Repression's Little Helpers - or How to Make a King
Repression always needs aides who abet
Monday, July 10, 2006
ROBYN BLUMNER
Repression doesn’t just happen. It has to be organized, arranged, justified and marketed to a willing populace. In other words, it takes a team. Most tyrannies aren’t of the epic variety involving a Josef Stalin or a Saddam Hussein. They are subtler, sapping freedom from a system that precariously depends on the integrity of those in charge. It doesn’t take much more than a corrupt sheriff, a mayor who helps a developer grab private property with eminent domain, or a president who claims that terror suspects have no rights, to harm our foundational constructs of liberty.
And aides to petty and great tyrants have a central role: to dispense with core values that get in the way of power. They make the world less just and humane, since those are the rules that protect the vulnerable from the strong, and such people have been enlisted to make the strong stronger.
In a nation of laws, lawyers are the most helpful in this regard, and the Bush administration has had two standouts: David Addington, who is Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, former counsel and longtime associate, and John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the executive branch on the constitutionality of policy.
These men embroidered the legal justifications for a kinglike presidency that may disregard federal law, constitutional rights and the express terms of ratified treaties if the president believes it furthers national security.
Emanating from this tyrannical idea has come an entire legal regime giving the president the power to approve torture, secret prisons, indefinite detention, kangaroo military commissions and warrantless domestic surveillance. These are programs contrary to law and our moral fiber.
Yoo and Addington were working at the behest of President Bush and Cheney (OK, mostly Cheney), but their enthusiastic embrace of presidential supremacy makes them guilty men.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has thrown the word treason at The New York Times for informing the American people of the Bush administration’s surveillance of international financial transactions. I say what The Times did in disclosing a follow-the-money program that the administration has been essentially crowing about for years is piffle compared with the acts of Yoo and Addington, who conspired to undo checks and balances by granting the president dictatorial powers.
In the July 3 New Yorker, reporter Jane Mayer lifts the veil off the secretive Addington and describes a man obsessed with setting forth a "new paradigm," in which the commander-in-chief may "disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries."
The plan predates 9/11, according to Bruce Fein, a Republican activist who worked in the Reagan administration Justice Department and has known Cheney and Addington for decades. "The idea of reducing Congress to a cipher was already in play," Fein told Mayer. "It was Cheney and Addington’s political agenda."
Insiders told Mayer that administration lawyers who raised questions about the plenary powers being seized by the president were dismissed by Addington as giving away the store.
This doctrine also fit the thinking of Yoo, who rose in the Office of Legal Counsel to be the go-to guy on warpowers questions. His popularity had to do with his answers, which tilted toward expanding presidential power.
Yoo is a primary author of the memo giving legal cover to torture and he opined that the administration may deny the Taliban and prisoners captured in the "war" on terror the protections of the Geneva Conventions. On these points, Yoo’s reasoning was as dangerous as it was strained.
But the Supreme Court just made mincemeat of Yoo’s manifesto on executive-branch unilateralism, and he has been on the defensive ever since.
In Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, five members of the court said Bush doesn’t have the authority to put Guantanamo detainees through show trials of his own making. The court retrieved Common Article 3 of the Conventions from the dustbin that Yoo had thrown it, and said its fair-trial protections for prisoners do apply to the detainees at Guantanamo.
The ruling was a respite from the disastrous course on which we’ve been set by all the vice president’s men, who have rolled up their sleeves.
Robyn Blumner writes for Tribune Media Services.
blumner@sptimes.com
Monday, July 10, 2006
ROBYN BLUMNER
Repression doesn’t just happen. It has to be organized, arranged, justified and marketed to a willing populace. In other words, it takes a team. Most tyrannies aren’t of the epic variety involving a Josef Stalin or a Saddam Hussein. They are subtler, sapping freedom from a system that precariously depends on the integrity of those in charge. It doesn’t take much more than a corrupt sheriff, a mayor who helps a developer grab private property with eminent domain, or a president who claims that terror suspects have no rights, to harm our foundational constructs of liberty.
And aides to petty and great tyrants have a central role: to dispense with core values that get in the way of power. They make the world less just and humane, since those are the rules that protect the vulnerable from the strong, and such people have been enlisted to make the strong stronger.
In a nation of laws, lawyers are the most helpful in this regard, and the Bush administration has had two standouts: David Addington, who is Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, former counsel and longtime associate, and John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the executive branch on the constitutionality of policy.
These men embroidered the legal justifications for a kinglike presidency that may disregard federal law, constitutional rights and the express terms of ratified treaties if the president believes it furthers national security.
Emanating from this tyrannical idea has come an entire legal regime giving the president the power to approve torture, secret prisons, indefinite detention, kangaroo military commissions and warrantless domestic surveillance. These are programs contrary to law and our moral fiber.
Yoo and Addington were working at the behest of President Bush and Cheney (OK, mostly Cheney), but their enthusiastic embrace of presidential supremacy makes them guilty men.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has thrown the word treason at The New York Times for informing the American people of the Bush administration’s surveillance of international financial transactions. I say what The Times did in disclosing a follow-the-money program that the administration has been essentially crowing about for years is piffle compared with the acts of Yoo and Addington, who conspired to undo checks and balances by granting the president dictatorial powers.
In the July 3 New Yorker, reporter Jane Mayer lifts the veil off the secretive Addington and describes a man obsessed with setting forth a "new paradigm," in which the commander-in-chief may "disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries."
The plan predates 9/11, according to Bruce Fein, a Republican activist who worked in the Reagan administration Justice Department and has known Cheney and Addington for decades. "The idea of reducing Congress to a cipher was already in play," Fein told Mayer. "It was Cheney and Addington’s political agenda."
Insiders told Mayer that administration lawyers who raised questions about the plenary powers being seized by the president were dismissed by Addington as giving away the store.
This doctrine also fit the thinking of Yoo, who rose in the Office of Legal Counsel to be the go-to guy on warpowers questions. His popularity had to do with his answers, which tilted toward expanding presidential power.
Yoo is a primary author of the memo giving legal cover to torture and he opined that the administration may deny the Taliban and prisoners captured in the "war" on terror the protections of the Geneva Conventions. On these points, Yoo’s reasoning was as dangerous as it was strained.
But the Supreme Court just made mincemeat of Yoo’s manifesto on executive-branch unilateralism, and he has been on the defensive ever since.
In Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, five members of the court said Bush doesn’t have the authority to put Guantanamo detainees through show trials of his own making. The court retrieved Common Article 3 of the Conventions from the dustbin that Yoo had thrown it, and said its fair-trial protections for prisoners do apply to the detainees at Guantanamo.
The ruling was a respite from the disastrous course on which we’ve been set by all the vice president’s men, who have rolled up their sleeves.
Robyn Blumner writes for Tribune Media Services.
blumner@sptimes.com
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home