The Demise of Democracy: Fascism in America

excerpted from the book

The Twilight of Democracy

The Bush Plan for America

by Jennifer Van Bergen

Common Courage Press, 2005, paper

p77
... a remark made by General [Tommy] Frank in November 2003 that another major terrorist attack on Americans would likely cause "our population to question our town Constitution and to begin to militarize our country" indicates a willingness in high levels of this Administration to consider, if not promote, martial law as a viable path. This conclusion is supported by the indefinite detentions of so-called "unlawful enemy combatants" at Guantanamo and the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. Such a public official willingness to overthrow the Constitution is unprecedented in American history.

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p81
Iraq: Preemptive war and International law

The invasion of Iraq established the doctrine of preemptive war: the idea that the U.S. can unilaterally attack another sovereign nation to prevent or neutralize a perceived potential future threat. On September 20, 2002, six months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, the Bush administration unveiled its National Security Strategy. The Strategy, according to Senator Edward Kennedy, "claims that these new threats are so novel and so dangerous that we should 'not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting pre-emptively." Kennedy pointed out in an address that was made on the floor of the Senate on October 7, 2002, that while the Administration "often uses the terms 'pre-emptive' and 'preventive' interchangeably[, un the realm of international relations, these two terms have long had very different meanings." Kennedy explains:

Traditionally, "pre-emptive" action refers to times when states react to an imminent threat of attack. For example, when Egyptian and Syrian forces mobilized on Israel's borders in 1967, the threat was obvious and immediate, and Israel felt justified in pre-emptively attacking those forces. The global community is generally tolerant of such actions, since no nation should have to suffer a certain first strike before it has the legitimacy to respond.

By contrast, "preventive" military action refers to strike that target country before it has developed a capability that could someday become threatening. Preventive attacks have generally been condemned. For example, the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was regarded as a preventive strike by Japan, because the Japanese were seeking to block a planned military buildup by the United States in the Pacific.

Kennedy concludes that "[t]he coldly premeditated nature of preventive attacks and preventive wars makes them anathema to well-established international principles against aggression" and adds that "what the Administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior." Kennedy notes that "the Bush Strategy asserts that the United States should be exempt from the rules we expect other nations to obey." This Strategy "is not just an academic debate[; t]here are important real world consequences." It could "deprive America of the moral legitimacy necessary to promote our values abroad ... give other nations from Russia to India to Pakistan-an excuse to violate fundamental principles of civilized international behavior ... [and] fuel anti-American sentiment throughout the Islamic world and beyond."

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p83
The Coup in Haiti

"Regime change" seems to be the watchword of this Administration. The February 2004 military coup in Haiti was) not only supported by the United States but was funded and organized by it. While the U.S. government announced that Aristide had resigned, and Cheney actually said that Aristide had "left of his own free will," it later became all too clear that he was given no choice. Had he not resigned, the U.S. was going to let the U.S.-funded and trained "rebels" kill him.

According to Marjorie Cohn, the Executive Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild and a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Aristide's forcible removal by the United States violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.N. Charter, the governing charters of the Organization of American States, and the InterAmerican Democratic Charter. The U.S. also violated the multilateral Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons Treaty, of which both Haiti and the United States are signatories. Cohn makes it clear that the U.S. is violating even more laws than these and calls for an investigation by international human rights bodies.

... The human rights situation in Haiti is appalling. As I write, news has just emerged that French troops and "Blue Helmets"-U.N. soldiers-raided the home of Jean-Charles Moises, the former democratically-elected mayor of a small northern town whom my team met with in April while he was in hiding. The troops took Jean-Charles' wife, There have been thousands of murders and buildings burnt, The Multinational Interim (Peacekeeping) Force of American marines, French and Canadian troops, have done little or nothing to stop these atrocities.

p84
Withdrawal from the International Criminal Court

... [U.S.] withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC) frees the United States from international accountability for war crimes.

The ICC was created through an international agreement called the Rome Statute ("the Statute"), which was adopted on July 17, 1998 by an overwhelming majority of 120 participating countries. The Court sits in the Hague, and is a permanent court, empowered to try individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and crimes against humanity that would otherwise escape prosecution. Only seven countries voted against the Statute, including China, the U.S., and Israel.

There are built-in safeguards in the Statute against frivolous or politically motivated prosecutions. An ICC investigation can be initiated by either the Security Council, a state party to the statute, or by the Independent Prosecutor (l/P). The l/P, however, must submit a "request for authority" to the Pre-Trial chamber before launching an investigation, which is granted only if the Pre-Trial Chamber determines both that there is a "reasonable basis to proceed" and that "the case appears to fall within the jurisdiction of the Court." The Statute also gives the UN Security Council the power to stop investigations or prosecutions for renewable one-year periods.

Another important stop-gap is the principle of complementarity, which is a mechanism within the Court that ensures that the ICC would complement rather than supersede national systems. When a state is investigating a case within its own legal system, the case is inadmissible before the ICC "unless the State is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution."

Former President Clinton signed the Rome Statute but did not send it to the Senate for ratification before he left office. However, in July 2002, the United States launched a full-scale multi-pronged campaign against the ICC, claiming that the ICC might initiate politically-motivated prosecutions against U.S. nationals. As part of its efforts, the Bush administration approached countries around the world seeking to conclude Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs), purportedly based on Article 98 of the Rome Statute, excluding its citizens and military personnel from the jurisdiction of the Court. These agreements prohibit the surrender to the ICC of a broad range of persons including current or former government officials, military personnel, and U.S. employees (including contractors) and nationals. These agreements, which in some cases are reciprocal, do not include an obligation by the US to subject those persons to investigation and/or prosecution at home.

Many governmental, legal and non-governmental experts have concluded that the bilateral agreements being sought by the U.S. government are contrary to international law and the Rome Statute.

Another facet of this crusade against the Court is the adoption of U.S. legislation known as the American Service Members' Protection Act (ASPA), This law, passed by Congress in August 2002, contains provisions restricting U.S. cooperation with the ICC, making U.S. support of peacekeeping missions largely contingent on achieving impunity for all U.S. personnel, and even granting the President permission to use "any means necessary" to free American citizens and allies from ICC custody (prompting the nickname "The Hague Invasion Act"). The legislation also contains waivers that make all of these provisions non-binding. However, the Bush administration has been using these waivers as bargaining chips to pressure countries around the world into concluding bilateral immunity agreements-or otherwise lose essential US military assistance.

The European Parliament stated that the bilateral agreements which the Bush administration was conducting were undermining the ICC as well as "jeopardizing its role as a complementary jurisdiction to the State jurisdictions and a building block in collective global security."

p89
Jerry Mander, author of In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations, lists eleven "inherent rules of corporate behavior" that explain why the people within corporations follow "a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors" and destruction of social ties and the environment.

1. The profit imperative
2. The growth imperative
3. Competition and aggression
4. Amorality
5. Hierarchy
6. Quantification, linearity, and segmentation
7. Dehumanization
8. Exploitation
9. Ephemerality (corporations are legal creations that exist only on paper-as such, they have no physical nature or commitment to place)
10. Opposition to nature
11. Homogenization.

Mander explains:
Corporations are inherently bold, aggressive, and competitive. Though they exist in a society that claims to operate by moral principles, they are structurally amoral. It is inevitable that they will dehumanize people who work for them, and dehumanize the overall society as well. They are disloyal to workers, including their own managers. If community goals conflict with corporate goals, then corporations are similarly disloyal to the communities they may have been part of for many years. It is inherent in corporate activity that they seek to drive all consciousness into one-dimensional channels. They must attempt to dominate alternative cultures and to effectively clone the world population into a form more to their liking. Corporations do not care about nations; they live beyond boundaries. They are intrinsically committed to destroying nature. And they have an inexorable, unabatable, voracious need to grow and to expand. In dominating other cultures, in digging up the earth, corporations blindly follow the codes that have been built into them as if they were genes.

p91
Prosecutions & Proceedings

The Bush administration has launched prosecutions of activists that could, if successful, establish a permanent framework for repression of free speech and dissent. The government is using several methods that build upon the PATRIOT Act: grand jury inquiries (which now allow sharing of secret grand jury information with the CIA and even with foreign powers); "national security letters" (which arise out of an expansion of the PATRIOT Act and demand information about clients from financial institutions); investigations by the FBI or other departments such as the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and the army; and, of course, criminal indictments and prosecutions themselves.

The Prosecution of Greenpeace

In August 2003, the DOJ announced it was indicting Greenpeace under an obscure federal law that appears to have been used only twice since its 1872 enactment. The law criminalizes "sailor-mongering" or the luring of sailors with liquor and prostitutes from their ships-obviously not the sort of actions in which Greenpeace engages. The action was brought against Greenpeace because several of their members had boarded a ship that was carrying illegal mahogany and hung a banner off the ship demanding that Bush stop illegal mahogany trading. Normally, if any charges are brought for such an action, it is only misdemeanor trespass against the individual. This time, however, the justice Department brought the sailor-mongering charge, which is a serious felony charge, against the entire organization.

lithe Justice Department had been successful, Greenpeace would have been forced to "give a government employee access to its offices and membership and donor records" and to "regularly report its actions to the government." A Miami federal judge threw the case out in May 2004.

Significantly, Greenpeace was the first group to demonstrate against Bush in Texas after his inauguration.

The prosecution of Greenpeace pulls together several elements in common with other items in the Bush agenda: it targets environmental/activist groups, it goes after and into organizational records, and it represses First Amendment expressions that oppose the U.S. government or its corporate interests.

The demand for unlimited access to records mirrors terrorist provisions in the PATRIOT Act. The targeting of activists also mirrors the uses of the PATRIOT Act. The targeting of environmentalists is similar to the dilution or eradication of environmental protections. The repression of First Amendment activities is found in the repression of FTAA demonstrations, as well as in some provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

Thus, it is difficult to view these components as random similarities. Rather, the prosecution of Greenpeace joins distinct ideas and tactics that the Bush Administration has used elsewhere in bits and pieces. Cleverly, the prosecution does not rely upon the PATRIOT Act or any anti-terrorism law. However, the tactics used are exactly those used under the PATRIOT Act. This prosecution was meant to clear the way for the concept that "activists = terrorists." The joining of these tactics in this prosecution clarifies the Administration's underlying purpose in them separately: control, suppression, and eradication of opposition.

p98

MATRIX

MATRIX is a new "data mining" system being used by police and federal authorities in some states. The MATRIX creates a "terrorism quotient" that measures the likelihood that individuals in the databases are terrorists. Seisint calls this measure a "High Terrorist Factor" or HTF score. According to a Seisint slide presentation obtained by the ACLU, the company's aim is to "use the power of the supercomputer to analyze massive amounts of data in order to identify potential terrorists in the general population." One slide declares "When enough insignificant data is gathered and analyzed, IT BECOMES SIGNIFICANT."

... The ACLU ... said about MATRIX that it shows the "the federal authorities have been deeply involved in developing the state-run effort to spy on citizens." Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, in his earlier report, stated that the capability of MATRIX "is completely unprecedented in our history, and remains unrestrained by our legal system." Steinhardt said: "This kind of data mining has the potential to change forever the relationship between private individuals and their government in the United States of America; it is not something that should be taking place in the shadows."

... If the PATRIOT Act places a disturbing amount unchecked power in the hands of the Executive, MATRIX consolidates and solidifies that power. Again, this is unchecked power, as Steinhardt point out. It completely overrides and subverts judicial checks.

Indeed, by erecting this system "in the shadows," as Steinhardt notes, MATRIX avoids both congressional oversight and judicial review, the only checks on abuse of Executive powers (other than voting an administration out of office). It can therefore also be said to violate separation of powers and our system of checks and balances, since it intrinsically arrogates to itself and only to itself any review or oversight. It is completely undemocratic and anti-civil libertarian. Most worrisome is that once the power is in place, it cannot be undone. Moreover, it is tremendous power that could be used both against its own citizens and globally.

p101
The 2000 election

The Federal Farmer, Oct. 8, 1787

It is natural for men, who wish to hasten the adoption of a measure, to tell us, now is the crisis-now is the critical moment which may be seized, or all will be lost: and [then] to shut the door against free enquiry whenever [they become] conscious [that] the thing presented has defects in it, which time and investigation will probably discover. This has been the custom of tyrants and their dependants in all ages.

p107
September 11, 2001

... The Bush administration has continually blocked the independent investigation into September 11th. Kyle Hence notes that September 11th has conveniently "been a trump card played at every turn to justify [the administration's] plan for America and the globe." He adds that "as they recklessly project American might around the world in service to corporate interests and in the interest of securing control over dwindling fossil fuel reserves, they undermine our liberties here at home all the while lying about what they knew and when and obstructing the investigation into the matter."

p109
The picture [of the Bush Administration] is of a government run by a ruling elite of religious fanatics that have set up a legal system of tremendous unrestrained oppressive power, are violating just about every one of the first ten amendments of the Constitution, our Bill of Rights, suppressed speech, arrested and physically injured people for nothing more than their dissent against the government, grabbed people off the streets and thrown them in prison with no access to an impartial judge to review their charges-and even without any charges at all-ignoring and violating the rule of law and customs of civilized society, waged "preemptive" war on a false pretext, freed themselves from all responsibility or liability for their actions, lied about facts, hidden other facts, and paid themselves a lot of money, undermined and further impoverished working people, and gone after anyone who they didn't like with prosecutions and legal proceedings. They've set up a system of electronic watchers so intrusive that the movie Minority Report no longer seems futuristic or remote and 1984 seems outdated. They are an immensely destructive administration, destroying the working class and labor, destroying the environment, destroying civil liberties, the rule of law, and the friendship of foreign nations the world over. They have sullied the name and reputation of the United States Supreme Court by using that Court to illegitimately place themselves in power. Despite increasing spending for military, straining the military machine almost beyond its endurance, unnecessarily risking the lives of young American men and women soldiers, they have not succeeded in capturing the one person responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The Twilight of Democracy

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