[NYTr] Bowing Before an American Tyranny

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News - Sep 6, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/090507.html


Bowing Before an American Tyranny

By Robert Parry

The 9/11 tragedy did become a demarcation point for the United States,
although not in the way many Americans understand. Before that date six
years ago, there existed an American Republic – albeit one in decline –
but afterwards a New Age authoritarian state quickly took shape.

Though some defenders of the old Republic rose up, nobody was strong
enough to protect it.

How this historic calamity happened – one of the most under-reported
events of modern times – is the centerpiece of our new book, Neck Deep:
The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, which looks at the roles
of aggressive Republicans, accommodating Democrats, bullying pundits
and careerist journalists.

But the fact that the eclipse of the Republic did happen has gained
more corroboration from a new book by Jack Goldsmith, the former chief
of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) who clashed
with senior White House lawyers over their expansive interpretation of
presidential power.

“We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us
stop,” explained Vice President’s Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David
Addington, according to Goldsmith’s new book, The Terror Presidency.

Goldsmith wrote that Addington “and, I presumed, his boss viewed power
as the absence of constraint.”

However, “the absence of constraint” in the context of political
leaders wielding the extraordinary authority of a powerful state is
synonymous with tyranny, the antithesis of a democratic Republic with
checks and balances, rule of law and respect for the will of an
informed electorate.

This Bush tyranny combined its lust for unrestrained power with a
parallel contempt for logic and objective information, becoming what
might be called an imperial presidency in an anti-empirical world.
Rationality and legality were brushed aside; action and toughness were
all that mattered.

Even as President Bush stripped away the inalienable rights guaranteed
by the Founders in the Constitution, he kept much of the population
confused with misdirection, by asserting that he was taking these
actions to defend "liberty" and "freedom." In spring 2003, after
becoming assistant attorney general at the influential Office of Legal
Counsel, Goldsmith encountered the administration’s sophistry in the
legal opinions that were the cornerstones of Bush’s claims of virtually
unlimited presidential power in “wartime.”

“As I absorbed the opinions, I concluded that some were deeply flawed,
sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary
constitutional authorities on behalf of the President,” wrote
Goldsmith, who regards himself as a conservative Republican though with
a rational bent.

Goldsmith also was stunned to encounter the ideological extremism of
Bush’s White House, which chafed at even the modest limits put on
Bush’s spying power by the secret court created in 1978 by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In one February 2004 meeting, Addington remarked, “We’re one bomb away
from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” according to
Goldsmith’s book.

The very idea that a senior government official would, even flippantly,
welcome a terrorist attack as a way to panic the American people and
further enhance Bush’s powers underscores how contemptuous the White
House had become of the Founders’ vision of a constitutional Republic
based on law and reason.

No Dissent

Bush’s White House also would brook no dissent from legal experts
within the Justice Department. When Goldsmith questioned the legal
reasoning behind Bush’s unilateral decision to waive the Geneva
Conventions in regard to the “war on terror,” Addington lashed out
angrily.

“The President has already decided that terrorists do not receive
Geneva Convention protections,” Addington snapped. “You cannot question
his decision.”

But Goldsmith proved to be a gutsy – if short-lived – bureaucratic
infighter. When he suspended a legal opinion that permitted harsh
interrogations of detainees, he did so without giving the White House
advance warning.

On another occasion, when Goldsmith torpedoed a memo that permitted
torture by narrowly defining it, he timed his move with the delivery of
his resignation letter so the administration would find it tricky to
reverse his opinion without drawing unwanted attention to the internal
dispute.

Goldsmith left his influential position at the Office of Legal Counsel
in July 2004 to return to academia.

Though the resistance from Goldsmith and a few others did complicate
Bush’s consolidation of unlimited presidential power, the amassing of
executive authority has continued to advance in the three years since
Goldsmith left.

In September 2006, for instance, the Republican-controlled Congress
pushed through the Military Commissions Act, which in effect creates an
extra-constitutional legal system for handling a wide range of cases
that Bush asserts involve “unlawful enemy combatants” and their
accomplices, whether foreign or domestic.

Even after Democrats wrested control of Congress from the Republicans
in November 2006, Bush continued to expand his powers. In May 2007, the
Bush administration reversed long-standing legal policies and cleared
the way for using powerful spy satellites against domestic targets.

Also in spring 2007, Congress acquiesced to giving Bush another blank
check to fund the Iraq War. Then, just before the August recess,
Democrats caved in to Bush’s demands for even more sweeping authority
to spy on Americans who communicate or travel abroad.

So, the larger questions have yet to be resolved: Can Bush’s pursuit of
what Goldsmith termed the “absence of constraint” be halted and
reversed? Will some “larger force” finally materialize to stop the
pushing from Addington and other Bush loyalists?

Can the great American Republic be salvaged and revived?


[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at
neckdeepbook.com ]