The NYTimes "impeachment" case against George W Bush...

kentuck

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sun Jul-16-06 09:36 AM
Original message

The NYTimes "impeachment" case against George W Bush...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/opinion/16sun1.html?_r=1&oref=login

<snip>
Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

<snip>
The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what to do with them over the long run. Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent on hunkering down. The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of �civilized peoples,� �judicial guarantees� or �humiliating and degrading treatment� do they find confusing?

<snip>
The administration�s intent to use the war on terror to buttress presidential power was never clearer than in the case of its wiretapping program. The president had legal means of listening in on the phone calls of suspected terrorists and checking their e-mail messages. A special court was established through a 1978 law to give the executive branch warrants for just this purpose, efficiently and in secrecy. And Republicans in Congress were all but begging for a chance to change the process in any way the president requested. Instead, of course, the administration did what it wanted without asking anyone. When the program became public, the administration ignored calls for it to comply with the rules. As usual, the president�s most loyal supporters simply urged that Congress pass a law allowing him to go on doing whatever he wanted to do.

<snip>
To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans� deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans� civil liberties have been trampled. The nation�s image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents �disappear� people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guant�namo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time.

....more