There was a headline in the Onion that read "Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be."
Our elected officials, even on local school boards and so forth, swear oaths to defend the Constitution. We kick in doors at night and shoot families in Afghanistan to supposedly defend the Constitution. But we can't know if people are doing their jobs unless we read the thing. We'll still have the problem of all of its many shortcomings, but we'll be able to better protect what it does provide if we know what's in there. And if you think you'll forget, just carry it with you like I do. Read it to Capitol Police officers as appropriate.
We are supposed to have a transparent government answerable to we the people. If you're a Republican and like wars and don't believe in global warming or the round globe, then Dick Cheney holding secret meetings with oil company CEOs to plan our military and energy policies is no big worry. If you're a Democrat and convinced that anything Republicans consider satanic communism must be pretty good, then Obama holding secret meetings with health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to set our healthcare policies is just part of the game. But if you're a human being, you should be worried. Secret government has not proven to be a way to get the wisest and most honest advice. It's proven to result in people doing things in secret that we wouldn't let them get away with in public.
For two and a quarter centuries presidents have accumulated power and passed it on to their successors, who have accepted what they've been given and added a little more -- or a lot more in some cases. The president we needed after Bush, in the absence of a Congress with a pulse or a populace out en masse shutting the city down with its demands, the president we needed (but will never get without compelling it ourselves) was one who came in and said:
We will henceforth have the rule of law, not the law of rulers. The new Justice Department will answer to our Constitution, the treaties that form a part of it, and the statutes that are on our law books, not to me. Crimes will be investigated and prosecuted, beginning with the most serious crimes by the highest officials. Where appropriate cases will also be referred to the International Criminal Court. Laws that have been created through signing statements, secret memos, and executive orders and decrees are not laws. They will all be made public if they are not yet. They will all be eliminated. We will make public all evidence of the workings of our government that does not needlessly endanger someone. This will include text, photographs, and videos, including those depicting horrible acts of torture, rape, and murder. We are past the point of outraging people abroad. What they need to understand is that we are repudiating such conduct, forswearing similar behavior in the future, and backing up our words by deterring crime through law enforcement and, where the courts see fit, through restitution to victims. Allowing this information to dribble out in the form of partial rumors, accompanied by the certainty that no one is being held accountable, would merely encourage animosity abroad and, at home, the militarism, xenophobia, and bigotry behind these crimes. Before long we would be having churches trying to burn Korans. It is better to turn the page, not by blithely announcing that I've turned a page, but by fully airing the facts and punishing those responsible rather than waiting for someone else to attempt to punish us all, including the innocent, be it with a bomb in Times Square or something even worse.
This wasn't what Barack Obama said. It was even further from what he did. He re-wrote laws with signing statements, kept open the option of creating laws with secret memos, and this week appeared to announce his intention to violate a law prior to its passage. He publicly told the attorney general to back off torture prosecutions. He allowed his staff to make clear that he claims the power to torture and rendition if he chooses. He expanded presidential powers of secrecy and immunity tremendously. A decision in the ninth circuit court of appeals last week agreed with the current Justice Department and denied torture victims access to courts to sue for damages, on grounds of national security. Why is it compensating victims that endangers our security and not the torture itself? If a piece of evidence might actually endanger someone, why not have a judge review that claim in closed chambers rather than blocking whole categories of law suits?
As the Democratic nominee for the White House, Obama reversed his promise to filibuster any bill giving immunity to corporations that have helped the government spy on us without warrants; he supported the bill. Warrantless spying programs have apparently continued, which is what things tend to do when they are rewarded rather than punished. And when you grant immunity, you're not just pardoning crimes, you're also preventing the public from learning exactly what crimes you're pardoning and even whom you're pardoning. We're left to guess based on such circumstantial evidence as AT&T's sponsorship of the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
The announcement of the closure of Gitmo was a nice start, and would have been easy to follow through on. You just had to try people for crimes in credible courts of law or set them free. But President Obama decided there was a third category of prisoner, those he wanted to hold indefinitely without putting them on trial. And the larger prison at Bagram was never a big issue in the news anyway. So our death camps -- which is what you call a place you take people and give them no hope of ever leaving -- are still grinding along.
Adding insult to injury, President Obama stood in front of the Constitution in the National Archives and threw habeas corpus out the window. After 800 years of believing people should be given a fair trial before imprisonment, I guess it was time for a change.
In England they have had non-stop inquiries into the Iraq War lies since 2003, and memos have leaked out, tell-all books have been published. In this country, the Iraq War is being recuperated. You can't have wars without lies. We're going to have more wars. So, we can't leave people thinking the Iraq war was all bad. Three weeks ago the President spoke from the oval office and breathed new life into all the lies. The War on Iraq was begun to disarm a nation, he told us. Our innocent troops go caught up in the barbarians' civil war. But we kept on killing them for their own good. And with dedication, the war was then won in 2007 through a surge of additional troops.
That surge was in reality very small and the reasons for the gradual decline in violence had nothing to do with it and are not present in Afghanistan -- reasons including massive death and displacement, a unilateral ceasefire by the largest militia, bribery, and indications followed by a commitment to withdraw. None of the surge's political goals were, in fact, accomplished at all.
But this was a speech by a man who, for the first time in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, had given an acceptance speech arguing for the necessity of war and his power to launch wars. George Mason said at the Constitutional Convention "I am against giving the power of war to the executive, because he is not safely to be trusted with it -- or to the Senate [...] I am for clogging rather than facilitating war."
We joined with many other nations in 1928 in criminalizing war. War has been a crime ever since. Our ambassador to France at the time, who also got a Nobel Peace Prize for this, told the French ambassador that he would not accept any loopholes for defensive wars or good wars. If all war was not banned, he argued, any loophole would be expanded to the point of rendering the whole agreement meaningless. But when our Senate ratified the treaty it added an exception for defensive war. And for several decades we've behaved as if the treaty were meaningless, even though the same ban on aggressive war was created again in 1945 in the United Nations Charter.
We're currently moving in the direction of smaller but more secretive and criminal wars. We have a drone war on Pakistan without having had any public or congressional debate over whether to have a war with Pakistan. A United Nations report in June concluded that the U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan were illegal. We have a military increasingly privatized and employing unaccountable mercenaries. We have special forces operating now in 75 countries, but we don't know what all the countries are. The CIA reportedly has a secret and unaccountable 3,000-man army in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration has declared that it has the right to assassinate Americans, and I have yet to see anyone respond by questioning where the hell they got the right to assassinate non-Americans. Our latest addition to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, at her confirmation hearing said the war we're in is everywhere and has no identifiable end in time.
General Petraeus is quoted on Afghanistan saying "I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. . . . This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."
Our elected officials, even on local school boards and so forth, swear oaths to defend the Constitution. We kick in doors at night and shoot families in Afghanistan to supposedly defend the Constitution. But we can't know if people are doing their jobs unless we read the thing. We'll still have the problem of all of its many shortcomings, but we'll be able to better protect what it does provide if we know what's in there. And if you think you'll forget, just carry it with you like I do. Read it to Capitol Police officers as appropriate.
We are supposed to have a transparent government answerable to we the people. If you're a Republican and like wars and don't believe in global warming or the round globe, then Dick Cheney holding secret meetings with oil company CEOs to plan our military and energy policies is no big worry. If you're a Democrat and convinced that anything Republicans consider satanic communism must be pretty good, then Obama holding secret meetings with health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to set our healthcare policies is just part of the game. But if you're a human being, you should be worried. Secret government has not proven to be a way to get the wisest and most honest advice. It's proven to result in people doing things in secret that we wouldn't let them get away with in public.
For two and a quarter centuries presidents have accumulated power and passed it on to their successors, who have accepted what they've been given and added a little more -- or a lot more in some cases. The president we needed after Bush, in the absence of a Congress with a pulse or a populace out en masse shutting the city down with its demands, the president we needed (but will never get without compelling it ourselves) was one who came in and said:
We will henceforth have the rule of law, not the law of rulers. The new Justice Department will answer to our Constitution, the treaties that form a part of it, and the statutes that are on our law books, not to me. Crimes will be investigated and prosecuted, beginning with the most serious crimes by the highest officials. Where appropriate cases will also be referred to the International Criminal Court. Laws that have been created through signing statements, secret memos, and executive orders and decrees are not laws. They will all be made public if they are not yet. They will all be eliminated. We will make public all evidence of the workings of our government that does not needlessly endanger someone. This will include text, photographs, and videos, including those depicting horrible acts of torture, rape, and murder. We are past the point of outraging people abroad. What they need to understand is that we are repudiating such conduct, forswearing similar behavior in the future, and backing up our words by deterring crime through law enforcement and, where the courts see fit, through restitution to victims. Allowing this information to dribble out in the form of partial rumors, accompanied by the certainty that no one is being held accountable, would merely encourage animosity abroad and, at home, the militarism, xenophobia, and bigotry behind these crimes. Before long we would be having churches trying to burn Korans. It is better to turn the page, not by blithely announcing that I've turned a page, but by fully airing the facts and punishing those responsible rather than waiting for someone else to attempt to punish us all, including the innocent, be it with a bomb in Times Square or something even worse.
This wasn't what Barack Obama said. It was even further from what he did. He re-wrote laws with signing statements, kept open the option of creating laws with secret memos, and this week appeared to announce his intention to violate a law prior to its passage. He publicly told the attorney general to back off torture prosecutions. He allowed his staff to make clear that he claims the power to torture and rendition if he chooses. He expanded presidential powers of secrecy and immunity tremendously. A decision in the ninth circuit court of appeals last week agreed with the current Justice Department and denied torture victims access to courts to sue for damages, on grounds of national security. Why is it compensating victims that endangers our security and not the torture itself? If a piece of evidence might actually endanger someone, why not have a judge review that claim in closed chambers rather than blocking whole categories of law suits?
As the Democratic nominee for the White House, Obama reversed his promise to filibuster any bill giving immunity to corporations that have helped the government spy on us without warrants; he supported the bill. Warrantless spying programs have apparently continued, which is what things tend to do when they are rewarded rather than punished. And when you grant immunity, you're not just pardoning crimes, you're also preventing the public from learning exactly what crimes you're pardoning and even whom you're pardoning. We're left to guess based on such circumstantial evidence as AT&T's sponsorship of the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
The announcement of the closure of Gitmo was a nice start, and would have been easy to follow through on. You just had to try people for crimes in credible courts of law or set them free. But President Obama decided there was a third category of prisoner, those he wanted to hold indefinitely without putting them on trial. And the larger prison at Bagram was never a big issue in the news anyway. So our death camps -- which is what you call a place you take people and give them no hope of ever leaving -- are still grinding along.
Adding insult to injury, President Obama stood in front of the Constitution in the National Archives and threw habeas corpus out the window. After 800 years of believing people should be given a fair trial before imprisonment, I guess it was time for a change.
In England they have had non-stop inquiries into the Iraq War lies since 2003, and memos have leaked out, tell-all books have been published. In this country, the Iraq War is being recuperated. You can't have wars without lies. We're going to have more wars. So, we can't leave people thinking the Iraq war was all bad. Three weeks ago the President spoke from the oval office and breathed new life into all the lies. The War on Iraq was begun to disarm a nation, he told us. Our innocent troops go caught up in the barbarians' civil war. But we kept on killing them for their own good. And with dedication, the war was then won in 2007 through a surge of additional troops.
That surge was in reality very small and the reasons for the gradual decline in violence had nothing to do with it and are not present in Afghanistan -- reasons including massive death and displacement, a unilateral ceasefire by the largest militia, bribery, and indications followed by a commitment to withdraw. None of the surge's political goals were, in fact, accomplished at all.
But this was a speech by a man who, for the first time in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, had given an acceptance speech arguing for the necessity of war and his power to launch wars. George Mason said at the Constitutional Convention "I am against giving the power of war to the executive, because he is not safely to be trusted with it -- or to the Senate [...] I am for clogging rather than facilitating war."
We joined with many other nations in 1928 in criminalizing war. War has been a crime ever since. Our ambassador to France at the time, who also got a Nobel Peace Prize for this, told the French ambassador that he would not accept any loopholes for defensive wars or good wars. If all war was not banned, he argued, any loophole would be expanded to the point of rendering the whole agreement meaningless. But when our Senate ratified the treaty it added an exception for defensive war. And for several decades we've behaved as if the treaty were meaningless, even though the same ban on aggressive war was created again in 1945 in the United Nations Charter.
We're currently moving in the direction of smaller but more secretive and criminal wars. We have a drone war on Pakistan without having had any public or congressional debate over whether to have a war with Pakistan. A United Nations report in June concluded that the U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan were illegal. We have a military increasingly privatized and employing unaccountable mercenaries. We have special forces operating now in 75 countries, but we don't know what all the countries are. The CIA reportedly has a secret and unaccountable 3,000-man army in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration has declared that it has the right to assassinate Americans, and I have yet to see anyone respond by questioning where the hell they got the right to assassinate non-Americans. Our latest addition to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, at her confirmation hearing said the war we're in is everywhere and has no identifiable end in time.
General Petraeus is quoted on Afghanistan saying "I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. . . . This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."
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