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2004-07-24 12:34:16 UTC
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"When we Americans first begun, our biggest danger was clearly in view. We
knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious
threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the
hands of an executive, whether he be a king or a president. Our ingrained
American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the
character or persona of the individual who wields that power; it is the
power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully
balanced in order to ensure the survival of freedom.
"In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous
enemy of democracy, because under the right circumstances, it can trigger
the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to
someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from
fear.
"It truly is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully
designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and
free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of
his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's
stewardship now, at the beginning of this 21st century, what do you suppose
he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the
unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely,
without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of
their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any
crime?
"All that is necessary, according to our president, is that he, the
president, label any citizen an unlawful enemy combatant and that will be
sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty without due
process, even for the rest of his life if the president so chooses. There's
no appeal.
"What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument
from our current Justice Department that the president may authorize what
plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners, and that any law or treaty
which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war would
itself be a violation of the Constitution our founders put together?
"What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he
has the inherent power, even without a declaration of war by the Congress,
to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth at any time he chooses for any
reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United
States?
"How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current president's
recent claim in Department of Justice legal opinions that he is no longer
subject to the rule of law, so long as he is acting in his role as commander
in chief?
"I think that it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely
concerned about these recent developments in American democracy, and that
they would feel that we, here, now, are facing a clear and present danger
with the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.
Shouldn't we be equally concerned, and shouldn't we ask ourselves how it is
that we have come to this point?
"Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for
terrorist attacks, a potential that is all too real, our founders would
almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the
America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always
faced whenever they have appeared in history, a challenge rooted in the
inherent difficulty of self-governance and the vulnerability to fear that is
part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is
that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too
much power in the hands of one person.
"Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders
knew intimately both its strengths and its weaknesses. And during their
debate, they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of
the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most
serious one, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in
which this threat might become particularly potent: that is, when war
transformed America's president into our commander in chief. They worried
that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal
constitutional boundary and upset the delicate checks and balances, which
they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty. That is precisely why
they took extra care to parse the war powers in the Constitution, assigning
the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president but retaining
for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not and when our
nation might decide to go to war.
"Indeed, that limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen
as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
these words: 'The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments
demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in
war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the
question of war in the legislature,' end quote.
"Now of course, in more recent decades the emergence of new, modern weapons
that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to
war or the declaration to war and the actual waging of war have naturally
led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive's war-making
power. But the practicalities of modern warfare, which do necessarily
increase the war powers of the president at the expense of Congress, do not
thereby render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the
making of war by the president, when added to his other powers, carries with
it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our constitution and,
in the process, actually threatening our liberties.
"They, our founders, were greatly influenced far more than we can imagine
by a careful reading of the history and human drama surrounding the
democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic.
"They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar
crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Roman Senate's long prohibition
against a returning general entering the city while still in command of
military forces. Though the senate lingered in form and was humored for
decades, when Caesar impolitically combined his military commander role with
his chief of state role, the Roman Senate, and with it the Roman Republic
and the dream of democracy, withered away; and for all intents and purposes
democracy disappeared from the face of the Earth for 17 centuries, until its
rebirth in our land.
"Symbolically, President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander
in chief role and his head of government roles as a means of maximizing the
power that people are naturally eager to give those who promise to defend
them against active threats. But as he does so, we are now witnessing some
serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a
healthy democracy in America.
"In Justice Jackson's famous concurring opinion in the Youngstown Steel
case backing the 1950s, the single most important Supreme Court case ever on
the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time
of war, Justice Jackson wrote:
'The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most
impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercise by George III, and
the description of its evils in the Declaration of Independence leads me to
doubt that they created their new executive in their image. And if we seek
instruction from our own times' he, again, writing in the 1950s continued,
'we can match it only from the executive governments we disparagingly
describe as totalitarian.'
"I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest
challenge facing our republic is not terrorism, as serious a threat as that
is, but how we react to terrorism; and not war, but how we manage our fears
and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that
they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any
president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful
balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of
government.
"Our current president has gone to war and has crossed back into the city
and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he
says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that
increase his personal power as president at the expense of Congress, the
courts and every individual citizen. We must surrender some of our
traditional American freedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient
power to protect us against those who would do us harm. Public fear remains
at an unusually high level almost three years after we were viciously
attacked on September 11th, 2001.
"In response to those devastating attacks, the president properly and
skillfully assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military
invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps, were
harbored, and planned their assault, but then just as the tide of battle was
shifting decisively in our favor, the commander in chief made a
controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade
another country, a country that, according to the best evidence now compiled
in a new, exhaustive, bipartisan study, posed no imminent threat to us and
had nothing to do with the attack against us.
"As the main body of our troops were deployed for the new invasion, those
who had organized the attack against us escaped, and many of them are still
at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably
because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to
us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice. And then
the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage
against the United States in those lands, and, according to several studies,
has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked
us and still wishes us harm.
"A little over a year ago, when we launched this war against the second
country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave our people the clear
impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that
attacked us, al Qaeda, and that Iraq not only provided a geographic base for
them but was also close to providing them with weapons of mass destruction,
including even nuclear bombs.
"But now the extensive independent investigation by this bipartisan
commission formed to study the 9/11 attack has just reported that there was
no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind; and of
course, over the past year we had previously found out that there were no
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"So now the president and the vice president are arguing with this
commission and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are
right and that there actually was a working, cooperative relationship
between Iraq and al Qaeda. Now, the problem for President Bush is that he
does not have any credible evidence to support this claim, and yet in spite
of that, he persists in making that claim repeatedly and vigorously.
"And so I would like to pause here for a moment today to address the
curious question of why President Bush continues to make this claim that
most people who have investigated it know is wrong. And I think it's a
particularly important question because it is closely connected to the
questions of constitutional power with which I began this speech; and the
way we answer it will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among
our three branches of government. To begin with, our founders would not be
the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us
about why it's so important politically for President Bush to keep the
American people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage
between Iraq and al Qaeda just isn't true. Among those Americans who still
believe that there is a linkage, there remains very strong support for the
president's decision to invade Iraq, but among those who accept the
commission's new detailed finding that there is no connection, support for
the war in Iraq and the decision to launch it dries up pretty quickly.
"And that's understandable, because if Iraq had nothing to do with the
attack or the organization that launched the attack against us, then that
means the president took us to war when he didn't have to, a war in which
almost 900 of our soldiers have been killed and almost 5,000 have been
wounded and many thousands of Iraqis have been killed and wounded. Thus,
for all of these reasons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have
evidently decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there
is and was a meaningful connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. They think
that if they lose that argument and people see the truth, then they will not
only lose support for that controversial decision to go to war against Iraq,
but also lose some of the new power they have picked up from the Congress
and the courts, and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the
American people. As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading
the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a
linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
"If he actually believed in the linkage that he asserts, that would by
itself, in light of the available evidence, make him genuinely unfit to lead
our nation's struggle against al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy
scraps, then who would want them in charge of anything? Are they too
dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.
"But the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the president's determined
dissembling. Listen, for example, to the words of this editorial this week
from the Financial Times, and I quote: 'There was nothing intrinsically
absurd about the WMD fear' -- the weapons of mass destruction fear -
'nothing ignoble about the opposition to Saddam's tyranny, however late
Washington developed this. But the purported link between Baghdad and al
Qaeda, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the
region. It was and is nonsense.' End quote.
"Now of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist.
"Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and the Middle East from
tyranny. And it has been a positive good to remove Saddam Hussein from
power, but our troops were not greeted with the promised garlands of flowers
and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92 percent of Iraqis, while only
2 percent see them as liberators, according to a careful poll by the
Coalition Provisional Authority.
"But alongside those two rationales, right from the start, beginning very
soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start
mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath, in a
cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind.
He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a
false impression in the minds of the American people that Saddam Hussein was
responsible for 9/11. Usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording.
Indeed, President Bush's consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence
that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie,
visibly circumnavigating the truth, over and over again, as if he had
practiced how to avoid encountering the truth.
"But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice President Cheney also
sometimes slipped away from their usual tricky wording and in careless
moments resorted to statements that were clearly outright falsehoods on
their face.
"In any case, by the time he was done, public opinion polls showed that
fully 70 people of the people had gotten the message that he wanted them to
get and had been convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11
attacks.
"The myth that Iraq and al Qaeda were working together was no accident. The
president and vice president deliberately ignored warnings before the war
from international intelligence services, from the CIA and from their own
Pentagon that the claim was false.
"Europe's top terrorism investigators said in 2002, and I quote, 'We have
found no evidence of any links between Iraq and al Qaeda. If there were such
links, we would have found them, but we have found no serious connections
whatsoever.' End quote. A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the
White House directly undercut the Iraq-al Qaeda claim. Top officials in the
Pentagon told newspaper reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by
President Bush and Vice President Cheney was an exaggeration, in their
words.
"And at least some honest voices within the president's own party admitted
the same thing. Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated war hero who sits on the
Foreign Relations Committee, said point blank, and I quote, 'Saddam is not
in league with al Qaeda. I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me
to connect Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda.' Period, end quote.
"But these voices and others did not stop the deliberate campaign to
mislead America. Over the course of a year, the president and vice president
used their carefully crafted language to scare Americans into believing
there was an imminent threat from al Qaeda that was going to be armed by
Iraq.
"In the fall of 2002, President Bush actually told the country, and I
quote, 'You cannot distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam,' end quote. He
also said, and I quote, 'The true threat facing our country is an al
Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam,' end quote. At the same
time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that -- and I quote -
'there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and
the Iraqi government,' end quote. By the spring, Secretary of State Powell
was in front of the United Nations, in an appearance he now says he regrets,
claiming a -- and I quote - 'sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda
terrorist network,' end quote.
"But after the invasion, no ties were found, no evidence emerged. In June
of 2003, the United Nations Security Council's al Qaeda- monitoring agency
told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the
Iraqi regime to al Qaeda.
"By August 3, former Bush administration national security and intelligence
officials admitted that the evidence that had been used to make this Iraq-al
Qaeda claim was, in their words, 'tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds
with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies,' end quote. And earlier
this year, Knight Ridder newspapers reported, and again I quote, 'Senior
U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence of a connection.'
"So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report last week finding
no credible evidence of an Iraqi-al Qaeda connection, it should not have
caught the White House off guard. Yet, instead of the candor that Americans
need and deserve from their leaders, there have been more denials and more
insistence without evidence.
"Vice President Cheney, for example, said even this week, and I quote,
'There clearly was a relationship' and there was 'overwhelming evidence.'
Even more shockingly, Cheney put forward this question. Quote, 'Was Iraq
involved with al Qaeda in the attack on 9/11? We don't know.' And then he
claimed that he probably had more information than the commission had, but
has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more
insults. The president was even more brazen. He dismissed all questions
about his statements by saying, and I quote, 'The reason I keep insisting
that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda was
because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.' And he
provided no evidence whatsoever.
"Friends of the administration have tried mightily to rehabilitate their
cherished by now shattered linkage. John Lehman, one of the Republicans on
the 9/11 commission, offered up what sounded at first like new evidence that
a Saddam henchman had attended an al Qaeda meeting. But within hours, the
commission's files yielded definitive evidence that no, that was another man
with a similar name, ironically capturing the near-miss quality of Bush's
entire symbolic argument.
"They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief
in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin
Laden that they dare not admit the truth, lest they look like complete fools
for launching our country into a reckless totally discretionary war against
a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever.
"But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to the
misallocation of military and economic and political resources, not limited
even to the loss of blood and treasure, because whenever a chief
executive -- whenever a president spends prodigious amounts of energy in an
effort to convince the American people of a falsehood, he damages the fabric
of democracy and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our
self-government.
"And that creates a need for -- that they feel for control over the flood
of bad news and bad policies and bad decisions, and that also explains their
striking attempts to influence and control news coverage.
"To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly eager
and ready to do battle with the news media when he went out on CNBC earlier
this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11 commission's conclusion that
Iraq did not have a relationship with al Qaeda. He lashed out at The New
York Times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9/11
commission finds no Qaeda-Iraq tie, a clear statement of the obvious. And
he then said that there is no, quote, 'fundamental split here and now
between what the president said and what the commission said.' End quote. He
tried to deny that he had ever personally been responsible for helping to
create the false impression that there was linkage between al Qaeda and
Iraq. Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for 'The Daily Show'
with Jon Stewart. And Stewart played Cheney's outright denial that he had
ever said that representatives of al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence met in
Prague, and then Stewart froze Cheney's image and played the exact video
clip when Cheney had indeed said exactly that in exactly the words he had
denied, catching him on videotape in a lie. And at that point, Stewart said,
addressing himself to Cheney's frozen image on the television screen, 'It's
my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire.'
"It's not unusual in the news-gathering environment of the kind that exists
in our country today for comedians to be able to say things that others feel
like they can't. Dan Rather, for example, said that the post-9/11 patriotism
stifled journalism -- has stifled journalists from asking government
officials, quote, 'the toughest of the tough questions.' Rather went so far
as to reach for a metaphor and compare administration efforts to intimidate
the press to necklacing in apartheid South Africa. While acknowledging it as
a, in his phrase, 'an obscene comparison,' here's the point he made, and I
use his words. 'The fear is that you will be necklaced; you will have a
flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck,' Rather explained.
It was his network, CBS, remember that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs
from the American people for two weeks at the request of the Bush
administration.
"I have a close friend whose young son was staying with a family in
Barcelona, Spain, for the spring quarter. And he called his father in
anguish during that two-week period and said the Spanish family with whom he
was living was telling him, in the Spanish he had not yet perfected, that
America had been found to be torturing Iraqi prisoners, stripping their
clothes off and making them do all the things we saw in the pictures. 'And
Dad, it's not true, is it?' And his father said, 'No, son, it's not true. Of
course it's not true. You tell them that I don't know what they have on
their television there, but this is not true. This is not America.'
"His son relayed the response from his Spanish host family, who said, 'Tell
your father that they don't show you these pictures in the United States
now, but we see them.'
"Three days later, this father called his son back, embarrassed and
chagrined, and said it was us. 'I can't believe it.' And that's kind of the
reaction most all of us had.
"But the fact that others around the world saw these pictures before we did
is itself an issue that runs to the core of important concerns about the
course of our democracy.
"Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that current criticisms of
the administration's policy in Iraq, and I quote, 'makes it complicated and
more difficult to fight the war.'
"CNN's Christiane Amanpour said on another network last September, and I
quote, 'I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled.
I'm sorry to say, but certainly television -- and perhaps, to a certain
extent, my station -- was intimidated by the administration.' End quote.
The administration works closely with a network of rapid responders, a group
of digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors and
publishers and advertisers, and are quick to accuse them of undermining
support for our troops.
"Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first
journalists to regularly expose the president's consistent distortion of the
facts. Krugman writes, and I quote, 'Let's not overlook the role of
intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative
about the president, you had to expect right wing pundits and publications
to do all they could to ruin your reputation.' Bush and Cheney are spreading
purposeful confusion, while attempting to punish in any way they can any
reporters who stand in the way of the confusion.
"It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions
to resist that kind of pressure, which in the case of individual journalists
can threaten their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead
to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because
without a press able to report without fear or favor, our democracy will
disappear.
"Recently the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way
it allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false
pretenses. We are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media,
which is so dominant in America, to never let this happen again. We must
help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake or else we risk other
wrongheaded decisions being based upon false and misleading impressions.
"So now we are left with an ongoing, unprecedented, high-intensity conflict
every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this
administration's policies have been based and the reality of the world in
which the American people live their lives.
"When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq
policy, it's actually fairly simple: He adopted an ideologically driven view
of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone
wrong is in one way or another the result of this spectacular and violent
clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the
all too painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and
taxpayers have encountered. Of course, there have been several other
collisions between President Bush's ideology and America's reality. To take
the most prominent example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into
a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation
as the Iraq war. But there has been no more bizarre or troubling
manifestation of how seriously off track this president's policies have
taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation's conscience over
the last month. First came those extremely disturbing pictures that document
the strange forms of physical and sexual abuse and even torture and even
murder by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in
Iraq, an estimated 90 percent of them innocent of any charge.
"And then the second shock to our conscience came just this past week with
the strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration
which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal
rationale for the sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American
people; activities which, according to any reasonable person, would be
recognized as war crimes.
"In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the
president, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above
and immune from the rule of law. At least we don't have to guess what our
founders would have to say about that bizarre and un-American theory.
"And by the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of
this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were
throwing the memo out and it was, in their words, irrelevant and over-broad.
But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong, and
in fact, a Department of Justice spokesman today confirmed that they stand
by the tortured definition of torture.
"In addition, the broad analysis regarding the commander in chief powers
that they had asserted has explicitly not been disavowed. And the view of
the memo -- that it was within the commander in chief's power to order any
interrogation techniques necessary to extract information -- most certainly
contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against
the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
"We also know that President Bush rewarded the principal author of this
legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. And the
president himself meanwhile continues to place the blame for the horrific
consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and
corporals and sergeants, who may well be culpable as individuals for their
actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set
up the Bush gulag and led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq.
"I call today on this administration to disclose all of its interrogation
policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
those employed by the CIA at any detention centers operated outside the
U.S., as well as all of the analyses related to the adoption of those
policies.
"We deserve to know what and why it's being done in our name. Policies
matter. The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination
over any potential adversary was what led to the hubristic, tragic
miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster
after another, based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the
people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and
the Iraqis in prison and out.
"The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world
is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to
be completely dominant within our constitutional system. Our founders
understood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of his famous
aphorism that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The
goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power, even absolute power.
"Ironically, all of the administration's didactic messages about how
democracies don't invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The
pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the Bush
administration to ignore the United Nations, to do serious damage to our
most important alliances in the world, to violate international law, and
risk the hatred and contempt of many in the rest of the world. The seductive
exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers
under the Constitution in a way what would have been the worst nightmare of
our framers.
"And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fool's gold in any case.
Just as its pursuit in Iraq has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers
and the Iraqi people and everything we think is important, in the same way
the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that ends up weakening
the Congress, the courts and civil society is not good for either the
presidency or the rest of the nation. If the Congress becomes an enfeebled
enabler to the executive and the courts become known for political
calculations in their decisions, then the country suffers.
"The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this
administration has engaged in order to aggrandize power have included
censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, the
silencing of dissent, the ignoring of intelligence. And although there have
been other efforts by other presidents to encroach upon the legitimate
prerogatives of Congress and the courts, there has never been this kind of
persistent, systematic abuse of the truth and the institutionalization of
dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process.
"Two hundred and twenty years ago John Adams wrote, in describing one of
America's most basic founding principles -- and I quote: 'The executive
shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them,
to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.' The last time we
had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was when Richard
Nixon told an interviewer, David Frost -- he said, and I quote, 'When the
president does it, that means it's not illegal.' He went on to elaborate:
'If the president, for example, approves something, approves an action
because of national security or, in this cases, because of a threat to
internal peace and order of significant order, then the president's decision
in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out
without violating the law,' end quote. Fortunately for our country,
President Nixon was forced to resign before he could implement his
outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance
of the Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis. The
two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot
Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity.
And even though they were loyal Republican partisans, they were more loyal
to the Constitution, and they resigned on principle rather than implement
what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon. And then Congress, also on a
bipartisan basis, bravely resisted Nixon's abuses of power and launched
impeachment proceedings. Some of our Congress's proudest hours in recent
decades came in that trial, in that struggle.
"But you know, in some ways our current president is actually claiming more
extraconstitutional power vis-a-vis Congress and the courts than Richard
Nixon did.
"For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens
indefinitely with no charge of a crime, with no access to a lawyer and
notification to their family.
"And in this administration, this time the attorney general, John Ashcroft,
is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede an abuse
of power. In fact, it seems like whenever there's an opportunity to abuse
power in this administration, Ashcroft seems to be out there leading the
charge. And he's the one, after all, who's responsible for picking those
staff lawyers at the Justice Department, responsible for those embarrassing
memos justifying and enabling torture.
"Moreover, in contrast, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress
that helped to save our country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses, the
current Congress, controlled by the president's party, has virtually
abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal
branch of government. Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for
the most part, to take orders from the president on what to vote for and
what to vote against. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have
even started blocking Democrats from attending conference committee
meetings, where legislation takes its final form; and instead, they let the
president's staff come to the meetings and write key parts of the laws for
them.
"Come to think of it, the decline and lack of independence shown by this
Congress would shock our founders more than anything else, because they
believe that the power of the Congress was the single most important check
and balance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by the
executive branch. I wish the Republican leaders of this Congress would show
some backbone and discharge their constitutional responsibilities to the
American people. This administration has not been content simply to reduce
the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy
in order to deny the American people access to crucial information with
which they might hold government officials accountable for their actions,
and they have launched a systematic effort to manipulate and intimidate the
media into presenting a more favorable image of the administration to the
American people.
"Listen to what U.S. News and World Report recently had to say about their
secrecy, and I quote: 'The Bush administration has quietly but efficiently
dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal
government, cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the
public domain important information on health, safety and environmental
matters.' Here are just a few examples, and for each one you have to ask,
what are they hiding and why are they hiding it?
"First of all, more than 6,000 documents have been removed by the Bush
administrations from governmental websites; to cite only one example, a
document on the EPA website giving citizens crucial information on how to
identify chemical hazards near to where their families live. Some have
speculated that the principal threat to the Bush administration is a threat
by the chemical hazards if the information remains available to American
citizens.
"To head off complaints from our nation's governors over how much they
would receive under federal programs, the Bush administration simply stopped
printing the primary state budget report. To muddy the clear consensus of
the scientific community on global warming, the White House directed major
changes and deletions to an EPA report -- changes that were so egregious
that the agency said it was too embarrassed to use the language insisted
upon by the political employees at the White House.
"And of course, they've kept hidden from view Vice President Cheney's
ultra-secret energy task force. They've pitched a -- they fought a pitched
battle in the courts for more than three years to continue denying the
American people the ability to know which special interests and which
lobbyists advised Vice President Cheney on the design of the new law.
"We know that Ken Lay was in charge of vetting the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, and we've recently seen some of the evidence of what
Enron did to circumvent the regulators. And another example. When mass
layoffs became too embarrassing, this administration simply stopped
publishing the regular layoff report that economists and others have been
receiving for decades.
"For this administration, the truth hurts; that is, when the truth is
available to the American people. Instead, they often find bliss in the
induced ignorance that comes when they deprive the American people of access
to information that they have a right to. What are they hiding, and why are
they hiding it?
"In the end, for this administration it is all about power. This lie about
the invented connection between al Qaeda and Iraq was and is the key to
justifying the current ongoing constitutional power grab by the president.
So long as their big, flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the
public's mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for
himself the power to make war on his whim.
"He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil
liberties, again on his personal discretion. He will continue to intimidate
the press, and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the
American people during his bid for reelection.
"War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for
rules. We know that in our wars there have been dissents from these
standards, often the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion
of battle. But we have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in
which the framework for this kind of violence has been created by the
president. Nor have we had a situation where these things were mandated by
directives signed by the secretary of Defense, as it is alleged, and
supported by the national security adviser.
"Always before, we could look to the chief executive as the point from
which redress would come and law would be upheld. That was one of the great
prides of our country, humane leadership faithful to the law. What we have
now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a president and an
administration for whom the best law is no law, so long as law threatens to
constrain their political will. And where the constraints of law cannot be
prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by
delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction and by failure to enforce on the
part of those sworn to uphold the law.
"In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and
in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by
an aroused Congress, whose bipartisan members know that they will stand
before the judgment of history. We cannot depend upon a debased Department
of Justice, given over to the hands of zealots. Congressional oversight and
special prosecutor are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a
nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield
themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns; it is by
bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves.
"Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a
society or as a people; it came from the belief that, in the end, this was
and is a country which should -- which would pursue justice as the compass
pursues the pole. And that although we might deviate, we would return and
find our path in the name of our founders for the sake of posterity. This is
what we as Americans must now do. Thank you."
-- Former President Al Gore to the American Constitution Society for Law and
Policy, Thursday, June 24, 2004
"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier."
-- George W. Bush, Governing Magazine, July 1998
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator."
-- George W. Bush, CNN.com, December 18, 2000
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about
it."
-- George W. Bush, Business Week, July 30, 2001
"I am the commander, see? I do not need to explain why I say things. That's
the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to
explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an
explanation."
-- George W. Bush, CBSNews.com, November 17, 2002
"When we Americans first begun, our biggest danger was clearly in view. We
knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious
threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the
hands of an executive, whether he be a king or a president. Our ingrained
American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the
character or persona of the individual who wields that power; it is the
power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully
balanced in order to ensure the survival of freedom.
"In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous
enemy of democracy, because under the right circumstances, it can trigger
the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to
someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from
fear.
"It truly is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully
designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and
free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of
his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's
stewardship now, at the beginning of this 21st century, what do you suppose
he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the
unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely,
without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of
their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any
crime?
"All that is necessary, according to our president, is that he, the
president, label any citizen an unlawful enemy combatant and that will be
sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty without due
process, even for the rest of his life if the president so chooses. There's
no appeal.
"What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument
from our current Justice Department that the president may authorize what
plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners, and that any law or treaty
which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war would
itself be a violation of the Constitution our founders put together?
"What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he
has the inherent power, even without a declaration of war by the Congress,
to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth at any time he chooses for any
reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United
States?
"How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current president's
recent claim in Department of Justice legal opinions that he is no longer
subject to the rule of law, so long as he is acting in his role as commander
in chief?
"I think that it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely
concerned about these recent developments in American democracy, and that
they would feel that we, here, now, are facing a clear and present danger
with the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.
Shouldn't we be equally concerned, and shouldn't we ask ourselves how it is
that we have come to this point?
"Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for
terrorist attacks, a potential that is all too real, our founders would
almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the
America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always
faced whenever they have appeared in history, a challenge rooted in the
inherent difficulty of self-governance and the vulnerability to fear that is
part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is
that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too
much power in the hands of one person.
"Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders
knew intimately both its strengths and its weaknesses. And during their
debate, they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of
the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most
serious one, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in
which this threat might become particularly potent: that is, when war
transformed America's president into our commander in chief. They worried
that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal
constitutional boundary and upset the delicate checks and balances, which
they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty. That is precisely why
they took extra care to parse the war powers in the Constitution, assigning
the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president but retaining
for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not and when our
nation might decide to go to war.
"Indeed, that limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen
as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
these words: 'The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments
demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in
war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the
question of war in the legislature,' end quote.
"Now of course, in more recent decades the emergence of new, modern weapons
that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to
war or the declaration to war and the actual waging of war have naturally
led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive's war-making
power. But the practicalities of modern warfare, which do necessarily
increase the war powers of the president at the expense of Congress, do not
thereby render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the
making of war by the president, when added to his other powers, carries with
it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our constitution and,
in the process, actually threatening our liberties.
"They, our founders, were greatly influenced far more than we can imagine
by a careful reading of the history and human drama surrounding the
democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic.
"They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar
crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Roman Senate's long prohibition
against a returning general entering the city while still in command of
military forces. Though the senate lingered in form and was humored for
decades, when Caesar impolitically combined his military commander role with
his chief of state role, the Roman Senate, and with it the Roman Republic
and the dream of democracy, withered away; and for all intents and purposes
democracy disappeared from the face of the Earth for 17 centuries, until its
rebirth in our land.
"Symbolically, President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander
in chief role and his head of government roles as a means of maximizing the
power that people are naturally eager to give those who promise to defend
them against active threats. But as he does so, we are now witnessing some
serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a
healthy democracy in America.
"In Justice Jackson's famous concurring opinion in the Youngstown Steel
case backing the 1950s, the single most important Supreme Court case ever on
the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time
of war, Justice Jackson wrote:
'The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most
impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercise by George III, and
the description of its evils in the Declaration of Independence leads me to
doubt that they created their new executive in their image. And if we seek
instruction from our own times' he, again, writing in the 1950s continued,
'we can match it only from the executive governments we disparagingly
describe as totalitarian.'
"I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest
challenge facing our republic is not terrorism, as serious a threat as that
is, but how we react to terrorism; and not war, but how we manage our fears
and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that
they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any
president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful
balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of
government.
"Our current president has gone to war and has crossed back into the city
and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he
says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that
increase his personal power as president at the expense of Congress, the
courts and every individual citizen. We must surrender some of our
traditional American freedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient
power to protect us against those who would do us harm. Public fear remains
at an unusually high level almost three years after we were viciously
attacked on September 11th, 2001.
"In response to those devastating attacks, the president properly and
skillfully assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military
invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps, were
harbored, and planned their assault, but then just as the tide of battle was
shifting decisively in our favor, the commander in chief made a
controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade
another country, a country that, according to the best evidence now compiled
in a new, exhaustive, bipartisan study, posed no imminent threat to us and
had nothing to do with the attack against us.
"As the main body of our troops were deployed for the new invasion, those
who had organized the attack against us escaped, and many of them are still
at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably
because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to
us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice. And then
the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage
against the United States in those lands, and, according to several studies,
has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked
us and still wishes us harm.
"A little over a year ago, when we launched this war against the second
country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave our people the clear
impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that
attacked us, al Qaeda, and that Iraq not only provided a geographic base for
them but was also close to providing them with weapons of mass destruction,
including even nuclear bombs.
"But now the extensive independent investigation by this bipartisan
commission formed to study the 9/11 attack has just reported that there was
no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind; and of
course, over the past year we had previously found out that there were no
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"So now the president and the vice president are arguing with this
commission and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are
right and that there actually was a working, cooperative relationship
between Iraq and al Qaeda. Now, the problem for President Bush is that he
does not have any credible evidence to support this claim, and yet in spite
of that, he persists in making that claim repeatedly and vigorously.
"And so I would like to pause here for a moment today to address the
curious question of why President Bush continues to make this claim that
most people who have investigated it know is wrong. And I think it's a
particularly important question because it is closely connected to the
questions of constitutional power with which I began this speech; and the
way we answer it will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among
our three branches of government. To begin with, our founders would not be
the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us
about why it's so important politically for President Bush to keep the
American people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage
between Iraq and al Qaeda just isn't true. Among those Americans who still
believe that there is a linkage, there remains very strong support for the
president's decision to invade Iraq, but among those who accept the
commission's new detailed finding that there is no connection, support for
the war in Iraq and the decision to launch it dries up pretty quickly.
"And that's understandable, because if Iraq had nothing to do with the
attack or the organization that launched the attack against us, then that
means the president took us to war when he didn't have to, a war in which
almost 900 of our soldiers have been killed and almost 5,000 have been
wounded and many thousands of Iraqis have been killed and wounded. Thus,
for all of these reasons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have
evidently decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there
is and was a meaningful connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. They think
that if they lose that argument and people see the truth, then they will not
only lose support for that controversial decision to go to war against Iraq,
but also lose some of the new power they have picked up from the Congress
and the courts, and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the
American people. As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading
the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a
linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
"If he actually believed in the linkage that he asserts, that would by
itself, in light of the available evidence, make him genuinely unfit to lead
our nation's struggle against al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy
scraps, then who would want them in charge of anything? Are they too
dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.
"But the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the president's determined
dissembling. Listen, for example, to the words of this editorial this week
from the Financial Times, and I quote: 'There was nothing intrinsically
absurd about the WMD fear' -- the weapons of mass destruction fear -
'nothing ignoble about the opposition to Saddam's tyranny, however late
Washington developed this. But the purported link between Baghdad and al
Qaeda, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the
region. It was and is nonsense.' End quote.
"Now of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist.
"Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and the Middle East from
tyranny. And it has been a positive good to remove Saddam Hussein from
power, but our troops were not greeted with the promised garlands of flowers
and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92 percent of Iraqis, while only
2 percent see them as liberators, according to a careful poll by the
Coalition Provisional Authority.
"But alongside those two rationales, right from the start, beginning very
soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start
mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath, in a
cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind.
He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a
false impression in the minds of the American people that Saddam Hussein was
responsible for 9/11. Usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording.
Indeed, President Bush's consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence
that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie,
visibly circumnavigating the truth, over and over again, as if he had
practiced how to avoid encountering the truth.
"But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice President Cheney also
sometimes slipped away from their usual tricky wording and in careless
moments resorted to statements that were clearly outright falsehoods on
their face.
"In any case, by the time he was done, public opinion polls showed that
fully 70 people of the people had gotten the message that he wanted them to
get and had been convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11
attacks.
"The myth that Iraq and al Qaeda were working together was no accident. The
president and vice president deliberately ignored warnings before the war
from international intelligence services, from the CIA and from their own
Pentagon that the claim was false.
"Europe's top terrorism investigators said in 2002, and I quote, 'We have
found no evidence of any links between Iraq and al Qaeda. If there were such
links, we would have found them, but we have found no serious connections
whatsoever.' End quote. A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the
White House directly undercut the Iraq-al Qaeda claim. Top officials in the
Pentagon told newspaper reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by
President Bush and Vice President Cheney was an exaggeration, in their
words.
"And at least some honest voices within the president's own party admitted
the same thing. Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated war hero who sits on the
Foreign Relations Committee, said point blank, and I quote, 'Saddam is not
in league with al Qaeda. I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me
to connect Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda.' Period, end quote.
"But these voices and others did not stop the deliberate campaign to
mislead America. Over the course of a year, the president and vice president
used their carefully crafted language to scare Americans into believing
there was an imminent threat from al Qaeda that was going to be armed by
Iraq.
"In the fall of 2002, President Bush actually told the country, and I
quote, 'You cannot distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam,' end quote. He
also said, and I quote, 'The true threat facing our country is an al
Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam,' end quote. At the same
time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that -- and I quote -
'there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and
the Iraqi government,' end quote. By the spring, Secretary of State Powell
was in front of the United Nations, in an appearance he now says he regrets,
claiming a -- and I quote - 'sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda
terrorist network,' end quote.
"But after the invasion, no ties were found, no evidence emerged. In June
of 2003, the United Nations Security Council's al Qaeda- monitoring agency
told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the
Iraqi regime to al Qaeda.
"By August 3, former Bush administration national security and intelligence
officials admitted that the evidence that had been used to make this Iraq-al
Qaeda claim was, in their words, 'tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds
with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies,' end quote. And earlier
this year, Knight Ridder newspapers reported, and again I quote, 'Senior
U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence of a connection.'
"So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report last week finding
no credible evidence of an Iraqi-al Qaeda connection, it should not have
caught the White House off guard. Yet, instead of the candor that Americans
need and deserve from their leaders, there have been more denials and more
insistence without evidence.
"Vice President Cheney, for example, said even this week, and I quote,
'There clearly was a relationship' and there was 'overwhelming evidence.'
Even more shockingly, Cheney put forward this question. Quote, 'Was Iraq
involved with al Qaeda in the attack on 9/11? We don't know.' And then he
claimed that he probably had more information than the commission had, but
has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more
insults. The president was even more brazen. He dismissed all questions
about his statements by saying, and I quote, 'The reason I keep insisting
that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda was
because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.' And he
provided no evidence whatsoever.
"Friends of the administration have tried mightily to rehabilitate their
cherished by now shattered linkage. John Lehman, one of the Republicans on
the 9/11 commission, offered up what sounded at first like new evidence that
a Saddam henchman had attended an al Qaeda meeting. But within hours, the
commission's files yielded definitive evidence that no, that was another man
with a similar name, ironically capturing the near-miss quality of Bush's
entire symbolic argument.
"They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief
in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin
Laden that they dare not admit the truth, lest they look like complete fools
for launching our country into a reckless totally discretionary war against
a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever.
"But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to the
misallocation of military and economic and political resources, not limited
even to the loss of blood and treasure, because whenever a chief
executive -- whenever a president spends prodigious amounts of energy in an
effort to convince the American people of a falsehood, he damages the fabric
of democracy and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our
self-government.
"And that creates a need for -- that they feel for control over the flood
of bad news and bad policies and bad decisions, and that also explains their
striking attempts to influence and control news coverage.
"To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly eager
and ready to do battle with the news media when he went out on CNBC earlier
this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11 commission's conclusion that
Iraq did not have a relationship with al Qaeda. He lashed out at The New
York Times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9/11
commission finds no Qaeda-Iraq tie, a clear statement of the obvious. And
he then said that there is no, quote, 'fundamental split here and now
between what the president said and what the commission said.' End quote. He
tried to deny that he had ever personally been responsible for helping to
create the false impression that there was linkage between al Qaeda and
Iraq. Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for 'The Daily Show'
with Jon Stewart. And Stewart played Cheney's outright denial that he had
ever said that representatives of al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence met in
Prague, and then Stewart froze Cheney's image and played the exact video
clip when Cheney had indeed said exactly that in exactly the words he had
denied, catching him on videotape in a lie. And at that point, Stewart said,
addressing himself to Cheney's frozen image on the television screen, 'It's
my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire.'
"It's not unusual in the news-gathering environment of the kind that exists
in our country today for comedians to be able to say things that others feel
like they can't. Dan Rather, for example, said that the post-9/11 patriotism
stifled journalism -- has stifled journalists from asking government
officials, quote, 'the toughest of the tough questions.' Rather went so far
as to reach for a metaphor and compare administration efforts to intimidate
the press to necklacing in apartheid South Africa. While acknowledging it as
a, in his phrase, 'an obscene comparison,' here's the point he made, and I
use his words. 'The fear is that you will be necklaced; you will have a
flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck,' Rather explained.
It was his network, CBS, remember that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs
from the American people for two weeks at the request of the Bush
administration.
"I have a close friend whose young son was staying with a family in
Barcelona, Spain, for the spring quarter. And he called his father in
anguish during that two-week period and said the Spanish family with whom he
was living was telling him, in the Spanish he had not yet perfected, that
America had been found to be torturing Iraqi prisoners, stripping their
clothes off and making them do all the things we saw in the pictures. 'And
Dad, it's not true, is it?' And his father said, 'No, son, it's not true. Of
course it's not true. You tell them that I don't know what they have on
their television there, but this is not true. This is not America.'
"His son relayed the response from his Spanish host family, who said, 'Tell
your father that they don't show you these pictures in the United States
now, but we see them.'
"Three days later, this father called his son back, embarrassed and
chagrined, and said it was us. 'I can't believe it.' And that's kind of the
reaction most all of us had.
"But the fact that others around the world saw these pictures before we did
is itself an issue that runs to the core of important concerns about the
course of our democracy.
"Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that current criticisms of
the administration's policy in Iraq, and I quote, 'makes it complicated and
more difficult to fight the war.'
"CNN's Christiane Amanpour said on another network last September, and I
quote, 'I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled.
I'm sorry to say, but certainly television -- and perhaps, to a certain
extent, my station -- was intimidated by the administration.' End quote.
The administration works closely with a network of rapid responders, a group
of digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors and
publishers and advertisers, and are quick to accuse them of undermining
support for our troops.
"Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first
journalists to regularly expose the president's consistent distortion of the
facts. Krugman writes, and I quote, 'Let's not overlook the role of
intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative
about the president, you had to expect right wing pundits and publications
to do all they could to ruin your reputation.' Bush and Cheney are spreading
purposeful confusion, while attempting to punish in any way they can any
reporters who stand in the way of the confusion.
"It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions
to resist that kind of pressure, which in the case of individual journalists
can threaten their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead
to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because
without a press able to report without fear or favor, our democracy will
disappear.
"Recently the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way
it allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false
pretenses. We are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media,
which is so dominant in America, to never let this happen again. We must
help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake or else we risk other
wrongheaded decisions being based upon false and misleading impressions.
"So now we are left with an ongoing, unprecedented, high-intensity conflict
every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this
administration's policies have been based and the reality of the world in
which the American people live their lives.
"When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq
policy, it's actually fairly simple: He adopted an ideologically driven view
of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone
wrong is in one way or another the result of this spectacular and violent
clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the
all too painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and
taxpayers have encountered. Of course, there have been several other
collisions between President Bush's ideology and America's reality. To take
the most prominent example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into
a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation
as the Iraq war. But there has been no more bizarre or troubling
manifestation of how seriously off track this president's policies have
taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation's conscience over
the last month. First came those extremely disturbing pictures that document
the strange forms of physical and sexual abuse and even torture and even
murder by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in
Iraq, an estimated 90 percent of them innocent of any charge.
"And then the second shock to our conscience came just this past week with
the strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration
which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal
rationale for the sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American
people; activities which, according to any reasonable person, would be
recognized as war crimes.
"In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the
president, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above
and immune from the rule of law. At least we don't have to guess what our
founders would have to say about that bizarre and un-American theory.
"And by the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of
this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were
throwing the memo out and it was, in their words, irrelevant and over-broad.
But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong, and
in fact, a Department of Justice spokesman today confirmed that they stand
by the tortured definition of torture.
"In addition, the broad analysis regarding the commander in chief powers
that they had asserted has explicitly not been disavowed. And the view of
the memo -- that it was within the commander in chief's power to order any
interrogation techniques necessary to extract information -- most certainly
contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against
the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
"We also know that President Bush rewarded the principal author of this
legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. And the
president himself meanwhile continues to place the blame for the horrific
consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and
corporals and sergeants, who may well be culpable as individuals for their
actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set
up the Bush gulag and led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq.
"I call today on this administration to disclose all of its interrogation
policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
those employed by the CIA at any detention centers operated outside the
U.S., as well as all of the analyses related to the adoption of those
policies.
"We deserve to know what and why it's being done in our name. Policies
matter. The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination
over any potential adversary was what led to the hubristic, tragic
miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster
after another, based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the
people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and
the Iraqis in prison and out.
"The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world
is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to
be completely dominant within our constitutional system. Our founders
understood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of his famous
aphorism that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The
goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power, even absolute power.
"Ironically, all of the administration's didactic messages about how
democracies don't invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The
pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the Bush
administration to ignore the United Nations, to do serious damage to our
most important alliances in the world, to violate international law, and
risk the hatred and contempt of many in the rest of the world. The seductive
exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers
under the Constitution in a way what would have been the worst nightmare of
our framers.
"And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fool's gold in any case.
Just as its pursuit in Iraq has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers
and the Iraqi people and everything we think is important, in the same way
the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that ends up weakening
the Congress, the courts and civil society is not good for either the
presidency or the rest of the nation. If the Congress becomes an enfeebled
enabler to the executive and the courts become known for political
calculations in their decisions, then the country suffers.
"The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this
administration has engaged in order to aggrandize power have included
censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, the
silencing of dissent, the ignoring of intelligence. And although there have
been other efforts by other presidents to encroach upon the legitimate
prerogatives of Congress and the courts, there has never been this kind of
persistent, systematic abuse of the truth and the institutionalization of
dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process.
"Two hundred and twenty years ago John Adams wrote, in describing one of
America's most basic founding principles -- and I quote: 'The executive
shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them,
to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.' The last time we
had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was when Richard
Nixon told an interviewer, David Frost -- he said, and I quote, 'When the
president does it, that means it's not illegal.' He went on to elaborate:
'If the president, for example, approves something, approves an action
because of national security or, in this cases, because of a threat to
internal peace and order of significant order, then the president's decision
in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out
without violating the law,' end quote. Fortunately for our country,
President Nixon was forced to resign before he could implement his
outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance
of the Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis. The
two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot
Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity.
And even though they were loyal Republican partisans, they were more loyal
to the Constitution, and they resigned on principle rather than implement
what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon. And then Congress, also on a
bipartisan basis, bravely resisted Nixon's abuses of power and launched
impeachment proceedings. Some of our Congress's proudest hours in recent
decades came in that trial, in that struggle.
"But you know, in some ways our current president is actually claiming more
extraconstitutional power vis-a-vis Congress and the courts than Richard
Nixon did.
"For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens
indefinitely with no charge of a crime, with no access to a lawyer and
notification to their family.
"And in this administration, this time the attorney general, John Ashcroft,
is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede an abuse
of power. In fact, it seems like whenever there's an opportunity to abuse
power in this administration, Ashcroft seems to be out there leading the
charge. And he's the one, after all, who's responsible for picking those
staff lawyers at the Justice Department, responsible for those embarrassing
memos justifying and enabling torture.
"Moreover, in contrast, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress
that helped to save our country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses, the
current Congress, controlled by the president's party, has virtually
abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal
branch of government. Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for
the most part, to take orders from the president on what to vote for and
what to vote against. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have
even started blocking Democrats from attending conference committee
meetings, where legislation takes its final form; and instead, they let the
president's staff come to the meetings and write key parts of the laws for
them.
"Come to think of it, the decline and lack of independence shown by this
Congress would shock our founders more than anything else, because they
believe that the power of the Congress was the single most important check
and balance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by the
executive branch. I wish the Republican leaders of this Congress would show
some backbone and discharge their constitutional responsibilities to the
American people. This administration has not been content simply to reduce
the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy
in order to deny the American people access to crucial information with
which they might hold government officials accountable for their actions,
and they have launched a systematic effort to manipulate and intimidate the
media into presenting a more favorable image of the administration to the
American people.
"Listen to what U.S. News and World Report recently had to say about their
secrecy, and I quote: 'The Bush administration has quietly but efficiently
dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal
government, cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the
public domain important information on health, safety and environmental
matters.' Here are just a few examples, and for each one you have to ask,
what are they hiding and why are they hiding it?
"First of all, more than 6,000 documents have been removed by the Bush
administrations from governmental websites; to cite only one example, a
document on the EPA website giving citizens crucial information on how to
identify chemical hazards near to where their families live. Some have
speculated that the principal threat to the Bush administration is a threat
by the chemical hazards if the information remains available to American
citizens.
"To head off complaints from our nation's governors over how much they
would receive under federal programs, the Bush administration simply stopped
printing the primary state budget report. To muddy the clear consensus of
the scientific community on global warming, the White House directed major
changes and deletions to an EPA report -- changes that were so egregious
that the agency said it was too embarrassed to use the language insisted
upon by the political employees at the White House.
"And of course, they've kept hidden from view Vice President Cheney's
ultra-secret energy task force. They've pitched a -- they fought a pitched
battle in the courts for more than three years to continue denying the
American people the ability to know which special interests and which
lobbyists advised Vice President Cheney on the design of the new law.
"We know that Ken Lay was in charge of vetting the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, and we've recently seen some of the evidence of what
Enron did to circumvent the regulators. And another example. When mass
layoffs became too embarrassing, this administration simply stopped
publishing the regular layoff report that economists and others have been
receiving for decades.
"For this administration, the truth hurts; that is, when the truth is
available to the American people. Instead, they often find bliss in the
induced ignorance that comes when they deprive the American people of access
to information that they have a right to. What are they hiding, and why are
they hiding it?
"In the end, for this administration it is all about power. This lie about
the invented connection between al Qaeda and Iraq was and is the key to
justifying the current ongoing constitutional power grab by the president.
So long as their big, flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the
public's mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for
himself the power to make war on his whim.
"He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil
liberties, again on his personal discretion. He will continue to intimidate
the press, and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the
American people during his bid for reelection.
"War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for
rules. We know that in our wars there have been dissents from these
standards, often the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion
of battle. But we have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in
which the framework for this kind of violence has been created by the
president. Nor have we had a situation where these things were mandated by
directives signed by the secretary of Defense, as it is alleged, and
supported by the national security adviser.
"Always before, we could look to the chief executive as the point from
which redress would come and law would be upheld. That was one of the great
prides of our country, humane leadership faithful to the law. What we have
now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a president and an
administration for whom the best law is no law, so long as law threatens to
constrain their political will. And where the constraints of law cannot be
prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by
delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction and by failure to enforce on the
part of those sworn to uphold the law.
"In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and
in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by
an aroused Congress, whose bipartisan members know that they will stand
before the judgment of history. We cannot depend upon a debased Department
of Justice, given over to the hands of zealots. Congressional oversight and
special prosecutor are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a
nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield
themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns; it is by
bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves.
"Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a
society or as a people; it came from the belief that, in the end, this was
and is a country which should -- which would pursue justice as the compass
pursues the pole. And that although we might deviate, we would return and
find our path in the name of our founders for the sake of posterity. This is
what we as Americans must now do. Thank you."
-- Former President Al Gore to the American Constitution Society for Law and
Policy, Thursday, June 24, 2004
"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier."
-- George W. Bush, Governing Magazine, July 1998
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator."
-- George W. Bush, CNN.com, December 18, 2000
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about
it."
-- George W. Bush, Business Week, July 30, 2001
"I am the commander, see? I do not need to explain why I say things. That's
the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to
explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an
explanation."
-- George W. Bush, CBSNews.com, November 17, 2002