by Alan Colmes
Information is power, and by controlling the flow of information available about the doings of former presidents, Bush 43 was grabbing executive branch power. And by setting a precedent about what could or could not be revealed about former presidents, he was trying to control what could eventually be withheld about his days holding the reins.
By the way, I wonder which previous president Bush 43 was looking to protect. Someone with a similar name, maybe? And while we're at it, Bush 43 sent his gubernatorial papers to his father's library rather than to the archives at Texas A&M where they were slated to go; this way, they would be on federal, rather than state, property, and not subject to Texas's more open freedom of information laws. It turns out that Texas attorney general John Cornyn ruled these papers would be subject to the state laws anyway.
A penchant for secrecy is not inconsistent with executive branch politics, but the Bush 43 administration has taken it to new heights. The media made much of Bill Clinton's attempt to claim executive privilege when he didn't want his aides to testify before Congress in the Monica Lewinsky case. When Dick Cheney invoked executive privilege with regard to his meeting with Enron officials, I didn't hear a peep out of those who had been furious with Clinton for trying to keep his counsel private. I guess it's more fun knowing about a president's sex life than which officials a vice president meets with to help determine policy.
Unlike Clinton, Cheney was not the president (contrary to what many may have thought). And the people to whom he spoke were not advisers or cabinet members; they were corporate people outside of government. Bill Clinton wanted to keep personal conversations about a personal relationship—having nothing to do with running the country—personal. Dick Cheney wanted to keep secret conversations with big donors that helped to steer policies that affected every American. But the supposed "liberal media" only made a big deal about it when Clinton invoked executive privilege.
When the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, sued to get access to information about Cheney's secret meeting with energy lobbyists, Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court
ruled for Cheney that no injury was caused to the GAO by keeping the information private. But don't the American people have a right to know with whom its elected officials meet to create policy? And if those officials are campaign contributors, isn't that a significant factor in policy creation?
Adam Clymer had a featured piece in the New York Times on January 3, 2003, about the lack of government openness in the Bush 43 administration. You remember Adam Clymer. This is the man to whom then candidate Bush referred as a "major league" orifice at a Labor Day event in Illinois in 2000. That's when Cheney earned the nickname, "Big Time." In the twelve months ending on September 30, 2001, Clymer points out, 18 percent more documents were classified than in the previous year, and three new agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Health and Human Services—were given permission to classify documents as "secret."
A tour of the subterranean landscape wouldn't be complete without a look at the Carlyle Group. This relatively privately held organization manages billions of dollars in assets, with huge investments in defense companies that do business with the government. Reagan's defense secretary, Frank Carlucci, former secretary of state James Baker, and former president George Bush 41 all advise Carlyle. The former president gives speeches around the globe on their behalf. Other investors have included a family named bin Laden. Heavy defense spending is good for business. When the March 5, 2001, New York Times featured Bush 41 on its front page posing next to next to Saudi King Fahd on a Carlyle-sponsored trip, Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, was quoted saying, "George Bush is getting money from private interests that have business before the government, while his son is president. And, in a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments. The average American doesn't know that. To me, that's a jaw-dropper." Lewis and his Center for Public Integrity are equally scathing to Democrats who fall off the ethics wagon, and his conclusions aren't tainted by partisanship. The Carlyle connection has been underreported. It's a shame that the complexity of these interconnected relationships make our eyes glaze over. The sting of potential for duplicity should pry them wide open.
Should War Diminish Justice?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it matter whether it is felled illegally? It should. As signatories to the Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Convention of 1907, we pledge to abide by certain humanitarian principles. In spite of our claims to be a country that has a high moral imperative, we too often seek revenge over justice. This has especially been true since September 11, 2001.
Seymour Hersh had a stunning piece in the December 23, 2002, issue of the New Yorker called "The Bush Administration's New Strategy in the War on Terrorism." It addressed the U.S. policy of denying judicial recourse to individuals we believe to be terrorists. Hersh asked Rummy's office about a secret directive issued on July 22, 2002, that detailed how to approach alleged terrorists. The directive said, in part, "The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise." Hersh was pointed toward a December 3 press briefing during which the defense secretary was asked about the use of the Predator reconnaissance plane "to assassinate or to kill an Al Qaeda." Rumsfeld replied by saying, "They are not trained to do the word you used [assassinate] which I won't even repeat. That is not what they're trained to do. They are trained to serve the country and to contribute to peace and stability in the world."
But Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, an al Qaeda leader, had been driven with five other men to a remote desert area in Yemen where they were fired upon by a Predator, leaving all the men dead. Even when it was possible to find suspected al Qaeda members and bring them to justice, the United States had a secret policy to have them murdered far away from the prying eyes of civilization. The United States, presenting itself to the world as a beacon of morality, was nonetheless practicing selective assassination, contrary to our country's stated policy. Hersh quoted a former top-level intelligence officer, "They want to turn these guys into assassins. They want to go on rumors—not facts—and go for political effect, and that's what the Special Forces Command is really afraid of. Rummy is saying that politics is bigger than war, and we need to take guys out for political effect: 'You have to kill Goebbels to get to Hitler'."
Essentially, "The 'War' on Terror" became a pretext for war on the American criminal justice system. Detainees were held without being charged with offenses and denied access to attorneys, and the Bush 43 administration invented a system of "justice" never before seen in this country. On November 14, 2001, the Washington Post offered these chilling words about self-declared presidential powers: "President Bush declared an 'extraordinary emergency' yesterday that empowers him to order military trials for suspected international terrorists and their collaborators, bypassing the American criminal justice system, its rules of evidence and its constitutional guarantees."
Similarly chilling, and eerily consistent, was Attorney General Ashcroft's statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee on December 6, 2001, which he directed to critics of the Justice Department's handling of "The 'War' on Terror": ". . . to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."
Did John Ashcroft forget a seminal statement of one of our founding fathers? As Ben Franklin said to the Pennsylvania state legislature in 1755, "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
In one area, however, Ashcroft was a staunch defender of rights: gun rights. At that same December 6 Senate Judiciary hearing, Ashcroft stated that gun data from the National
Instant Criminal Background Check System could not be shared with the FBI and other agencies looking into terrorism. "I don't want to hear two messages from this committee . . . that you want me to enforce some laws and not other laws ... or respect some rights and not other rights," Ashcroft declared. What happened to that "extraordinary emergency" declared less than a month earlier? Suddenly, here was Ashcroft talking about "rights." Senator John McCain, not exactly an NRA enemy, came out in favor of eliminating this loophole, and said that as this stood, "suspected terrorists were able to acquire guns, hide their immigrant status, and shield their criminal records." But thanks to the powerful NRA lobby, gun shows remain open territory for anyone wanting a nice, warm gun.
For many conservatives, gun rights clearly trump gay rights in righting "The 'War' on Terror." In this fight, if you have special skills you're an asset to your country. Unless you're gay. In November of 2002, right after the Republicans ensured their hold on all branches of government, nine army linguists were dismissed for the offense of being gay. Six of these language experts were Arabic experts. Bear in mind that we had and have a critical shortage of personnel fluent in Arabic. On November 15, 2002, the Associated Press said: " 'We face a drastic shortage of linguists, and the direct impact of Arabic speakers is a particular problem,' said Donald R. Hamilton, who documented the need for more linguists in a report to Congress as part of the National Commission on Terrorism." And USA Today reported shortly after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks how the 1993 attacks there might have been prevented: "In 1993, after the first World Trade Center bombing, the FBI learned that it had evidence of the plot before the attack but that the vital documents had never been translated from Arabic."
So let me get this straight (no pun intended). You have a unique specialty that few others possess and your area of expertise can help us fight "The 'War' on Terror." However, because the government doesn't like your choice of sleeping partner(s), this great, inclusive country will refuse your services.
"Sorry, Mr. Michelangelo, we'd love to hang that beautiful piece of art in the Sistine Chapel, but we can't because you're gay." Margaret Mead did some wonderful work in Samoa, but sorry, Maggie, your groundbreaking anthropological finds are meaningless. You're a lesbian. And tell Will Shakespeare that we'd love to put his play on at the next meeting of the Garden Club, but his lifestyle was, well, you know a little "different." And while we're at it, let's go through those names on the wall at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Let's make sure that none of those names was ever sexually linked with another name of the same gender.
According to the administration, other rights are similarly fungible in arbitrary ways. Jose Padilla, a onetime Chicago street
thug, was arrested in May 2002 for allegedly hatching a plot to set off radioactive bombs. He was labeled an "enemy combatant," which, under the Bush/Ashcroft justice system, entitled him to sit indefinitely in a military brig with no charges cited against him and no access to counsel. From the term "enemy combatant" you wouldn't know that Padilla was actually an American citizen. I wonder if the American public would have been more outraged about this if, instead of "Jose Padilla," his name had been "Bucky Smith." Defenders of this egregious misreading of the Constitution cite a 1942 move by FDR who, they claim, applied similar standards of justice; but those actions were taken against German saboteurs who arrived here by submarine after war had already been declared against Germany. Not quite the same thing. And FDR gave them a speedy trial, something the Bush 43 administration did not intend to give Padilla.
The injustice of Jose Padilla's plight was underscored by Judge Jack Coughenour. "Mr. Padilla is an American citizen," Coughenour said. "He is before a military tribunal. This is unprecedented." Coughenour, by the way, is a U.S. district judge in Seattle who owes his job to Ronald Reagan, lest you think he's some wild-eyed liberal appointee.
Here we have another example of an executive branch power grab: our president said he would decide which defendants would be tried by military tribunals, while our secretary of defense would appoint panels and sets rules and procedures with no judicial review. There is a little problem here called the United States Constitution. We're supposed to have a separation of powers that does not imbue the executive branch with totalitarian control.
If the Padilla case is any guide, we risk having an executive branch that interprets rulings and laws as it sees fit, without regard to the constitutional rights of American citizens. On January 8, 2003, a three-judge panel from the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, agreed, in an unprecedented decision, that our government has the right to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely if they participate in foreign battles or if they take part in terrorist activity against U.S. interests. But this ruling did not include actions that take place on U.S. soil. This means our own citizens have more to fear from our own government if they're outside the United States. This was the case of Yasar Esam Hamdi, twenty-two-year-old native of Louisiana, who was arrested in Afghanistan in November 2001, accused of fighting with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Last I heard, the American justice system exists to protect all Americans, regardless of where they are in the world. Jose Padilla was also accused of conspiring with al Qaeda, but he was arrested at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, not in the wilds of Afghanistan. Both Padilla and Hamdi are American citizens and, as such, should be subject to the American system of justice or declared prisoners of war, in which case they'd be covered by the Geneva Convention.
The Geneva Convention gives protections to those in custody such as the right to choose their own lawyers, protections the Bush 43 administration has allowed the attorney general the right to remove. The Convention also guaranteed the right to trials in independent courts not subject to the whims of a president and the right to appeal unanimous verdicts. Conservatives love to cite "the rule of law." But how about applying it consistently?
Amazingly, even military justice is less severe than what this administration wanted to do. According to military law, defendants have a right to review cases against them, death sentences have to be unanimous, and they can file appeals to higher military courts and the Supreme Court.
Even Nazi murderers were given a trial at Nuremberg because of a bold decision by President Harry Truman: "Undiscriminating executions or punishments," he said, "without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would not fit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride."
In California, immigrants from Iran and other Middle Eastern countries were asked to register with the state by December 16, 2002, and some of those who came forward were detained and mistreated. On December 19, the Los Angeles Times told of hundreds of detainees who had been living, working, and paying taxes in America who were handcuffed, hosed down with cold water, and forced to sleep on concrete floors. They were denied access to community lawyers who wanted to help them. Men with no known criminal history were shackled and kept in freezing conditions. The INS refused to make the number of arrests public. In fact, it was the INS that was responsible for many of these immigrants not having their paperwork in order because of that agency's inability to process applications in a timely manner. If it had been Americans abroad who'd been treated this way, you'd hope the State Department would use strong measures to protect them. But these citizens of other countries, motivated to begin life anew in a strange land, must have wondered what it was they had bargained for.
Constitutional rights, it should be noted, apply not only to "citizens" but to "persons." This shows that the humanity of our forefathers was not limited to only Americans.
The Patriot Act was another illicit exercise in toying with our rights. Nat Hentoff, one of the leading beacon-carriers for our civil liberties, wrote in the Washington Times about this heinous piece of legislation:
With a warrant, FBI agents may now enter homes and offices of citizens and noncitizens when they're not there. The agents may look around, examine what's on a computer's hard drive and take other re
cords of interest to them. These surreptitious visits are not limited to investigations of terrorism, but can also be used in regular criminal investigations. . . . While in the office or home, the FBI can plant a "Magic Lantern" in your computer. It's also called the "sniffer keystroke logger." The device creates a record of every time you press a key on the computer.
In a six-month period that ended July 15, 2003, an internal Justice Department report said that the inspector general's office had received thirty-four credible complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations by department employees, directly related to enforcement of the Patriot Act. These accusations ranged from verbal abuse of immigrants to allegations that Muslims and Arabs in federal detention centers had been beaten. Among the substantiated charges were those against a prison doctor who, as the New York Times reported on July 21, 2003, told an inmate he was examining that "if I was in charge, I would execute every one of you" because of "the crimes you all did."
And from the friendly folks who brought you the Patriot Act comes the Patriot Act II. They've yet to snooker us into this one that would, among other things, set up a national DNA database and give the attorney general the power to strip citizenship from individuals who are members of groups the government doesn't like.
One big government initiative, as in sync for a freedom-loving nation as David Duke at a Kwanzaa celebration (and thankfully, it disappeared as fast as he would, were he ever to find himself in such a situation), is the TIPS Program. TIPS stands for the "Terrorism Information and Prevention System." What it should stand for is "Tattletales In Private Spying." This was a program whereby the government was going to recruit approximately one in twenty-four citizens to spy on fellow citizens. If the cable guy saw a magazine on your coffee table he didn't like, he would report it to the government. Okay, maybe the cable guy isn't such a threat, since he rarely shows up. But let's say your mail carrier had been recruited for this program and noticed you were getting mailings in what she thought were suspicious brown wrappers. In the name of "national security" she might think she was doing her patriotic duty by turning you in to the "authorities."
