What
You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter
How the U.S. Army Kills Its Own Soldiers
A horrifying,
exclusive report from JoAnn Wypijewski on the grim secrets of
Fort Sill, Oklahoma. How a sadistic drill sergeant tortured basic
trainees, amid brutal indifference that led to the death on March
19,2006,of 21-year-old PFC Matthew Scarano. Dead Movement Marching? Cockburn and St Clair
assess the failures of the national antiwar groups, even as popular
opposition to the war tops 60 per cent. Stalin or Confucius? Chris Reed on
the Secrets of the Garden of Bliss, otherwise known as North
Korea.CounterPunch
Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember,
we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition
of CounterPunch. Please
support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter,
which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or
by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
"Wartime is not a time to weaken the
commander in chief," says paramount partisan hack Sen. Orrin
Hatch (R-UT), responding to the testimony of former Nixon White
House Counsel John Dean at Friday's Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing on Sen. Russ Feingold's Bush censure motion.
A good question for the senator
might be this: if the war in question is the so-called "War
on Terror," when exactly might we consider it an appropriate
time for "weakening" the commander in chief?
President Bush has used this
faux "war" as justification for all manner of power
grabs, from the invasion of a country to the ignoring of acts
Congress, to the violation of court orders to the violation of
federal laws, to the termination of citizenship rights. By Bush's--and
Hatch's--reasoning, the president cum commander in chief could
order the secret arrest, detention, torture and execution of
any one of us, could cancel national elections, could indeed,
declare martial law and have done with the Constitution altogether.
And since this "war"
will never end--terrorism having been with us for as far back
as you want to look, and likely to be with us forever--Hatch's
argument is a prescription for dictatorship.
It's amazing to watch how these
self-described conservatives are trashing their own philosophy
of limited government and traditional values.
Just imagine what the Founding
Fathers would have had to say about this idea of presidential
omnipotence and infallibility.
Actually, we don't have to
imagine what they'd say. As I note in my new book The Case for
Impeachment (see above right), they pretty much said
it all.
Here's Jefferson, on the idea
of a president violating the rights of citizens. In a letter
to a friend, Isaac Tiffany, he wrote in 1819: "Law is often
but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right
of an individual."
His political and philosophical
rival, Alexander Hamilton, had this to say about the idea of
scrapping habeas corpus and clapping people in jail without charges
and the right to a public trial: "To bereave a man of life
or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or
trial would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as
must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole
nation; but confinement of the person by secretly hurrying him
to gaol, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a
less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous
engine of arbitrary government."
More to the point in the current
censure debate, James Madison said: "The accumulation of
all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same
hands, whether or one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary,
self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very
definition of tyranny."
And of course, there is old
Ben Franklin, now celebrating his 300th birthday, who said simply:
"Those who would give up essential liberties to obtain a
little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security."
Orrin Hatch's words will not
go down in history, it's safe to say, but it's worth noting what
prompted them. He was responding to the testimony of John Dean,
a man whose last occasion to testify before Congress was in 1974,
during the Senate Watergate hearings, when he spilled the beans
about president Nixon's constitutional crimes. And he was responding
to comments made by the censure motion's author, Sen. Feingold
(D-WI).
Dean told the Judiciary Committee
that Bush's warrantless NSA spying authorization was worse than
anything Nixon had done, and he added, "Had the Senate or
House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the
tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented."
For his part, Feingold said,
"If we in the Congress don't stand up for ourselves and
the American people, we become complicit in the lawbreaking."
My guess is that Dean's and
Feingold's words will resonate decades hence far more than the
words of the enabler from Utah.
But Feingold, who is contemplating
a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, might
have added that if the American people this November return to
Congress the very Republican partisan hacks and Democratic cowards
who have allowed this president to become the Willie Sutton of
constitutional violators, We the People will be complicit in
Bush's crimes.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.