Democracy itself is in grave danger , Part 4,

[Guest guest]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/06/24/gore_speech/index3.html

 

 

 

" Democracy itself is in grave danger " | Part 4,

 

 

 

They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in

the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin Laden

that they dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for

launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that

posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever. But the damage they have done to our

country is not limited to misallocation of military economic political

resources. Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy

convincing people of lies, he damages the fabric of democracy, and the belief in

the fundamental integrity of our self-government.

 

 

That creates a need for control over the flood of bad news, bad policies and bad

decisions also explains their striking attempts to control news coverage.

 

To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly ready to do

battle with the news media when he went on CNBC earlier this week to attack news

coverage of the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Iraq did not work with

al-Qaida. He lashed out at the New York Times for having the nerve to print a

headline saying the 9/11 commission " finds no Qaeda-Iraq Tie " -- a clear

statement of the obvious -- and said there is no " fundamental split here now

between what the president said and what the commission said. " He tried to deny

that he had personally been responsible for helping to create the false

impression of linkage between al-Qaida and Iraq.

 

 

Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for " The Daily Show With Jon

Stewart. " Stewart played Cheney's outright denial that he had ever said that

representatives of al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence met in Prague. Then Stewart

froze Cheney's image and played the exact video clip in which Cheney had indeed

directly claimed linkage between the two, catching him on videotape in a lie. At

that point Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney's frozen image on the

television screen, " It's my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire. "

 

Dan Rather says that post-9/11 patriotism has stifled journalists from asking

government officials " the toughest of the tough questions. " Rather went so far

as to compare administration efforts to intimidate the press to " necklacing " in

apartheid South Africa, while acknowledging it as " an obscene comparison. " " The

fear is that you will be necklaced here (in the U.S.), you will have a flaming

tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck, " Rather explained. It was CBS,

remember, that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs from the American people for

two weeks at the request of the Bush administration.

 

Donald Rumsfeld has said that criticism of the administration's policy " makes it

complicated and more difficult " to fight the war. CNN's Christiane Amanpour said

on CNBC last September, " I think the press was muzzled and I think the press

self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say but certainly television, and perhaps to a

certain extent my station, was intimidated by the aAdministration. "

 

The administration works closely with a network of " rapid response " digital

Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for " undermining

support for our troops. " Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of

the first journalists to regularly expose the president's consistent distortions

of the facts. Krugman writes, " Let's not overlook the role of intimidation.

After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative of the President

.... you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could

to ruin your reputation.

 

Bush and Cheney are spreading purposeful confusion while punishing reporters who

stand in the way. It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic

institutions to resist this pressure, which, in the case of individual

journalists, threatens their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters

can lead to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because

without a press able to report " without fear or favor " our democracy will

disappear.

 

Recently, the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way it

allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false pretenses. We

are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media, to never let this

happen again. We must help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake, or we

risk other wrong-headed decisions based upon false and misleading impressions.

 

We are left with an unprecedented, high-intensity conflict every single day

between the ideological illusions upon which this administration's policies have

been based and the reality of the world in which the American people live their

lives.

 

When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq

policy, it is actually fairly simple: he adopted an ideologically driven view of

Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is

in one way or another the result of a spectacular and violent clash between the

bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all-too-painful

reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have

encountered. Of course, there have been several other collisions between

President Bush's ideology and America's reality. To take the most prominent

example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into a $4 trillion deficit

is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation as the Iraq war.

 

But there has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously

off track this President's policies have taken America than the two profound

shocks to our nation's conscience during the last month. First came the

extremely disturbing pictures that document strange forms of physical and sexual

abuse -- and even torture and murder -- by some of our soldiers against people

they captured as prisoners in Iraq. And then, the second shock came just last

week, with strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration,

which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal

rationale for bizarre and sadistic activities conducted in the name of the

American people, which, according to any reasonable person, would be recognized

as war crimes. In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded

that the President, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is

above and immune from the " rule of law. " At least we don't have to

guess what our founders would have to say about this bizarre and un-American

theory.

 

By the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal

analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out

and it was, " irrelevant and overbroad. " But no one in the administration has

said that the reasoning was wrong. And in fact, a DOJ spokesman says they stand

by the tortured definition of torture. In addition the broad analysis regarding

the commander-in-chief powers has not been disavowed. And the view of the memo

-- that it was within commander-in-chief power to order any interrogation

techniques necessary to extract information -- most certainly contributed to the

atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu

Ghraib. We also know that President Bush rewarded the principle author of this

legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. President Bush,

meanwhile, continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his

morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and

sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who

were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush Gulag and

led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq.

 

I call on the administration to disclose all its interrogation policies,

including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed

by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the U.S., as well as all the

analyses related to the adoption of those policies.

 

The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any

potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war,

a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken

assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the U.S.

soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison. The top-heavy focus on

dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world is exactly paralleled in

their aspiration for the role of the president to be completely dominant in the

constitutional system. Our founders understood even better than Lord Acton the

inner meaning of his aphorism that power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts

absolutely. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power. Ironically, all

of their didactic messages about how democracies don't invade other nations fell

on their own deaf ears. The pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy

led the bush administration to ignore the

United nations, do serious damage to our most alliances in the world, violate

international law and risk the hatred of the rest of the world. The seductive

exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers

under the constitution in a way that would have been the worst nightmare of our

framers.

 

And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fool's gold in any case. Just as

its pursuit in Mesopotamia has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers, the

Iraqi people, our alliances, everything we think is important, in the same way

the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that weakens the Congress,

courts and civil society is not good for either the presidency or the rest of

the nation.

 

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