[Dialogue] All the President's Confessions

Sat Dec 24 12:43:41 EST 2005

Colleagues, a very distrubing article on the presidency of the US America.
Peace, Harry 
  _____  

AlterNet

All the President's Confessions

By G. Pascal Zachary, AlterNet
Posted on December 23, 2005, Printed on December 24, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/29995/

Bush's statement last Saturday that he ordered domestic spying, knowing it
was possibly against the law to do so, was an astonishing confession in the
annals of American history -- and the defining moment of Bush's tortured
presidency. Why, after all, would the president open himself to the
possibility, however remote, of an impeachment proceeding?

If American presidents stand for anything, it is deniability. This is the
prime directive of presidential authority. More than 50 years ago, Franklin
D. Roosevelt, who invented the Imperial Presidency and presided over the
country during World War II, avoided leaving a paper trail of his most
sensitive decisions. Even his order to build an atomic weapon was vague.
"O.K. - FDR" is the only surviving record of his ever having granted
authority for what turned out to be the most expensive and secretive project
in American history.

Later presidents also took pains to make sure they were in a position to
deny knowledge of executive actions clearly outside the law. President
Eisenhower would not admit to flying spy planes over the Soviet Union at the
height of Cold War hysteria in the late 1950s, even though his Democratic
opponents were making false accusations about Russian capabilities to strike
the U.S. with nuclear weapons. President Kennedy kept a safe distance from
secret plots to kill Cuban leader Castro (unsuccessful) and South Vietnamese
president Diem (successful). President Johnson approved the fabrication of
evidence that led the U.S. Congress to authorize a wider war in Southeast
Asia.

None of these presidents ever admitted that their actions had broken the
law.

Not even President Nixon, at the height of Watergate, admitted to breaking
the law. Nor did Bill Clinton, who was a master of denial. He denied
"inhaling" pot, he denied fellatio was real sex, he denied the Whitewater
allegations.

Indeed, presidents past have denied breaking the law, even when they have,
because following the law is their prime directive, their sole basis for
democratic legitimacy. In political theory, the executive is a hybrid
creature, part enlightened monarch and part accountable leader. The
executive is free to act on the basis of his or her conscience -- the
enlightened monarch -- but he or she must do so subject to laws approved by
a legitimate independent body, on which the executive's accountability
rests.

The need for a balance between executive action and democratic
accountability was crucial to the creators of the American republic in the
late 18th century. Until then, the democratic movements in Europe had
succeeded only in subjecting monarchs to certain limits, such as "the power
of the purse" in England. In the U.S., the president would be circumscribed
by law. This was the great invention of American political practice, even
more so than the idea of federalism, which enabled different states of the
union to manage their affairs differently.

Because rule of law is fundamental to the moral basis of the presidency,
presidents must even uphold laws they don't agree with. Indeed, the
willingness of presidents to do so is their defining trait. In this regard,
presidents are unlike other citizens. They do not have the option to perform
acts of civil disobedience. They cannot argue, in essence, that their
conscience does not allow them to abide by the law.

Why then is President Bush insisting on his duty, and even his right, to
disregard the laws covering domestic spying, laws that demand the government
seek a judge's authority before spying on Americans on American soil?

One explanation, of course, is that Bush hopes to find that he actually
possesses the legal authority to unilaterally spy on his own citizens. The
chances of him constructing a compelling case for this power, however, seem
slim. He is not surrounded by great legal minds, and the consensus among
constitutional scholars is clear. As Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the
University of Chicago, told the New York Times on Wednesday, "The
president's authorizing of the N.S.A. to spy on Americans is blatantly
unlawful and unconstitutional."

Given the likelihood that Bush's allies will find no legal basis for his
actions, Bush's confession ought to be viewed as a triumph of lawlessness
over law. After all, the president had options. Many commentators and
critics have noted that he could have asked Congress to approve his spying
program. He did not. Instead he chose lawlessness.

And now he is boasting about it.

His confessions -- for he keeps repeating himself, as boasters will -- are
calculated, a means of positioning himself as a troubadour of conscience,
the nation's chief advocate of lawlessness. His posture is not just the act
of a desperate president whose own Republican Party stalwarts are abandoning
him. Bush's advocacy of lawlessness lies at the heart of the right-wing
agenda to remake America.

It is easily forgotten, now that the right-wing has controlled Washington
for a decade, that right-wing tactics were nearly all borrowed from the
highly successful tactics of left-liberals in the 1960s and early '70s. The
prime method of the civil-rights movement, after all, was disobedience:
unjust laws were to be disregarded. In the 1980s, the anti-abortion right,
and especially its violent wing, embraced the notion that violent actions
were justified to break laws they considered unjust.

The militia movement, which led to the Oklahoma City bombing 10 years ago,
also justified illegal actions on the grounds of a "higher" law. More
recently, the attacks on federal courts (and the judges themselves) by Tom
DeLay and other right-wingers are expressions of the new conventional wisdom
that there is a higher law than the law of the land, and that law is the
right-wing agenda.

When Bush says he is breaking the law in order to protect Americans, he is
rallying the forces of lawlessness in the country and standing on its head
the spirit of civil disobedience, which defined the civil-rights era and the
anti-Vietnam War movement.

>From this perspective, Bush will not be unhappy if the entire liberal
establishment in the U.S., including moderate members of his own party, find
him to have broken the law by authorizing domestic spying by the NSA. All
that is left to his presidency is a kind of hollow martyrdom. He will be
quite pleased to go down in history as the man who broke the law to satisfy
the dictates of the right-wing ascendancy in America.

His greatest legacy will be the promotion of a culture of lawlessness that
makes disregard for the law the starting point for political discussions,
not the ending point. That's why Bush wants to rally popular support for
domestic spying; he knows that a majority of Americans may actually support
the practice, which after all is the sort of vindication for his lawlessness
that he seeks.

After Bush, Might will become Right in America. Laws will be bent to reflect
the new ethos of lawlessness.

What can be done? The bureaucracy that administers the law must act in its
own self-interest. Congress must appoint a special prosecutor to investigate
potential crimes committed by the president, his staff and the staff of the
National Security Agency, which is carrying out the illegal spying. Just as
Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's chief aide, was indicted for his role in the
outing of a CIA agent, Bush's aides and NSA staffers could well be indicted
for their roles in this disheartening scandal.

For people who want to halt the rising tide of lawlessness in the corridors
of political power, indictments and prosecutions are cold comfort. But at
least the unfolding of the legal process, however tedious and unsatisfying,
will send a different message to the American people and the world. 

G. Pascal Zachary is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar
<http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-0262740222-2L>  Bush, Engineer of the
American Century, a biography of FDR's science adviser and architect of the
Manhattan Project. 

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