Triggering a war with Iran

Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker reports that someone at a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney seriously suggested that a fake incident be staged to provoke the American public against Iran, to start a war. Who was this man? Has he been fired? Where is the outrage? If there is a unitary vice-presidency :-/, Cheney, if he condoned a breath of this behavior, if he did not drum him out, adds a count, a count to his impeachment. Where is Congress?

The dog of war unleashed

Preface: For all my Democratic friends who go on about President Bush and his precipitous moves in the Middle East, this article is for you.

In a parallel universe, Presidents of the United States of America are held accountable for unconstitutional threats, invasions, and occupations.

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The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies,—all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.

- Federalist LXIX

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Whereas "We, the people," as stated in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, did "ordain and establish this Constitution" in order to, among other ends, "provide for the common defense."

Whereas the Constitution of the United States enumerates the limited powers granted therein by the free people of the United States and vested in the specified branches of the Government of the United States.

Whereas, according to Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States, "The Congress shall have the Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay ... for the common Defense ... of the United States," and not for intervention.

Whereas, according to Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States, "The Congress shall have Power ... To declare War," and not the President.

Whereas, according to Article 2, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States, "The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States ... when called into the Actual Service of the United States," and not before.

Whereas, according to Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution of the United States "expressly requires the concurrence of the three branches to commit us to the state of war, but permits two of them, the President and the Senate, to change it to that of peace, for reasons as obvious as they are wise."

Whereas, according to Thomas Jefferson, referring to the Constitution of the United States in a letter to James Madison, "We have already given, in example one effectual check to the Dog of war, by transferring the power of letting him loose, from the executive to the Legislative body, from those who are to spend to those who are to pay."

Whereas the President has presented Congress and the American people with a fait accompli in his threatened invasion and occupation of Haiti.

Whereas the President, in response to the question, "Mr. President ... do you intend to make as a pattern using military action without the consent of Congress or the approval of the American people?" answered: "With regard to Congress ... I think we'll have to take this on a case by case basis. In terms of popular approval, the American people, probably wisely, are almost always against any kind of military action when they first hear about it unless our people have been directly attacked. And they have historically felt that way, and obviously, at the end of the Cold War, they may be more inclined to feel that way. The job of the President is to try to do what is right, particularly in matters affecting our long-term security interests. And unfortunately, not all the decisions that are right can be popular."

Whereas, according to Article VI of the Constitution of the United States, "This Constitution ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land," and "The Senators and Representatives ... and all executive ... Officers ... of the United States ... shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution..."

Whereas absolutism begins where support for the Constitution of a free people ends.

May we, the People, resolutely call on our Representatives and Senators to impede the occupation of Haiti, which is unconstitutional in substance, not being for the common defense, and in means, not being initiated by Congress. Congress has the constitutional power to impede this operation. First, either House may declare that the acts of war launched were unauthorized; second, the House of Representatives may withdraw its funding for this venture; and third, the House of Representatives may impeach that officeholder who breaks the supreme law of the land which is our Constitution, duly so if after a long train of abuses and usurpations. If we fail to act now, how shall we act if that officeholder launches a reckless venture in Iran without our consent, or the consent of our Representatives?

May we leash this dog who, in the name of saving democracy abroad, has snarled at the democracy due within our own constitutional republic.

Postscript: This article did appear in the Minnesota Libertarian, October 1994. Only the name of one country has changed. Instead of Iran, the article originally read Bosnia.

When will the partisans on both sides remove their blinders to see how both parties set and accept the precedents of the other now?

I am disappointed that the Democrats have not impeached another President, Dick Cheney, the President of the Senate, since their rise to power in Congress in 2006.

The Congress does not have the power to vest its own power elsewhere. Neither is the President of the Senate vested with executive powers.

The next best thing to an impeachment might be the election of Bob Barr, a check and a balance on both party monsters. To all evidence he seems to take the rule of law seriously, while the real anarchists of both parties play.

Is Representative Dennis Kucinich's information accurate? How would we, the American people, know?



What does President Clinton's phrase really mean, doing the right thing?

The adapted article "The dog of war unleashed" was originally published in The Minnesota Libertarian, October 1994, p. 4, with the word Bosnia written instead of Iran. The author, Casey Bowman; the cartoonist, Logan Quinn; and the original publication are due attribution.

Related links

• Andrew Cockburn (May 2008) Secret Bush "Finding" Widens War on Iran
• Solonian Journal (Jun 19, 2008) President of the Senate

Update (Jul 3, 2008): Seymour Hirsh - Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran
The New Yorker, July 7, 2008







Update (Aug 11, 2008): Ron Suskind and Philip Giraldi provide evidence to fuel the impeachment of Cheney.

Bob Barr tells his story on Bloomberg

Bob Barr tells his story. What happened to the Republican Party after the Republican Revolution of 1994? Barr argues in this interview on Bloomberg that it died 4 years later in a meeting with Newt Gingrich right before the 1998 election. However, in his book The Meaning of Is (2004) I learned that things changed much earlier than that. It happened with Newt's cave (p. 223) on the Clinton 1995 budget, where Barr reports that Gingrich meant to discipline Republicans who did not do a 180 with him, with Gingrich that is.

Barr continues, explaining that he stayed in the Republican Party after 1998 because he saw hope yet for reform from within the party. This hope disappeared for him when (1) he heard Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez say that habeas corpus was no longer important and (2) President Bush repeatedly say that he would spy on American citizens within this country without court orders because he was commander-in-chief, even though there's a law that says he can't.

I must say that personally these were exactly the two things I saw in the Bush administration that deeply alarmed me. I remember turning to a friend of mine, while watching Kafka's play Amerika at the Jeune Lune Theatre and saying that Bush needed to be impeached if he didn't back off. That was early 2006. Since then I have changed my mind. Now I support impeaching Cheney instead, after learning more, particularly from Frontline. I continue to be deeply alarmed, and the Democrats are no succor.








Responding to the dull argument in the third video, I say it's not campaign finance that's at the root of the two-party state, it's the form of election. We Americans can address the problem without curtailing political speech, by moving to a form of election that's truly general.

Bob Barr's book's a bipartisan bombshell

I finished Bob Barr's book today, The Meaning of Is (2004). Though his theme is Clinton, in fact, it's a bombshell lobbed against both parties, or factions as they've become.

My evidence?

As America burned, the Republican Party was fiddling away.

p. 114

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Like nervous corporate CEOs, the leadership structure of the Republican Party and it[s] corporate patrons preferred predictable consistency above all else. They felt they could deal with any reality as long as that reality was stable.

p. 227

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In the new Congress, partisanship was everything. You played on a team and you were loyal to that team no matter what. Independent thought was strongly discouraged, and loyalty was enforced through a system that rewarded lemmings and punished mavericks. If you towed the line, you got campaign cash, action on your bills, and perhaps a shot at a committee chairmanship. If not, then the party leadership was not going to lift a finger to help you get anything done, either in your home district or Washington. The same system was enforced in both parties, and it ultimately made it difficult for anyone to cross partisan lines...

p. 148

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We have a huge responsibility as a nation. We can close our eyes. But when we open them, the problem will still be there, looming before us with a brooding darkness. We can answer this question the wrong way. And allow the president to hold his office with the knowledge that he has committed multiple felonies. Or we can answer this question the right way. The only right answer to the question is to respond to presidential felonies with impeachment. Regardless of whether the president is ultimately removed by the Senate, we must take this step in the House, as directed by our Constitution, in order to establish a precedent that will prevent future presidents from engaging in similar conduct.

p. 171, quoting himself, emphasis added

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We had not damaged national security, attacked the integrity of the criminal justice system, abused the most powerful public office in the world, or violated the constitutional rights of large numbers of American citizens. Bill Clinton had done all of these things, and this was the reason he was being impeached, not because of the affair he had with Monica Lewinski or the long list of affairs that preceded it.

p. 180, emphasis added

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If any other person had done what Bill Clinton had done, he not only would have been prosecuted, but convicted, sentenced, and put in jail. Obviously, no prosecutor in America was going to bring an indictment against a sitting president. But that is precisely the reason the Founders put the impeachment provision in the Constitution. The whole point of the trial was to determine his guilt or innocence. By arguing that Clinton had already been tried and cleared—when he had not—[Senator Dale] Bumpers conveniently gave the senators cover to vote against removal, even though presented with a clear factual case for doing so. Like any masterful attorney, he was giving the jury a plausible reason to do what it wanted to do, even though its desires ran contrary to the facts and the law. Put colloquially, the senators were chicken, and Bumpers was giving them a place to hide.

p. 199, emphasis added

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Along these lines, I observed one of the most amazing cases of odd behavior by a senator during my closing presentation. Its source was Alaska senator Ted Stevens. Stevens chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and consequently owns one of the most heavily kissed backsides in Washington, D.C. He is constantly besieged by a cornucopia of special interests, all seeking their own slice of taxpayer money from the budget pie. He is a guy who is used to having everyone around him act exactly as he wants them to. Early in the trial, he had emerged as one of the most strident opponents in the Republican conference to putting together a real trial. He wanted the spectacle of the impeachment trial to end as quickly as possible so the Senate could get on its real business—which as he saw it was doling out taxpayer monies.

Still, I expected Stevens at least to keep his opinion to himself during the actual trial. Needless to say, I was surprised to look up during my initial presentation and see him slowly moving his hand back and forth across his throat while staring me down. Either they guy was having serious thoughts of suicide, or he was giving me a sign to sit down and shut up. Here, I thought, was Senate arrogance at its best.

p. 209, emphasis added

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Does party membership amount to little more than the kind of choice a college freshman makes in choosing a fraternity or a young criminal makes in choosing a neighborhood street gang in which to participate? If parties are mere labels, rather than representations of deeply shared principles, then the answer is "yes."

p. 228

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The Libertarian Party actually seemed to grasp the significance of Clinton's assaults on individual freedom. In a public call for impeachment in July 1998, the Libertarians argued that Clinton "has the worst record on civil liberties since Richard Nixon, and the worst record on economic issues since Fidel Castro. What he's done to the Constitution should be classified as a hate crime." Specifically, they cited the administration's systematic assaults on cherished constitutional principles, most notably those contained in the Bill of Rights. I found myself fully in agreement with their logic, and we became close allies in the impeachment effort, although I still disagreed with the party's position on several issues such as abortion and drug legalization. Interestingly, this disagreement would surface four years later when, in running for election in a new district, the national Libertarian Party, in a move reflective of the old adage about "cutting off your nose to spite your face," worked hard to defeat me over the drug issue, even though on privacy and civil liberties I was—in the words of many of the party's own members—one of their best friends in office.

p. 102, emphasis added

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Can women say no?

The point here is not that Clinton had extramarital affairs while in office. He was not the first president to cheat, and he will not be the last. Bill Clinton's adultery was—in my view—something that was between him, his wife, and God. I am amazed that any spouse would tolerate his brazen behavior, but it is none of my business. However, what was my business as a member of Congress is that the evidence clearly showed that the president of the United States was a sexual predator (and, of course, a perjurer and obstructor of justice.) There was a clear pattern. First, Clinton targeted women he believed were vulnerable to his advances and who could not say no due to their station in life or their personal circumstances. When some of these women did say "no," they were subjected to a carefully orchestrated and brutal campaign that involved lawyers, political operatives, donors, and White House staff, with the clear goal of threatening or pounding them into silence.

p. 100, emphasis added

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Can Congress say no?

Requests from the executive branch to pass its legislative proposals without hearings are becoming more, rather than less, common, even as the complexity and importance of that legislation makes it imperative that the Congress conduct searching and substantive—if time-consuming—hearings (as was not done with the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001).

p. 229, emphasis added

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Ignoring the Separation of Powers and attempting to make end runs around Congress was a favorite Clinton strategy, and the use of Executive Orders was his favorite tactic for doing so. In their legitimate form, Executive Orders are simply management tools used by the president to keep federal agencies running in the most efficient manner possible. They reflect the clear intent of laws passed by Congress and merely put a finer point on existing law. Bill Clinton turned this logic upside down, using Executive Orders to legislate—in clear violation of the Constitution—because he though[t] it too much trouble to be bothered by negotiating with Congress. ...

Some of the most insidious sets of Executive Orders were those issued by Clinton on the topic of federalism. A bedrock principle of the Constitution, which is woven throughout the debates over its passage and permanently protected in the Tenth Amendment, is that powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government belong to the state governments and the American people. Although the notion of federalism was being consistently eroded by years of contrary legislation and court decisions, no president had ever changed all that. They essentially set up a system where any conflict between state and federal regulations was automatically decided in favor of the federal law. This meant all an agency that wanted to run roughshod over a state had to do was pick a fight, which it knew it would win because the game was rigged ahead of time by Clinton's Executive Orders. Simply put, this amounted to crippling the Tenth Amendment, and it was done solely by executive action without any involvement from the courts or Congress.

pp. 91-92, emphasis added

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However, the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) quickly followed [the failed attempt to require Clipper Chips in telephones]; the Clinton administration convinced Congress to pass this act in 1994. Under CALEA, every phone company in America is legally required to install snooping technology in all its new equipment so that government agents can listen in with ease.

p. 90, emphasis added

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I am anything but a supporter of terrorists and criminals. I spent a large portion of my adult life working for the CIA and prosecuting criminals at the Department of Justice, so I am not unsympathetic to law enforcement. However, I have a theory about law enforcement: investigations can be hampered more than benefited by new authority and fancy technology. In my experience—privacy concerns aside—relying too much on sophisticated laboratories and massive wiretapping operations rather than on shoe-leather police work often resulted in cases that took too long to bring to trial and were far too weak and complex once they got there. For example, wiretapping can quickly overwhelm an investigation, particularly if multiple targets are involved or language barriers are present. Merely trying to cope with the resulting information is like trying to drink from an open fire hydrant. Despite the shortcomings, many agents like these methods because they are easier in many ways than old-fashioned investigative work.

p. 85, emphasis added

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Who's defending civil liberties and due process now?

In past years, being a Democrat meant having a certain appreciation for civil liberties that went far beyond mere expediency. To be sure, Democrats did not always protect individual freedom, but they were far more reliable allies for the American Civil Liberties Union than were Republicans. This assumption of American politics cracked and ultimately shattered during the eight years of the Clinton administration. The first sign that this philosophy was dying occurred when many respected liberals went out of their way to cover up actions by federal law enforcement in the Waco attack. It went completely out the window when the Clinton administration introduced its draft anti-terrorism legislation following the tragic Oklahoma City bombing.

pp. 81-82, emphasis added

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Much later, the FBI was forced to admit that it did use incendiary munitions after officials—including Janet Reno—testified under oath that they did not do so. ...

There are still numerous questions surrounding the Waco tragedy. At least two things are certain, however. First, top federal law enforcement officials from Janet Reno down behaved as if they wanted everyone in that compound dead, and their actions achieved that result. Secondly, the same top Clinton administration officials participated in an extensive effort to cover up the truth about what really happened at Waco. ...

I kept pursuing my hard line of questioning, but as we all know, it was largely in vain. We succeeded in getting important facts one the record, but the official version of the story is still largely one of a fiery mass suicide that the federal government was powerless to prevent. This, like so much of what passes for commonly accepted official stories in Washington, is a lie.

pp. 78, 80, emphasis added

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As most Americans remember, Bill Clinton put Hillary Clinton in charge of a task force to develop a new health insurance plan for America. ...

Making this bad situation worse, Hillary insisted on meeting secretly to work on the plan. This resulted in a head-on collision with federal laws requiring government meetings to be open to the public if they involved non-governmental individuals. ...

Interestingly [the precedent] might also be used to prevent White House officials from being compelled to testify about conversations with other private individuals. Such a privilege—if asserted based on this precedent—would certainly encourage all kinds of corrupt conduct currently banned by law. In fact, it was this very argument that Vice President Cheney's legal team made in a bid to keep information about his energy policy task force secret when sued by Judicial Watch.

pp. 51-52, emphasis added

Now I know what my vote for Bob Barr would mean.

A vote for Bob Barr is a vote for due process and the rule of law.

A vote for Bob Barr is a vote to let government officials know that no one is above the law, the Constitution, and a respect for human rights.

A vote for Bob Barr is a vote for holding our President accountable. Our country needs a good impeachment. A vote for Bob Barr is the next best thing.


One last quote :-)

While I was frequently derided throughout my congressional career for never smiling, next to Maxine Waters I was the Cheshire Cat.

p. 131

Version 1.1 - bit about factions added May 18
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Now playing: Beck - The New Pollution (I noticed some bits and pieces of this song are from the Brazilian band Os Mutantes)
via FoxyTunes