September 11, 2001: A Day That Will Long Live In Infamy
They killed approximately 3,000 people that day. They totally destroyed two of the largest skyscrapers in the world. They did serious damage to the Pentagon. They cold-bloodedly murdered the passengers and crews of four airliners. And I am becoming more and more fearful that there was one more casualty of that terrible day: the Constitution of the United States.
I have an image of watching all of the shattered pieces of paper falling out of the skies of lower Manhattan over the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Among those falling papers is that famous document beginning, "We the People. . ." Tattered and burned, it floats to the ground, to be trampled on and swept away, along with the rest of the detritus of that horrible day.
I also have an image that while most of the country went through fits of anger, fear and sorrow, a few men in Washington, D.C. and Crawford, Texas were dancing a jig. They had been handed a golden opportunity to implement their plan to eliminate Constitutional government in the United States of America. Now I fear that the terrified citizens of the country are letting them get away with it.
We have seen a brutal, unprovoked and unnecessary war -- a war that can only undermine the interests of the country and strengthen the position of terrorists. We have seen America, once the great champion of international human rights, become the defender of torture. We have seen the suspension of habeas corpus, as our government asserts the right to hold American citizens in prison indefinitely, without charge and without counsel. It is the lingering fear emanating from September 11 that allows all of this to go on.
How else can one explain the extraordinarily timid public response to the revelation of Bush's blatantly illegal warantless electronic surveillance program? One can hardly even call this a "scandal" since the reaction to Bush's latest outrage has been so tepid. Why isn't this the subject of constant public outrage? Why isn't Congress incensed about the the fact that its authority is being flouted?
Let there be no doubt about the fact that what Bush is doing is clearly and unquestionably illegal. The legal arguments that Torturer General Gonzalez and the rest of the Bush junta have come up with to seek to justify this program are so anemic that any first-year law student who advanced them would be politely told to explore a career in dentistry in view of such student's patent lack of aptitude for the law.
The provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA") could not be any clearer. 50 U.S.C. Section 1802 expressly provides that electronic surveillance is permitted without a Court order only if the Attorney General certifies, under oath, that the surveillance is solely directed to communications "between or among foreign powers" (under the Patriot Act, FISA was amended to include international terrorist organizations within the definition of a "foreign power"), and that there "is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." Although the Bush crowd continues to stonewall as to what precisely it has been doing, there is apparently no dispute that it has been intercepting communications to which United States persons are parties. In the absence of a Court order, such electronic surveillance is in clear violation of FISA. Section 1802 also sets forth various "minimization" requirements as well as various reporting requirements with respect to any electronic surveillance conducted without a court order all of which, apparently, Bush has also violated. In all cases not covered by Section 1802, FISA requires national security surveillance to be conducted pursuant to the order of a special court. Historically, the "FISA Court" has been extraordinarily accommodating to government requests for orders to conduct such surveillance, having rejected only a handful of such requests during the twenty-eight year period in which FISA has been in effect. FISA also permits Court approval for national security electronic surveillance to be given retroactively in emergency situations, so long as an application is submitted to the FISA Court within seventy-two hours of the surveillance.
50 U.S.C. Section 1809 provides specifically that any person who intentionally "engages in electronic surveillance except as authorized by statute" is guilty of a felony punishable by up to five years' imprisonment. If there is any credible explanation out there as to why Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, et al., are not felons under this statute, I've yet to hear it.
It is interesting to consider the history of FISA. The history of the statute can be traced back to 1972, when the Nixon Justice Department argued before the Supreme Court that the President had "inherent authority" as "commander in chief" under Article II of the Constitution, to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance in "domestic security" investigations. The Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 8-0 (Rehnquist sat the case out, because he had been one of the people in the Nixon Justice Department who had cooked up the "inherent power" argument) that this argument was wrong, and that the President could not rely upon his commander in chief status in order to override the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, which the Supreme Court has construed to prohibit warrantless electronic surveillance. United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972). The Supreme Court did note that a more lenient Fourth Amendment standard might apply in national security investigations involving the activities of foreign powers, but the Court did not explicitly decide this issue because, at the time, there was no law governing the conduct of electronic surveillance in such investigations.
FISA was enacted in 1978 precisely to deal with the issues left open by the Supreme Court's decision. The statute empowers the government to conduct electronic surveillance in national security investigations subject to the approval of a special, highly secretive FISA Court, under more relaxed standards than are generally applicable to Court orders to conduct electronic surveillance in ordinary criminal investigations. And, as described above, Section 1802 eliminates the need for Court approval altogether where the surveillance is directed solely against foreign powers and there is no "substantial likelihood" that the communications of any United States persons (citizens and permanent residents) will be intercepted.
In short, FISA can hardly be characterized as a statute that ties the hands of the President in conducting electronic surveillance in national security investigations. Notably, Bush & Co. have never identified any concrete examples of any sort of electronic surveillance that the national security requires them to conduct but which FISA prohibits. They have made no claim that the FISA Court has turned down any of their applications to conduct electronic surveillance. Nor has any suggestion been made that the FISA Court is subject to "leaks" that impair the viability of any national security investigations. On the contrary, the FISA Court has an outstanding reputation for taking its obligations extremely seriously and for safeguarding the secrecy of classified information that is entrusted to it. In light of the fact that a high-ranking official of the Bush Administration has been indicted for lying about his revelation of the identity of an active CIA agent, Bush & Co. are hardly in any position to cast aspersions on the FISA Court for leaking classified information. The FISA Court is as close to being leak-proof as any governmental entity yet devised. FISA has provided an extremely effective mechanism for conducting aggressive and confidential national security investigations while still respecting the privacy rights of American citizens.
Bush's actions, however, have nothing to do with protecting national security. They have everything to do with undermining Constitutional government by ignoring all checks on the exercise of executive power. What is going on here is an illegal power grab, plain and simple.
The arguments that Gonzalez et al. have floated to justify Bush's rampant violations of FISA are pathetic. First, it is suggested that the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan implicitly overrides FISA. Not even Congressional Republicans buy that one, as there was never any suggestion when that resolution was enacted that Congress was effectively repealing the comprehensive legislation governing the use of electronic surveillance in national security investigations. The resolution itself doesn't say a word about electronic surveillance -- aren't these Republicans supposedly the ones who believe in "strict construction" of the law? It is also noteworthy that Gonzalez himself didn't even come up with this rationale until after the force authorization resolution was passed by Congress. As Senator Leahy aptly pointed out to Gonzalez, this argument is nothing more than an after-the-fact CYA exercise.
It is also worth pointing out that the Patriot Act was enacted after the Congressional resolution on the use of force in Afghanistan, and, as noted above, the Patriot Act amended FISA to include terrorist organizations within the definition of a "foreign power." If, as Gonzalez now claims, the force authorization resolution had effectively repealed FISA, at least with respect to investigations relating in some way to terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, then why would Congress have found it necessary or even appropriate to amend FISA at all?
Gonzalez's other argument is that the President's "inherent power" as commander in chief effectively renders FISA null and void. This argument comes very close to the one that the Supreme Court rejected in 1972, although, as discussed above, the Court did leave the window open a crack in the case of national security investigations of "foreign powers." That, however, was precisely the question that FISA resolved in 1972.
[A digression: Listening to Gonzalez make this argument about the President's "inherent authority" to engage in warrantless electronic surveillance makes me wish that Senator Sam Ervin could somehow be brought back from the dead. I recall the look of shock and disbelief on the good Senator's face when John Ehrlichman made the very same argument about inherent Presidential power -- trying to justify the activities of "The Plumbers" and the break-in of the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist -- that Gonzalez now advances. I remember how the Harvard-educated "ol' country lawyer" Ervin told Ehrlichman in no uncertain terms that he was full of it, and that so far as he knew, the Fourth Amendment stood for the proposition that "a man's home is his castle" and that neither the King of England nor the President of the United States had the right to invade that sanctuary. It is a sad commentary on our times that it is the legacy of John Ehrlichman, not Sam Ervin, that appears to have carried the day.]
The pertinent decisions of the Supreme Court give absolutely no support to Gonzalez's argument about inherent Presidential power. The Supreme Court' s decision in the famous "steel seizure" case is directly on point. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). That case arose during the Korean War and involved a threatened nationwide strike in the steel industry. President Truman argued that any disruption in the nation's production of steel would have disastrous consequences for the war effort, and he therefore ordered his Secretary of Commerce to take possession of the country's major steel mills and keep them operating. [Another digression: This all seems so quaint, since today, America has virtually no steel industry and instead buys most of its steel from Japan and Korea.] The Supreme Court ruled that Truman's actions were illegal, rejecting Truman's argument that his inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution as commander in chief empowered him to seize control of the steel mills in order to keep them in operation during war time.
The opinion of Justice Robert Jackson in the steel seizure case is generally considered the definitive analysis of the scope of Presidential power under Article II of the Constitution. Justice Jackson ruled that Presidential power is at its "lowest ebb" in situations in which there is no explicit provision in the Constitution authorizing the contested Presidential action, but there is an explicit act of Congress prohibiting the President's action. Justice Jackson's typically meticulous and eloquent opinion provides a very cogent explanation of precisely what is at stake in a case such as this:
"When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own Constitutional powers minus any Constitutional powers of Congress over the matter. Courts can sustain exclusive Presidential control in such a case only by disabling the Congress from action upon the subject. Presidential claim to power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system."
Justice Jackson concluded that the steel seizure case fell into this category because there was an explicit statute -- the Taft-Hartley Act -- that sets forth the procedure dictated by Congress for dealing with strikes that create a national emergency. President Truman's status as commander in chief did not permit him to ignore the law.
Here there is not only an explicit statute, namely FISA, dealing with the prescribed method for conducting electronic surveillance in national security investigations, there is actually a criminal statute making it a felony to conduct any electronic surveillance by any means not permitted by FISA. This criminal provision is obviously directed specifically against unlawful electronic surveillance conducted by members of the executive branch, for who else is going to be carrying on electronic surveillance in a national security investigation. Bush's actions in clear violation of the requirements of FISA fall squarely into the category in which, in Justice Jackson's words, the scope of Presidential authority is at its "lowest ebb."
Again, it should be emphasized that Bush has not put forward any compelling explanation as to why any necessary electronic surveillance cannot be carried out in compliance with FISA. In one of his speeches seeking to justify his actions, Bush stated the obvious proposition that if Al Qaeda is communicating with people in the United States, we ought to know what they are talking about. Of course we should, and for that reason, the President ought to have no difficulty persuading the FISA Court to enter an order permitting such electronic surveillance. The issue is not whether or not conducting the widest possible amount of electronic surveillance directed against Al Qaeda is in the national interest; the issue is whether there is any reason or justification for conducting such surveillance in violation of the law.
What is really at stake here is accountability. Without a record of Court orders setting forth the contours of the electronic surveillance being carried on, we simply have no idea what Bush is doing. Undoubtedly, that is precisely the way Bush & Co. like it. Some reports have indicated that the communications that have been intercepted in violation of FISA number in the thousands. The magnitude of the invasion of the privacy of law abiding American citizens may well be staggering. One also has to wonder whether or not this unlawful electronic surveillance is being carried out for political reasons. When this story first surfaced, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell posed a question to James Risen, the New York Times reporter who broke the story, about a rumor that one of the persons whose conversations had been intercepted was CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour. Risen said that he had not heard anything about this, and the rumor has not resurfaced, but one has to wonder about its source. It is interesting to note that Ms. Amanpour is married to James Rubin, a high-ranking State Department official in the Clinton Administration, and Ms. Amanpour herself has publicly criticized the Bush Administration's manipulation of the media during the run-up to the Iraq war.
Watergate should have taught us that if Presidents are given the opportunity to abuse their power, they will probably do so. We are not left with blind faith in any individual President as the only basis for preventing such abuses; we have a Constitution that is supposed to do that. As Justice Jackson -- a man who had been the chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials and who had more than a passing familiarity with the kinds of abuses that can be justified by powerful and unscrupulous men who are purporting to serve the public good -- so wisely emphasized, "what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our Constitutional system."
Notwithstanding the dire concerns I expressed at the outset of this post, let us hope that the devotion to republican government in this country is sufficiently strong to have survived the onslaught of September 11, 2001.
I have an image of watching all of the shattered pieces of paper falling out of the skies of lower Manhattan over the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Among those falling papers is that famous document beginning, "We the People. . ." Tattered and burned, it floats to the ground, to be trampled on and swept away, along with the rest of the detritus of that horrible day.
I also have an image that while most of the country went through fits of anger, fear and sorrow, a few men in Washington, D.C. and Crawford, Texas were dancing a jig. They had been handed a golden opportunity to implement their plan to eliminate Constitutional government in the United States of America. Now I fear that the terrified citizens of the country are letting them get away with it.
We have seen a brutal, unprovoked and unnecessary war -- a war that can only undermine the interests of the country and strengthen the position of terrorists. We have seen America, once the great champion of international human rights, become the defender of torture. We have seen the suspension of habeas corpus, as our government asserts the right to hold American citizens in prison indefinitely, without charge and without counsel. It is the lingering fear emanating from September 11 that allows all of this to go on.
How else can one explain the extraordinarily timid public response to the revelation of Bush's blatantly illegal warantless electronic surveillance program? One can hardly even call this a "scandal" since the reaction to Bush's latest outrage has been so tepid. Why isn't this the subject of constant public outrage? Why isn't Congress incensed about the the fact that its authority is being flouted?
Let there be no doubt about the fact that what Bush is doing is clearly and unquestionably illegal. The legal arguments that Torturer General Gonzalez and the rest of the Bush junta have come up with to seek to justify this program are so anemic that any first-year law student who advanced them would be politely told to explore a career in dentistry in view of such student's patent lack of aptitude for the law.
The provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA") could not be any clearer. 50 U.S.C. Section 1802 expressly provides that electronic surveillance is permitted without a Court order only if the Attorney General certifies, under oath, that the surveillance is solely directed to communications "between or among foreign powers" (under the Patriot Act, FISA was amended to include international terrorist organizations within the definition of a "foreign power"), and that there "is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." Although the Bush crowd continues to stonewall as to what precisely it has been doing, there is apparently no dispute that it has been intercepting communications to which United States persons are parties. In the absence of a Court order, such electronic surveillance is in clear violation of FISA. Section 1802 also sets forth various "minimization" requirements as well as various reporting requirements with respect to any electronic surveillance conducted without a court order all of which, apparently, Bush has also violated. In all cases not covered by Section 1802, FISA requires national security surveillance to be conducted pursuant to the order of a special court. Historically, the "FISA Court" has been extraordinarily accommodating to government requests for orders to conduct such surveillance, having rejected only a handful of such requests during the twenty-eight year period in which FISA has been in effect. FISA also permits Court approval for national security electronic surveillance to be given retroactively in emergency situations, so long as an application is submitted to the FISA Court within seventy-two hours of the surveillance.
50 U.S.C. Section 1809 provides specifically that any person who intentionally "engages in electronic surveillance except as authorized by statute" is guilty of a felony punishable by up to five years' imprisonment. If there is any credible explanation out there as to why Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, et al., are not felons under this statute, I've yet to hear it.
It is interesting to consider the history of FISA. The history of the statute can be traced back to 1972, when the Nixon Justice Department argued before the Supreme Court that the President had "inherent authority" as "commander in chief" under Article II of the Constitution, to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance in "domestic security" investigations. The Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 8-0 (Rehnquist sat the case out, because he had been one of the people in the Nixon Justice Department who had cooked up the "inherent power" argument) that this argument was wrong, and that the President could not rely upon his commander in chief status in order to override the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, which the Supreme Court has construed to prohibit warrantless electronic surveillance. United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972). The Supreme Court did note that a more lenient Fourth Amendment standard might apply in national security investigations involving the activities of foreign powers, but the Court did not explicitly decide this issue because, at the time, there was no law governing the conduct of electronic surveillance in such investigations.
FISA was enacted in 1978 precisely to deal with the issues left open by the Supreme Court's decision. The statute empowers the government to conduct electronic surveillance in national security investigations subject to the approval of a special, highly secretive FISA Court, under more relaxed standards than are generally applicable to Court orders to conduct electronic surveillance in ordinary criminal investigations. And, as described above, Section 1802 eliminates the need for Court approval altogether where the surveillance is directed solely against foreign powers and there is no "substantial likelihood" that the communications of any United States persons (citizens and permanent residents) will be intercepted.
In short, FISA can hardly be characterized as a statute that ties the hands of the President in conducting electronic surveillance in national security investigations. Notably, Bush & Co. have never identified any concrete examples of any sort of electronic surveillance that the national security requires them to conduct but which FISA prohibits. They have made no claim that the FISA Court has turned down any of their applications to conduct electronic surveillance. Nor has any suggestion been made that the FISA Court is subject to "leaks" that impair the viability of any national security investigations. On the contrary, the FISA Court has an outstanding reputation for taking its obligations extremely seriously and for safeguarding the secrecy of classified information that is entrusted to it. In light of the fact that a high-ranking official of the Bush Administration has been indicted for lying about his revelation of the identity of an active CIA agent, Bush & Co. are hardly in any position to cast aspersions on the FISA Court for leaking classified information. The FISA Court is as close to being leak-proof as any governmental entity yet devised. FISA has provided an extremely effective mechanism for conducting aggressive and confidential national security investigations while still respecting the privacy rights of American citizens.
Bush's actions, however, have nothing to do with protecting national security. They have everything to do with undermining Constitutional government by ignoring all checks on the exercise of executive power. What is going on here is an illegal power grab, plain and simple.
The arguments that Gonzalez et al. have floated to justify Bush's rampant violations of FISA are pathetic. First, it is suggested that the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan implicitly overrides FISA. Not even Congressional Republicans buy that one, as there was never any suggestion when that resolution was enacted that Congress was effectively repealing the comprehensive legislation governing the use of electronic surveillance in national security investigations. The resolution itself doesn't say a word about electronic surveillance -- aren't these Republicans supposedly the ones who believe in "strict construction" of the law? It is also noteworthy that Gonzalez himself didn't even come up with this rationale until after the force authorization resolution was passed by Congress. As Senator Leahy aptly pointed out to Gonzalez, this argument is nothing more than an after-the-fact CYA exercise.
It is also worth pointing out that the Patriot Act was enacted after the Congressional resolution on the use of force in Afghanistan, and, as noted above, the Patriot Act amended FISA to include terrorist organizations within the definition of a "foreign power." If, as Gonzalez now claims, the force authorization resolution had effectively repealed FISA, at least with respect to investigations relating in some way to terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, then why would Congress have found it necessary or even appropriate to amend FISA at all?
Gonzalez's other argument is that the President's "inherent power" as commander in chief effectively renders FISA null and void. This argument comes very close to the one that the Supreme Court rejected in 1972, although, as discussed above, the Court did leave the window open a crack in the case of national security investigations of "foreign powers." That, however, was precisely the question that FISA resolved in 1972.
[A digression: Listening to Gonzalez make this argument about the President's "inherent authority" to engage in warrantless electronic surveillance makes me wish that Senator Sam Ervin could somehow be brought back from the dead. I recall the look of shock and disbelief on the good Senator's face when John Ehrlichman made the very same argument about inherent Presidential power -- trying to justify the activities of "The Plumbers" and the break-in of the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist -- that Gonzalez now advances. I remember how the Harvard-educated "ol' country lawyer" Ervin told Ehrlichman in no uncertain terms that he was full of it, and that so far as he knew, the Fourth Amendment stood for the proposition that "a man's home is his castle" and that neither the King of England nor the President of the United States had the right to invade that sanctuary. It is a sad commentary on our times that it is the legacy of John Ehrlichman, not Sam Ervin, that appears to have carried the day.]
The pertinent decisions of the Supreme Court give absolutely no support to Gonzalez's argument about inherent Presidential power. The Supreme Court' s decision in the famous "steel seizure" case is directly on point. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). That case arose during the Korean War and involved a threatened nationwide strike in the steel industry. President Truman argued that any disruption in the nation's production of steel would have disastrous consequences for the war effort, and he therefore ordered his Secretary of Commerce to take possession of the country's major steel mills and keep them operating. [Another digression: This all seems so quaint, since today, America has virtually no steel industry and instead buys most of its steel from Japan and Korea.] The Supreme Court ruled that Truman's actions were illegal, rejecting Truman's argument that his inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution as commander in chief empowered him to seize control of the steel mills in order to keep them in operation during war time.
The opinion of Justice Robert Jackson in the steel seizure case is generally considered the definitive analysis of the scope of Presidential power under Article II of the Constitution. Justice Jackson ruled that Presidential power is at its "lowest ebb" in situations in which there is no explicit provision in the Constitution authorizing the contested Presidential action, but there is an explicit act of Congress prohibiting the President's action. Justice Jackson's typically meticulous and eloquent opinion provides a very cogent explanation of precisely what is at stake in a case such as this:
"When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own Constitutional powers minus any Constitutional powers of Congress over the matter. Courts can sustain exclusive Presidential control in such a case only by disabling the Congress from action upon the subject. Presidential claim to power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system."
Justice Jackson concluded that the steel seizure case fell into this category because there was an explicit statute -- the Taft-Hartley Act -- that sets forth the procedure dictated by Congress for dealing with strikes that create a national emergency. President Truman's status as commander in chief did not permit him to ignore the law.
Here there is not only an explicit statute, namely FISA, dealing with the prescribed method for conducting electronic surveillance in national security investigations, there is actually a criminal statute making it a felony to conduct any electronic surveillance by any means not permitted by FISA. This criminal provision is obviously directed specifically against unlawful electronic surveillance conducted by members of the executive branch, for who else is going to be carrying on electronic surveillance in a national security investigation. Bush's actions in clear violation of the requirements of FISA fall squarely into the category in which, in Justice Jackson's words, the scope of Presidential authority is at its "lowest ebb."
Again, it should be emphasized that Bush has not put forward any compelling explanation as to why any necessary electronic surveillance cannot be carried out in compliance with FISA. In one of his speeches seeking to justify his actions, Bush stated the obvious proposition that if Al Qaeda is communicating with people in the United States, we ought to know what they are talking about. Of course we should, and for that reason, the President ought to have no difficulty persuading the FISA Court to enter an order permitting such electronic surveillance. The issue is not whether or not conducting the widest possible amount of electronic surveillance directed against Al Qaeda is in the national interest; the issue is whether there is any reason or justification for conducting such surveillance in violation of the law.
What is really at stake here is accountability. Without a record of Court orders setting forth the contours of the electronic surveillance being carried on, we simply have no idea what Bush is doing. Undoubtedly, that is precisely the way Bush & Co. like it. Some reports have indicated that the communications that have been intercepted in violation of FISA number in the thousands. The magnitude of the invasion of the privacy of law abiding American citizens may well be staggering. One also has to wonder whether or not this unlawful electronic surveillance is being carried out for political reasons. When this story first surfaced, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell posed a question to James Risen, the New York Times reporter who broke the story, about a rumor that one of the persons whose conversations had been intercepted was CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour. Risen said that he had not heard anything about this, and the rumor has not resurfaced, but one has to wonder about its source. It is interesting to note that Ms. Amanpour is married to James Rubin, a high-ranking State Department official in the Clinton Administration, and Ms. Amanpour herself has publicly criticized the Bush Administration's manipulation of the media during the run-up to the Iraq war.
Watergate should have taught us that if Presidents are given the opportunity to abuse their power, they will probably do so. We are not left with blind faith in any individual President as the only basis for preventing such abuses; we have a Constitution that is supposed to do that. As Justice Jackson -- a man who had been the chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials and who had more than a passing familiarity with the kinds of abuses that can be justified by powerful and unscrupulous men who are purporting to serve the public good -- so wisely emphasized, "what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our Constitutional system."
Notwithstanding the dire concerns I expressed at the outset of this post, let us hope that the devotion to republican government in this country is sufficiently strong to have survived the onslaught of September 11, 2001.
posted by democratic core at 2:48 PM
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