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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The case for imperial
liquidation By Chalmers Johnson
In politics, as in medicine, a cure based
on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless,
often worsening the condition that is supposed to
be healed. The United States today suffers from a
plethora of public ills. Most of them can be
traced to the militarism and imperialism that have
led to the near-collapse of the country's
constitutional system of checks and balances.
Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so
far by American
politicians or analysts
addresses the root causes of the problem.
According to an NBC (National Broadcasting
Co) News/Wall Street Journal poll released on
April 26, some 78% of Americans believe their
country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only
22% think the Bush administration's policies make
sense, the lowest number on this question since
October 1992, when George H W Bush was running for
a second presidential term - and lost. What people
don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts
and, above all, what the remedy - or remedies -
ought to be.
The range of opinions on this
is immense. Even though large numbers of US voters
vaguely suspect that the failings of the political
system itself led their country into its current
crisis, most evidently expect the system to
perform a course correction more or less
automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York
Times reported, by the end of March, at least
280,000 US citizens had already contributed some
US$113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John
Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, and John
McCain.
If these people actually believe a
presidential election a year and a half from now
will significantly alter how the country is run,
they have almost surely wasted their money. As
Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American
Militarism, [1] puts it: "None of the
Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing
so with the promise of reviving the system of
check and balances ... The aim of the party out of
power is not to cut the presidency down to size
but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of
the executive branch but to regain them."
Republican President George W Bush has, of
course, flagrantly violated his oath of office,
which requires him "to protect and defend the
constitution", and the opposition Democratic Party
has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to
account. Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors"
that, under other political circumstances, would
surely constitute the constitutional grounds for
impeachment are these: the president and his top
officials pressured the Central Intelligence
Agency to put together a National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both
the administration and the CIA knew to be patently
dishonest. They then used this false NIE to
justify a US war of aggression. After launching an
invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration
unilaterally reinterpreted international and
domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners
held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret
locations around the world.
Nothing in the
US constitution, least of all the
commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to
commit felonies. Nonetheless, within days after
the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush
had signed a secret executive order authorizing a
new policy of "extraordinary rendition", in which
the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects
anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in
such countries as Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan,
where torture is a normal practice, or to secret
CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency
operatives themselves do the torturing.
On
the home front, despite the post-September 11
congressional authorization of new surveillance
powers to the administration, its officials chose
to ignore these and, on its own initiative,
undertook extensive spying on US citizens without
obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and
without reporting to Congress on this program.
These actions are prima facie violations of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978
(and subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of
the US constitution.
These alone
constitute more than adequate grounds for
impeachment, while hardly scratching the surface.
And yet, on the eve of the national elections last
November, then House minority leader, now Speaker,
Nancy Pelosi pledged on the CBS (Columbia
Broadcasting System) News program 60
Minutes that "impeachment is off the table".
She called it "a waste of time". And six months
after the Democratic Party took control of both
houses of Congress, the prison at Guantanamo Bay
was still open and conducting drumhead
courts-martial of the prisoners held there; the
CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation
techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal
intrusions into the privacy of US citizens
continued unabated; and, more than 50 years after
the CIA was founded, it continues to operate
under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional
oversight.
Promoting lies, demoting
democracy Without question, the Bush
administration's catastrophic war in Iraq is the
single overarching issue that has convinced a
large majority of Americans that their country is
"heading in the wrong direction". But the war
itself is the outcome of an imperial presidency
and the abject failure of Congress to perform its
constitutional duty of oversight. Had the
government been working as the authors of the US
constitution intended, the war could not have
occurred. Even now, the Democratic majority
remains reluctant to use its power of the purse to
cut off funding for the war, thereby ending the US
occupation of Iraq and starting to curtail the
ever-growing power of the military-industrial
complex.
One major problem of the US
social and political system is the failure of the
press, especially television news, to inform the
public about the true breadth of the
unconstitutional activities of the executive
branch. As Frederick A O Schwarz and Aziz Z Huq,
the authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced:
Presidential Power in a Time of Terror,
observe, "For the public to play its proper
checking role at the ballot box, citizens must
know what is done by the government in their
names."
Instead of uncovering Bush
administration lies and manipulations, the US
media actively promoted them. Yet the First
Amendment to the US constitution protects the
press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy
that is the bureaucrat's most powerful,
self-protective weapon. As a result of this
failure, democratic oversight of the government by
an actively engaged citizenry did not - and could
not - occur. The people of the United States
became mere spectators as an array of ideological
extremists, vested interests and foreign
operatives - including domestic neo-conservatives,
Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israel
lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries,
warmongers and profiteers allied with the
military-industrial complex, and the entrenched
interests of the professional military
establishment - in essence hijacked the
government.
Some respected professional
journalists do not see these failings as the mere
result of personal turpitude but rather as deep
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