Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  The latest innovation is an experimental microsatellite, XSS-11, that deploys tiny probes to inspect or service spacecraft in distress, according to the carefully worded air force publicity statement. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on April 11, 2005. The plan is for the XSS-11 to remain in space for twelve to eighteen months and inspect six or seven spent rocket stages and dead U.S. satellites. Some space watchers have speculated that the XSS-11 is actually testing antisatellite concepts to disable enemy craft.90

  Jeffrey Lewis of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs reports on two joint British-Chinese experimental microsatellites of fifty kilograms each, whose controllers were able to maneuver within nine meters of a Chinese target satellite. Lewis concludes, “If the Chinese were to conduct a proximity maneuver near a U.S. satellite, the reaction [in the Pentagon] would be apoplectic.”91 Nonetheless, Theresa Hitchens warns, “There will be a price to pay the first time a U.S. anti-satellite weapon shoots down an innocent Chinese communications satellite because a crucial widget on a U.S. satellite conked out due to faulty manufacturing processes.”92

  These problems will only get worse. In order to protect our nation’s and others’ space assets from the air force’s hubris and incompetence, we must relearn how to cooperate with our fellow inhabitants of the planet and take the lead in crafting international agreements on the rules of the road in space, particularly treaties to control weapons in space. We need to agree, for example, that a country’s technical means of observing and verifying what other nations are doing are never appropriate targets of anti-satellite or other kinds of space weapons. We should outlaw all weapons that are designed to destroy other nations’ reconnaissance and surveillance satellites. This was the principle contained in the old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which we foolishly abandoned in accordance with the recommendations of the 2001 Rumsfeld space commission. The reason is that if one side blinds another, the country that is blinded is almost compelled to conclude that it is being set up for an attack and should therefore use everything it’s got, including nuclear weapons, in retaliation.

  The United States has greatly damaged the integrity of international law by refusing to be constrained by its norms, even though no nation needs international law more than we do. International law offers guidelines to acceptable behavior for all nations, rich and poor, and, since violations of the guidelines invite retaliation, it provides deterrence against illegal behavior. The current cluttering of key orbits with debris, for example, reflects a lack of cooperation and our own shortsighted imperialist arrogance. Without any rules on space debris, a poor state with few technical capabilities could decide to blind the United States by the active deployment of space garbage. Such a genuinely “rogue state” could, for instance, detonate a nuclear weapon in space, which is banned by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty but is actively discussed in every military headquarters around the world, particularly since the United States pays so little attention to treaty obligations. Such a detonation would not kill anyone and would not create a worldwide “nuclear winter,” but its electromagnetic pulse would instantly fry the electronics in all orbiting satellites. Even more low-tech, a desperate state could simply send up a few rocket loads of gravel into low Earth orbit.93 The resulting collisions would instantly level the global playing field: no more American smart bombs, no more electronic battlefields, no more global positioning systems, no more secure communications among troops in battle and commanders in rear areas. Instead of obtaining multilateral agreements that would ban such actions, the United States continues to waste its money building space-based antisatellite weapons.

  Space weapons are not simply a strategic problem. They are both the cause and the result of several pathological developments in our political and economic system. The iron triangle of the air force, Congress, and the military-industrial complex, sanctified by the high-tech jobs it offers to American workers, is driving our country toward bankruptcy. For some, it is tempting to continue the lucrative practice of buying arcane space technologies that do not work—missile defenses, for example—simply because it keeps people employed. Meanwhile, our democracy is undercut by members of Congress who use the lavish “campaign contributions” they receive—bribes by any other name—to buy elections. The only public business these bought-and-paid-for congressmen attend to is providing a legal veneer for munitions makers’ unquestioned access to the tax revenues of the government. The proper use of a vital human resource— the space we occupy in the universe—is a matter for profound philosophical deliberation. Space has also become, unfortunately, an arena for American hubris and one more piece of evidence that Nemesis is much closer than most of us would care to contemplate.

  7

  The Crisis of the American Republic

  My administration has a job to do and we’re going to do it. We will rid the world of evildoers.

  —PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH,

  September 16,2001

  The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading—as a last resort—all other justifications having failed to justify themselves—as liberation. ... We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it “bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.”

  —HAROLD PINTER, the 2005 Nobel Prize Lecture in Literature,

  Guardian, December 7,2005

  When America is no longer a threat to the world, the world will no longer threaten us.

  —HARRY BROWNE,

  “What Has ‘Victory’ Achieved?”

  Antiwar.com, January 11,2002

  As a goddess, Nemesis represents a warning that neither men and women nor countries can indefinitely ignore the demands of reciprocal justice and honesty. She is the spirit of retribution, a corrective to the greed and stupidity that sometimes governs relations among people. America’s most famous interpreter of ancient Greek culture, Edith Hamilton, tells us that Nemesis stands for “righteous anger.”1 If that is the case, we should welcome her arrival. For if we do not awaken soon to the wholesale betrayal of our basic political values and offer our own expression of righteous anger, the American republic will be as doomed as the Roman Republic was after the Ides of March that spring of 44 BC.

  Several American presidents have been guilty of using excessive power during wartime. Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus; Woodrow Wilson had his “Red Scare” with the illegal jailing or deportation of people who opposed his intervention in World War I; Franklin Roosevelt conducted a pogrom against Americans of Japanese ancestry, incarcerating almost all of them in the continental United States in detention camps. In addition, there is no question that, from the earliest years of the republic to the 1990s, the United States witnessed a huge accretion of power by the executive branch, largely due to the numerous wars we fought and the concomitant growth of militarism. Nonetheless, the separation of powers, even if no longer a true balance of power, continued to serve as a check on any claims of presidential dominance.

  When it comes to the deliberate dismantling of the Constitution, however, the events that followed the Supreme Court’s intervention in the election of 2000 that named George W. Bush the forty-third president have proved unprecedented. Bush has since implemented what even right-wing columnist George Will has termed a “monarchical doctrine” and launched, as left-wing commentator James Ridgeway put it, “a consistent and long-range policy to wreck constitutional government.”2 In doing so, Bush has unleashed a political crisis comparable to the one Julius Caesar posed for the Roman constitution. If the United States has neither the means nor the will to over
come this crisis, then we have entered the last days of the republic.

  James Madison, the primary author of our Constitution, considered the people’s access to information the basic right upon which all other rights depend. This is the right that, from the moment George W. Bush entered the White House, his administration has most consistently attacked. Its implacable, sweeping claims to executive secrecy, which predate the “Global War on Terror,” go a long way toward explaining why the press and the public have been so passive in the face of this imperial presidency. In 1798, in a resolution in the Virginia legislature defending the first amendment against an act that Congress had passed the previous year, Madison denounced “a power [in the law] which, more than any other, ought to produce universal alarm, because it is levelled against the right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed the only effective guardian of every other right.”3 Bush knows that if he can wrap his acts in a cloak of official secrecy, neither Congress nor the public will be able to exercise the slightest oversight.

  “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it,” Madison later wrote, “is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”4 In theory, given our Constitution, we should not need a Freedom of Information Act. Except for keeping the most sensitive details of military or financial operations secret, and only until they have been carried out, we should enjoy easy access to information about the activities of our government. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Congressman John Moss (Democrat from California) became so frustrated by his inability to get accurate information out of the federal bureaucracy that he worked virtually single-handedly for years to push the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) through Congress.

  On July 4, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed it, expressing “a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded.” As Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, later reported, “Well, yes, but what few people knew at the time is that LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act; hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets; hated them challenging the official view of reality. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the courage and political skill of a Congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all, and that was after a twelve-year battle against his elders in Congress who blinked every time the sun shined in the dark corridors of power.”5

  From the start the FOIA exempted from requests for disclosure the federal courts, the Congress (a big mistake), and parts of the Executive Office of the President that function solely to advise and assist the president. It also excluded all classified documents and nine types of information—including national security information, confidential business information, matters of personal privacy, deliberations and decisions of federal financial institutions, geological information (concerning mining and oil rights), and certain law enforcement records. The new law did not work very well. Many agencies simply failed to respond to FOIA requests and others dragged their bureaucratic feet interminably. In 1974, in the wake of revelations that President Nixon had illegally used the CIA, the FBI, and the military to spy on the American people, Congress strengthened the act considerably. Nixon had even ordered his secret gang of personal thugs—”the plumbers”—to break into the office of the psychiatrist of former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg seeking material with which the White House could blackmail him.6

  In an attempt to force the executive branch to comply with the law, the 1974 reforms required agencies to organize their archives in a standard manner and hold them available for public scrutiny regardless of whether or not a citizen ever asked. This ended the common practice of agencies claiming that they could not provide information requested because their archives were not adequately organized to do so. Donald Rumsfeld, then President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld’s deputy, urged him to veto the act as “unworkable and unconstitutional.” Ford did as he was told, but Congress promptly overrode the veto.7

  These amendments led to a great deal of litigation in court, making the FOIA a far more formidable oversight instrument. In June 1995, while in Tokyo, I had a conversation about the FOIA with former vice president Walter Mondale, then ambassador to Japan. As a senator, he had been deeply involved in the new law’s passage. The law, he assured me, would never have worked without the power of an applicant to go to court and force the government to comply. For example, virtually all the information now publicly available on prisoner abuse, torture, and other criminal acts by military men and women and CIA operatives at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, and elsewhere came via FOIA requests, first denied by government agencies and only fulfilled as a result of a court order.8

  The FOIA now depends almost totally on the courts for its viability, as Bush administration officials have done their best to envelop the act in a new web of secrecy and nondisclosure. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Ruth Rosen, in one of her columns, caught the crucial moment when this occurred, itself obscured by official secrecy, “The president didn’t ask the networks for television time. The attorney general didn’t hold a press conference. The media didn’t report any dramatic change in governmental policy. As a result, most Americans had no idea that one of their most precious freedoms disappeared on October 12 [2001].”9 On that day Attorney General John Ashcroft sent a memo to all federal agencies urging them to bring every excuse they could think of to bear in turning down Freedom of Information requests. He offered agency heads backing on this stance: “When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis.” In marked contrast, his predecessor, Janet Reno, had advised all departments and agencies that they should honor FOIA requests so long as doing so caused “no foreseeable harm.”10

  The Bush administration subverted the FOIA in ways large and small. For instance, charges were raised to excessive levels for fulfilling FOIA requests even though the law stipulates that service fees should be minimal. In January 2005, the Justice Department typically informed People for the American Way, a watchdog organization critical of the government’s record on civil rights and other issues, that it would be charged $372,999 for a search of the department’s files and disclosure of 1,200 cases in which court proceedings against immigrants arrested and confined after 9/11 were conducted in secret.11 Needless to say, small grassroots organizations cannot afford such expenses.

  Three weeks after Ashcroft tried to shut down FOIA, President Bush made a tone-setting decision when it came to closing off the people’s right to know. Back in 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, Congress seized President Nixon’s records and tape recordings because it feared that the former president planned to destroy them. (On May 2, 1972, following the death of the longtime director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, his personal secretary and lover, Clyde A. Tolson, had indeed destroyed decades of official and unofficial FBI records to keep Hoover’s many illegal acts secret.) In light of these developments, in 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act, making the papers of a former president federal property upon his leaving office. It required that such records be transferred to the Archivist of the United States, who was ordered to open them to the public after no more than twelve years. The intent of the law was to lessen abuses of power under the veil of secrecy, or at least to disclose them in history books.

  On November 1, 2001, just as a small portion of the Reagan administration’s presidential papers was about to be opened to the public, President Bush issued Executive
Order 13233 countermanding the Presidential Records Act.12 It gave him (as well as former presidents) the right to veto requests to see his presidential records. Even if a former president wants his records released—as is the case with Bill Clinton—the order states that access will be granted only at the discretion of the sitting president in consultation with the former president, if still living. It has been widely speculated that Bush’s intent was to protect his father, a former director of the CIA and Reagan’s vice president, from being implicated in the crimes committed during the Iran-Contra affair by Reagan administration officials. Throughout the Iran-Contra investigation, George H. W. Bush argued that he had been “out of the loop” and therefore not involved in the complex illegal fund-raising for and support of the Nicaraguan Contras, who were trying to overthrow the Sandinista government. Reagan’s records might have revealed just how far out of the loop he actually was.

  As Thomas Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, observes, “The Presidential Records Act was designed to shift power over presidential records to the government and ultimately to the citizens. This [Executive Order] shifts the power back.”13 Historian Richard Reeves, author of President Nixon: Alone in the White House and President Kennedy: Profile of Power, comments, “Post-Nixon, presidential papers were no longer personal property. They belonged to the American people. So, now we live in a new historical reality.”14 The American Historical Association contends that Executive Order 13233 not only violated the 1978 act but functionally canceled the law by executive fiat and so “potentially threatens to undermine one of the very foundations of our nation.” We still await a Supreme Court decision on whether the president can, through an executive order, or what is called a “signing statement,” suspend or modify a law passed by Congress. So far, Bush has gotten away with it many times, and his two 2006 appointees to the court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, are both believers in the “theory” of “unitary executive power.”