> Two dozen officials -- career professionals; not partisan politicians
> -- discuss the case for war.
>
> >Review of Film: Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
> >
> >     Case For War Confected, Say Top U.S. Officials
> >      By Andrew Gumbel
> >      Independent UK
> >http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=461953
> >      Sunday 09 November 2003
> >
> >      An unprecedented array of US intelligence professionals, diplomats and
> >former Pentagon officials have gone on record to lambast the Bush
> >administration for its distortion of the case for war against Iraq. In their
> >view, the very foundations of intelligence-gathering have been damaged in
> >ways that could take years, even decades, to repair.
> >
> >      A new documentary film beginning to circulate in the United States
> >features one powerful condemnation after another, from the sort of people
> >who usually stay discreetly in the shadows - a former director of the CIA,
> >two former assistant secretaries of defence, a former ambassador to Saudi
> >Arabia and even the man who served as President Bush's Secretary of the Army
> >until just a few months ago.
> >
> >      Between them, the two dozen interviewees reveal how the pre-war
> >intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the picture the
> >administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the world. They also
> >reconstruct the way senior White House officials - notably Vice-President
> >Dick Cheney - leaned on the CIA to find evidence that would fit a
> >preordained set of conclusions.
> >
> >      "There was never a clear and present danger. There was never an
> >imminent threat. Iraq - and we have very good intelligence on this - was
> >never part of the picture of terrorism," says Mel Goodman, a veteran CIA
> >analyst who now teaches at the National War College.
> >
> >      The case for accusing Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons of mass
> >destruction was, in the words of the veteran CIA operative Robert Baer,
> >largely achieved through "data mining" - going back over old information and
> >trying to wrest new conclusions from it. The agenda, according to George
> >Bush Senior's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, was both highly
> >political and profoundly misguided.
> >
> >      "The theory that you can bludgeon political grievances out of existence
> >doesn't have much of a track record," he says, "so essentially we have been
> >neo-conned into applying a school of thought about foreign affairs that has
> >failed everywhere it has been tried."
> >
> >      The hour-long film - entitled Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq
> >War - was put together by Robert Greenwald, a veteran TV producer in the
> >forefront of Hollywood's anti-war movement who never suspected, when he
> >started out, that so many establishment figures would stand up and be
> >counted.
> >
> >      "My attitude was, wow, CIA people, I thought these were the bad guys,"
> >Mr Greenwald said. "Not everyone agreed on everything. Not everyone was
> >against the war itself. But there was a universally shared opinion that we
> >had been misled about the reasons for the war."
> >
> >      Although many elements in the film are not necessarily new - the forged
> >document on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq, the aluminium tubes falsely
> >assumed to be parts for nuclear weapons, the satellite images of "mobile
> >biolabs" that turned out to be hydrogen compression facilities, the
> >"decontamination vehicles" that were in fact fire engines - what emerges is
> >a striking sense of professional betrayal in the intelligence community.
> >
> >      As the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern argues with particular force,
> >the traditional role of the CIA has been to act as a scrupulously accurate
> >source of information and analysis for presidents pondering grave
> >international decisions. That role, he said, had now been "prostituted" and
> >the CIA may never be the same. "Where is Bush going to turn to now? Where is
> >his reliable source of information now Iraq is spinning out of control? He's
> >frittered that away," Mr McGovern said. "And the profound indignity is that
> >he probably doesn't even realise it."
> >
> >      The starting point for the tarnishing of the CIA was a speech by
> >Vice-President Cheney on 26 August 2002, in which he told the Veterans of
> >Foreign Wars in Nashville that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons
> >programme and was thus threatening to inflict "death on a massive scale - in
> >his own region or beyond".
> >
> >      According to numerous sources, Mr Cheney followed up his speech with a
> >series of highly unorthodox visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,
> >in which he badgered low-level analysts to come up with information to
> >substantiate the extremely alarming - but entirely bogus - contents of his
> >speech.
> >
> >      By early September, intelligence experts in Congress were clamouring
> >for a so-called National Intelligence Estimate, a full rundown of everything
> >known about Iraq's weapons programmes. Usually NIEs take months to produce,
> >but George Tenet, the CIA director, came up with a 100-page document in just
> >three weeks.
> >
> >      The man he picked to write it, the weapons expert Robert Walpole, had a
> >track record of going back over old intelligence assessments and reworking
> >them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political interest group.
> >In 1998, he had come up with an estimate of the missile capabilities of
> >various rogue states that managed to sound considerably more alarming than a
> >previous CIA estimate issued three years earlier. On that occasion, he was
> >acting at the behest of a congressional commission anxious to make the case
> >for a missile defence system; the commission chairman was none other than
> >Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defence and a key architect of the Iraq
> >war.
> >
> >      Mr Walpole's NIE on Iraq threw together all the elements that have now
> >been discredited - Niger, the alumin- ium tubes, and so on. It also gave the
> >misleading impression that intelligence analysts were in broad agreement
> >about the Iraqi threat, relegating most of the doubts and misgivings to
> >footnotes and appendices.
> >
> >      By the time parts of the NIE were made public, even those few
> >qualifications were excised. When President Bush's speechwriters got to work
> >- starting with the address to Congress on 7 October that led to a
> >resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq - the language became
> >even stronger.
> >
> >      Mr Tenet fact-checked the 7 October speech, and seems to have played a
> >major role in every subsequent policy address, including Colin Powell's
> >powerful presentation to the United Nations Security Council on 5 February.
> >Of that pivotal speech, Mr McGovern says in the film: "It was a masterful
> >performance, but none of it was true."
> >
> >
> >More info on the Film:
> >
> >http://www.truthuncovered.com/
> >
> >
> >[Looks like this DVD could be a great tool for house parties and other fund
> >raising and consciousness raising events.]
>
3:50:38 PM    

god, I wish this guy would run!

This GoreCast is a free service of www.AlGoreDemocrats.com

------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcript of Al Gore's November 9th speech "Freedom and Security"
------------------------------------------------------------------
Remarks as prepared for delivery

By Al Gore

Thank you, Lisa, for that warm and generous introduction.  Thank you Zack,
and thank you all for coming here today

I want to thank the American Constitution Society for co-sponsoring
today's event, and for their hard work and dedication in defending our
most basic public values.

And I am especially grateful to Moveon.org, not only for co-sponsoring
this event, but also for using 21st Century techniques to breathe new life
into our democracy.

For my part, I'm just a "recovering politician" - but I truly believe that
some of the issues most important to America's future are ones that all of
us should be dealing with.

And perhaps the most important of these issues is the one I want to talk
about today: the true relationship between Freedom and Security.

So it seems to me that the logical place to start the discussion is with
an accounting of exactly what has happened to civil liberties and security
since the vicious attacks against America of September 11, 2001 - and it's
important to note at the outset that the Administration and the Congress
have brought about many beneficial and needed improvements to make law
enforcement and intelligence community efforts more effective against
potential terrorists.

But a lot of other changes have taken place that a lot of people don't
know about and that come as unwelcome surprises.  For example, for the
first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the
executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged
with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to
see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families.

President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American
citizen he believes is an "enemy combatant." Those are the magic words.
If the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe
someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held
incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the
right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment.

Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by
somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then it's almost
impossible for that person to prove his innocence - because he can't talk
to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesn't even have the
right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing.  So a
constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used
to think of in an old-fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly
stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by
any other branch of government.

How do we feel about that? Is that OK?

Here's another recent change in our civil liberties:  Now, if it wants to,
the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on
the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email
from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you - and
they don't even have to show probable cause that you've done anything
wrong.  Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they're doing
with the information.  Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep
them from reading the content of all your email.

Everybody fine with that?

If so, what about this next change?

For America's first 212 years, it used to be that if the police wanted to
search your house, they had to be able to convince an independent judge to
give them a search warrant and then (with rare exceptions) they had to go
bang on your door and yell, "Open up!" Then, if you didn't quickly open
up, they could knock the door down.  Also, if they seized anything, they
had to leave a list explaining what they had taken.  That way, if it was
all a terrible mistake (as it sometimes is) you could go and get your
stuff back.

But that's all changed now.  Starting two years ago, federal agents were
given broad new statutory authority by the Patriot Act to "sneak and peak"
in non-terrorism cases.  They can secretly enter your home with no warning
- whether you are there or not - and they can wait for months before
telling you they were there.  And it doesn't have to have any relationship
to terrorism whatsoever.  It applies to any garden-variety crime.  And the
new law makes it very easy to get around the need for a traditional
warrant -- simply by saying that searching your house might have some
connection (even a remote one) to the investigation of some agent of a
foreign power.  Then they can go to another court, a secret court, that
more or less has to give them a warrant whenever they ask.

Three weeks ago, in a speech at FBI Headquarters, President Bush went even
further and formally proposed that the Attorney General be allowed to
authorize subpoenas by administrative order, without the need for a
warrant from any court.

What about the right to consult a lawyer if you're arrested? Is that
important?

Attorney General Ashcroft has issued regulations authorizing the secret
monitoring of attorney-client conversations on his say-so alone; bypassing
procedures for obtaining prior judicial review for such monitoring in the
rare instances when it was permitted in the past.  Now, whoever is in
custody has to assume that the government is always listening to
consultations between them and their lawyers.

Does it matter if the government listens in on everything you say to your
lawyer? Is that Ok?

Or, to take another change -- and thanks to the librarians, more people
know about this one -- the FBI now has the right to go into any library
and ask for the records of everybody who has used the library and get a
list of who is reading what.  Similarly, the FBI can demand all the
records of banks, colleges, hotels, hospitals, credit-card companies, and
many more kinds of companies.   And these changes are only the beginning.
Just last week, Attorney General Ashcroft issued brand new guidelines
permitting FBI agents to run credit checks and background checks and
gather other information about anyone who is "of investigatory interest,"
- meaning anyone the agent thinks is suspicious - without any evidence of
criminal behavior.

So, is that fine with everyone?

Listen to the way Israel's highest court dealt with a similar question
when, in 1999, it was asked to balance due process rights against dire
threats to the security of its people:

"This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it,
and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it.
Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back,
it nonetheless has the upper hand.  Preserving the Rule of Law and
recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component
in its understanding of security.  At the end of the day they (add to) its
strength."

I want to challenge the Bush Administration's implicit assumption that we
have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from
terrorists.

Because it is simply not true.

In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our
civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch
an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.

In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.

In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and
unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more
important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.

In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and
misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative
presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.

In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain
and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually
weakening not strengthening America.

In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order
to avoid accountability to the Congress, the Courts, the press and the
people.

Indeed, this Administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our
democracy on its head.  A government of and for the people is supposed to
be generally open to public scrutiny by the people -- while the private
information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from
government intrusion.

But instead, this Administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret
even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about
American citizens.  Under the rubric of protecting national security, they
have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep
it secret.  Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose
information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism.

They are even arrogantly refusing to provide information about 9/11 that
is in their possession to the 9/11 Commission - the lawful investigative
body charged with examining not only the performance of the Bush
Administration, but also the actions of the prior Administration in which
I served.  The whole point is to learn all we can about preventing future
terrorist attacks.

Two days ago, the Commission was forced to issue a subpoena to the
Pentagon, which has - disgracefully - put Secretary Rumsfeld's desire to
avoid embarrassment ahead of the nation's need to learn how we can best
avoid future terrorist attacks. The Commission also served notice that it
will issue a subpoena to the White House if the President continues to
withhold information essential to the investigation.

And the White House is also refusing to respond to repeated bipartisan
Congressional requests for information about 9/11 - even though the
Congress is simply exercising its Constitutional oversight authority. In
the words of Senator McCain, "Excessive administration secrecy on issues
related to the September 11 attacks feeds conspiracy theories and reduces
the public's confidence in government."

In a revealing move, just three days ago, the White House asked the
Republican leadership of the Senate to shut down the Intelligence
Committee's investigation of 9/11 based on a trivial political dispute.
Apparently the President is anxious to keep the Congress from seeing what
are said to have been clear, strong and explicit warnings directly to him
a few weeks before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial
airliners and use them to attack us.

Astonishingly, the Republican Senate leadership quickly complied with the
President's request.  Such obedience and complicity in what looks like a
cover-up from the majority party in a separate and supposedly co-equal
branch of government makes it seem like a very long time ago when a
Republican Attorney General and his deputy resigned rather than comply
with an order to fire the special prosecutor investigating Richard Nixon.

In an even more brazen move, more than two years after they rounded up
over 1,200 individuals of Arab descent, they still refuse to release the
names of the individuals they detained, even though virtually every one of
those arrested has been "cleared" by the FBI of any connection to
terrorism and there is absolutely no national security justification for
keeping the names secret.   Yet at the same time, White House officials
themselves leaked the name of a CIA operative serving the country, in
clear violation of the law, in an effort to get at her husband, who had
angered them by disclosing that the President had relied on forged
evidence in his state of the union address as part of his effort to
convince the country that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of building
nuclear weapons.

And even as they claim the right to see the private bank records of every
American, they are adopting a new policy on the Freedom of Information Act
that actively encourages federal agencies to fully consider all potential
reasons for non-disclosure regardless of whether the disclosure would be
harmful.  In other words, the federal government will now actively resist
complying with ANY request for information.

Moreover, they have established a new exemption that enables them to
refuse the release to the press and the public of important health, safety
and environmental information submitted to the government by businesses -
merely by calling it "critical infrastructure."

By closely guarding information about their own behavior, they are
dismantling a fundamental element of our system of checks and balances. 
Because so long as the government's actions are secret, they cannot be
held accountable.  A government for the people and by the people must be
transparent to the people.

The administration is justifying the collection of all this information by
saying in effect that it will make us safer to have it.  But it is not the
kind of information that would have been of much help in preventing 9/11.
 However, there was in fact a great deal of specific information that WAS
available prior to 9/11 that probably could have been used to prevent the
tragedy.  A recent analysis by the Merkle foundation, (working with data
from a software company that received venture capital from a CIA-sponsored
firm) demonstrates this point in a startling way:

"In late August 2001, Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar bought tickets to
fly on American Airlines Flight 77 (which was flown into the Pentagon).
They bought the tickets using their real names. Both names were then on a
State Department/INS watch list called TIPOFF. Both men were sought by the
FBI and CIA as suspected terrorists, in part because they had been
observed at a terrorist meeting in Malaysia.

These two passenger names would have been exact matches when checked
against the TIPOFF list. But that would only have been the first step.
Further data checks could then have begun.

Checking for common addresses (address information is widely available,
including on the internet), analysts would have discovered that Salem
Al-Hazmi (who also bought a seat on American 77) used the same address as
Nawaq Alhazmi.  More importantly, they could have discovered that Mohamed
Atta (American 11, North Tower of the World Trade Center) and Marwan
Al-Shehhi (United 175, South Tower of the World Trade Center) used the
same address as Khalid Al-Midhar.

Checking for identical frequent flier numbers, analysts would have
discovered that Majed Moqed  (American 77) used the same number as
Al-Midhar.

With Mohamed Atta now also identified as a possible associate of the
wanted terrorist, Al-Midhar, analysts could have added Atta's phone
numbers (also publicly available information) to their checklist. By doing
so they would have identified five other hijackers (Fayez Ahmed, Mohand
Alshehri, Wail Alsheri, and Abdulaziz Alomari).

Closer to September 11, a further check of passenger lists against a more
innocuous INS watch list (for expired visas) would have identified Ahmed
Alghandi. Through him, the same sort of relatively simple correlations
could have led to identifying the remaining hijackers, who boarded United
93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania)."

In addition, Al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhamzi, the two who were on the
terrorist watch list, rented an apartment in San Diego under their own
names and were listed, again under their own names, in the San Diego phone
book while the FBI was searching for them.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what is needed is better and more
timely analysis.  Simply piling up more raw data that is almost entirely
irrelevant is not only not going to help.  It may actually hurt the cause.
 As one FBI agent said privately of Ashcroft: "We're looking for a needle
in a haystack here and he (Ashcroft) is just piling on more hay."

In other words, the mass collecting of personal data on hundreds of
millions of people actually makes it more difficult to protect the nation
against terrorists, so they ought to cut most of it out.

And meanwhile, the real story is that while the administration manages to
convey the impression that it is doing everything possible to protect
America, in reality it has seriously neglected most of the measures that
it could have taken to really make our country safer.

For example, there is still no serious strategy for domestic security that
protects critical infrastructure such as electric power lines, gas
pipelines, nuclear facilities, ports, chemical plants and the like.

They're still not checking incoming cargo carriers for radiation.  They're
still skimping on protection of certain nuclear weapons storage
facilities. They're still not hardening critical facilities that must
never be soft targets for terrorists. They're still not investing in the
translators and analysts we need to counter the growing terror threat.

The administration is still not investing in local government training and
infrastructures where they could make the biggest difference.  The first
responder community is still being shortchanged. In many cases, fire and
police still don't have the communications equipment to talk to each
other. The CDC and local hospitals are still nowhere close to being ready
for a biological weapons attack.

The administration has still failed to address the fundamental
disorganization and rivalries of our law enforcement, intelligence and
investigative agencies. In particular, the critical FBI-CIA coordination,
while finally improved at the top, still remains dysfunctional in the
trenches.

The constant violations of civil liberties promote the false impression
that these violations are necessary in order to take every precaution
against another terrorist attack. But the simple truth is that the vast
majority of the violations have not benefited our security at all; to the
contrary, they hurt our security.

And the treatment of immigrants was probably the worst example.  This mass
mistreatment actually hurt our security in a number of important ways.

But first, let's be clear about what happened:  this was little more than
a cheap and cruel political stunt by John Ashcroft.  More than 99% of the
mostly Arab-background men who were rounded up had merely overstayed their
visas or committed some other minor offense as they tried to pursue the
American dream just like most immigrants.  But they were used as extras in
the Administration's effort to give the impression that they had caught a
large number of bad guys.  And many of them were treated horribly and
abusively.

Consider this example reported in depth by Anthony Lewis:

"Anser Mehmood, a Pakistani who had overstayed his visa, was arrested in
New York on October 3, 2001. The next day he was briefly questioned by FBI
agents, who said they had no further interest in him. Then he was shackled
in handcuffs, leg irons, and a belly chain and taken to the Metropolitan
Detention Center in Brooklyn. Guards there put two more sets of handcuffs
on him and another set of leg irons. One threw Mehmood against a wall. The
guards forced him to run down a long ramp, the irons cutting into his
wrists and ankles. The physical abuse was mixed with verbal taunts.

"After two weeks Mehmood was allowed to make a telephone call to his wife.
She was not at home and Mehmood was told that he would have to wait six
weeks to try again. He first saw her, on a visit, three months after his
arrest. All that time he was kept in a windowless cell, in solitary
confinement, with two overhead fluorescent lights on all the time. In the
end he was charged with using an invalid Social Security card. He was
deported in May 2002, nearly eight months after his arrest.

The faith tradition I share with Ashcroft includes this teaching from
Jesus: "whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me."

And make no mistake: the disgraceful treatment suffered by many of these
vulnerable immigrants at the hands of the administration has created deep
resentments and hurt the cooperation desperately needed from immigrant
communities in the U.S. and from the Security Services of other countries.

Second, these gross violations of their rights have seriously damaged U.S.
moral authority and goodwill around the world, and delegitimized U.S.
efforts to continue promoting Human Rights around the world.  As one
analyst put it, "We used to set the standard; now we have lowered the
bar." And our moral authority is, after all, our greatest source of
enduring strength in the world.

And the handling of prisoners at Guantanomo has been particularly harmful
to America's image. Even England and Australia have criticized our
departure from international law and the Geneva Convention.  Sec.
Rumsfeld's handling of the captives there has been about as thoughtful as
his "postwar" plan for Iraq.

So the mass violations of civil liberties have hurt rather than helped.
But there is yet another reason for urgency in stopping what this
administration is doing.    Where Civil Liberties are concerned, they have
taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, "Big
Brother"-style government -- toward the dangers prophesized by George
Orwell in his book "1984" -- than anyone ever thought would be possible in
the United States of America.

And they have done it primarily by heightening and exploiting public
anxieties and apprehensions.  Rather than leading with a call to courage,
this Administration has chosen to lead us by inciting fear.

Almost eighty years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote   "Those who won our
independence by revolution were not cowards. . . .  They did not exalt
order at the cost of liberty." Those who won our independence, Brandeis
asserted, understood that "courage [is] the secret of liberty" and "fear
[only] breeds repression."

Rather than defending our freedoms, this Administration has sought to
abandon them.  Rather than accepting our traditions of openness and
accountability, this Administration has opted to rule by secrecy and
unquestioned authority. Instead, its assaults on our core democratic
principles have only left us less free and less secure.

Throughout American history, what we now call Civil Liberties have often
been abused and limited during times of war and perceived threats to
security. The best known instances include the Alien and Sedition Acts of
1798-1800, the brief suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, 
the extreme abuses during World War I and the notorious Red Scare and
Palmer Raids immediately after the war, the shameful internment of
Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the excesses of the FBI and
CIA during the Vietnam War and social turmoil of the late 1960s and early
1970s.

But in each of these cases, the nation has recovered its equilibrium when
the war ended and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of
excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that what we are
experiencing may no longer be the first half of a recurring cycle but
rather, the beginning of something new.  For one thing, this war is
predicted by the administration to "last for the rest of our lives."
Others have expressed the view that over time it will begin to resemble
the "war" against drugs - that is, that it will become a more or less
permanent struggle that occupies a significant part of our law enforcement
and security agenda from now on.  If that is the case, then when - if ever
-- does this encroachment on our freedoms die a natural death?

It is important to remember that throughout history, the loss of civil
liberties by individuals and the aggregation of too much unchecked power
in the executive go hand in hand.  They are two sides of the same coin.

A second reason to worry that what we are witnessing is a discontinuity
and not another turn of the recurring cycle is that the new technologies
of surveillance - long anticipated by novelists like Orwell and other
prophets of the "Police State" -- are now more widespread than they have
ever been.

And they do 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.

Moreover, these technologies are being widely used not only by the
government but also by corporations and other private entities.  And that
is relevant to an assessment of the new requirements in the Patriot Act
for so many corporations - especially in the finance industries - to
prepare millions of reports annually for the government on suspicious
activities by their customers.  It is also relevant to the new flexibility
corporations have been given to share information with one another about
their customers.

The third reason for concern is that the threat of more terror strikes is
all too real. And the potential use of weapons of mass destruction by
terrorist groups does create a new practical imperative for the speedy
exercise of discretionary power by the executive branch - just as the
emergence of nuclear weapons and ICBMs created a new practical imperative
in the Cold War that altered the balance of war-making responsibility
between Congress and the President.

But President Bush has stretched this new practical imperative beyond what
is healthy for our democracy.  Indeed, one of the ways he has tried to
maximize his power within the American system has been by constantly
emphasizing his role as Commander-in-Chief, far more than any previous
President -- assuming it as often and as visibly as he can, and bringing
it into the domestic arena and conflating it with his other roles:  as
head of government and head of state - and especially with his political
role as head of the Republican Party.

Indeed, the most worrisome new factor, in my view, is the aggressive
ideological approach of the current administration, which seems determined
to use fear as a political tool to consolidate its power and to escape any
accountability for its use.  Just as unilateralism and dominance are the
guiding principles of their disastrous approach to international
relations, they are also the guiding impulses of the administration's
approach to domestic politics.   They are impatient with any constraints
on the exercise of power overseas -- whether from our allies, the UN, or
international law. And in the same way, they are impatient with any
obstacles to their use of power at home - whether from Congress, the
Courts, the press, or the rule of law.

Ashcroft has also authorized FBI agents to attend church meetings,
rallies, political meetings and any other citizen activity open to the
public simply on the agents' own initiative, reversing a decades old
policy that required justification to supervisors that such infiltrations
has a provable connection to a legitimate investigation;

They have even taken steps that seem to be clearly aimed at stifling
dissent.  The Bush Justice Department has recently begun a highly
disturbing criminal prosecution of the environmental group Greenpeace
because of a non-violent direct action protest against what Greenpeace
claimed was the illegal importation of endangered mahogany from the
Amazon.  Independent legal experts and historians have said that the
prosecution -- under an obscure and bizarre 1872 law against
"sailor-mongering" -- appears to be aimed at inhibiting Greenpeace's First
Amendment activities.

And at the same time they are breaking new ground by prosecuting
Greenpeace, the Bush Administration announced just a few days ago that it
is dropping the investigations of 50 power plants for violating the Clean
Air Act - a move that Sen. Chuck Schumer said, "basically announced to the
power industry that it can now pollute with impunity."

The politicization of law enforcement in this administration is part of
their larger agenda to roll back the changes in government policy brought
about by the New Deal and the Progressive Movement.  Toward that end, they
are cutting back on Civil Rights enforcement, Women's Rights, progressive
taxation, the estate tax, access to the courts, Medicare, and much more.
And they approach every issue as a partisan fight to the finish, even in
the areas of national security and terror.

Instead of trying to make the "War on Terrorism" a bipartisan cause, the
Bush White House has consistently tried to exploit it for partisan
advantage.  The President goes to war verbally against terrorists in
virtually every campaign speech and fundraising dinner for his political
party.  It is his main political theme.  Democratic candidates like Max
Cleland in Georgia were labeled unpatriotic for voting differently from
the White House on obscure amendments to the Homeland Security Bill.

When the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, was
embroiled in an effort to pick up more congressional seats in Texas by
forcing a highly unusual redistricting vote in the state senate, he was
able to track down Democratic legislators who fled the state to prevent a
quorum (and thus prevent the vote) by enlisting the help of President
Bush's new Department of Homeland Security,  as many as 13 employees of
the Federal Aviation Administration who conducted an eight-hour search,
and at least one FBI agent (though several other agents who were asked to
help refused to do so.)

By locating the Democrats quickly with the technology put in place for
tracking terrorists, the Republicans were able to succeed in focusing
public pressure on the weakest of the Senators and forced passage of their
new political redistricting plan.  Now, thanks in part to the efforts of
three different federal agencies, Bush and DeLay are celebrating the gain
of up to seven new Republican congressional seats in the next Congress.

The White House timing for its big push for a vote in Congress on going to
war with Iraq also happened to coincide exactly with the start of the fall
election campaign in September a year ago.  The President's chief of staff
said the timing was chosen because "from a marketing point of view, you
don't introduce new products in August."

White House political advisor Karl Rove advised Republican candidates that
their best political strategy was to "run on the war".  And as soon as the
troops began to mobilize, the Republican National Committee distributed
yard signs throughout America saying, "I support President Bush and the
troops" -- as if they were one and the same.

This persistent effort to politicize the war in Iraq and the war against
terrorism for partisan advantage is obviously harmful to the prospects for
bipartisan support of the nation's security policies.  By sharp contrast,
consider the different approach that was taken by Prime Minister Winston
Churchill during the terrible days of October 1943 when in the midst of
World War II, he faced a controversy with the potential to divide his
bipartisan coalition.  He said, "What holds us together is the prosecution
of the war.  No.man has been asked to give up his convictions. That would
be indecent and improper. We are held together by something outside, which
rivets our attention. The principle that we work on is, 'Everything for
the war, whether controversial or not, and nothing controversial that is
not bona fide for the war.' That is our position. We must also be careful
that a pretext is not made of war needs to introduce far-reaching social
or political changes by a side wind."

Yet that is exactly what the Bush Administration is attempting to do - to
use the war against terrorism for partisan advantage and to introduce far
reaching controversial changes in social policy by a "side wind," in an
effort to consolidate its political power.

It is an approach that is deeply antithetical to the American spirit.
Respect for our President is important. But so is respect for our people.
Our founders knew - and our history has proven - that freedom is best
guaranteed by a separation of powers into co-equal branches of government
within a system of checks and balances -- to prevent the unhealthy
concentration of too much power in the hands of any one person or group.

Our framers were also keenly aware that the history of the world proves
that Republics are fragile.  The very hour of America's birth in
Philadelphia, when Benjamin Franklin was asked, "What have we got? A
Republic or a Monarchy?" he cautiously replied, "A Republic, if you can
keep it."

And even in the midst of our greatest testing, Lincoln knew that our fate
was tied to the larger question of whether ANY nation so conceived could
long endure.

This Administration simply does not seem to agree that the challenge of
preserving democratic freedom cannot be met by surrendering core American
values.  Incredibly, this Administration has attempted to compromise the
most precious rights that America has stood for all over the world for
more than 200 years:  due process, equal treatment under the law, the
dignity of the individual, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure,
freedom from promiscuous government surveillance.  And in the name of
security, this Administration has attempted to relegate the Congress and
the Courts to the sidelines and replace our democratic system of checks
and balances with an unaccountable Executive. And all the while, it has
constantly angled for new ways to exploit the sense of crisis for partisan
gain and political dominance. How dare they!

Years ago, during World War II, one of our most eloquent Supreme Court
Justices, Robert Jackson, wrote that the President should be given the
"widest latitude" in wartime, but he warned against the "loose and
irresponsible invocation of war as an excuse for discharging the Executive
Branch from the rules of law that govern our Republic in times of peace.
No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government," Jackson
said, "of holding that a President can escape control of executive powers
by law through assuming his military role. Our government has ample
authority under the Constitution to take those steps which are genuinely
necessary for our security.  At the same time, our system demands that
government act only on the basis of measures that have been the subject of
open and thoughtful debate in Congress and among the American people, and
that invasions of the liberty or equal dignity of any individual are
subject to review by courts which are open to those affected and
independent of the government which is curtailing their freedom."

So what should be done?  Well, to begin with, our country ought to find a
way to immediately stop its policy of indefinitely detaining American
citizens without charges and without a judicial determination that their
detention is proper.

Such a course of conduct is incompatible with American traditions and
values, with sacred principles of due process of law and separation of
powers.

It is no accident that our Constitution requires in criminal prosecutions
a "speedy and public trial."  The principles of liberty and the
accountability of government, at the heart of what makes America unique,
require no less. The Bush Administration's treatment of American citizens
it calls "enemy combatants" is nothing short of un-American.

Second, foreign citizens held in Guantanamo should be given hearings to
determine their status provided for under Article V of the Geneva
Convention, a hearing that the United States has given those captured in
every war until this one, including Vietnam and the Gulf War.

If we don't provide this, how can we expect American soldiers captured
overseas to be treated with equal respect?  We owe this to our sons and
daughters who fight to defend freedom in Iraq, in Afghanistan and
elsewhere in the world.

Third, the President should seek congressional authorization for the
military commissions he says he intends to use instead of civilian courts
to try some of those who are charged with violating the laws of war.
Military commissions are exceptional in American law and they present
unique dangers.  The prosecutor and the judge both work for the same man,
the President of the United States.  Such commissions may be appropriate
in time of war, but they must be authorized by Congress, as they were in
World War II, and Congress must delineate the scope of their authority.
Review of their decisions must be available in a civilian court, at least
the Supreme Court, as it was in World War II.

Next, our nation's greatness is measured by how we treat those who are the
most vulnerable.  Noncitizens who the government seeks to detain should be
entitled to some basic rights.  The administration must stop abusing the
material witness statute.  That statute was designed to hold witnesses
briefly before they are called to testify before a grand jury. It has been
misused by this administration as a pretext for indefinite detention
without charge.  That is simply not right.

Finally, I have studied the Patriot Act and have found that along with its
many excesses, it contains a few needed changes in the law.  And it is
certainly true that many of the worst abuses of due process and civil
liberties that are now occurring are taking place under the color of laws
and executive orders other than the Patriot Act.

Nevertheless, I believe the Patriot Act has turned out to be, on balance,
a terrible mistake, and that it became a kind of Tonkin Gulf Resolution
conferring Congress' blessing for this President's assault on civil
liberties.  Therefore, I believe strongly that the few good features of
this law should be passed again in a new, smaller law - but that the
Patriot Act must be repealed.

As John Adams wrote in 1780, ours is a government of laws and not of men.
What is at stake today is that defining principle of our nation, and thus
the very nature of America.  As the Supreme Court has written, "Our
Constitution is a covenant running from the first generation of Americans
to us and then to future genera­tions." The Constitution includes no
wartime exception, though its Framers knew well the reality of war.  And,
as Justice Holmes reminded us shortly after World War I, the
Constitution's principles only have value if we apply them in the
difficult times as well as those where it matters less.

The question before us could be of no greater moment:  will we continue to
live as a people under the rule of law as embodied in our Constitution?
Or will we fail future generations, by leaving them a Constitution far
diminished from the charter of liberty we have inherited from our
forebears?  Our choice is clear.


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