Secret Military Dictatorship

Yesterday, the Obama administration released nine previously classified legal memorandums. These memorandums were drafted in secret and kept classified by the Bush administration. They served as the legal basis for the administration's actions in its "War on Terror" - including domestic spying in violation of the FISA statute, the arrest and indefinite detention (on U.S. soil) of U.S. citizens, without charges, and its rendition/torture program.

The first thing to notice is how genuinely radical the people who have been running our government the last eight years truly were. I use the term "radical" not as a synonym for "extreme," but in the more accurate sense of the Bush Administration's rejection of the core (or root) precepts of the American constitutional order. Here's just one of the memorandums in which the Administration granted itself the authority to conduct domestic military operations within the United States, against U.S. citizens! The memorandum has to be read to be believed, but it essentially advises the President that he, as Commander in Chief of the U.S. Military, has the authority to ignore all federal laws and the entire Bill of Rights in his prosecution of the "war on terror" within the United States.

(For what its worth, in October of 2008, Stephen Bradbury, Chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, withdrew this memo and denounced both its legal reasoning and its conclusions).

The second thing to be grasped is that the Obama administration released these memorandums in unredacted form. Unredacted! This conclusively demonstrates that the memorandums never contained information that posed a threat to national security. All the memorandums ever contained was the Bush administration's understanding of its authority under the constitution. Why did that have to be secret?

Far more importantly, how could we, the citizens of the United States of America, have tolerated, much less supported and relected, a President who claimed (and exercised) sweeping, unreviewable, and heretofore unprecedented tyrannical powers, based only on his (and his lawyers') reading of the constitution? How could we tolerate this while that very same president refused to reveal the legal reasoning supporting his claims?

And now that we can see for ourselves how utterly ridiculous the legal reasoning supporting those claims was, how can we simply "fix it and move on" as President Obama suggests?

Who are we?

Its hard to come to terms with this. I keep asking myself, "did we really have a secret coup?" Is it possible for lawyers working in the Office of Legal Counsel (whose opinions supposedly have immunizing power for officials who rely on them) to replace our entire constitutional order, in secret, and then have their legal opinions immunize their benefactors from all legal accountability?

Remember, these memorandums formed the legal basis for: (1) the administration's indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charges; (2) the administration's torture program ("torture" is the description given to the administration's actions by its own officials); and (3) the Administration's domestic surveillance program (which was unmistakeably illegal and felonious). Each of these actions/programs violated very specific federal statutes, as well as the U.S. Constitution's Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Yet they were all premised on nothing more the President's alleged constitutional authority as Commander in Chief of the U.S. military, as interpreted secretly, by Administration appointed lawyers working in the Office of Legal Counsel.

Think about that for a minute. Our elected leaders commit war crimes and other felonies in our names. Their acts are then immunized by secret (and truly ridiculous) interpretations of the Constitution's "commander and chief" clause, drafted by lawyers appointed by that very same commander and chief. And now that all of this has come to light, everyone wants to simply "move on?"

That is truly insane! I find that set of facts absolutely incomprehensible!

But however insane it appears to me, no prosecutions appear to be in the works. What's more, our entire political class, including President Obama, is recommending that we look forward rather than backward. And however incomprehensible it appears to me, it looks as if President Bush's radical (and hitherto secret) interpretation of our constitution has effectively immunized him and other Bush administration officials from legal accountability.

Hey, if this is how it works, here's a message to President Obama: Appoint me to the OLC and you'll be our next King.

I'll tell you, unless we find a way to officially repudiate all of this constitutional nonsense and, at minimum, publicly denounce the authoritarian radicals who ran our country for the last eight years, our constitutional order is finished.

Its just a matter of time.

Joe H.

UPDATE

Andrew Sullivan expresses this point as well as anyone has.

UPDATE II.

Here's another good summary of the dictatorial powers the President secretly claimed as war time powers (and remember, there was no forseeable end to the "war on Terror."