WHO JUDGES THE JUDICIARY?

WHO JUDGES THE JUDICIARY?

By Peter Fredson

February 7, 2006

When I heard that the Senate Judiciary Committee was going to “investigate” President Bush’s arrogant claims of being above the law, and signing statements that he could pick and choose which laws he might observe, I worried about the partisanship of the committee. On previous occasions all the Republican Senators tried their best to hamper, trivialize, distract, and obfuscate any attempts to implicate the imperial President into any sort of illicit conduct.

During the Abu Ghraib investigation they praised all the high officers and the “brave boys” and swore that Americans would NEVER torture or abuse anyone. They rather insolently lectured the Democrats that there was a war going on and that any criticism of the President would give great aid and comfort to the enemy.

Several compared torture to fraternity boy initiation stunts. They expressed indignation that anyone who took or published the atrocity photographs had not been promptly imprisoned for life. And, of course, they gave lavish praise to the President for his leadership in torture and abuse.

I also heard a rumor that Senator Specter had taken some sort of loyalty oath to the President in order to remain as presiding officer of the committee. I frankly doubted the statements of Cabinet officials that President Bush or anyone in the administration would investigate himself honestly, fully, without reservation.

Then I listened to the incredible lies of Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld and others who swore that no torture or abuse was ever committed while at the same time they were urging for more legislation allowing them to torture and abuse.

Little Condi Rice went on national and international audiences and swore in her tiny voice and new shoes that there was no torture, no abuse, no kidnapping, no secret jails, no surreptitious flights, no renditions, no illegal searches and seizures, no indefinite detentions.

So I felt that any investigation of Constitutional contempt by the President would follow all previous Republican investigations in a whitewash that Tom Sawyer would admire.

Senator Specter did not think it necessary to swear Gonzales in, for as we all know everyone in the Bush administration is honorable, honest, forthcoming and would never lie, deceive, bully, misinform, or arrogantly assume more authority than is guaranteed by our Constitution. He did express some reservation that the laws pertaining to wiretapping and other kinds of surveillance might not had been observed and this boded well for the investigation.

As we witnessed in many other committee investigations, some Republican senators tried to trivialize the proceedings, assert that mountains were being made of molehills, mentioned that By God We are at WAR and that anyone who hampered Bush in his noble quest to defeat the terror upon us was doing the nation an injustice, or that the integrity of Bush was not to be questioned by unreasonable critics for fear of destroying the morale of his troops and putting the public at grave risk.

Several Republicans repeated the declarations of Bush and Cheney verbatim, carbon-copies, declared that wiretapping was necessary to root out foreign and domestic enemies and that to deny Bush his unitary executive privilege was to give terrorists the upper hand.

In general they repeated all the excuses of the Bush administration, showing great deference to the majesty of the Bush presidency.

To be fair, some Republican senators were curious about Bush thinking he was above the law, and asked Gonzales what made him advise the President that he did not have to obey legislation. They all seemed to accept his explanations without much probing and praised his judgment.

Several Republican senators praised the vigilance and dedication of Gonzales in defending the U.S. from the specter of nuclear attack by spying, reading e-mails, reading letters, etc. although none today justified the Bush tactics of abuse, torture, renditions, secret CIA jails, surreptitious overflights on sovereign countries, kidnapping, indefinite detention, pronouncements of Condi Rice threatening Syria, Iran and other countries, and none mentioned the Downing Street Memos, the New World Order strategy, or the statement of Bush that the Constitution is just a GDDDMMM piece of paper.

None mentioned the missiles that Bush sent screaming into Pakistan, killing civilians and causing terror.

Not a single Republican mentioned that the Bush family had initiated the terror in the Middle East nor did they want to investigate the genesis of that terror caused by warmongering and armament sales. None mentioned the Bush family arrogance and their contempt for Islamic customs or that they might entitled to park tanks in sacred sites or declare no-flight zones by sovereign countries. None mentioned that Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape by Bush incompetence and his desire to outsource the job of catching bin Laden.

And no one mentioned the warmongering chicken hawks of the Bush administration, that long before 9/11 decided to invade Iraq, Iran and Syria to seize their oil reserves for the Bush petroleum industry cronies.

The legality of the invasion of Iraq never seemed to come up. Investigation of the rush to invade Iraq by the entire Bush cabinet, to lie to the entire country, to deliberately misinform the nation about mushroom clouds, aluminum tubes, yellow cake, biological labs, and the deadly pilotless planes of Saddam to drop nuclear weapons and blow up the entire United States of America - none of that was even remotely hinted at.

I predict that the entire investigation will come to nothing.

The Republican majority will protect Bush and his thugs to the bitter end. Bush will be praised as a courageous and competent leader and allow him to strut, swagger and smirk while he makes endless speeches about compassion, unity, bipartisanship, Jesus, prayer as a remedy for AIDS, and attends many National Prayer breakfasts.

Democratic Senators tried patiently to extract some useful information from Alberto Gonzales, but spent more time making speeches than in making short questions for Gonzales. They often stepped on their own lines, interrupting themselves, while Gonzales smiled in obvious amusement at their probing.

Perhaps if they could have followed the Bush formula of torture and abuse with Gonzales he might have cracked under genital shock, police dogs snarling, pistols pointed at his head, waterboarding, starvation, sleeplessness, loud noises. But it seems that Republicans do not approve of this kind of treatment when directed at themselves.

Senators Kennedy and Feinstein provided some intense moments when civility seemed about to end, but Gonzales rode out all interrogation storms with a slight smile and ambiguous rhetoric.

The details were frankly boring, the evasions monumental.

Read the transcripts of the proceedings for laughs or frustration at the evasions, justifications, twisted logic, sycophant praise, and the painful process of extracting slight tidbits of dubious information. If anyone thinks torture and abuse will elicit useful details, the committee hearings will soon disabuse you of that notion.

All of my very low expectations of the Republican Senators were realized. They defended Bush to the last dollar of contributions. There was some clucking, some indignant gestures, a lot of whirling press conferences, rooms full of rhetoric, many references to terrible terrorists, many references to 9/11, reminders to Democrats that we are in a war, and hourly assertions that our courageous president must not be hampered by petty considerations whereby thousands of people will perish in mushroom clouds.

I hope I’m wrong about Bush arrogance, petulance, ambitions for world domination, staying a failed course, preparing for new adventures in shock and awe, and incompetence.

The SOTU of 2006 showed a President at the end of his rope, invoking 9/11 to stay in office, making a long list of promises from other SOTU’s which also were failures, but determined to follow Karl Rove’s formula of using War and Terror to frighten Americans into despicable “solutions” and thus keep Republicans in office and attract enormous amounts of cash.

I still am not sure if Bush intends to invoke the “terrible emergency of world terrorism” and mushroom clouds to justify remaining in office indefinitely or declaring some kind of martial law. Time will tell. In three more years Bush can inflict an enormous amount of damage to our beloved Constitution, to civil rights, to religious freedom for all, to greet corruption gladly, and to show contempt for critics.

And there will be more “investigating” committees, all of which will stay the course. After all, Bush has the knack of selecting lawyers that agree that his imperial will trumps all legislation and all congressional debates.

But the final trump in the Bush box of cards is that he can mention 9/11 endlessly. Although he cannot explain why Osama bin Laden escaped or could present such terror living in a cave a thousand miles from nowhere, with nothing but box-cutters for weapons, still Bush can always raise a billion or a hundred billion dollars for his cruise missiles, fast planes, huge tanks, armor, large caliber weaponry and daily announce great progress and VICTORY.

Bush, on the sage advice of Karl Rove, now has mapped out the entire strategy of his remaining years in office. I foresee at least 2 main components.

1. Use all the tricks of personality to smile, strut, swagger, present a confident happy appearance, glad-hand audiences, pat kids on the head, give flood survivors a sandwich, make a hundred more speeches with identical content, emit some pleasantry about Laura, smile some more, blink, stare intently at the camera, bob his head, gesture pathetically, mention Jesus and his God, quote from a Bible, and beg for cooperation.

He can do this by living in the bubble created by his handlers. He is comfortable living in fantasy and escaping from reality by cutting brush and holding prayer meetings. His fundamentalist followers are fully committed to him and to their absolutist dogma, beliefs and practices.

2. Use 9/11 as a device to terrorize the American public, spend billions of dollars for his cronies armaments, frequently mention the “brave boys” dying for his lies, and constantly refer to his bringing democracy, liberty, freedom, peace, democracy, compassion, unity, restoration of sovereignty, conquering EVIL, winning hearts and minds, etc.

He does all this by the George Orwell devices of Double-Think and NewSpeak whereby nothing is what it appears to be or is the reverse of what he alleges it to be.

He can do this with heavy armament, duress, torture and abuse, high explosives, deceit, lies, misinformation, secrecy, and manipulating the sycophant press owned by his handlers. He can do this by listening in to Americans at work and play, by using spy cameras to observe all actions of Americans at work and play. He can do this by metaphorically sniffing crotches to see who is performing obscene sex.

He can do this by distractions at any time people begin to question his competence. Hatred of gays will always work for his followers.
Waving flags will always work. Propaganda will always work.

Slander and swift-boating has been very successful and will continue.

Fomenting fear and terror to govern has always worked for Bush. And little Condi Rice lying her little head off has worked very well and will undoubtedly continue.