Peace Messenger

How Close to Presidential Dictatorship?

Analysis and commentary on the Bush-era memos made public on Monday, March 2:

David G. Savage, "Bush Memos on Presidential Power Shock Legal Experts," Chicago Tribune, 4 March 2009: Legal experts said Tuesday they were taken aback by the claim in the latest batch of secret Bush-era memos that the president alone had the power to set the rules during the war on terrorism.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin called this a "theory of presidential dictatorship. They say the battlefield is everywhere. And the president can do anything he wants, so long as it involves the military and the enemy."...

Guided Missiles, Misguided Men

The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril
by Eugene Jarecki
Free Press / 2008

Eugene Jarecki (pictured below) carries forward the exploration of the pervasive influence of the "military-industrial complex" in American culture presented in his powerful 2006 documentary Why We Fight.  The publisher describes The American Way of War as

a penetrating and revelatory inquiry into how forces within the American political, economic, and military systems have come to undermine the carefully crafted structure of our republic -- upsetting its balance of powers, vastly strengthening the hand of the president in taking the nation to war, and imperiling the workings of American democracy. This is a story not of simple corruption but of the unexpected origins of a more subtle and, in many ways, more worrisome disfiguring of our political system and society.

While in no way absolving George W. Bush and his inner circle of their accountability for misguiding the country into a disastrous war -- in fact, Jarecki sheds new light on the deepest underpinnings of how and why they did so -- he reveals that the forty-third president's predisposition toward war and Congress's acquiescence to his wishes must be understood as part of a longer story

In his farewell address 47 years ago, President Eisenhower identified the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" as both new and far- reaching. Its influence was not just military but "economic, political, even spiritual" thus involving "the very structure of our society."

Bringing to light the connections through which the military-industrial complex extends its influence throughout American culture is what made the Why We Fight documentary so effective. The "spiritual" aspect -- broad but very real ways -- comes through with depth and poigniance. If The American Way of War reinforces and extends the quality of analysis found in the documentary, it will be an exceptionally valuable book.

Takoma Park Pacifists Targetted as Terrorism Suspects

Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, reporting from Takoma Park, MD in "Spying on Pacifists, Environmentalists and Nuns" (7 December 2008):

To friends in the protest movement, Lucy was an eager 20-something who attended their events and sent encouraging e-mails to support their causes.

Only one thing seemed strange.

"At one demonstration, I remember her showing up with a laptop computer and typing away," said Mike Stark, who helped lead the anti-death-penalty march in Baltimore that day. "We all thought that was odd."

Not really. The woman was an undercover Maryland State Police trooper who between 2005 and 2007 infiltrated more than two dozen rallies and meetings of nonviolent groups.

Maryland officials now concede that, based on information gathered by "Lucy" and others, state police wrongly listed at least 53 Americans as terrorists in a criminal intelligence database -- and shared some information about them with half a dozen state and federal agencies, including the National Security Agency.

Among those labeled as terrorists: two Catholic nuns, a former Democratic congressional candidate, a lifelong pacifist and a registered lobbyist....

Read more at the LA Times web site or at Truthout.org.

Replacing Jesus With America

Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
by Greg Grandin

Holt Paperbacks / 2007

Historian Greg Grandin "locates the origins of the militarism that led to war in Iraq" in Central America during the 1980s.  There, he contends, the Reagan administration's policy first brought together the forces driving U.S. imperialism twenty years later.  Grandin identifies these forces as "punitive idealism, free market absolutism, and the mass fervor of right wing evangelicalism."  Most pertinent for our concerns, it was in the Central American was that "New Right Christian theologians joined forces with secular nationalism to elaborate an ethical justification for rejuvenated militarism" (6).

As the following excerpt from his conclusion shows, Grandin's analysis shines an intense light on the militarist idolatry that holds America in its thrall today:

...[A]ll of George Bush's abuses of power -- the manipulation of intelligence and the media, the building of an interagency war party that operated autonomously from Washington's foreign policy establishment, the illegal wiretaps, the surveillance of antiwar activists -- have their most immediate antecedents in Reagan's Central America policy, which in retrospect has to be understood as the first battle in the New Right's crusade to roll back restrictions placed on the imperial presidency in the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, COINTELPRO, and other scandals of the 1970s....

How the War on Terror Became a War on American Ideals

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals

by Jane Mayer

Doubleday / 2008

Mayer argues that the "radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long held agenda to enhance Presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment."

Twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize during her twelve years with the Wall Street Journal, Jane Mayer is now a staff writer for the New Yorker.  Bill Moyers interviewed her on the July 25 broadcast of Bill Moyers' Journal. Excerpts:

On the first lines of dissent against the administration's "enhanced interrogation" policies: The first line of dissent came from the United States military leaders and particularly the military lawyers who are experts in the laws of war. And they said this is dishonorable. This is not how we fight wars. And if you do this to these people, they're, it's going to enflame them and it's going to endanger our own men and women when they get taken captive. And another very early line of dissent came from the FBI,...a couple of the FBI agents who were there said, "These people, the CIA, should be arrested for criminal behavior. What they're doing is, the quote was, "borderline torture."... So...we've had a war on terror where the FBI has pretty much taken a backseat or no seat because they don't want to have any part in this thing because they know that they think that some of it's criminal.

On the argument that in exceptional cases "torture works" in protecting Americans against terrorist attacks, with information obtained from al-Qaeda "logistics chief" Abu Zubaydah cited as a major example of success: The convention against torture, which the United States Senate ratified, has no exceptions. It's a major felony. There's no excuse for doing it for war. There's no excuse for national security. It doesn't have exceptions. So this is a serious legal problem....

Secondly,...What led them to Abu Zubaydah? Was it torture? It wasn't actually. It was a bribe that they gave to the Pakistanis that got them to Abu Zubaydah. Bribing people does work, and that's, you can see again and again in the war on terror. Then, what did they get out of Abu Zubaydah when they brutalized him?... Dan Coleman, who's an FBI agent who knows a lot about Abu Zubaydah and this interrogation...thinks they got nothing out of him. First of all, he was mentally unstable.... He later said that he made up half of the things that he told them.

...And, according to a very top CIA officer I spoke to who was very close with [former director George] Tenet, he said 90 percent of what we got was crap. And he said and that was true of every method we used: Torture, non-torture.

On the most horrific thing she found in researching "the dark side:" I just think the worst thing for me is reading and finding out about innocent people who were taken by mistake and put through this program. And there's...a German citizen, Khalid el-Masri, who was locked up for months. And the CIA actually had doubts that he was a terrorist from the start, and they wouldn't do anything about it, which I think is unconscionable. They just kept him in there to the point where he lost 70 pounds. Everybody, you, who was around him, was banging their heads in, against the wall, trying to commit suicide. It's, it's really awful to see the psychic destruction of people for no reason. It just doesn't seem American to me.