It’s time to check the balance of power
<
p>San Francisco Chronicle, USA
Congress must rein in Bush’s abusive actions
Bruce Fein
Since 9/11, President Bush’s repeated assaults on the Constitution and celebration of international lawlessness in confronting al Qaeda have needlessly made Americans less safe. The president, for example, has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in intercepting the conversations and e-mails of American citizens on American soil on his say-so alone. He has claimed authority to break into and enter our homes, open our mail and commit torture in order to collect foreign intelligence.
He has insisted that the entire United States is a battlefield — even pizza parlors — where lethal military force may be employed to kill al Qaeda suspects with bombs or missiles. He has detained citizens and noncitizens alike as enemy combatants based on secret evidence. And he has insisted that he is constitutionally empowered to keep U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely.
Congress should restore the Constitution’s checks and balances and protections against government abuses. Citizens would be safer. And international terrorism would be more effectively arrested by restoring cooperation with allies; by cultivating friendly democratic regimes abroad through democratic example; and by preventing injustices that serve as recruiting fodder for al Qaeda (for instance, Mahar Arar, the Syrian Canadian who was mistaken for a terrorist and tortured in Syria with U.S. and Canadian complicity).
The most frightening of Bush’s abuses travels under the banner of “extraordinary rendition.” In its name, Bush has kidnapped, secretly imprisoned, and tortured or treated inhumanely people he believes are implicated in international terrorism. The practice is what would be expected of dictators such as the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The detainees are held incommunicado without accusation or trial. No judge reviews the allegedly incriminating evidence. No law restricts interrogation methods or the conditions of confinement. And the innocent are left without recourse as “collateral damage” in Bush’s war on global terrorism. [more]