There are many reasons to impeach Bush. His flagrant disregard for international law, U.S. civil liberties, the separation of powers, public opinion, and human rights associate Bush with the worst tyrants of the 20th century. It is true that Bush has not yet been able to subvert all the institutions that constrain his executive power, but he and his band of Federalist Society lawyers have been working around the clock to eliminate the constraints that the U.S. Constitution and international law place on executive power.

Republicans are "outraged" that "liberal judges" have prevented Bush from "protecting us from terrorists." In the U.S. Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist said that Republicans will propose legislation to enable Bush to get around the Supreme Court's decision. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) already had a bill ready. What sense does it make to talk about "liberal opposition" when liberal Republicans like Specter are falling all over themselves to kowtow to Bush?

Americans are going to have to decide which is the greater threat: terrorists, or the Republican Party's determination to shred American civil liberties and the separation of powers in the name of executive power and the "war on terror."

The rest of the world has already reached a decision. A Harris Poll recently conducted for the Financial Times found that the populations of our European allies - Britain, France, Italy, and Spain - view the United States as the greatest threat to global stability.

A Pew Foundation survey released the same week found that 60 percent of the British believe that Bush has made the world less safe and that 79 percent of the Spanish oppose Bush's war on terror.

Republicans and conservatives equate civil liberties with homosexual marriage, abortion, racial quotas, flag burning, banning of school prayer, and crime resulting from a lax punishment of criminals. This is partly the fault of the ACLU and left-wingers, who go to extremes to make a point. But it is also the fault of conservatives, who believe that their government is incapable of evil deeds.

In their dangerous and ill-founded belief, conservatives are in total opposition to the Founding Fathers, who went to the trouble of writing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in order to protect us from our government. Most conservatives believe that they do not need constitutional protections, because they "are not doing anything wrong." Conservatives have come to this absurd conclusion despite the Republicans' decision to sell out the Bill of Rights for the sake of temporary power.

A number of important books have recently been published decrying America's decaying virtue. In Lawless World, the distinguished British jurist, Philippe Sands, documents the destruction by George Bush and Tony Blair of the system of international law put in place by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. In The Peace of Illusions, Christopher Layne documents the American drive for global hegemony that threatens the world with war and destruction. Americans are enjoying a sense of power with little appreciation of where it is leading them.

Congress has collapsed in the face of Bush's refusal to abide by statutory law and his "signing statements," by which Bush asserts his independence of U.S. law. Bush has done what he can to turn the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp of his unaccountable power by placing John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the bench. Though much diminished by these appointments, the Court found the strength to rise up in opposition to Bush's budding tyranny.

Amazingly, on the very same day in England, where our individual rights originated, the High Court struck down Tony Blair's "anti-terrorism" laws as illegal breaches of the human rights of suspects. As with the Bush regime, the Blair regime tried to justify its illegality on the grounds of "protecting the public," but a far larger percentage of the British population than the American understands that the erosion of civil liberty is a greater threat to their safety than terrorists.

Thus, in the two lands most associated with civil liberties, courts have struck down the tyrannical acts of the corrupt executive. Perhaps the fact that courts have reaffirmed the rule of law will give hope and renewed strength to the friends of liberty to withstand the assaults on freedom that are the hallmarks of the Bush and Blair regimes. On the other hand, the two tyrants might ignore the courts as they have statutory law.

What's to stop them?

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

In both instances, the administration is using a sweeping doctrine, the State Secrets Privilege, to dismiss cases that could challenge government misconduct. Under this privilege, established by the Supreme Court in 1953, the executive branch can halt cases that might expose government secrets. When the administration invokes state secrets, even judges are not allowed to assess the information and decide if the claim is valid. Instead, the Justice Department simply declares that continuing the case, even in a closed setting, would jeopardize national security. After that, a judge is simply supposed to throw the case out of court. So instead of the court checking the executive and keeping it within its constitutional boundaries, the President becomes the only informed judge of his conduct.

The case that the administration tried to preempt with state secrets last month is CCR v Bush, which I helped file with the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Americans who were targeted for warrantless electronic spying. But the case does not currently include any major secrets. In fact, the evidence cited in our briefs is not from secret government documents, but from the public record. (For example, the briefs quote public statements by President Bush and then-NSA Chief Michael V. Hayden). So it is hard to accept the Bush Administration's assertion that discussing this public information in court would expose government secrets.

This case is important because it is one of the last resorts to challenging domestic surveillance. The suit challenges illegal surveillance of attorneys' conversations and e-mails, which violates federal law, the Constitution and due process. If the administration can spy on Americans without warrants and judicial review, there will be no check to prevent the Executive Branch from spying on anyone it chooses, including political opponents challenging its power, journalists scrutinizing its actions, or attorneys challenging its conduct.

Yet the administration's state secrets claims go far beyond spying. Many of the fundamental legal challenges to President Bush's conduct over the past five years have been met with the trump card of state secrets. As the New York Times recently reported, President Bush is invoking it "more frequently" and more broadly than any other administration in history; scholars say the process has "short-circuited judicial scrutiny and public debate of some central controversies of the post-9/11 era."

The principles at stake in these controversies cut to the heart of American democracy and human decency: Can the federal government spy on you forever with no oversight? Can the police imprison you for no reason without any judicial recourse or oversight? Can the military secretly send people abroad for torture? Can the President hide mistakes that compromise our security by unilaterally shutting down any court challenge that might expose facts about government misconduct, abuse or negligence?

There are many disturbing examples of President Bush shutting down the cases that raise these questions.

For example, an ACLU case about the US kidnapping of a German citizen based on mistaken identity was stifled by state secrets. Yet the facts of the case probably risked government embarrassment more than government secrets, since the mistakenly kidnapped person did not possess any special information about the US. A similar CCR challenge to the wrongful detention and rendition of a Canadian citizen also elicited state secrets claims. (That case was dismissed for other national security reasons and it will be appealed.)

The administration has also tried to silence government whistleblowers with the privilege. An FBI translator was fired in 2002 after complaining about problems in her unit, and her suit for "retaliatory termination" was shut down by state secrets. But the woman, Sibel Edmonds, was a recently hired translator with a low security clearance, so she could not have known any national security secrets. According to newspaper accounts, the issues revolved around FEMA-style incompetence, not classified information. She told her superiors that the administration assigned underqualified translators to conduct interviews with detainees in Guantánamo, and that there was evidence of espionage and corruption within the program.

Did the administration misuse the privilege simply to hide those mistakes? That is a question the court refused to even consider.

These cases all have one thing in common: The administration can use state secrets to avoid challenges to its conduct, undermine judicial oversight and ultimately threaten American democracy as we know it.

In the end, the Bush Administration's quest for unchecked, unilateral executive power is no secret. Nor are the illegalities of this administration--from torture to warrantless electronic surveillance. If the courts continue to blindly accept the administration's unprecedented expansion of state secrets claims, the Executive Branch will operate above the law and can continue to act with impunity--a dangerous precedent for any country calling itself a democracy.

BIO: Michael Ratner is a human rights lawyer and the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a human rights organization that represents victims of torture, rendition and domestic spying.

"I don't think the threshold test of whether you write about how the government is waging the war on terror is whether they've done something that's blatantly illegal or outrageous," Keller said. "I think you probably would like to know what they're doing that's successful as well."

Keller told CBS host Bob Scheiffer that "when lives are clearly at risk," The Times often withholds information from publication.

"But this was a case where clearly the terrorists or the people who finance them know quite well, because the
Treasury Department and the White House have talked openly about it, that they monitor international banking transactions. It's not news to the terrorists," he said.

Reports in several newspapers last month that the White House was tracking terrorist-related financial transactions in the international banking system triggered a new storm of criticism, primarily from Republicans, about news disclosures of secret U.S. efforts to pre-empt terrorist plots and activities.

President Bush said the latest revelation was "disgraceful" and did "great harm" to the country. Rep. Peter King (news, bio, voting record), R-N.Y., chairman of the House
Homeland Security Committee, reiterated his view on CNN's "Late Edition" on Sunday that The Times should be prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act for repeatedly revealing classified information.

"The Times can't have it both ways," King said. "They can't on the one hand say there's no harm in releasing this. Everybody knew about it. But on the other hand, we had to put it on Page One because it was so top secret."

Keller, on CBS, said it is the government that "likes to have it both ways. ... They confide in us when they want to advertise the programs that are successful. And then they rebuke us if we write about something they would prefer we didn't write about."

He added that he is only a little surprised by the level of criticism the paper is receiving.

"I mean, it's an election year. Beating up on The New York Times is red meat for the conservative base," Keller said. "But I don't think this is all politics. I think the administration is a little embarrassed. This is the most secretive White House we've had since the Nixon White House."

Columnist William Safire, who writes the weekly "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine, defended the paper Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press."

"I don't speak for the Times. I've been in the Times for 30 years disagreeing with Times' editorial policy right down the line. On this one, I think they did the right thing," he said.

28 June 2006

[Federal Register: June 28, 2006 (Volume 71, Number 124)]

Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to have an effective, reliable, integrated, flexible, and comprehensive system to alert and warn the American people in situations of war, terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other hazards to public safety and well-being ... to ensure that under all conditions the President can communicate with the American people.

The project includes gaining command-and-control over existing alert systems:

(i) inventory, evaluate, and assess the capabilities and integration with the public alert and warning system of Federal, State, territorial, tribal, and local public alert and warning resources;

(ii) establish or adopt, as appropriate, common alerting and warning protocols, standards, terminology, and operating procedures for the public alert and warning system to enable interoperability and the secure delivery of coordinated messages to the American people through as many communication pathways as practicable, taking account of Federal Communications Commission rules as provided by law;

(v) through cooperation with the owners and operators of communication facilities, maintain, protect, and, if necessary, restore communications facilities and capabilities necessary for the public alert and warning system;

(ix) administer the Emergency Alert System (EAS) as a critical component of the public alert and warning system;

and

(x) ensure that under all conditions the President of the United States can alert and warn the American people

(c) The Secretary of Homeland Security may issue guidance to implement this order.

(iii) the Federal Communications Commission shall, as provided by law, adopt rules to ensure that communications systems have the capacity to transmit alerts and warnings to the public as part of the public alert and warning system;

and

(iv) the heads of agencies with capabilities for public alert and warning shall comply with guidance issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security under subsection 2(c) of this order, and shall develop and maintain such capabilities in a manner consistent and interoperable with the public alert and warning system.

Sec. 4. Reports on Implementation. Not later than 90 days after the date of this order, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall submit to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, a plan for the implementation of this order, and shall thereafter submit reports from time to time, and not less often than once each year, on such implementation, together with any recommendations the Secretary finds appropriate.

Sec. 5. Amendment, Revocation, and Transition.
(a) Section 3(b)(4) of Executive Order 12472 of April 3, 1984, as amended, is further amended by striking "Emergency Broadcast System" and inserting in lieu thereof "Emergency Alert System".