By Al Gore
Former Vice President of the United States
When we Americans first began,our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitterexperience with King George III that the most serious threat todemocracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the handsof an Executive, whether he be a King or a president.Our ingrained Americandistrust of concentrated power has very little to do with thecharacter or persona of the individual who wields that power. It isthe power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed andcarefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival offreedom. In addition, our founders taughtus that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy becauseunder the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of thosewho govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promisesstrength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear.
It is an extraordinary blessing to live in anation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty andsafeguard self-governance and free communication. But if GeorgeWashington could see the current state of his generation's handiworkand assess the quality of our generation's stewardship at thebeginning of this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he wouldthink about the proposition that our current president claims theunilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizensindefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or informtheir families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity ofeven charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, accordingto our new president is that he--the president--label any citizen an"unlawful enemy combatant," and that will be sufficient to justifytaking away that citizen's liberty--even for the rest of his life, ifthe president so chooses. And there is no appeal.
What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curiousand discredited argument from our Justice Department that thepresident may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture ofprisoners - and that any law or treaty, which attempts to constrainhis treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation ofthe constitution our founders put together.
What would Benjamin Franklin think of PresidentBush's assertion that he has the inherent power--even without adeclaration of war by the Congress--to launch an invasion of anynation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes,even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the UnitedStates.
How long would it take James Madison to dispose ofour current President's recent claim, in Department of Justice legalopinions, that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long ashe is acting in his role as Commander in Chief.
I think it is safe to say that our founders wouldbe genuinely concerned about these recent developments in Americandemocracy and that they would feel that we are now facing a clear andpresent danger that has the potential to threaten the future of theAmerican experiment.
Shouldn't we be equally concerned? And shouldn'twe ask ourselves how we have come to this point?
Even though we are now attuned to orange alertsand the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders would almostcertainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of theAmerica we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies havealways faced whenever they have appeared in history--a challengerooted in the inherent difficulty of self governance and thevulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again,specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans willacquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power inthe hands of one person.
Having painstakingly created the intricate designof America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths andweaknesses, and during their debates they not only identified theaccumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-termthreat which they considered to be the most serious, but they alsoworried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat mightbecome particularly potent - that is, when war transformed America'spresident into our commander in chief, they worried that his suddenlyincreased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutionalboundaries and upset the delicate checks and balances they deemed socrucial to the maintenance of liberty.
That is precisely why they took extra care toparse the war powers in the constitution, assigning the conduct ofwar and command of the troops to the president, but retaining for theCongress the crucial power of deciding whether or not, and when, ournation might decide to go war.
Indeed, this limitation on the power of theexecutive to make war was seen as crucially important. James Madisonwrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, "The constitution supposes,what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the Executiveis the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war inthe legislature."
In more recent decades, the emergence of newweapons that virtually eliminate the period of time between thedecision to go to war and the waging of war have naturally led to areconsideration of the exact nature of the executive's war-makingpower. But the practicalities of modern warfare which necessarilyincrease the war powers of the President at the expense of Congressdo not render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that themaking of war by the president--when added to his otherpowers--carries with it the potential for unbalancing the carefuldesign of our constitution, and in the process, threatening ourliberty.
They were greatly influenced--far more than we canimagine--by a careful reading of the history and human dramassurrounding the democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman republic.They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome whenCaesar crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Senate's longprohibition against a returning general entering the city while stillin command of military forces. Though the Senate lingered in form andwas humored for decades, when Caesar impoliticly combined hismilitary commander role with his chief executive role, theSenate--and with it the Republic--withered away. And then for allintents and purposes, the great dream of democracy disappeared fromthe face of the Earth for seventeen centuries, until its rebirth inour land.
Symbolically, President Bush has been attemptingto conflate his commander-in-chief role and his head of governmentrole to maximize the power people are eager to give those who promiseto defend them against active threats. But as he does so, we arewitnessing some serious erosion of the checks and balances that havealways maintained a healthy democracy in America.
In Justice Jackson's famous concurring opinion inthe Youngstown Steel case in the 1950's, the single most importantSupreme Court case on the subject of what powers are inherent to thecommander in chief in a time of war, he wrote, "The example of suchunlimited executive power that must have most impressed theforefathers was the prerogative exercised by George III, and thedescription of its evils in the declaration of independence leads meto doubt that they created their new Executive in their image...andif we seek instruction from our own times, we can match it only fromthe Executive governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian."
I am convinced that our founders would counsel ustoday that the greatest challenge facing our republic is notterrorism but how we react to terrorism, and not war, but how wemanage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. Iam also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is ingrave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commanderin chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, thelegislative and the judicial branches of government. Our currentpresident has gone to war and has come back into "the city" anddeclared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which hesays justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways thatincrease his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts,and every individual citizen.
We must surrender some of our traditional Americanfreedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient power toprotect us against those who would do us harm. Public fear remains atan unusually high level almost three years after we were attacked onSeptember 11th, 2001. In response to those devastating attacks, thepresident properly assumed his role as commander in chief anddirected a military invasion of the land in which our attackers builttheir training camps, were harbored and planned their assault. Butjust as the tide of battle was shifting decisively in our favor, thecommander in chief made a controversial decision to divert a majorportion of our army to invade another country that, according to thebest evidence compiled in a new, exhaustive, bi-partisan study, posedno imminent threat to us and had nothing to do with the attackagainst us.
As the main body of our troops were redeployed forthe new invasion, those who organized the attacks against us escapedand many of them are still at large. Indeed, their overall numbersseem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the countrythat did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in theirpart of the world as a gross injustice, and the way in which we haveconducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the UnitedStates in those lands and, according to several studies, hasstimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group thatattacked us and still wishes us harm.
A little over a year ago, when we launched the waragainst this second country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave ourpeople the clear impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to theterrorist group that attacked us, al Qaeda, and not only provided ageographic base for them but was also close to providing them weaponsof mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. But now the extensiveindependent investigation by the bipartisan commission formed tostudy the 9/11 attacks has just reported that there was no meaningfulrelationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind. And, of course,over the course of this past year we had previously found out thatthere were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So now, thePresident and the Vice President are arguing with this commission,and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they areright, and that there actually was a working co-operation betweenIraq and al Qaeda.
The problem for the President is that he doesn'thave any credible evidence to support his claim, and yet, in spite ofthat, he persists in making that claim vigorously. So I would like topause for a moment to address the curious question of why PresidentBush continues to make this claim that most people know is wrong. AndI think it's particularly important because it is closely connectedto the questions of constitutional power with which I began thisspeech, and will profoundly affect how that power is distributedamong our three branches of government.
To begin with, our founders wouldn't be the leastbit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell usabout why it's so important particularly for President Bush to keepthe American people from discovering that what he told them about thelinkage between Iraq and al Qaeda isn't true. Among these Americanswho still believe there is a linkage, there remains very strongsupport for the President's decision to invade Iraq. But among thosewho accept the commission's detailed finding that there is noconnection, support for the war in Iraq dries up pretty quickly.
And that's understandable, because if Iraq hadnothing to do with the attack or the organization that attacked us,then that means the President took us to war when he didn't have to.Almost nine hundred of our soldiers have been killed, and almost fivethousand have been wounded.
Thus, for all these reasons, President Bush andVice President Cheney have decided to fight to the rhetorical deathover whether or not there's a meaningful connection between Iraq andal Qaeda. They think that if they lose that argument and people seethe truth, then they'll not only lose support for the controversialdecision to go to war, but also lose some of the new power they'vepicked up from the Congress and the courts, and face harsh politicalconsequences at the hands of the American people. As a result,President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people bycontinuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between alQaeda and Saddam Hussein.
If he is not lying, if they genuinely believethat, that makes them unfit in battle with al Qaeda. If they believethese flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they toodishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.
But the truth is gradually emerging in spite ofthe President's determined dissembling. Listen, for example, to thiseditorial from the Financial Times: "There was nothing intrinsicallyabsurd about the WMD fears, or ignoble about the opposition toSaddam's tyranny--however late Washington developed this. Thepurported link between Baghdad and al Qaeda, by contrast, was neverbelieved by anyone who knows Iraq and the region. It was and isnonsense."
Of course the first rationale presented for thewar was to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turnedout not to exist. Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and theMiddle East from tyranny, but our troops were not greeted with thepromised flowers and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92% ofIraqis, while only 2% see them as liberators.
But right from the start, beginning very soonafter the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to startmentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in acynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public'smind. He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined mannerto create a false impression in the minds of the American people thatSaddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Usually he was pretty trickyin his exact wording. Indeed, Bush's consistent and careful artificeis itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling anartful and important lie -visibly circumnavigating the truth over andover again as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering thetruth. But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice PresidentCheney also sometimes departed from their tricky wording and resortedto statements were clearly outright falsehoods. In any case, by thetime he was done, public opinion polls showed that fully 70% of theAmerican people had gotten the message he wanted them to get, and hadbeen convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11attacks.
The myth that Iraq and al Qaeda were workingtogether was no accident--the President and Vice Presidentdeliberately ignored warnings before the war from internationalintelligence services, the CIA, and their own Pentagon that the claimwas false. Europe's top terrorism investigator said in 2002, "We havefound no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. If there weresuch links, we would have found them. But we have found no seriousconnections whatsoever." A classified October 2002 CIA report givento the White House directly undercut the Iraq-al Qaeda claim. Topofficials in the Pentagon told reporters in 2002 that the rhetoricbeing used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was "anexaggeration."
And at least some honest voices within thePresident's own party admitted as such. Senator Chuck Hagel, adecorated war hero who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, saidpoint blank, "Saddam is not in league with al Qaeda...I have not seenany intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with alQaeda."
But those voices did not stop the deliberatecampaign to mislead America. Over the course of a year, the Presidentand Vice President used carefully crafted language to scare Americansinto believing there was an imminent threat from an Iraq-armed alQaeda.
In the fall of 2002, the President told thecountry "You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam" and thatthe "true threat facing our country is an al Qaeda-type networktrained and armed by Saddam." At the same time, Vice President Cheneywas repeating his claim that "there is overwhelming evidence therewas a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government."
By the Spring, Secretary of State Powell was infront of the United Nations claiming a "sinister nexus between Iraqand the al-Qaeda terrorist network."
But after the invasion, no ties were found. InJune of 2003, the United Nations Security Council's al Qaedamonitoring agency told reporters his extensive investigation hadfound no evidence linking the Iraqi regime to al Qaeda. By August,three former Bush administration national security and intelligenceofficials admitted that the evidence used to make the Iraq-al Qaedaclaim was "tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusionof key intelligence agencies." And earlier this year, Knight-Riddernewspapers reported "Senior U.S. officials now say there never wasany evidence" of a connection.
So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued itsreport finding "no credible evidence" of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection,it should not have caught the White House off guard. Yet instead ofthe candor Americans need and deserve from their leaders, there havebeen more denials and more insistence without evidence. VicePresident Cheney insisted even this week that "there clearly was arelationship" and that there is "overwhelming evidence." Even moreshocking, Cheney offered this disgraceful question: "Was Iraqinvolved with al-Qaeda in the attack on 9/11? We don't know." He thenclaimed that he "probably" had more information than the commission,but has so far refused to provide anything to the commission otherthan more insults.
The President was even more brazen. He dismissedall questions about his statements by saying "The reason I keepinsisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam andal Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and alQaeda." He provided no evidence.
Friends of the administration tried mightily torehabilitate their cherished but shattered linkage. John Lehman, oneof the Republicans on the commission, offered what sounded like newevidence that a Saddam henchman had attended an Al Qaeda meeting. Butwithin hours, the commissions files yielded definitive evidence thatit was another man with a similar name--ironically capturing thenear-miss quality of Bush's entire symbolic argument.
They have such an overwhelming political interestin sustaining the belief in the minds of the American people thatHussein was in partnership with bin Laden that they dare not admitthe truth lest they look like complete fools for launching ourcountry into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation thatposed no immediate threat to us whatsoever. But the damage they havedone to our country is not limited to misallocation of militaryeconomic political resources. Whenever a chief executive spendsprodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies, he damagesthe fabric of democracy, and the belief in the fundamental integrityof our self-government.
That creates a need for control over the flood ofbad news, bad policies and bad decisions also explains their strikingattempts to control news coverage.
To take the most recent example, Vice PresidentCheney was clearly ready to do battle with the news media when hewent on CNBC earlier this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11Commission's conclusion that Iraq did not work with Al Qaeda. Helashed out at the New York Times for having the nerve to print aheadline saying the 9/11 commission "finds no Qaeda-Iraq Tie"--aclear statement of the obvious--and said there is no "fundamentalsplit here now between what the president said and what thecommission said." He tried to deny that he had personally beenresponsible for helping to create the false impression of linkagebetween Al Qaeda and Iraq.
Ironically, his interview ended up being fodderfor the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart played Cheney's outrightdenial that he had ever said that representatives of Al Qaeda andIraqi intelligence met in Prague. Then Stewart froze Cheney's imageand played the exact video clip in which Cheney had indeed directlyclaimed linkage between the two, catching him on videotape in a lie.At that point Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney's frozenimage on the television screen, "It's my duty to inform you that yourpants are on fire."
Dan Rather says that post-9/11 patriotism hasstifled journalists from asking government officials "the toughest ofthe tough questions." Rather went so far as to compare Administrationefforts to intimidate the press to "necklacing" in apartheid SouthAfrica, while acknowledging it as "an obscene comparison." "The fearis that you will be necklaced here (in the U.S.), you will have aflaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck," Ratherexplained. It was CBS, remember, that withheld the Abu Ghraibphotographs from the American people for two weeks at the request ofthe Bush Administration.
Donald Rumsfeld has said that criticism of theAdministration's policy "makes it complicated and more difficult" tofight the war. CNN's Christiane Amanpour said on CNBC last September,"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 certainextent my station, was intimidated by the Administration."
The Administration works closely with a network of"rapid response" digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reportersand their editors for "undermining support for our troops." PaulKrugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the firstjournalists to regularly expose the President's consistentdistortions of the facts. Krugman writes, "Let's not overlook therole of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of sayinganything negative of the President...you had to expect right-wingpundits and publications to do all they could to ruin yourreputation.
Bush and Cheney are spreading purposeful confusionwhile punishing reporters who stand in the way. It is understandablydifficult for reporters and journalistic institutions to resist thispressure, which, in the case of individual journalists, threatenstheir livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead toother forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, becausewithout a press able to report "without fear or favor" our democracywill disappear.
Recently, the media has engaged in some healthyself-criticism of the way it allowed the White House to mislead thepublic into war under false pretenses. We are dependent on the media,especially the broadcast media, to never let this happen again. Wemust help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake, or we riskother wrong-headed decisions based upon false and misleadingimpressions.
We are left with an unprecedented, high-intensityconflict every single day between the ideological illusions uponwhich this administration's policies have been based and the realityof the world in which the American people live theirlives.
When you boil it all down to precisely what wentwrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it is actually fairly simple: headopted an ideologically driven view of Iraq that was tragically atodds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is in one way oranother the result of a spectacular and violent clash between thebundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and theall-too-painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomatsand taxpayers have encountered. Of course, there have been severalother collisions between President Bush's ideology and America'sreality. To take the most prominent example, the transformation of a$5 trillion surplus into a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way justas spectacular a miscalculation as the Iraq war.
But there has been no more bizarre or troublingmanifestation of how seriously off track this President's policieshave taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation'sconscience during the last month. First came the extremely disturbingpictures that document strange forms of physical and sexualabuse--and even torture and murder--by some of our soldiers againstpeople they captured as prisoners in Iraq. And then, the second shockcame just last week, with strange and perverted legal memoranda frominside the administration, which actually sought to justify tortureand to somehow provide a legal rationale for bizarre and sadisticactivities conducted in the name of the American people, which,according to any reasonable person, would be recognized as warcrimes. In making their analysis, the administration lawyersconcluded that the President, whenever he is acting in his role ascommander in chief, is above and immune from the "rule of law." Atleast we don't have to guess what our founders would have to sayabout this bizarre and un-American theory.
By the middle of this week, the uproar caused bythe disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administrationto claim they were throwing the memo out and it was, "irrelevant andoverbroad." But no one in the administration has said that thereasoning was wrong. And in fact, a DOJ spokesman says they stand bythe tortured definition of torture. In addition the broad analysisregarding the commander-in-chief powers has not been disavowed. Andthe view of the memo--that it was within commander-in-chief power toorder any interrogation techniques necessary to extractinformation--most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led tothe atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. We alsoknow that President Bush rewarded the principle author of this legalmonstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. President Bush,meanwhile, continues to place the blame for the horrific consequencesof his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporalsand sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for theiractions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policieswhich set up the Bush Gulag and led to America's strategiccatastrophe in Iraq.
I call on the administration to disclose all itsinterrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraqand Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detentioncenters outside the U.S., as well as all the analyses related to theadoption of those policies.
The Bush administration's objective ofestablishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to thehubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventuremarked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumptionafter another. But the people who paid the price have been the U.S.soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison. The top-heavyfocus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world isexactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the presidentto be completely dominant in the constitutional system. Our foundersunderstood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of hisaphorism that power corrupts and absolutely power corruptsabsolutely. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power.Ironically, all of their didactic messages about how democraciesdon't invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The pursuitof dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the Bushadministration to ignore the United nations, do serious damage to ourmost alliances in the world, violate international law and risk thehatred of the rest of the world. The seductive exercise of unilateralpower has led this president to interpret his powers under theconstitution in a way that would have been the worst nightmare of ourframers.
And the kind of unilateral power he imagines isfools gold in any case. Just as its pursuit in Mesopotamia has led totragic consequences for our soldiers, the Iraqi people, ouralliances, everything we think is important, in the same way thepursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that weakens theCongress, courts and civil society is not good for either thepresidency or the rest of the nation.
If the congress becomes an enfeebled enabler tothe executive, and the courts become known for political calculationsin their decisions, then the country suffers. The kinds of unnatural,undemocratic activities in which this administration has engaged, inorder to aggrandize power, have included censorship of scientificreports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, silencing dissent, andignoring intelligence. Although there have been other efforts byother presidents to encroach on the legitimate prerogatives ofcongress and courts, there has never been this kind of systematicabuse of the truth and institutionalization of dishonesty as aroutine part of the policy process.
Two hundred and twenty years ago, John Adamswrote, in describing one of America's most basic founding principles,"The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicialpowers, or either of them...to the end it may be a government of lawsand not of men."
The last time we had a president who had the ideathat he was above the law was when Richard Nixon told an interviewer,"When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal... Ifthe president, for example approves something, approves an actionbecause of national security, or, in this case, because of a threatto internal peace and order, of significant order, then thepresident's decision in this instance is one that enables those whocarry it out to carry it out without violating the law."
Fortunately for our country, Nixon was forced toresign as President before he could implement his outlandishinterpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance ofthe Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis.
The two top Justice Department officials underPresident Nixon, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turnedout to be men of great integrity, and even though they were loyalRepublicans, they were more loyal to the constitution and resigned onprinciple rather than implement what they saw as abuses of power byNixon. Then Congress, also on a bipartisan basis, bravely resistedNixon's abuse of power and launched impeachment proceedings.
In some ways, our current President is actuallyclaiming significantly more extra-constitutional power,vis-à-vis Congress and the courts, than Nixon did. Forexample, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizensindefinitely without charging them with a crime and without lettingthe see a lawyer or notify their families. And this time, theattorney general, John Ashcroft, is hardly the kind of man who wouldresign on principle to impede an abuse of power. In fact, wheneverthere is an opportunity to abuse power in this administration,Ashcroft seems to be leading the charge. And it is Ashcroft whopicked the staff lawyers at Justice responsible for the embarrassingmemos justifying and enabling torture.
Moreover, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rdCongress that saved the country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses,the current Congress has virtually abdicated its constitutional roleto 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 theyvote for and what they don't vote for. The Republican leaders of theHouse and Senate have even started blocking Democrats from attendingconference committee meetings, where legislation takes its finalform, and instead, they let the President's staff come to themeetings and write key parts of the laws for them. (Come to think ofit, the decline and lack of independence shown by this Congress wouldshock our founders more than anything else, because they believedthat the power of the Congress was the most important check andbalance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by theExecutive branch.)
This administration has not been content just toreduce the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged inunprecedented secrecy, denying the American people access to crucialinformation with which they might hold government officialsaccountable for their actions, and a systematic effort to manipulateand intimidate the media into presenting a more favorable image ofthe Administration to the American people.
Listen to what U.S. News and World Report has tosay about their secrecy: "The Bush administration has quietly butefficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many criticaloperations of the federal government--cloaking its own affairs fromscrutiny and removing from the public domain important information onhealth, 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?
More than 6000 documents have been removed by theBush Administration from governmental Web sites. To cite only oneexample, a document on the EPA Web site giving citizens crucialinformation on how to identify chemical hazards to their families.Some have speculated that the principle threat to the Bushadministration is a threat by the chemical hazards if the informationremains available to American citizens.
To head off complaints from our nation's Governorsover how much they receive under federal programs, the BushAdministration simply stopped printing the primary state budgetreport.
To muddy the clear consensus of the scientificcommunity on global warming, the White House directed major changesand deletions to an EPA report that were so egregious that the agencysaid it was too embarrassed to use the language.
They've kept hidden from view Cheney'sultra-secret energy task force. They have fought a pitched battle inthe courts for more than three years to continue denying the Americanpeople the ability to know which special interests and lobbyistsadvised with Vice President Cheney on the design of the newlaws.
And when mass layoffs became too embarrassing theysimply stopped publishing the regular layoff report that economistsand others have been receiving for decades. For this administration,the truth hurts, when the truth is available to the American people.They find bliss in the ignorance of the people. What are they hiding,and why are they hiding it?
In the end, for this administration, it is allabout power. This lie about the invented connection between al Qaedaand Iraq was and is the key to justifying the current ongoingConstitutional power grab by the President. So long as their bigflamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public's mind,President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself thepower to make war on his whim. He will be seen as justified in actingto selectively suspend civil liberties--again on his personaldiscretion--and he will continue to intimidate the press and therebydistort the political reality experienced by the American peopleduring his bid for re-election.
War is lawful violence, but even in its midst weacknowledge the need for rules. We know that in our wars there havebeen descents from these standards, often the result of spontaneousanger arising out of the passion of battle. But we have never before,to my knowledge, had a situation in which the framework for this kindof violence has been created by the President, nor have we had asituation where these things were mandated by directives signed bythe Secretary of Defense, as it is alleged, and supported by theNational Security Advisor.
Always before, we could look to the ChiefExecutive as the point from which redress would come and law beupheld. That was one of the great prides of our country: humaneleadership, faithful to the law. What we have now, however, is theresult of decisions taken by a President and an administration forwhom the best law is NO law, so long as law threatens to constraintheir political will. And where the constraints of law cannot beprevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened byevasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction, and by failureto enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the law.
In these circumstances, we need investigation ofthe facts under oath, and in the face of penalties for evasion andperjury. We need investigation by an aroused congress whosebipartisan members know they stand before the judgment of history. Wecannot depend up on a debased department of Justice given over to thehands of zealots. "Congressional oversight" and "special prosecution"are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a nation is tobe restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves bybringing the law to bear against their pawns: it is by bringing thelaw to bear against the mighty themselves. Our dignity and honor as anation never came from our perfection as a society or as a people: itcame from the belief that in the end, this was a country which wouldpursue justice as the compass pursues the pole: that although wemight deviate, we would return and find our path. This is what wemust now do.
Speech given at the Georgetown University
June 24, 2004
Copyright 2004 West-Art, Prometheus 92/2004