Charles Pierce/Esquire: "Required Reading"

[KoKo]

Required Reading

By Charles Pierce, Esquire
If you read nothing else this weekend, read Gregory Johnsen's somewhat epic performance on Buzzfeed

http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-without-end-the-untold-story-of-the-most

about the original Authorization for the Use of Military Force that came out of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the permanent state of war that one 60-word sentence in that document created in the United States, a phenomenon that the Founders specifically and repeatedly warned against. (Johnsen is the recipient of first Michael Hastings Fellowship, named for the renowned journalist who died in an automobile accident last year.) If nothing else, the piece functions as a very loud warning siren against upending the rule of law and the separation of powers out of fear and panic. War, Mr. Madison cautioned, is "the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." We have traded his wisdom for the undying partisan hackery of apparatchiks like David Addington and John Yoo. It is not a good trade.

Unbound by time and unlimited by geography, the sentence has been stretched and expanded over the past decade, sprouting new meanings and interpretations as two successive administrations have each attempted to keep pace with an evolving threat while simultaneously maintaining the security of the homeland. In the process, what was initially thought to authorize force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan has now been used to justify operations in several countries across multiple continents and, at least theoretically, could allow the president - any president - to strike anywhere at anytime. What was written in a few days of fear has now come to govern years of action.

The piece goes on to illustrate with painful clarity a meek and timorous Congress, which had allowed so much of its constitutional war powers to leach into the executive over the previous five decades that most of its members had forgotten how to exercise them at all, let alone how to exercise them at a moment of national trauma. (One pissant aide to a forgettable schlub like Dennis Hastert gets to bulldoze past legitimate constitutional questions because we...must...do...something, and everybody acclaims him a hero.) Congress -- in the persons of Joe Biden and John Kerry, among others -- tries to cover its ass but ends up taking what everybody knows is a dive. And, after the dive, we see Yoo, who should have been kept away from the councils of government for the same reason we keep Charlie Manson out of the cutlery, immediately find a way to renege on a deal that had been cut with the Congress and expand the president's power beyond anything remotely conceived of in the Constitution.

Maybe it shouldn't be so surprising that Congress didn't think about how the war would end when it passed the AUMF on Sept. 14, 2001, but after more than a dozen years, we are no closer to an answer. "This is a bizarro war," Jack Goldsmith told me recently. A tenured law professor at Harvard who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, Goldsmith has written a pair of books on national security law. "What we don't see, we don't care about."

Read the whole thing and understand how we got to where we are today, when the president is going to deliver a speech about the NSA revelations, arguing for "reforms" in which there is no good reason to believe. Read the whole thing and see in it the seedbed for unlimited drone warfare and whatever comes after that, which undoubtedly will be worse. Read the whole thing and understand how Abu Ghraib happened and why Gitmo is still open. Read the whole thing and watch the relentless abandonment of self-government over the past 13 years. Read the whole thing and realize that we are no longer even the nation we pretend to be, Read the whole thing and realize how much the late Osama bin Laden actually won.

BUZZFEED LINK to OP:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-without-end-the-untold-story-of-the-most

Charles Pierce Post from "Reader Supported News"

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/266-32/21579-focus-required-reading

[Scuba]

1. "What was written in a few days of fear has now come to govern years of action."

Gonzales wanted his deputy to draft the congressional resolution that would authorize the president to go after those responsible. Flanigan listened to the instructions, but he was out of his element. He had clerked for Warren Burger during the chief justice’s final years on the Supreme Court in 1985 and 1986, but most of those cases focused on things like antitrust laws and regulating adult bookstores, not national security and war. Still, he at least knew where to start. While the U.S. had never been attacked like this before, Congress had a long history of authorizing the use of force. What he needed was a precedent.

After a quick search online, Flanigan located the last time Congress had given the president permission to act: the 1991 Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Iraq. Then, according to an account in Kurt Eichenwald’s best-selling 2012 book 500 Days, he copied and pasted the text of that resolution into a new document. Next Flanigan called David Addington, a gruff, standoffish man in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. Addington had started his career as a lawyer in the CIA and he had a better sense of the issues at stake. So too did John Yoo, a 34-year-old law professor from Berkeley, Calif., whose innovative legal arguments in Bush v. Gore a year earlier had secured him a place in the Bush White House. Together the three men hammered out a first draft of the resolution, which they faxed to congressional leaders that evening.

Almost no one liked Flanigan’s initial offering. Everyone was working long hours and fighter jets were still patrolling the skies over Washington, but Congress wasn’t ready to give President George W. Bush a blank check to go after an ill-defined enemy no one knew anything about. At a Democratic caucus in the basement of the Capitol building, several members complained that the wording was too broad. Republicans were similarly concerned. One part of Flanigan’s draft authorized the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force” both in the United States as well as abroad. What exactly did that mean? officials wondered. Could President Bush use the military domestically? What about the CIA? No one seemed to know.

Flanigan and Yoo spent much of Thursday, Sept. 13, walking scared and sleep-deprived congressional staffers through the brief text. At one of the meetings in the Roosevelt Room, tempers started to fray as Flanigan and Yoo dug in to defend their work. The day before, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle had warned President Bush to be careful with his rhetoric, particularly his use of the word “war.” And now his staff was driving home a similar point. Mostly they wanted to make sure that the resolution adhered to the War Powers Resolution language, which Congress had passed in the wake of the Vietnam War as a way of checking the president’s ability to unilaterally wage war.

This is a good read; take time to read it all if you can.

[KoKo]

2. Yes...it's a long read...but incredible refresher of memory with updates and

revelations up to now....! I appreciate Charly Pierce gave a "Heads Up" to this read...because I know many DU'ers don't like Buzzflash and it's not a site I frequent....but the writer of the piece is a "Michael Hastings Fellow" (assume family or friends established this Fellowship in his memory)...so I went over there to read it and it was worth it!

Thanks!

[KoKo]

3. It's a good bookmark for those interested to Bookmark for Weekend

If, you are a Progressive Democrat and I would hope the Others in Dem DU'ers would take the time to read it also.