David Isenberg is an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information and a senior analyst with the British-American Security Information Council. The views expressed are his own.
If Arthur Schlesinger were writing his classic book The Imperial Presidency today, he would have to produce an extended version to accommodate all the actions undertaken by George W. Bush in the name of what Dick Cheney calls a “robust” and “unimpaired” presidency.
It is axiomatic that all presidents seek to enlarge their powers in wartime. After all, Abraham Lincoln grabbed power by suspending habeas corpus , but at least he was doing it to end slavery. President Bush seems to want power for its own sake. And now that the United States is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as an overarching global war on terror, Bush has, in the name of fighting terrorism, done so with a vengeance.
Further illuminating this flagrant grab for power by the executive branch is the news of illicit wiretaps on international phone calls of U.S. citizens suspected of being Al Qaeda members or contacts. These wiretaps are obtained without judicial warrants and violate the fourth amendment right for U.S. citizens to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. The illegal wiretaps, ordered by Bush shortly after the 9/11 attacks and orchestrated by the National Security Agency (NSA), are the latest revelation in a sad litany of abuses and illegalities by an increasingly authoritarian Bush administration.
The Bush administration’s abuse of power further defies American rights by violating civil liberties under the PATRIOT Act as well as allowing for the analysis of detailed information of U.S. citizens by John Poindexter’s brainchild, the “Total Information Awareness” project—originally envisioned to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant. It is surely ironic how the Bush administration claims to be on a mission to spread democracy around the world, yet feels free to violate it at home.
Americans are not the only people to be hurt by the Bush administration’s abuse of power, as evidenced by the administration’s brazen breach of international law: from misrepresenting the evidence for invading Iraq to flouting the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian laws against torture in Abu Ghraib, to running a secret prison network.
The abuses committed by the Bush administration affect Americans and the international community and also often ignore Congress. This all culminates into a flagrant disrespect for one of the fundamental purposes of the U.S. Constitution: to prevent the accumulation of power by any one branch of government.
In retrospect, it was easy enough to see this abuse of executive power coming, based on the past actions of current administration officials. Consider, for example, that when he was Powell's deputy undersecretary for international arms control, John Bolton, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on the orders of Dick Cheney instructed the NSA to conduct domestic eavesdropping on phone calls between Powell and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Of primary interest to Bolton and Cheney was Powell's green light to Richardson to conduct diplomatic back-channel nuclear talks with North Korea's U.N. ambassador in New York.
According to news reports, the NSA eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped; thus, the number of Americans being illicitly monitored may have reached into the thousands since the program began in 2001.
And what is the result of the incessant NSA monitoring? Not much. Most people targeted by the NSA have never been charged with a crime.
Sadly, the NSA monitoring is an excuse for something worse: incompetence in the U.S. intelligence community. For example, to defend the monitoring, Bush said two of the hijackers who helped fly a jet into the Pentagon had communicated with suspected Al Qaeda members overseas while they were living in the United States. "But we didn't know they were here until it was too late," Bush said. To fix this problem, Bush claimed that the authorization he gave the NSA after 9/11 would prevent similar mistakes in a way that is “fully consistent” with his “constitutional responsibilities and authorities." More recently, Vice President Cheney asserted they would have been caught had the program been in effect at the time.
However, a 2002 inquiry into the case by the House and Senate intelligence committees blamed interagency communication breakdowns—not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any other intelligence—gathering guidelines for the lack of action against the hijackers contact with Al Qaeda.
The explanations offered in defense of the wiretaps are so lame as to be incredible. U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of the judges sitting on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases, has resigned from the court in protest of Bush's secret authorization of the domestic spying program. Even noted conservative George Will wrote, “The president's decision to authorize the NSA's surveillance without the complicity of a court or Congress was a mistake.”
It is worth noting (although hardly anyone does) that Bush asserts his authority to approve domestic surveillance anytime he wants because he claims the United States is at war. But is it? If so, why hasn’t Congress issued a declaration of war? Not all armed conflicts vest the president with emergency powers. If Bush needs greater authority than he currently has, he should ask Congress for it.
Some administration supporters argue that Congress obviated the need to declare war by passing the War Powers Resolution immediately after the 9/11 attacks. As former Texas Rep. Martin Frost recently wrote: “I was a member of Congress when we passed the resolution giving the president the authority to use all force necessary against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Congress clearly meant this as authorization to go into Afghanistan and find Osama bin Laden. No one ever thought this authorized our government to wiretap American citizens in our own country without court approval.”
As has been pointed out numerous times the U.S. Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. The post-9/11congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.
Perhaps the worst part of the abuses is that the NSA is a military agency. Thus we have the military executing actions that violate U.S. civilian laws. Ironically, when we see illicit actions like this taking place in other countries, we usually call it a police state.
