Today's the, er..., day

Well, it's November 6, 2007, and ... lo and behold: there is a strike today! Only ... it's a strike just by people who write movies and television shows ... and it's over how to distribute profits rather than the usurpation of core democratic values by this administration.

It seems most people, though overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the state of our nation, are content to wait for next year's election. And so it appears that we will not expunge this stain on our democracy all at once and in a national show of commitment to the principles that had made our nation an object of affection around the world. ("We are all Americans now," they once said.) Rather, we are content to replace Bush and the rest of the criminals who now infest the Executive Branch in due course, letting the blemishes they have left recede over time, inevitably to be reviled and made the subject of apology and cautionary tale.

Forgive me for wanting the America of my generation to be recalled as more than cautionary tale. I want my country unambiguously to reject the administration's ineptitude, maximalist theories of power, and what amounts to dictatorial and colonial ambition. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," they told us in the heady days when fighting terrorism made them feel warm and fuzzy, infused with a sense of historical gravitas. No we're not, and no we don't, I want us to tell them in the cold reality of late 2007.

And so what will it be?

• Do we or do we not reject the proposition that the President can kidnap a human being, even a US citizen, and hold him or her indefinitely, without recourse to any other individual?


• Do we or do we not reject the proposition that the President's prisoners can be held incommunicado and subjected to torture? (Why quibble? I'm absolutely sick of the debate over whether this or that is torture. We've committed, through our wayward employee George W. Bush, disgusting and inhuman acts. We are torturers.)


• Do we or do we not reject the proposition that a President can remain in office after grossly misrepresenting the case for a disastrous foreign occupation?


• Do we or do we not reject the proposition that the President should be permitted unending latitude to expand such conflict despite a record of invariable failure, poor planning, and, it must be added, callousness?


• Do we or do we not reject the proposition that the President has unilateral authority to launch us into yet another, doubtlessly ill-conceived, armed conflict?


• Do we or do we not reject the proposition that the Executive Branch is permitted to listen to our phone calls, read our emails, and otherwise spy on Americans without showing the necessity of such surveillance to a court?


• Do we or do we not reject the proposition that our President can refuse to follow our laws?


• Will we or will we not insist that our nation be grounded in common decency rather than fear and xenophobia?


And so it's come to this. The great uniter, not a divider, has run us into the ground in every conceivable way. He has cynically exploited our political differences. He has violated the Constitution and broken the law. Indeed, his lawlessness is matched only by his incompetence. What will we do?  If not today, then perhaps, forgive my unwarranted optimism, the next crisis of mismanagement or immorality will jolt the nation and our Congress into adopting something resembling my proposed Contract with America.  It is still my hope that we can recapture the greatness that all but evaporated after September 11, 2001.  We picked the wrong President, twice.  This is our mess to clean up.

Cheney's Law

An excellent summary of this Administration's war on the rule of law is now available for online viewing. Frontline's documentary can and should be viewed in its entirety here.

Determined to secure unlimited authority for the President to wage the war on terror, a war with undefined limits in space and time, the Administration first asked Congress for authority to "wage" the war through any means and in any place, including within the United States. Rebuffed, it made the most of the authorization it had been given and satisfied itself that it could go beyond this authority based on the meaning it ascribed to the phrase "Commander in Chief" in the Constitution. The results: warrantless spying on Americans, kidnapping and torture of suspects, unlawful and indefinite detention and torture of American citizens, and incalculable damage to the very concept of America as a place ruled by law, not people.

It is plain that Cheney's and, ultimately, Bush's view of the office of the presidency is indistinguishable from dictatorship. The president has unlimited authority to prosecute a war. The president has unlimited authority to choose whether and how to engage in war. The president has unlimited authority to define when war begins, when it ends, and who the enemies are. Whatever else the Constitution might mean, it surely precludes such a role for any government official.

Here, again, is the short form of the Contract with America that we must demand our representatives accept:

• Restore the right of habeas corpus.


• Protect the people against arbitrary detention, arrest, and spying.


• Defund the office of Dick Cheney, incapacitating him from making a further mess of the rule of law and our national interests. At the same time, ensure the firing of David Addington and his disqualification from public service.


• Require the approval of Congress before attacking another nation.


• Stop lying about Iraq. No more "wait and see."


• Do your duty and begin an impeachment inquiry against the President.

It's our duty to demand no less.

Frank Rich is on board

Frank Rich lays it out today in the NY Times. It's not good enough to blame torture and the reckless prosecution of the war on Bush. We must do something, as his failures are our failures. The final sentences of his column state precisely the objective of my writings here: "It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name."

The challenge

As I said in my first post here, I don't pretend that my writing here is likely to have any effect. I hope it will and that in combination with the work of others it might do some good. That's all anyone really should aspire to do. But I certainly did not want to do nothing or to snipe from the sidelines at the daily news of deception and incompetence without at least suggesting a way out. I want instead to advocate doing something, namely focusing our discontent into a palpable political demand.

There is no good prospect that this will come to pass. After all, the forces that usually underly popular demand are somewhat lacking. Though there are certainly excellent reasons for the majority of our people to be upset at the state of the economy and over the Administration's purposeful fiscal conduct to secure and exacerbate this situation, these concerns are mostly separate from the essence of the political and moral crisis at which my words are directed. And so, we have no equivalent of the Stamp or Townshend Acts galvanizing the well off to join with the less well off to dump tea into Boston Harbor.

Nor do we have a draft. The youth on our campuses are surely angry, and we have seen some signs (here and here, for example) of the sort of turmoil that became common during the latter years of the Vietnam War. But conscripting our youth to fight in an unpopular war is kindling for social action, and we have none. Though we revile the images on television and the accounts of the horrors faced by our soldiers and the civilians among whom they serve, most of us are safe assuming that we will not be asked to play a direct part. Were it otherwise, the streets would be filled with protest.

And so we face a great challenge. When his comfort is not already threatened, what can move a person to make demand on his rulers? While laudable, it is not the height of courage or conviction for a man to rise up and demand change when his prospect of stability is already under siege. Nearly all of us would answer the call to duty when the threat to our freedoms has blown open our own doors. No, the real patriot is the one willing to forsake comfort, when doing nothing would do no harm to his own affairs, because he wants to support or save the values that animate his country.

This is Keizer's last paragraph:
"I wrote this appeal during the days leading up to the Fourth of July. I wrote it because for the past six and a half years I have heard the people I love best—family members, friends, former students and parishioners—saying, 'I’m sick over what’s happening to our country, but I just don’t know what to do.' Might I be pardoned if, fearing civil disorder less than I fear civil despair, I said, 'Well, we could do this.' It has been done before and we could do this. And I do believe we could. If anyone has a better idea, I’m keen to hear it. Only don’t tell me what some presidential hopeful ought to do someday. Tell me what the people who have nearly lost their hope can do right now."

It's time to demand accountability. Though you need 60 Senators to pass anything of substance and 67 to override a veto, you only need 41, and maybe fewer if you're smart, to block legislation. We have the numbers to shut down this government. We will see whether those who say they are with us also have the will. That should be our goal, the 65% of us who disapprove of the Administration. Showing them, strongly, that we will stand with them, if only they will have the spine to stand with us.

Do you realize ...

what we did to this man? Our agents kidnapped him, tortured him in Afghanistan, then released him - several months later. Turns out that we had brutalized an innocent man because his name was similar to that of an actual terrorist suspect. Khaled el-Masri says that while in one of our secret prisons known as "the salt pit" he was beaten, sodomized, humiliated, and subject to inhuman conditions. Oh - and though it was known he was the wrong man by April at the latest, he was not released until the end of May, over four months after we had kidnapped him. His family had no idea what had become of him and had left Germany for Lebanon in his absence.

Here's El Masri's account of the moments before he was forced aboard an airplane to depart for his cell in Afghanistan:

"I heard the door being closed. And then they beat me from all sides, from everywhere, with hands and feet. With knives or scissors they took away my clothes. In silence. The beating, I think, was just to humiliate me, to hurt me, to make me afraid, to make me silent. They stripped me naked. I was terrified. They tried to take off my pants. I tried to stop them so they beat me again. And when I was naked I heard a camera."

Apparently this was followed by an anal search. Hooded, ears plugged, chained to the bare floor of the aircraft, he was drugged until arriving in Afghanistan where he was transported to one of our prisons in the trunk of a car. His treatment got worse from there. Now free and asking us, through our courts, for an apology and compensation, El-Masri has been brushed aside. The US Supreme Court rejected his appeal of a lower court ruling that even if everything he alleges is true his "private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets." This is not the first case in which we have refused to hear complaints from a victim of rendition on grounds that it would compromise national security, a doctrinally shaky and, in practice, morally abhorrent abdication of the judicial role.

We did all of this. Ours have been the deeds of animals. It will not do to point our fingers at the Boy King or George Tenet or Cheney. Unless we repudiate what these men have done and take action to make it right, we are no better than they. I humbly suggest you stay home from work on November 6th and ask everyone you know to do the same. It won't begin to atone for our sins, but it's a start.

Degeneracy

Echoing some posts of mine on Digg: A nation is well on the path to tyranny or irrelevance when it is willing to become more worked up over a man who lied, even if under oath, about a sexual affair than one who has led us into a disastrous war that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and who has instituted a program of spying, torture, and arbitrary detention. When we are more prepared to prosecute sex scandals than to avert such profound constitutional and moral crisis, I fear we have become truly degenerate.

"We work to make this country the kind of America they [U.S. veterans] were willing to die for. That's an America where the idea of sacred honor still has the power to stir men's souls. My solitary, solitary hope is that 100 years from today people will look back at what we've done and say, 'They kept the faith.'"
Henry Hyde, Senate trial of Bill Clinton. Hyde's summation of his effort to win conviction of Bill Clinton in the Senate is worth reading in full, as are those of the other House Managers. Whither Henry Hyde?

One more thing...

Oops. I forgot the most important thing. Final demand: "You, the representative agreeing to this Contract, agree to do whatever is in your power to ensure that no other business is conducted in Congress until the other provisions of this Contract are enacted." Upshot, President Bush and sympathetic members of Congress, you can filibuster, and you can veto. But the only items for business that will be considered are the ones listed here. Like the general strike itself, the government will shut down until we get this right.

Contract with America

While I will continue to post the reasons why I believe the show of will that Keizer recommends is necessary (See my first post on this blog for more.), I'm going to pause for a moment to elaborate on what the people of the United States should demand from their representatives. The purpose of this blog is not to comment on the news of the day, not to unearth new information, and not to suggest clever insights into facts well known. Others do a great job of that. Rather, my intent is to help make the case for action and to catalog in one place the manifold reasons that make this action necessary.

Keizer recommends a general strike. No work, no consumption. A silent, legal protest that hits those in power where it hurts. But what should be the goal of such a thing - who is its target? I suggest a real Contract with America, one that we draft. (And yes, I'm consciously using the name "Contract with America.") Election Day 2007 would be the point of focus, the day on which we demand that our representatives agree to this compact and on which we support those who already have. Here are possible terms, the consideration for which shall be our votes and our getting on again with our daily lives. In other words, you are either for the Contract or you no longer have our support. I'm counting on your help to revise this.

Contract with America, Draft 1

• Restore unequivocally the right of habeas corpus to all those detained by the United States. This does not mean that the exigencies of war must be ignored and full trials given to true, battlefield detainees. The Supreme Court made that clear in the Hamdi case. But there shall be no utterly rights-free zones and no Executive (Royal) power to detain without charge and under whatever conditions for as long as his highness deems fit.



• Strengthen the right of US residents against executive detention. Habeas is not enough. No resident ought to fear being plucked from the streets and absconded to a naval brig, as was Jose Padilla. There shall be no disappearances here. In addition, remove the putative power granted to the Executive to spy on Americans without a warrant.



• Defund completely Cheney's office. Even if Cheney is not immediately impeached for his crimes, he should be denied a staff and the means to do more harm. It is enough constitutionally that the Vice President is left the ability to assume the presidency. As a corollary, David Addington must be fired and barred from public service.



• Bar the use of military force against Iran absent Congressional authorizations. Even if one believes that the President has some authority to launch major combat operations without a declaration of war from Congress, this President has demonstrated such gross incompetence in the use of our military that Congress should affirmatively bar him from using it further. Agree to be willing quickly to grant an emergency authorization if needed to protect vital national security interests.



• No more Friedman Units. No politician agreeing to this Compact is permitted to tell us that we should wait for six or nine more months before evaluating and taking concrete action to end the involvement of the United States in Iraq. Our incalculably tragic errors of judgment have led us to this point, imposing unneeded suffering on the Iraqi people. We have a moral duty to help them in any way we can. But fighting to "win," in the vaguest of hopes that the Boy King will somehow manage to rescue his legacy, is not a plan.



• Begin impeachment proceedings against the President. It matters not whether he is removed from office immediately, the last day of his presidency, or not at all. There is more than enough evidence of abuse of power to justify an impeachment inquiry. Not beginning the process is a dereliction of congressional duty.

In snappier form, we'd have:

• Restore the right of habeas corpus.


• Protect the people against arbitrary detention, arrest, and spying.


• Defund the office of Dick Cheney, incapacitating him from making a further mess of the rule of law and our national interests.


• Require the approval of Congress before attacking another nation.


• Stop lying about Iraq. No more "wait and see."


• Do your duty and begin an impeachment inquiry against the President.

I'm open for suggestions.