So Much Damage, Such a Nut-case
Reality-based folks may not actually learn much from this Greenwald post. Read it anyway!! It can't hurt (too much!) to be reminded how badly the bush administration has abused the concepts of democracy and freedom while pretending that these are the principles we are (ever so incompetently) insisting on fomenting elsewhere. Of course that was something like the fifth lame explanation for little george's semi-wet dream that getting a second war on was the secret to getting his sorry little testicles to finally drop. Do you suppose Laura has noticed the difference?
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Increasingly, there is simply no role for courts to review the President's actions, nor for citizens to challenge the legality and constitutionality of those actions. A month or so ago I wrote about the administration's rapidly increasing use of the "state secrets privilege" -- once a rarely invoked weapon used by the Government to prevent litigation from exposing critical national security secrets, but now something which the Bush administration routinely exploits to prevent any legal challenge to its behavior. As lawyer Henry Lanman details in Slate today:
Never heard of the "state secrets" privilege? You're not alone. But the Bush administration sure has. Before Sept. 11, this obscure privilege was invoked only rarely. Since then, the administration has dramatically increased its use. According to the Washington Post, the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press reported that while the government asserted the privilege approximately 55 times in total between 1954 (the privilege was first recognized in 1953) and 2001, it's asserted it 23 times in the four years after Sept. 11. For an administration as obsessed with secrecy as this one is, the privilege is simply proving to be too powerful a tool to pass up.
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Who has less credibility to deliver these sermons to the world than George Bush? The stories of the U.S. abducting people, torturing them, and then blocking any judicial review of its behavior are read around the world. Photographs from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are ingrained in the minds of anyone around the world with a television set, as is the Bush administration's insistence that it is unbound by the Geneva Conventions and legal prohibitions on the use of torture. The threat by Alberto Gonzales over the weekend to imprison American journalists was reported prominently in international newspapers, as are stories of the U.S. Government eavesdropping on its own citizens in secret, the creation of secret Eastern European prisons, and the general lawlessness which has prevailed in this country since September 11.
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As we lecture the world about the need for transparency and democracy, and as we continue to proclaim that our foreign policy is based principally on the objective of spreading our ideas about democracy to other countries -- even by military invasion, if necessary -- the U.S. has become a symbol of human rights abuses and anti-democratic measures around the world. We have squandered almost every molecule of moral credibility which we justifiably possessed for most of the 20th Century, particularly since World War II. In so many ways during the last five years, we have become a country which engages in those very practices which always characterized other countries, the ones we were grateful not to live in because they failed to protect the liberties and principles which defined the United States.
[clip]
The crux of the Bush administration for the last five years has basically been a competition of contrived, cheap manliness where the winner is he who can wage the most aggressive and fundamental war on American principles of government which have defined our country since its founding. Vesting increased power in the Commander-in-Chief and compiling ever-increasing powers of secrecy have been the only two principles with any recognized value. Those most steadfastly loyal to those two objectives have flourished and consolidated power. As a result, the role of the judiciary and the Congress in our system of government has never been smaller, while the power of the President has never been greater. And the greatest enemy of the administration are checks and balances of any kind -- whether from Congress, the courts or the media.
[clip]
Increasingly, there is simply no role for courts to review the President's actions, nor for citizens to challenge the legality and constitutionality of those actions. A month or so ago I wrote about the administration's rapidly increasing use of the "state secrets privilege" -- once a rarely invoked weapon used by the Government to prevent litigation from exposing critical national security secrets, but now something which the Bush administration routinely exploits to prevent any legal challenge to its behavior. As lawyer Henry Lanman details in Slate today:
Never heard of the "state secrets" privilege? You're not alone. But the Bush administration sure has. Before Sept. 11, this obscure privilege was invoked only rarely. Since then, the administration has dramatically increased its use. According to the Washington Post, the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press reported that while the government asserted the privilege approximately 55 times in total between 1954 (the privilege was first recognized in 1953) and 2001, it's asserted it 23 times in the four years after Sept. 11. For an administration as obsessed with secrecy as this one is, the privilege is simply proving to be too powerful a tool to pass up.
[clip]
Who has less credibility to deliver these sermons to the world than George Bush? The stories of the U.S. abducting people, torturing them, and then blocking any judicial review of its behavior are read around the world. Photographs from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are ingrained in the minds of anyone around the world with a television set, as is the Bush administration's insistence that it is unbound by the Geneva Conventions and legal prohibitions on the use of torture. The threat by Alberto Gonzales over the weekend to imprison American journalists was reported prominently in international newspapers, as are stories of the U.S. Government eavesdropping on its own citizens in secret, the creation of secret Eastern European prisons, and the general lawlessness which has prevailed in this country since September 11.
[clip]
As we lecture the world about the need for transparency and democracy, and as we continue to proclaim that our foreign policy is based principally on the objective of spreading our ideas about democracy to other countries -- even by military invasion, if necessary -- the U.S. has become a symbol of human rights abuses and anti-democratic measures around the world. We have squandered almost every molecule of moral credibility which we justifiably possessed for most of the 20th Century, particularly since World War II. In so many ways during the last five years, we have become a country which engages in those very practices which always characterized other countries, the ones we were grateful not to live in because they failed to protect the liberties and principles which defined the United States.
[clip]
The crux of the Bush administration for the last five years has basically been a competition of contrived, cheap manliness where the winner is he who can wage the most aggressive and fundamental war on American principles of government which have defined our country since its founding. Vesting increased power in the Commander-in-Chief and compiling ever-increasing powers of secrecy have been the only two principles with any recognized value. Those most steadfastly loyal to those two objectives have flourished and consolidated power. As a result, the role of the judiciary and the Congress in our system of government has never been smaller, while the power of the President has never been greater. And the greatest enemy of the administration are checks and balances of any kind -- whether from Congress, the courts or the media.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:52 PM
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