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CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
gives us the "New China" without illusions: from the
"millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes
to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn
on What's wrong with the U.S. left.
They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies
about 9/11; they're blogging; they're confusing a medium with
a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq.
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Does
a State of War Give Bush a Right to Commit War Crimes?
By DAVE LINDORFF
Right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer
has weighed in against the Supreme Court's latest ruling in Hamdan,
claiming that the Court erred in barring President Bush from
denying Guantanamo detainees the protections of the Third Geneva
Convention. The basis for his argument is that the U.S. is at
war, and that traditionally "supreme courts have been loath
to intervene against presidential war powers in the midst of
conflict."
Let's look at this assertion
for a minute.
First of all, the fact that
in the past, presidents have grievously abused their power during
wartime, and damaged the Constitution in the process, is hardly
grounds for letting this president do so again. Krauthammer cites,
for example, President Lincoln's famous revocation of the age-old
common law right of habeas corpus--the right to have one's imprisonment
brought before a judge--to justify Bush's current denial of habeas
corpus to captives in Guantanamo Bay.
Well, what Krauthammer fails
to mention is that in 1866, the Supreme Court slapped down the
administration of the assassinated President Lincoln, overturning
the detention and execution order (never carried out) of one
Lambdin P. Milligan, who had been arrested on orders of the president
on a charge of treason and denied habeas rights. In that ruling,
the Justice David Davis wrote:
The Constitution of the United
States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in
peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes
of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine
involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the
wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during
any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads
directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity
on which it is based is false, for the government, within the
Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary
to preserve its existence, as has been happily proved by the
result of the great effort to throw off its just authority. (Milligan,
71 U.S. 2 (1866))
Those stirring words should
be mailed to every member of Congress as they now consider the
Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling, with many Republicans clamoring
to pass a law exempting the Guantanamo detainees from the Geneva
Convention's jurisdiction.
Second, let's examine Krauthammer's
(and the Bush administration's) premise that the nation is at
war, and that therefore the president can claim special powers.
Is the country at war?
Certainly it's not at war in
Afghanistan, where there is an elected government, and where
U.S., British, French, German, Canadian and other military forces
serve at the invitation of the government. To call the small-scale
fighting against remnant Taliban fighters a war would be to say
that the U.S. is always at war, for U.S. military forces have
been in combat situations somewhere in the world almost constantly,
especially since World War II. Consider Korea, Indochina, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada,
Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, etc. (have I forgotten
any?). If these situations, in which U.S. forces were shooting
and being shot at, were all to be called states of war, then
by Krauthammer's faulty "logic," the U.S. should have
been under presidential rule, with the Constitution suspended,
for several generations already.
Clearly this is absurd. For
the term "war" to have any meaning, it must refer to
a condition in which the nation itself is in jeopardy. Certainly
it was this threat to America's very existence that led Lincoln
to declare martial law in some jurisdictions, and to suspend
the protections of the Constitution, rightly or wrongly.
Happily, nothing like that
kind of threat pertains today.
Neither the fighting in Afghanistan,
nor the larger fighting in Iraq--which was certainly a war (with
us as the invader!), but which is now a police action at the
request of a sovereign government, in the words of our president
himself--is a war.
The only "war" that
can be at issue then, is the so-called "war on terror."
But is this in any way a real "war"? Unless one believes
the self-serving clap-trap of the administration that the soldiers
in Iraq are fighting in the war on terror--an absurdity because
there were no terrorists in Iraq before the U.S. invaded that
country, and now what is called "terrorism" in Iraq,
at least as directed against U.S. interests, is nothing but garden
variety guerrilla warfare against a foreign army (ours)--the
answer has to be no. As Bush famously declared back on April
30, 2003, major combat ended in Iraq over three years ago. There
is no war in Iraq.
That leaves the global "war"
on terrorism. But let's get real. This is no more a war than
was the "war" on drugs or the "war" on poverty.
Sure, there may be a few soldiers who are involved, but mostly
it's about spying, monitoring, infiltrating and arresting suspected
terrorists. To call that kind of thing a war is to debase the
currenty of the language beyond recognition. (The truth is there
are probably more actual U.S. military forces involved in the
so-called "war" on drugs than there are involved in
the so-called "war" on terror.)
Moreover, while terrorists
certainly can threaten the lives and safety of Americans, they
cannot threaten the survival of or the territorial integrity
of the United States, which is after all what wars are all about.
Furthermore, Krauthammer speaks
of presidents needing to be able to suspend Constitutional rights
and to claim special extra-constitutional powers during wars,
and of the tradition of them then restoring those rights after
a conflict ends. But the administration has made it clear, in
between stirring calls for "total victory," that there
will be no end to this "war" on terror. And indeed
there cannot be, for there will always be those who will seek
to disrupt or punish a global power like the U.S. through the
use of terror. To accept the argument that fighting against such
threats requires a suspension of rights and a president with
dictatorial powers is to say that the Constitution, with its
separation of powers and its Bill of Rights, is finished.
Like the administration he
serves, Krauthammer is simply wrong, and surely in making such
a preposterous claim has surrendered the right to call himself
a conservative.
Justice Davis, writing at a
time right after the nation had fought a four-year war for its
very survival, a year after the president had been slain by an
agent of the enemy, and while forces of resistance in the South
were continuing to battle U.S. occupation troops, had it exactly
right when he said: "The Constitution of the United States
is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace."
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