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Fatal Vision: The Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill
by Chris Floyd
by Chris Floyd
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There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon
this country - if the people lose their confidence in themselves - and lose
their roughness and spirit of defiance.
~ Walt Whitman
I.
It was a dark hour indeed last Thursday when the United States
Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into
a "Leader-State," giving the president and his agents the power to capture,
torture and imprison forever anyone - American citizens included - whom they
arbitrarily decide is an "enemy combatant." This also includes those who merely
give "terrorism" some kind of "support," defined so vaguely that many experts
say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even
political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures.
All of this is bad enough - a sickening and cowardly surrender of
liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by
the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of
our degradation. In reality, the darkness is deeper, and more foul, than most
people imagine. For in addition to the dictatorial powers of seizure and
torment given by Congress on Thursday to George W. Bush - powers he had already
seized and exercised for five years anyway, even without this fig leaf of sham
legality - there is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed -
and used - openly, without any demur or debate from Congress at all: ordering
the "extrajudicial killing" of anyone on earth that he and his deputies decide
- arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal - is
an "enemy combatant."
That's right; from the earliest days of the Terror War - September
17, 2001, to be exact - Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death
over the entire world. If he says you're an enemy of America, you are. If he
wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should
die, he'll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or "conspiracy
theory": it's simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by
senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents - and
boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national
television audience.
And although the Republic-snuffing act just passed by Congress does
not directly address Bush's royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless
strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that
the designation of an "enemy combatant" is left solely to the executive branch;
neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law
is coupled with the existing "Executive Orders" authorizing "lethal force"
against arbitrarily designated "enemy combatants," it becomes, quite literally,
a license to kill - with the seal of Congressional approval.
How arbitrary is this process by which all our lives and liberties
are now governed? Dave Niewert at Orcinus has unearthed a remarkable admission
of its totally capricious nature. In a December 2002 story in the Washington
Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of
the process with admirable frankness:
"[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out
its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant," Olson
argues.
"'There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end
this,' Olson said in the interview. 'There will be judgments and instincts and
evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are
probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the
circumstances.'"
In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your
freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side
of the law, because the "law" is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions:
their "instincts" determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in
the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very
essence of despotism - and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding
principle of the United States government.
And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of
presidential murder. Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law
and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable
to most people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our
reality, and has been for five years. To overcome what seems to be a widespread
cognitive dissonance over this concept, we need only examine the record - a
record, by the way, taken entirely from publicly available sources in the mass
media. There's nothing secret or contentious about it, nothing that any
ordinary citizen could not know - if they choose to know it.
II.
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed a
"presidential finding" authorizing the CIA to kill those individuals whom he
had marked for death as terrorists. This in itself was not an entirely radical
innovation; Bill Clinton's White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting
the president's right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy of the
United States in self-defense," despite the legal prohibitions against
assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team
based this ruling on the "inherent powers" of the "Commander in Chief" - that
mythical, ever-elastic construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend
his own unconstitutional usurpations.
The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by
Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the
traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of
civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or
international outlaw - as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory
in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998,
or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian
infrastructure in Serbia during that nation's collective punishment for the
crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, Clinton was following the example set by
George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian
civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan,
who killed Moamar Gadafy's adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians
in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.
Junior Bush, of course, was about to outdo all those blunderbuss
strokes with his massive air attacks on Afghanistan, which killed thousands of
civilians, and the later orgy of death and destruction in Iraq. But he also
wanted the power to kill individuals at will. At first, the assassination
program was restricted to direct orders from the president aimed at specific
targets, as suggested by the Clinton memos. But soon the arbitrary power of
life and death was delegated to agents in the field, after Bush signed orders
allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval
for each attack, the Washington Post reported in December 2002. Nor was it
necessary any longer for the president to approve each new name added to the
target list; the "security organs" could designate "enemy combatants" and kill
them as they saw fit. However, Bush was always keen to get the details about
the agency's wetwork, administration officials assured the Post.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of
an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA drone
missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred on December 4,
2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza
Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were
those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The
grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on
another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani
officials reported.
However, there is simply no way of knowing at this point how many
people have been killed by American agents operating outside all judicial
process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly,
professionally. As a Pentagon document uncovered by the New Yorker in December
2002 revealed, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate
clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover
arrangements to ... enter countries surreptitiously."
What's more, there are strong indications that the Bush
administration has outsourced some of the contracts to outside operators. In
the original Post story about the assassinations - in those first heady weeks
after 9/11, when administration officials were much more open about "going to
the dark side," as Cheney boasted on national television - Bush insiders told
the paper that "it is also possible that the instrument of targeted killings
will be foreign agents, the CIA's term for nonemployees who act on its behalf.
Here we find a deadly echo of the "rendition" program that has sent
so many captives to torture pits in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere - including many
whose innocence has been officially established, such as the Canadian
businessman Maher Arar, German national Khalid El-Masri, UK native Mozzam Begg
and many others. They had been subjected to imprisonment and torture despite
their innocence, because of intelligence "mistakes." How many have fallen
victim to Bush's hit squads on similar shaky grounds?
So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of
Bush's "unitary executive" dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that
undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it's hard to
believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he
could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to
believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human
nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it
is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America
have done.
But this should come as no surprise. They have known about it all
along, and have not only countenanced Bush's death squad, but even celebrated
it. I'll end with one more passage from that December article, which sadly is
even more apt for our degraded reality today. It was a depiction of the one of
the most revolting scenes in recent American history: Bush's state of the Union
address in January 2003, delivered live to the nation during the final
warmongering frenzy before the rape of Iraq:
Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that
"more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide - "and many
others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic
leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing
people: "Let's put it this way. They are no longer a problem."
In other words, the suspects - and even Bush acknowledged they
were only suspects - had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating
unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics,
finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass.
Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing
to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a
bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a
zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds - or any other
purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he
called "the meaning of American justice." And the assembled legislators ...
applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little
man's bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law
- our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant,
ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in
protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day,
not ever.
And now, in September 2006, we know they will never raise that
protest. Oh, a few Democrats stood up at the last minute on Thursday to posture
nobly about the dangers of the detainee bill - but only when they knew that it
was certain to pass, when they had already given up their one weapon against
it, the filibuster, in exchange for permission from their Republican masters to
offer amendments that they also knew would fail. Had they been offering such
speeches since October 2001, when the lineaments of Bush's presidential tyranny
were already clear - or at any other point during the systematic dismantling of
America's liberties over the past five years - these fine words might have had
some effect.
Now the killing will go on. The tyranny that has entered upon the
country will grow stronger, more brazen; the darkness will deepen. Whitman,
thou should'st be living at this hour; America has need of thee.
This is a slightly revised version of a piece that first appeared
on the Oct. 2 edition of Truthout.org.
October 5, 2006
Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The
Secret History of the Bush Regime.
Copyright © 2006 Chris Floyd
Chris Floyd Archives
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