Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday March 3, 2009
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
Reviewing yesterday's front page of the print edition of The New York Times prompted this observation from Digby:
I looked at the front page of the paper this morning and wondered for a moment if I was looking at one of those historical documents about which scholars would wonder if those who read it in real time had a clue about the scale of what was happening.
There's a run on the banks in Ukraine, the world's biggest insurer suffered the highest quarterly losses in corporate history, Europe is starting to come apart -- with Germany being the lead player. Major change seems to be rumbling in a bunch of different ways right now --- with echoes of the past overlaid with things we've never seen before. Maybe it's just a blip. But maybe not.
Various universal perception biases always make it difficult to assess how genuinely consequential contemporary events are: events in the present always seem more important than ones in the past; those that affect us directly appear more significant than those that are abstract, etc. (though powers of denial -- e.g.: all of those bad things I've read about in history can't happen to me and my country and my time -- undercut those biases). Whatever else is true, it seems undeniably clear, at the very least, that the extreme decay and instabilities left in the wake of the Bush presidency will alter many aspects of the social order in radical and irrevocable (albeit presently unknowable) ways.
One of the central facts that we, collectively, have not yet come to terms with is how extremist and radical were the people running the country for the last eight years. That condition, by itself, made it virtually inevitable that the resulting damage would be severe and fundamental, even irreversible in some sense. It's just not possible to have a rotting, bloated, deeply corrupt and completely insular political ruling class -- operating behind impenetrable walls of secrecy -- and avoid the devastation that is now becoming so manifest. It's just a matter of basic cause and effect.
Yet those who have spent the last several years pointing out how unprecedentedly extremist and radical was our political leadership (and how meek and complicit were our other key institutions) were invariably dismissed as shrill hysterics. As but one of countless highly illustrative examples, here is a November, 2004 David Broder column scoffing at the notion that there was anything radical or unusual taking place in the U.S., dismissively deriding the claim that there was anything resembling an erosion of basic checks and safeguards in the United States:
Bush won, but he will have to work within the system for whatever he gets. Checks and balances are still there. The nation does not face "another dark age," unless you consider politics with all its tradeoffs and bargaining a black art.
That was (and still is) the prevailing attitude among our political and media elites: it was those who were sounding alarm bells about the radicalism and damage of the Bush administration -- not Bush officials themselves -- who were the real radicals and, worst of all, were deeply Unserious.
* * * * *
Yesterday, the Obama administration, to its credit, took steps towards fulfilling an important promise by disclosing -- in response to a long-standing, hard-fought ACLU lawsuit for disclosure -- multiple DOJ documents that contained Bush administration decrees with regard to government power (these are the documents that formed what, literally, was the regime of secret laws under which we were ruled for the last eight years). Unlike the NYT front page which Digby examined yesterday, even a quick review of these newly disclosed documents leaves no doubt about their historical significance. They are the grotesque blueprint for what the U.S. Government became, laid out so starkly that even the David Broders of the world could recognize their extremism.
Let's just look at one of those documents (.pdf) -- entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S." It was sent to (and requested by) Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes and authored by Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and DOJ Special Counsel Robert Delahunty. But it's not a "Yoo memo." Rather, it was the official and formal position of the U.S. Government -- at least of the omnipotent Executive Branch -- from the time it was issued until just several months George Bush before left office (October, 2008), when OLC Chief Stephen Bradbury abruptly issued a memo withdrawing, denouncing and repudiating both its reasoning and conclusions.
The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens. And it wasn't only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls "domestic military operations" was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying -- in secret and with no oversight -- on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
That the U.S. Government had suspended the Fourth Amendment itself isn't exactly news. A fleeting reference to that event (largely ignored by the media) was made in a footnote to one of Yoo's previously released torture memos (release of which was also compelled not by the U.S. Congress or the media, but by the ACLU). But reading the document that actually effectuated (in secret) that suspension -- released only yesterday -- is genuinely breathtaking.
[...]
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/03/yoo/index.html
Admin edit: added carriage returns after url to eliminate "bounce".
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday March 3, 2009
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
Reviewing yesterday's front page of the print edition of The New York Times prompted this observation from Digby:
I looked at the front page of the paper this morning and wondered for a moment if I was looking at one of those historical documents about which scholars would wonder if those who read it in real time had a clue about the scale of what was happening.
There's a run on the banks in Ukraine, the world's biggest insurer suffered the highest quarterly losses in corporate history, Europe is starting to come apart -- with Germany being the lead player. Major change seems to be rumbling in a bunch of different ways right now --- with echoes of the past overlaid with things we've never seen before. Maybe it's just a blip. But maybe not.
Various universal perception biases always make it difficult to assess how genuinely consequential contemporary events are: events in the present always seem more important than ones in the past; those that affect us directly appear more significant than those that are abstract, etc. (though powers of denial -- e.g.: all of those bad things I've read about in history can't happen to me and my country and my time -- undercut those biases). Whatever else is true, it seems undeniably clear, at the very least, that the extreme decay and instabilities left in the wake of the Bush presidency will alter many aspects of the social order in radical and irrevocable (albeit presently unknowable) ways.
One of the central facts that we, collectively, have not yet come to terms with is how extremist and radical were the people running the country for the last eight years. That condition, by itself, made it virtually inevitable that the resulting damage would be severe and fundamental, even irreversible in some sense. It's just not possible to have a rotting, bloated, deeply corrupt and completely insular political ruling class -- operating behind impenetrable walls of secrecy -- and avoid the devastation that is now becoming so manifest. It's just a matter of basic cause and effect.
Yet those who have spent the last several years pointing out how unprecedentedly extremist and radical was our political leadership (and how meek and complicit were our other key institutions) were invariably dismissed as shrill hysterics. As but one of countless highly illustrative examples, here is a November, 2004 David Broder column scoffing at the notion that there was anything radical or unusual taking place in the U.S., dismissively deriding the claim that there was anything resembling an erosion of basic checks and safeguards in the United States:
Bush won, but he will have to work within the system for whatever he gets. Checks and balances are still there. The nation does not face "another dark age," unless you consider politics with all its tradeoffs and bargaining a black art.
That was (and still is) the prevailing attitude among our political and media elites: it was those who were sounding alarm bells about the radicalism and damage of the Bush administration -- not Bush officials themselves -- who were the real radicals and, worst of all, were deeply Unserious.
* * * * *
Yesterday, the Obama administration, to its credit, took steps towards fulfilling an important promise by disclosing -- in response to a long-standing, hard-fought ACLU lawsuit for disclosure -- multiple DOJ documents that contained Bush administration decrees with regard to government power (these are the documents that formed what, literally, was the regime of secret laws under which we were ruled for the last eight years). Unlike the NYT front page which Digby examined yesterday, even a quick review of these newly disclosed documents leaves no doubt about their historical significance. They are the grotesque blueprint for what the U.S. Government became, laid out so starkly that even the David Broders of the world could recognize their extremism.
Let's just look at one of those documents (.pdf) -- entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S." It was sent to (and requested by) Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes and authored by Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and DOJ Special Counsel Robert Delahunty. But it's not a "Yoo memo." Rather, it was the official and formal position of the U.S. Government -- at least of the omnipotent Executive Branch -- from the time it was issued until just several months George Bush before left office (October, 2008), when OLC Chief Stephen Bradbury abruptly issued a memo withdrawing, denouncing and repudiating both its reasoning and conclusions.
The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens. And it wasn't only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls "domestic military operations" was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying -- in secret and with no oversight -- on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
That the U.S. Government had suspended the Fourth Amendment itself isn't exactly news. A fleeting reference to that event (largely ignored by the media) was made in a footnote to one of Yoo's previously released torture memos (release of which was also compelled not by the U.S. Congress or the media, but by the ACLU). But reading the document that actually effectuated (in secret) that suspension -- released only yesterday -- is genuinely breathtaking.
[...]
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/03/yoo/index.html
Admin edit: added carriage returns after url to eliminate "bounce".