[Peace-discuss] The road to fascism

[Paul Patton]

* The Unrestrained President *
  *by Tom Engelhardt *
     As 2006 begins, we seem to be at a not-completely-unfamiliar crossroads
in the long history of the American imperial presidency. It grew up,
shedding presidential constraints, in the post-World War II years as part of
the rise of the national security state and the military-industrial complex.
It reached its constraint-less apogee with Richard Nixon's presidency and
what became known as the Watergate
scandal<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=38684>-- an event
marked by Nixon's attempt to create his own private national
security apparatus which he directed to secretly commit various high crimes
and misdemeanors for him. It was as close as we came -- until now -- to a
presidential *coup d'etat* that might functionally have abrogated the
Constitution. In those years, the potential dangers of an unfettered
presidency (so apparent to the nation's founding fathers) became obvious to
a great many Americans. As
now<http://tonykaron.com/2006/01/03/bush-and-the-republican-mutiny/>,
a failed war helped drag the President's plans down and, in the case of
Nixon, ended in personal disgrace and resignation, as well as in a brief
resurgence of congressional oversight activity. All this mitigated, and
modestly deflected, the growth trajectory of the imperial presidency -- for
a time.

The "cabal," as Lawrence
Wilkerson<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wilkerson25oct25,0,7455395.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions>,
Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, has called Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and various of their neoconish pals, stewed over
this for years, along with a group of lawyers who were prepared, once the
moment came, to give a sheen of legality to any presidential act. The group
of them used the post-9/11 moment to launch a wholesale campaign to
recapture the "lost" powers of the imperial presidency, attempting not, as
in the case of Nixon, to create an alternate national security apparatus but
to purge and capture the existing one for their private purposes. Under
George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their assorted advisers, acolytes, and
zealots, a virtual cult of unconstrained presidential power has been
constructed, centered around the figure of Bush himself. While much has been
made of feverish Christian fundamentalist support for the President, the
real religious fervor in this administration has been almost singularly
focused on the quite un-Christian attribute of total earthly power. Typical
of the fierce ideologues and cultists now in the White House is Cheney's new
Chief of Staff David Addington. The Washington Post's Dana
Milbank<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22665-2004Oct10.html>described
him this way back in 2004 (when he was still Cheney's "top
lawyer"):

*"[A] principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of
terrorism suspects... a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding
of terrorism suspects without access to courts[,] Addington also led the
fight with Congress and environmentalists over access to information about
corporations that advised the White House on energy policy. He was
instrumental in the series of fights with the Sept. 11 commission and its
requests for information... Even in a White House known for its dedication
to conservative philosophy, Addington is known as an ideologue, an adherent
of an obscure philosophy called the unitary executive theory that favors an
extraordinarily powerful president."*

 For these cultists of an all-powerful presidency, the holy war, the
"crusade" to be embarked upon was, above all, aimed at creating a President
accountable to no one, overseen by no one, and restricted by no other force
or power in his will to act as he saw fit. And so, in this White House, all
roads have led back to one issue: How to press ever harder at the weakening
boundaries of presidential power. This is why, when critics concentrate on
any specific issue or set of administration acts, no matter how egregious or
significant, they invariably miss the point. The issue, it turns out, is
never primarily -- to take just two areas of potentially illegal
administration activity -- torture or warrantless surveillance. Though each
of them had value and importance to top administration officials, they were
nonetheless primarily the means to an end.

This is why the announcement of (and definition of) the "global war on
terror" almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks was so important. It was
to be a "war" without end. No one ever attempted to define what
"victory"<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2323>might
actually consist of, though we were assured that the war itself would,
like the Cold War, last generations. Even the recent sudden presidential
announcement that we will now settle only for "complete
victory"<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051130-2.html>in
Iraq is, in this context, a distinctly limited goal because Iraq has
already been defined as but a single "theater" (though a "central" one) in a
larger war on terror. A war without end, of course, left the President as a
commander-in-chief-without-end and it was in such a guise that the acolytes
of that "obscure philosophy" of total presidential power planned to claim
their "inherent"<http://www.alpheratz.net/BushCo/comments/gonzales_defends_eavesdropping_program>constitutional
right to do essentially anything. (Imagine what might have
happened if their invasion of Iraq had been a success!)

Having established their global war on terror, and so their "war powers," in
the fall of 2001, top administration officials then moved remarkably quickly
to the outer limits of power -- by plunging into the issue of torture. After
all, if you can establish a presidential right to order torture (no matter
how you manage to redefine
it<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=32668>)
as well as to hold captives under a category of warfare dredged up from the
legal dustbin of history in
prisons<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html>especially
established to be beyond the reach of the law or the oversight of
anyone but those under your command, you've established a presidential right
to do just about anything imaginable. While the get-tough aura of torture
may indeed have appealed to some of these worshippers of power, what
undoubtedly appealed to them most was the moving of the presidential
goalposts, the changing of the rules. From Abu Ghraib on, the results of all
this have been obvious enough, but one crucial aspect of such unfettered
presidential power goes regularly unmentioned.

As you push the limits, wherever they may be, to create a situation in which
all control rests in your hands, the odds are that you will create an
uncontrollable situation as well. From torture to spying, such acts, however
contained they may initially appear to be, involve a deep plunge into a dark
and perverse pool of human emotions.
Torture<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1795>in
particular, but also unlimited forms of surveillance and any other
acts
which invest individuals secretly with something like the powers of gods,
invariably lead to humanity's darkest side. The permission to commit such
acts, once released into the world, mutates and spreads like wildfire from
top to bottom in any command structure and across all boundaries. You may
start out with a relatively small program of secret imprisonment, torture,
spying or whatever, meant to achieve limited goals while establishing
certain prerogatives of power, but in no case is the situation likely to
remain that way for long. This was, perhaps, the true genius of the American
system as imagined by its founders -- the understanding that any form of
state power left unchecked in the hands of a single person or group of
people was likely to degenerate into despotism (or worse), whatever the
initial desires of the individuals involved.

Sooner or later, the hubris of taking all such powers up as your own is
likely to prove overwhelming and then many things begin to slip out of
control. Consider the developing scandal over the National Security Agency's
wiretapping and surveillance on presidential order and without the necessary
(and easily obtained) FISA court warrants. In this case, the President has
proudly admitted to everything. He has essentially said: I did it. I did it
many times over. We are continuing to do it now. I would do it again. ("I've
reauthorized<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051219-2.html>this
program more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks, and I
intend to do so for so long as our nation is -- for so long as the nation
faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American
citizens.") In the process, however, he has been caught in a curious,
potentially devastating Presidential lie, now being used against him by
Democratic pols and other critics.

While in Buffalo, New York, for his reelection campaign in April 2004, in
one of those chatty "conversations" -- this one about the Patriot Act --
that he had with various well-vetted groups of voters, the President said
the following:

*"There are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you
hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a
wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're
talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court
order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand,
when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it
comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value
the Constitution."*

 By that time, as he has since admitted, the President had not only ordered
the warrantless NSA wiretapping and surveillance program and recommitted to
it many times over, despite resistance from
officials<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/politics/01spy.html?pagewanted=print>in
the Justice Department and even, possibly, from then-Attorney General
John Ashcroft, but had been deeply, intimately involved in it. (No desire
for classic presidential "plausible
deniability"<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060109/schell>can be found
here.) So this, as many critics have pointed out, was a lie.
But what's more interesting -- and less noted -- is that it was a lie of
choice. He clearly did not make the statement on the spur of the moment or
in response to media questioning (despite the
claims<http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/01/nsa.spying/>in some
reports). He wasn't even "in conversation" in any normal sense. He
was simply on stage expounding in a prepared fashion to an audience of
citizens. So it was a lie that, given the nature of the event (and you can
check it out<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html>yourself
on-line), had to be preplanned. It was a lie told with forethought,
in full knowledge of the actual situation, and designed to deceive the
American people about the nature of what this administration was doing. And
it wasn't even a lie the President was in any way forced to commit. No one
had asked. It was a voluntary act of deception. Now, he is claiming that
these comments were meant to be "limited" to the Patriot act as the NSA
spying program he launched was "limited" to only a few Americans -- both
surely absurd claims. ("I was
talking<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/politics/01cnd-spy.html?ei=5094&en=9ff551c41e38344a&hp=&ex=1136178000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print>about
roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is
different from the N.S.A. program. The N.S.A. program is a necessary
program. I was elected to protect the American people from harm. And on
Sept. 11, 2001, our nation was attacked. And after that day, I vowed to use
all the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American
people, which is what I have been doing, and will continue to do.")

In other words, by his own definition of what is "legal" based on that
"obscure philosophy" (and with the concordance of a chorus of in-house
lawyers), but not on any otherwise accepted definition of how our
Constitution is supposed to work, the President has admitted to something
that, on the face of it, seems to be an impeachable act -- and he has been
caught as well in the willful further act of lying to the American people
about his course of action. Here, however, is where – though so many of the
issues of the moment may bring the Nixon era to mind -- things have changed
considerably. Our domestic politics are now far more conservative; Congress
is in the hands of Republicans, many of whom share the President's fervor
for unconstrained party as well as presidential power; and the will to
impeach is, as yet, hardly in sight.

In his news conference defending his NSA program, the President took umbrage
when a reporter asked:

*"I wonder if you can tell us today, sir, what, if any, limits you believe
there are or should be on the powers of a President during a war, at
wartime? And if the global war on terror is going to last for decades, as
has been forecast, does that mean that we're going to see, therefore, a more
or less permanent expansion of the unchecked power of the executive in
American society?"*

 "To say 'unchecked power,'" responded an irritated Bush, "basically is
ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the President, which I
strongly reject."

How the nation handles this crossroads presidential moment will tell us much
about whether or not "some kind of dictatorial position" for our imperial,
imperious, and impervious President will be in the American grain for a
long, long time to come.
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