Department of Fatherland Security

By Crispin Sartwell

 

It has been a very good month for American liberty.

    The free press has performed precisely the functions Jefferson foresaw for it. The Washington Post reported that the CIA had established a series of secret internment facilities in Europe. The New York Times reported that president has authorized the NSA to spy on Americans, with no authorization from Congress or oversight of any court.

   And the Congress itself seems to have recovered the function envisioned by the republic's founders as providing a check on executive power. It has refused to reauthorize portions of the Patriot Act and forced the administration to sign off on an explicit repudiation of torture.

    The response of the administration to 9.11 was, in every aspect, authoritarian. That is a devastating indictment of the personalities involved, of Dick Cheney, of Donald Rumsfeld, of John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales: authoritarians operating in and supplementing an atmosphere of fear. Their actions have been as much a matter of pathology as of policy.

     They interpreted the Congress's authorization of armed conflict against terrorists as a suspension of the Constitution: of the writ of habeus corpus; of Article 3, Section 3 on the procedures for trying accusations of treason; of the 4th amendment provisions against unreasonable searches; of the due process provisions of the 5th amendment; of the sixth amendment guidelines for criminal trials; of the 8th amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.

     The "black site" program of secret prisons is criminal on its face. Ask yourself: why would a government want secret prisons? It is likely that these are essentially torture facilities, an interpretation bolstered by the administration's breathtaking resistance to declaring publicly that it would abide by the Constitution and international law on the treatment of prisoners. I would like to know how many people were killed in those facilities.

    The claim that the executive can unilaterally authorize indefinitely widespread surveillance of American citizens is a flat contradiction of our form of government, as clearly unconstitutional as anything could be. It is the approach of a KGB or a Stasi. It is hard, indeed, to understand why the administration is seeking re-authorization of the Patriot Act: it claims, without it, to have all the powers enumerated in that act and many more.

     Essentially, the Bush administration has declared permanent martial law. "Homeland," they say again and again; it might as well be "fatherland." They have created whole new bureaucracies. Under their authority, we have become a place that would be unrecognizable to James Madison or Alexander Hamilton as the country whose form of government they created.

     In the hysterical aftermath of 9.11, the Congress acquiesced in the abrogation of the Constitution. They passed a vague declaration of hostilities that the administration interpreted as giving it aconstitutional"war powers." Every senator except Russ Feingold voted for the Patriot Act.

     The passivity and connivance of the press were disgusting. Judith Miller of the New York Times and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, for example, participated in the administration's cover-up of its disinformation campaign with regard to Saddam's weapons programs.

     That these institutions have come back to their senses is perhaps not a tribute to their fierce independence, but to their sensitivity to popular opinion: as soon as Bush appeared vulnerable in the polls, Congress and the press rediscovered their love of freedom.

     There are limits to this backlash. Congress will probably end up renewing the Patriot Act. The new domestic surveillance programs may never be subject to oversight by anyone. It is extremely disturbing that the Post and the Times both sought approval from administration officials before publishing their stories. The Post honored the administration's request not to publish the locations of the secret prisons, and so helped them move and continue their operations. The Times, incomprehensibly, sat on the NSA story for a year. So the stories both critiqued and enabled the strategies of authoritarianism.

     But whatever the reason and whatever the limits, the resistance of the press and the Congress to the authoritarians has begun.

    And if Americans are, as George Bush says (in a voice that should be dripping with sarcasm) a freedom-loving people, the resistance will continue.