Here's a different Wolf report: - continued
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as
"espionage'. Every closing society does this,
just as it elaborates laws that increasingly
criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand
the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When
Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York
Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush
called the Times' leaking of classified
information "disgraceful", while Republicans in
Congress called for Keller to be charged with
treason, and rightwing commentators and news
outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some
commentators, as Conason noted, reminded
readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat
that attack represented. It is also important
to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial
accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai
Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact,
executed. And it is important to remind
Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was
last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919
Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested
without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in
jail for up to five months, and "beaten,
starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened
with death", according to the historian Myra
MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were
"enemies of the people". National Socialists
called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most
Americans do not realise that since September
of last year - when Congress wrongly,
foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act
of 2006 - the president has the power to call
any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the
power to define what "enemy combatant" means.
The president can also delegate to anyone he
chooses in the executive branch the right to
define "enemy combatant" any way he or she
wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if
we turn out to be completely innocent of what
he has accused us of doing, he has the power to
have us seized as we are changing planes at
Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock
on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and
keep you or me in isolation, possibly for
months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged
isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers
psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy
prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an
isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every
satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most
brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually -
for now. But legal rights activists at the
Center for Constitutional Rights say that the
Bush administration is trying increasingly
aggressively to find ways to get around giving
even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant"
is a status offence - it is not even something
you have to have done. "We have absolutely
moved over into a preventive detention model -
you look like you could do something bad, you
might do something bad, so we're going to hold
you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No
wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it
is true. In every closing society, at a certain
point there are some high-profile arrests -
usually of opposition leaders, clergy and
journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After
those arrests, there are still newspapers,
courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a
civil society. There just isn't real dissent.
There just isn't freedom. If you look at
history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of
2007 gave the president new powers over the
national guard. This means that in a national
emergency - which the president now has
enhanced powers to declare - he can send
Michigan's militia to enforce a state of
emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over
the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney
Spears's meltdown and the question of who
fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times
editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing
recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws
that strike to the heart of American democracy
have been passed in the dead of night ...
Beyond actual insurrection, the president may
now use military troops as a domestic police
force in response to a natural disaster, a
disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the
Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to
restrain the federal government from using the
military for domestic law enforcement. The
Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill
encourages a president to declare federal
martial law. It also violates the very reason
the founders set up our system of government as
they did: having seen citizens bullied by a
monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified
of exactly this kind of concentration of
militias' power over American people in the
hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable
to the violent, total closing-down of the
system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome
or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our
democratic habits are too resilient, and our
military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our
experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a
fascist shift you see the profile of barbed
wire against the sky. In the early days, things
look normal on the surface; peasants were
celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in
1922; people were shopping and going to the
movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden
put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while
someone is being tortured, children are
skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with
their doggy life ... How everything turns away/
Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping
tuned to internet shopping and American Idol,
the foundations of democracy are being fatally
corroded. Something has changed profoundly that
weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic
traditions, independent judiciary and free
press do their work today in a context in which
we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without
end, on a battlefield described as the globe,
in a context that gives the president - without
US citizens realising it yet - the power over
US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding
under the foundation of all these still-
free-looking institutions - and this foundation
can give way under certain kinds of pressure.
To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another
attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The
executive can declare a state of emergency.
History shows that any leader, of any party,
will be tempted to maintain emergency powers
after the crisis has passed. With the gutting
of traditional checks and balances, we are no
less endangered by a President Hillary than by
a President Giuliani - because any executive
will be tempted to enforce his or her will
through edict rather than the arduous,
uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper
were charged with treason or espionage, as a
rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with
last year? What if he or she got 10 years in
jail? What would the newspapers look like the
next day? Judging from history, they would not
cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are
trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the
rest of us - staff at the Center for
Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats
for representing the detainees yet persisted
all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at
the American Civil Liberties Union; and
prominent conservatives trying to roll back the
corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new
group called the American Freedom Agenda. This
small, disparate collection of people needs
everybody's help, including that of Europeans
and others internationally who are willing to
put pressure on the administration because they
can see what a US unrestrained by real
democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what
ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the
"end of America" could come for each of us in a
different way, at a different moment; each of
us might have a different moment when we feel
forced to look back and think: that is how it
was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative,
executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ...
is the definition of tyranny," wrote James
Madison. We still have the choice to stop going
down this road; we can stand our ground and
fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of
Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
--
___
__________________________________________
Dr. John M. Bennett
Curator, Avant Writing Collection
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall
Columbus, OH 43210 USA
(614) 292-3029
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.johnmbennett.net
http://www.library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/avantwriting/
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