On Deception Watch

by David H Spielberg

  Sylvia had been leaning toward General Slaider waiting for her moment to object, to interject, to express her indignation, her counterargument, but when Slaider finished, waiting for her response, she found herself lost, broken, uncertain. She sank back into her chair.

  Slaider went on. “And of course, Dr. Cranshaw will be the head of the new lab. I need his fearless ability to plunge into solution-finding, not simply endless solution-seeking. He is a technical genius whose ability to create effective teams is the best I have ever encountered. He is the Robert Oppenheimer of laser-fusion energy. I need him, Sylvia.”

  “Oh my god, General Slaider. It’s too much. I . . . I . . . forgive me, but I don’t want to be on the bull’s-eye of history. I’m not big enough for what you want from me.”

  “Sylvia, trust me. You are big enough. Bigger than you think or imagine. I know you. I’ve watched you. I have confidence in you. You can do this and you can help your country and ultimately the world. We want this technology to move quickly, to use it for good, to push people worldwide to see that we can turn this planet into a paradise if we all stop pressing our petty issues, our petty passions. The sooner the rest of the world sees the vision of the new world before us, of the new future, the sooner we can stop the madness that hasn’t stopped simply because we entered a new millennium. This is the moment, Sylvia. I can do it without you, but with you and your colleagues it will be so much easier. Soldiers risk their lives everyday for their country. I’m not asking you to die for your country. I’m asking you and your people to just continue doing what you have been doing. Of course you can do it.”

  Sylvia let out a deep breath. Then another. “What do you see happening? What’s the scope and what’s the schedule? What is this new world you see, General, so I have an idea what we are really talking about?”

  Slaider smiled. “Fair enough. The Council will announce that the first commercial-scale power plant would be operating within twelve months. We foresee the conversion of all interstate power generation to laser fusion within twenty years. The Executive Council will announce the establishment of a national Hydrocarbon Research Laboratory dedicated to the development of pharmaceutical, chemical, and synthetics applications for petroleum and natural gas—to promote other ventures for the fossil fuel industry, ventures other than fuel. Perhaps fossil chemical industry would be a better name in the future. The council will announce the mandatory use of hydrogen fuel cells for all automobiles within ten years. For purposes of transportation, we want the conversion to a hydrogen-fuel-cell-energy economy to be substantially complete within twenty years because that is the life cycle of conventional power plants coming online today.”

  “Whew.” Sylvia sat silently, absorbing the future Slaider was describing.

  “Think of it, Sylvia. Can you imagine the world we will be creating? Power without pollution. In fact, those impossible treaties pledging to reduce carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions to the level of 1990 or 2000 or even 2015 will be as pointless as they have been unachievable. There will be no carbon dioxide or nitrogen oxide emissions. Any connection between global warming and man’s power-production activities will be eliminated. Gone completely. In fact, we will be ameliorating the damage already done.

  “And the insane burning of hydrocarbons will be ended at a date certain and the richness of these molecules can be harvested for hugely more sustainable uses. Isn’t this part of Dr. Cranshaw’s dream? Don’t you owe this to him and to Samuel Berman and to the rest of your amazing team to continue that work, to manifest that dream?”

  “General . . . ”

  Sylvia could not continue. She bent her head and quietly sobbed remembering the nightmare of the past few months.

  “I understand, Sylvia. So much has happened. So much pain. So much uncertainty.”

  Slaider moved his chair closer to Sylvia and took her hand in his and gently stroked it, waiting for her to regain her composure.

  After a few moments, Sylvia raised her head and asked, “What exactly do you think I can do for you?”

  “I want the Nova organization, staff and management intact, to begin life again as the core of the National Fusion Power Laboratory. I want you to be the Assistant Director of the laboratory. All electrical power generation in the United States will be nationalized over a number of years as plants are decommissioned or converted. Dr. Cranshaw will be the Director of the National Laser Fusion Laboratory. He will also be the lead technical advisor for the as yet unspecified authority that will manage the nationalized power infrastructure. He will report to the head of that authority. The head of the managing authority will report to the secretary of energy. You will continue reporting to the Dr. Cranshaw. The specific mandates and organization charts and so forth will be devised by members of the secretary of energy once the tenure of the Executive Council is over.

  “Sylvia, I want you to accept this appointment. Then I want you to work in whatever way you believe best to bring everyone else on board. I want this done before a public announcement is made next week. I want your people to understand my faith and pride in what you and they have achieved and that it must continue. Dr. Cranshaw’s dream will not die. To that end I am also asking you to arrange a meeting here with me and Dr. Cranshaw. At that meeting I will offer him the directorship of the National Laser Fusion Laboratory and apprise him of its charter and first annual budget. You may alert him in advance of my intent.

  “That’s pretty much it. I know you can do it, Sylvia. The question is do you want to do it?”

  “Oh my god. Yes!” she said, sinking back into her chair. “Yes, yes . . . what am I saying? Yes, of course.”

  100

  When the announcement was made to the American public and the world introducing the new National Energy Authority and the energy vision behind its creation . . .

  . . . the newspaper headlines ran huge banners: “Brave New World!”

  . . . the people forgot about the United Nations.

  . . . the people forgot about the US military insurrections.

  . . . the people forgot about Paul Latimer.

  . . . the people forgot about the Congress and the constitution.

  101

  Jeb Paxton remembered with a grin the saying he had heard earlier in his career, when his aim was to use his legislative clout to catapult him into the presidency. Campaigning in Florida his knowledge of the demographics of the state validated the often heard saying there that “you had to go North to go South in Florida.” Southern Florida was populated mostly by invading New Yorkers, Ohioans, or Canadians. The irony of the contradiction in terms amused and appealed to him. And now he was living another irony. “You had to go backward to move forward.”

  The National Security Agency had become so adept at intercepting all forms of electromagnetic communication that none of it could be considered private or secure. Telephone, internet, laser relay, everythingthey must all be treated as if your enemy was reading it as you sent it. So Paxton learned from Muslim terrorist networks and created a complex web of couriers. Hand-delivered messages by people who had no idea what they were delivering or why simply moved when instructed, receiving and passing on.

  The sequestering of government and legislative leaders and officials was over, but it made no difference to the country. The Executive Council still ran the country under its own state of emergency order. All the machinery was reappearing, but all it could do was sit and wait. Very slowly, at the lowest levels of authority, at the village level, some autonomy was beginning to reemerge. However, the watchful eyes of military observers were an ever-present sobering influence. But the process of returning to normalcy had visibly begun at the grassroots level and it was enough to establish a calculable trajectory toward a return to the former institutions of law, order, and leadership. The fact that the predicted portion of that trajectory was still much greater than the actual portion did not seem to bother many people. But it bothered Jeb Paxton.

  There was no court,
no authority to whom to appeal the formation of the Executive Council. The people believed it was needed and that was all it took. In a rare throwback to the original thinking of the founding fathers, all power to govern comes from the people. And not only the power but the form of government. The people could change that at any time should they determine that the governing structure no longer served or had been corrupted beyond repair. That assertion would not have been an alien premise to the founders. It was one of a free people’s inalienable rights. It is memorialized in the Declaration of Independence:

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

  But this sober document went on to warn that such a drastic prerogative was not something to be done without profound and continuing provocation:

  “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

  So in that exquisite tug-of-war of sides that forms the American system, there is the side that bears the banner of change.

  But another countervailing force, equally fundamental, holds to the old ways. It is the American credo taught at the earliest impressionable age that the United States is a nation of laws and that no one was above the law. However, here the people can speak with a mixed message and have from time to time gone against the laws. The sequestering of Japanese-American citizens during World War II was an example that, when provoked to act, the guiding light of law can be perverted or ignored by the people. President Roosevelt, with the issuing of Executive Order 9066, provided the military with the authority to declare military regions to be exclusion zones from which any and all people may be excluded. The military used this authority to exclude all United States citizens of Japanese ancestry from the entire West Coast of the United States.

  The legality of legislating by executive order, explicitly illustrated by Executive Order 9066, addressed precisely the kind of incursions into the authority of another branch of government that the doctrine of checks and balances was designed to resist.

  Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the American Civil War was another excursion away from the tug and pull of coequal departments of government, the process formulated by the genius of the founders to prevent one branch of government from encroaching on and thereby diminishing the authority of the another branch of government.

  Lincoln suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus; that is, he suspended the means by which an arrested person can seek relief from unlawful imprisonment. To justify his actions, Lincoln used Article I, Section 9, of the constitution, which states:

  “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

  However, Roger B. Taney, chief justice of the supreme court, ruled that the suspension could only be manifested by an act of Congress and is not a prerogative of the president. Lincoln, and the military simply ignored Justice Taney’s ruling.

  The indefinite detention by both the Bush and Obama administrations of “unlawful enemy combatants” at the sole discretion of the president and without the privilege of petitioning for a writ of habeas corpus was enacted during the so-called war on terror in the early years of this century. Under the administration of George W. Bush, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was passed, that included these words:

  “Except as provided in section 1005 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”

  The last phrase “or is awaiting such determination” gave the president of the United States the right to incarcerate virtually any noncitizen at his discretion. Alberto Gonzales, President Bush’s attorney general, even went so far as to claim there was no constitutional right to habeas corpus even for American citizens and that the constitution only asserted that the right could be suspended, not that the right existed. Presented with the illogic of specifying a method of suspending a right that did not exist failed to move that attorney general. The attorney general of the United States was asserting that the right of habeas corpus, the so-called Great Writ, was not a declared right of the people asserted by the constitution. He went too far. But even if you split the difference, the drift to massive executive incursions into the prerogatives of the other two branches of government gives shape and substance to the term “Imperial Presidency.”

  So, the intricate balance of powers between the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government, the genius of the American system, had slowly been eroding over the years anyway. The breakdown only became openly evident with the explosion of the Age of Information brought on by the internet and the worldwide web. Like the frog who sits quietly in the water rather than jump out as the water is gradually heated to boiling, the undermining of the doctrine of checks and balances rested quietly in the slowly rising heat of public indulgence.

  Senator Jeb Paxton knew the source of this public indulgence in overstepping the bounds of the presidency. Anyone who read George Washington’s farewell address knew the source of the public indulgence that allowed the presidency to become “imperial.” It was political parties. Washington despised them and had this to say about them in his farewell address:

  "All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They [political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.

  “However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterward the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

  The doctrine of checks and balances was supposed to be what resisted usurpation of power. Each branch of government was, through jealous protection of its own powers and prerogatives, to act as a brake on overstepping of bounds. However, parties created loyalties to the faction rather than to the branch of government. When the Congress was dominated by one party ideology and the executive branch another, then rigidity, stagnation, and obstr
uction resulted. When the Congress and the executive branch were dominated both by the same party ideology, then excess, abuse, and corruption resulted. It was always during these periods of one-party domination that the most damage was done, and no political system in the history of mankind has yet been devised that mastered the art of revoking the past. The American system of government, founded on a blueprint of a strictly confined federal role, an abhorrence of a national debt carried from one generation to another, and an avoidance of national entanglements, had evolved by increments that played to the loyalty of factions into exactly the opposite of that blueprint.

  President Washington’s predictions of the dire consequences of parties no longer roiled and agitated below the surface. The consequences to Jeb Paxton were clear to him because he worked in the belly of the beast. And they were clear to General Morgan Slaider, because as general and then as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and now as . . . what? . . . he had to work that system too to get what he needed.

  Paxton believed he was finally beginning to understand Slaider’s plan. He was going to change the system by beating it at its own game. He would work the system. He would get his man appointed president by the Congress. He would convince everyone he was on their side while he deftly defanged them as he stroked them. He was a master of deception. And he, Paxton, knew a con artist when he saw one.

  After all, how had the country spiraled into governance by executive order? It was from Congress passing laws so muddy and ill-defined so as to inflame no one and to irritate the least voters possible while still appearing to be taking a decisive step. It was for the purpose of clarifying the muddy water of legislative smoke and mirrors that executive orders first appeared. They gave guidance to personnel in the executive branch as to how to carry out the mission of the law. They were simply a clarifying tool so that the president could carry out one of his few specified responsibilities under the constitution: “to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”