WAR ON TERRORISM: Grabbing power, losing respect: Eric Mink

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http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/columnists.nsf/ericmink/story/2DC297C42BB554FB86256F8700380EC8?OpenDocument&Headline=WAR+ON+TERRORISM%3A+Grabbing+power,+losing+respect
WAR ON TERRORISM: Grabbing power, losing respect
By Eric Mink
Of the Post-Dispatch
01/12/2005

Post-Dispatch Columnist Eric Mink
Oc Register titled this ABOVE THE LAW..white house rejects legal and constitutional check on presidential power


For more than three years, President George W. Bush has been using the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and legal sophistry produced by attorneys appointed to key positions in the White House, Justice Department and the Department of Defense to justify the exercise of essentially unlimited and unchecked presidential power.

In the spring and summer of 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, the president's chief legal adviser, presided over discussions of abusive techniques military and civilian U.S. interrogators could use to extract information from prisoners in their custody. Out of these discussions emerged the official legal position of the American government, spelled out in a Justice Department memo to Gonzales dated Aug. 1, 2002. It has come to be known as the "torture memo."


The fruits of this cynical exercise have been grimly apparent since the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted last May. Last month's court-ordered release of thousands of government documents and records demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that abuse has been widespread. It stretches back to 2002 and well into 2004 and involves hundreds of prisoners, probably more, under American control on at least two continents. And that doesn't include those secreted by the CIA at clandestine facilities in unspecified locations all over the globe and those shipped by the United States to countries where torture is routine.

But even more chilling than its winking at torture was the broader legal finding at the heart of the August 2002 memo: The U.S. Constitution - rather than enshrining the structure of a representative democracy, balancing the limited authority of government among three branches and protecting the rights of the individual - actually is a blueprint for dictatorship. The memo states that the Constitution empowers the president, as commander in chief of the armed forces, to violate laws passed by Congress, to betray the word and bond of the United States by ignoring its ratified international treaties and to authorize anyone else to commit any act he deems necessary - any act - absolved of responsibility and free from the risk of criminal prosecution and punishment.