Bush Continues to Over-ride Constitutional Safeguards
By Ralph Nader
Nader.org. Friday, September 29. 2006
The messianic, authoritarian George W. Bush and the minds of his cohorts have further collapsed the rule of law with his bulldozing through a divided Congress more dictatorial powers in his increasingly self-defined, self-serving and failing "war on terror."
The normally restrained New York Times in an
editorial titled "Rushing off a Cliff" condemned Bush's "ghastly ideas about
antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to
our 217 year-old nation of laws—while doing nothing to protect the nation from
terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads.
Our democracy is the big loser."
Bush has concentrated so much arbitrary power in his Presidency that he can be
described in the vernacular as the torturer-in-chief, the jailer-in-chief and
the arrestor-in-chief. Who needs the courts? Who needs the constitutional rights
to habeas corpus for defendants to be able to argue that they were wrongfully
arrested or capriciously imprisoned? The only light at the end of this Bush
tunnel comes from many law professors and knowledgeable members of Congress,
such as Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT), who believe that when this law reaches the
Supreme Court, its offending and vague provisions will be declared
unconstitutional. But that will take two years and in the meantime King George
can continue expanding his massively losing tally of arrests, detentions and
imprisonment of innocent people who are tortured or mistreated, isolated and
defenseless.
As both military attorneys and civilian pro bono attorneys for those imprisoned
in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have declared—the vast majority of the nearly 700
"detainees" were innocent from the get-go, victims of bounty hunters in
Afghanistan and neighboring countries who "sold" them for cash to intermediaries
who turned them over to the U.S. military for transfer to Cuba. All these
"catches" made George W. Bush look like he was really rounding up all those evil
terrorists – like cab drivers, British tourists of Pakistani descent and so
forth.
Timed for the November elections, Bush moves on Congress, complete with his
minions there issuing McCarthyite press releases accusing opposing Democrats, in
the words of House Speaker, Dennis Hastert (R – Ill.), of voting "in favor of
MORE rights for terrorists." (His emphasis)
All this shameless, anti-American unconstitutional bile from the Bushites comes
in the midst of his own top intelligence people reporting that their President’s
war in Iraq is providing a recruitment and training ground for growing numbers
of terrorists in Iraq and from other countries. Earlier, Bush’s own CIA
Director, Porter Goss, told a Senate Committee the same thing. Bush’s own
generals in Iraq also agree. Critics call it pouring gasoline on a raging fire.
Nonetheless, the closed mind of Mr. Bush, whose foreign-military policies have
upset his mother and father deeply, according to a new book by Bob Woodward,
tells Americans that our country will be in Iraq doing what it is doing right
through his Administration’s term ending in January 2009.
Never mind the mounting American casualties, which Bush and Cheney deliberately
undercount
www.democracyrising.us ; never mind the destruction of Iraq, its enormous
civilian casualties and a growing insurgency and sectarian violence that would
not be there without the Bush occupation. Never mind Bush's sectarian
preferences, the Bush economic decrees, puppet politics and the widely reported
Bush blunders and massive corruption-waste registered by his corporate
contracting friends engaged in reconstruction—so called.
So long as the lawyers and their bar associations in America do not challenge
the advancing dictatorial powers of George W. Bush, so long as citizen groups,
labor unions and libertarians, conservatives and liberals avoid uniting
together, these constitutional crimes against due process, probable cause,
habeas corpus, together with torture and indefinite imprisonment at the whim of
the Executive branch, will worsen and erode American jurisprudence with serious
consequences for both the nation’s security and its liberties.
The White House is on a rampage. The President is a documented lawless,
reckless, arrogant politician whose policies are fueling more terrorism in the
Middle East. Nonetheless, he then turns around and demands more flagrant
over-rides on constitutional safeguards in order to let him fight terrorism.
Quite a convenient vicious circle by him to hoist his daily politics of fear on
the country.
Remember that telling thought by the British Parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, at
the time of the American Revolution: "All that is necessary for the triumph of
evil is that good men do nothing."