Bush shows he believes he is above the law
Marie Cocco
December 20, 2005
Who needs the Patriot Act? Not President Run-amok.
The president has now admitted to secretly authorizing what amounts to an end-run around the law that is meant, specifically and determinedly, to keep intelligence agencies from snooping on Americans at home.
In asking the super-secret National Security Agency to monitor - without any court oversight whatsoever - the international phone calls and e-mails of hundreds of Americans, President George W. Bush has gone far beyond what even the Patriot Act allows. So why make a fuss over the Senate's refusal to extend it? Even if lawmakers passed it, Bush would ignore it.
This is a president who believes no law applies to him.
He long ago violated a 1971 statute that bars the detention of U.S. citizens "except pursuant to an Act of Congress." In his "war on terror," Bush has nonetheless thrown American citizens into the clink and asserted he has the right to hold them there indefinitely, without charge and without showing any evidence against them.
He failed to comply with U.S. and international laws against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners - his political apparatchiks at the Pentagon and in the Justice Department instead concocted justifications for violating them. The president relented only days ago, and only after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) forced submission by engineering overwhelming votes in Congress to bring a measure of sanity to our detention schemes.
The Geneva Conventions have been tossed aside like wastepaper. They are replaced by gross violations of basic human rights at U.S. detention facilities, secret and semi-secret, around the world. The Pentagon, supposedly restricted from gathering information on the American citizenry, has compiled a vast database of information on anti-war protesters and those opposed to military recruitment practices.
Who else is in their sights? We do not yet know.
This president simply disregards the Constitution, save for the one clause he invokes to justify his violation of so many others: He is, he says, commander-in-chief. This power trumps all.
It wipes out an individual's guarantee of a public trial, and the right to be brought before a court to hear charges. It erases the clause that says treaties are "the supreme Law of the Land." It eviscerates the citizens' protection against being deprived of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Now with his extra-legal surveillance scheme, Bush has violated the right of the people to be free from "unreasonable searches and seizures."
This is no ideal forced upon us by the squishy Europeans. The law regulating intelligence-gathering within the United States is a homegrown statute, put in place to guard against the excesses of a besieged president, acting under the guise of "national security" to monitor and harass political enemies.
Do not be fooled by arguments that getting a warrant to wiretap for intelligence reasons is cumbersome. The secret court authorizing them can act within hours, in the dead of night. Wartime rules are spelled out in the law. During the security threat surrounding the turn of the millennium in 2000, former Attorney General Janet Reno told the 9/11 commission, she often sat in a secure office "until the early hours of the morning" to sign applications for secret warrants to put before the special court. This court almost never says no: It approved 1,754 surveillance orders in 2004 and rejected none.
Even this is too much checking-and-balancing for Bush, who claims for himself the power of kings. He vows to continue the unsupervised, secret surveillance, even though it has now been exposed. How is he to be stopped?
Congressional hearings won't be enough. The deferential inquests into Abu Ghraib barely changed detention policies. The Constitution might contemplate impeachment - I have never before uttered the word in relation to Bush - but it will not be brought about by a Republican Congress that has mostly put partisan loyalty ahead of duty. Congressional elections next year that change control of one chamber on Capitol Hill to the Democrats would at least bring stiffer oversight.
For now we seem destined to live in a nation that spies on its own people, detains hundreds without charge and maintains secret prisons around the world. This is not the Soviet Union. But it is what we have allowed our union to become.
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
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