When Bush pardons himself

The Bush administration did not have an exit strategy for Iraq, but you can bet they have one for themselves. With the nation distracted by the election, few are discussing what steps Bush might take before leaving the White House for avoiding the Big House. Or what secret, pre-planning is likely going on as we speak to address that.

We all expect a flurry of preemptive presidential pardons for Bush’s pals before he leaves office. But unless there is a Republican following him in the White House, who pardons Bush?
“He couldn’t pardon himself,” my wife said yesterday.

“We’re talking about George W. Bush,” I replied. Who would have foreseen a president voiding habeas corpus, authorizing torture or any of his other offenses?

Sure, there would be a firestorm of criticism, but if it is between public opinion or George doing time, has he ever cared what we think? They have already granted themselves retroactive immunity for past war crimes in the Military Commissions Act.

With our president’s history, it would not surprise me for Bush to pardon himself. Barring impeachment, the constitution does not forbid it. At worst, Bush might worry that someone will challenge it before the Supreme Court -- the Roberts Supreme Court.

Respect my authority!

The president demands Congress remain in session to pass an update to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) so his legal wiretapping activities will be legal again:

"So far the Democrats in Congress have not drafted a bill I can sign," Mr. Bush said at FBI headquarters, where he was meeting with counterterror and homeland security officials. "We've worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution, but we are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short."

The president said lawmakers cannot leave for their August recess this weekend as planned unless they "pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States."

Or the terrorists win, we know.

Bush's demand echoes his insistence that Congress pass the Military Commissions Act last September. (The act undermined habeas corpus, in case you missed that.) "The need for this legislation is urgent," Bush said last September. The Congress passed the president's urgently needed bill on September 29.

While he was out fundraising and campaigning, the action-figure president let the Military Commissions bill sit urgently on his desk for two and a half weeks before signing it on October 17.

How many times will Democrats in Congress let this guy play them?

It's legal. Trust us.

That's why they're pushing so hard for legislation that says so:

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

This is the point at which bloggers on the right scream for loose-lipped heads to roll, right?

The WaPo report continues:

The decision was both a political and practical blow to the administration, which had long held that all of the National Security Agency's enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal. The administration for years had declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and after it finally did so in January the court ruled that the administration's legal judgment was at least partly wrong.

It's a dog bites man story at this point. When this administration starts getting things right it should be real headline news.

Bad faith

(This piece first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on October 22, 2006.)

If they had voted away the right to bear arms, we’d have had a revolution. When they gutted habeas corpus, we hardly noticed.

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” – U.S. Constitution, Article I

America confronts a serious threat from terrorism, but faces neither rebellion nor invasion.

No matter. With little debate 65 U.S. Senators voted September 28 to deny habeas corpus review for alien detainees in U.S. custody. Every Republican but two approved the “Military Commissions Act of 2006,” a broadly written bill concerned primarily with tribunals for terror suspects detained since September 11. Twelve Senate Democrats joined the Republican majority.

Thirty-two Democrats and 218 Republicans (all but seven) approved the final bill in the House. And so Congress repudiated a fundamental principle of liberty that predates the Magna Carta.

Ironically, the 14 Guantanamo suspects facing charges receive limited due process under this bill. Hundreds of others face legal limbo, barred from contesting their indefinite imprisonment.

Habeas corpus (“you have the body”) is not a right many Americans use daily. Still, the “Great Writ,” the prisoner’s right to challenge the king’s reasons for jailing him, has been a cornerstone freedom for centuries. Until now.

"What the bill seeks to do is set back basic rights by some 900 years," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA). He then voted for the bill he called "patently unconstitutional on its face."

His colleagues also knew that the Supreme Court will likely overturn the habeas provision. But a party rocked by scandals and an unpopular war in Iraq needed a divisive vote with which to paint Democrats soft on terrorism.

All who voted yea proved they were soft on the Constitution.

To recap, 65 Senators and 250 congressmen approved a bill that undermines the Constitution they swore a solemn oath to uphold. President Bush will sign it.

Consider that when asked, “Who do you trust?” But there are more skeletons in this closet.

The War Crimes Act that enforces the Geneva Conventions makes cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners a federal crime. When the Supreme Court ruled this summer that Geneva’s Common Article 3 applies to all detainees, CIA interrogators scrambled to buy legal-defense insurance. Bush administration lawyers had led them to believe that Geneva did not apply to “enemy combatants,” and that waterboarding and other abuses were legal.

Thus the hurry to pass the Military Commissions Act before Republicans lose control of Congress this November.

The act parses the meaning of cruelty and grants legal immunity retroactive to 1997 for both interrogators and senior officials involved in all but “grave” prisoner abuses.

The president decides what is “grave.” The act bars courts from reviewing his decisions.

A recent estimate says that America holds 14,000 prisoners in camps from Bagram (Afghanistan) to Guantanamo. Retired Army Major General John Batiste testified recently that of 13,000-plus once held in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, “probably 99 percent … were guilty of absolutely nothing,” but “the way we abused them turned them against the effort in Iraq forever.”

Stay this course? No.

Raise questions about prisoner treatment and hardliners suggest you “don’t get it,” and invariably change the subject to al Qaeda’s barbarity. “The terrorists” deserve no rights.

Assuming that’s true, then presumably the innocent do. Justice, honor and decency demand that. What percentage of those 14,000 prisoners are guilty of nothing? Which are “the terrorists” deserving military justice?

The administration won’t say and thinks patriots wouldn’t ask. Americans who do are soft on terrorism.

The detainee treatment question is not about the blackness of terrorists’ hearts.

It is about our own hearts. About our standards of behavior, not theirs. Neitzsche cautioned, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster."

Fighting terrorism requires tough measures. Tough, but smart. And effective.

Promoting democracy requires living by our principles, not retreating from them.

America aspires to set a standard for the world, a moral high bar so high that sometimes she fails in reaching it. In our post-9/11 zeal we allowed our enemies to re-set that bar for us – ankle-high. Stay one step above those who cut off prisoners' heads on videotape and we can still claim moral superiority. Not that the world will pay attention any longer.

Osama bin Laden wants to destroy America? He needn’t bother. We just might do it for him.

You think?

The AP has realized "Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches":

There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care ... for all people."

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

...

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

U.S. News & World Report will release a story tonight on another assault on the 4th Amendment (from Daily Kos):

Olbermann: (reading from a U.S. News & World Report press release) "Soon after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department argued that the same legal authority that the same legal authority that allowed warrentless electronic surveillance inside the US, could also be used to justify physical searches of terror suspects homes & businesses without court approval."

Olbermann: Doesn't that send chills down your spine?

Turley: Well it does. It's horrific, because what that would constitute is to effectively remove the 4th Amendment from the U.S. Constitution and the fact that it was so quick as a suggestion shows the inclinations, unfortunately, of this administration. It treats the Constitution as some legal technicality instead of the thing were trying to fight to protect. Notably, the U.S. News & World Report story says the FBI officals, or some of them apparently, objected... [W]e're seeing a lot of people in the administration with the courage to say "Hold it, this is not what we're supposed to be about. If we're fighting a war, it's a war of self definition and if we start to take whole amendments out of the Constitution in the name of the war on terror-we have to wonder what's left at the end, except victory."

Sure, I love the smell of burning Constitution in the morning.