DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
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 - an event marked by Nixon's attempt to
create his own private national-security
apparatus, which he directed to commit secretly
various high crimes and
misdemeanors for him. It was as close as the US
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, 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, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff
at the State Department, has called Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld and various of their neo-connish
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 moment after September 11, 2001, 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 alternative
national-security apparatus but to purge and
capture the existing one for their private
purposes.
Under President George W Bush,
Vice President Dick Cheney and their assorted
advisers, acolytes and zealots, a virtual cult of
unconstrained presidential power has been
constructed, centered on the figure of Bush
himself. While much has been made of feverish
Christian fundamentalist support for the
president, the real religious fervor in his
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 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 September 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 the Bush 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 September 11 attacks was so
important. It was to be a "war" without end. No
one ever attempted to define what "victory" 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 the US will now
settle only for "complete victory" 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" 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 autumn 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) as well as to hold
captives under a category of warfare dredged up
from the legal dustbin of history in prisons
specially 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 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 US 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 (NSA)
wiretapping and surveillance on presidential order
and without the necessary (and easily obtained)
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court
warrants. In this case, the president has proudly
admitted to everything.
He has in essence
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 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 re-election 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, Bush
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, Bush had not only ordered the
warrantless NSA wiretapping and surveillance
program and recommitted to it many times over,
despite resistance from officials 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" 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.
Bush clearly did not make the statement on
the spur of the moment or in response to media
questioning (despite the claims in some reports).
He wasn't even "in conversation" in any normal
sense. He was simply onstage expounding in a
prepared fashion to an audience of citizens. So it
was a lie that, given the nature of the event, had
to be pre-planned. 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 the administration
was doing. And it wasn't even a lie Bush 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 about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved
in the Patriot Act. This is different from the NSA
program. The NSA program is a necessary program. I
was elected to protect the American people from
harm. And on September 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 the US constitution is supposed
to work, President Bush 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. US
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, Bush 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 United States handles
this crossroads presidential moment will tell us
much about whether or not "some kind of
dictatorial position" for the nation's imperial,
imperious, and impervious president will be in the
American grain for a long, long time to come.
Tom Engelhardt is editor ofTomdispatchand the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2006 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
