Constitutional Crisis?
Bromwich, David
Is the United States facing a constitutional crisis? We posed the following question to a group of prominent writers and intellectuals who represent a range of political opinion: Many people, as...
...Their responses appear below...
...The years 20022003 saw the campaign by Likud partisans such as Richard Perle and Tom DeLay to draw America into preemptive war on Iraq...
...The outlaw policy and the higher-law excuses of the past three years do not date from 9/11...
...But for the claim to be plausible, three forces must be brought into alignment: foreign entanglements...
...Then, in the mid-1980s, it passed into the mainstream...
...In 1986, illegal missions were jointly run by elements of the National Security Council and the State Department, whereas, in 2002, the substitute intelligence was relocated to Defense and overseen by the Office of the VicePresident...
...So the new law on searches and seizures without notice to the suspect, the new law on detention without a chance for the accused to confront the charges, the new finding on transportation of prisoners whose names are erased, the new finding on torture as an allowed method of obtaining information: these changes are revolutionary, and they strike at the foundations of constitutional and international law, but if they are adopted in practice they will need no stronger support...
...Once believe that you are good, and anything you do will be excusable by the purity of your motives...
...It is a kind of test: how much will we take...
...domestic attacks or threats of attack...
...The first and third conditions have been met, the third most notably in speeches by the vice president...
...Several names are the same—Poindexter, Abrams, Negroponte—and the operating method is the same...
...During the cold war, action on that basis was mostly confined to the Central Intelligence Agency, the special forces, and other peculiar adjuncts of the government and the military...
...The more we accept, the more they will ask us to bear...
...It will become more powerful and more secret, or it will yield to the traditions of liberty and public discussion...
...The diversion of illicit money to the contra rebels came at an important moment in the careers of both Dick Cheney and G.W...
...A similar pattern was observable in 2002-2003...
...Time is not on our side," the war on terror "may last our lifetime"—these matter-of-fact mutterings aim to chill the blood, to obstruct inquiry, and to cow dissent...
...How should we balance security and liberty, and how far are we today from getting that balance right...
...Here again, separate interests were uneasily joined, DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 5 COLLOQUIUM and the war hardened the identity of America and Israel as terrorist targets in command of occupying armies...
...The Bush administration wants to annex to itself extraordinary powers until they come to seem ordinary...
...This requires it to sustain the claim that we now live in a permanent state of emergency...
...In 1985, a government within the government, recognizing that no existing institution could serve its needs, set up an alternative focus of clandestine operations outside the CIA...
...Bush...
...THE SLANTING OF intelligence estimates, early plans for the war in Iraq concealed from the Congress and from the secretary of state, internal memos to create a rationale for torture and the abrogation of due process— it would be hard to deny a cumulative meaning to these acts...
...These are the effects of an imperium in imperio, a power within the power of government...
...Wiser to make it open at first...
...The testing ground was Central America...
...DAVID BROMWICH is co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty 6 n DISSENT / Fall 2004...
...We posed the following question to a group of prominent writers and intellectuals who represent a range of political opinion: Many people, as politically diverse as members of the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, now believe that the Bush administration poses a danger to the basic liberties and the political structure of constitutional democracy...
...Constitutionally speaking, that is an abuse of language, for if the state is permanent, it is not an emergency...
...They date from Iran-contra...
...By accustoming us to anti-constitutional proceedings, the administration gains a tacit approval for its new instruments of control...
...And then a time will come when they stop asking...
...Emotionally, it may hold us nonetheless...
...In 1985, Israeli interests uneasily crossed with American interests in the agreement by Israel to ship American arms to Iran...
...Lewis Libby, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Stephen Cambone, these men and others have worked with a sinister piety to subvert the Constitution...
...There are other disturbing parallels...
...How do you evaluate the significance of Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, the harsh interrogation techniques, the increased scrutiny of immigrants, the breakdown of the wall between foreign intelligence operations and domestic law enforcement...
...To guard it closely might appear to confess it shameful...
...Yet our secret government is an open secret: a condition that cannot last...
...EDS...
...and continuous propaganda...
...It showed them what was possible...
...What is the point of a secret government that is an open secret...
...Nothing is more dangerous to the morals of a free people than the belief that "We are good...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
