Posted by rogerhollander in Criminal Justice, Torture.
Tags: aaon burr, Bush Doctrine, bush memos, constitution, constitutional rights, democracy, Dick Cheney, dictatorship, fifth amendment, first amendment, fourth amendment, fuhrer's law, George Bush, hitler, john yoo, jose padilla, Karl Rove, legal memos, michael ratner, mussolini, naomi wolf, police state, posse comitatus, presidential authority, roger hollander, secret memos, stalin, torture memo, treason, unreasonable searches seizures, veneer of legality, war on terror, warrantless wiretapping
Legal expert Michael Ratner calls the legal arguments made in the infamous Yoo memos, “Fuhrer’s law.”
By Naomi Wolf, AlterNet. Posted March 25, 2009.
In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo’s memos outlining the destruction of the republic.
The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.
It was as if Milton’s Satan had a law degree and was establishing within the borders of the United States the architecture of hell.
I thought this was — and is — certainly one of the biggest stories of our lifetime, making the petty burglary of Watergate — which scandalized the nation — seem like playground antics. It is newsworthy too with the groundswell of support for prosecutions of Bush/Cheney crimes and recent actions such as Canadian attorneys mobilizing to arrest Bush if he visits their country.
The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.
As a non-lawyer, was I completely off base in my reading of what this meant, I wondered? Was I hallucinating?
Astonished, I sought a reality check — and a formal legal read — from one of the nation’s top constitutional scholars (and most steadfast patriots), Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of defending the detainees and our own liberties.
Here is our conversation:
Naomi Wolf: Michael, can you explain to a layperson what the Yoo memos actually mean?’
Michael Ratner: What they mean is that your book looks moderate in respect to those issues now. This — what is in the memos — is law by fiat.
I call it “Fuhrer’s law.” What those memos lay out means the end of the system of checks and balances in this country. It means the end of the system in which the courts, legislature and executive each had a function and they could check each other.
What the memos set out is a system in which the president’s word is law, and Yoo is very clear about that: the president’s word is not only law according to these memos, but no law or constitutional right or treaty can restrict the president’s authority.
What Yoo says is that the president’s authority as commander in chief in the so-called war on terror is not bound by any law passed by Congress, any treaty, or the protections of free speech, due process and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The First, Fourth and Fifth amendments — gone.
What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the U.S. and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They — the military — can pick you or me up in the U.S. for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That’s the Fourth and Fifth amendments.)
The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances — a lawless state. Law by fiat.
Who has suspended the law this way in the past? It is like a Caesar’s law in Rome; a Mussolini’s law in Italy; a Fuhrer’s law in Germany; a Stalin’s law in the Soviet Union. It is right down the line. It is enforcing the will of the dictator through the military.
NW: The mainstream media have virtually ignored these revelations, though it seems to me this is the biggest news since Pearl Harbor.
MR: I think that’s right. We had a glimmering of the blueprint for some of this — when they picked up Jose Padilla, the military went to a prison and snatched an American citizen as if they had a perfect right to do so.
Now we can see that these memos laid the legal groundwork for such actions. We knew the military could do this to an individual. We did not know the plan was to eliminate First Amendment constitutional rights for the entire population.
NW: If Bush only wanted these powers in order to prosecute a war on terror, why does he need to suspend the First Amendment? Isn’t that the smoking gun of a larger intention toward the general population?
MR: Part of this plan was actually implemented: for instance, they tried to keep people like Padilla from getting to a magistrate. They engaged in the wiretapping, because according to these memos there was no Fourth Amendment.
They had to be planning some kind of a takeover of the United States to be saying they could simply abolish the First Amendment if the president believed it was necessary in the name of national security. It lays the groundwork for what could have been a massive military takeover of the United States.
Here they crept right up and actually implemented part of the plan, with Padilla, with the warrantless wiretapping. Yet they are saying in the White House and in Congress that it is looking backward to investigate the authors of these memos and those who instructed Yoo and others to write them.
But investigation and prosecutions are really looking forward — to say we need the deterrence of prosecution so this does not happen again.
NW: What about the deployment of three brigades in the U.S.? How should we read that?’
MR: With terrorism as less of a concern to many, but now with the economy in tatters there is a lot more militant activism in U.S. — the New School and NYU student takeovers, protests around the country and strikes are just the beginning. I think governments are now concerned over people’s activism, and people’s anger at their economic situation. I don’t think those brigades can be detached from the idea that there might well be a huge amount of direct-action protest in the U.S.
There could have also been a closer election that could have been stolen easily and then a huge protest. Those troops would have been used to enforce the will of the cabal stealing the election.
NW: As a layperson, I don’t fully understand what powers the memos actually manifest. Are they theoretical or not just theoretical? What power did the memos actually give Bush?
MR: They were probably, in fact almost for sure, written in cahoots with the administration — [Karl] Rove, [Dick] Cheney — to give them legal backing for what they planned or wanted to carry out.
What I assume happened here is people like Cheney or his aides go to the Office of Legal Counsel and say, “We are going to need legal backing, to give a face of legality to what we are doing and what we are planning.” When the president then signs a piece of paper that says, “OK, military, go get Jose Padilla,” these memos give that order a veneer of legality.
If you are familiar with the history of dictators, coups and fascism (as I know you are), they (the planners) prefer a veneer of legality. Hitler killed 6 million Jews with a veneer of legality — getting his dictatorial powers through the Reichstag and the courts.
These memos gave the Bush administration’s [lawless] practices the veneer of legality.
NW: So are you saying that these memos actually created a police state that we did not know about?
MR: If you look at police state as various strands of lawlessness, we knew about some of this lawlessness even before this latest set of memos.
But the memos revealed how massive the takeover of our democracy was to be — that this wasn’t just going to be a few individuals here or there who suffered the arrows of a police state.
These memos lay the groundwork for a massive military takeover of the United States in cahoots with the president. And if that’s not a coup d’etat then, nothing is.
NW: Can I ask something? I keep thinking about the notion of treason. In America now, people tend to read the definition of treason in the Constitution as if they are thinking of a Tokyo Rose or an American citizen acting as an agent for an enemy state — very much a World War II experience of the traitor to one’s country.
But I’ve been reading a lot of 16th and 17th century history, and it seems to me that the founders were thinking more along the lines of English treason of that era — small groups of Englishmen, usually nobility, who formed cabals and conspired with one another to buy or recruit militias to overthrow the crown or Parliament.
The notion that a group might conspire in secret to overthrow the government is not a wild, marginal concept, it is a substantial part of European, and especially British, Renaissance and Reformation-era history and would have been very much alive in the minds of the Enlightenment-era founders. (I just visited the Tower of London where this was so frequent a charge against groups of English subjects that there is a designated Traitor’s Gate.)
So clearly you don’t have to act on behalf of another state to commit treason. The Constitution defines it as levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. It says nothing about the enemy having to be another state.
When the Constitution was drafted, the phrase “United States” barely referred to a singular country; it referred to a new federation of many united states. They imagined militias rising up against various states; it was not necessarily nation against nation.
Surely, when we have evidence Bush prepared the way to allow the military to imprison or shoot civilians in the various states and created law to put his own troops over the authority of the governors and the national guard of the various states, and when the military were sent to terrorize protesters in St. Paul, [Minn.], Bush was levying war in this sense against the united states?
Hasn’t Bush actually levied war against Minnesota? And if our leaders and military are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, and there is clear evidence now that Bush and his cabal intended to do away with it, are they not our enemies and giving aid and comfort to our enemies? Again, “enemy” does not seem to me to be defined in the Constitution as another sovereign state.
MR: You are right. Treason need not involve another state. Aaron Burr was tried for treason. I do think that a plan to control the military, use it in the United States contrary to law and the Constitution and employ it to levy a war or takeover that eliminates the democratic institutions of the country constitutes treason, even if done under the president of the United States.
The authority given by these memos that could be used to raid every congressional office, raid and search every home, detain tens of thousands, would certainly fit a definition of treason.
This would be the president making war against the institutions of the United States.
Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007).
Posted by rogerhollander in Europe.
Tags: clerical fascism, democracy, eluana englaro, euthanasia, geoff andrews, giorgio napolitano, italian communist party, italy, italy fascism, italy neo-fascism, mussolini, pieo paolo pasolini, Pope benedict, roger hollander, Roman Catholic Church, Silvio Berlusconi, Vatican
The political use of a medical tragedy is the latest episode in Italy’s alarming regression, says Geoff Andrews.
The death of a young woman after seventeen years in a coma, following a decision by doctors on legal advice not to continue feeding her, is a public as well as a private event. In a mature democratic society, it would merit dignified ethical debate of a kind that might be expected to balance differing views and cut across party-political boundaries.
Italy, however, is different. The country is at present dominated by intolerant public discourses and veering towards authoritarian solutions; in this febrile atmosphere, such an event threatens to become a serious constitutional crisis. As the prime minister blames the president of the republic for the young woman’s death, and as leading politicians and Vatican representatives indulge in feverish rhetoric and stoke paranoia, what Pier Paolo Pasolini once called “clerical fascism” feels like apt social critique (see “The life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini“, 1 November 2005).
Eluana Englaro was just 21 when she fell into a coma in January 1992 after a car accident. Her father and her friends always testified that her wish would have been to end her life rather than prolong it in a vegetative state. In November 2008, the court of cassation ruled that her feeding-tubes could be removed. On 3 February 2009 she was transferred to a clinic in Udine, northeast Italy, where she died on 9 February. Her father, Beppino, who is also currently nursing his seriously ill wife, was relieved that this particular journey had come to an end; he asked to be left alone in his grief.
In contemporary Italy, this proved a vain hope. The prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is as populist and opportunist as ever; he has used the occasion to refuel his political ambitions, revealing in the process his contempt for the rule of law and constitutional processes. The Vatican has exploited the case to reinforce its conservative agenda, castigating the voices of liberal and secular opinion.
Berlusconi had attempted to pass an emergency decree instructing doctors to continue feeding Englaro. The president of the republic, Giorgio Napolitano, rejected this; he asked that the law be respected and that changes to the legal and constitutional process could not be amended in such an arbitrary way and needed full consideration and the consent of both chambers of parliament.
Berlusconi and his allies responded by turning their fire on Napolitano for the president’s “serious mistake”, as well as on the judges for their temerity in upholding and protecting constitutional procedures. The prime minister attempted to rush through a new law that could be used to keep Eluana Englaro alive, something rendered null by the young woman’s death. There followed uproar in the Italian parliament, with right-wing politicians shouting “murderers” at the opposition; Berlusconi fed the pack by accusing the president of responsibility for her death.
The pope’s battalion
Pope Benedict XVI also entered the fray. Since his election in 2005, the pope has advanced a very traditional Catholic doctrine, condemning many features of modern living; free unions and trial marriages were the result of “anarchic freedoms” and “moral relativism”, while homosexuality was “an intrinsic moral evil”. His time in office has been marked with a series of controversial acts that have alienated a host of constituencies – the lecture at Regensburg in September 2006; the planned speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University in January 2008, which was cancelled after protests over comments made in 1990 about the trial of Galileo in 1633; criticism of Barack Obama for his views on abortion; and most recently the astonishing rehabilitation of four ultra-conservative bishops, including a holocaust-denier (see Maurice Walsh, “The Vatican’s debacle“, 16 February 2009).
In the Englaro case, the Vatican has revealed its full force as an unrestrained power with little respect for constitutional procedures or individual liberty. The pope’s spokesmen whipped up such frenzy in the wake of Englaro’s death that her funeral shrine was turned into a site of moral outrage directed towards those who had followed Italian law and her father’s wishes. “May the Lord embrace and forgive those who brought her to this point”, as Javier Lozano Barragan, the Vatican’s equivalent of health minister, put it.
Berlusconi had not previously shown much interest in defending Catholic morality, and indeed his multiple private interests have not always met with Vatican approval. However many believe his interventions reflect his ambition to assume the presidency at a later date. His hostility to Napolitano is not a surprise: he always opposed the latter’s election as head of state. But his rapprochement with the Vatican is a truly unholy alliance (see “Death in Udine“, Economist, 12 February 2009).
A dark return
Indeed, the alliance between the Vatican and Silvio Berlusconi reveals an older, threatening undercurrent in Italian politics. This is characterised by the arrogance of power and an unyielding belief that there are higher values capable of rendering liberal constitutional norms and democratic procedures irrelevant (see Sarah Pozzoli, “Who rules Italy?” 23 June 2005).
In recent times there seems to be a growing convergence between Berlusconi’s attacks on legality and constitutionalism and the Vatican’s hostility to secular society. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s stark description of the way in which the Vatican provided the legitimacy for the Christian Democrats’ (DC) long and manipulative hold on power and repression of dissident voices has acquired fresh relevance, even if the DC is no more.
Both Berlusconi and the Vatican have significant interests to defend. For the Vatican it is a declining authority over its subjects – opinion polls show that even many lay Catholics regard the Englaro affair as a private family matter. The Vatican has in the past been prepared to make dubious compromises in order to preserve its interests and power; the 1929 concordat with fascism is an example.
For Berlusconi, it is a further opportunity to berate and subdue his critics. Martin Jacques has compared him to Benito Mussolini – both have displayed a similar contempt for democracy, used parliament to protect their own interests, manipulated laws and attacks on anyone who got in their way (see “New Labour must recognise that Berlusconi is the devil“, Guardian, 16 March 2006). In the recent controversy, the links with the Vatican has provided legitimacy for the shift towards authoritarianism and intolerance, further apparent in the increasing restrictions on immigration and the demand that doctors and other public-sector professionals report anyone they suspect is an illegal immigrant.
Against the tide
Italy’s creeping fascism has been aided by the opposition’s disarray. The new Democratic Party should be well placed to defend the integrity of the constitution, the supremacy of the rule of law and transparent democracy. Yet even the conviction on 17 February 2009 of the British tax lawyer David Mills for giving false evidence in return for a payment from Berlusconi seems to leave the prime minister himself untarnished, and the opposition unable to persuade the electorate of the dangers he poses – even if the fact that Berlusconi changed the law to avoid prosecution while he remains in office makes his opponents’ job harder.
The Democratic Party leader, Walter Veltroni, may have made constant favourable references to Barack Obama and aspired to create a modern European social-democratic movement. But the rhetoric cannot disguise the reality of a top-down party led by sectional interests, which is disabled by the contradiction between its Christian-democratic conservatism and its ambitions to escape from the old left. This “phantom opposition” has wasted the hopes it once raised, an outcome that has culminated in Veltroni’s announcement of his resignation on the evening of 17 February 2009 after an embarrassing election defeat in Sardinia.
At least the “old left”, in the form of the Italian Communist Party, sustained a strong defence of Italy’s anti-fascist tradition embodied in the post-war constitution. It is a mark of Italy’s decline that in the current dispute it has been the “post-fascist” speaker of the Italian lower house, Gianfranco Fini, and the leader of the secessionist Northern League, Umberto Bossi, who have intervened to defend the “integrity” of the constitution.
Those democratic parliamentarians able to offer a coherent and stringent defence of the Italian constitution have been reduced to a declining minority of dissenters. They include Italy’s former president, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro; Giorgio Napolitano himself, an aged dignitary who in his later years has assumed the role of a beleaguered representative of the anti-fascist constitution, and Antonio Di Pietro, the reforming judge whose earlier attempts to clean up Italian politics in the early 1990s have been largely forgotten by the Italian public and is generally regarded with disdain by Italy’s political class. But these in any case are marginalised voices in what is becoming a decayed and intolerant state.
roger hollander 
The Forgotten Fight Against Fascism June 15, 2014
Posted by rogerhollander in History, Imperialism, Nazi / Fascist, War.Tags: anti-fascist, ethiopia, fascism, Franco, haile selassie, history, hitler, lincoln brigade, mussolini, nazi, oliver law, roger hollander, Spanish Civil War, william loren katz, world war II
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Roger’s note: When we think of fascism we think of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. But fascism, as defined functionally, is when the state is indistinguishable from corporate capital. Such was the case in both Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. Under these conditions, individual rights and civil liberties and imperial war mongering inevitably follow, with their accompanying brutality and bloodshed. When we look at the United States today we see corporate capital more and more every day in control of the three branches of government, and what else to we see? We see torture, police state violence against peaceful protest, the loss of habeas corpus, uncontrollable government spying, and gross violations of both the constitution and the Geneva Conventions (drone missiles, torture, targeting of civilian populations [US supported Israel vs. the Palestinians], presidential assassination lists, indefinite detention, indiscriminate bombing, undeclared wars, etc.).
I happen to be reading at the moment, William Shirer’s classic “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” What we see in the 1930s are the capitalist democracies, principally England and France, not simply appeasing Hitler, but in fact by their cowardice and narrow self interest, actually enabling Hitler. By the time the Allies got their act together to confront Hitler, he had already armed Germany and moved into the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Soviets early on had been pushing England and France to form an alliance to stop Hitler, but they declined and were more afraid of being infected with Bolshevism.
I believe that the struggle today is not narrowly against terrorism or Islamic extremism, but rather the same fight against fascism. This article gives us some historical perspective on that fight.
In late 1944 as a high school senior I rushed off to a U.S. Navy recruiting station ready to take on world fascism. Cooler heads insisted I wait until my graduation in June. After boot camp I served in “The Pacific Theater”—Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hawaii, Saipan, Japan, and the China Sea.
From Hitler’s rise to power, the governments of England and France, with the United States following their lead, never tried to prevent, slow, or even warn of the fascist danger. They started by greeting Japan’s attack on Manchuria with disapproving noises, and continued to trade with Japan. It was a prelude to Japan’s 1937 invasion of China.
Mussolini, seeking an “Italian Empire” in Africa, threw his army and air force against Ethiopia in October 1935. Fascist planes bombed and dropped poison gas on villages. Emperor Haile Selassie turned to the League of Nations and speaking in his native Amharic described fascist air and chemical attacks on a people “without arms, without resources.” “Collective security,” he insisted, “is the very existence of the League of Nations,” and warned “international morality” is “at stake.” When Selassie said, “God and history will remember your judgment,” governments shrugged.
However, in the midst of a worldwide “Great Depression,” citizens in the distant United States were aroused to help Ethiopia. Black men trained for military action—an estimated 8,000 in Chicago, 5,000 in Detroit, 2,000 in Kansas City. In New York City, where a thousand men drilled, nurse Salaria Kea of Harlem Hospital collected funds that sent a 75-bed hospital and two tons of medical supplies to Ethiopia. W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson addressed a “Harlem League Against War and Fascism” rally and A. Philip Randolph linked Mussolini’s invasion to “the terrible repression of black people in the United States.” A people’s march for Ethiopia in Harlem drew 25,000 African Americans and anti-fascist Italian Americans.
In Chicago on Aug. 31, 1935, as the fascist noose on Ethiopia tightened, Oliver Law, a black Communist from Texas, organized a protest rally in defiance of a ban by Mayor Edward J. Kelly. Ten thousand people gathered and so did 2,000 police. Law began to speak from a rooftop, and was arrested. Then one speaker after another appeared on different rooftops, to shout their anti-fascist messages, and all six were arrested.
In July 1936 pro-fascist Francisco Franco and other Spanish generals in Morocco launched a military coup against Spain’s new Republican “Popular Front” government. By early August, Hitler and Mussolini provided vital assistance. In the world’s first airlift, Nazi Germany dispatched 40 Luftwaffe Junker and transport planes to ferry Franco’s army from Morocco to Seville, Spain. Italy’s fleet in the Mediterranean sank ships carrying aid or volunteers to Republican Spain, and 50,000 to 100,000 Italian fascist troops began to arrive in Spain. Hitler and Mussolini had internationalized a civil war—and revealed fascism’s global intentions.
But one of the first lessons learned from Spain was fascist aggressors had nothing to fear from the Western democracies. The Luftwaffe destroyed cities such as Gernika in the Basque region of Spain, and Nazi gestapo agents interrogated Republican prisoners. But English and French officials, and their wealthy corporations with financial ties to Nazi Germany, greeted the fascist march with a shrug, quiet appreciation, or offers of cooperation. In England, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin prodded Germany and Italy to march east toward the Soviet Union. The British ambassador to Spain told the U.S. ambassador, “I hope they send in enough Germans to finish the war.”
The Nazi Luftwaffe overhead, Franco’s legions rolled toward Madrid and Franco expected a fast victory. But at the gates of Madrid everything changed. Under the slogan “They shall not pass,” members of unions and political and citizen groups formed military units and headed toward the front carrying lunch and a rifle. Madrid’s women, wearing pants and carrying rifles, took part in early skirmishes. Other women ran the first quartermaster corps.
By November the volunteer rush became a torrent: An estimated 40,000 men and women from 53 nations left home to defend the Republic. For the only time in history, a volunteer force of men and women from all over the world came together to fight for an ideal: democracy. The volunteers brought a message that ordinary people could resist fascist militarism.
Though most volunteers had little military experience, they hoped their commitment, courage, and sacrifice would persuade the democratic governments to unite against the fascist march, and head off a new world war.
But the Western governments ignored Spain’s plea for “collective security.” And some countries outlawed travel to Spain. France closed its border to Spain so volunteers faced arrest and had to scale the Pyrenees at night. England formed a Non-Intervention Committee of 26 nations that blocked aid to the Republican government, but not to Franco’s rebels.
U.S. policy followed England and France. The United States stamped passports “Not Valid for Spain.” The State Department tried to prevent medical supplies and doctors from reaching Spain. The Texas Oil Company sent almost 2 million tons of oil, most of Franco’s oil needs. Four-fifths of rebel trucks came from Ford, General Motors, and Studebaker. U.S. media outlets, isolationist and wealthy groups, and the Catholic Church cheered Franco’s fight against “Godless Communism.”
In a time of massive unemployment, lynching, segregation, and discrimination, 90 of the volunteers were African American. “Ethiopia and Spain are our fight,” said James Yates, who fled Mississippi. The United States had only five licensed African American pilots, and two came to join the Republic’s tiny air force (one brought down two German and three Italian planes).
Most of the African American volunteers had marched with white radicals to protest lynching, segregation, and racism, and to demand relief and jobs during the Great Depression. These men and women of color—one was nurse Salaria Kea—formed the first integrated U.S. army. Oliver Law became an early commander of the Lincoln Brigade.
What is remembered as World War II began the next year in 1939, when Germany attacked Poland. It would take a massive, multinational effort to defeat Hitler, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan, and cost tens of millions of lives.
In 1945, world fascism was finally defeated. But for a crucial decade the democracies did not oppose and often emboldened the fascist advance into Manchuria and China, Ethiopia and Spain. But students today don’t learn this. Instead, texts present World War II as an inevitability and the Allies as anti-fascists and saviors of democracy. A fuller history of the failure of the United States to fight fascism at its outset—and even its multifaceted support of fascism—would help students rethink this supposed inevitability. Today’s students deserve more than a few textbook paragraphs describing the fight against fascism before 1939 while the governments of the United States, England, and France encouraged its aggressions.
William Loren Katz is the author of Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage and forty other books. His website is: www.williamlkatz.com