NEW YORK - His name is Clare Callan. He is a feisty 85-year-old former congressman from rural Nebraska. And he is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to declare that Pres. George W. Bush had no legal authority to go to war in Iraq.
Callan does not see himself as some kind of Don Quixote, haplessly tilting at windmills. He is not asking the Supreme Court to end the war. Callan himself is a World War II veteran, who served on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific.
He says he is proud of the U.S. military, proud of his own service, and proud of the troops fighting in Iraq. But he believes that president violated the Constitution when he sent U.S. soldiers into harm's way. Now, he wants the nation's highest court to say so.
”I'm not wet behind the ears,” Callan said in an IPS interview. ”I know how Washington works. So I have no great expectations that my point of view will prevail. But I have an obligation as a citizen to do what I can. If we don't use the freedoms we have, they'll disappear.”
Other lawsuits have been brought by parents of U.S. soldiers and members of Congress challenging the authority for the invasion without an explicit congressional declaration of war, but none have gotten far.
Callan's case goes like this:
When Congress passed the Iraq Resolution in Oct. 2002, the legislators specifically made it subject to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, known as the War Powers Act. The Iraq resolution was definite. ”Nothing in this joint resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution,” it reads.
Rather than giving Pres. Bush the authority to take the nation to war, Callan believes, it granted him only the right to determine whether the standards laid out by the War Powers Act had been met. The War Powers Act was passed near the end of the Vietnam War in an effort to ensure that future Congresses would be less likely to abdicate their constitutional responsibility to decide whether the nation should go to war.
To justify going to war, the War Powers Act sets out several criteria. Most important of these is ”clear” evidence of an ”imminent” threat to U.S. security. The words ”clear” and ”imminent” are used repeatedly to describe situations where U.S. military force is permitted.
In the run-up to the invasion -- and ever since -- Pres. Bush went out of his way to avoid using the words ”clear” and ”imminent”, Callan says. Bush described the threat from Iraq with adjectives like ”growing” and ”gathering”.
While some of his surrogates, including his then press secretary Ari Fleisher, declared the threat ”imminent”, the president never did.
In essence, Callan's suit, filed in a U.S. circuit court three years ago, charges that the president failed to meet his constitutional obligation.
It has been rejected and appealed multiple times since then, with lower courts ruling that they lacked jurisdiction to hear his complaint, or that he had no legitimate cause of action.
Callan argues that he is only asking the courts to interpret an act of Congress based on ”plain language and common sense”.
”Courts do not lack the power and the ability to make the factual and legal determination of whether this nation's military actions constitute war for purposes of the constitutional War Clause,” Callan said, and has cited numerous precedents in his filings.
See:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0122-04.htm
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