How will history judge President George W.
Bush?
The Taipei Times
By Aryeh Neier
January 12, 2006
How will US President George W. Bush's administration be remembered
historically? After five years in office, and with another three years to go,
some answers are already apparent. Others are emerging gradually. The latter
category includes an increasing assault on civil liberties within the US that
now compares to that of former president Richard Nixon's administration more
than thirty years ago.
Of course, civil liberties were bound to suffer in the wake of the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Throughout US history, threats to national security,
whether real or imagined, have led to clampdowns on the rights of citizens and,
to a far greater extent, on the rights of immigrants and others suspected of
acting in the interests of alien forces.
In the twentieth century, abuses of civil liberties were particularly severe
during four periods. In the years 1917 to 1919, US participation in World War I
and anarchist bombings after the war led to almost two thousand federal
prosecutions, mass roundups of aliens, and summary deportations. During World
War II, Japan's attack on the US was followed by the internment of more than
120,000 Japanese-Americans because of their race, including many who were born
in the US.
In the late 1940s and the 1950s, the Cold War and fears that the Red Menace
would sap US resolve from within led to myriad anti-subversive programs, with
tens of thousands of Americans losing their livelihoods as a result. Finally,
during the Nixon years, the president's paranoia about opposition to the
Vietnam War and to his policies fuelled a pattern of abuses that eventually
brought about his resignation in disgrace.
The Nixon administration's legacy is particularly instructive in assessing
the Bush record. Though Americans tend to lump Nixon's violations of civil
liberties together under the heading of "Watergate," much more was involved
than the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters and the subsequent cover-up.
The participants in those events included the "Plumbers," a personal secret
police established by Nixon and so named because one of their tasks was to
eliminate leaks of information that the White House did not want to
disclose.
Another secret assault on civil liberties was Nixon's adoption of the
"Huston Plan" which authorized political surveillance by burglary, electronic
eavesdropping and the use of the military to spy on civilians. Nixon used these
methods against political opponents, journalists and government employees
suspected of disloyalty to the president.
As far as we know, Bush has not gone that far. Nevertheless, electronic
eavesdropping without court authorization, of the sort Bush ordered starting in
2002, played a particularly important part in Nixon's downfall. One of the
three counts against Nixon in the vote to impeach Nixon by the House of
Representatives' Judiciary Committee was based on such eavesdropping.
In fact, Bush pursued his policy despite a 1978 law -- adopted in response
to the Nixon-era abuses -- that specifically requires judicial approval, and in
contradiction to his public assurance that no such eavesdropping takes place
without a court order. Now that his electronic surveillance program has been
exposed, Bush's Justice Department has launched an investigation into how the
news became public, threatening the journalists who reported the
information.
But even before the latest revelations, the Bush administration's assaults
on civil liberties were legion, including its imprisonment of hundreds of men
without charges at Guantanamo Bay in an effort to evade judicial review of
their cases. It also rounded up, jailed and deported hundreds of aliens in an
anti-terrorist drive none of whose targets was shown to have any link to
terrorism.
The list does not stop there. Bush's subordinates authorized methods of
interrogation that led to torture and his administration adamantly resisted
legislation that would ban its use. It even insisted that it could imprison an
American citizen, Jose Padilla, incommunicado for an indefinite period without
criminal charges until, faced with the prospect of Supreme Court review, it
suddenly pressed charges that had nothing to do with the allegations that had
formed the basis for his detention.
Indeed, a hallmark of the Bush administration's violations of civil
liberties is that many involve efforts to evade judicial review. Guantanamo,
the deportations, the Padilla case and the electronic eavesdropping program all
share this characteristic.
At the same time, Bush has systematically packed the federal courts with
judges chosen for their readiness to defer to presidential power. His latest
nominee to the US Supreme Court, Judge Samuel Alito, exemplifies this
trend.
The mood in the US today is far from the point that it reached in 1973 and
1974, when the drive to impeach Nixon and convict him in the US Senate forced
him to resign. But, while it seems safe to predict that Bush will serve out the
rest of his term, it also appears certain that history will look upon him as a
president who sought to undermine civil liberties.
Unfortunately, given Bush's repeated assertions -- in defiance of America's
constitutional tradition of checks and balances -- that his office endows him
with unilateral powers to violate rights, he appears to be untroubled by that
prospect.
Aryeh Neier is the president of the Open Society Institute and a founder of
Human Rights Watch.
|