Still Running Off at the Keyboard

"FROM LIBERTY TO LEVIATHAN"

I'd like to return once more to Lee Penn's article in the latest SCP Journal. It contains enough information to give you nightmares for a week about curtailment of freedoms we have seen in America over the years since 9/11.

In the opening paragraphs of the story Lee writes:

In the United States and around the world, would-be authoritarians continue their assaults on individual freedom. In the US, Canada, Great Britain, the European Union, the former Societ Bloc, China, the Islamic nations, and the rest of the Third World, the trend is the same. At the same time, Western religious and secular pundits--mainstream "liberals" and "conservatives" alike--denounce what they call "radical individualism" and call for a reassertion of the "common good" rather than a defense of human rights. As in the 1930s, virtually everywhere the trend of the times is strongly against liberty.

As the powers-that-be reassert their will to dominate their own people, they are also--worldwide--mobilizing for new wars. On the Left and the Right, and in secular and religious states, calls for peace are being drowned out by those who propose to violently remake the world according to their own will. On all sides, those who plan the wars expect to usher in a utopia once the enemy is crushed. Fear and hate, fanaticism and utopianism ride forward together. Mankind rushes toward a self-inflicted Armageddon, followed by a self-willed anthill State. To many observers, no unified human conspiracy is responsible; what we are seeing is how humanity acts when it makes itself--and its tribes, its rulers, its beliefs, its wealth, and its security--into idols. As a race, humanity has cavorted with Astarte, sought gold from Mammon, and given honor to Baal; now the time comes for Moloch to exact his sacrifice of blood.

These trends, which blighted much of the 20th Century, seemed to have abated or reversed with the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989-1991. However, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, the world resumed its swift travel down the road to serfdom.

That is the premise of the entire 36 page article. Are we slipping into dictatorship by tiny increments that are not startling enough to get our full attention? I bought a box of Sudafed this morning and had to produce my driver's licence to do that and sign the log book. Lee cites this latest restriction as one of the examples of loss of freedom, and after reading his article I would have to agree that I was annoyed with the procedure. Just like my experience with the airport check-in procedure, this too made me feel as though I was vaguely guilty of something criminal and that I was being watched.

Lee quotes Bush making statements that seem to indicate that what he wants is to have the government his way. This is what I find most disturbing in the article. Is power consolidating in the hands of a few?

Some incidents of what would appear to be the abuse of executive power include the following decisions of the president taken from the article:

--Congress has passed the law Bush wanted, allowing indefinite detention--without court review--of those designated by the President as "enemy combatants." ...Establishing a precedent--suspension of the right of

habeas corpus for enemy aliens--clears the way for suspension of the same right for Americans, if the government deems a future "emergency" to require it.

--After the invasion of Afghanistan, the President decreed that Al Qaeda and Taliban captives would not be entitled to the protections of Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which set standards for humane treatment of enemy captives. [The Supreme Court overturned this decree.]


--High-stakes deception has abounded on the part of the Bush Administration and its allies. President Bush has lived by the principle that he set forth in his May 2005 speech about Social Security privatization: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

--A senior adviser to Bush...[said] "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

--Since taking office, [Bush] has attached more than 750 "signing statements" to laws that reach his desk. Since the Reagan administration, previous presidents had used signing statements to clarify what they believed to be ambiguous areas of the law. Bush is using these statements to override Congressional attempts to limit his power.

--In December 2000, Bush told Congressional leaders, "there were going to be some times where we don't agree with each other. But that's OK. If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

--...in July 2001, Business Week reported that he said, "A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it."

In discussing the Patriot Act, Lee writes:

Even before 9/11, the Bush Administration had proven itself to be addicted to secrecy. In March 2001, Bush told the National Archives not to release 68,000 pages of documents from the Reagan Administration, despite the 1978 Presidential Records Act stating that Presidential papers were to be made public 12 years after the end of that Administration. In November 2001, Bush issued an executive order stating that "even if an ex-president wants to release his papers to the public, the sitting president has the right to bar their release anyway." He has ordered the National Archives to seal tens of thousands of pages of documents that were previously available to the public--and directed Archive staff not to explain why the documents were re-classified.

--In November 2005, according to a journalist with multiple White House sources, "GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the [Patriot] act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. 'I don't give a goddam,' Bush retorted. 'I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.' 'Mr. President,' one aide in the meeting said. 'There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.' 'Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,' Bush screamed back. 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper!' ...Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the 'Constitution is an outdated document.'

That's only the tip of the iceberg in Lee's article. It is a very unsettling piece of journalism.

We are still a relatively free nation as Lee points out. He can write this article for SCP criticizing the government with no fear of repercussions. But freedom must be guarded. It can be lost.

Bush has taken up war powers as a result of one single incident and a lot of press about potentional additional incidents. One could almost come to believe that the one incident was manufactured with dictatorship in mind if one were inclined to go to extremes. It would not be the first time a government used diabolical means to take dictatorial control.

Will the Democratic Congress slow the progress of this movement toward dictatorship? Will it cause a rethinking about tactics? Or will it merely postpone until the next presidential election additional reduction in freedoms that the next president, if he has a Congress from the same party, will pursue with the same ernestness that Bush seems to have been applying?