The
American Caesar
By Ralph Nader
12 April, 2006
Palestine
Chronicle
In
the name of fighting stateless terrorism, George W. Bush is looming
as the American Caesar running roughshod over the civil liberties of
the American people who have turned against him in ever larger majorities.
In the name of fighting terrorism,
George W. Bush fabricated numerous excuses for illegally invading Iraq
and occupying it for now over three costly years in ways that are magnets
for the recruitment and training of ever more stateless terrorists.
His own CIA Director, Porter Goss, made exactly this point in testimony
before the U.S. Senate in February 2005. So too have many retired intelligence
and military specialists including those who recently worked for George
W. Bush.
More and more evidence of
the workings of Caesar Bush are coming to public light. Just this week,
in court filings by the prosecutor against the indicted I. Lewis Libby
Jr., Dick Cheney's right hand man, another thunderbolt came forth. Mr.
Libby testified that, in the words of The New York Times, "Mr.
Bush, who has long criticized leaks of secret information as a threat
to national security" himself approved Libby leaking just such
information to the press in order to rebut a critic.
Democratic Senate Leader,
Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) said that "in light of today's shocking
revelation, President Bush must fully disclose his participation in
the selective leaking of classified information," calling the President
"the leaker in chief."
Not that the Democrats will
do anything about this latest outrage, but the Republicans in the Congress
are reaching certain limits to their self-censored sycophancy toward
Caesar Bush. Also this week, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told
a House Committee that the President may have the legal authority even
to wiretap communications between Americans inside the United States
without a court order. When pressured for his authority behind such
breathtaking outlawry, he fell back on his usual Caesarean mantra -
"his inherent [the President's] role as commander in chief."
Sounds like the modern version of the "divine right of Kings".
This was too much even for
the House Judiciary Chair, Republican F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wisconsin),
who accused the Bush administration of "stonewalling".
Unbridled Presidential authority
is un-American whether in peacetime, wartime or fighting a gang whose
exaggerated power has served Bush and Cheney very well politically.
How better to silence the Democrats, stifle or chill public dissent,
distract attention from domestic necessities, until their post-Katrina
debacle, enrich their donating corporate buddies with military contracts
and concentrate more lawless power in the White House at the expense
of the courts and Congress than by breaking our constitutional system
of separation of powers?
Mr. Bush gave the "Go"
signal for the leak without going through a conventional declassification
process to determine how such "information might compromise methods
or sources," according to Professor Jonathan Turley of the George
Washington University Law School.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California)
summed the leak up this way:
If the [Bush] administration
believes it can tap purely domestic phone calls between Americans without
court approval, there is no limit to executive power. This is contrary
to settled law and the most basic constitutional principles of the separation
of powers.
Still the Democrats do not
have the modest fortitude to support Senator Russell Feingold's (D-Wisconsin)
modest motion to censure George W. Bush. The Democrats are waiting for
more incriminating material to spill out from the Executive Branch to
add to the mounds of evidence already made public from U.S. and British
sources.
For sure more will spill
out. Whenever there are court cases like Libby's, where the defendant
wants to defend only himself, there will be more damaging memos, emails,
testimony and maybe confessions. When an awakened mainstream media is
hungry in pursuit of such stories, you can be sure more will come out.
Inside contacts and sources will increase. Retirements will increase
as well to produce more whistleblowers.
If the House and Senate start
exercising their constitutional rights to oversight, more power will
be added to extract information from the gold mines of what Bush and
Cheney did and when prior and after the invasion of Iraq.
At some point the Bush regime's
luck, bred by secrecy, cover-ups and mendacity, will run out. The critical
mass will be reached. And the American Caesar will fall, with or without
the assistance of the pitiful Democrats.
Writing about the Democratic
Primary race in Connecticut between Senator Joseph Lieberman and Ned
Lamont, who calls the incumbent "Bush's favorite Democrat",
Keith C. Burris of the Manchester, Connecticut Journal Inquirer declares,
"Even in wartime, the power of government must be checked; even
in wartime the president is not a law unto himself; even in wartime
the people deserve to be informed by the free exchange of ideas. Even
in wartime, the citizens may seek to change the government."
Especially during an unconstitutional,
illegal war in Iraq started by George W. Bush! See http://www.DemocracyRising.US
for more information.