Now I Understand Why They Hate Us

By David Hilfiker, AlterNet. Posted January 12, 2009.

Yes, of course, many of us have been shocked by the foreign policy excesses of the Bush administration -- preventive war, torture, extraordinary rendition, foreign policy unilateralism, and so on -- but these are more the extensions of previous American immorality than new directions. This is my country, but I am ashamed that we allow militarism to so dominate it and ashamed that it has taken me so long to see it clearly.

Arrogation of Power and Subversion of the Constitution

One of the major threats to democracy from this state of permanent war is the inevitable transfer of power from Congress and the judiciary to the president as commander in chief. With the entire military under his command, with the intelligence services under his control, with the political power of the military contractors backing him, the president has in wartime extraordinary power, even if it is only his own fiat that has created "wartime." Ongoing war profoundly endangers the checks and balances of our constitutional system.

It is not only the Bush administration; this subversion of the Constitution has happened during most wartimes. President Lincoln illegally suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. President Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans during World War II. Under Eisenhower, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran to install the shah. Johnson engineered the Gulf of Tonkin incident to force Congress to authorize the war in Vietnam. President Reagan authorized the illegal Contra war against the government of Nicaragua, even after Congress had expressly prohibited him from doing so. True, the presidential arrogation of power has accelerated under our current president, but it is also a continuation of a long and dangerous trend. (It has also been the trend in many other historical empires  just before they collapsed.)

President Bush has declared a "War on Terror." Since the Constitution allows only Congress to declare war, the War on Terror is not a constitutionally legal war, yet the president continues to claim extraordinary powers as commander in chief in "wartime." But how does one know when the War on Terror is over? When there are literally no more terrorists? A president who can define war however he chooses and remain at war as long has he chooses has indefinite dictatorial powers. The militarization of our nation puts us into a state of perpetual war (declared or undeclared), which creates a perpetual transfer of power to the president that makes a mockery of the constitutional balance of powers between the president, Congress and the courts.

When Bush several years ago signed the law (that he had originally opposed) prohibiting torture by U.S. forces, he created a "signing statement" indicating that he would follow the law only if it did not conflict with his understanding of his duties as commander in chief. In other words, he was not bound by the portions of the law he did not like; he was above the law. In reality, signing statements have no standing under the law and are most likely unconstitutional. All recent presidents have occasionally used signing statements, but primarily to clarify for the executive branch of government under him how the law should be interpreted. But under Bush not only have signing statements become routine, they have also been used specifically to nullify parts of the law, further arrogating power to the president. If their use is allowed to stand, they move us significantly toward presidential dictatorial powers.

Citing his authority as commander in chief, Bush several years ago authorized the National Security Administration to wiretap Americans without a warrant from the secret court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the history of that FISA court, there had been over 18,000 previous government requests for surveillance warrants; only four had ever been rejected, so it is difficult to understand why the president believed it necessary to break the lawb unless he thought that even the compliant court would not tolerate the kind of surveillance planned.

Chalmers Johnson writes that the inevitable result of our failure to reign in military spending once the Cold War was under way (and then even after it was over) was a continual transfer of powers to the presidency exactly as Madison had predicted, the use of executive secrecy to freeze out Congress and the judiciary, the loss of congressional mastery over the budget, and the rise of two new, extraconstitutional centers of power that are today out of control -- the Department of Defense and the 15 intelligence organizations, the best known of which is the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Bush administration is the most secretive in U.S. history. The 1979 Freedom of Information Act requires all federal departments to provide nonclassified documents to any who request it. But Attorney General John Ashcroft sent out explicit, detailed instructions to all government departments on how to foil the law. The Presidential Records Act was passed after the Watergate conspiracy to keep all presidential papers under public administration once the president left office so scholars could eventually determine what actually went on. But Bush signed an executive order contravening the explicit provisions of the act. The courts have not yet ruled on the constitutionality of his order, but that he believed he needed it is significant.

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David Hilfiker, M.D., spent his medical career as a physician with low-income people in rural Minnesota and inner-city Washington. He is the founder of Joseph’s House, a home and hospice for homeless men and women with AIDS and/or cancer. No longer in active practice, he is a lecturer and teacher and author of books and numerous articles on poverty and other subjects. His most recent book is Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen.

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