Woodstock, New York

Last January 20th, Bush inaugurated his second term from stage right - wafting in on clouds of freedom rhetoric that mixed up Biblical references to the Dies Irae with Dostoyevsky’s Possessed and that “fire that burns in the minds of men.” Issuing a solemn warning to “all rulers and nations” that they’d better choose freedom over oppression, our president proudly declared that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one” and modestly committed the American people to wage a generational struggle with the “ultimate goal of ending tyranny on Earth.” No wonder then that an analyst on MSNBC news characterized it as a speech worthy of The Emperor of the World, while other commentators, such as Dimitry Simes of The National Interest, wondered out loud, whether “we weren’t dealing with an extremist in the White House.” The question, of course, when speaking of the Bush Administration is whether the extremists in the house are limited to only one.

The Inauguration speech that re-branded The War On Terrorism as The War on Tyranny also marked the public re-entry from stage left of the Neo Con talking heads who had been banished from air-waves for the duration of last year’s presidential campaign. Richard Perle et al are back - brimming with self confidence now that we’ve put that “accountability moment” called an election behind us - with a short list of potential targets. So Mr. Cheney can speculate freely on the IMES In the Morning talk show about whether it will be the United States that takes out Iran’s nuclear facilities or whether it will be the Israeli air force that whacks them first. And Mr. William Kristol can dispute this in the pages of The Weekly Standard, and argue instead that we should “bomb Syrian military facilities,” or “occupy the town of Abu Kamal in Eastern Syria,” because our “Syrian problem” is of greater urgency than either our Iranian or Saudi ones. Finally, Mr. Bush - eager to get down to specifics after his “abstract” Inauguration speech - targets all three for expressions of his wrath in his State of the Union Address.

Contrary to the press buzz around Condi Rice’s move to the State Department, it doesn’t really sound like “the moment for diplomacy has now arrived.” Instead, as Ms. Rice observed in her testimony to the Senate confirmation hearings, “we will remain at war until the terrorist threat to Nation is ended.” We face an open ended commitment to a war that has no fixed enemy or practical end goal. Such a war might seem by definition “un-winnable,” but perhaps that is of its very essence. An un-winnable WOT makes permanent both a state of emergency that will expand Presidential war powers and allow for the revision of legal norms that limit the police powers of the Homeland Security State. As Ms. Rice remarked, “Bold and comprehensive changes are sometimes only possible in the wake of catastrophic events - events that create a new consensus that allows us to transcend old ways of thinking and acting.” The outline of these bold changes now seems apparent.

First, as the recent testimony of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at his confirmation hearings should remind us, this Administration is operating under a revolutionary legal doctrine where it recognizes no constitutional or international treaty limit on the President’s war powers when he acts as commander in chief. We now know that the President of the United States does “not condone torture” - in part because he has redefined it so as to exclude current American practice in Guantánamo, Iraq and Afghanistan - but theoretically could do, should he so choose. Under Senate examination, Judge Gonzales repudiated the specifics of the infamous torture memos written by the White House Legal Counsel in 2002, but stubbornly refused to negate the doctrine that underlay it. The doctrinal shift goes beyond the issue of torture of unlawful combatants that originally gave rise to it and gives a new meaning to the word freedom - as in the unfettered war powers of the White House or a Senate licence to Mr. Gonzales to interpret our laws freely to suit his master’s mood swings. It’s worth noting that this imperial definition of our freedoms contradicts the very notion of international law, since it presupposes one standard for US sovereignty and another subaltern standard for every other “ruler and nation.”

Secondly, President Bush’s refusal on two occasions to accept Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation signals the institutional consolidation of war making and intelligence collection in the Pentagon as well as the blurring of any legal distinction between the two. The Pentagon emerges from its turf battles of the last year with the CIA with its authority to collect intelligence overseas greatly reinforced, and a renewed licence to conduct “black ops” in foreign countries. According to Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, the President has signed a series of orders granting the Pentagon the right to insert US Special forces in some ten countries where “hunter killer teams” would track and eliminate terrorist targets. This has been described by General Boykin, the Deputy Under- Secretary of Defence for Intelligence, as a worldwide version of the CIA’s “Operation Phoenix” directed against the Viet Cong. Rumsfeld has claimed that these operations can be conducted under his existing authority and need not be reported to the Congressional Oversight Committees.

The new WOT then will be fought as a “shadow war” by US forces in countries with which we are not yet formally at war. But not only overseas, it would seem, since the Pentagon was also authorized to position “super secret commandos” on US soil as part of the security arrangements for the President’s inauguration - in total violation of the prohibition on such deployments contained in existing federal statutes.

The real significance of these changes was captured by Sy Hersh in an interview on Democracy Now when he remarked : “What the story is about” is that “more is totally centralized in the White House and the Pentagon than since the rise of the national security state after World War II and the Cold War.” This is something to reflect upon while Ms. Condoleezza Rice wages her “public diplomacy” campaign across “old Europe”.

Liens

L’interview de Seymour Hersh mentionnée ci-dessus :
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005
Seymour Hersh : U.S. Conducting Covert Operations in Iran For Possible Military Strike
http://www.democracynow.org/article...

Diplomatie américaine : les phrases qui tuent
http://www.temps-reels.net/article....

Le discours inaugural de George Bush, 20 janvier 2005
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/rele...