Letters at 3AM

Illustration By Jason Stout

In July a New York Times/CBS poll revealed that 45% of Americans thought "other people are really running the government." An equal number thought "that the president was in charge." New corporate scandals hit the news every day, Congress scrambled to pass laws to keep big business honest, stocks gyrated wildly, and retirement funds took a bad beating. In that poll, "two-thirds of all respondents, and slightly more than half of Republicans, said business interests had too much influence on the Republican Party." They thought Democrats were only slightly less influenced. A July 20 New York Times headline ran: "GOP Lawmakers Bolt Bush's Herd -- Many Skittish Over Economy as Midterm Elections Near." Bush was unavailable for comment.

Though he denied it publicly (at the time), his attention was on Iraq -- and has been all year. Since January, his administration has stocked massive oil reserves; he doesn't want long lines at the gas pumps when his attack on Iraq cuts off our Mideast pipeline. On July 30 The New York Times noted this incredible figure: "United States acquisitions for the reserve were accounting for more than half of the growth in demand for oil this year." There have also been many reports of Bush quietly amassing soldiers and materiel in the Mideast in readiness to attack Iraq, as well as plans to call up 15,000 reservists. Of course, White House cronies in the defense industry are profiting handily -- Halliburton, for instance, whose former CEO was Dick Cheney. The New York Times, July 13: "From building cells for detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to feeding American troops in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon is increasingly relying on a unit of Halliburton ... The contract [that Halliburton] recently won from the Army is for 10 years and has no lid on costs, the only logistical arrangement by the Army without an estimated cost ... (Meanwhile, thousands of Halliburton retirees' benefits were cut severely as a direct result of Cheney's decisions as CEO -- though Cheney, as has been well-documented, left Halliburton with millions in his bank account).

A co-priority with war on Iraq is Bush's "restructuring" of American democracy. On July 13 John Ashcroft's Justice Department resisted any oversight by both House and Senate judiciary committees regarding new powers given Ashcroft by last October's passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. (Many Congressmen who voted for it now admit they never read it!) Ashcroft was scheduled to appear at a hearing; he canceled. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, complained that Ashcroft was stonewalling. The matter has yet to be addressed again.

The next day The Los Angeles Times reported that "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is pushing a series of sweeping proposals that would weaken congressional oversight ... They include allowing the Pentagon to send its initiatives directly to Capitol Hill before other agencies could review them. Once there, the legislation would require Congress to vote quickly, with only limited debate ..." On the same day, Bush proposed "domestic security" measures that for the first time would allow the military to perform law-enforcement functions within the United States. Bush also insisted that Homeland Security have broad powers to "redirect" millions of dollars to projects "without Congressional approval" -- a proposal that flatly contradicts the intent and letter of the Constitution, which gives Congress sole control of the government's purse-strings.

In short: While the economy was reeling, Bush was relentlessly concentrating on a subversion of the American process that would drastically curtail citizen control of the executive branch and the military. For Bush, our economic difficulties are no more than a handy smokescreen.

In August the man went on vacation. A little worried that we'd think he wasn't paying attention to the economy, Bush left his Crawford ranch just long enough to attend a bogus economic conference in nearby Waco, at which he stated: "I think one of the things you'll hear is that even though times are kind of tough right now, that we're America." Stocks plunged again. His father's most trusted advisers -- Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and others -- began a chorus of statements telling Sonny to slow down on Iraq. (If they're nervous, we should be very nervous.) Vice-President Cheney began a series of bellicose declarations that Secretary of State Colin Powell contradicted. And a few courageous federal judges questioned the White House's unconstitutional arrests and detentions since the September 11 attacks. Judge Gladys Kessler bravely stated what should be obvious to all: "Secret arrests are a concept odious to a democratic society." In an astonishing defiance of law, the Justice Department (which is supposed to enforce our laws) refused to abide by the judge's orders. In a similar case, Federal Judge Robert G. Doumar stated: "This case appears to be the first in American jurisprudence where an American citizen is being held incommunicado and subjected to an indefinite detention in the continental United States without charges, without any findings by a military tribunal, and without access to a lawyer." Doumar added: "Is this what we're fighting for?" Incredibly, President Bush deemed none of this important enough to merit a direct response.

On Sept. 1 a White House spokesman insisted that Bush hadn't made up his mind to invade Iraq -- though Bush had recently addressed an audience of soldiers, saying that he welcomed Congressional input on Iraq but "I won't change my mind." On Sept. 3, the usually articulate Colin Powell was reduced to incoherence: "I have been on the wire pretty constantly for the last week talking to all of our friends, making sure I understand their point of view, making sure they know where the president is. It's not where some people say where the president is, or people who are not even in the government who claim to know where the president is. The president hasn't decided yet where he is."

Rumsfeld took incoherence further on Sept. 7: "We know of certain knowledge that we know these things -- we know them. We also know there's a category of things we don't know." And: "Inspections [of Iraq] would have to be sufficiently intrusive that one could come away and have confidence that you could say yes -- you see, the purpose is not inspections, the purpose is disarmament. So, the question would -- would -- is there such a thing as an inspection regime that would be sufficiently intrusive, and how -- what would it look like ... Anyone's guess is as good as anyone else." [sic] Cheney chimed in: "Who did the anthrax attack last fall? We don't know. I don't know who did it. I'm not here to speculate on or to suggest that he [Saddam Hussein] did. My point is that it's the nature of terrorist attacks, of these unconventional warfare methods, that it's very hard sometimes to identify who is responsible, who is the source." Again incredibly, this was one of his arguments for attacking Iraq. (At the bottom of The New York Times front page that day is an item that would have been headline news if all this war chaos hadn't obscured it: "Almost three million people nationwide have been out of work for at least 15 weeks, up more than 50% from a year ago. Half of them have not worked in at least 6 months.")

Incoherence is catching. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., on why he wants an independent commission to investigate our September 11 intelligence failures: "I think America, and we're part of America, we want the best security we can have for ourselves ... We never had, ever in this country, a police state, and I don't know, gosh, I hope we never have."

Gosh. I write this in the wee hours of September 11, 2002. I could have filled three times my allotted space with more contradictory, chaotic, incoherent items. The nation is adrift, but the administration isn't. Economic havoc plays into Bush's purpose; most Americans are preoccupied with just trying to hang on, and can't be bothered with government obfuscations. The White House is intent on totalitarian measures and war; it employs incoherence because it cannot speak plainly of its machinations. The news media is reduced to making the best of statements that, intentionally, make no sense. An analysis of nonsense produces only more nonsense. The public has nothing but nonsense to go on. It scratches its head and waits, passive and inarticulate. It isn't that the rules are changing; it's that there are no rules anymore. The checks and balances that are the foundation of American government exist now only on paper. We're halfway down the vortex, and nothing but a UFO landing in the Rose Garden -- or a groundswell of public outcry -- will check our descent into the maelstrom.