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Fatal
Vision: The Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill
By Chris Floyd, TO UK
Correspondent
t r u t h o u t |
Perspective
Monday
02 October 2006
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
1.
It
was a dark hour indeed on 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 an 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.
2.
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 the 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.
Chris
Floyd is an American journalist. His work has
appeared in print and online in venues all over the
world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia
Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il
Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is
the author of Empire Burlesque: High
Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium,
and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire
Burlesque" political blog. He can be reached at
cfloyd72@gmail.com.
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Link
to article: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100206A.shtml
Link
to vote:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:SN03930:@@@R
Link
to Senate:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00259
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