Running the Show

"Victory against al-Qaeda was in our grasp, and we were releasing the pressure" -- General Tommy Franks, CentCom Commander

Ever since September 11, 2001, we in 'the land of the free' and 'the home of the brave' have seen a steady assault on our liberties. Yet from the very beginning while the so-called "War on Terror" was being used to justify an unprecedented and unconstitutional expansion of executive power, the purported 'enemy' who must be be fought by 'all possible means' was being conveniently 'forgotten'.

"It took me a second to digest what he had told me. General Franks' mission in Afghanistan--which, as a good soldier, he was loyally carrying out--was being downgraded from a war to a manhunt. What's more, the most important tools for a manhunt, the Predators, had been redeployed to Iraq at the moment they were most needed in Afghanistan.

I was stunned. This was the first time I had been informed that the decision to go to war with Iraq had not only been made but was being implemented, to the substantial disadvantage of the war in Afghanistan.

Franks continued, "We can finish this job in Afghanistan if we are allowed to do so. And there is a set of terrorist targets after Afghanistan. My first priority would be Somalia--there is no effective government to control the large number of terrorist cells. Next, I would go to Yemen. Iraq is a special case. Our intelligence there is very unsatisfactory. Some Europeans know more than we on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction..." so writes former Senator Bob Graham in Intelligence Matters.

Now we learn that months before Sen. Graham the Chairman of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence had that conversation, General Franks was in Oxfordshire drawing up secret plans for the Iraq invasion with Britain's' RAF.

So who is really in charge of U.S. foreign policy? The Framers of the Constitution specifically vested in Congress the sole and exclusive authority to initiate military hostilities, including full-blown war, as well as lesser acts of armed force, on behalf of the American people. The constitutional grant to Congress of the war power, which Justice William Paterson described in United States v. Smith (1806) as "the exclusive province of Congress to change a state of peace into a state of war," constituted a sharp break from the British model.

Yet here was the general in charge of U.S. military command drawing up war plans with a foreign government without informing the Congress. To illustrate the extent to which the American people have seen their rights routinely abused and eroded since George W. Bush took office, now the Justice Dept in defending against suits charging civil violations feels bold enough to invoke 'states secrets privilege' in order to circumvent the courts and carry on more illegal surveillance and even the assassination of U.S. citizens without so much an indictment of treason.

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
-Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952

So much for the Constitution. Like the Magna Carta it will remain an inspiring document, the one that set the standard in places like Kenya. Here at home we have bravely surrendered the right to be ruled Law. Instead we are to be ruled by men and women, their secretive goals enforced without question -- and if the teabaggers get their way, perhaps one day soon, by a President Palin.