The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html

And within the political sphere all relationships are oriented in turn toward the most extreme “crisis,” toward the decision about the “state of emergency,” of war and peace. The true possessor of power is defined as beyond all legality and legitimacy: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of emergency.” (Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie,1922). Sovereignty is founded on the factual power to make this decision (decisionism). The basic political relationship is the “friend-enemy relationship.” Its crisis is war, which proceeds until the enemy has been physically annihilated. There is no social relationship that does not in a crisis turn into a political relationship. Behind all economic, social, religious, and cultural relations stands total politicization. There is no sphere of private or public life, no legal or rational court of appeal that could oppose it.
Negations, page 36.

The idea of the charismatic, authoritarian leader is already preformed in the liberalist celebration of the gifted economic leader, the “born” executive.
Negations, page 18.

Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, a secret memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’ office concluded that President Bush had the power to deploy military force “preemptively” against any terrorist groups or countries that supported them—regardless of whether they had any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.

The memo, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, argues that there are effectively “no limits” on the president’s authority to wage war—a sweeping assertion of executive power that some constitutional scholars say goes considerably beyond any that had previously been articulated by the department. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6732484/site/newsweek/

Hence, the thundering opening of his treatise: 'The sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' It is a disturbingly 'realistic' view of politics, which, in the manner of Hobbes, subordinates de jure authority to de facto power: autoritas, non veritas facit legem. (The law is made by the one who has authority (i.e. power) and not the one who possesses the truth (the legitimate sovereign).)

The problem of the exception, for the constitutional jurist Schmitt, can only be resolved within the framework of a decision (an actual historical event) and not within that of a norm (an ahistoric and transcendent idea). Moreover, the legal act which decides what constitutes an exception is 'a decision in the true sense of the word', because a general norm, an ordinary legal prescription, 'can never encompass a total exception'. If so, then, 'the decision that a real exception exists cannot be derived entirely from this norm.' The problem of the exception, in other words, demarcates the limit of the rule of law and opens up that trans-legal space, that no-man's land of existential exigency, which is bereft of legal authority and where the decision of the sovereign abrogates the anomaly of the legal void. …against the legal positivism of his times, Schmitt seems to be arguing that not law but the sovereign, not the legal text but the political will, is the supreme authority in a state. States are not legal entities but historical polities; they are engaged in a constant battle for survival where any moment of their existence may constitute an exception, it may engender a political crisis that cannot be remedied by the application of the rule of law. From the existential priority of the sovereign over the legitimacy of the norm, it would also follow that according to Schmitt, law is subservient to politics and not autonomous of it.
The Sovereignty of the Political
Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism
http://www.algonet.se/~pmanzoor/CarlSchmitt.htm

Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday vigorously defended the Bush administration's use of secret domestic spying and efforts to expand presidential powers, saying "it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years." Talking to reporters aboard his government plane as he flew from Islamabad, Pakistan to Muscat, Oman on an overseas mission, Cheney said a contraction in the power of the presidency since the Vietnam and Watergate era must be reversed. "I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it. And to some extent, that we have an obligation as the administration to pass on the offices we hold to our successors in as good of shape as we found them," he said.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/20/D8EK28B82.html

Human right must be kept sacred, no matter how great the sacrifice it costs the ruling powers. One cannot go only halfway and contrive a pragmatically conditioned right….All politics, rather, must bend the knee before sacred human right…

Those arrested by either the police or the Gestapo had less than three minutes to pack clothing and say their goodbyes. Once arrested, they were sent to the nearest police cell. Those in custody were told to sign Form D-11; this was an "Order For Protective Custody". By signing this, you agreed to go to prison. Those who did not sign it were beaten until they did or officers simply forged their signature. Once a D-11 was signed, you were sent to a concentration camp. How long you stayed here depended on the authorities...
Who would get arrested?
The list was intentionally expansive:

-Anybody considered to be a political threat was arrested;

-those who made jokes about the Nazi Party were also arrested (jokes about Hitler were punished with death);

-the "work shy" were also arrested. This fitted in exactly with Hitler’s plan to reduce unemployment as an unemployed person would be offered work at a Labour Exchange and if they refused it as too menial for them, they would be arrested as work shy. As no-one in concentration camps counted as unemployed, the figures for unemployment had to come down;

-"Bibelforscher's" were also arrested (these were people who would only seek guidance from the Bible and rejected all Nazi ideas and they also refused to do military service);

-homosexuals were also arrested and the SS used this as a common tactic to discredit someone.

-habitual criminals were also arrested.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi_police_state.htm

Snip from How Hitler Became a Dictator by Jacob G. Hornberger

The Reichstag fire

On February 27, Hitler was enjoying supper at the Goebbels home when the telephone rang with an emergency message: “The Reichstag is on fire!” Hitler and Goebbels rushed to the fire, where they encountered Hermann Goering, who would later become Hitler’s air minister. Goering was shouting at the top of his lungs,

This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very day be strung up.

The day after the fire, the Prussian government announced that it had found communist publications stating,

Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to be burned down... . Women and children were to be sent in front of terrorist groups.... The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection and civil war.... It has been ascertained that today was to have seen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, against private property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of general civil war.

So how was Goering so certain that the fire had been set by communist terrorists? Arrested on the spot was a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe. Most historians now believe that van der Lubbe was actually duped by the Nazis into setting the fire and probably was even assisted by them, without his realizing it.

Why would Hitler and his associates turn a blind eye to an impending terrorist attack on their national congressional building or actually assist with such a horrific deed? Because they knew what government officials have known throughout history — that during extreme national emergencies, people are most scared and thus much more willing to surrender their liberties in return for “security.” And that’s exactly what happened during the Reichstag terrorist crisis.

Suspending civil liberties

The day after the fire, Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to issue a decree entitled, “For the Protection of the People and the State.” Justified as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree suspended the constitutional guarantees pertaining to civil liberties:

Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

Two weeks after the Reichstag fire, Hitler requested the Reichstag to temporarily delegate its powers to him so that he could adequately deal with the crisis. Denouncing opponents to his request, Hitler shouted, “Germany will be free, but not through you!” When the vote was taken, the result was 441 for and 84 against, giving Hitler the two-thirds majority he needed to suspend the German constitution. On March 23, 1933, what has gone down in German history as the “Enabling Act” made Hitler dictator of Germany, freed of all legislative and constitutional constraints.

The judiciary under Hitler

One of the most dramatic consequences was in the judicial arena. Shirer points out,

Under the Weimar Constitution judges were independent, subject only to the law, protected from arbitrary removal and bound at least in theory by Article 109 to safeguard equality before the law.

In fact, in the Reichstag terrorist case, while the court convicted van der Lubbe of the crime (who was executed), three other defendants, all communists, were acquitted, which infuriated Hitler and Goering. Within a month, the Nazis had transferred jurisdiction over treason cases from the Supreme Court to a new People’s Court, which, as Shirer points out, soon became the most dreaded tribunal in the land. It consisted of two professional judges and five others chosen from among party officials, the S.S. and the armed forces, thus giving the latter a majority vote. There was no appeal from its decisions or sentences and usually its sessions were held in camera. Occasionally, however, for propaganda purposes when relatively light sentences were to be given, the foreign correspondents were invited to attend.

One of the Reichstag terrorist defendants, who had angered Goering during the trial with a severe cross-examination of Goering, did not benefit from his acquittal. Shirer explains:

The German communist leader was immediately taken into “protective custody,” where he remained until his death during the second war.

In addition to the People’s Court, which handled treason cases, the Nazis also set up the Special Court, which handled cases of political crimes or “insidious attacks against the government.” These courts consisted of three judges, who invariably had to be trusted party members, without a jury. A Nazi prosecutor had the choice of bringing action in such cases before either an ordinary court or the Special Court, and invariably he chose the latter, for obvious reasons. Defense lawyers before this court, as before the Volksgerichtshof, had to be approved by Nazi officials. Sometimes even if they were approved they fared badly. Thus the lawyers who attempted to represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally withdrew the action.

Even lenient treatment by the Special Court was no guarantee for the defendant, however, as Pastor Martin Niemoeller discovered when he was acquitted of major political charges and sentenced to time served for minor charges. Leaving the courtroom, Niemoeller was taken into custody by the Gestapo and taken to a concentration camp.

The Nazis also implemented a legal concept called Schutzhaft or “protective custody” which enabled them to arrest and incarcerate people without charging them with a crime. As Shirer put it,

Protective custody did not protect a man from possible harm, as it did in more civilized countries. It punished him by putting him behind barbed wire.

On August 2, 1934, Hindenburg died, and the title of president was abolished. Hitler’s title became Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor. Not surprisingly, he used the initial four-year “temporary” grant of emergency powers that had been given to him by the Enabling Act to consolidate his omnipotent control over the entire country.
Accepting the new order

Oddly enough, even though his dictatorship very quickly became complete, Hitler returned to the Reichstag every four years to renew the “temporary” delegation of emergency powers that it had given him to deal with the Reichstag-arson crisis. Needless to say, the Reichstag rubber-stamped each of his requests.

For their part, the German people quickly accepted the new order of things. Keep in mind that the average non-Jewish German was pretty much unaffected by the new laws and decrees. As long as a German citizen kept his head down, worked hard, took care of his family, sent his children to the public schools and the Hitler Youth organization, and, most important, didn’t involve himself in political dissent against the government, a visit by the Gestapo was very unlikely.

Keep in mind also that, while the Nazis established concentration camps in the 1930s, the number of inmates ranged in the thousands. It wouldn’t be until the 1940s that the death camps and the gas chambers that killed millions would be implemented. Describing how the average German adapted to the new order, Shirer writes,

The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.... The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed.... On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.

September 1, 2006

31 Similarities Between Hitler and President Bush
by Edward Jayne
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 29, 2004
(revised from an earlier version posted March 29, 2003)

When President Bush decided to invade Iraq, his spokesmen began comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler, the most monstrous figure in modern history. Everybody was therefore shocked when a high German bureaucrat turned the tables by comparing Bush himself with Hitler. As to be expected, she (the bureaucrat) was forced to resign because of her extreme disrespect for an American president. However, the resemblance sticks--there are too many similarities to be ignored, some of which may be listed here.

Like Hitler, President Bush was not elected by a majority, but was forced to engage in political maneuvering in order to gain office.

Like Hitler, Bush began to curtail civil liberties in response to a well-publicized disaster, in Hitler’s case the Reichstag fire, in Bush’s case the 9-11 catastrophe.

Like Hitler, Bush went on to pursue a reckless foreign policy without the mandate of the electorate and despite the opposition of most foreign nations.

Like Hitler, Bush has increased his popularity with conservative voters by mounting an aggressive public relations campaign against foreign enemies. Just as Hitler cited international communism to justify Germany’s military buildup, Bush has used Al Qaeda and the so-called Axis of Evil to justify our current military buildup. Paradoxically none of the nations in this axis--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--have had anything to do with each other.

Like Hitler, Bush has promoted militarism in the midst of economic recession (or depression as it was called during the thirties). First he used war preparations to help subsidize defense industries (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.) and presumably the rest of the economy on a trickle-down basis. Now he turns to the very same corporations to rebuild Iraq, again without competitive bidding and at extravagant profit levels.

Like Hitler, Bush displays great populist enthusiasm in his patriotic speeches, but primarily serves wealthy investors who subsidize his election campaigns and share with him their comfortable lifestyle. As he himself jokes, he treats these individuals at the pinnacle of our economy as his true political ‘base.’

Like Hitler, Bush envisages our nation’s unique historic destiny almost as a religious cause sanctioned by God. Just as Hitler did for Germany, he takes pride in his ‘providential’ role in spreading his version of Americanism throughout the entire world.

Like Hitler, Bush promotes a future world order that guarantees his own nation’s hegemonic supremacy rather than cooperative harmony under the authority of the United Nations (or League of Nations).

Like Hitler, Bush quickly makes and breaks diplomatic ties, and he offers generous promises that he soon abandons, as in the cases of Mexico, Russia, Afghanistan, and even New York City. The same goes for U.S. domestic programs. Once Bush was elected, many leaders of these programs learned to dread his making any kind of an appearance to praise their success, since this was almost inevitably followed by severe cuts in their budgets.

Like Hitler, Bush scraps international treaties, most notably the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Land Mines, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Global Warming Accord, and the International Criminal Court.

Like Hitler, Bush repeats lies often enough that they come to be accepted as the truth. Bush and his spokesmen argued, for example, that they had taken every measure possible to avoid war, than an invasion of Iraq would diminish (not intensify) the terrorist threat against the U.S., that Iraq was linked with Al Qaeda, and that nothing whatsoever had been achieved by U.N. inspectors to warrant the postponement of U.S. invasion plans. All of this was false. They also insisted that Iraq hid numerous weapons it did not possess since the mid-190s, and they refused to acknowledge the absence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq since the early nineties. As perhaps to be expected, they indignantly accused others of deception and evasiveness.

Like Hitler, Bush incessantly shifted his arguments to justify invading Iraq--from Iraq’s WMD threat to the elimination of Saddam Hussein, to his supposed Al Qaeda connection, to the creation of Iraqi democracy in the Middle East as a model for neighboring states, and back again to the WMD threat. As soon as one excuse for the war was challenged, Bush advanced to another, but only to shift back again at another time.

Like Hitler, Bush and his cohorts emphasize the ruthlessness of their enemies in order to justify their own. Just as Hitler cited the threat of communist violence to justify even greater violence on the part of Germany, the bush team justified the invasion of Iraq by emphasizing Hussein’s crimes against humanity over the past twenty-five years. However, these crimes were for the most part committed when Iraq was a client-ally of the U.S. Our government supplied Hussein with illegal weapons (poison gas included), and there were sixty U.S. advisors in Iraq when these weapons were put to use (see NY Times, Aug. 18, 1992). U.S. aid to Iraq was actually doubled afterwards despite disclaimers from Washington that our nation opposed their use. President Reagan’s special envoy Donald Rumsfeld personally informed Hussein of this one hundred percent increment during one of his two trips to Iraq at the time. He also told Hussein not to take U.S. disclaimers seriously.

Like Hitler, Bush takes pride in his status as a ‘War President,’ and his global ambition makes him perhaps the most dangerous president in our nation’s history, a ‘rogue’ chief executive capable of waging any number of illegal preemptive wars. He fully acknowledges his willingness to engage in wars of ‘choice’ as well as wars of necessity. Sooner or later this choice will oblige universal conscription as well as a full-scale war economy.

Like Hitler, Bush continues to pursue war without cutting back on the peacetime economy. Additional to unprecedented low interest rates bestowed by the Federal Reserve, he has actually cut federal taxes twice by substantial amounts, especially for the top one percent of U.S. taxpayers, while conducting an expensive invasion and an even more expensive occupation of a hostile nation. As a result, President Clinton’s $350 billion budget surplus has been reduced to a $450 billion deficit, comprising an unprecedented $800 billion decline in less than four years. At the same time the U.S. dollar has steadily dropped against currencies of both Europe and Japan.

Like Hitler, Bush possesses a war machine much bigger and more effective than the military capabilities of other nations. With the extra financing obliged by the defeat and occupation of Iraq, Bush now relies on a ‘defense’ budget well in excess of the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world. Moreover, the $416 billion defense package passed last week by Congress will probably need to be supplemented before the end of the year.

Like Hitler, bush depends on an axis of collaborative allies, which he describes as a ‘coalition of the willing,’ in order to give the impression of a broad popular alliance. These allies include the U.K. as compared to Mussolini’s Italy, and Spain and Bulgaria, as compared to, well, Spain and Bulgaria, both of which were aligned with Germany during the thirties and World War II. As a result of their cooperation, Prime Minister Blair’s diplomatic reputation has been ruined in England, and a surprising election defeat has produced an unfriendly government in Spain. The Philippines have withdrawn their troops from Iraq to save the life of a hostage, and other defections can be expected in the near future.

Like Hitler, Bush is willing to go to war over the objections of the U.N. (League of Nations). His Iraq invasion was illegal and therefore a war crime as explained by Articles 41 and 42 of the U.N. Charter, which require two votes, not one, by the Security Council before any state takes such an action. First a vote is needed to explore all possibilities short of warfare (in Iraqi’s case through the use of U.N. inspectors), and once this has been shown to be fruitless, a second vote is needed to permit military action. U.S. and U.K. delegates at the Security Council prevented this second vote once it was plain they lacked a majority. This was because other nations on the Security Council were satisfied with the findings of U.N. inspectors that no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found. Minus this second vote, the invasion was illegal. Bush also showed in the process that he has no qualms about bribing, bullying, and insulting U.N. members, even tapping their telephone lines. This was done with undecided members of the Security Council as well as the U.N. Secretary General when the U.S.-U.K. resolution was debated preceding the invasion.

Like Hitler, Bush launches unilateral invasions on a supposedly preemptive basis. Just as Hitler convinced the German public to think of Poland as a threat to Germany in 1939 (for example in his Sept. 19 speech), Bush wants Americans to think of Iraq as having been a ‘potential’ threat to our national security--indeed as one of the instigators of the 9-11 attack despite a complete lack of evidence to support this claim.

Like Hitler, Bush depends on a military strategy that features a ‘shock and awe’ blitzkrieg beginning with devastating air strikes, then an invasion led by heavy armored columns.

Like Hitler, Bush is willing to inflict high levels of bloodshed against enemy nations. Between 20,000 and (more probably) 37,000 are now estimated to have been killed, as much as a ro-1 kill ratio compared to the more than 900 Americans killed. In other words, for every U.S. fatality, probably as many as forty Iraqi have died.

Like Hitler, Bush is perfectly willing to sacrifice life as part of his official duty. This would be indicated by the unprecedented number of prisoners executed during his service as governor of Texas. Under no other governor in the history of the United States were so many killed.

Like Hitler, Bush began warfare on a single front (Al Qaeda quartered in Afghanistan), but then expanded it to a second front with Iraq, only to be confronted with North Korea and Iran as potential third and fourth fronts. Much the same thing happened to Hitler when he advanced German military operations from Spain to Poland and France, then was distracted by Yugoslavia before invading the USSR in 1941. Today, bush seems prevented by the excessive costs of the Iraqi debacle from going to war elsewhere if reelected, but not through any lack of desire.

Like Hitler, Bush has no qualms about imposing ‘regime change’ by installing Quisling-style client governments backed by a U.S. military occupation with both political and economic control entirely in the hands of Americans. It is no surprise that Iyad Alawi, Iraqi’s current temporary prime minister, was once affiliated with the CIA and has been reliably reported by the Australian press to have executed six hooded prisoners with a handgun to their heads just a day or two before his appointment a couple weeks ago.

Like Hitler, Bush curtails civil liberties in captive nations and depends on detention centers (i.e., concentration camps) such as a Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and any number of secret interrogation centers across the world. Prisoners at the camps go unidentified and have no legal rights as ordinarily guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. They have also been detained indefinitely (for 2 ½ years already at Guantanamo Bay), though there is mounting evidence that many are innocent of what they have been charged--some, for example, having been randomly seized by Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan for an automatic bounty from U.S. commanders. Moreover, many Iraqi prisoners have been tortured, in many instances just short of death. Recent U.S. documents disclose that as many twenty have died while being tortured, and twenty others have died under unusual circumstances yet to be determined.

Like Hitler, Bush uses the threat of enemies abroad to stir the fearful allegiance of the U.S. public. For example, he features public announcements of possible terrorist attacks in order to override embarrassing news coverage or to crowd from headlines positive coverage of Democratic Party activities. He also uses the threat of terrorism to justify extraordinary domestic powers granted by the Patriot Act. Even the books we check out of public libraries can be kept on record by federal agents.

Like Hitler, Bush depends on a propaganda machine to guarantee sympathetic news management. In Hitler’s case news coverage was totally dominated by Goebbels; in Bush’s case reporters have been almost totally ‘imbedded’ by both military spokesmen and wealthy media owners sympathetic with Bush. The most obvious case is the Fox news channel, owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Not surprisingly, recent polls indicate that the majority of Fox viewers still think Hussein played a role in the 9-11 attack.

Like Hitler, Bush increasingly reduces the circle of aides he feels he can trust as his policies keep boomeranging at his own expense. Just as Hitler ended up isolated in his headquarters, with few individuals granted access, Bush is now said to be limiting access primarily to Attorney General Ashcroft (who also talks with God on a regular basis) as well as Karl Rove, the Vice President, Karen Hughes, and a few others. Both Secretary of State Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld are now said to be out of the loop.

Like Hitler, Bush has become obsessed with his vision of conflict between good (U.S. patriotism) and evil (anti-Americanism. Many in contact with the White House are said to be worried that he is beginning to lose touch with reality--perhaps resulting from the use of medication that seriously distorts his judgment. Possibly symptomatic of this concern is the increasing number of disaffected government officials who leak embarrassing documents.

Like Hitler, bush takes pleasure in the mythology of frontier justice. As a youth Hitler read and memorized the western novels of Karl May, and Bush retains into his maturity his fascination with simplistic cowboy values. He also exaggerates a cowboy twang despite his C-average elitist education at Andover, Yale, and Harvard.

Like Hitler, Bush misconstrues Darwinism, in Hitler’s case by treating the Aryan race as being superior on an evolutionary basis, in Bush’s case by rejecting science for fundamentalist creationism.

Of course countless differences may be listed between Hitler and President Bush, most of which are to the credit of Bush. Nevertheless, the resemblances listed here are striking, especially since Bush’s first term in office must be compared with Hitler’s performance as German Chancellor through the year 1937, preceding the chain of events immediately preceding World War II. In any case, George W. Bush seems the worst and most dangerous U.S. president in recent memory (for me since Roosevelt)--if not in the entire history of the United States.

Edward Jayne is a retired English professor with experience as a '60s activist. He can be contacted at: edward.jayne@wmich.edu.

Neo-Fascism and Paleo-Tyranny
by Jack D. Douglas
December 27, 2005
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/douglas6.html

Neo-fascist regimes, defined as corporate-statist regimes with pseudo-democratic faces, face the difficult task of building their vast (so called "totalitarian" in popular usage) Party powers in secret in their early years in power. This was true even in Italy and Germany where civil liberties and democracy had only weak roots when the fascist regimes took power. It is far more true in the democratic nations, especially in the U.S., the cradle of modern democracy among major nations (following in part in Swiss footsteps). The Italian and German fascists created non-state armies, the black and brown shirts, and moved quietly below the public radar to get control of the media and courts and police by purchase, infiltration, and intimidation. The American Neo-Fascist Party, the Republicrats with their two factions, have done the same things, but have relied far more on corporate, legal purchases of the media and on infiltration than on direct intimidation, which always involves the danger of exposure which could be fatal as long as the people still oppose Party control of their lives. (The U.S. factions of the Party have at times used vast character assassination attacks by telephone, etc., and have used all kinds of less "formal" intimidation and "tricks" that cannot be traced back to a Party source.)

The crucial task of the Party in its early years is to build legitimacy by deceiving the people. They do this mostly by using three devices. First, they frighten the people, or make use of real sources of fright, by creating foreign and domestic threats � the capitalist dogs, the Jews, the Versailles Slave Treaty, the commies are everywhere, The Terrorists want to destroy America, etc. Two, they use attacks on weak foreign "enemies" and weak domestic enemies to "prove" the Party can SAVE the people from the foreign and domestic threats. This leads to an explosion not only of relief for salvation, but also soaring nationalistic pride associated with the Party, which is crucial in building legitimacy for the Party. Three, the Party uses its growing control of the Media, both direct and indirect, and its control of growing secret police armies (Gestapo, SS, FBI, CIA, IRS, etc.) to deceive the people about what is happening � to transform foreign allies like Iraq into "ENEMIES that threaten our very existence!," to cover-up the growth of the secret tyrannical armies of police, to cover-up vast Party blunders and corruptions of all forms, etc.

By these means the Party secretly builds the legitimacy of the secret tyrannies it has been building. Once it has widespread support among the less informed (more misinformed by the Party Media), less intelligent, and more paid-off (by Party contracts, etc.), the Party tries to carefully choose a TURNING POINT, a point at which it can bring its vast, secret tyrannical powers into the open and have them accepted and legitimized by the people. For the Nazis this turning point came after the dramatic burning of the Reichstag (the erstwhile parliament building). It was probably set by the Nazis, though we can only guesstimate this from how they operated in general, since they covered their tracks well and blamed it on their domestic enemies. The public sense of threat and outrage led to a great surge in Party support, as any politician knows will happen in such circumstances, and this led after months of build up and maneuvering politically to the Enabling Act which gave Hitler and the Nazis legitimacy for the secret tyrannical powers they had been building.

The U.S. has followed this same basic scenario almost step by step. The attacks on the U.S. of 9/11 led to the vast expansion of secret police powers both by public legislation and by vast secret usurpations. The Party has moved in every way possible to get more control over the Media to silence opposition, to hide its secret activities, to cover its tracks, and so on. They have manufactured "ENEMIES WHO THREATEN OUR VERY EXISTENCE" (Muslims, not Jews, Iraq, not Poland) who can be easily defeated to build a sense of nationalistic pride, and on and on.

The U.S. Party made a fatal mistake in forgetting a crucial lesson of modern warfare � guerilla warfare is very effective even against Superpowers. If Bush et al. had won their war against the "ENEMIES" of Iraq, they would have been seen as heroes by most ignorant Americans and would by now be passing legislation to legitimize all of their vast expansions of the tyrannical powers of their secret police. As it is, they have been losing legitimacy and some of the Media are no longer as intimidated as they were. The Media have begun to slowly reveal the perfectly obvious fact of their vast expansion of secret police tyrannies � spying massively on Americans, torture chambers, kidnappings, murders, and vast war crimes of all kinds.

This has apparently forced the Bush Junta to "put up or shut up." They feel that they must "go for broke." If they back down now, the Media will reveal more and more of the awful truths about what they have been doing, their immense corruptions of every form will be exposed, their stupid mistakes will be exposed, and they will be in danger of facing war crimes tribunals or simple court actions for their vast kidnappings and torturing of people around the world.

They feel they must play out their hand however weak it is. So they are forcing the issue: they are admitting their secret tyrannies and showing nationalistic pride in them and insisting that they are necessary for the Party to SAVE us from THE EVIL ONES.

This is a very dangerous period, a turning point one way or the other. Bush et al. may now try to use far more secret police powers to intimidate people or to openly seize far more power, presumably under the pretense that it is necessary and legitimized by the state of national emergency that never ends. My guess is that most of the American people will not wake up to the obvious threat. They will see this as just "politics" and think Cassandras like me are RANTING as usual. But the military and secret police are split. Many secretly vehemently oppose the Party seizures of power that have been going on. (This is almost an exact parallel to the split in Germany where the military General Staff remained generally opposed to Hitler and almost killed him and the head of the Abwehr, comparable to the FBI, was stridently anti-Hitler.) In such a situation the emerging events will have great effects on the outcomes. And, of course, looming over it all is the vast financial BUBBLE the Party has built globally to advance their powers, a BUBBLE that can crash at any time. At this point, we cannot say for sure which way the U.S. will go. But my guesstimate is that the vastly powerful Neo-Fascist Party state will continue to grow, with fits and starts, retreats and advances, ups and downs, as it has done for a century, regardless of the fate of Gush et al. And whenever the Party BUBBLE finally implodes, as I strongly expect it will at some point, the resulting mass dread, suffering and chaos will be an ideal situation for the Party to seize vast new powers and have them legitimized by a people really facing mass starvation.

I am, however, optimistic about the very long run. Having tried in some form almost every one of the totally bizarre, absurd and disastrous programs of modern totalitarianism, Americans will eventually realize that "FREEDOM WORKS" and retreat to some form of vastly reduced government power. The Nightmare Years of total corruption of everything by the Party will end and Americans will fall back on the simple and decent foundations of human nature to put their lives back together. The Utopian Plans of the Party will leave only a ghastly hangover

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Problem with Presidential Signing Statements: Their Use and Misuse by the Bush Administration
By JOHN W. DEAN
FindLaw
Jan. 13, 2006

Presidential signing statements are old news to anyone who has served in the White House counsel's office. Presidents have long used them to add their two cents when a law passed by Congress has provisions they do not like, yet they are not inclined to veto it. Nixon's statements, for example, often related to spending authorization laws which he felt were excessive and contrary to his fiscal policies.

In this column, I'll take a close look at President Bush's use of signing statements. I find these signing statements are to Bush and Cheney's presidency what steroids were to Arnold Schwarzenegger's body building. Like Schwarzenegger with his steroids, Bush does not deny using his signing statements; does not like talking about using them; and believes that they add muscle.

But like steroids, signing statements ultimately lead to serious trouble.

Relying On Command, Rather Than Persuasion

Phillip Cooper is a leading expert on signing statements. His 2002 book, By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action, assesses the uses and abuses of signing statements by presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Cooper has updated his material in a recent essay for the Presidential Studies Quarterly, to encompass the use of signing statements by now-President Bush as well.

By Cooper's count, George W. Bush issued 23 signing statements in 2001; 34 statements in 2002, raising 168 constitutional objections; 27 statements in 2003, raising 142 constitutional challenges, and 23 statements in 2004, raising 175 constitutional criticisms. In total, during his first term Bush raised a remarkable 505 constitutional challenges to various provisions of legislation that became law.

That number may be approaching 600 challenges by now. Yet Bush has not vetoed a single bill, notwithstanding all these claims, in his own signing statements, that they are unconstitutional insofar as they relate to him.

Rather than veto laws passed by Congress, Bush is using his signing statements to effectively nullify them as they relate to the executive branch. These statements, for him, function as directives to executive branch departments and agencies as to how they are to implement the relevant law.

President Bush and the attorneys advising him may also anticipate that the signing statements will help him if and when the relevant laws are construed in court - for federal courts, depending on their views of executive power, may deem such statements relevant to their interpretation of a given law. After all, the law would not have passed had the President decided to veto it, so arguably, his view on what the law meant ought to (within reason) carry some weight for the court interpreting it. This is the argument, anyway.

Bush has quietly been using these statements to bolster presidential powers. It is a calculated, systematic scheme that has gone largely unnoticed (even though these statements are published in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents) until recently, when President Bush's used a signing statement to attempt to nullify the recent, controversial McCain amendment regarding torture, which drew some media attention.

Pumping Up the Bush Presidency With Signing Statements

Generally, Bush's signing statements tend to be brief and very broad, and they seldom cite the authority on which the president is relying for his reading of the law. None has yet been tested in court. But they do appear to be bulking up the powers of the presidency. Here are a few examples:

Suppose a new law requires the President to act in a certain manner - for instance, to report to Congress on how he is dealing with terrorism. Bush's signing statement will flat out reject the law, and state that he will construe the law "in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties."

The upshot? It is as if no law had been passed on the matter at all.

Or suppose a new law suggests even the slightest intrusion into the President's undefined "prerogative powers" under Article II of the Constitution, relating to national security, intelligence gathering, or law enforcement. Bush's signing statement will claim that notwithstanding the clear intent of Congress, which has used mandatory language, the provision will be considered as "advisory."

The upshot? It is as if Congress had acted as a mere advisor, with no more formal power than, say, Karl Rove - not as a coordinate and coequal branch of government, which in fact it is.

As Phillip Cooper observes, the President's signing statements are, in some instances, effectively rewriting the laws by reinterpreting how the law will be implemented. Notably, Cooper finds some of Bush's signing statements - and he has the benefit of judging them against his extensive knowledge of other President's signing statements -- "excessive, unhelpful, and needlessly confrontational."

The Constitutional and Practical Problems With Bush's Use of Signing Statements

Given the incredible number of constitutional challenges Bush is issuing to new laws, without vetoing them, his use of signing statements is going to sooner or later put him in an untenable position. And there is a strong argument that it has already put him in a position contrary to Supreme Court precedent, and the Constitution, vis-�-vis the veto power.

Bush is using signing statements like line item vetoes. Yet the Supreme Court has held the line item vetoes are unconstitutional. In 1988, in Clinton v. New York, the High Court said a president had to veto an entire law: Even Congress, with its Line Item Veto Act, could not permit him to veto provisions he might not like.

The Court held the Line Item Veto Act unconstitutional in that it violated the Constitution's Presentment Clause. That Clause says that after a bill has passed both Houses, but "before it become[s] a Law," it must be presented to the President, who "shall sign it" if he approves it, but "return it" - that is, veto the bill, in its entirety-- if he does not.

Following the Court's logic, and the spirit of the Presentment Clause, a president who finds part of a bill unconstitutional, ought to veto the entire bill -- not sign it with reservations in a way that attempts to effectively veto part (and only part) of the bill. Yet that is exactly what Bush is doing. The Presentment Clause makes clear that the veto power is to be used with respect to a bill in its entirety, not in part.

The frequency and the audacity of Bush's use of signing statements are troubling. Enactments by Congress are presumed to be constitutional - as the Justice Department has often reiterated. For example, take what is close to boilerplate language from a government brief (selected at random): "It is well-established that Congressional legislation is entitled to a strong presumption of constitutionality. See United States v. Morrison ('Every possible presumption is in favor of the validity of a statute, and this continues until the contrary is shown beyond a rational doubt.')."

Bush's use of signing statements thus potentially brings him into conflict with his own Justice Department. The Justice Department is responsible for defending the constitutionality of laws enacted by Congress. What is going to happen when the question at issue is the constitutionality of a provision the President has declared unconstitutional in a signing statement?

Does the President's signing statement overcome the presumption of constitutionality? I doubt it. Will the Department of Justice have a serious conflict of interest? For certain, it will.

Should thus Congress establish its own non-partisan legal division, not unlike the Congressional Reference Service, to protect its interests, since the Department of Justice may have conflicts? It's something to think about.

These are just a few practical and constitutional problems that arise when a president acts as if there is his government, and then there is the Congress' government. Signing statements often ignore the fact the only Congress can create all the departments and agencies of the Executive Branch, and only Congress can fund these operations.

And the power to create and fund is also, by implication, the power to regulate and to oversee. Congress can, to some extent, direct how these agencies will function without infringing on presidential power.

Impact Of Presidential Signing Statements

The immediate impact of signing statements, of course, is felt within the Executive Branch: As I noted, Bush's statements will likely have a direct influence on how that branch's agencies and departments interpret and enforce the law.

It is remarkable that Bush believes he can ignore a law, and protect himself, through a signing statement. Despite the McCain Amendment's clear anti-torture stance, the military may feel free to use torture anyway, based on the President's attempt to use a signing statement to wholly undercut the bill.

This kind of expansive use of a signing statement presents not only Presentment Clause problems, but also clashes with the Constitutional implication that a veto is the President's only and exclusive avenue to prevent a bill's becoming law. The powers of foot-dragging and resistance-by-signing-statement, are not mentioned in the Constitution alongside the veto, after all. Congress wanted to impeach Nixon for impounding money he thought should not be spent. Telling Congress its laws do not apply makes Nixon's impounding look like cooperation with Congress, by comparison.

The longer term impact of signing statements is potentially grave - and is being ignored by the Bush administration. But it cannot be ignored forever. Defiance by Bush of Congressional lawmaking will come back to haunt this President.

Watergate was about abuse of power. Nixon, not unlike Bush, insisted on pushing the powers of the presidency to, and beyond, their limits. But as Nixon headed into his second term with even grander plans than he'd had in the first term, the Congress became concerned. (And for good reason.)

Bush, who has been pushing the envelope on presidential powers, is just beginning to learn what kind of Congressional blowback can result.

First, there are the leaks: People within the Executive branch become troubled by a president's overreaching. When Nixon adopted extreme measures, people within the administration began leaking. The same is now happening to Bush, for there was the leak about the use of torture. And, more recently, there was the leak as to the use of warrantless electronic surveillance on Americans.

Once the leaks start, they continue, and Congressional ire is not far behind. The overwhelming Congressional support for Senator John McCain's torture ban suggests, too, that Congress will not be happy if leaks begin to suggest the President - as his signing statement foreshadows - is already flouting the ban.

In short, Bush's signing statements, which are now going over the top, are going to cause a Congressional reaction. It is inevitable. If Republican lose control of either the House or Senate - and perhaps even if they don't, if the subject is torture or an egregious violation of civil liberties -- then the Bush/Cheney administration will wish it had not issued all those signing statements.

Indeed, the Administration may be eating its words - with Congress holding the plate out, and forcing the unconstitutional verbiage back down. That, in the end, is the only kind of torture Americans ought to countenance.

Interested readers may also want to consult several recent Findlaw columns that have addressed President Bush's use of signing statements. Edward Lazarus noted Bush's use of a signing statements as an example of his "interpret[ing] away constraints on his power," such as Senator John McCain's amendment prohibiting American forces from engaging in torture and the applications of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act to electronic surveillance of Americans. Jennifer Van Bergen addressed signing statements in the broader context of the Bush's Administration's embrace of the so-called "unitary executive" concept, the claim that a president totally controls the executive branch and has standing equal to the courts in interpreting the constitution as it relates to his branch.--Ed.

Conservatives Endorse the Fuhrer Principle
Our leader über alles
by Paul Craig Roberts
Antiwar.com
February 17, 2006

Last week's annual Conservative Political Action Conference signaled the transformation of American conservatism into brownshirtism. A former Justice Department official named Viet Dinh got a standing ovation when he told the CPAC audience that the rule of law mustn't get in the way of President Bush protecting Americans from Osama bin Laden.

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr, who led the House impeachment of President Bill Clinton, reminded the CPAC audience that our first loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution, not to a leader. The question, Barr said, is not one of disloyalty to Bush, but whether America "will remain a nation subject to, and governed by, the rule of law or the whim of men."

The CPAC audience answered that they preferred to be governed by Bush. According to Dana Milbank, a member of the CPAC audience named Richard Sorcinelli loudly booed Barr, declaring: "I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say Bush is off course trying to defend the United States." A woman in the audience told Barr that the Constitution placed Bush above the law and above non-elected federal judges.

These statements gallop beyond the merely partisan. They express the sentiments of brownshirtism. Our leader über alles.

Only a few years ago this same group saw Barr as a conservative hero for obtaining Clinton's impeachment in the House. Obviously, CPAC's praise for Barr did not derive from Barr's stand on conservative principle that a president must be held accountable if he violates the law. In Clinton's case, Barr's principles did not conflict with the blind emotions of the politically partisan conservatives demanding Clinton's impeachment.

In opposing Bush's illegal behavior, Barr is simply being consistent. But this time, Barr's principles are at odds with the emotions of the politically partisan CPAC audience. Rushing to the defense of Bush, the CPAC audience endorsed Viet Dinh's Fuhrer Principle over the rule of law.

Why do the media and the public allow partisan political hacks, like Viet Dinh, to define Bush's illegal actions as a national security issue? The purpose of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is to protect national security. FISA creates a secret court to which the president can apply for a warrant even after he has initiated spying. Complying with the law in no way handicaps spying for national security purposes. The only spying handicapped by the warrant requirement is spying for illegitimate purposes, such as spying on political opponents.

There are only two reasons for Bush to refuse to obey the law. One is that he is guilty of illegitimate spying for which no warrant would be issued by the FISA court. The other is that he is using "national security" to create unconstitutional powers for the executive.

Civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate writing in the Boston Phoenix says that Bush's grab for "sweeping, unchecked power in direct violation of a statute would open a Pandora's box of imperial possibilities." In short, it makes the president a dictator.

For years, the Republican Federalist Society has been agitating for concentrating more power in the executive. The members will say that they do not favor a dictator, just a check on the "imperial Congress" and "imperial judiciary." But they have not spelled out how the president can be higher than law and still be accountable, or, if he is only to be higher than some laws, but not other laws, and only in some circumstances, but not all circumstances, who draws the line through the law and defines the circumstances.

On Feb. 13, the American Bar Association passed a resolution belatedly asking President Bush to stop violating the law. "We cannot allow the U.S. Constitution and our rights to become a victim of terrorism," said bar association president Michael Grecco.


The siren call of "national security" is all the cover Bush needs to have the FISA law repealed, thus legally gaining the power to spy however he chooses, the protection of political opponents be damned. However, Bush and his Federalist Society Justice Department are not interested in having the law repealed. Their purpose has nothing to do with national security. The point on which the regime is insisting is that there are circumstances (undefined) in which the president does not have to obey laws. What those circumstances and laws are is for the regime to decide.

The Bush regime is asserting the Fuhrer Principle, and Americans are buying it, even as Bush declares that America is at war in order to bring democracy to the Middle East.

It’s Munich In America. There Will Be No Normandy.
by David Michael Green
February 21, 2006
CommonDreams.org

This is it, folks. This is the scenario our Founders lost sleep over. This is the day they prepared us for.

Outside the Philadelphia convention Benjamin Franklin was asked what sort of government he and his colleagues were crafting. His reply? “A republic. If you can keep it.” And that is just the question at issue today. Can we keep it?

Sure, it can sound melodramatic to use the f-word (no, not the one Churlish Cheney hurled at Patrick Leahy), and I have mostly avoided doing so for just that reason. Especially where the politically less informed are concerned, arguing that America is slipping into fascism can be the first and last point they’ll hear you make.

But, nowadays, even George F. Will is worried. You know you’re in a seriously bad place when that happens.

America may not be a fascist country today, but it’s not for want of trying. I have no question but that through Dick Cheney’s dark heart courses the blood of Mussolini. No wonder the damn thing’s so diseased. And I have no doubt that Karl Rove has only admiration and envy for Joseph Goebbels. Hey, why can’t we do that here? (Hint: We are.)

America is not a fascist country (if it was, you wouldn’t be reading this), but pardon me if I don’t defer to Bush defenders and ringside Democrats who consider me hysterical for worrying about the direction in which we’re heading.

These are the same people who’ve spent the last two decades denying the existence of global warming, while we now learn with each passing week how much worse than we had ever imagined is that environmental wreckage. These are the same people who said Iraq would be a cakewalk, and planned accordingly. These are the same people who prepared us for 9/11, the Iraq occupation, Hurricane Katrina and the prescription drug plan, and who have set new records for ineptitude in responding to those crises. These are the people who can’t get body armor on our troops, three years after launching the war, and who are getting flunking grades in terrorism preparation from the 9/11 Commission four years after that attack. These are the same people who have turned a massive surplus into a record-setting debt, and coupled it with equally breathtaking trade deficits. And now they want to cut federal tax revenue even more.

Yes, he is the president, but golly gee, Sargent Carter, he sure seems to make an awful lot of mistakes!

So forgive me if I don’t trust their judgement on matters of rather serious importance. Forgive me if I don’t stand by hoping they’re right as the two hundred year-old experiment in American democracy goes down the toilet. Besides, I thought being a conservative meant taking the prudent course, anyhow. Even if there was only a one in a hundred chance that a grenade was live, would you play with it? Wouldn’t it have been better to have acted ‘conservatively’ with the fate of the planet at stake, and assumed that global warming might be real? And, likewise, shouldn’t we worry about what is happening to American democracy now, while we still can?

The truth is, there is a government in office which seeks such complete power and dominance that even some conservatives have started to notice. Too blind to see the true intentions of this bunch, they can at least figure out that an imperial presidency created by George Bush might one day be inherited by Hillary Clinton (complete with her plans for a revolutionary dope-smoking lesbian Marxist state and global UN domination, enforced by an armada of black helicopters), so now even these fools are getting nervous about where this goes. They know that the only difference between the monarchism our Founders so reviled and contemporary Cheneyism is that the technology of our time allows George Bush to turn George III into George Orwell.

It’s Munich in America, people. We can dream the pleasant dream that if we just stand by quietly while the Boy King gobbles up some of our liberties, he won’t want any more, but that would be a lot like Chamberlain dreaming that a chunk of Czechoslovakia would be enough to appease Hitler. It wasn’t, and it won’t be.

Do I overstate the concern? The New York Times recently editorialized “We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers – and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.” The Times should know. Between rah-rah’ing the war for Bush, sitting on the Downing Street Memos as if they were banana import trade policy documents, and covering for Judith Miller while she covered for The Cheney Gang, they have about as much blood on their hands as does Donald Rumsfeld. But if even the Times can work up the concern to print a line like that, we’re in a world of hurt.

And we are, in fact, in a world of hurt. Those shreds of parchment on the floor of the National Archives aren’t from Mrs. Washington’s shopping list, I’m afraid to say.

It is true, of course, that other presidents – even the best of them – have taken enormous liberties with the Constitution, especially during wartime. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, FDR jailed Americans on the West Coast for the crime of having Japanese ancestry, Truman and Eisenhower stood by while McCarthyism ripped a gaping hole through American civil liberties, and Nixon and his plumbers went to work on his political enemies in the name of national security. Of course, we now look back on those episodes as among the most shameful in American history. But the present crew is even more dangerous for their intentions of creating permanent war to justify permanent repression.

Already they’ve torn large chunks out of the Constitution.

Article One creates the legislative branch, that which the Founders intended to be the most powerful and consequential. Today, we have a president who makes the stunning assertion that he is the “sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs”. This Congress seems mostly to agree, even though the Founders gave them the power to declare war, to fund all governmental activities, to ratify treaties and to oversee the executive. Who, us? Bye-bye Article One.

Article Three creates a Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes (especially over governmental powers) and to protect the Constitution. But BushCo can’t be bothered to follow even the Court’s tentative interventions into due process concerning Guantánamo and beyond. And why should it? By the time they get done with loading the damn thing up with ‘unitary executive’ fifth-column shills like Roberts and Alito, it will be a moot court, just like the ones in law school. Once the Supreme Court becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of the executive branch (about one vote from now), it’s bye-bye Article Three.

The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble in protest. But protest is a joke in Bush’s America. People are kenneled off into pens so far from the president he is never confronted with any contrary views at all, apart from the odd funeral he has to show up at but Rove can’t script. The halls of Congress are ground zero for American democracy, much boasted about at home and jammed down the throat of the world (except when the results don’t favor American corporate or strategic interests). But go there and sit in the balcony wearing a t-shirt with the number of dead soldiers in Iraq printed on it and see how fast you get a lesson in Bush’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights. And that little display at the state of the union address was no freak event, either. That kind of thing happened all the time during the 2004 campaign. At Bush rallies, people were getting arrested for the bumper-stickers on their cars.

The First Amendment also protects freedom of the press. That freedom has not been eliminated, per se, but it has been effectively neutered beyond effectiveness. Between the White House intimidating most of the press, coopting the rest, stonewalling information requests, planting stories in the American and foreign media, and buying off journalists, today’s mainstream media has too often become a pathetic megaphone for White House lies, and that includes those supposed bastions of liberalism, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bye-bye First Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees “against unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation”. Can you say “NSA”? “Guantánamo”? “Abu Ghraib”? It’s bad enough that Bush has authorized himself to bug anybody, arrest anybody, convict anybody and silence anybody, but his NSA chief doesn’t even appear to have read the Fourth Amendment. That whole thing about probable cause was lost on him, as he and his president simultaneously trampled the separation of powers and checks and balances doctrines by eliminating two out of three branches of government from their little surveillance loop.

Meanwhile, informed estimates repeatedly assert that the majority of detainees rotting away in Guantánamo are there either because they were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time simply and got swept away like so much garbage into a dustpan, or were reported as al Qaeda so that one Afghan clan could use the US military to burn another. And so there they sit, unable to be charged, to be tried, to exercise habeas corpus, to have representation, to confront witnesses – unable now even to starve themselves to death in protest. If this wasn’t precisely the fear of the Founders when they put this language into the Constitution, then Dick Cheney is a poster boy for the ACLU. Strike the Fourth Amendment.

And take with it the Fifth (no one shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”), the Sixth (“the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury”, the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense”), and the Eighth, providing against “cruel and unusual punishments”). Boom, boom, boom.

In a disgusting display of legal sophistry, the administration would argue that these provisions don’t apply because of jurisdiction, which of course was the entire purpose for putting their gulag in Guantánamo in the first place. As if it is not American territory since we ‘lease’ it from Cuba. As if Castro could send in the police to clean up the open sore of Bush’s human rights travesty there, and the US could do nothing about it, since it is Cuban land. Right.

But even if Fun With Domestic Jurisprudence is to be their game, the actions of the administration also represent a massive breach of international law, since the Geneva Conventions prohibit precisely these sorts of horrors which the Creature from Crawford has visited upon the poor SOBs caught in his dragnet.

Your scissors are probably getting a bit dull by now, but this means that not only is international law in scraps, but you can also go ahead and cut out Article Six of the Constitution as well, which provides that “all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land”. Ah, how ‘quaint’. How very ‘obsolete’.

Such treaties may be the supreme law in some land, but apparently not in Bush Land. Or, at least not if you don’t mind another cute legal charade, in which a new category of POWs called “unlawful combatants” is fabricated with the intention of rendering – with disingenuousness extraordinaire – the detainees as falling outside the Geneva provisions.

That’s precious, as if a ‘lawful’ Bush all of a sudden got religion for the fine points of international jurisprudence. Except, of course, when it came to the need for obtaining a Security Council resolution to invade Iraq. Except when it comes to the International Criminal Court, which the Bush junta has been desperately trying to undermine at every opportunity (gee, I wonder why, given the Court’s mandate to prosecute war criminals). Except for nuclear nonproliferation. Except for the use of white phosphorus in Falluja. Apparently the only legal distinctions these guys follow are the ones Bush orders Alberto Gonzales, that paragon of legal independence and the rule of law, to create for him out of whole cloth. That international law.

There’s not much left of the Constitution now that these guys have tortured it as if it were some personal project in Lynndie England’s basement. Of course, they’ve made damn sure that the Second Amendment is fully protected, to the point where John Ashcroft wouldn’t investigate the gun purchase records of the 9/11 hijackers. You gotta love that. I wish they gave the rest of the Bill of Rights a tenth of the attention the Second Amendment gets. Heck, for that matter, I wish they’d even interpret the Second Amendment properly. Maybe in my next lifetime.

Meanwhile, arguably the three most brilliant inventions of the Constitution are separation of powers, the guarantee of civil liberties, and federalism. Even the latter – which has least to do with foreign affairs or checking executive power, and therefore has been least assaulted – is under duress as the Bush Gang attack state power any time it strays from their regressive political agenda, for instance with respect to euthanasia, medical marijuana or affirmative action.

In fact, all three of these key constitutional doctrines are suffering under a brutal assault from a regime which finds democracy and liberty fundamentally inconvenient to their aspirations for unlimited power. The administration absurdly claims to be bringing democracy to the Mid-East. (After that whole WMD thing went MIA, and Saddam’s links to al Qaeda proved equally credible, what the hell else were they going to say?). But far from the ludicrous claims that they are agents for the spread of democracy abroad, they are busy unraveling it with furious industry here at home.

It is, I’m afraid, Munich in America, and now we must decide whether to appease the bullies and pray for happy endings, or fight back to preserve a two hundred year-old experiment in democracy. Despite all its flaws and failures, Churchill was still right about it: Democracy is the worst system of governance except for all the others. And that makes it worth fighting for.

But the spot we’re in now is actually worse than Munich, because there will be no Normandy in this war, and no Stalingrad. No country with the deterrent threat of a nuclear arsenal can ever be invaded by another country or group of countries, regardless of the magnitude of the latter’s own military power.

That means we’re on our own, folks. If we flip completely over to the dark side, nobody will be storming our beaches and scrambling up our cliffs to liberate us from our own folly. Hell, if they weren’t so worried about the international menace we represent, they’d probably be laughing at us, anyhow, thinking how richly we deserved the government we got.

But there’s nothing funny about this situation. Hitler dreamed of a thousand year reich, but didn’t count on the resilience of an endless army of Slavs, or the technological prowess of a nation of shopkeepers’ great-grandchildren hammering his would-be millennium down to a decade. If the US goes authoritarian (or worse), on the other hand, who will play Russia or America to our Germany? The answer is no one, and it is not apocalyptic paranoia to fear a very, very long period of unrelenting political darkness, once the curtain comes down.

Is this the beginning of the end for American democracy? Maybe. I have no doubt that unchecked Cheneyism intends precisely that. It’s therefore up to the rest of us to stop it. It’s up to us to say yes to Philadelphia, and no to Munich. Because there will be no Normandy.

Now we find out if we can keep Mr. Franklin’s republic, after all.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (pscdmg@hofstra.edu), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.

Neocons’ Nazi Hero
How Carl Schmitt Spawned Fascist America
By ARTHUR VERSLUIS Counterpunch.org
August 10, 2006

At the insistence of the White House, the Pentagon publicly asserted in 2006 what has already become self-evident, that the United States would not observe the protocols of the Geneva Conventions concerning some prisoners. Coming as the announcement did on the heels of revelations about the prisons at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and various secret locations to which the CIA had prisoners flown for interrogation and torture, it would seem that American citizens had lost their capacity for outrage or even indignation. But the fact remains that the selective abrogation of the Geneva Conventions, the George W. Bush administration's attempts to assert "unitary executive" power, has an instructive precedent.

As is well known, the White House has been eager to assert what is claimed to be the power of the "unitary executive," that is, the asserted power of the executive branch to override those provisions of laws with which it does not agree. This theory of the "unitary executive" meant, in practice, that the White House attached "signing statements" to hundreds of pieces of legislation enacted by Congress. Instead of vetoing bills, the Bush Jr. administration issues these statements asserting the administration's unilateral rejection of or re-interpretation of the legislation.

This asserted "unitary executive power" is not only a rationale for "signing statements.” It underlies nearly everything that the George W. Bush administration has done. To take the most historically important example, the invasion and occupation of Iraq took place without the authorization of Congress (that is, without any official Declaration of War, and of course without the imprimatur of the United Nations). A violation of both American and international law, the invasion of Iraq was, in fact, the unilateral abrogation of law by the American executive power.

The invasion of Iraq is, of course, not the only example, just the one with the most far-reaching and visible consequences. There are others. Consider the abrogation of FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, whose purpose was to limit the abuse of federal uses of wiretaps or other forms of surveillance after the abuses of the 1960s and 1970s had been revealed. The scope of the wiretapping and other invasions of American citizens' privacy is not yet fully known, but no doubt eventually many abuses will be revealed. Only long after the election shenanigans of November, 2004, did Americans even learn that the Bush Jr. administration once again had unilaterally abrogated American law, asserting here too the "power of the unitary executive." What very few people have realized is that this notional "unitary executive" power has an instructive precedent, which is outlined in the works of the German legal theorist, Carl Schmitt. In the 1920s, Schmitt sharply criticized the parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic, in an analysis that has a striking resonance with the contemporary American Congress's morass of ineptness, paralysis, and manifest corruption. When National Socialism came to power in the 1930s, Schmitt defended the Third Reich and its right to peremptory justice by reference to the juridical example of the Inquisition.

According to Schmitt, the ultimate power of government is not to be found in legislation, but in the executive power to abrogate or suspend legislation. What matters is not the rule, but the exception, and "sovereign is he who decides the exception." Schmitt's aphorism describes how Hitler in fact took power, with the unilateral abrogation of civil liberties in Germany. Hitler imposed a "state of exception" on those whom he deemed alien to or a danger to the regime, and those in such a state of exception no longer have the rights of citizens. This state of exception, willed by the German unitary executive power, was the juridical basis for the Nazi death camps. The assertion of notional "unitary executive power" in part results from officials' prior disgust at the inherent weakness of a parliamentary system to forcefully address long-term problems facing society, like a weak fiat currency, economic crisis, or terrorism. A "unitary executive power" appeals to the "Right," to which Schmitt and purportedly the Bush Jr. administration belong, but, one has to note, it also could have appeal for the "Left." Such executive powers no doubt appeal to all who are certain of their own rectitude, certain that they are guided by destiny or by God to act, to be decisive. Thus one characteristic of fascism is said to be "decisionism." "At least we're doing something," a decisionist says - even if what "we're" doing is in fact despotic and destructive. George W. Bush is, he tells us, "the decider."

In The New Inquisitions: Heretic-hunting and the Origins of Modern Totalitarianism (Oxford UP, 2006), I detail inquisitional pathologies that have haunted the West for a very long time. These pathologies are clearly visible today - and not only in various Bush Jr. administration policies - but especially in the attempted abrogation, by executive fiat, of the Geneva Conventions. It surprises me that there is comparatively little written about such attempts, let alone about their historical precedents in National Socialism, but perhaps that is only to be expected in what a growing number of observers from across the political spectrum recognize as the proto-fascist ambience of the contemporary United States.

Arthur Versluis is author of The New Inquisitions: Heretic-hunting and the Origins of Modern Totalitarianism (Oxford UP, 2006). He is professor of American Studies at Michigan State University and can be reached at versluis@msu.edu

... And the American Judicial system is following the pattern of Nazi law after 1933 when there was an increase in the departmentalization of jurisdictions (the CIA, DEA, FEMA, Homeland Security, FBI, military courts, Immigration Police, Special Project Committees) replacing a unified system of criminal law and becoming more susceptible to the ideological service of those who rule (The Emergence of the Homeland Security State).

U.S. prosecutors quit in San Diego, S.F.
Critics accuse the Bush administration of forcing out U.S. attorneys to circumvent Senate confirmation of their replacements.
By Richard Marosi, Times Staff Writer
LaTimes.com
January 17, 2007

SAN DIEGO — The top federal prosecutors in San Diego and San Francisco announced their resignations Tuesday as critics charged the Bush administration with forcing out a growing number of U.S. attorneys without cause.

The U.S. attorneys in San Diego and San Francisco, Carol Lam and Kevin V. Ryan respectively, did not comment on whether they had been forced to resign. Lam said she would leave Feb. 15; Ryan gave no date.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), in a Senate speech Tuesday, said at least five other U.S. attorneys have been forced to resign without explanation. She accused the Bush administration of trying to circumvent Senate confirmation of their replacements.

Such appointments were subject to Senate review until last year, when the Patriot Act was reauthorized with a provision that allowed the U.S. attorney general to appoint longer-term, interim replacements without Senate approval.

The departures, Feinstein said, come at a sensitive time as federal prosecutors are pursuing political corruption cases.

"The U.S. attorney's job is too important for there to be unnecessary disruptions or, worse, any appearance of undue influence," Feinstein said.

A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said senators would be consulted before the nomination of replacements, as has been the routine since the law was changed.

"It is inconceivable for a member of Congress to believe that use of an appointment authority to fill a vacancy is in any way an attempt to circumvent the confirmation process," Roehrkasse said.

Feinstein said she planned to bring up the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday at which U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzalez was scheduled to appear.

Lam, a former judge, oversaw the corruption prosecutions of former U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a Republican, and two San Diego City Council members. She was criticized by some U.S. Border Patrol agents who accused her office of not focusing enough attention on immigration and alien-smuggling cases.

Ryan's notable prosecutions included the BALCO steroids case. His office also launched investigations of Silicon Valley giants Hewlett-Packard Co. and Apple Inc.

Anthrax Coverup: A Government Insider Speaks Out
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2007-07-03
By Steve Watson

Is it possible that the anthrax attacks were launched from within our own government? A former Bush 1 advisor thinks it is.

Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.

"After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration tried to ram the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress," Boyle said in a radio interview with Austin-based talk-show host Alex Jones. "That would have set up a police state.

"Senators Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The
first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas
corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and
guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere,
come these anthrax attacks."

"At the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either
with respect to September 11 or the anthrax attacks, but then the New
York Times revealed the technology behind the letter to Senator
Daschle. [The anthrax used was] a trillion spores per gram, [refined
with] special electro-static treatment. This is superweapons-grade
anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly
proclaimed programs, had never developed before. So it was obvious to
me that this was from a U.S. government lab. There is nowhere else you
could have gotten that."

Boyle's assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding
America's bioweapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the
Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed
unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President
George H.W. Bush.

After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job,
Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism
and counterterrorism, Marion "Spike" Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met
at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School.
Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to
carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government
anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave
Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs
conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.

Bowman then informed Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick
on the matter. Boyle expressed his view that Fort Detrick could be the
main problem. As widely reported in 2002 publications, notably the New
Scientist, the anthrax strain used in the attacks was officially
assessed as "military grade."

"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized
the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor
said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the spores
used in the attacks.

The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames,
Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant
destruction of evidence. It meant that there was no way of finding out
which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax
used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led
directly back to a secret government biowarfare program.

"Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of
justice, a federal crime," said Boyle. "That collection should have
been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the
fingerprints right there. It later came out, of course, that this was
Ames strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letters."

At that point, recounted Boyle, it became very clear to him that there
was a coverup underway. He later discovered, while reading David Ray
Griffin's book on the 9/11 attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, that Bowman
was the same FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for
access to [convicted co-conspirator] Zacharias Moussaoui's computer
prior to 9/11. Moussaoui's computer contained information that could
have helped prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

In 2003, Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award by
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a
letter to Mueller, chastising the organization for granting such an
honor to an agent who had so obviously compromised America's security.

During the anthrax scare, the House of Representatives was officially
shut down for the first time in the history of the republic. Once
opposition from Leahy and Daschle evaporated in the wake of the
attempts on their lives, the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through.
Testimony by Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that most
members of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even
reading it.

"They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is
all that really separates us from a police state," Boyle said. "And
that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants [in
the Military Commissions Act of 2006]." Boyle added that lawmakers are
now arguing that Amendment XIV, which guarantees due process of law to
all Americans, does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that,
under the Military Commissions Act, any U.S. citizen can be stripped of
citizenship and be labeled an enemy combatant.

Continued Boyle: "In other words, they have taken the position that at
some point in time, if they want to, they can unilaterally round up
United States native-born citizens, as they did for Japanese-Americans
in World War II, and stick us into concentration camps." Boyle asserted
that top officials, such as White House legal advisor John Yoo and
former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith (now a professor at
Harvard Law School), are pushing for the legalization of torture as
well.

"The Nazis did the exact same thing," said Boyle. "They had their
lawyers infiltrating law schools. Carl Schmidt was the worst, and he
was the mentor to Leo Strauss, the [ideological] founder of the
neoconservatives. So the same phenomenon that started in Nazi Germany
is happening here, and I exaggerate not. We could all be tortured; we
could all be treated this way."

Boyle stressed that it is vital to keep up the pressure on Senator
Leahy, who now chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, giving him
subpoena power. Since Leahy was himself a target, he may have
sufficient motivation to get to the bottom of the attacks. The FBI and
the Justice Department have so far refused full disclosure to Congress.

In addition to his credentials as a government advisor, Boyle also
holds a doctorate of law magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in political
science, both from Harvard University. He teaches international law at
the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Boyle also served on
the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and
represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court.

Boyle alleged that due to his activities as a lawyer, he was
interrogated by an agent from the CIA/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in
the summer of 2004. The agent tried to recruit him as an informant to
provide the FBI with information on his Arab and Muslim clients. When
he refused, according to Boyle, the FBI placed him on the government's
terrorism watch lists.