Dick, Head Man

Folks!!

We need to take the call from "The World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime" VERY seriously!! I'll post something about it soon.

- Uke Man


December 23, 2005
New York Times Editorial
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency


George W. Bush has quipped several times during his
political career that it would be so much easier to
govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his
vice president that this was a joke.


Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr.
Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has
spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers
of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind
closed doors with oil executives to abrogating
longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a
pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions
and spy on American citizens.


It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming
about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching
events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and
the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the
presidency had become too powerful, secretive and
dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and
fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough,
and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for
accountability.


The president "needs to have his constitutional powers
unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of
national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week
as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic
spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11
attacks.


Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the
institutional and legal structure of multilateral
foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the
Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to
build an antimissile shield that doesn't work but
makes military contactors rich. Early in his tenure,
Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton
to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy
industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to
rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr.
Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get
candid advice on important matters, and the courts,
sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an
exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people
who agreed with him, and allowed them to write
national policy for an industry in which he had
recently amassed a fortune.


The effort to expand presidential power accelerated
after 9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus
that the president should have additional powers to
use judiciously against terrorists.


Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq
immediately, pushing the intelligence community to
come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al
Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to
writing the legal briefs justifying the abuse and
torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can
designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and
detain them indefinitely, and a secret program
allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on
American citizens without warrants. And when Senator
John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule
of law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not
only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also
tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at
C.I.A. prisons.


There are finally signs that the democratic system is
trying to rein in the imperial presidency. Republicans
in the Senate and House forced Mr. Bush to back the
McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan to legalize
torture by intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress
also agreed to extend the Patriot Act for five weeks
rather than doing the administration's bidding and
rushing to make it permanent.


On Wednesday, a federal appeals court refused to allow
the administration to transfer Jose Padilla, an
American citizen who has been held by the military for
more than three years on suspicion of plotting
terrorist attacks, from military to civilian custody.
After winning the same court's approval in September
to hold Mr. Padilla as an unlawful combatant, the
administration abruptly reversed course in November
and charged him with civil crimes unrelated to his
arrest. That decision was an obvious attempt to avoid
having the Supreme Court review the legality of the
detention powers that Mr. Bush gave himself, and the
appeals judges refused to go along.


Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have insisted that the secret
eavesdropping program is legal, but The Washington
Post reported yesterday that the court created to
supervise this sort of activity is not so sure. It
said the presiding judge was arranging a classified
briefing for her fellow judges and that several judges
on the court wanted to know why the administration
believed eavesdropping on American citizens without
warrants was legal when the law specifically requires
such warrants.


Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are tenacious. They still
control both houses of Congress and are determined to
pack the judiciary with like-minded ideologues. Still,
the recent developments are encouraging, especially
since the court ruling on Mr. Padilla was written by a
staunch conservative considered by President Bush for
the Supreme Court.