Letters to the Editor
What Constitution?
Published Letters: 158
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The "September 10 mindset" is the one where the Constitution applies, how quaint....
[Read the article: A "September 10th mindset"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They really want to argue about this?
On Sunday, Obama stood with the Constitution in an interview, supporting the Supreme Court's habeas decision and citing the trial and conviction of the 1993 WTC bombers, in contrast to the intractable morass of the Guantanamo detainee situation, to suggest that our country can in fact work within the structure of the Constitution. Right wingers howled (including McCain) that this reflects only a "September 10 mentality" and appeases Terra. Of course, the "September 10" they are envisioning would be one where the United States Constitution is in force, and the President does not have unilateral and subjective authority to detain without charges, to torture, to spy and eavesdrop without warrant, to wage war without oversight, and to commit US to military presence for decades without congressional input. Uh, "post-September 10 mentality" is preferable in their minds why?
It seems to me that if they want to focus the argument on what they call a "pre- versus post-September 10 mentality", then let's do that. And let's call their "post-September 10 mentality" exactly what it is: dictatorship. That's certainly what McCain's own advisor has called it, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out a couple of weeks ago. This election presents America with a chance to vote for, or against, dictatorship. Bush didn't run on such a platform, either in 2000 or 2004. McCain is doing so now.
And if the choice between dictatorship or constitutional democracy must be decided based on whether or not the events of September 11 "changed" our ability to rely upon the structure of pre-9/11 anti-terror capabilities (i.e., 9/11 "proves" that the government "needs" additional extra-constitutional power to "meet this challenge"), could we please all revisit the historical record? As we know, the President and his advisors all had the memo -- "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". Using planes. American intelligence officers knew there were people training to fly, but not land, airliners. What we know is that the intelligence was ignored. The problem we have been having, as a country, is with connecting the dots here -- it's just been really hard to believe that Administration incompetence alone (not a failure of information, not a gap in some ability to investigate that was attributable to the inconvenience of living in a constitutional democracy) is the biggest reason that 9/11 happened.
Well, that was so "then". Now, today, the constant litany of botched, incompetent, malevolent and horrendously stupid aspects of post-9/11 actions by the Bush Administration makes their having ignored the pre-9/11 intelligence seem like par for the course. But it's actually more than that, because now they're openly seeking to presume and rely upon their own incompetence to support arguments that would gut the Constitution.
So if we're going to have a debate today about whether the "situation" requires granting dictatorial powers to the President and ignoring what the Constitution has required for hundreds of years, isn't it incumbent upon everyone to acknowledge that the "situation" is about as self-inflicted as could be possibly imagined, and that the remedy for the President's consistent incompetence is not to waive the Constitution but to enforce it? To hear today's Rethug mantras, operating within the "confines" of the United States Constitution is "dangerous" -- but the irrefutable fact is that all we ever needed was a President who would competently act upon the information a constitutional system already had provided to him. It is no justification for abandoning the Constitution that those seeking to do so have been grossly incompetent.
"Even an idiot-proof system still has idiots", as Professor Turley noted when the Supreme Court ruled that our Constitution endures and applies even when things are tough. To argue that a "pre-September 10 mentality" must be met with evisceration of the Constitution is disgraceful, stupid and rewards the idiots for their demonstrated incompetence.