01-31-06
DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND
SEE: The Top 10 Conservative Idiots (No. 230)
Perhaps if
George W. Bush had taken it seriously when he was handed a daily briefing
on August 6th 2001 titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," the
world would be a different place right now. But he didn't.
Still, Bush started to take bin Laden seriously after September 11th,
right? For example, here's what he had to say on March 13, 2002:
Q: But don't you believe that the
threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found
either dead or alive?
THE RESIDENT: Well, as I say, we
haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the
center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -
I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.
01-27-06
King George the Stupid. This article sums things up so well that I decided to publish it in its entirity rather than just a snippet. For those nearby.
SEE: SLATE
The Power-Madness of King
George
Is Bush turning America into an elective dictatorship?
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006, at 3:44 PM ET
It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency
spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights.
President Bush believes he has the legal authority to order electronic
snooping without asking anyone's permission. Civil libertarians and
privacy-fretters think Bush needs a warrant from the special court created
to authorize wiretapping in cases of national security. But in practice,
the so-called FISA court that issues such warrants functions as a virtual
rubber stamp for the executive branch anyhow, so what's the great
difference in the end?
Would that so little were at stake. In fact, the Senate hearings on NSA
domestic espionage set to begin next month will confront fundamental
questions about the balance of power within our system. Even if one
assumes that every unknown instance of warrant-less spying by the NSA were
justified on security grounds, the arguments issuing from the White House
threaten the concept of checks and balances as it has been understood in
America for the last 218 years. Simply put, Bush and his lawyers contend
that the president's national security powers are unlimited. And since the
war on terror is currently scheduled to run indefinitely, the executive
supremacy they're asserting won't be a temporary condition.
This extremity of Bush's position emerges most clearly in a 42-page
document issued by the Department of Justice last week. As Andrew Cohen, a
CBS legal analyst, wrote in an online commentary, "The first time you read
the 'White Paper,' you feel like it is describing a foreign country guided
by an unfamiliar constitution." To develop this observation a bit further,
the nation implied by the document would be an elective dictatorship,
governed not by three counterpoised branches of government but by a
secretive, possibly benign, awesomely powerful king.
According to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the putative author of the
white paper, the president's powers as commander in chief make him the
"sole organ for the Nation in foreign affairs." This status, which derives
from Article II of the Constitution, brings with it the authority to
conduct warrant-less surveillance for the purpose of disrupting possible
terrorist attacks on the United States.
That power already sounds boundless, but according to Gonzales, this sole
organ has garnered even more authority under the congressional
authorization for the use of military force, passed in the wake of the
Sept. 11 attacks. This resolution is invariably referred to by the
ungainly acronym AUMF—the sound, perhaps, of civil liberties being exhaled
by a democracy. In the language of the white paper, the potent formula of
Article II plus AUMF "places the president at the zenith of his powers,"
giving him "all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress
can delegate."
This somewhat daffy monarchical undertone accompanies legal reasoning that
recalls Alice's conversation with the March Hare. "AUMF" is understood by
the Justice Department to expressly authorize warrant-less surveillance
even though the resolution that Congress passed neither envisioned nor
implied anything of the kind. The president's insistence that he alone can
divine the hidden meaning of legislation is of a piece with his recently
noticed practice of appending "signing statements" to bills—as in, "by
signing this anti-torture bill into law, I pronounce it to signify that it
has no power over me." Similarly, in his white paper, Bush as much as
declares: "I determine what my words mean and I alone determine what yours
mean, too."
Twisting vague statements into specific authorization is a stretch. But it
is in inverting specific prohibitions into blanket permission that
Gonzales reaches for the genuinely Orwellian. The Federal Intelligence
Surveillance Act of 1978 not only does not authorize Bush's warrant-less
snooping but clearly and specifically prohibits it by prescribing the FISA
court system as the "exclusive" method for authorizing electronic
surveillance for intelligence purposes. With a little help from the white
paper, however, that protection goes aumf as well; Gonzales proposes that
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must either be read as
consistent with the position that King Zenith can wiretap whomever he
wants (thus becoming meaningless) or, alternatively, be dismissed as an
unconstitutional irrelevancy.
Bush's message to the courts, like his message to Congress, is: Make way,
subjects. His quiet detour around the federal judges who sit on the FISA
court is entirely consistent with the White House position in the big
terrorism civil liberties cases that federal judges lack jurisdiction to
meddle with presidential decisions about whom to lock up and how to treat
them. In the Hamdi case, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 8-1, curtailed
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's ability to detain "enemy
combatants" indefinitely without a hearing. In a plurality opinion,
O'Connor wrote "a state of war is not a blank check for the President."
The Justice Department memo, however, cites Hamdi as ballast for its
stance that when it comes to spying domestically, Bush has not only a
blank check but a wallet full of no-limit platinum cards.
The final problem with Gonzales' theories of unfettered executive
authority is that they, as the lawyers say, prove too much. The Article II
plus AUMF justification for warrant-less spying is essentially the same
one the administration has advanced to excuse torture; ignore the Geneva
Conventions; and indefinitely hold even U.S. citizens without a hearing,
charges, or trial. Torture and detention without due process are bad
enough. But why does this all-purpose rationale not also extend to press
censorship or arresting political opponents, were the president to deem
such measures vital to the nation's security?
I don't suggest that Bush intends anything of the kind—or that even a
Congress as supine as the current one would remain passive if he went so
far. But the president's latest assertion that he alone can safeguard our
civil liberties isn't just disturbing and wrong. It's downright
un-American.