Although the United States of America was conceived, as President Lincoln stated in his 1863
Gettysburg Address, as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, in recent decades our government has deviated markedly from that principle, so that today it resembles a monarchy in many ways more than a government of, by, and for the people.
It could be said that the presidency of Richard Nixon, sometimes referred to as
the imperial presidency, was the beginning of that trend, or at least that it represented a sharp acceleration of it. Nixon’s own words capture that principle as well as any others, perhaps none more clearly than in his
interview with David Frost, which aired on television on May 19th, 1977. Here are some pertinent excerpts:
FROST (To the audience): The wave of dissent, occasionally violent, which followed in the wake of the Cambodian incursion, prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him. To this end, the Deputy White House Counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings… These meetings produced a plan,
the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against antiwar groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasized to Nixon, were clearly illegal. Nevertheless, the president approved the plan… The president's approval was later to be listed in the
Articles of Impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power.
FROST (To Nixon): So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.
NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.
FROST: By definition?
NIXON: Exactly. Exactly… Yes, and the dividing line and, just so that one does not get the impression, that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate…. We also have to have in mind, that a president has to get appropriations from the Congress….
So, what is the difference between the form of government that Richard Nixon espoused and any run of the mill dictatorship? Could it be that, as Nixon later clarified, the legality of the President’s actions hinge upon some “national security” reason or other concept of the greater good? How could it? Almost all dictators claim that their actions are motivated by the purest of motives.
The worst effect of Nixon’s crimes is that they set a precedent for exactly the dictatorial philosophy of government that Nixon had in mind. His
successor pardoned him before he was even indicted for his crimes. And that set the stage for what came later.
The Iran-Contra ScandalThe war and its precedentsOn July 19th, 1979, a popular uprising by the revolutionary Sandinista Party
overthrew the repressive dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. The Sandinistas began reversing Somoza's devastation of the country with a program of land reform, social justice, and redistribution of wealth and income. Former members of Somoza's National Guards and other war criminals formed in opposition to the Sandanistas, and they became known as the Contras.
Supporting the Contras in their efforts to take over Nicaragua was one of the primary goals of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, despite abundant evidence of
repeated atrocities perpetrated by the Contras, including:
murder, the rape of two girls in their homes, torture of men, maiming of children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, amputating the genitals of people of both sexes, scraping the skin off the face, pouring acid on the face, breaking the toes and fingers of an 18 year old boy, and summary executions. These were the people Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters" and "the moral equal of our founding fathers."… The human rights organization Americas Watch concluded that "the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses…. so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war."
In addition to the Reagan administration funding the Contras, it used the CIA to assist them in their carnage, including the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors. By the mid-1980s, the Contra war had produced 14,000 casualties, including 3,000 dead children and adolescents, and 6,000 children had become war orphans.
Congress tries to fight backThe
Boland Amendments were a series of laws passed by Congress beginning in 1982 for the purpose of cutting off funding to the Contras and other support of their war by the Reagan administration.
The Reagan administration basically ignored the orders of Congress, continuing to fund and support the Contras through various means, most notoriously by selling military weapons to Iran in return for assistance in obtaining the release of American hostages in Lebanon – a scandal that became known as
Iran-Contra.
Avoidance of accountability by the Reagan/Bush administrationInvestigations into this scandal were later led by independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, with consequent
indictments of a long list of high level Reagan administration officials, most notably including the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger. On Christmas Eve, 1992, with less than a month remaining in George H.W. Bush’s lame duck presidency, Bush
issued full pardons to the top Reagan administration officials who had been indicted, even though Walsh had not yet completed his investigations.
Despite overwhelming evidence indicating that both Bush and Reagan attended several meetings where there were conversations concerning the arms-hostages swap, they both continued to plead ignorance of the affair.
There ensued a series of Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits, with the purpose of holding the Reagan administration accountable for their crimes. To prevent destruction of the relevant evidence, on January 6, 1993,
Judge Charles Richey ruled that computer tapes containing copies of e-mail messages by Reagan and Bush White House staff must be preserved. However, on January 19, 1993, President Bush
signed a secret agreement (See 7th paragraph) with Don Wilson, head of the National Archives and Records Administration, purporting to grant Bush exclusive legal control over the e-mail tapes of his administration.
The Clinton administration, for reasons unknown, proved reluctant to cooperate with efforts to bring crucial information to light (much less prosecute the Reagan administration crimes themselves), prompting Judge Richey on May 22, 1993,to
cite the Clinton White House and the acting Archivist of the United States for contempt of court. On February 15, 1995, Judge Richey rejected the Clinton administration's arguments to continue to withhold the evidence as "arbitrary and capricious... contrary to history, past practice and the law". And on February 27, 1995, Richey
addressed the Bush/Wilson agreement by declaring it “null and void” and writing that "No one, not even a President, is above the law."
But notwithstanding Judge Richey’s efforts to declare that the United States of America is not a dictatorship, neither Bush nor Reagan was ever held accountable for the Iran-Contra crimes
The George W. Bush administration crimesPerhaps it was the failure of our system to hold previous presidential administrations accountable for serious crimes that encouraged the George W. Bush administration to embark upon a series of crimes more horrendous than ever seen in the history of our country, thus earning for Bush the reputation of the
worst president in American history.
The list is too long to cover here in any substantial detail. A glimpse of the magnitude of these crimes can be seen from the
35 articles of impeachment that Congressman Dennis Kucinich presented to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 9th, 2008. Here is a summary:
Articles I – XIII: Creating a propaganda campaign and lying to the American people and Congress in order to build a false case for war against Iraq; then invading and occupying Iraq, in violation of U.S. and international law and in the absence of any good reason whatsoever; then failing to provide our troops with the body armor they needed, falsifying accounts of US troop deaths, and establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.
Article XIV: Exposing a covert CIA agent.
Articles XV-XVI: Providing immunity from prosecution to criminal contractors in Iraq and recklessly wasting US tax dollars on contractors in Iraq.
Articles XVII-XX: Indefinitely detaining our prisoners, including children, without charges or any legal rights, torturing them, and kidnapping people and transporting them to other countries to be tortured.
Article XXI: Lying to the American people and Congress, with the goal of overthrowing the Iranian government.
Article XXII: Creating secret laws.
Article XXIII: Violating the Posse Comitatus Act
Articles XXIV – XXV: Spying on American citizens in violation of our 4th Amendment.
Article XXVI: Announcing intent to violate duly enacted laws with signing statements.
Article XXVII: Failure to comply with Congressional subpoenas.
Article XXVIII - XXIX: Tampering with free and fair elections and corruption of the administration of justice.
Article XXX: Misleading Congress and the American people in an attempt to destroy Medicare.
Article XXXI: Failure to plan for or adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina.
Article XXXII: Obstructing efforts to address global climate change.
Article XXXIII - XXXV: Failure to respond to the 9/11 attacks on our country; then endangering the health of first responders and obstructing investigation into the attacks.
Failure to hold the Bush administration accountable for their crimesDespite Congressman Kucinich spelling out the evidence for each of these serious crimes and misdeeds, the U.S. House of Representatives utterly failed to hold the Bush administration accountable for any of them, through impeachment or any other means. The idea that a sitting President would engage in such things was seen as too painful for our nation to bear.
Of all these crimes, the most horrendous were an illegal, immoral and imperial war (Articles I-XIII) and the widespread abuse and torture of our prisoners (Articles XVII-XX). The evidence for these crimes is so clear that it would hardly take an investigation to uncover them. That evidence has been staring us in the face for several years:
The Iraq WarThe rationale that the Bush administration used to justify the Iraq war was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties to al Qaeda that posed a vital threat to our country. Foremost among the WMD threats was Iraq’s alleged nuclear capability, based on their alleged attempt to purchase yellow cake (natural uranium) from Africa and their possession of aluminum tubes alleged for use in the construction of a nuclear weapon. Though these claims were frequently repeated by the Bush administration to Congress and to the American people, it is quite evident that George Bush and Dick Cheney knew all of these claims to be false.
Regarding the yellow cake claims: In March 2002, Joe Wilson, the man who was sent to Niger by Dick Cheney’s office to verify the yellow cake claim, reported that there was
no evidence for that claim; our own government’s
National Intelligence Estimate stated that “claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious”; and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told our government on March 3, 2003, that the
Niger uranium documents were forgeries.
Regarding the aluminum tube claims: On September 7, 2002 Bush claimed that a new IAEA report stated Iraq was 6 months away from developing a nuclear weapon – though
no such report existed; later that same month the
Institute for Science and International Security released a report calling the aluminum tube intelligence ambiguous and warning that “U.S. nuclear experts who dissent from the Administration’s position are expected to remain silent…”; and on January 24, 2003, the
Washington Post reported that the IAEA stated “It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium, but you’d have to believe that Iraq…”
And to top it all off, on March 7, 2003, just a few days before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq,
the IAEA reported “We have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.” George Bush and Dick Cheney had to have known all of this. Yet they uttered not a word of it to Congress or the American people as they tried to sell their war, as George Bush repeated both claims, and more, in his January 28, 2003
State of the Union speech.
Treatment of our prisoners including tortureRep. Kucinich sums up the abuse and torture charge in his articles of impeachment:
In a statement on Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared that in the US fight against Al Qaeda, "None of the provisions of Geneva apply," thus rejecting the Geneva Conventions that protect captives in wars and other conflicts. By that time, the administration was already transporting captives… to US-run prisons in Afghanistan and to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The round-up and detention without charge of Muslim non-citizens inside the US began almost immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon… The US, on orders of the president, began capturing and detaining without charge alleged terror suspects in other countries and detaining them abroad and at the US Naval base in Guantanamo.
Estimates of how many prisoners have disappeared into the Bush administration’s Gulag system
cannot be precise because of the secrecy. Estimates have varied
from 8,500 to
35,000. An
AP story estimated around 14,000. An ACLU-sponsored
2005 analysis of 44 autopsies, of men who died in our detention facilities, found 21 of the 44 deaths evaluated by autopsy to be homicides – probably only a small fraction of the total amount of Bush administration-sponsored torture-related deaths.
All of these atrocities – the same for which we sentenced Nazi war criminals to death at the
Nuremberg trials – were made possible by Bush’s signing of the
February 7, 2002 memo declaring that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to his “War on Terror” prisoners. Notwithstanding the fact that Bush had pressured his administration’s lawyers to write legal opinions justifying his actions, the fact remains that violation of the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is a signatory, is a clear violation of U.S. law. The torture that Bush’s memo unleashed is also a violation of the
8th Amendment to our Constitution. And even the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Bush administration
guilty of war crimes in their
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision.
ConclusionSo it is that our nation’s failures to hold criminals at the highest levels of government accountable for their crimes destroys respect for the rule of law and enables more of the same. The United States now has the
current world record for per capita rate of imprisonment, standing at 702 per 100,000 persons in 2002, and continuing to increase since that time. But the vast majority of those prisoners are poor and a highly disproportionate number are of minority races.
But when it comes to holding those with wealth and power, and especially those who hold (or held) high public office, accountable for their crimes our leaders suddenly become unconcerned with law and order. Instead they tell us that it would be traumatic to our nation to prosecute them, or that we should
look to the future, not the past. In other words, they want us to ignore the crimes of our leaders, with the rationale that they happened in the past. What kind of a criminal justice system is that? That kind of philosophy is more like that of a dictatorship than a government of, by and for the people. Hopefully, sooner than later, the American people will rise up and tell their leaders what they think of that kind of political philosophy.
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