTI ACTION CANADIENNE
LEADER, CONSTANCE (Connie) FOGAL
CANADIAN ACTION PARTY/PARTI ACTION CANADIENNE
LEADER, CONSTANCE (Connie) FOGAL
www.canadianactionparty.ca
Telephone Connie Fogal at: 604 872 2128 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 5:41 pm Post subject: Welcome to Fascist America! |
| http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan160.html
Welcome to Fascist America!
by Gene Callahan
My fellow Americans, it’s official now: We live in a fascist nation.
Now, the term "fascist" has been thrown around over the last fifty years in a loose way that has drained it of much of its meaning. If someone wanted to cut 5% off of a leftist professor's favourite welfare programme, the professor would call his opponent a "fascist." I’m not using the word like that. I mean honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned, 1930s style fascism, featuring such old favourites as:
* Secret prisons – they’re back!
* Torture – we’re doing it.
* Spying on all citizens.
* Arrests and indefinite imprisonment without trial.
* Rampant militarism.
* Secret detention.
* Enforced disappearance.
* Denial and restriction of habeas corpus.
* Prolonged incommunicado detention.
* Unfair trial procedures.
(This list was compiled partially based on the work of Amnesty International, available here.)
An absolutely mind-numbing response to complaints that our traditional legal system is being torn apart is the question, "So, you want to protect the rights of terrorists?"
Um, no, I want to protect the rights of non-terrorists who might be falsely accused of terrorism! That was sort of, you know, the whole idea of our legal system. I’m sure there was some neo-con around in the 1700s saying to Jefferson or Madison, "So, you want to protect the rights of murderers and robbers?" but luckily they ignored him.
We’ve now gotten to the point where Nazi Germany was, say, in 1934. Remember, at that time, if you had told a typical German what his government would do over the next ten years, he would have looked at you as a madman. After all, his land had been civilized for over a thousand years. His was the nation of Albertus Magnus, Gutenberg, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Bach, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Heisenberg, Reimann, Mann, Lessing, Herder, Handel, D?Leibniz, Gauss, Helmholtz – he could have gone on, but you get the point. His nation could not possibly descend into barbarism! If you tried to tell him he was living in a police state, he would have pointed out that his government had used its vast new powers very judiciously, and only against a few trouble-makers. So far.
It is interesting, in gauging the direction we are heading, to look at the proclamations of "respectable" opinion writers who support this administration. For instance, we have people at a "libertarian" think tank proclaiming that Moslems are not entitled to full civil rights in the US. (Perhaps we need to make them wear something special on their clothing like, say, a yellow star, so we know just who they are, hey?) But "conservatives" provide even more stunning examples of purely fascist reasoning. For example, conservative demagogue Ann Coulter has called for the editor of The NY Times to face the firing squad for his part in publicizing this administration's abuses of power. Let’s look at a recent column by Douglas MacKinnon at TownHall.com.
MacKinnon considers all of those involved in revealing the sordid collection of secret programmes that have been launched by the Bush administration as "traitors" who have publicized these schemes "purely because they don’t like the policies of the new president." Well, he’s right in that "they don’t like the policies" that they consider unconstitutional violations of our rights. Far from "aiding the enemy," these revelations aided us, the American people, by letting us know what our government has in store for us.
Consider what the point of classifying these programmes was in the first place, and who they were being kept secret from. The jihadists no doubt already knew about the secret prisons – their friends are in them! They surely knew that the war in Iraq has been helping their recruiting – it’s their recruiting! ("Praise be to Allah, Abdul, I read in The NY Times that it is the Iraq War that is sending us these thousands of new recruits – who knew?") They no doubt suspect they may be wiretapped – what they didn’t know was that all the rest of us are, as well. No, not one of these leaks helps terrorists, nor was one of them classified to stop terrorists from finding them out. We were the ones who weren’t supposed to find out about them.
MacKinnon continues: "And if even one American lost his or her life because of a leak, then I would want that person to be executed for treason."
So anyone who reveals our fascist government policies is a traitor who can be executed! This is obviously an attempt to intimidate the opposition so that our police state can be expanded without the annoying work stoppages caused by public outcry when the latest bit of construction is revealed. And just how does MacKinnon propose to show that some American lost his life because a journalist revealed that the US government tortures people across the globe, rather than, say, because the policies he supports have inspired a million new jihadists? Secret trial, perhaps? Or why even bother with trials for filthy traitors?
Herr Goebbels – oops, I mean MacKinnon – writes, "Until we severely punish those who leak classified information, then the traitors among us will not only continue to flourish, but will grow more brazen with the secrets they reveal."
Yes, what we ought to be able to do, you know, is simply seize anyone who even mentions our government’s "secret" prisons, and, without a trial, throw them in a secret prison! This is the logical conclusion of this fascist’s article, after all, since those who talk about the American Gulag are pretty much terrorists themselves.
Folks, this is coming real soon, and, once it does, domestic opposition is pretty much over. One journalist – that will be about all it takes – will be seized as a "terrorist" and thrown in the Gulag. The government may release him, but then another will simply disappear in the night in Iraq or Afghanistan, and rumors will circulate that he is being kept in a cage somewhere and waterboarded. No journalist lacking heroic courage will any longer be willing to seriously protest government policy.
America is full of decent people, who could never believe their own government could become fascist. So were Germany and Italy in the 1920s. But they became fascist anyway. They passed laws suspending civil liberties, but the government promised the frightened populace that those laws would only be used against targets like "Communist terrorists." And, a little bit at a time, the target kept getting bigger and bigger, slowly enough that the people who weren’t paying close attention never detected it.
And, next thing you know, there were millions of people dead! So, it turns out, it would have been worth paying attention after all.
October 4, 2006
Gene Callahan [send him mail], the author of Economics for Real People, is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a contributing columnist to LewRockwell.com. His first novel, PUCK, has just been published.
Copyright ? 2006 Gene Callahan | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject: |
| The following article is most concerning, however, I don't buy the conspiracy aspect of 9/11 and still believe that US support for Israel brought about the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and on 9/11 (as conveyed via http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/05/the-gorilla-in-the-room-is-us-support-for-israel.php ):
America the Tyranny
The Road to Authoritarianism
By Manuel Valenzuela
10/03/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Behold and bear witness to what has become of America, in this era of uncertainty and bewilderment, in this time of fear and intimidation, that since towers were brought down and demolished has methodically fallen into the viper pit of neocon decadence, becoming, as it stands today, an authoritarian’s heaven and a corporatist’s promised land, its people ignorant, as always, to the barrage of waves systemically eroding centuries of rights, freedoms and liberties. From sea to shining sea, despotism is what today those who pay attention see.
The road to fascism is being paved at a clandestine yet alarming velocity, across valleys, prairies and forests, surrounding cites, towns and states, from Atlantic to Pacific, immersing 300 million individuals into a fog of engendered tyranny, who without a care or whisper or concern remain trapped by comfortable surroundings born through perpetual indebtedness. Even as their rights and freedoms and liberties are made to disappear, even as their Constitution is burned, even as their nation hangs on the precipice of despotism, even as their collective destiny is being destroyed those residing inside the belly of the beast hear no evil, see no evil and feel no evil, preferring to gossip about pedophile politicians and celebrity failings than informing themselves to the last throes of the American republic.
The waves of autocracy are upon the shores of America, the demons of the past find themselves resurrected once again, free to unleash fear, intimidation and enslavement onto hundreds of millions of human beings. The high tide of tyranny has returned from the unlearned lessons of history, again engulfing humankind with human wickedness and Machiavellian rule, soon to subjugate the masses in the slavery endemic throughout man’s brief – yet thoroughly destructive – reign over Earth.
Authoritarianism has woken from its dormant slumber, ready to terrorize yet one more human generation, for while it meticulously rises and stretches out its arms, ready to spread its omnipotent disease, it has lived and thrived since the dawn of man, accompanying humankind wherever we might go, since man alone creates and grants it life. Indeed, it is those who have seen it rise before that today see it birthed again. Its symptoms are apparent, its dangers known; the stages of tyranny are remembered, for they are never forgotten. It is those who have been witness to and victims of its malevolence that see the approaching storm clearest; it is they whose experienced eyes and mature minds that are sounding alarms. Fascism, under the guise of protection, freedom and security, is upon us.
To those paying attention, the evolution of the coming tyranny has been apparent since 9/11, when the Twin Towers, America’s Reichstag Fire, were pulverized into nothingness by demolition explosives, in a declaration of psychological war upon the American people. On 9/11 the Earth stood still, as if the collective consciousness of the world awoke to a most ominous catastrophic and catalyzing event that would send the world entire down a vicious circle of death, destruction and despotism. On that day, the future course of human civilization was altered, spawning the birth pangs of authoritarianism rising, freedom dying, and of perpetual warfare breathing its devastating repercussions onto the realities of six billion human beings.
Almost immediately after those in power had imploded and brought down the World Trade Center towers upon their own footprints the initial stages of imposing authoritarianism upon the people were implemented, beginning first with a Patriot Act whose sheer volume and length betray its existence pre-dating 9/11. Brought out of the fascist closet and dusted, it was rushed through the Congress even as the Twin Towers still smoldered and, for good measure, in the terrifying wake of the still unsolved anthrax attacks that served both to threaten legislators into compliance and scaring the populace even further into obedience. The assault on the lives of Americans had begun and, out of the bowels of our collective fear, despotism once more breathed life.
In Enemies Tyrants Find Life
What was 9/11 but a direct declaration of war against the freedoms, rights and liberties of America’s most cherished documents and principles? What was it if not the death throes of the Bill of Rights? The New Pearl Harbor was as much an opportunity to wage war in the Middle East as it was to eradicate tyranny’s impediments in America. The complete assault on the U.S. Constitution and on 200 years of laws has been possible by the inside job of 9/11, for it became the catalyst needed to introduce fear into the populace and authoritarianism into government.
What was the passage of the original Patriot Act if not the first shots fired in the half-decade long war against our rights and liberties and freedoms? Make no mistake, for the last five years we have been shocked and awed into remaining passive and acquiescent automatons as the fascists in power eradicate – slowly but surely – what was once a plethora of enumerated and implied rights, freedoms and liberties. A government concerned with preserving freedoms and liberties would not try to eradicate them under the rubric of fighting terrorism. A government wanting to protect our way of life would not try its hardest to destroy it as well.
Conveniently, then, in typical fascist behavior, it is the Bush cabal that tells us terrorists hate us for our freedoms and rights, that they want us destroyed for our way of life, even as it is the cabal itself that hates us for our freedoms and rights, wanting to destroy our way of life. By imputing their desires and wishes onto the fictional barbarian horde, an unknown dark-skinned entity of alien religion, and knowing the ignorance and gullibility of the American masses, the fascist cabal can at once generate fear and hatred among the people while acting to devastate the nation’s freedoms and liberties under the guise of fighting the evildoers.
In reality, terrorism is but the excuse used to curtail our rights; the dismantling of the Constitution is justified by the fictional threat of dark-skinned bogeymen, and explains why the government, as well as its corporate media collaborators, has been relentless in the perpetual dissemination of propaganda trying to convince us of our imminent peril. The tyrants and their collaborators depend on the fear of the masses to grant sustenance to the momentum used to demolish the foundations of the republic. The emotional fortification created by fear thus ensures that the primitive human brain will cease to think logically and analytically, enabling the wisdom of reason to be usurped by the reptilian and mammalian desire for survival. Without some semblance of thinking by the masses, who by fear are relegated to the role of sheep, the authoritarians in power are free to pursue the evisceration of all burdensome rights and freedoms that interfere with their long-held goals.
Under the guise of fighting terrorism – a terrorism the government itself creates, perpetuates, expands, nurtures and helps grow – the Constitution as we know it is being dismantled, not by terrorist evildoers intent on destroying us, but by our own government intent on destroying our way of life. For a government need not eviscerate a nation’s laws, protections, guarantees, rights, freedoms and liberties to guarantee security. It need not introduce a police state that destroys the way of life for 300 million individuals. This government is pursuing the dismantling of the Constitution and our laws not for fighting terror but to fight the American people. It is doing this in a methodical, some would say obsessive, desire to erode rights and freedoms, grant unlimited powers to the executive and silence dissent because in doing so it is removing the barriers that have for decades impeded authoritarians and corporatists from implementing their vision of the world. As such, the last remaining vestiges of American freedoms and rights are all that stand between fascists and their despotic nirvana. With the relative ease by which they have eviscerated so many laws and rights since 9/11, it is these few liberties left that will be targeted next, becoming easy pickings on the road to full fledged American tyranny.
Already, the government has been granted the right to enter our homes without a warrant and without our knowledge. It can ask for and get library records when it chooses. It has the right to pick us off the street and take us into custody without probable cause. It can wiretap any phone it wants, as well as listen in to any voice message in the country, monitoring our private conversations. Today we are regularly surveilled upon, our histories deciphered, our lives dissected. Our Internet activities are frequently monitored, our emails read and scrutinized. Technology has allowed the government the capacity to overlook our movements using the ever-expanding public cameras, as well as each and every activity we do using our credit or debit cards. It can track our financial records as well as our purchases, all the while gathering files with our complete, bio-metric information. It can do all this in secrecy, without transparency, without accountability, without needing the color of law as a guiding instrument nor the legality of honest governance for inspiration. Activists and dissidents are spied upon and harassed, their activities monitored. Enemies of the state have their names placed on various lists, prohibiting them from enjoying the daily rights afforded to millions.
Free speech is oftentimes relegated to small corrals, called free speech zones by the fascists. The right to assemble is oftentimes denied, as the state tries to prevent the people from protesting and massing in numbers. More and more, to question the actions of governance is to be called a traitor, treasonous, an abettor of the enemy, a terrorist appeaser. To dissent and protest is to risk being labeled unpatriotic, un-American, an enemy of freedom. Yet it is those few thousands, out of a total population of 300 million, scattered in small clusters throughout the vast lands that comprise America, that are the true patriots, the true Americans, fighting for their nation, their rights and freedoms, fighting the real evildoers and terrorists. They are the real brave heroes of the republic, escaping the culture of cowardice, sacrificing beautiful minds full of Kool-Aid and comfort in order to confront the distressing truths of emerging tyranny. It is they fighting evil, trying to stop its carnage upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, trying to prevent it from triumphing, from destroying everything we hold dear, and take for granted. It is they who are Americans and they who are the new patriots. Yet it is also they who will be first to suffer the ramifications of a despotic America, for authoritarians hate dissent, protest and truth.
For those paying attention to the reality of America today and not to the distractions of a 500 ring circus saturated with distraction, gossip, celebrity, inconsequential political news of typical Republican debased behavior, and mind-numbing entertainment, the road to tyranny has continued on its seemingly unstoppable momentum, with each new year since 9/11 presenting new attacks on civil liberties, human rights and our cherished freedoms.
Every year has seen an attempt at expanding the powers of the executive, to the point where the President is today, for all intents and purposes, a dictator. He is free to interpret the law as he sees fit, using the over 700 signing statements to ignore laws passed by the legislature. He has reigned over an era of untold secrecy, where the state is no longer transparent and accountable. He has expanded greatly illegal wiretaps, warrants and domestic spying, increasing the mechanisms needed by a budding police state to thrive and grow. Congress has become but a rubber stamp legislature, as has the Supreme Court, itself now controlled by Bush yes-men. Using the presidential bully pulpit, he has transformed millions of Americans into quasi-authoritarians, followers one and all, ready to follow tyrant’s folly straight into human wickedness.
Today, the president claims himself the unitary executive, the Dictator in Chief, possessing absolute power, doing what he wants, when he wants and without a care in the world that he will ever be held to account. This is dictatorship. This is the end of America as we knew her and the birth of an America we wish never to know.
Tyranny Nurtured Through the Bosom of Lady Liberty
Such is the power of the president that the corporate media – today’s Ministry of Truth – serves his every wish, protecting him from truth being exposed, incompetence being discovered and his authority being questioned. The executive branch has not seen this level of unfettered and untouched power since the establishment of the republic. Indeed, it is the executive branch that has facilitated the rise of fascism since 9/11, from the Department of State to the Attorney General to the Department of War, through the CIA, NSA and FBI, with authoritarians at the helm prevalent in the various departments pursuing the establishment of despotic policies.
It is inside the executive branch where tyranny is being nurtured and raised, where it is feeding off the bosom of Lady Liberty, making her weaker by the day, growing ever stronger from its parasitic usurpation of governance, protected and guided until that time when its strength and maturity is ready to extend its power into omnipresent perpetuity. In the halls of power fascism rises; throughout Washington the last vestiges of freedom are under direct assault. Despotism is being set in motion, it is being prepared and orchestrated, slowly yet surely being implemented throughout the mechanisms of the state. It is being molded according to American culture, according to American thought, growing at its own pace and under different conditions, evolving like organisms do, differing from other forms of despotism according to blood and environment, according to time and place. Yet approaching it remains, like a gathering storm of unnerving energy ready to strike relentlessly throughout the landscape, transforming an America we knew into a nation of wickedness and malevolence, of the worst in the human condition. Its tentacles are now in place, freedoms and rights have been made weak, it is now only a matter of time before what has arrived makes itself fully known and what is about to be made fully known eradicates an America that has only existed in the delusions and dreams of the brainwashed.
Unlike Hollywood reality and events move at their own accord and pace, possessing the patience fictional movies cannot afford, developing fully in time and through the magic of fantasy, their creation almost never the perfection portrayed by acting and editing. As we can see, American fascism is both completely different than its Nazi counterpart yet eerily similar in its characteristics. No two forms of tyranny are crafted out of the same mold. No two systems are born under the same stars, and each takes into history’s cauldron its own personality and traits, its own crimes and punishments. Yet under the guise of “freedom and democracy,” under the illusion of the so-called “war on terror,” tyranny is being birthed inside America, born through the hemorrhaging of the World Trade Center and reared by the incessant fear of hundreds of millions of American citizens. In the death of 3,000 humans, fascists found new life; in the demolition of two 110 story monoliths to the nadir of Ground Zero, criminals and murderers reached the zenith of their power. From Reichstag Fire to World Trade Center demolition, the more things change the more things stay the same, and again and again New Pearl Harbors will be orchestrated from which to usurp power from the People and once again granting sustenance to tyranny.
Despotism arrives in many forms, under many disguises, and in America, along with all previous carriers of the disease, the virus has infiltrated into the consciousness of the ignorant masses under the rubric of waging peace, bringing security, and under the false assumption that scapegoat enemies must be defeated in battle, lest they destroy everything we stand for. That tyranny fails to achieve each measure is never discussed, nor the fact that authoritarians rely on waging war, fostering insecurity, concocting ever-newer enemies and destroying everything the people stand for in order to assure for themselves of greater and absolute power. It is fascism, after all, that enables authoritarians to control entire populations through the oppression and subjugation of the citizenry, usually at the behest of the state and usually using the intimidating presence of the barrel of the gun and the brute force of the omnipresent police state.
At no point have American freedoms, rights and liberties been under such duress than in the last five years, as the Bush cabal has taken full advantage of 9/11 to wage perpetual, preemptive, illegal and immoral war upon both Afghanistan and Iraq, the former with its geostrategic location and pipeline accessibility, the latter with its vast petroleum fields and geopolitical circumstance, each of vital importance to the Pax Americana in its pursuit of imperial hegemony, their conquest a long held goal of the military-energy-industrial complex. Of course, using 9/11 as the perfect Pearl Harbor-like event from which to launch imperial invasions in lands deemed vital and strategic, the fascists and corporatists in power lay claim to both nations under the rubric of the fictional war on terror.
The invasion of Afghanistan had nothing to do with fighting terrorism – since 9/11 was an inside job – and everything to do with American controlled oil and gas pipelines running through Afghan territory. In the same way, Iraq’s decimation and occupation by America’s military had nothing to do with WMD or with bringing freedom or democracy – to give just two of the myriad number of lies to justify invasion – and everything to do with control of Iraq’s petroleum, Israel’s hegemony and strategic gamesmanship.
Just as Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were brought to fruition based on lies, deceptions, manipulations and distortions, so too has the erosion of American rights and freedoms been implemented based on lies, manipulations and cynical deceptions of the American people, with the lies of war and the lies of authoritarianism oftentimes intertwined in an enormous knot of convenience. Thanks to the two invasions and subsequent occupations of Arab and Muslim lands, the executive branch has been able to expand its power in the homeland through the methodical erosion of rights and liberties, both of citizens and foreigners, using as pretext the prosecution and imprisonment of captured or kidnapped “unlawful enemy combatants,” as well as all ambiguous yet unfound evildoer terrorists, to destroy the basic tenets and principles of the American republic.
Under the rubric of the so-called war on terror, therefore, the executive has laid claim to supreme powers in the detention, treatment and prosecution of those deemed “unlawful enemy combatants,” invariably dismantling the freedoms and rights and liberties of the American people. For in lowering and ultimately altering the rights of so called enemy combatants, the executive branch has in essence also destroyed those same rights afforded American citizens. In pursuing the so called enemy combatant, who in any civilized society invariably must, in his prosecution by the state, be afforded the same rights and privileges as any suspect charged in the nation, the Bush cabal has instead ignored the rule of law as well as the central tenets of the Bill of Rights. This, of course, is not by accident.
In the last five years, Bush and his cabal of corporatists have triumphed, legislatively and through the sheer powers of the executive, to rewrite the laws of the nation enumerated for two centuries in the founding documents of the republic, as always arguing that the Constitution stands in the way of prosecuting enemy combatants and waging the perpetual war on terror. It has argued that to maintain security, to protect the American people from the Arab evildoers, the laws of the land, the cherished rights and liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the precedent of the judiciary, must all be altered according to the vision of the executive. The Bill of Rights, after all, interferes severely in the successful waging of war against the terrorists. It has thus rewritten laws and regulations, ignored statutes and rules, created new standards of law and enforced, without opposition, any and all opinions and laws it has unilaterally decided to enact. The Bush cabal has used the prosecution of enemy combatants to both erode the Bill of Rights as well as to give life to its totalitarian mechanisms for dealing with enemies of the state.
Once the “unlawful enemy combatant” excuse to destroy the Constitution is complete, all done in the name of national security, what is left of the Bill of Rights and of the freedoms and rights Americans once had will be insignificant, leaving it anemic and impotent, and what was once considered a vital “tool” for fighting the so called terrorist will fall like a gauntlet at the neck of the American people, severing at once the last vestiges of an America we once thought everlasting. For what is being done today to prisoners in the vast American gulag system will tomorrow be done to Americans themselves. The experiment is first perfected upon the guinea pigs, then it is unleashed upon the intended victims.
For the last five years the Bush cabal has successfully conditioned the population to its “New Normal,” the new America. It has manipulated both society and laws to accept gross violations of human rights, a suppression of liberties, and an authoritarian paradigm of disturbing wickedness. It is preparing us to incorporate into American law and culture the mechanisms used in totalitarian states. Using the incomprehensible ignorance and apathy of the American people against us, it has clandestinely destroyed the foundation of our principles and virtues. Using its vast power, its legions of authoritarians, its army of stenographers and it great arsenal of tools at its disposal, it has inexplicably made the American people tolerant and even acceptant of torture, rape, humiliation, illegal imprisonment, disappearances and criminal malfeasance, something thought unthinkable just years ago. The New Normal has become a reality, the new America now routinely tortures and inflicts horrible pain and suffering on human beings, all to the indifference and acceptance of the American people.
Without the notice or attention of the vast majority of Americans, most too busy addicted to the television and its 500 ring circus, the Congress, being the bunch of idiots, prostitutes, pedophiles and criminals that they usually are, have granted the executive, and by consequence the state, the unfettered power to make extinct the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. In one giant swoop of criminal culpability, in one hypnotized vote during a fascist’s wet dream, our so-called representatives eviscerated habeas corpus, the centuries old right to challenge the state regarding imprisonment, as always under the fictional guise of protecting national security from enemy combatants, as well as destroying the judicial review needed to fight and appeal detention. In an orgy of despotic glee, our elected leaders gave the Bush cabal the ability to detain suspects or “enemy combatants” into perpetuity, without ability to challenge incarceration, and to keep in ignorance those it chooses to detain, without ever divulging any information. Of course, the executive itself decides who and what is an “enemy combatant”.
Due process and right to counsel have been thrown into the heap of waste, as has the right to question and analyze the state’s evidence. Evidence based on hearsay, forced confession and torture can now be used against the accused, even, as likely, it has no merit in truth. Trials must be held in military tribunals, using only military attorneys. Regarding the Geneva Convention, that stalwart monument protecting human rights, the executive now has complete discretion in deciding what constitutes torture as well as cruel and unusual punishment. The president, it appears, can now torture when he wants, whoever he wants, whenever he wants, without concern or transparency.
The Decider in Chief has become the Torturer in Chief. Suspects deemed enemies of the state can, for all practical purposes, be sent to rot in the dungeons of the Commander in Chief, without ever seeing the light of day, without ever challenging their imprisonment and without ever to hear or fight the charges against them. In short, enemies of the executive can be made to disappear.
American Enemy Combatants
In an even more ominous development, the definition of “enemy combatant” has been expanded to include those who “have purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” As has been mentioned in many other recent articles, this devolution into classifying those hostile to the executive branch, or to the policies of the state, as possible enemy combatants, in many cases regardless of citizenship, is the weapon the fascists need to silence dissent, protest and debate throughout the nation. The threat of new ideas and opinions, which tyrants abhor, can now be managed and controlled, for in the broad language of the law virtually anyone can now be imprisoned and disappeared, forever. Since the executive branch determines who is being hostile against the United States, or who materially supports these so-called hostilities, it is easy to see that anyone at odds with the president, his administration or the government of the United States can be persecuted for expressing views no longer protected. Under this provision, any speech or activity deemed hostile to the state can be used to permanently imprison a person indefinitely.
This new interpretation and expansion of police powers virtually assures that American dissent and opposition to the state’s policies will be seen as hostile to the national security of the nation. What other reason exists to include such broad language into this provision other than to declare a war on dissent and on the opposition. Ostensibly this law is being marketed by the Ministry of Truth as a necessary tool to fight the evildoers, but in reality, can the imprisonment of dissenters and protestors, activists and intellectuals be far behind?
This gigantic step in the direction of totalitarianism is clear evidence the direction the Bush cabal is heading towards, with the American people being hijacked straight into despotism, our ankles slowly being shackled to the instruments of oppression. Already dissent is equaled to treason and of being unpatriotic in an age when being patriotic is almost compulsory. In certain authoritarian circles dissent and activism is seen as rendering aid and comfort to the enemy, while in others challenging the state is seen as wrongfully aiding the enemy. Activists seeking accountability and the truth are labeled terrorists, while others are seen as appeasers of terror. With such exaggerated language being used, oftentimes under complete levels of seriousness, can the accusations of supporting hostilities against the state be far behind, possibly leading to now legal and permanent imprisonment and torture?
The road less traveled is being paved with the concrete tablets of tyranny, and slowly, but most certainly surely, the caravan of authoritarians is approaching our towns and cities, eager to unleash their chained beast of oppression onto the most powerful nation on Earth. The momentum is theirs, as is the power and control to determine events and circumstances that can accelerate the approaching storm. Our destiny is in their hands, for they can do as they wish, counting the days when their plans and goals can be fully implemented. America as we once knew her is no more, thanks to the tyrants in power, thanks to our own ignorance and indifference.
Soon it will matter not that 9/11 was an inside job, for any talk of its truth will be severely punished, even banned, to be whispered in closets or over the sound of loud music. In fact, so much momentum is the movement gaining, so much traction among the People is its truth creating, that sooner rather than later the authoritarians may begin imprisoning truth seekers under the guise of “purposefully and materially supporting hostilities against the United States.” Such is the threat of exponentially growing numbers of Americans taking the red pill of reality, that the state’s handlers may very well deem the entire movement a terrorist organization, the easier to suppress and intimidate the truth from ever being exposed. It is only a matter of time until tyranny unleashes its instruments of repression against both truth seekers and America’s real patriots, dissenters and activists.
Already the Constitution has been dealt a death knell, meaning it has no more significance or worth. The Constitution has become, for all intents and purposes, just “another god damn piece of paper,” a relic of history, an obstacle overcome by America’s authoritarians. It will soon be said, as it always is, that at first the state came for the scapegoats, the marketed enemy, the chalice used to make drunk the masses, the bread used to destroy the system. Later it will come for its citizens, its threats, its People. Once everything is in place, once all the kinks have been ironed out, once all obstacles have been erased, the totalitarian evisceration of the Constitution will devastate a population conditioned to follow the letter of the law, now left unprotected, bewildered and condemned for the gross negligence it has allowed itself to perpetuate. Ironically, the People’s anger and hatred at the enemy scapegoat are themselves the catalysts for its own decimation, oppression and enslavement. In the end, we are our own worst enemies, both our Judas and our cyanide, not knowing what we do to ourselves, and each other.
When the masses finally see what has transpired in their country, when they finally wake to the morning fog, unable to see beyond the limits of their existence, they will see a landscape dark and ominous, a police state under the control of tyranny, a nation under the grip of repression. The America of their past and present gone, ignorant as any society has ever been, the masses will evolve to their new reality, their new normal. Most will welcome authoritarianism, for most are followers. The brainwashed will become tools of despotism, adapting to the brave new world of sheep oppressed and subjugated. Many will never really notice that freedom and rights and liberties no longer exist. Millions will teach their children to be good Americans, as fate has decided tyranny should rule. Imprisoned in their own minds, the masses will inevitably be conditioned to follow and obey the dictates of their masters.
Those who question authority, those who use their mind and those who see the slavery and oppression that has been birthed at the expense of liberty will become enemies of the state, threats to the system of tyranny, dissidents aiding and abetting the enemy, commissioned to never see light again. These dissidents the state will imprison and make disappear, to be erased from memory and time, their quest for truth and accountability buried six feet underground. To the obedient sheeple whose blind faith guides them in myth and state, totalitarianism will come naturally, becoming a nirvana to life-long followers; to free thinkers, independent minds, progressives and those who have escaped the incessant brainwashing from birth, it will be hell on Earth.
The approaching storm has reached the warm waters of America, rapidly gaining speed, ready to unleash its torrent of tyrannical laws and regulations upon our shores, its police state arriving with the sudden flash of thunder and lightning. The giant tempest has been building for over five years, granted life through death, rising high and mighty thanks to destruction and demolition, our own ignorance and sheer indifference granting it oxygen, our fear giving it power, our hatreds helping seal our own fate. America the Tyranny has risen to be born, the wickedness of humankind once more resurrected from the annals of history, free to repress and subjugate, eager to shackle and control. The destruction of the World Trade Center has made tyranny a reality; our continued impotence will allow it to flourish.
We Reap What We Sow
Perhaps it is fitting that a People that has cared not an ounce for systemic torture, preemptive war, illegal invasion, brutal occupation, mass murder, depleted uranium use, incessant rape, constant humiliation of human beings, destruction of Iraqi and Afghani society, renditions, illegal detentions, disappearances and untold levels of suffering should be made to suffer the realities of living in totalitarianism, under a police state, under constant paranoia and fear of both the state and your neighbors. Perhaps it is fitting that a People possessing such levels of ignorance, indifference and comfort be made to experience a reality that afflicts hundreds of millions of human beings. Perhaps in time we will learn humility and suffering, wisdom and the virtues of honor and peace.
America is a land so arrogant it calls itself and usurps as its own the name belonging to two entire continents; it is the country whose ego has been so aggrandized that it thinks itself the only nation blessed by the Christian god; it was a nation once cherished now thoroughly reviled; the land of the free now a land of tyranny, the home of the brave now nothing but the culture of cowardice, its bowels putrid with the smell of authoritarianism; its people enraptured by ignorance and fear, its moral foundations crumbling under the weight of pervasive corruptions and the evils of capitalism. The gluttony of comfort and the greed of excessiveness have made the American people the laughing stock of the world, our inability to escape the bubble of grandeur condemning us to be the spoiled child of wealth, unwise, unlearned and arrogant, never forced to confront suffering or trouble, condemning us to be the mirror image of our President.
The shining beacon on a hill has had its bright light extinguished, becoming in the span of half a decade a banana republic rotting from within, governed by incompetent dictatorship, its national elections routinely manipulated through the systemic impulses of blatant fraud, with representatives now nothing more than prostitutes bending over to receive the full gyrating assault of the corporate world, cannibalized by its own people addicted to consumerism and materialism, an army of ignorant sheep unaware of the future destiny they have helped chart, a population betraying their children’s future happiness for their short-term gratification.
The land of freedom and rights has ceased to exist, replaced by ever-growing authoritarianism. Perhaps, in the cosmic laws of the universe, where karma intertwines with fate, we are entering into the other side of midnight, journeying into exactly what we deserve, a taste of our own medicine, a taste of what we have exported to tens of dozens of other nations. We are reaping what we have sowed, and upon our shores now stands America the Tyranny, perhaps meant to suffer through another Hitler, another Stalin or Mao, or perhaps simply another Pinochet, Shah, Suharto or Saddam. America has entered its darkest hour, and as the clock approaches midnight the nation we once knew vanishes from the grip of the People. Nobody knows where we are headed, yet we do know in which direction we go, for the path has been paved, the pattern has begun to emerge, and through the horizon, no salvation can be found.
Instead of the world confronting the evil emblem of the swastika we must realize that it is the emblazoned red, white and blue that now represents despotic thinking and tyrannical rule. It was Old Glory that sprung up like a giant field of weeds in the aftermath of 9/11, flowing from every vehicle and every home, every business and every street, giving America the aura of jingoism and nationalism undoubtedly similar to 1930’s Germany, giving it the appearance, to anyone who cared to look and think, of what Germany’s streets in the 1930’s certainly looked like, right before society turned into barbarism. Perhaps this orgy of fanatical and jingoistic revelry was but the first sign of things to come, the birth pangs of America the Tyranny.
Five years later, the red, white and blue still flows proudly in the minds of followers and quasi-authoritarians, with knuckle dragging proto-patriots brainwashed to stand behind it in fear and terror of concocted enemies, their blind loyalty to anybody in power, even a little man with even smaller understanding. The stars and stripes has become the new symbol of jingoism, nationalism, xenophobia and blind loyalty and faith in tyrants, just as the swastika once did, even as it stands smeared in the blood of thousands, protecting torturers, rapists, war criminals, murderers and human rights violators, even as it has been besmirched by the destruction of innocent life and that of entire societies.
Old Glory now stands for the worst abuses of human rights, representing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram, the destruction of the Constitution and of Lady Liberty, the loss of habeas corpus and of the Geneva Convention. The red, white and blue, sadly enough, has become the symbol of what we most hate, of what we swore to never become. It has become a flag hijacked by tyrants, with the American People unconcerned and unwilling, to the point of embarrassment, to free it from its dungeon, with most too lazy or apathetic to care, most too ignorant to know. As a result, it has become, like the wretched symbol of the Nazis, a most reviled and despised emblem, an image of tyranny rising, wickedness growing and criminality evolving. Only Americans know how much more reviled and hated it will become in the coming years.
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet essayist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com and at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a fiction novel. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Oct 07, 2006 6:43 am Post subject: Feds/Cops Spy On Lindorff At Anti-Bush Rally. |
| Feds/Cops Spy On Lindorff At Anti-Bush Rally.
Police Spying In The Birthplace Of The First Amendment
By Dave Lindorff
10-6-6.
This is the 21st Century. Get with it, man!"
This past Thursday I was invited by the group World Can't Wait to talk about impeachment and Bush's preparations for war against Iran at a Philadelphia rally--part of the group's Oct. 5 "Drive Out the Bush Regime" campaign of 170 such rallies around the country. Assembled on the mall in front of the Rizzo Municipal Offices building in central Philadelphia in front of me were some 300 people, mostly young, and all well-behaved, if high spirited.
While I was talking about the Bush administration's impeachable crimes against the American people and the Constitution--in particularly the ramming through Congress of a bill that, for the first time since American patriots drove the British out of the 13 colonies, authorizes indefinite detainment without charge and imprisonment of American citizens without the right to a trial--I noticed two men in sunglasses with a high-quality video camera and a high-quality still camera with telephoto lense filming the assembled crowd.
After I spoke, I walked over to the two men and asked what station they were with. I was pretty certain they were police, despite their total lack of identification, because normally news organizations plaster their cameras with their station call letters and these cameras had no such identification on them. When I pressed them, both men turned their cameras directly on me, from just two feet away, filming me as I denounced their intimidation.
"You should be ashamed of yourselves," I said, as young people around me looked on in surprise. "This rally has a police permit, and all the people here are legally exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly."
The two men remained silent, and continued to grimly film and photograph me as I spoke. I began telling everyone around me who the men were and what they were doing, and some of the young people began to pester the officers themselves.
I later saw a member of the Philadelphia Police Department's Civil Affairs Unit, a Captain William Fisher, who unlike the camera detail, was clearly identified as a police officer by both a card pinned to his shirt, and by a prominent armband saying: Philadelphia Police Department.
Asked why the men were filming the crowd, he responded briskly, "This is a free country. This is a public space. You're free to be here, and they're free to come too and to take your picture."
I allowed as this was true, technically, but that clearly there was an element of intimidation involved when police come and film the faces of everyone who comes to an event that is about criticizing the government.
"Oh, you're so `70s," he said, looking at my gray beard and balding head. "This is the 21st Century. Get with it, man."
Indeed, he's right.
It is the 21st Century.
When I was a newspaper reporter in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, it was discovered that the Los Angeles Police Department was sending unmarked police officers like these armed with video cameras to press conferences at places like the Los Angeles Press Club, where they were setting up and filming certain events as part of a campaign of keeping tabs on activist groups.
This revelation caused a sensation, with front-page articles in the Los Angeles Times, and inquiries into the practice by irate members of the Los Angeles City Council. In the end, the police were forced to back down and cease the practice, at least for a time.
Now, here in Philadelphia, birthplace of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, this trampling of the freedom of assembly and speech seems to merit no attention at all in the local mainstream media. When I called the Inquirer's police reporter, Barbara Boyer, to alert her to what had happened, her response was "Well, I could take your picture on the sidewalk, too, if I wanted. It's not illegal."
Apparently the Philadelphia Police Department and most of the local media think that it's appropriate for police to film people who are exercising their Constitutional rights, and that this is what we do in "21st Century America." To me, though, this seems more like 1930s Germany, or 21st-Century China.
Inspector Robert Tucker, who heads the counter-terrorism task force of the Philadelphia Police Department, confirmed in a phone conversation the next day that the two men with the cameras were working for him. He apologized for their lack of identification, and for their unwillingness to identify themselves, promising that at future public events, they and others doing that kind of work would wear prominent identification showing they were with the police. But he insisted that their work was appropriate.
"At events like these, there are usually anarchists who show up," he argued, "and they're the ones that sometimes end up breaking glass and causing problems." (It's an argument that might justify video cams on every street corner of Philly, since crime is everywhere.) He said that by filming the whole group, it would be possible to identify those people later if there were incidents. Asked why the officers were videotaping the entire crowd--and the speakers like myself who were clearly identifiable anyhow--he offered no answer. Tucker claimed that the tapes and photos made at the event would ordinarily not be retained, but would be "taped over at the next event" unless there were an incident involving an arrest, but he also noted that the department does maintain files on "some people."
What makes this whole thing feel particularly creepy is the anti-terrorism bill just passed by a Congress of supine Republicans and cowardly Democrats, which gives the president the authority, on his own, to call anyone an "unlawful combatant," or a supporter of terrorism, and to lock them away in a military brig with no right to a trial or even a lawyer. When you put this police surveillance in that context, it becomes intimidating indeed. Especially since the Philadelphia Police counter-terrorism unit is an integral part of the federal joint counter-terrorism strike force, making it easy for such film materials to migrate over into federal hands.
It seems to me it's time to get back not to the 1970s, but to the 1770s, when Americans knew what was happening to them, and stood up and said, "No more!". | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
