Benjamin Franklin said '....A Republic if you can keep it....'

Have we failed because of apathy, ignorance and propaganda?

Gregory D. Johnsen wrote, "Maybe it shouldn't be so surprising that Congress didn't think about how the war would end when it passed the AUMF on Sept. 14, 2001, but after more than a dozen years, we are no closer to an answer." (photo: unknown)

Required Reading

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

19 January 14

f you read nothing else this weekend, read Gregory Johnsen's somewhat epic performance on Buzzfeed about the original Authorization for the Use of Military Force that came out of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the permanent state of war that one 60-word sentence in that document created in the United States, a phenomenon that the Founders specifically and repeatedly warned against. (Johnsen is the recipient of first Michael Hastings Fellowship, named for the renowned journalist who died in an automobile accident last year.) If nothing else, the piece functions as a very loud warning siren against upending the rule of law and the separation of powers out of fear and panic. War, Mr. Madison cautioned, is "the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." We have traded his wisdom for the undying partisan hackery of apparatchiks like David Addington and John Yoo. It is not a good trade.

Unbound by time and unlimited by geography, the sentence has been stretched and expanded over the past decade, sprouting new meanings and interpretations as two successive administrations have each attempted to keep pace with an evolving threat while simultaneously maintaining the security of the homeland. In the process, what was initially thought to authorize force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan has now been used to justify operations in several countries across multiple continents and, at least theoretically, could allow the president - any president - to strike anywhere at anytime. What was written in a few days of fear has now come to govern years of action.

The piece goes on to illustrate with painful clarity a meek and timorous Congress, which had allowed so much of its constitutional war powers to leach into the executive over the previous five decades that most of its members had forgotten how to exercise them at all, let alone how to exercise them at a moment of national trauma. (One pissant aide to a forgettable schlub like Dennis Hastert gets to bulldoze past legitimate constitutional questions because we...must...do...something, and everybody acclaims him a hero.) Congress -- in the persons of Joe Biden and John Kerry, among others -- tries to cover its ass but ends up taking what everybody knows is a dive. And, after the dive, we see Yoo, who should have been kept away from the councils of government for the same reason we keep Charlie Manson out of the cutlery, immediately find a way to renege on a deal that had been cut with the Congress and expand the president's power beyond anything remotely conceived of in the Constitution.

Maybe it shouldn't be so surprising that Congress didn't think about how the war would end when it passed the AUMF on Sept. 14, 2001, but after more than a dozen years, we are no closer to an answer. "This is a bizarro war," Jack Goldsmith told me recently. A tenured law professor at Harvard who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, Goldsmith has written a pair of books on national security law. "What we don't see, we don't care about."

Read the whole thing and understand how we got to where we are today, when the president is going to deliver a speech about the NSA revelations, arguing for "reforms" in which there is no good reason to believe. Read the whole thing and see in it the seedbed for unlimited drone warfare and whatever comes after that, which undoubtedly will be worse. Read the whole thing and understand how Abu Ghraib happened and why Gitmo is still open. Read the whole thing and watch the relentless abandonment of self-government over the past 13 years. Read the whole thing and realize that we are no longer even the nation we pretend to be, Read the whole thing and realize how much the late Osama bin Laden actually won.

 

 

 

WE CAN’T AFFORD THE LUXURY OF FAILURE: When we said no to the corporations and the moneyed interests we canceled our “option to fail.” We finish our funding-drives because we must. In peace and solidarity. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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