07.11.08

The idea of America as the beacon of liberty has survived until quite recently

Posted in The Role Of America In The World - Discussion, Recovering Founding Principles at 4:30 pm by Brian Schuettler

THE IDEA OF AMERICA, PART I
by Pierre Lemieux

As Lord Acton reminded us, the American Revolution exerted much influence in France and in the world. America was seen as a beacon of liberty. The Statue of Liberty proclaims: “From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome”. Liberty – individual liberty – was the essence of the idea of America. In his Civil Disobedience , Henry David Thoreau conveys the spirit when he reports that, in half an hour, he was “in a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.”

The idea of America as the beacon of liberty has survived until quite recently. For example, in a reflection on the growth of government surveillance, law professor Peter P. Swire writes, “the beacon of liberty argument suggests that U.S. adoption of surveillance tools can have significant negative effects elsewhere in the world.” “Instead of applying its weight on the side of liberty,” he explains, “the United States is becoming a leader in requiring surveillance technologies… The moral authority of the United States will be on the side of government rather than on the side of individual liberty.” Swire is not talking about the obvious growth of government surveillance that has followed 9/11: he was writing in 1999, and focussing mainly on the monitoring of financial transactions with tools like money-laundering controls.

When Was America?

Remember America? In the 1950s, there was no political correctness, and Americans were proud of their culture. Despite the grip of religion, one could privately indulge in pornography without much risk. More generally, one could quite safely entertain one’s vices on one’s private property. There were no laws against sexual harassment. There was already much economic regulation, often inherited from the 1930s, but it did not directly affect the average American, and men of business were not scared of the state. There was no public health insurance – no Medicare, no Medicaid. The owner of a restaurant or a bar could run it as he wished, and admit whomever he wanted, including smokers. The rule of law was still more a means for citizens to defend themselves against the state than a way for the state to control them. Except for the driver’s license, there were no ID papers, and even drivers’ licenses often did not bear photographs. Cops were humble, at least if you looked like a sovereign individual and knew how to talk. For a Western European immigrant, America was still a paradise of freedom and the easy life.

Better, consider the first decade of the 20th century. In general, anybody could start a business, find investors, and sell his product without any government license and oversight. There was no SEC, no IRS, no FCC, no FDA, no OSHA, no USCIS (formerly INS), no EPA. The absence of regulation did not prevent the development of vibrant capital markets, and New York City was on its way to becoming the top financial place in the world. The right to keep and bear arms, so typically American in the 20th century, had survived relatively unscathed. There was no witch-hunt and, in a legal fight between an individual and the government, it is the latter that felt handicapped. Writing in 1910, Lord Acton could confidently say that the American people are “more free than any other the world has seen.” In her celebration of American liberty in the early 20th century, Rose Wilder Lane could exclaim: “That is what Europeans meant when, after a few days in this country, they exclaimed, ‘You are so free here!’.”

And there was even more liberty before the Civil War – at least if one was a white man. “[W]e have gone downhill from the Revolution until now,” writes Voltairine de Cleyre.

Once, it seems, there was America.

When was America? It would be overly ambitious to try to answer this question. It is easier, even if less satisfying, to point out the opposition between the libertarian foundations of America, and how these ideas were implemented by American governments. Was it only St. John Crevecoeur’s French naïveté that made him fall in love with America’s “mild government,” and marvel at the colonists “all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they were equitable”? Lord Acton, a more serious analyst, notes that “the temper of the Constitutional Convention was as conservative as the Declaration of Independence was revolutionary.” The Founders were establishing a government, not an anarchistic society. When one starts thinking about America, one is immediately confronted by the puzzle of a powerful state trusted to protect the right of individuals to distrust it. The Revolution, argues Voltairine de Cleyre, aimed at “a change in the political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy,” and she adds parenthetically, “but not so much trusted as not to be continually watched.”

I will come back later to this paradox of a state to be simultaneously trusted and mistrusted. For the moment, let me underline a misleading aspect in the terminology of America’s founding. Using the term “States” to describe the former colonies had the unfortunate effect of abolishing the distance between the state and the subjects who, then, don’t live under a state but in a state. The danger is to disarm mistrust towards the state. Not only does this usage create much noise in international contexts, where “the government” usually means “the administration” (as opposed to the legislative and the judiciary), but it also confuses “the government” and “government,” as if criticizing “government” (i.e., “the state”) could only mean criticizing a specific administration. The reader will thus forgive me for disregarding the American terminology and reverting to the European usage. I will distinguish “the state” as an institution, from “States” as geographical jurisdictions (using a capital “S” for the latter) in America, and by “the American state,” I will mean the global apparatus of government in America.

The history of America does not show a linear progress of liberty. In the early colonies, Puritanism led to serious infringements of individual liberty. In the Connecticut Code of 1650, Tocqueville reports, “there was scarcely a sin which was not subject to magisterial censure.” “Sometimes,” he adds, “the zeal for regulation induces [the legislator] to descend to the most frivolous particulars; thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco.” And this was little compared to the burning of suspected witches in Massachusetts in the late 17th century. These theocratic trends had abated by the time Tocqueville wrote his Democracy in America in the early 19th century. Rothbard argues persuasively that the libertarian influence increased during the 18th century.

A reversal to authoritarian Puritanism occurred at the end of the 19th century, which can partly be traced to the increase in state power fuelled by the Civil War. The first federal law criminalizing the mailing of obscene material was adopted in 1865, the very year the Civil War ended. With Anthony Comstock’s crusade against birth control and obscenity, and the rise of the Temperance Movement, America seemed to be heading back to theocracy. In the early 20th century, anarchist and feminist Voltairine de Cleyre thought that the spirit of America had been lost. The Prohibition, which lasted from 1919 to 1933, continued to illustrate the dark side of American religion and busybodyism. Other “Comstock laws” had a longer shelf life. Until 1971, contraception was still on the postal prohibition list, and Wendy McElroy reports that, in the late 1960s, a U.S. customs officer forced an American woman to throw her diaphragm into the harbor before allowing her to reenter the country.

During the 20th century, the authoritarian strand in American religion became less influential. The battles won by the Larry Flints during the second half of the century could have suggested that Puritanism was dead. However, other sorts of prohibitionist and puritanical causes were resurrected under a trend that can be put under the general label of “political correctness.” Social and environmental stuff is the god of the new religion, which dictates socially acceptable opinions – on discrimination, feminism, life’s pleasures, the environment, etc. – and is translated into coercive laws.

Government economic intervention during the 19th century should not be underestimated, if only because of state-protected slavery. Radicals like Lysander Spooner and Henry David Thoreau were already raising red flags. Protectionism, in the form of high tariffs, was rampant. But, by and large, at least until the Civil War, if you were a white man, America was the freest economy in the world. From the late 19th century on, economic intervention gathered momentum with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 and the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

According to historian Jeffrey Hummel, the Civil War was “America’s Turning Point.” He argues that the War was basically an enterprise of aggrandizement of central power, of the American state as opposed to the Ameri-can States . The Civil War gave, if only temporarily, immense powers to the state, and “altered attitudes about government.” In 1869, George Ticknor, the well-know scholar and Harvard professor, wrote:

The civil war of ’61 has made a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born, or in which I received whatever I got of political education and principles.

“In contrast to the whittling away of government that had preceded Fort Sumter,” Hummel concludes, “the United States had commenced its halting but inexorable march toward the welfare-warfare state.”

In the field of taxation, the idea of America also started to be lost in the late 19th century. A temporary federal income tax was created in 1862 to finance the Civil War. Extended twice, it died in 1872, but was re-adopted by Congress in 1894, only to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1896. In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment legalized it. Frank Chodorov later wrote: “As a result of income taxation, we now have a government with far more power than George III ever exercised.”

The 1910s and 1920s were periods of great increases in government intervention. Between 1913 (the year when the Federal Reserve System was created) and 1920, total government expenditures grew from 7.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 12 per cent. The New Deal was another period of advancing government power, and Rose Wilder Lane, despite her earlier optimism, became very worried about the evolution of American politics. Total government expenditure reached 20 per cent of GDP before World War II, 27 per cent in 1960, and more than 30 per cent from 1980 until now.

For a long time, individual liberty was the essence of the idea of America as it was experienced through the country’s history. Whatever faults and rough edges characterized the average American, however naïve was his idea of individual independence, he was self-reliant, inventive, adventurous, and free. Mark Twain’s beautiful Old Times on the Mississippi (1875) illustrates this vividly.

America Today

What is left of the idea of America? It looks as if what Tocqueville had forecasted has arrived to America. “I had remarked during my stay in the United States,” wrote Tocqueville, “that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism.” Ancient tyrants like Roman emperors “possessed an immense and unchecked power” which they frequently used “to deprive their subjects of property or of life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the many; it was confined to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited.” The future democratic tyrannies will extend “over the whole community,” and maintain men “in perpetual childhood”: the state “provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry…” The state, as Tocqueville envisioned its future, “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd…it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Americans are now caught in the “network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform” that Tocqueville forecasted. Virtually all activities – even those protected by the Bill of Rights – are regulated in some way, and most often in many ways. Just at the federal level, there are probably 4,000 statutes, although it’s hard to tell the exact number, notes a Wall Street Journal reporter, “because the statutes aren’t listed in one place.” And this does not include the regulations. “We continue to claim that nobody is supposed to ignore the law,” wrote French legal theorist Georges Ripert in 1949, “but those who know it are certainly to be commended.” In 2001, federal prosecutors brought more than 80,000 cases. To this must be added the laws, regulations and prosecutions at the State and local levels. It is estimated that 15 per cent of all Americans have an arrest record. France has come to America.

James Bovard provides a vivid description of how today’s American state is powerful compared to the English state at the time of the Revolution:

The Massachusetts colonists rebelled after the British agents revived “writs of assistance” that allowed them to search any colonist’s property. Modern Americans submit passively to government sweep searches of buses, schools, and housing projects. Virginia revolted in part because King George imposed a two-pence tax on the sale of a pound of tea; Americans today are complacent while Congress imposes billions of dollars of retroactive taxes…Connecticut rebelled in part because the British were undermining the independence of judges; nowadays, federal agencies have the power to act as prosecutor, judge and jury in suits against private citizens. Maine revolted in part because the British Parliament issued a decree confiscating every white pine tree in the colony; modern Americans are largely complacent when local governments impose almost unlimited restrictions on individuals’ rights to use their own property. The initial battles of the Revolution occurred after British troops tried to seize the colonists’ private weapons; today, residents in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities submit to de facto prohibitions on handgun ownership…

Note again that Bovard was writing before 9/11. Whatever happened afterwards, the American state was, before 9/11, incredibly more powerful than the Founders, or the Americans of the late 19th-century, or even those of the 1950s, could ever imagine.

Consider two paradigmatic illustrations of the demise of the idea of America: the regulation of financial transactions and ID papers.

Serious monitoring of financial transactions can probably be traced to the creation of the SEC in 1934, but the agency’s original mission of monitoring the issuing of securities was only the opening salvo. Seventy-five years later, the state exerts totalitarian financial surveillance over, and imposes minute rules and regulations on, all kinds of financial transactions. Money laundering legislation was introduced in 1970, in order to fight the organized crime generated by the creation of victimless crimes by the state itself. Gradually tightened from the 1980s on, the legislation now allows the state to monitor all cash transactions over $10,000 and virtually all non-cash money transfers. Banks and other financial intermediaries have been drafted in the service of the state against money launderers, that is, against anybody who transfers money earned in one of the innumerable crimes manufactured by galloping legislation. Even after creating costly “compliance departments,” financial intermediaries are not immune to the risk of civil or criminal prosecution by the state. William McDavid, general counsel of J.P. Morgan Chase uses an analogy: “[T]hink if you are running a railroad, and we say to you, ‘We want you to monitor everyone who takes your train and see if their trip is legitimate.’” “One unintended consequence,” continues the Wall Street Journal , “is that banks are simply dropping small money-transfer businesses as clients, a move that could hurt millions of poor immigrants who send cash to relatives overseas.”

The SEC plays a major role in the witch-hunt against corporate executives and financial wizards (the modern Salem witches), and in the governance fad. Through civil suits and administrative proceedings and orders, the SEC mandates securities registration, regulates brokerage, trading and disclosure, and helps enforce the prohibition of insider trading. It scares large companies into settling suits without trial. Royal Dutch/Shell paid a U.S.$120-million settlement. The agency also imposes fines and work bans. It regulates stock exchanges, which were historically private organizations. It files civil suits against violators of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The president of the SEC scolded American CEOs: “You must have an internal code of ethics that goes beyond the letter of the law to also encompass the spirit of the law.” The problem is, where is the spirit of the law explained in writing, so that one knows what is required? Where is the rule of law? By mandating certain sorts of disclosure and preventing others, the SEC is, in fact, engaged in the control of information and speech. Where is the First Amendment?

The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act imposes such wide-ranging requirements to corporations that they now compel their employees to change their computer passwords frequently. The risk of forgetting passwords (of course) increases, with the consequence that corporate employees resort to insecure tricks, like writing passwords on sticky notes affixed to their computers.

“Americans today,” wrote Rose Wilder Lane in her famous 1936 celebration of the idea of America, “are the most reckless and lawless of peoples.” Tightly controlling and punishing financial entrepreneurs has been an important step in the taming of the reckless and the lawless – the Michael Milkens, the Martha Stewarts, the Conrad Blacks – that is, in the taming of America.

ID papers are another way of controlling the reckless and the lawless. “We were not obliged, as Continental Europeans have been,” wrote Rose Wilder, “to carry at all times a police card, renewed and paid for at intervals, bearing our pictures properly stamped and stating our names, ages, addresses, parentage, religion and occupation.” Parentage, religion and occupation are not important pieces of information on ID cards, as long as the state has related databases. Indeed, modern European ID cards don’t include all such details. What is dangerous with ID cards, or official ID papers in general, is that they help the state follow an individual from the cradle to the grave, and from one residence to another. Without ID papers, it is very costly for the state to enforce laws requiring that the whereabouts of the subjects be known; consequently, fewer such laws are enacted, and the ones that are cannot be efficiently enforced. It used to be that Americans could escape the state by disappearing where the state is nowhere to be seen, as Thoreau said. Jeffrey Hummel reports that, during the Civil War, about 13 per cent of soldiers, from both the North and the South, deserted, and that over half the deserters were never apprehended. This would be inconceivable with the surveillance apparatus of today’s American state, which relies heavily on the ubiquitous Social Security Number (SSN) and on ID papers – like drivers’ licenses or passports – that can be matched to the SSN or other identifiers.

The last half of the 20th century has seen the introduction of de facto ID papers in America. Simultaneously, the obligation to identify oneself – with official “photo ID,” of course – when agents of authority request it has appeared, and has been legalized by the recent judgment (split 5 to 4) of the Supreme Court in the Hiibel case. The intelligence reform bill adopted by Congress in December 2004 has gone further on the road to a national ID card by mandating federal standards on State driver’s licenses. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) declared, “Nationalizing standards for drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, and linking them together via a national database, creates a national ID system pure and simple.” This, warned Paul, points to “a Soviet-style internal passport system.” The fact that the 3,000-page bill was adopted 336 to 75 by the House, and 89 to two by the Senate, shows how far the idea of America has receded.

America has witnessed a large-scale highjacking of the law by the state. Inherited from the mother country, the rule of law was a crucial component of the idea of America. The Bill of Rights was meant to reinforce the common law guarantees against persecution through legal prosecution. These guarantees were gradually overcome by the state through its mere power to spend, the proliferation of laws, the federalization of virtually all crimes, and the use of civil courts to enforce laws (as opposed to criminal courts, where the burden of proof is much heavier). When the government cannot prove a crime without a reasonable doubt, it now has a whole panoply of legal instruments to threaten and punish virtually anybody it wants.

The events of September 11, 2001 have been used as an excuse to extend the requirement to carry official ID in long distance public transportation, as well as in many other cases. More generally, 9/11 has lowered the political cost of increasing state power. In that respect, the July 2004 Department of Justice report on the PATRIOT Act provides for interesting reading. The government argues that the new powers granted by the PATRIOT Act (wiretappings, searches, warrantless access to ISPs, etc.) have stopped a few terrorist conspiracies. But the report also confirms that the new powers have been used to hunt fraudsters, computer hackers, “individuals operating unlicensed money transmitting businesses that sent money to…India,” child pornographers, drug dealers, etc. The introduction of the report had already prepared the reader: “Some of the examples in this report do not involve terrorism but instead detail how the Department has used certain provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act to combat serious criminal conduct… Congress chose not to limit certain authorities contained in the USA PATRIOT Act only to the context of terrorism, and the examples contained in this report demonstrate the wisdom of that decision.” Recall that “USA PATRIOT” stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”

Editor’s Note: Pierre Lemieux is an economist affiliated with the Department of Management Sciences of the Université du Québec en Outaouais (pierre.lemieux@uqo.ca ). He is the author of many books, including The Idea of America , with co-author Bill Bonner. His latest work, Comprendre l’économie (Understanding Economics ), will be published at Les Belles Lettres (Paris) this fall. He has also authored a large number of articles, including in the Western Standard , where he was a columnist. He is now the Editor-in-Chief of LibertyInCanada.com (http://www.LibertyInCanada.com and, in French, at http://www.LIBERTEauCANADA.com ). His personal website is at http://www.pierrelemieux.org . 

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06.11.08

The Republic Under Siege : The Onslaught of Executive Tyranny and Judicial Fiat

Posted in Death of the West?, Culture Wars, What Is A Conservative? - Discussion, The Role Of America In The World - Discussion, Classical Liberalism, And what exactly is it you do?, The Primacy of Natural Law, Critical Thinking, The Tyranny of Relativism, An Informed Mind and Conscience, Recovering Founding Principles at 3:18 pm by Brian Schuettler

The George W. Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with an assault on U.S. civil liberty that Bush justified in the name of the “war on terror.” The government assured us that the draconian measures apply only to “terrorists.” The word terrorist, however, was not defined. The government claimed the discretionary power to decide who is a terrorist without having to present evidence or charges in a court of law.

Frankly, the Bush administration’s policy evades any notion of procedural due process of law. Administration assurances that harsh treatment is reserved only for terrorists is meaningless when the threshold process for determining who is and who is not a terrorist depends on executive discretion that is not subject to review. Substantive rights are useless without the procedural rights to enforce them.

Terrorist legislation and executive assertions created a basis upon which federal authorities claimed they were free to suspend suspects’ civil liberties in order to defend Americans from terrorism. Only after civil liberties groups and federal courts challenged some of the unconstitutional laws and procedures did realization spread that the Bush administration’s assault on the Bill of Rights is a greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.

The alacrity with which Congress accepted the initial assault from the administration is frightening. In 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act passed by a vote of 98 to 1 in the Senate and by 357 to 66 in the House. The act was already written and waiting on the shelf before the 9/11 attack. Indeed, the FBI and Department of Justice have tried for years to introduce PATRIOT Act provisions into the law. That act was introduced immediately after the attacks, and few members of Congress read its contents prior to passing it.

Federal courts declared some provisions of the legislation to be unconstitutional. Vague language criminalizing “expert advice or assistance” as material support for terrorism was thrown out, as were gag orders and “National Security Letters” used to obtain private information without judicial oversight. Despite challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union and resolutions passed in 8 states and 396 cities and counties condemning the act for its attack on civil liberties, Congress reauthorized the act in March 2006, making most of it permanent and sending a clear signal that the “war on terror” takes precedence over civil liberty.

The PATRIOT Act’s infringements of civil liberty are serious, but they pale by comparison to the Bush administration’s assertion of executive power to set aside habeas corpus protection for both citizens and noncitizens declared by the executive branch to be “enemy combatants.” The Bush administration claimed and exercised the power to hold indefinitely anyone so designated without access to legal representation. In other words, the Bush administration claimed the discretionary and unaccountable power to imprison whomever it wished.

In keeping with its self-declared powers, the Bush administration quickly rounded up hundreds of detainees whom it claimed – without evidence – to be “enemy combatants.” Four detainees, Rasul, Hamdi, Padilla, and Hamdan, consisting of a British citizen, two American citizens, and an Afghan, respectively, challenged the administration in federal court cases that reached the Supreme Court.

In Rasul v. Bush the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that, contrary to Bush administration assertions, the courts have jurisdiction over Guantánamo and that detainees must be allowed to challenge their detention.

Also in June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that Hamdi, an American citizen, was deprived of due process and had the right to challenge his detention. However, the ruling was far from a clean sweep for civil liberty. Both noted civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate (Reason, January 2005) and John Yoo, a Department of Justice apologist for the new tyranny, agree that the Supreme Court decision left flexibility and room for the government to maneuver and prevail in the end.

In December 2003, an appellate court ruled that U.S. citizen José Padilla could not be denied habeas corpus protection. To forestall another Supreme Court ruling against the Bush administration, the administration withdrew Padilla’s status as “enemy combatant” and filed criminal charges that bore no relationship to the administration’s original assertions that Padilla was plotting to explode a “dirty bomb” in an American city. As Harvey Silverglate has documented (Boston Phoenix, September 16, 2005), the Padilla case is also an extraordinary story of “forum shopping” (picking a court where judges are friendly to its case) by the Department of Justice.

Forced by the federal judiciary to release José Padilla from years of illegal detention or to put him on trial, the Bush administration had to scramble to put together some kind of charges. The best that the Bush administration could do was to charge Padilla not with any terrorist acts, but with wanting to be a terrorist – a “terrorist-wannabe” to use the words of Andrew Cohen (WashingtonPost.com, August 16, 2007).

By the time Padilla went to trial, he had been demonized for years in the media as an “enemy combatant” who intended to set off a radioactive bomb. Peter Whoriskey (Washington Post, August 17, 2007) described the Padilla Jury as a patriotic jury that appeared in court with one row of jurors dressed in red, one in white, and one in blue. It was a jury primed to be psychologically and emotionally manipulated by federal prosecutors. No member of this jury was going to return home to accusations of letting off the “dirty bomber.”

Evidence, of which there was little, if any, played no role in the case. The chief FBI agent, James T. Kavanaugh, testified in court that the intercepted telephone conversations were innocuous and contained no references to terrorism or Islamic extremism, but the jury wasn’t listening. The judge allowed prosecutors to show the jury a ten-year-old video of Osama bin Laden that had no relevance to the case, but which served to arouse in jurors fear, anger, and disturbing memories of September 11, 2001. The jury convicted Padilla on all counts, despite the total absence of any evidence that he had ever committed a terrorist act or had agreed to commit such an act.

By convicting Padilla, the jury opened Pandora’s box and created a Benthamite precedent for imprisoning U.S. citizens on the suspicion that they might commit a terrorist act.

In July 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that Bush’s military tribunals violate U.S. military law and the Geneva Conventions.

Republicans, who tend to regard civil liberties as devices that coddle criminals and terrorists, turned to legislation in attempts to subvert the Supreme Court’s defense of the U.S. Constitution. In November 2005, the Senate Republicans passed an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act offered by Lindsay Graham of South Carolina authorizing the president to deny habeas corpus protection to Guantánamo detainees. The fact that it was known by this time that the vast majority of the detainees were hapless individuals who were captured by Afghan warlords and sold to the Americans, who were paying a bounty for “terrorists,” carried no weight with the Republican senators.

The Republicans replied to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld with the Military Commissions Act passed in September 2006 and signed by Bush in October. The act strips detainees of protections provided by the Geneva Conventions: “No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights.” Other provisions of the act strip detainees of speedy trials and of protection against torture and self-incrimination. This heinous law has a breathtaking provision that retroactively protects torturers against prosecution for war crimes.

The act explicitly denies habeas corpus protection and access to federal courts to any alien detained by the U.S. government as an “enemy combatant” and any alien awaiting determination of his status. The act reads: “No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the US who has been determined by the US to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”

This act is as atrocious a piece of legislation as the world has ever seen. It permits people to be sentenced to death on the basis of hearsay, secret evidence, and on a confession extracted by torture. Indeed, detainees could be shot in the back of the head without undergoing the kangaroo tribunal and no one would ever know or be held legally responsible.

A number of legal experts have concluded that there is no assurance that the act cannot be applied to U.S. citizens. Although language in the act refers to “alien unlawful enemy combatant,” other language in the document does not limit the act’s applicability only to aliens. Legal scholars have warned that the legislation defines enemy combatant in such broad language that the act applies to any person whom the executive branch declares has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States. No evidence for the charge is necessary. By seizing the power to decide who is and who is not an “enemy combatant,” the executive branch has seized the power to decide who shall and who shall not be permitted the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The Bush administration has resurrected the dungeons and torture chambers that Blackstone’s Rights of Englishmen banished from the English-speaking world.

It is too early to know how the act will be interpreted and applied to American citizens or whether it can be challenged and overturned on constitutional grounds, but forebodings are severe. What we can say is that the act is draconian and dangerous legislation that is completely unnecessary. If the U.S. government has enough correct information to designate a person truthfully to be an enemy combatant, the U.S. government has enough information to put the person on trial in open court with all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to defendants. The U.S. government only needs indefinite detention, torture, and secret evidence when it has no evidence. Every American should be concerned that John Yoo, one of the Justice Department authors of this totalitarian legislation, is now a law professor at the University of California. Liberty has no future in America if law schools provide legitimacy to those who would subvert the U.S. Constitution.

The Assault on the Constitution

We concluded the first edition of this book with a call for “an intellectual rebirth, a revival of constitutionalism.” Alas, far from a rebirth of constitutionalism, we are witnessing a rending that we would not have imagined. On January 17, 2007, the attorney general of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, declared in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that “the Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas.” The chairman of the committee, Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) was incredulous when Gonzales insisted that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

In June 2007, Dick Cheney astonished Americans with his claim that the Office of Vice President is independent of both the executive branch and Congress and is accountable to neither.

Americans should pay attention to the power that the Bush administration is claiming over them. If Americans are not protected by habeas corpus, the government can pick us up at its will and cast us into dungeons for the rest of our lives without ever giving any accountability of its action. If the Constitution does not grant habeas corpus protection, the administration is under no compulsion to provide indictments, evidence, and trial. The government can simply imprison at will.

The Bush administration is using every strategy to push aside the remains of the legal principles that shield the people from arbitrary government power. It is a short step from denying Americans’ constitutional right to a public trial by an impartial jury to denying every other constitutional right. Clearly, on the basis of an indefinite “war” against an indefinite “terrorist enemy,” the Bush regime is attempting to claim powers that are not limited by the Constitution, Congress, or the courts. It is a life-and-death matter for Americans to understand that the Bush administration is seeking to undermine all rights by shutting off the procedural avenues for enforcing rights.

Few Americans seem alarmed. Conservative attorneys, such as members of the Federalist Society who present themselves as defenders of “original intent,” are pushing for more power to be concentrated in the executive. One of the tools used to obtain this goal is Bush’s misuse of “signing statements.” Scholars, such as Phillip J. Cooper of Portland State University writing in the September 2005 issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly, warn that Bush uses signing statements not only as illegal line-item vetoes that evade congressional override but also as “wide-ranging assertions of exclusive authority and court-like pronouncements that redefine legislative powers under the Constitution. They reveal a systematic effort to define presidential authority in terms of the broad conception of the prerogative both internationally and domestically under the unitary executive theory.”

Signing statements deserve a closer look than they are receiving. There is no provision in the Constitution for signing statements. Courts often look to congressional debates and proceedings to ascertain legislative intent when a statute’s meaning is not obvious. The Bush administration is endeavoring to establish the judicial practice of also looking to the president’s signing statements in the same way, an absurd idea as the president does not enact legislation. President Bush’s use of signing statements signals the refusal of the executive branch to abide by the rule of law, a frightening prospect.

A growing number of thoughtful Americans believe, rightly or wrongly, that the “war on terror” is a hoax that is providing cover for what former President Nixon’s White House counsel, John W. Dean, says is an assault on American liberty by “authoritarian conservatives.” Time will tell whether Americans will continue to tolerate the neoconservatives’ wars and attacks on civil liberty.

The Case of Sami Al-Arian

The demise of the Rights of Englishmen, the unaccountability of police and prosecutors, the witch-hunt atmosphere created by the “war on terror,” the government’s need to find terrorist suspects in order to maintain the public’s alarm, and the sadistic and bigoted attitudes of many prison guards and even federal prosecutors and judges toward Muslims have resulted in the use of law for persecution. The case of Sami Al-Arian, who was a professor of computer science at the University of South Florida, is a pure example of the use of law as a weapon for persecution.

Most Americans know only the Israeli side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian side is rarely heard. Even prominent Americans, such as former president Jimmy Carter, who point out that there are two sides to the story, are subjected to demonization and name-calling. Sami Al-Arian was gaining success as a voice for a more even-handed Middle East policy. He spoke to intelligence personnel and military commanders at MacDill Air Force Central Command. He gave interviews. He even invited the FBI to attend meetings where he spoke.

This was too much for the Israeli Lobby, which has enjoyed a total monopoly on the explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. The hysteria following 9/11 created the opportunity to destroy Sami Al-Arian. Alexander Cockburn (CounterPunch, March 3, 2007) reports that “at the direct instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft” trumped-up terrorism and conspiracy charges were leveled at Al-Arian.

The neoconservative media and right-wing talk radio went to work on Al-Arian. Pushed by Gov. Jeb Bush, the university fired him. He was arrested and deemed too dangerous for bail. He was held in solitary confinement for two and a half years while the federal government tried to manufacture some evidence against him. Wikipedia reports that “Amnesty International said Al-Arian’s pre-trial conditions ‘appeared to be gratuitously punitive’ and stated ‘the restrictions imposed on Dr. Al-Arian appeared to go beyond what were necessary on security grounds and were inconsistent with international standards for humane treatment.’”

The government failed to produce any evidence. The jury acquitted Al-Arian on all serious charges and voted 10–2 for acquittal on all other charges. The jury acquitted him despite U.S. District Court judge James Moody’s many biased rulings against Al-Arian.

Knowing that Al-Arian and his family could not stand the strain of solitary confinement for another two and a half years while a new case was prepared, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would retry him. His attorney urged him to make a plea in order to end the ordeal.

Al-Arian’s plea is innocuous and bears no relationship to the serious charges on which he was tried. According to Wikipedia, as part of the plea agreement “the government acknowledged that Al-Arian’s activities were non-violent and that there were no victims to the charge in the plea agreement.”

Under the plea agreement, Al-Arian’s sentence amounted essentially to time served, but he was double-crossed by Judge Moody, who according to Alexander Cockburn used “inflamed language about Al-Arian having blood on his hands” (a charge rejected by the jury) and handed down the maximum sentence.

The “terrorist” prosecutors had yet more in store for Al-Arian. In October 2006, federal prosecutor Gordon Kromberg, reportedly “notorious as an Islamophobe,” demanded, in violation of the plea agreement, that Al-Arian testify before a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, investigating an Islamic research center. According to Wikipedia, “in a verbal agreement that appears in court transcripts, federal prosecutors agreed [as part of the plea agreement] that Al-Arian would not have to testify in Virginia.”

Al-Arian’s lawyers saw Kromberg’s subpoena of their client as a setup, and Al-Arian refused to testify. On January 22, 2007, Al-Arian was brought before a federal judge on contempt charges. He described to the judge the extraordinary abuse he had suffered at the hands of federal prison officials. The guards and officers all felt free to abuse Al-Arian, because they had heard the lie on right-wing talk radio and from neoconservative media that he was a terrorist who hated Americans. The hostile judge sentenced Al-Arian to eighteen months more on a civil contempt charge for refusing to testify about a case that he knew nothing about.

Kromberg contrived to put Al-Arian in a situation in which truthful answers in court under oath could be turned into a perjury charge by offering the defendants reduced charges in exchange for their testimony that Al-Arian was involved with them in some alleged activity and lied under oath. Alternatively, Al-Arian would be cited for civil contempt for refusal to testify. The ease with which Kromberg violated the plea agreement and abused the prosecutorial power in full view of federal judges should give pause to every American.

When a university professor, who has done nothing but try to correct the one-sided story Americans are fed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, can be treated in this way by the U.S. Department of Justice, civil liberty in the United States is in a precarious condition.

The ease with which Al-Arian was transformed into a terrorist should be a lesson to us all. People in charge of Homeland Security are no less inclined than police and prosecutors to make expansive interpretations of their mandate and what constitutes terrorism and suspect behavior. On May 28, 2007, the Associated Press reported that the Alabama Department of Homeland Security had included among terrorist groups listed on its Web site environmentalists, antiwar protesters, abortion opponents, and gay- and animal-rights advocates. It is an ancient practice of government to hype fear in order to gain arbitrary power that can be turned against anyone. Perhaps this expansive definition of terrorist explains the eighty thousand names on the government’s no-fly list.

Another problem with arbitrary and undefined power is that it ends up being exercised by people who tend to receive low marks for good judgment and intelligence. English film director Mike Figgis was held for five hours in an interrogation cell at Los Angeles International Airport because U.S. immigration officers are unfamiliar with the professional language of television show producers and lacked the common sense to avoid a misunderstanding. When asked the reason for his visit, Figgis said: “I’m here to shoot a pilot.” “Shoot,” of course, means to film, and “pilot” is the first episode of a new TV show. The people providing our security concluded that Figgis had voluntarily confessed to a plot to come to America in order to murder an airline pilot. Figgis survived his assumption that people in Los Angeles understood movie talk, but the desire of people empowered to thwart terrorism to use their power is great. Any excuse will do.

Sliding Toward Dictatorship

The assaults of the Bush regime on civil liberty, the Constitution, and the separation of powers are more determined and more successful than its military assaults on the Middle East, which provide the “war time” justification for the attack on civil liberty in the United States. The regime and its supporters are determined to raise the president to dictatorial powers, at least in times of war, the initiation of which is being turned into a presidential prerogative.

On May 9, 2007, President Bush signed the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive. If in the president’s opinion a “catastrophic emergency” occurs, the directive places all governmental power in the hands of the president, effectively abolishing the checks and balances in the Constitution. Underlying this directive is the “unitary executive” doctrine, a theory pushed by the Federalist Society, an important source of law clerks, DOJ appointees, and judicial nominees for the Republican Party. The doctrine, supported by Supreme Court justices such as Samuel Alito, claims that the executive power of the president is completely separate and independent of the legislative and judicial powers and not subject to infringement by them. The manner in which this doctrine is being institutionalized is creating the additional claim that executive power is the supreme power. In effect, unitary executive theory is elevating the president to a dictator with the power to ignore or suspend laws.

The unitary executive doctrine is a direct attack on the constitutional separation of powers established by the Founding Fathers. One of the alleged advantages of the unitary executive is that the president can act more quickly and efficiently if he is not subject to interference from Congress and the judiciary. However, as Justice Louis Brandeis explained in 1926, “the doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.”

News reports that the Bush administration has contracted with Halliburton to build detention centers in the United States at a cost of $385 million revive memories of the World War II detention of Japanese American citizens. It has not been explained who are the intended detainees for the new detention centers. Do the American people want to trust with detention centers an executive branch, which claims the power to set aside habeas corpus, statutory law, due process, and the prohibition against torture?

Polls show that 36 percent of the American public and more than half of New Yorkers lack confidence in the 9/11 Commission Report. Despite a significant percentage of the public’s disbelief in the explanation of the event that took America to war in the Middle East, Congress and the media continue to tolerate the Bush administration’s aggressive rhetoric, which seeks to widen the “war on terror” from Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. The diligence with which Vice President Cheney and the neoconservatives press for an attack on Iran, and the extreme position that the Bush administration has taken on executive power, raise the question whether the Bush administration has an agenda that takes precedence over America’s constitutional democracy.

Never in its history have the American people faced such danger to their constitutional protections as they face today from those in the government who hold the reins of power and from elements of the legal profession and the federal judiciary that support “energy in the executive.” An assertive executive backed by an aggressive U.S. Department of Justice and unobstructed by a supine Congress and an intimidated corporate media has demonstrated an ability to ignore statutory law and public opinion. The precedents that have been set during the opening years of the twenty-first century bode ill for the future of American liberty.

Excerpted from The Tyranny of Good Intentions by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Paul Craig Roberts a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades.Lawrence M. Stratton is a Ph. D. candidate in Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary and a former adjunct professor of Georgetown University Law Center. He is currently on the adjunct Ethics faculty at Villanova University. A new edition of their book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has just been released by Random House.

Copyright © 2008 Paul Craig Roberts

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06.06.08

Remembering RFK

Posted in 2008 Campaign, The Role Of America In The World - Discussion, The Real Democrats, The Suffering Poor, Existentialists at 12:57 pm by Brian Schuettler

RFK and the Death of American Idealism

By Joseph Palermo

http://hnn.us/articles/50982.html

The lengthy primary campaign of 2008 has produced a bevy of tasteless references to political assassination in general, and to Robert F. Kennedy’s killing in particular. The former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, made a shameless wisecrack in front of the National Rifle Association about Barack Obama diving to the ground after someone pointed a gun at him. Hillary Clinton has on at least two occasions brought up Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination as evidence that “anything can happen” in a presidential race. Fox News sunk to a new low by giving a platform to a “political analyst” named Liz Trotta who riffed on Clinton’s remarks and interpreted them as suggesting “that somebody knock off Osama, um, Obama — well, both, if we could.” I never thought I would see the day when presidential candidates and television commentators would be wisecracking and making light of the nation’s scourge of public figures being gunned down in recent American history.

On January 4, 2008, I posted a blog where I drew on the RFK experience and raised the issue of powerful forces in this country that are currently profiting from the Iraq war wishing to do harm to a presidential candidate who might put the brakes on their gravy train. I received a lot of angry emails from people who were appalled that I would suggest that a political assassination could take place in America in this day and age. And then just a few months later I hear presidential candidates and commentators yukking it up about the RFK assassination and “joking” about gunplay aimed at Obama. It’s sad and obscene.

After Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, people throughout California collected tens of thousands of handguns and melted them down to create a giant metal sculpture. Two million people lined the tracks to pay their respects as Kennedy’s funeral train traveled from New York to Washington. The killing of Robert Kennedy was widely recognized as an unmitigated disaster for the country with lasting historical consequences. But I guess after 40 years our contemporary political discourse has become so callous and cynical that no national tragedy of the magnitude of Robert Kennedy’s assassination has the power to shame us anymore.

On the night of June 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy was mingling with well-wishers in a crowded suite in the Ambassador Hotel when television news reporters began haranguing him to give his victory speech before Californians retired for the night. He had beaten Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy in the pivotal California primary, and now Kennedy was poised to wrest the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination away from Vice President Hubert Humphrey. At about 11:30 pm, flanked by his aides and half a dozen journalists, Kennedy entered a packed elevator and went down to speak. The huge Embassy Room ballroom was clogged with celebrants, campaign workers, reporters, photographers, and Kennedy partisans of all kinds. When he finally appeared at the podium, the several thousand revelers greeted him with thunderous applause. “If there is one lesson of this political year,” he began, “it is that the people of this country wish to move away from the politics which led to an endless war abroad and to increasing unrest in our own country.” Senator McCarthy’s supporters “deserve the gratitude of the nation,” he said, “for the courageous fight which helped to break the political logjam, demonstrated the desire for change, and helped make citizen participation into a new and powerful force of our political life.”

But Kennedy wasted no time in focusing his attention on Humphrey who he had to beat to win the nomination. In all of the primaries the voters had “rejected those slates of delegates committed to the Johnson-Humphrey Administration,” he said. “I cannot believe that the Democratic Party will nominate a man whose ideas and programs have been so decisively rejected. Yet the Vice President apparently believes he can win the nomination without once submitting his case to the people.” He wanted a face-to-face meeting: “I will go any place any time to meet the Vice President in a televised debate.” Standing at the podium, with Ethel, Jesse Unruh, Dolores Huerta, and many others by his side, Kennedy continued, “I am the only candidate committed to a realistic negotiated solution to the Vietnamese war, one embracing all the elements of the South Vietnamese population, and opposed to the use of American military force to carry the major burden of what should be essentially a Vietnamese conflict. In fact, I am the only candidate with policies likely to bring an honorable peace to let the killing stop. . . . ”

“What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis, and that what has been going on within the United States over a period of the last three years. The divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society — the divisions, whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups, or on the war in Vietnam — is that we can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. I intend to make that the basis for running.”

He thanked dozens of people by name who were involved in getting out the vote, as well as Ethel, Cesar Chavez, and the athletes Rosie Grier and Rafer Johnson who helped in the black communities. He also thanked his dog “Freckles,” who accompanied him on the campaign trail, which evoked cheers and laughter. “Where’s Freckles?” someone shouted out; “he’s sleeping right now,” Kennedy replied with a broad smile. “I thank all of you who made this possible this evening. All the effort you made, and all of the people whose places I haven’t been to, but who made or did all of the work at the precinct level, got out the vote . . . brought forth all of the efforts required. I was a campaign manager eight years ago, and I know what a difference that kind of effort, and that kind of commitment can make. My thanks to all of you, and on to Chicago, and let’s win there.” He flashed a “V” for victory with his right hand, swept back his forelock, and stepped back from the podium.

Amidst a deafening ovation, Kennedy slowly made his way from the dais through the masses of people milling about behind the stage, and moved toward a doorway that led to the hotel’s kitchen. A press conference was to take place in a room on the other side of the ballroom. Getting there through the kitchen seemed to be wiser than trying to push through the middle of the crowd. He disappeared into the pantry, which was stuffed with some seventy campaign workers, reporters, and food service employees. He paused to shake hands with workers from the hotel staff, and to sign a few autographs. Suddenly, a small man to Kennedy’s right who had been crouching behind a stack of metal trays lunged forward and began discharging a handgun. A clump of people surged toward the assailant as he wildly emptied his 22-caliber eight-shot revolver. Gunfire wounded five, including the union leader, Paul Schrade, who was shot in the head. But Kennedy received the worst of it: a single bullet with an upward trajectory had entered his brain from just below his right ear. The muzzle had been no farther than three inches from his head. The gun was a $30 Iver-Johnson pistol.

For eighty-five days, Kennedy had worked harder and longer hours on the campaign than anyone else. He looked forward to a relaxing night of celebration. He and Ethel planned to have dinner and drinks with close friends at a swanky Los Angeles eatery. Instead, he found himself collapsed on the greasy concrete floor of the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen pantry.

In the twenty-five hours following the shooting, Kennedy was transferred to two hospitals, and he underwent four hours of brain surgery. As he fought for his life at Good Samaritan hospital, mournful well wishers amassed at the front of the building. A makeshift pressroom was set up, and Frank Mankiewicz had the grim task of periodically updating the world about Kennedy’s condition. In the end, the damage from bullet and bone fragments was too severe. Mankiewicz made a brief announcement: “Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. With the Senator at the time of his death was his wife, Ethel, his sisters, Mrs. Patricia Lawford and Mrs. Stephen Smith, and his sister-in-law, Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was forty-two years old.”

In New York, schools closed, and a television station broadcast the single word “SHAME” for nearly three hours. Ethel Kennedy, who was expecting her eleventh child that October, received over 325,000 letters of sympathy. Condolence telegrams flooded Kennedy’s Senate office from Poland, South Africa, Vietnam, Argentina, and dozens of other countries. Sorrow and disbelief produced an “eerie quietness” in the city of Los Angeles. The student editor of the U.C.L.A. Daily Bruin said he believed the killing of Robert Kennedy would “make young people completely unreachable.”

President Johnson responded to the news: “This is a time of tragedy and loss. Senator Robert Kennedy is dead. Robert Kennedy affirmed this country — affirmed the essential decency of its people, their longing for peace, their desire to improve conditions of life for all. . . . Our public life is diminished by his loss.” The President ordered Secret Service protection for the remaining candidates, and offered the Kennedy family use of Air Force One. Eugene McCarthy suspended his campaign and visited the hospital; he linked the tragedy to “the disposition of violence, which we have visited upon the rest of the world.”

A Jordanian immigrant was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the murder. Press accounts portrayed the 24-year-old, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, as a Palestinian extremist. A newspaper clipping found in his pocket reported a speech Kennedy had given to a Los Angeles Jewish group where he endorsed the sale of jet fighters to Israel. But Kennedy’s speech that day was election year boilerplate. The killer had allegedly singled him out because of his mainstream support of the Jewish state; he could have just as easily targeted Humphrey, McCarthy, or Richard Nixon for the same offense.

Although the press portrayed Sirhan as an assassin with a clear political motive, he allegedly filled notebooks with repetitive hand-written gibberish. The phrase “RFK Must Die” is scrawled over again, filling pages of his notebooks, followed by: “Pay to the Order of” in identical form. They appear to be the work of a psychotic rather than an assassin with “rational” aims. Curious for a fanatic, he never staked claim to his deed, but said he could “not remember” the shooting. (It might have been a ploy for his defense to avoid the death penalty.) The Mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty, told reporters that Sirhan was a “Communist.” The killer’s grand “political” motive may have been an afterthought to give meaning to a senseless act in an era plagued by them. Or it may have been an attempt to snuff out public talk of conspiracies after the lingering doubts about the events of November 1963. (A Gallup poll taken the day after Robert Kennedy was shot showed that the public by a wide margin believed it was a product of a conspiracy.)

There is new acoustic evidence from tape recordings of the Ambassador Hotel’s pantry that night that suggests, as Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy did, that there were two firing positions: One in front of Kennedy where Sirhan was shooting wildly and wounding people behind the Senator, the other at extremely close range just behind Kennedy where the fatal head wound originated. The historian Philip Melanson and other authors have raised legitimate questions about some of the actions of the Los Angeles Police Department, (particularly the “Special Unit Senator” that ran the investigation), with respect to the treatment of the crime scene, the questioning of witnesses, and the destruction and handling of evidence. There is a new and interesting book on the assassination by the Irish-born writer, Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, which explores some of the inconsistencies with the “open and shut” case that convicted Sirhan as the crazed “lone gunman.” Paul Schrade, the labor leader who was shot in the head that night while standing behind Kennedy, has worked for years to try to reopen the case. Although it is not well known, the LAPD, and particularly the officer in charge of test firing the weapon allegedly used in the killing, DeWayne Wolfer, never even came close to proving with ballistic evidence that any of the bullets that hit Kennedy came from Sirhan’s Iver-Johnson.

Kennedy’s body was flown to New York where he lay for two days in the vaulted nave of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Over 100,000 people lined up for twenty-five blocks, some of them waiting five or six hours just to walk past his coffin. The diversity of those who came to show their respects was a testimony to Kennedy’s wide-ranging appeal. Edward Kennedy gave the eulogy. He had lost the last of his three brothers. He said Robert Kennedy should be remembered “simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

A funeral train carried Kennedy’s body to Washington. Thousands of people lined the tracks; some held American flags and plaintively sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” On television, as the twenty-car locomotive set out on its final leg, with the flag-draped coffin visible in the last car, Walter Cronkite, intoned: “It is the end of a brilliant political and public career.” Kennedy’s death also marked the end of an era, and a grave setback for those who were trying to stop the Vietnam War. On June 8, 1968, he was laid to rest not far from the eternal flame of his brother’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

Robert Francis Kennedy embodied the roles of activist and politician. His views on the perennial American problems of foreign wars, poverty, and racial strife continue to resonate. He had the unique ability to challenge people morally, and to stand together with those who wished to build a more humane society.

The killing of Robert F. Kennedy was particularly brutal coming just eight weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and less than five years after the murder of President John F. Kennedy. The leader of the peace wing of the Democratic Party was removed from national politics with a shocking abruptness. His death came at a time when the party and the nation were bitterly divided, when there were riots in the cities and over a half million American soldiers fighting in Southeast Asia. The silencing of Robert Kennedy’s voice could not have come at a worst time for the nation. His death cleared the path for the presidency of Richard Nixon with all of its attendant cynicism and divisive tactics that have had a lasting imprint even to this day.

Given our horrific recent history of assassinations that disfranchised millions of voters and robbed a generation of some of its best young leaders I fail to see “humor” in jokes about guns being aimed at candidates or public musings about how the killings affected the political chances of rivals. On the 40th anniversary of the death of Robert F. Kennedy, we should honor the memory of an extraordinary public servant and idealistic leader, and take a step back from the cynicism of our current political discourse and reflect for a moment on how America might be different today had he been allowed to live out his natural life.

Description	Senator Robert Kennedy discusses school with young Ricky Taggart of 733 Gates Ave. / World Telegram & Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico.

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When You Want Their Silence…Call Them Hitlerian

Posted in The Role Of America In The World - Discussion at 12:42 pm by Brian Schuettler

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals. … We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ “—George W. Bush, May 2008

“Moreover, in our time, these threats are not diminishing … [and] in these new threats, as during the time of the Third Reich, are the same contempt for human life and the same claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world.”—Vladimir Putin, May 2007

No, by citing these two quotations, I am not drawing comparisons between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, two vastly different men. Nevertheless, it is clear from the above that Bush and Putin, despite their vast differences, do share a common ailment: They both suffer from the inexplicable need to inject the Nazis into current political debate whether they belong there or not.

True, it seems that Nazi analogies can be used with almost infinite flexibility. Bush—in what was widely interpreted as an attack on Barack Obama last week—was making a point about politicians who talk to “terrorists and radicals,” comparing them to those who appeased Hitler in the 1930s. Putin, in what was widely interpreted as an attack on the Bush administration last year, was comparing the Nazis to contemporary regimes with “contempt for human life” and “claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world”—in other words, the United States.

But the Nazis have been invoked in arguments over many other causes. In a speech explaining what “this Kosovo thing is all about,” Bill Clinton once justified his decision to bomb Serbia by asking, “What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?” His secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was also fond of telling reporters that “Munich is my mind-set,” meaning Europe’s decision to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938. In 2006, a British group opposed to national identity cards designed an ad that depicted Tony Blair as Hitler with a bar code in place of a mustache. Last spring, American feminist Naomi Wolf compared Hitler’s brownshirts, the thugs who smashed Jewish shops and murdered old men, with the “[g]roups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers” who “menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000.” On Sunday, Al Gore told college seniors that fighting global warming was comparable to fighting fascism. And, of course, Saddam Hussein has been compared to Hitler many times, by many people, of many different political views.

I am not, I hasten to add, arguing here against the public discussion of history. If the Nazis were being invoked more generally—in warnings, say, about the unpredictability of totalitarian regimes—they might be a useful part of a number of discussions. Unfortunately, Nazi analogies are nowadays usually deployed in order to end arguments, not to broaden them. Once you inject “Hitler” or “the Third Reich” into a debate, you have evoked the ultimate form of evil, put your opponent in an indefensible position—”What, you’re opposed to a war against Hitler?”—and for all practical purposes halted the conversation.

Invoking the Nazis also changes the tenor of a debate. There may be good, tactical reasons for choosing not to negotiate with Hezbollah or the Iranian regime, for example (the best reason, usually, is that the relevant diplomats are fairly sure that negotiations won’t work). But calling opponents of this policy “appeasers” distorts the debate, giving tactical choices a phony moral grounding. In reality, circumstances do change, even where “terrorists and radicals” are involved, as this administration in particular knows perfectly well.

Clearly the circumstances changed, for example, in the case of North Korea, a regime that was featured as a part of the axis of evil in 2002 and with whose leadership a number of Bush administration officials now negotiate full-time. As it happens, I’ve got no problem calling North Korea “evil,” and I dislike the current negotiations, not least because they perpetuate the illusion that the United States, not China, is the most influential foreign player on the Korean peninsula.

Still, that doesn’t mean that the Americans participating in talks with North Korea are the precise contemporary equivalents of Neville Chamberlain, and it doesn’t mean that the North Koreans are about to invade Poland. By the same token, we don’t learn anything useful by calling Kim Jong-il “Hitler,” we haven’t achieved much by calling Bush or Blair a Nazi, and the idea that people who want to negotiate with Iran are the moral equivalent of Vichy collaborators is ridiculous. Seventy years have now passed. Let’s put the ghosts of Munich to rest, this time for good.

Anne Applebaum at Slate >>>>>   http://www.slate.com/id/2191698/

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The Long Road to Freedom and Justice for All

Posted in One Nation Under God, the concrete reality of a being, The Role Of America In The World - Discussion, The Primacy of Natural Law at 8:47 am by Brian Schuettler

Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative

MARY L. DUDZIAK University of Southern California Law School Stanford Law Review, Vol. 41, 1988

Abstract:      At the height of the McCarthy era, when Congressional committees were exposing “communist infiltration” in many areas of American life, the Supreme Court was upholding loyalty oath requirements, and the executive branch was ferreting out alleged communists in government, the U.S. Attorney General filed a pro-civil rights brief in what would become one of the most celebrated civil rights cases in American history: Brown v. Board of Education. Although seemingly at odds with the restrictive approach to individual rights in other contexts, the U.S. government’s participation in the desegregation cases during the McCarthy era was no anomaly. Rather, by the early 1950s, American leaders had come to believe that civil rights reform was crucial to the more central U.S. mission of fighting world communism. Based in part on diplomatic research in State Department archives, this article demonstrates that Cold War motives influenced the U.S. government’s involvement in Brown and other cases.  Originally published in 1988 in the Stanford Law Review, this article was the first publication to use State Department records to examine the relationship between Cold War foreign relations and civil rights in the United States. Diplomatic records illustrate the growing concern among American diplomats and political leaders after World War II about the impact of race discrimination on the U.S. image around the world, and the global critique that the United States could not be an effective “leader of the free world” as long as the nation blatantly denied rights to its own peoples. This research confirmed the suspicions of Derrick Bell and others who argued before these records were opened that foreign affairs affected U.S. government civil rights policies, and it helped illuminate the world-wide impact of the civil rights movement. This research was expanded upon in Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000), and in books and articles by other scholars. The larger body of work on race and foreign relations is an important aspect of efforts by historians to “internationalize” the study of American history. Thanks to the Stanford Law Review, the article is now available on SSRN so that it will be easily accessible on-line. Registration required to read abstract: Dudziak, Mary L., “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative” (1988). Stanford Law Review, Vol. 41, 1988 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1137993

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America: the Latest Colonial Empire?

Posted in Just War Doctrine Discussion, 2008 Campaign, The Role Of America In The World - Discussion at 8:38 am by Brian Schuettler

Bush Blackmailing al-Maliki with $50 Bn. in US Fed

 

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