Re: epiphany Says Uh-oh

In article <cigos1h40bvmcobbtti1bh2e3penoql9db@xxxxxxx>, epiphany@xxxxxxxxxxx
(epiphany) wrote:

*snip*

While I doubt that anybody really cares what Epiphany says, they might just care
about what Al Gore said yesterday:

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/01/landmark_speech_1.html

A landmark speech by ex Vice President Al Gore yesterday called for the defence
and preservation of the US constitution, an end to executive abuse, and
compliance with international law. Referring to the issue of extraordinary
rendition and torture he cites the work of Craig Murray. His quote is taken from
the Tashkent Telegrams,
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2005/12/damning_documen.html
documents that the British Government has strived to keep from public access.

"The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap
individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and
interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous
for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on
the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan - one of those
nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons - registered a
complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S.
practice: "This material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is
in fact positively harmful."

The full text of the speech is given below:

"Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have
joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and
Republicans alike-to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is
in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong
agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious
risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking
expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been
caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly
declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the
established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.
So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call
upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in
demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside
to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged
America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to
all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall
that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally
wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private
communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in
the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even
attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI
conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic
surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's
life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was
enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be
presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for
the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for
almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of
according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign
surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of
this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large
numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes
of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the
United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch
this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that
would permit such domestic intelligence collection."

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went
out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that,
of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American
citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in
place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false.
Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the
press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also
declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of
privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance.
What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the
conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law
repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our
government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a
government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of
government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and
balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern
through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise
the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may
be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate
legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the
judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the
Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom
they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all
powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of
one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may
justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense" ignited the American Revolution,
succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make
certain that "the law is king."

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens
America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional
structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable
role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means
that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive
officials operating in secret without constraint.

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested,
studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are
designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed
prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country
avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently
classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which
authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We
now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years
later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off
knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history.
Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too
real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the
wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in
protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of
government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us
weaker and more vulnerable.

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows.
The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for
the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts
outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to
information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for
the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is
threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

The President's men have minced words about America's laws. The Attorney General
openly conceded that the "kind of surveillance" we now know they have been
conducting requires a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has
been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does.
Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance was
implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who
attacked us on September 11th.

This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal
intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission
by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA
project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members
of Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this
probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization
for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along?
Second, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact
seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use
military force domestically - and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted
Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during
the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not
operate domestically.

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he
wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if
congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter
once wrote: "To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard
in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the
whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between
President and Congress."

This is precisely the "disrespect" for the law that the Supreme Court struck
down in the steel seizure case.
It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now brought our
republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution.
And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part
of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply
troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore
unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he
alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his
American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a
lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake
and imprisoned the wrong person.

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the
rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what
charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that
they have been imprisoned.

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized
authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute
torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in
several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by
Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In
the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of
torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any
charges.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation
has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our
Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then - until
now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International
Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals
in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our
behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of
their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the
part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan - one of those nations
with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons - registered a complaint
to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice:
"This material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact
positively harmful."

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?
If the answer is "yes" then under the theory by which these acts are committed,
are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has
the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration,
kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive
Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: "If the President has
commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide,
to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this
unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is
due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined
strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield
but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of
the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to
stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing
the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it.

Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison
American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. The
Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed
to prevent the Court from providing meaningful content to the rights of its
citizens.

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the
Executive Branch's handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden
abandonment of principle "at substantial cost to the government's credibility
before the courts."

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive
Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for
America's representative democracy are far higher than has been generally
recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our
Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a
radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been preserved in part by
our founders' wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government
into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to check and balance the
power of the other two.

On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three branches
has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are
invariably labeled "constitutional crises." These crises have often been
dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we
have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live
under the rule of law.

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the
consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or
small group who together exercise that power without the informed consent of the
governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was
founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the
ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was "whether that nation, or
any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure," he was not only
saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in
history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose
designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another
strongman regime.

There have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive
Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our
second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and
sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents.

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: "[The
essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has
gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and
reformation... [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let
us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to
peace, liberty and safety."

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the
Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration
were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red
Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked
a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive.
And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and
parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country
recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle
of excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing
and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades
been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a
global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the
American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to
conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our
military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an
instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has
almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As
Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, "The accretion of dangerous
power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative
force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most
disinterested assertion of authority."

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are
told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place
the country is going to "last for the rest of our lives." So we are told that
the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to
justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance
technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of
information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability
to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same
time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the
potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state
and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real
and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a
real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness
and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by
the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the
nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to
precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and
when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and
excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the
relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than
just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to
power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this
excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our
Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive
but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to
expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the
Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this
theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when
making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by
Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum
by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has
frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign.
When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the
implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we
can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a
lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a
subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the
same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based
primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and
self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and
control.
This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views
within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with
its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive Branch
employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion
that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under
pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s who
disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view that Dr. King was closely connected to
Communists. The head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division said that his
effort to tell the truth about King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and
his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. "It was evident that we had to
change our ways or we would all be out on the street.... The men and I discussed
how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious
matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in
school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes,
as they usually did. ... so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out
of the trouble that we were in."

The Constitution's framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander
Hamilton put it, "a power over a man's support is a power over his will."
(Federalist No. 73)

Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false
accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet's
CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a
linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: "We are all capable of believing things which we
know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently
twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is
possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it
is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually
on a battlefield."

Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to
mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence
flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the
Administration's eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had
conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of
some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration did in fact
have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available
to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of
the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this
information, it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of
unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be
given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability
for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not
challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many
conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President
means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next
President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is
why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this
President has done. If this President's attempt to dramatically expand executive
power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will
be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the
name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never
would have thought possible.

The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance characterizes
the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the
constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their
proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered to the rule of
law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the
ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out
of its hands - notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals
without legal process -- by appointing judges who will be deferential to its
exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the
third branch.

The President's decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the power of the
judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to
be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could
not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take
matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being bypassed.

The President's judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the
courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all
learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive - a
supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the
unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not - and I do not
- we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion
of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference
to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to
executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that
has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the
Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate
the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President's
judicial nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail
the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge
of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt for
the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every
turn.

But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp
decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as
shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of
its power.

I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8 years
in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a
young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was
elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate in
1971.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my
father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving
today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative
branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is
entirely subservient to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a
majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money
to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really
know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the oversight hearings
in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch
to the fire - no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost
unknown in the Congress today.

The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13
annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed anymore. Everything
is lumped into a single giant measure that is not even available for Members of
Congress to read before they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference
committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor consideration
of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the "greatest
deliberative body in the world," meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the
eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd
famously asked: "Why is this chamber empty?"

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive
election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to
the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the
money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is
largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is further
limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress' role, and often
Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in "overseeing" this massive four
year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the
Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really
means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and
Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This
small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at
least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to
VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were
placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats
as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking
action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly
unconstitutional program.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole-both House and Senate-the enhanced role of
money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for
reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to
pervasive institutionalized corruption.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the
integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the
failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by
our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the
American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your
oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start
acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you're supposed to
be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and
whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that
has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our
constitutional system.

We the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival of America's
democracy. We-as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here"-must examine our own role as
citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of
our democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the
public will." The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based
was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly
exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded
inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment
philosopher John Locke: "All just power is derived from the consent of the
governed."

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such
danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population
as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper
essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that
crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers
recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their
various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence,
the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for
ratification.

And it is "We the people" who must now find once again the ability we once had
to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed
pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a
distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell
more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our
dilemma today: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our
country."

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as
their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive
that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within
the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements.

And the political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads
is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those
politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the
masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has
encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as
a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the
hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy of its
operations. After all, the other branches can't check an abuse of power if they
don't know it is happening.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to
enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate
raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than
engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration
withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought
from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in
advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the
numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it
instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is
now collapsing- all over the country- with the Administration making an appeal
just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences
of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White
House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific
experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the
press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive
Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of
information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in
order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to
the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, "Any who act
as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear
confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the
door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared
witches and burnt women."

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their
endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our
country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of
Rights.
Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the
British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when
we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be
launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America
in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our
fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our
behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they
faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but
also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our
current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our
Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on
the part of the Executive Branch and the President's apparent belief that he
need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, "The President has dared the
American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I
hope they will."

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to
remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating
what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We have had a
fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel
with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick
Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing
allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the
bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special
counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of
Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for
members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing -- especially
where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas
of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive-and not just
superficial-hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the
part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in its
proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be
granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to
protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds
of abuses that have so recently been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with
access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without
a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this
apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the
health of our democracy.
It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected
against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large
media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I
stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a
golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established and
will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, "Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let
us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its
guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems
so close around us."

http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/2006/01/landmark-speech-by-al-gore-cites.h
tml

Alan

http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/



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