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November 7, 2011
I have just finished a book by John Grisham entitled The
Broker, published in 2005. "The Broker" in question is not a real
estate or stock-broker, but rather one of an ilk that when I was a boy many
years ago was called an "influence peddler." They now go by the more
polite name of "lobbyist." Anyway, this larger-than-life Jack
Abramoff-type had been caught dabbling in some very highly sensitive
security-stuff (which Abramoff himself was apparently smart enough never to
have done). The plot revolves around the determination of the CIA to have him
dead, for a variety of reasons. They have two problems. A) He is in Federal
prison and B) US government agencies cannot, under the law, just go around
murdering US citizens. And so, the CIA arranges to have him paroled by a
neer-do-well outgoing President and then ships him off to Italy where, they
hope, one of several nations interested in achieving the same end will find him
and do the job themselves.
The story is told with Grisham's usual panache, but if he
were to try to write it today he could not use the same plot. For, as is now
well-known, the US can, and does, go around murdering (or executing or
assassinating [from the Arab word for political murder]) US citizens that it
has in its sights. And it does this without the benefit of physical capture,
indictment, trial, or what-have-you, as prescribed under the fourth and sixth
Amendments to the Constitution. The death of Mr. Anwar el-Awlaki at the hands
of a US drone aircraft in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011 is just one piece of evidence
that what might be called "Cheneyism" has triumphed over traditional
constitutional democracy in our nation.
Dick Cheney, self-nominated for the position and accepted,
apparently without question, for it, was easily the most powerful Vice-President
the U.S. has ever had. His hand, either openly with is name on it, or covertly
without, was on virtually every major foreign and domestic policy decision made
during the Presidency of George W. Bush. And many of them, in one way or
another, continue to be followed under the presidency of Barack Obama. But the
essence of Cheneyism is its assault on U. S. Constitutional government,
embodied in his totally un-Constitutional concept of “Unitary Executive Power.”
Let us count the ways.
1. The famous "Energy Task Force." Despite his
claim in his recent memoir that one of the reason he was writing it was he
wanted "to be clear" and "to set the record straight," he
did not discuss its deliberations and to this day its minutes, official
government papers though they may be, have remained secret. Thus we can only
guess what was decided but surely the agenda included: as much de-regulation of
the extractive industries as possible; as much expansion of domestic oil
drilling as possible; a total shut-down of research on energy alternatives; and
perhaps a guarantee that war would be declared on Iraq with the objective of
getting hold of its oil reserves. Then there is the unconstitutional bit that
has followed Cheney's departure from office: the claim that the Vice-Presidency
is not part of the executive branch and therefore his papers are not subject to
public disclosure. That Article II of the Constitution, on the executive
branch, is the one that describes the office, to the extent it is described, is
apparently of no consequence. That it is mentioned in passing in article I, to
Cheney is.
2. The declaration of full-fledged war on Iraq without
engaging in the bothersome step of securing it from the Congress is a major
element of Cheneyism. There is no way that this could be fit under the
Presidential War Powers Act, as the Republicans never failed to point out about
Clinton's actions in the former Yugoslavia (which happened to have been carried
with no "boots on the ground" and no US casualties, but was still of
dubious constitutionality. Of course there were no weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, which the Bush Regime knew full well because the UN WMD inspector on
the ground, Hans Blix, told them so, over and over again. But
Presidential/Vice-Presidential lying, done over and over again, by both
Democrats and Republicans, is not unconstitutional.) Furthermore, since
unprovoked, or “preventive,” war by individual UN members is prohibited by
Chapter VII, especially Articles 39 and 51, of the UN Charter, to which the US
is a treaty signatory, engaging in such is also a violation of the
Constitution’s Article VI, which states: "all treaties made, or which
shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme
law of the land. . ."
3. And then there is the whole use-of-torture thing. Cheney
set up the policy, despite the fact that virtually every intelligence-gathering
expert says that it is useless for gathering intelligence from operatives with
any training to resist it (1, 2). That means nothing to Cheney who, perhaps
influenced by the earlier iterations of "24," has always insisted
that it is effective, and on his recent victory lap for his book continued to
do so. It does have many other uses for which it is known to be effective (3).
However, both points are irrelevant to the matter of its unconstitutionality
(4). Torture is prohibited by both the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention
against Torture, both treaties signed and ratified by the United States. Thus
the use of torture, no matter what contortions Cheney and his henchmen, Woo,
Bybee, and Addington, went through to try to redefine what Cheney had
authorized, also is a violation of the Constitution, Article VI.
4. Finally, since Guantanamo is functionally part of the
United States (no US government would ever claim that it is part of Cuba), the
whole operation there, for persons not prisoners of war (and since the US never
declared war, they couldn't be) violates the fourth and sixth Amendments.
There are of course many governmental policies of Cheney
that stay with us, for example: the creation of permanent war; the creation of
what can be called the Resource-Based Economy (the increasing reliance on the
discovery, use and export of fossil fuels for fueling capitalist profits); the
creation of the Patriot Act which, on paper at least, justifies the creation of
a total authoritarian state; and refining and expanding the use of the big lie
technique, which now underlies all of GOTP policy and politics. A number of
these governmental policies remain very much alive, in one form or another,
under the current administration.
But the principal legacy of Cheneyism is to make a reality
of George W. Bush's claim that the Constitution is "nothing but a piece of
paper." To the extent that the Obama Administration follows this dictum,
it is saying the same thing.
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References:
1. Jonas, S. "A Torturous Debate,"
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/081
2. Jonas, S. "The Torturous Debate, Revisited,"
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12725
3. Jonas, S. "Why Torture?"
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/082
4. Jonas, S. "Why 'It Doesn't Work' Doesn't Work,"
http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/156
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