Our Incredible Shrinking Constitution - Thoughts on July 4th
By Dave Lindorff
Today is the anniversary of the day that the nation's founders, gathered in Philadelphia a few miles from my house (which as it happens was already standing and about 28 years old already at the time), at great personal risk, signed the Declaration of Independence, with its ringing declaration that all men--Americans and everyone else, too--are born equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Five years ago at this time, I was just starting my road trip promoting my book, The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006), which documents the wholesale assault, by then President George W. Bush, and his chief consigliere, Vice President Dick Cheney, on those bold concepts and on the subsequent Constitution and Bill of Rights which those same founders set up as the guiding principles of this nation.
I never imagined as I wrote that book, and as I traveled the country making its case that these two wretched men were criminals and constitution-wreckers, that I would later be witness to a perhaps even more dangerous threat to what remains of our national heritage. But here we are, more than half-way through the first (and hopefully last) term of President Barack Obama, and we are witnessing not only a continuation of the crimes of those last two villains, not only a wholesale blocking of efforts to bring those two criminals and their accomplices to justice, but a continuation of the destruction of our once relatively free society.
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Under this president, Big Brother has grown prodigiously. Most recently, the Obama administration, with the backing of a vestigial and totally spineless Congress, has given the FBI and its 14,000 agents broad new authority to investigate law abiding citizens--monitoring our electronic communications, picking through our household trash, and surveilling our every activity--without even the need to obtain a warrant. This is being done even though we know that the already extraordinary investigative and surveillance powers given to the FBI in the so-called PATRIOT Act have been grossly abused, though not investigated.
The outrageous and far-reaching investigation and harassment and grand jury abuse of a group of anti-war activists by the FBI's midwest regional offices, which is clearly endorsed by the White House, shows that just the act of peacefully opposing and protesting the nation's warmongering is enough to get people in serious trouble, maybe even to land people in jail.
Then there is Bradley Manning, the young Army private who is languishing in a cell in Leavenworth, the military prison in Kansas, facing a potential capital trial, for following his conscience and exposing war crimes and other abuses as he is bound to do under the terms of the UN Charter and the Code of Military Justice. President Bush authorized the use of torture on captives in his so-called "War" on Terror -- including American citizens like Jose Padilla. That was bad enough. But President Obama has authorized the torture of Manning, a man who at worst can be charged with leaking government and military secrets, but who by no stretch of the imagination can be classified as a terrorist or "enemy combatant."
Furthermore, Specialist First Class Manning, under US law and under the Code of Military Justice, is innocent until proven guilty. And yet this president, supposedly a Constitutional Scholar (he taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago before entering politics) has actually publicly called Manning "guilty," effectively making a fair trial, particularly in a military court setting, impossible, given that the president is the commander in chief.
We Americans are all Private Manning at this point. If it is permissible to put someone like Manning in solitary confinement for months, without charge, barring contact with anyone but his lawyer and one personal friend, requiring him to be naked both in his cell and in public outside his cell, preventing him from sleeping for days and weeks at a time, along with other abuses -- all clearly torture, and all acknowledged to be actions designed to get him to "confess" to his "crimes" and to claim, even if it is not true, that Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange "induced" him to betray military secrets, then it is possible for this kind of Stalinist-style torture and show-trial process to be visited on any of us.
I am particularly disgusted by this administration's statements and actions with regard to the current Gaza aid flotilla. Some eight boats, including one, the provocatively-named "Audacity of Hope," which is a US-flagged vessel, are trapped in a harbor in Athens because of overt and secret behind-the-scenes pressure by the US government and its partner in crime Israel, which are leaning on the bankrupt and severely weakened Greek government to prevent them from setting sailing for Gaza.
Israeli divers have reportedly damaged the propeller shafts of the "Audacity of Hope" and another of the boats, the "Audacity's" captain is facing arrest on trumped-up charges, and the Greek coast guard is blocking the ships from departing for the open sea, again on trumped-up charges.
But more seriously, the Obama administration has publicly invited the Israeli military to use violence against the American ship! This is so incredible and shameful that it is mind-boggling. One of the first foreign actions of the fledgling United States was to join in a military campaign against Barbary pirates who were threatening the freedom of US-flagged vessels to sail in the Mediterranean Sea. For the first time since its founding, American fighting men were sent into harm's way and died fighting for that fundamental right, recognized by all countries of the world, at least at the time (the Marines still sing about this in their anthem).
How pathetic and grotesque that today, Israel, which already, last spring, attacked an unarmed Turkish- flagged vessel bound for Gaza, killing nine people including a 19-year-old American youth who was executed on the ground by several shots to the head fired by Israeli Defense Force troops, is not only being told it can attack a whole shipload of peaceful and unarmed American protesters (carrying only a cargo of letters expressing a desire for the peaceful liberation of Gaza), but is literally being invited to do so, by an American president and his Secretary of State.
The mind reels and the soul weeps.
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