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The Unrestrained President
Mother Jones
By Tom Engelhardt
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 around 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 Engelhard
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