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Misuse of Power: How the far right got control of our government, how they have misused their power, and how to get out of this mess we’re in

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Ed Asner

This article is based on a talk presented December, 19, 2005, to the Palm Beach, Florida, Democratic Club. It draws on the book, Misuse of Power, by Ed Asner and Burt Hall.

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In the 90s the far right refused to accept the results of our free democratic elections and declared war on the Clinton presidency. They used dirty politics in every imaginable way to subvert his Administration and strengthen their position for the next election. Dirty politics ranged from unethical and illegal practices to violations of our Constitution. They included a series of worthless but distracting investigations that wasted $100 million, and Clinton’s illegitimate impeachment. In a failed effort to drive the President from office, Tom DeLay blocked censure and railroaded the impeachment, using blackmail to get the necessary votes.

So, your butterfly ballot and the Supreme Court were not the only culprits. A decade of dirty politics won the day, and the far right finally got control of our government in 2001. As someone recently said, the right wing took over the West Wing.

Since then, the far right has put this country on a destructive path, and we are in serious trouble across the board. You name the issue -- national security, energy, the environment -- and we’re in big trouble. Unfortunately, our democracy is in big trouble, too.

World opinion on America has changed from great admiration to almost universal dislike and distrust, and there’s been a gradual decline in our superpower status. Mismanagement of the nation’s resources has piled up a crushing debt for future generations. Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan says we have (quote) “lost control” of the budget deficit. Your grandchildren and their children will be in hock up to their ears.

During the 5-year Republican reign we’ve experienced two unnatural disasters – 9/11 and a war. Let me emphasize that, not one, but both were preventable.

We might easily have been spared 9/11, if the President had heeded expert advice and made terrorism one of his highest priorities -- as the previous Administration had done.

Outgoing President Clinton and top-level government experts warned incoming President Bush that al-Qaeda would be his “greatest” and “gravest” threat. In the spring Bush continued to receive serious warnings, including an important one from a bipartisan commission on national security. By summer, dire warnings of an impending attack had reached unprecedented levels. Some of them (from Russia, Germany, Great Britain, Jordan and Afghanistan) even specified the exact method of attack -- using hijacked aircraft as weapons.

Let me put you on the spot. What would you do, as Commander-in-Chief, if you had heard a steady drumbeat of warnings like: multiple bin Laden attacks will deal a severe blow to U.S.; Arab TV reports U.S. will witness important surprises; attacks of catastrophic proportions expected and will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties; attacks will be on calamitous level and will cause world to be in turmoil; something very, very, very big is about to happen. In addition, your CIA Director tells you his system is blinking red and repeatedly warns of a significant attack in the near future. Would you have stayed in Washington and tried to prevent the predicted hijackings or would you have done nothing and gone on a long vacation -- as the President did?

The 9/11 hijackers would have faced great difficulty if the President had simply convened a cabinet meeting to require protection of commercial aircraft – just that one simple thing.

To get a picture of Bush’s interest at the time, look at the attitudes and priorities of the people reporting directly to him. National Security Advisor Rice was scheduled to give a speech on Sept. 11, 2001, focusing on the threats of tomorrow. The speech promoted missile defense. There was not a single word about bin Laden or al-Qaeda, although these two had been mentioned as threats in 40 CIA briefings to the President. The Secretary of Defense was A.W.O.L. at the time. He still had not filled his key position on terrorism and acknowledged that he was focused on other issues. The Joint Chiefs reported they had not been asked to furnish military options. As discussed in our book, the Vice-President and U.S. Attorney General were similarly disinterested.

We omit the White House Chief of counter-terrorism because, although frantic with concern, he no longer reported to the President -- he had been demoted.

Following the catastrophe, the White House used every means at its disposal to first block and then stonewall the 9/11 Commission investigation. Would you like to guess why?

Totaling missing from the 9/11 Commission report were any findings on the White House, its priorities or presidential leadership. Because of the approaching presidential election, the Commission feared that a partisan fight, already underway within their ranks, would get out of control and destroy the unity required for acceptance of their report.

The Commission did conclude that federal agencies never mobilized a response, got direction or had a plan. And, the public was not warned. But, the Commission did not assess responsibility for these failures. Instead, the Commission allowed federal operating agencies to assume the entire blame. The opportunity for real accountability may have ended with the 9/11 Commission report.

Why didn’t the President respond to the worst possible threats in decades and give the public a heads-up on the attack? We don’t really know, because the 9/11 Commission didn’t pursue the matter in their report. The most likely reasons are the Administration’s preoccupation with their new far-right agenda and fear – fear that public concern over possible terrorist attacks would sink an already sagging economy and endanger Bush’s reelection.

By allowing politics to influence its report, the Commission permitted Bush to campaign on the grounds that only he could keep our country safe -- although he certainly had not. He was reelected, using Ground Zero for his Republican convention and 3000 dead as his major platform.

There is no question that fixing airline vulnerabilities -- such as passenger screening and cockpit doors -- was the only reasonable and prudent thing to do under the circumstances. What we really needed was the kind of presidential leadership that worked during the turn-of-the-century threats. There also is no question that if the Commission had done its job properly, their report might have swung the election -- and we would have a different president today.

The needless war in Iraq has been costly in human and financial terms, and has weakened our national security. Our international reputation is in shambles. Diverting our military power from a high-level threat to a non-existent one surely will come back to haunt us.

A case can be made that the Administration exerted undue pressure on the intelligence community, cherry-picked intelligence favoring war and dramatized it to frighten Congress and the American people. In addition, as you will see, more solid information became available before the invasion -- and the Administration chose to ignore it.

Most of the public probably does not realize that as early as December 2001 Bush began reviewing military plans for a war in Iraq. In the spring of 2002, he sent his CIA Director with some operatives to northern Iraq to lay the groundwork for invasion. By mid 2002, the inevitability of Bush’s war became clear in the now famous British Downing Street memo.
The critical issue is did the Bush Administration use bad and inconclusive information to mislead the nation into war? The answer is yes. Administration policy drove the intelligence submitted to Congress that fall.

One senior CIA official put it this way. “Information not consistent with the Administration agenda was discarded and information that was {consistent} was not seriously scrutinized.” The CIA Ombudsman told Congress that the Administration’s “hammering” was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency. The former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman (your Sen. Bob Graham) says the Administration suppressed internal disagreement and then exaggerated the threat. Incidentally, he was wise enough to vote against the war.

The White House knew only too well that intelligence assessments are traditionally “estimates.” They are quite often qualified, inherently uncertain and subject to independent verification. In the case of Iraq, a number of U.S. intelligence assessments were being challenged within our own government and by the inspectors in Iraq.

For example, in a secret session of Congress Vice-President Cheney told the Senate that Iraq had unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering biological weapons to our coastal cities – a scary thought! Our own Air Force and inspectors in Iraq, however, disagreed with the assessment, but Cheney did not share that information with Congress. Instead, the President and Vice-President consistently presented intelligence to the public and Congress as absolute fact. In so doing, they misled the American people by dropping the dissents, caveats and other expressions of uncertainty from their public statements.

At the very least, the Administration should have let international inspectors finish their work and check out the dissents and caveats. Unfortunately, Bush’s premature invasion put the inspectors out of business. These inspectors had already reported no evidence of a nuclear program and were disproving other U.S. data on biological and chemical weapons. They wanted more time, but Bush was too anxious to go to war.

It is interesting to note that, after chief UN nuclear inspector, El Baradei, reported no evidence of a nuclear program, the Bush Administration tried to prevent his reappointment. Their efforts failed, and recently he received a Nobel Prize for his work in the nuclear field.

Aside from misusing faulty intelligence, the President and Vice-President continually misled the public and Congress into believing that Saddam had some connection with 9/11. They spoke as if they actually knew about the connection. In truth, the CIA repeatedly told the White House that there was no support for this proposition, and so, our two top elected officials have no one to blame but themselves.

Let’s be clear, the President had no informed consensus or authority from Congress and the American people to invest 500 billion dollars and thousands of precious lives in promoting democracy in the Mideast. As described in our book, there were better ways than going to war, and the President chose the wrong way to spread freedom.

I’m sure you’ve heard many of Bush’s other post-war justifications -- like Congress had access to the same intelligence data that he did. By virtue of his role as Commander-in-Chief, the President had access to a far greater volume of intelligence and to more sensitive information, including sources and methods. In this case, Congress only got a summarized, sanitized version without all the dissents and caveats.

The President also contends that the whole world was fooled about Saddam’s weapons. Not true! According to German intelligence people, the Bush Administration repeatedly exaggerated German intelligence on Iraq’s biological weapons -- despite multiple warnings questioning their source’s reliability. Similarly, the French challenged U.S. intelligence on Saddam’s nuclear program. These warnings were simply victims of Bush’s policy decision to go to war.

Other countries do not have the extensive military intelligence apparatus that we do. But, whatever they believed, most had enough sense to hold out for the facts before agreeing to sign on to a preemptive war. Since Bush was dragging the American people into war against the advice of much of the world community, it was his responsibility to get the facts straight and be sure of his position.

Two years ago the Senate Intelligence Committee launched an inquiry into this matter. But, as in the case of the 9/11 Commission, presidential politics got in the way. The Republican Committee Chairman deferred that portion of the inquiry dealing with how the White House used and influenced pre-war intelligence until after the election -- and then he quietly abandoned it. So, in November 2004, the American people had to choose a president without getting critical information on his past performance. As you probably know, last month the Democratic leadership shut down the Senate in a secret session until agreement was reached to reopen this inquiry.

At the present time, puppet Iraqi troops are fighting mostly against their own people and primarily for money. They are not properly equipped, are dependent on Americans and will let us do the real fighting as long as we stay there. As your Representative Robert Wexler said, the “Iraqi security forces have yet to ‘stand up’ and may do so only after we ‘stand down’.”

A new book The Next Attack, points out that as long as we are embroiled in Iraq there is no hope of making progress on our real threat -- al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks in some 60 countries. Retired Lt. General Odom calls the war “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”

Our book outlines two different ways to end the war. One is similar to Congressman Murtha’s, that leaves a quick reaction force on the borders; and the other is a more gradual withdrawal. The idea behind the two exit plans is to combine incentives with pressure for Iraqis to take back their country.

The Administration’s fear is the perception that Americans will cut and run from terrorists. We can remove that perception simply by working with all heads of state to (1) lead a worldwide attack on terror networks, (2) eliminate root causes that keep them alive and (3) hold periodic meetings on progress. This broader, more powerful strategy is described in our book and recognizes that the U.S. cannot suppress global terror alone.

Before turning to our troubled democracy, let’s connect the dots between the two disasters I’ve just talked about. Unfortunately, President Bush made it easy for 9/11 to happen and then exploited that tragedy to sell an unnecessary war and further his own reelection. Remarkable, but true.

Is there a clear and present danger to our democracy – I think so? The far right is solidifying its control and moving us toward a one-party system. Ninety percent of House seats are reserved for incumbents, due to a remapping of districts that favors them. This attempt to eliminate competitive races is undemocratic and the Supreme Court should declare it unconstitutional.

There is increased government secrecy and very little minority participation. If you have any doubts about the minority’s role today, read Congressman Pete Stark’s reflections on “Life under a Republican Dictatorship in the House.”

Far–right abuses of power are numerous -- threatening to remove the 200-year-old right to filibuster, blurring the lines between church and state, torturing and denying rights of prisoners, maintaining secret prisons overseas, spying and eavesdropping on the American people here at home, paying the media here and in Iraq to report favorable stories, overruling state decisions on a right–to-life issue and coaching military soldiers for televised presidential conferences. As Tom Friedman reported in The New York Times, these abuses could have been taken “right from the Saddam playbook.”

Another problem is that there are no real checks and balances today on presidential power. With earlier administrations, we had people in Congress who asked tough questions and performed serious oversight, even when their own political party was in power. Our current Republican leadership in Congress has shown no inclination to oversee the Administration’s flawed policies or hold it accountable for anything.

Where our representatives in Congress have backed the war, they should explain their failure of judgment or political courage. We must also determine whether candidates for the next Congress will (1) back sensible alternatives to the current far-right agenda and (2) honor our constitutional system of checks and balances.

The media should be the lifeblood of our democracy and could have helped to prevent war. During the war’s build-up, they failed the American people miserably. Some were seduced by Administration officials and Iraqi exiles; others did not challenge the Administration’s assumptions or do their own work, independently. They should have listened to expert inspectors in Iraq, not Administration spokesmen.

Years ago we had a strong media that, for example, kept the Johnson and Nixon administrations in check. To go back even further, many of us still remember the integrity, razor sharp questioning and tough reporting of Edward R. Murrow. How would the Bush Administration people have fared with him? Not well! Would there have been a second term? Maybe not.

Six huge corporations now own the vast majority of our newspapers, and radio and TV stations. Their profit taking and political affiliations conflict with an independent role and their duty to keep the public well informed. As one writer said, their monetary incentive is to play it safe and run with the White House propaganda. This situation constitutes a threat to our democracy. Our book urges public hearings into this matter.

Americans should rebel against the use of dirty politics. They are easily communicated because of the media’s need to fill up a 24-hour news cycle. In close elections, improperly assassinating someone’s character can result in selection of the wrong candidate – as they did in the last two presidential elections and probably in some local elections too.

Our best recourse is to simply eliminate any candidate who condones or allows this practice to go on either directly or indirectly. This would mean relying instead on a candidate’s performance and vision for the future. A must-read in this regard is our book’s Appendix II. It is an article by Rev. Dr. Graham Standish on use of dirty politics and religion in the affairs of our government.

The American people promoted Bush to his current level of incompetence and then hired him for another four years. During the next election we must do better – someone more moderate who will unify our country, choose the right priorities and bring the competence to achieve them.

But, be wary; the far right will have no scruples when it comes to doing whatever it takes to hold onto power. As I said in the book: How do porcupines make love? Very carefully! How do Americans take stands against the far-right agenda? Very carefully!

To add a bit of levity to our sad situation, we included in the book a thought-provoking satire on how Bush won his second term. We hope it will stimulate your thinking.

In the words of a great reporter and TV commentator -- Goodnight and Good Luck!

Ed Asner

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Ed Asner is a much admired actor best known for his television portrayal of journalist Lou Grant. He also has been an outspoken activist and advocate for human rights, political freedom, and on labor issues. With retired government analyst Burt Hall, he is coauthor of Misuse of Power, a hard-hitting view of the political far right.  BuzzFlash interviewed Ed Asner and offered Misuse of Power as a premium in October, 2005.