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WHAT ABOUT THE MORNING AFTER ?

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Since when is a presidential election the equivalent of surrender to a foreign system of government?

A Little Education Is Dangerous, They Say

Somewhere tonight in some cave/bunker/cellar/house/hotel room/command post in some country/state/territory Osama bin Laden is carefully reading the Washington Post and studying the current ABC opinion polls on what the American people think about George Bush and Iraq.  Bush’s popularity rating is currently at a low of 34%, while support for his mismanagement of the war on Iraq is 30%.

“Based on the substance of the polls, which indicate Americans do not want to fight Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their land, we do not mind offering a long-term truce based on just conditions,” bin Laden said in his December, 2005 taped message.

Maybe this is the poll from last November that bin Laden was referring to:

Throwing Down The Gauntlet

Apparently, as evidenced by his December, 2005 audio-tape message to Bush, America and the world, in the last year bin Laden has been studying English as a second language.  Bin Laden’s improved command of English is impressive. His closing paragraph:

“Reality shows that the war against the US and its allies is not just restricted to Iraq as he claims, but Iraq has become a gravitational point and recruiting ground for qualified mujahadeen.”

To measure his own effectiveness in releasing this message to the world, bin Laden has access to US and international newspapers and AlJazeerah television as well… the news station that received his taped message.  The CIA analyzed and authenticated the tape.  Yup, that’s him all right.  Bin Laden is in the news again.  He’s on the front page.

Unfortunately, President Bush will not be reading bin Laden’s message.

As Helen Thomas of Hearst Publications wrote:  “He walks into the Oval Office in the morning, and asks Chief of Staff Andrew Card: `What’s in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what’s moving,’ Bush said. `I rarely read the stories,’ he said.”

Too bad Bush did not read a briefing from August of 2001.  As reported in the New York Times last April:  “He’s not much of a reader. Said he doesn’t read newspapers, and didn’t bother to read an August 2001 brief titled, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S.”

It’s time for Bush to get back to work on Information Warfare, the Office of Strategic Communications, and the War on The Free Press.  He’s got to plug up these information leaks.  Bin Laden is reading the Washington Post!  Being a dictator would be so much easier said Mr. Bush repeatedly over the last five years.  If only he didn’t have to contend with American public opinion, with the Press, with the Congress, with environmentalists, with labor, with the UN, with the EU, and with his “domestic problems.”   That damn Washington Post, those damn ABC public opinion polls!

Osama Bin Who?

WHITE HOUSE BRIEFING

Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com

Wednesday, March 1, 2006; 12:24 PM

President Bush made a surprise stop in Afghanistan today on his way to India and Pakistan. But it wasn’t exactly a victory tour.

His hurried, heavily armored five hours there may have primarily served to call attention to the increasingly poor security situation there — and to the fact that Osama bin Laden is still alive and on the loose.

. . . .

But once it turned to questions — and only four were allowed — guess who came up?

Terence Hunt of the Associated Press: “I’d like to ask you, Mr. President, there was a time when you talked about getting Osama bin Laden dead or alive. Why is he still on the loose five years later? And are you still confident that you’ll get him?”

Bush: “I am confident he will be brought to justice. What’s happening is, is that we got U.S. forces on the hunt for not only bin Laden, but anybody who plots and plans with bin Laden. . . . . . .

“We’re making progress of dismantling al Qaeda. Slowly but surely, we’re bringing the people to justice, and the world is better for it, as a result of our steady progress.”

Later, it was Afghanistan television’s turn: “Your Excellency President Bush, welcome to Afghanistan and wish you a pleasant stay. The question is — it has been four years since the presence of the international forces in Afghanistan. However, the security situation is increasingly deteriorating. What will be your long-term security policy to Afghanistan? And the second part of the question is, how will the U.S. policy be affected in regards to Afghanistan if Osama and [Taliban leader] Mullah [Mohammad] Omar are captured?”

Bush: “It’s not a matter of if they’re captured or brought to justice, it’s when they’re brought to justice.”

As for the deteriorating security situation? Or when American troops will leave? Bush ducked those issues entirely.

. . . .

It’s just possible that bin Laden has slipped beneath the American radar, what with the diversion of troops, money and war from Afghanistan to the illegal bombing then invasion of Iraq.  George Bush wanted Saddam Hussein at any cost, and he got him.  The cost?  Current estimates of the cost of war against Iraq are as high as $2 Trillion US Dollars.  US soldiers killed in action?  About 2,300 and counting.  Cost to return a soldier to the US in a flag-draped coffin?  About $ 1 Billion per flag-draped coffin.  These numbers could improve.  As more Americans get killed under better fighting conditions the war in Iraq could become more cost-effective.  It’s possible that this will be the year that the Marines get the armor they requisitioned three years ago.

But it’s bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein, who is blamed for 911.  And it’s bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein, who heads the organization who took credit for 911.  And it was 911 that started Bush going on this whole “War On Terrorism.”  That’s the war that has no definition, the war on an abstract noun, the war with no parameters, the war against the amorphous enemy, the war with no foreseeable end.

Just When Bush Was At The Zenith of His Powers, bin Rears His Ugly Head

The “War On Terrorism.”  That’s the war that gave George Bush the “unlimited, unreviewable, plenary, and unitary power” to initiate and expand war at will, against any enemy anywhere that he alone decides on SUSPICION of terrorism, the power to designate and treat POW’s as sub-human, to torture at will, to render captives secretly to countries who torture, to strip down the Constitution-given civil rights of Americans – freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom from warrantless searches.  “The War On Terrorism” is the war that gave Bush the power to circumvent and undermine Congress, to violate the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution itself.

The “War On Terrorism.”  That’s the war that put Bush at the “zenith of his powers.”  As Commander In Chief of a Perpetual War Bush has out-Nixoned Nixon who said in 1997: “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”   And, in Bush’s “War On Terrorism” he’s got God on his side, something Nixon didn’t have the brass to claim.  Bush has got a direct line to the Almighty.  George Bush is doing God’s will in this “War On Terrorism” – this war is his crusade; it is the war of good vs. evil.  And, along the way, he’s spreading “democracy,” setting up puppet governments and military bases, inciting civil war, and seizing billions of barrels of oil.

From this one can see that without this “War On Terrorism” George Bush would be nothing – a schlub, a schlomo.  He’d just be a guy in an office doing a job.  Like you or me.  We all have our abilities; we all have to work with others, and we all have our limits.  Not GW Bush.  Through the vehicle of “The War On Terrorism” George Bush has become extra-human.  His powers are extra-Constitutional.

The Bush Sovereign Presidency is the end result of a 30 year struggle in US government to regain executive power reined in as a result of Nixon and Watergate.  As the New President, Bush has used this New Kind of War of his own invention to recreate the Executive Branch in his own image, and to establish the Sovereign Presidency as the paramount authority in American government. “When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity,” said George Orwell.

This claim of unlimited executive power is unprecedented – unchecked and imbalanced. And it sets Justice Jackson’s ruling in Youngstown Steel (1952) on its ear:

Justice Jackson articulated his famous three-part test for determining the validity of the exercise of executive power:

(1)    when the President and Congress act together, the President’s power is at its zenith;

(2)    when the President acts in violation of an act of Congress, his power “is at its lowest ebb”;

(3)    when the President acts in the absence of congressional authorization in an area of concurrent powers, he is in “a zone of twilight.” [FN135]

The purpose of the Constitution, said Justice Jackson, was not only to grant power, but to keep it from getting out of hand.

(YOUNGSTOWN CO. v. SAWYER, 343 U.S. 579 (1952)

Have The American People A Bush Exit Strategy?

Is it fair to ask when, if ever, the war on terror will be over?  Is it fair to ask, when Bush’s term in office has ended, what will have become of the Executive Office, and to the balance of powers in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches of US government?  What has Bush done to the American system of government?  What has Bush done to, (not through), the Constitution?  What have we become in the last several years?

Well we might ask, along with the (then) British Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy Adviser David Manning, “What happens on the morning after?”

Classified Memo

Strictly Personal

From: David Manning

DATE: 14 MARCH 2002

Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions:

  •     how to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified;
  •     what value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition;
  •     how to coordinate a US/allied military campaign with internal opposition (assuming there is any)
  •     WHAT HAPPENS ON THE MORNING AFTER?

    • Bush declared, without Congress, a New Kind of War, in which the traditional rules of war, including the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Military Code of Justice, do not apply. He declared this war in a church, on the Sunday following 9/11, with Colin Powell at his side.  Bush was using the church’s pulpit to declare a “Holy War.”  As Commander In Chief he claimed the authority to write New Rules for the New War and to do so without Congressional approval. He did this largely through the use of Presidential signing statements in which whatever law Congress thought it had passed was rewritten to mean whatever Bush meant it to mean.  And he did it through Executive Orders, secret and otherwise.

    This administration has claimed that the war against terrorism is a war, so outside the province of criminal law. By building his first detention camp in Cuba, outside US territory, and designating his prisoners “illegal enemy combatants,” Bush further attempted to evade US law, The Convention Against Torture, and the Geneva Conventions.  Finally, at the “zenith of his powers,” Bush improvised the New Constitution and established a New System of US Government.  This effort was underwritten by John Yoo who said in 2002, “What the administration is trying to do is create a new legal regime.” A new regime it is, but legal?  Devised by his league of lawyers, yes.  To establish this new regime the administration had to create a new meaning of “legal.”

    What is this?  A New Constitution?  A New Presidency?  A New War Powers Resolution?  A New Form of US Government?  What happened?  Was there a hostile takeover?  Since when is a presidential election the equivalent of surrender to a foreign system of government?  Did anybody know about this?

    John C. Yoo did.  He wrote it.  From his 1996 “Continuation of Politics By Other Means: The Original Understanding of War Powers,” to the “THE PRESIDENT’S CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY TO CONDUCT MILITARY OPERATIONS AGAINST TERRORISTS AND NATIONS SUPPORTING THEM;” September, 2001, through to the 2002 Yoo/Bybee Torture Memo, John C. Yoo wrote the book that overturned 212 years of American law.  He didn’t stop there, however.  He nullified the Magna Carta, too.  Quite a guy.

    Same War, Different Target

    This is how Al Gore, Vice President during the Clinton administration, and the man who won the popular vote for President in 2000 explains the shift in targets from bin Laden to Hussein right after 911:

    So, the freedom that bin Laden enjoys, studying English, watching television, and reading the Washington Post has been sponsored by George Bush’s executive decision as Commander-In-Chief to redirect the war effort away from bin Laden and towards Saddam Hussein.  If it were not for bin Laden’s yearly messages we might think he had disappeared altogether.

    Message Received

    I do not have access to the news sources that bin Laden has.  I just have one article dated January 20th, 2005 from Reuters’ newswire.  Headline: “Bin Laden Warns Of New Attacks Inside US.”  I have a bit of a problem with the wording of that headline, since he made his warning a month ago, and the warning is in itself nothing new.  One might respond, “Well, of course he warns the US of new attacks inside the US.  What else would he do?”  The threat:  al Qaeda is preparing new attacks directed inside the US.  “The operations are under preparation and you will see them in your houses as soon as they are complete, God willing.”

    Well, the operations are complete and have been running for years.  The American people are thoroughly terrorised.  The threats are in American houses 24/7.  American homes are saturated with toxins.  It’s called FOX News.  The American people have been held hostage in a state of hyper-vigilance for more than 4 years now, and FOX informs them hour to hour of how hot the threat is.  Amber Alert.  Orange Alert.  Red Alert.  I expect bin Laden’s latest message merits a Red Alert, but unlike bin Laden, I don’t have access to FOX News.

    There’s more in this message from bin Laden.  He says he’s aware that there is diminishing support in the US for the war/occupation of Iraq, and if the US will agree to withdraw its troops bin Laden will call off his terrorist network.  Bin Laden is offering a truce.  Now that’s news.

    Cheney to bin Laden:  “No dice.”

    “We do not negotiate with terrorists”

    (Dick Cheney’s reply to bin Laden’s December, 2005 message.)

    That’s really interesting, Mr. Cheney, because terrorists are the ones who do not negotiate.  Terrorists blow up civilians.  Terrorists torture and kill captives and make the other side witness it.  Cheney might as well have said, “We do not negotiate.  Period.”  The US does not negotiate with anyone.  Not the UN, not the EU, not anyone.  The US is perceived by friends and foes alike as arrogant, aggressive and insular.

    In 1996, in an interview on the American current affairs program 60 Minutes, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the UN, was asked: “We have heard that half a million Iraqi children have died . . . is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”  

    Avis T. Bohlen, who worked as assistant secretary of state for arms control under US ambassador to the UN John Bolton:

    “He was absolutely clear that he didn’t want any more arms control agreements,” Ms. Bohlen said. “He didn’t want any negotiating bodies. He just cut it off. It was one more area where we lost support and respect in the world.”

    From: “The Creation, Fall, Rise and Fall of the United Nations,” by John Bolton, US Ambassador to the UN:

    “Let us be realistic about the U.N.,” it asserts. “It has served our purposes from time to time; and it is worth keeping alive for future service. But it is not worth the sacrifice of American troops, American freedom of action, or American national interests.”

    “It can be a useful tool in the American foreign policy kit. The U.N. should be used when and where we choose to use it to advance American national interests. Not to validate academic theories and abstract models.”

    “If the UN building in New York lost 10 storeys, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” On another occasion, Bolton put forward the following opinion: “If I were redoing the Security Council today, I’d have one permanent member because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.”

    “The UN Security Council exists only so far as it serves American interests.”

    From Samantha Power writing in the New Yorker, May, 2004:

    “I’m pro-American,” Bolton says, as if that required him to be anti-world. He dismisses the U.N.’s tools for promoting peace and security.

    International law? “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so–because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.” (Never mind that such laws might have “constricted” the torture of detainees.)

    Humanitarian intervention? It’s “a right of intervention that is just a gleam in one beholder’s eye but looks like flat-out aggression to somebody else.”

    Negotiation as a way of dealing with rogue states? “I don’t do carrots,” Bolton says.

    No, the US does not do carrots – it does cluster bombs, depleted uranium, napalm and white phosphorus, but it does not do carrots.  We do not negotiate.  

    We Don’t Negotiate With Them, We Propagate Them

    What DOES the US do with terrorists?  Well, it hunts them, mostly.  It catches them almost never.  Sometimes it finds them and blows them up, but usually manages to kill ten times as many innocent civilians in the process.  And sometimes, as in the case of bin Laden, just as the US is about to capture the most terrorizing terrorist in the world, it allows him to escape.

    The US cannot identify who the terrorists are, except in terms so broad as to border on the meaningless, so that makes finding them rather difficult.  Terrorists are the insidious unknown, the other, except that the US suspects they are Muslim – hence, all Muslims are under suspicion.  Then again, terrorists could be Anyone from Anytown, USA.  So the net that’s cast for SUSPECTED terrorists is a net big enough to contain the whole world.  And the treatment for anyone caught in this net?  SUSPECTED terrorists can expect Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib Gulags.

    SUSPECTED terrorists can expect: no trial to determine if the US has been wrong in its suspicion and picked up an innocent civilian, no lawyer, no protection against torture, no access to the Red Cross, no UN or Amnesty oversight, and no end to it.  Unless, in their exuberance for using torture to gain information you do not hold, they manage to kill you.

    As it turns out about 85% of the prisoners held in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib should never have been held there at all.  But, once having been imprisoned as a SUSPECTED terrorist you can’t be let out of this system of gulags.  You might talk.

    The US hunts and tracks and intercepts suspected terrorist communications everywhere.  Recently revealed in The New York Times is a secret illegal domestic surveillance program that has been in operation since 2001 to spy on Americans.  This program involves data-mining, and stockpiles information traded between communications companies.  As the US doesn’t know what to make of these communications, it gains no intelligence to locate the terrorists.  If any intelligent person gives an intelligent analysis of this gathered intelligence, that person is ignored, smeared, censored, fired or dispensed with.

    Al Gore on the Bush administration’s misuse of intelligence:

    In Defense Of George Bush

    I suspect that along with his obvious “character flaws” George Bush is a simple, sincere, religious nut.  He is also an extremely dyslexic guy who, when he took the Oath of Office, misunderstood the meaning of the words he was saying.  To him, when he said “I swear to take care that the laws be faithfully executed” to him it meant that he would line up the laws of the land, including international treaties, like victims in front of a firing squad and carefully execute each and every one of them.  Should he falter in his aim or his nerve he had Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales to assist him.  It was John Yoo who supplied the arms and the ammunition…. all the way.

    I’d list those laws that he executed here, but the body count is too high to stack.  Just the violations of the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the War Powers Resolution, the US Constitution, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice is about 18 executed laws deep.  This doesn’t make a start on the impeachables…. lying to Congress, defrauding the American people, misappropriation of funds, illegal domestic surveillance without having sought warrants, then there is “fixing intelligence” to create the conditions for a predetermined war of aggression.  This law was, before Bush executed it, quite elegant:

    President Bush doesn’t just execute the laws – he eviscerates them.

    Message to bin Laden:  “I’m speechless.”

    If only George Bush had a speechwriter as good as bin Laden’s.  If only George Bush could read a speech as well.  And if only bin Laden hadn’t used that word “REALITY” in the last paragraph of his December message.  That’s the kicker.  The world’s number one most dangerous terrorist is saying, “Wake up to reality, Mr. Bush.  Let’s negotiate a truce.”

    Is it possible that the ever-studious bin Laden has been reading Ron Suskind’s essay, “Without A Doubt”?  On this side of the pond whenever anyone says “reality” it refers to “reality-based” versus “faith-based.”  If bin Laden in his crash course on modern Western Civilization has gotten hold of this essay we’re all in a lot of hot water.  This particular essay is a considerable weapon:

    “Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ”if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

    ”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: ”This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . .

    ”This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,” Bartlett went on to say. ”He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.” Bartlett paused, then said, ”But you can’t run the world on faith.”

    Here comes the kicker:

    `I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure (about an article I had written), and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

    `The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

    (“Without A Doubt,” by Ron Suskind; ESQUIRE MAGAZINE

    October 17, 2004)

    Houston, We Do Indeed Seem To Have A Problem

    If it is true that bin Laden in his off-hours has been reading around and turned his attention to this essay by Ron Suskind which explains so very clearly the workings of George Bush’s mind, then we do have a very serious problem.  Negotiation is one of the hallmarks of civilization.  So is literacy.  Bin Laden has taken the advantage here.  Against this type of terrorist tactic George Bush has no possible defense.  There’s only one thing he can do to combat this new breed of literate “reality-based” terrorist.  There’s only one kind of strike he can make to counter-attack his old nemesis bin Laden:  It’s time for George Bush to hit the books and face reality…. he must now face his failed war on terrorism has exposed him as operating, as Justice Jackson put it, in the twilight zone of his powers.  This President is crashing.  It’s up to the rest of us to now face “What About The Morning After?”

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