January 4, 2006
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 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,
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,
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 on 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 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"
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"
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 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) as well as to hold captives under a category of warfare dredged up from the legal dustbin of history in prisons
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
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
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
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. He 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 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
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
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.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.
Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt
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