The North Coast times-eagle., January 01, 2006, Page 5, Image 5

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THE UNRESTRAINED PRESIDENT
“central” one) in a larger war on terror. A war without end, of
course, left the President as a commander-in-chief-without-end,
and it was in such a guise that the acolytes of that “obscure
philosophy” of total presidential power planned to claim their
'inherent' constitutional right to do essentially anything. (Imagine
what might have happened if their invasion of Iraq had been a
success!)
Having established their global war on terror, and so
their “war powers,” in the fall of 2001, top administration officials
then moved remarkably quickly to the outer limits of power — by
plunging into the issue of torture. After all, if you can establish
a presidential right to order torture (no matter how you manage
to redefine it) as well as to hold captives under a category of
warfare dredged up from the legal dustbin of history in prisons
especially established to be beyond the reach of the law or the
oversight of anyone but those under your command, you've
established a presidential right to do just about anything imagin­
able. While the get-tough aura of torture may indeed have
appealed to some of these worshippers of power, what undoubt-
ably appealed to them was the moving of the presidential goal­
posts, the changing of the rules. From Abu Ghraib on, the results
of all this have been obvious enough, but one crucial aspect of
such unfettered presidential power goes regularly unnoticed.
BY TOM ENGELHARDT
As 2006 begins, we seem to be at a not-completely
unfamiliar crossroads in the long history of the American imperial
Presidency. It grew up, shedding presidential constraints, in the
post-Worid War 2 years as part of the rise of the national security
state and the military-industrial complex. It reached its constraint­
less apogee with Richard Nixon’s presidency and what became
known as the Watergate scandal — an event marked by Nixon's
attempt to create his own private national security apparatus
which he directed to secretly commit various high crimes and
misdemeanors for him. It was as close as we came — until now
— to a presidential coup d ’etat that might functionally have
abrogated the Constitution. In those years, the potential dangers
of an unfettered presidency (so apparent to the nation’s founding
fathers) became obvious to a great many Americans. As now,
a failed war helped drag the President’s plans down, and in the
case of Nixon, ended in personal disgrace and resignation, as
well as in a brief resurgence of congressional oversight activity.
All this mitigated, and modestly deflected, the growth trajectory
of the imperial presidency — for a time.
The “cabal,’’ as Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief
of staff at the State Department, has called Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, and various other neoconish pals, stewed over this for
years, along with a group of lawyers who were prepared, once
the moment came, to give a sheen of legality to any presidential
act. The group of them used the post-9/11 moment to launch a
wholesale campaign to recapture the ‘lost’ powers of the imperial
presidency, attempting not, as in the case of Nixon, to create an
alternate national security apparatus but to purge and capture
the existing one for their private purposes. Under George Bush,
Dick Cheney, and their assorted advisers, acolytes and zealots,
a virtual cult of unconstrained presidential power has been
constructed, centered around the figure of G. W. Bush himself.
While much has been made of feverish Christian fundamentalist
support for the President, the real religious fervor in this
administration has been almost singularly focused on the quite
un-Christian attribute of total earthly power. Typical of the fierce
ideologues and cultists now in the White House is Cheney's new
Chief of Staff David Addington. The Washington Post’s Dana
Milbank described him this way back in 2004 (when he was still
Cheney's “top lawyer”):
“[A] principle author o f the White House memo justifying
torture of terrorism suspects...a prime advocate o f arguments
supporting the holding o f terrorism suspects without access to
courtsj,] Addington also led the fight with Congress and environ­
mentalists over access to information about corporations that
advised the White House on energy policy. He was instrumental
in the series o f fights with the September 11 commission and its
requests for in formation.... Even in a White House known for its
dedication to conservative philosophy, Addington is known as
an ideologue, an adherent of an obscure philosophy called the
unitary executive theory that favors an extraordinarily powerful
President.''
For these cultists of an all-powerful presidency, the holy
war, the “crusade” to be embarked upon was, above all, aimed at
creating a President accountable to no one, overseen by no one,
and restricted by no other force or power in his will to act as he
saw fit. And so, in this White House, all roads have led back to
one issue: How to press ever harder at the weakening boundar­
ies of presidential power. This is why, when critics concentrate
on any specific issue or set of administration acts, no matter how
egregious or significant, they invariably miss the point.The issue,
it turns out, is never primarily — to take just two areas of potent-
DAVID WITT
¡ally illegal administration activity—torture or warrantless surveil­
lance. Though each of them had value and importance to top
administration officials, they were nonetheless primarily means
to an end.
This is why the announcement of (and definition of) the
“global war on terror” almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks
was so important. It was to be a “war" without end. No one ever
attempted to define what “victory” might actually consist of,
though we were assured that the war itself would, like the Cold
War, last generations. Even the recent sudden presidential
announcement that we will now settle only for “complete victory”
in Iraq is, in this context, a distinctly limited goal because Iraq
has already been defined as but a single “theater” (though a
As you push the limits, wherever they may be, to create
a situation in which all control rests in your hands, the odds are!*
that you will create an uncontrollable situation as well. From
torture to spying, such acts, however contained they may initially
appear to be, involve a deep plunge into a dark and perverse
pool of human emotions. Torture in particular, but also unlimited
forms of surveillance and any other acts which invest individuals
secretly with something like the power of gods, invariably lead
to humanity’s darkest side. The permission to commit such acts,
once released into the world, mutates and spreads like wildfire
from top to bottom in any command structure and across all
boundaries. You may start out with a relatively small program
of secret imprisonment, torture, spying or whatever, meant to
achieve limited goals while establishing certain prerogatives of
power, but in no case is the situation likely to remain that way for
long. This was, perhaps, the true genius of the American system
as imagined by its founders — the understanding that any form
of state power left unchecked in the hands of a single person
or group of people was likely to degenerate into despotism (or
worse), whatever the initial desires of the individuals involved.
Sooner or later, the hubris of taking all such powers
up as your own is likely to prove overwhelming and then many
things begin to slip out of control. Consider the developing
scandal over the National Security Agency’s wiretapping and
surveillance on presidential order and without the necessary
(and easily obtained) FISA court warrants. In this case, the
President has proudly admitted to everything. He has essentially
said: I did it. I did it many times over. We are continuing to do it
now. I would do it again. (“I ’ve reauthorized this program more
than 30 times since the September 11 attacks, and I intend to do
so for as long as our nation is — for so long as the nation faces
the continuing threat o f an enemy that wants to kill American
citizens. ’) In the process, however, he has been caught in a
curious, potentially devastating presidential lie, now being used
against him by Democratic pols and other critics.
While in Buffalo, New York, for his reelection campaign
in April 2004, in one of those chatty “conversations” — this one
about the Patriot Act — that he had with various well-vetted
groups, the President said the following:
“There are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the
way, any time you hear the United States government talking
abut wiretaps, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order.
Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about
chasing down terrorists, w e’re talking about getting a court order
ROTHER IS WATCHING
It took 21 years longer than expected, but the future has
finally arrived
And we don’t like it. Not one bit.
We are fighting a war with no end to create a peace with
no defined victory
We occupy a foreign land that doesn't want us, while at
home our civil liberties are discounted.
We are told that it’s better not to know what our govern­
ment is doing in our name, for security purposes. Meanwhile, our
government is becoming omnipresent, spying on us whenever it
deems it necessary.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell was right after all.
In 1948, Orwell penned 1984, a dark, futuristic satire in
which a totalitarian government used indoctrination, propaganda
and fear to enforce order and conformity.
Orwell wrote this book as a cautionary tale to underscore
the insidious danger of slowly eroded individual liberties. His
Thought Police may not yet be on the march, but it's not hyper­
bole to point out the eerie parallels with today’s America. . •
In America today, Big Brother is watching.
He’s watching because President Bush told him to.
Shortly after 9/11, Bush secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps
on US. citizens making or receiving international phone calls
and e-mails.
When it comes to fighting terror, Bush is totalitarian —
remember, you’re either with us or against us. Trust me to get it
right, he says Debate on the law is not only not needed, it's evil.
“An open debate about the law would say to the enemy,
Here’s what we’re going to do.” Bush said recently. “The fact
that we re discussing this program is helping the enemy."
Then there’s the Patriot Act, also created in the days
immediately after September 11, 2001. The Senate and House
of Representatives have voted to extend the law by a month.
President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insist
it's an indispensable tool in the war on terror and want it
extended permanently
“I'm as concerned about the privacy of American citizens
as anyone, but we cannot allow libraries to become safe havens
for terrorists," Gonzales said in July, defending one of the act’s
most controversial provisions.
Remember, too, that we invaded Iraq primarily because
we were told Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat with his
weapons of mass destruction. Now the Bush administration
acknowledges that wasn’t so, but insists there were (are?) other
reasons to invade. History is malleable.
Orwell wrote of war without end: we're told the war on
terror will last decades at least. Orwell wrote of a dumbed-down
“Newspeak," and who could argue that our national discourse
hasn’t slumped? Orwell's “Ministry of Love" tortured dissidents
real or imagined; our government decries Iraq’s secret torture
prisons while arguing over whether to ban torture. Meanwhile,
we maintain our own secret CIA prisons.
Bush is unapologetic. The President believes he has the
legal authority to spy on American citizens without a warrant, and
he plans to continue to reauthorize the program “as long as the
nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill
American citizens.” But when the enemy is poorly defined, who
determines when the threat is over? In this case, the same
government that secretly taps our phones.
Turns out the truth is no stranger than fiction.
We think it’s time for Congress to heed the warning of
George Orwell.
To that end, we're asking for your help: Mail us or drop
off your tattered copies of 1984. When we get 537 of them, we ll
send them to every member of the House of Representatives
and Senate and to President Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney.
Feel free to inscribe the book with a note, reminding
these fine people that we Americans take the threat to our
liberties seriously. Remind Congress that it makes no sense
to fight a war for democracy in a foreign land while allowing
our democratic principles to erode at home.
Remind President Bush that ours is a country of checks
and balances, not unbridled power.
Perhaps our nation's leaders can find some truth in this
fiction and more carefully ponder the road we’re traveling.
Bring or mail your books to the Oakland Tribune, 401
13th Street, Oakland, California 94612. Doors are open from
8 a m. to 5 p.m.
-EDITORIAL, THE OAKLAND TRIBUNE (12/30/05)
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