Published on Thursday, March 6, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
The Election That Might Not Happen by Betsy Hartmann
It’s springtime in American politics. It’s only early March, but there’s a
giddy, hopeful
feeling to this election season, a sense that new leader****p is
blossoming. We could have a
Democrat in the White House next year. But winter isn’t over yet and we
need to balance our hope
with a little fear. In 2000 Bush and Cheney stole the election in Florida.
In 2004 they played
dirty tricks in Ohio. In 2008 could they go one step further — and suspend
the election altogether?
The necessary architecture may already be in place. On May 4 last year,
the White House issued
the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, key
parts of which remain
classified and hence shrouded from public view. The directive outlines
procedures to respond to
a “catastrophic emergency,” defined broadly as “any incident, regardless
of location, that
results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption
severely affecting the
U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government
functions.” Of course
previous administrations also had emergency plans. But the Bush directive
transfers power from
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the White House, where
the Assistant to the
President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism is assigned the job
of “National Continuity
Coordinator”.
The unclassified part of the directive reveals little about who would have
the authority to
invoke emergency powers during a catastrophe. Nor does it refer to
existing laws, such as the
National Emergencies Act, that establish congressional checks on the
executive’s power to impose
martial law or other extraordinary measures. Its wording is ambiguous -
the directive shall be
implemented “consistent with applicable law,” without making clear which
laws are “applicable”.
“The Bush legal team has pushed a controversial theory that the
Constitution gives the president
an unwritten power to disobey laws at his own discretion to protect
national security,” writes
Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe. He quotes legal specialists who
describe the vagueness of
the new directive as “troubling”.
Also troubling is the Department of Homeland Security’s $385 million
contract awarded to
Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root in January 2006 to build
tem****ary detention
facilities. According to a Halliburton press release, the contract
provides for augmenting
existing immigration detention facilities in the event of “an emergency
influx of immigrants
into the U.S., or to sup****t the rapid development of new programs.” It
also includes the
development of a plan “to react to a national emergency, such as a
national disaster.”
Construction would commence only after an “emergency” is declared. While
immigrants appear to be
the main target, one cannot rule out the possibility that the detention
centers could be used as
holding pens for dissidents during a proclaimed emergency. Recent
crackdowns on illegal
immigrants have included military-style night raids on homes and
factories. Are we getting
softened up for the expansion of police state tactics?
But perhaps the most im****tant card the Bush administration holds in its
deck is a stacked
conservative majority on the Supreme Court. In 2000 the Court turned a
blind eye to the theft of
Al Gore’s electoral victory in Florida. Should we expect better today?
Just last month the Court
refused to review the ACLU’s legal challenge to the Bush administration’s
warrantless electronic
surveillance program. Can we depend on the Court to challenge emergency
rule and a suspension of
elections?
Even with this architecture in place, the Bush administration would need a
trigger to declare a
state of emergency. One can imagine several possible scenarios:
War with Iran - unfortunately, not so far-fetched. The National
Intelligence Estimate released
in December concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program back in
2003. But when have
Bush and Cheney ever based their foreign policy decisions on evidence?
Moreover, the most
im****tant reason they want to attack Iran is to control the flow of oil
through the Persian
Gulf, nukes or no nukes.
The assassination of a presidential candidate. Obama evokes memories of
JFK and Martin Luther
King. The bullet could come from a lone racist, a terrorist, or an agent
of a state. The threat
is real. The Secret Service knows it and so should we.
A terrorist strike, on the scale of 9/11 or worse. Again, not so
far-fetched. Bush and Cheney
have been Osama bin Laden’s greatest recruiters, making the U.S. appear to
be the enemy of
millions across the world. Al Qaeda may consider that regime change in the
U.S. is not in their
interest.
With the right spin, any of these events might be construed as a
“catastrophic emergency.”
These worst-case scenarios probably will not come to pass. We’ll probably
all be able to sleep
peacefully in our beds in the early hours of November 5, after watching
the election results on
TV. The value of worst-case scenarios lies not in their accurate
prediction of events, but
rather in what they tell us about the risks we face. We shouldn’t let hope
make us naïve. We
need to be alert, our vision razor-sharp. The price of liberty is eternal
vigilance. It could be
the price of elections, too. Let’s not count our spring flowers before
they bloom.
Betsy Hartmann’s latest book is the political thriller Deadly Election. A
longstanding activist
in the international women’s health movement, she lives in Amherst, MA
where she teaches and
directs the Population and Development Program at Hamp****re College. Her
other books include
Reproductive Rights and Wrongs and the novel The Truth About Fire about
neo-Nazis in the
American heartland. See www.BetsyHartmann.com.
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Finally, the campaigns of 1793 and 1794 set Clausewitz on the path of
recognizing war as a
political phenomenon. Wars, as everyone knew, were fought for a purpose
that was political,
or at least always had political consequences. Not as readily apparent
was the implication
that followed. If war was meant to achieve a political purpose, everything
that entered into
war — social and economic preparation, strategic planning, the conduct of
operations, the
use of violence on all levels — should be determined by this purpose, or
at least accord
with it. Even though soldiers had to acquire special expertise, and
function in what in some
respects was a separate world, it would be a denial of reality to allow
them to carry on
their bloody work undisturbed until an armistice brought their political
employer back into
the equation. Just as war and its institutions reflected their social
environment, so every
aspect of fighting should be suffused by its political impulse, whether
this impulse was
intense or moderate. The appropriate relation****p between politics and war
occupied
Clausewitz throughout his life, but even his earliest manuscripts and
letters show his
awareness of their interaction.
The ease with which this link — always acknowledged in the abstract —
can be forgotten in
specific cases, and Clausewitz’s insistence that it must never be
overlooked, are
illustrated by his polite rejection toward the end of his life of a
strategic problem set by
the chief of the Prussian General Staff, in which every military detail of
the opposing
sides was spelled out, but no mention made of their political purpose. To
a friend who had
sent him the problem for comment, Clausewitz replied that it was not
possible to draft a
sensible plan of operations without indicating the political condition of
the states
involved, and their relation****p to each other: ‘War is not an independent
phenomenon, but
the continuation of politics by different means. Consequently, the main
lines of every major
strategic plan are largely political in nature, and their political
character increases the
more the plan applies to the entire campaign and to the whole state. A war
plan results
directly from the political conditions of the two warring states, as well
as from their
relations to third powers. A plan of campaign results from the war plan,
and frequently - if
there is only one theater of operations - may even be identical with it.
But the political
element even enters the separate components of a campaign; rarely will it
be without
influence on such major episodes of warfare as a battle, etc. According to
this point of
view, there can be no question of a purely military evaluation of a great
strategic issue,
nor of a purely military scheme to solve it.’
Everyman’s Library, 1993 ISBN: 0679420436 On war /by Clausewitz, Carl
von, 1780-1831.
Knopf, 1993. From the introduction by Peter Paret, Pg7
_____________________________________________________________________
The U-2 is a jet-powered reconnaissance aircraft specially designed to fly
at high altitudes
(i.e., above 70,000 ft [21 km]). It was used during the late 1950s to
overfly the Soviet
Union, China, the Middle East, and Cuba; flights over the Soviet Union,
the primary mission
for which the plane was designed, ended in 1960 when a U-2 flown by CIA
pilot Gary Powers
was shot down over the Soviet Union. This event was a major political
embarrassment for the U.S.
http://www.espionageinfo.com/Te-Uk/U-2-Spy-Plane.html
Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev's reaction to the overflights which
were discovered
just before a summit conference in Paris with President Eisenhower: "It
was as though the
Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting" .
. ."How could
they count on us to give them a helping hand if we allowed ourselves to be
spat upon without
so much as a murmur of protest?" The only solution was to demand a formal
public apology
from Eisenhower and a guarantee that no more overflights would take place
. . .
But the apology Khrushchev was looking for would not come. Despite
having trespassed
on the Soviet Union for the past four years with scores of flights by both
U-2's and heavy
bombers, the old general still could not say the words, it was just not in
him. . . A time
bomb had exploded, prematurely ending the summit conference. . .
Back in Wa****ngton, the mood was glum. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee was
leaning toward holding a closed door investigation into the U-2 incident .
. . In public,
Eisenhower maintained a brave face. He "heartily approved" of the
congressional probe and
would 'of course fully cooperate,' he quickly told anyone who asked. But
in private he was
very troubled. For weeks he had tried to head off the investigation. His
major concern was
that his own personal involvement in the overflights would surface,
especially the May Day
disaster. Equally, he was very worried that details of the dangerous
bomber overflights
would leak out. The massed overflight may in fact, have been one of the
most dangerous
actions ever approved by a president.
pg. 51-55 ~Body of Secrets; Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security
Agency
James Bamford
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of
human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims,
have been born of
earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing, and for the time
being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does
nothing. If there is
no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and
yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want
rain without
thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may
be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did
and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to
and you have found
out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon
them, and these will
continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of
tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the
light of these
ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the
South so long as
they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either
moral or physical.
Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly
pay for all they
get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us,
we must pay for
their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and
if needs be, by our
lives and the lives of others."
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
Frederick Douglass, 1857
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http://www.politicsusaweb.com/
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