Politics > Politics-USA > The Real Republican Agenda - "The stench of Republican fascism spreads across our nation."
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16 Jul 2006 04:40:18 PM |
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The Real Republican Agenda - "The stench of Republican fascism spreads across our nation." |
NOVEMBER IS A REFERENDUM ON IMPEACHMENT...do your part to save mankind
From a New York Times editorial, 7/16/06:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/opinion/16sun1.html?ex=3D1310702400&en=3D=
d38dc3c60f31985e&ei=3D5090&partner=3Drssuserland&emc=3Drss
The Real Agenda
It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture
of the Bush administration's response to the terror attacks is
becoming clear.
Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin
Laden than with expanding presidential power.
Over and over again, the same pattern emerges:
Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some
unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the
legal constraints.
Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an
ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go
it alone.
While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight
terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been
shaped by another, perverse determination:
never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any
constraint on the executive branch.
One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on
a constitutional system of checks and balances.
Another has been a less effective war on terror.
The Guant=E1namo Bay Prison
This whole sorry story has been on vivid display since the Supreme
Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and United States law both
applied to the Guant=E1namo Bay detention camp.
For one brief, shining moment, it appeared that the administration
realized it had met a check that it could not simply ignore.
The White House sent out signals that the president was ready to work
with Congress in creating a proper procedure for trying the hundreds of
men who have spent years now locked up as suspected terrorists without
any hope of due process.
But by week's end it was clear that the president's idea of
cooperation was purely cosmetic.
At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely
wanted Congress to legalize President Bush's illegal actions -- to
amend the law to negate the court's ruling instead of creating a
system of justice within the law.
As for the Geneva Conventions, administration witnesses and some of
their more ideologically blinkered supporters in Congress want to scrap
the international consensus that no prisoner may be robbed of basic
human dignity.
The hearings were a bizarre spectacle in which the top military lawyers
-- who had been elbowed aside when the procedures at Guant=E1namo were
established -- endorsed the idea that the prisoners were covered by the
Geneva Convention protections.
Meanwhile, administration officials and obedient Republican lawmakers
offered a lot of silly talk about not coddling the masterminds of
terror.
The divide made it clear how little this all has to do with fighting
terrorism.
Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every
member of the American military who might ever be taken captive in the
future.
And if the prisoners scooped up in Afghanistan and sent to Guant=E1namo
had been properly processed first -- as military lawyers wanted to do
-- many would never have been kept in custody, a continuing reproach to
the country that is holding them.
Others would actually have been able to be tried under a fair system
that would give the world a less perverse vision of American justice.
The recent disbanding of the C.I.A. unit charged with finding Osama bin
Laden is a reminder that the American people may never see anyone
brought to trial for the terrible crimes of 9/11.
The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly
humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo
the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with
limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what
to do with them over the long run.
Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent
on hunkering down.
The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the
United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common
Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners
for more than half a century, was too vague.
Which part of "civilized peoples," "judicial guarantees" or
"humiliating and degrading treatment" do they find confusing?
Eavesdropping on Americans
The administration's intent to use the war on terror to buttress
presidential power was never clearer than in the case of its
wiretapping program.
The president had legal means of listening in on the phone calls of
suspected terrorists and checking their e-mail messages.
A special court was established through a 1978 law to give the
executive branch warrants for just this purpose, efficiently and in
secrecy.
And Republicans in Congress were all but begging for a chance to change
the process in any way the president requested.
Instead, of course, the administration did what it wanted without
asking anyone.
When the program became public, the administration ignored calls for it
to comply with the rules.
As usual, the president's most loyal supporters simply urged that
Congress pass a law allowing him to go on doing whatever he wanted to
do.
Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
announced on Thursday that he had obtained a concession from Mr. Bush
on how to handle this problem.
Once again, the early perception that the president was going to bend
to the rules turned out to be premature.
The bill the president has agreed to accept would allow him to go on
ignoring the eavesdropping law.
It does not require the president to obtain warrants for the one
domestic spying program we know about -- or for any other program --
from the special intelligence surveillance court.
It makes that an option and sets the precedent of giving blanket
approval to programs, rather than insisting on the individual warrants
required by the Constitution.
Once again, the president has refused to acknowledge that there are
rules he is required to follow.
And while the bill would establish new rules that Mr. Bush could
voluntarily follow, it strips the federal courts of the right to hear
legal challenges to the president's wiretapping authority.
The Supreme Court made it clear in the Guant=E1namo Bay case that this
sort of meddling is unconstitutional.
If Congress accepts this deal, Mr. Specter said, the president will
promise to ask the surveillance court to assess the constitutionality
of the domestic spying program he has acknowledged.
Even if Mr. Bush had a record of keeping such bargains, that is not the
right court to make the determination. In addition, Mr. Bush could
appeal if the court ruled against him, but the measure provides no
avenue of appeal if the surveillance court decides the spying program
is constitutional.
The Cost of Executive Arrogance
The president's constant efforts to assert his power to act without
consent or consultation has warped the war on terror.
The unity and sense of national purpose that followed 9/11 is gone,
replaced by suspicion and divisiveness that never needed to emerge.
The president had no need to go it alone -- everyone wanted to go with
him.
Both parties in Congress were eager to show they were tough on
terrorism.
But the obsession with presidential prerogatives created fights where
no fights needed to occur and made huge messes out of programs that
could have functioned more efficiently within the rules.
Jane Mayer provided a close look at this effort to undermine the
constitutional separation of powers in a chilling article in the July 3
issue of The New Yorker.
She showed how it grew out of Vice President ***** Cheney's long and
deeply held conviction that the real lesson of Watergate and the later
Iran-contra debacle was that the president needed more power and that
Congress and the courts should get out of the way.
To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up
this cause behind the shield of Americans' deep insecurity.
The results have been devastating.
Americans' civil liberties have been trampled.
The nation's image as a champion of human rights has been gravely
harmed.
Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we
know about, while other prisons operate in secret.
American agents "disappear" people, some entirely innocent, and
send
them off to torture chambers in distant lands.
Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guant=E1namo Bay without
charges or rudimentary rights.
And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being
painted as pro-terrorist at election time.
________________________________________________________
The stench of Republican fascism spreads across our nation.
Harry
from NewzNow:
(see all of NewzNow's excellent posts as they break, put this link
in your browser, use it, this is a search on google groups, on the
author "NewzNow" sorted by date... nothing fancy):
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?enc_author=3DSiBPxxEAAAB4p8-Ap3f0Gi_=
DB5UqgHD4kdEasx1kiYTQavV7mdW13Q&scoring=3Dd
.
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