|
Stay Within the Constitution!
By Charles Keil, Lakeville
We are moving away from Constitutional government in the U.S. very rapidly, and we are racing away from any effort to strengthen the rule of law internationally.
President Bush's swift moves away from legality at home and abroad are related. International treaties are broken without consultation or approval from Congress; the promised unilateral expansion of the terrorism war doesn't seem to require any discussion in the House or Senate either.
Every patriot needs to speak up loud and clear now! Tell your elected representatives: "Stay within the Constitution. The Constitution is our guide. The Constitution is the foundation of our democracy. Ignore it and sooner or later we the people and our representatives will have to impeach for 'high crimes' any President who ignores the legislature and the courts on matters of peace (treaties) and war." When Americans kill people abroad without a declaration of war from Congress it is called murder; when many are killed it is called mass murder—"high crimes," indeed.
Let's look at Iraq. Saddam Hussein and the leading participants in his dictatorship could have been on trial long ago for crimes against humanity, i.e. gassing Kurdish villages, murdering civilian citizens of Iraq by the hundreds using weapons of mass destruction.
Why doesn't the U.S. support the establishment of an international criminal court like the European countries do? Why doesn't the U.S. ask for an arrest warrant? Why not have the smallest "war" possible directed at arresting the criminals in charge, rather than punish the people of Iraq? Why not charge Saddam Hussein and his henchmen for their actual crimes of ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide, and then form an international police force that could act swiftly and professionally and legally to bring these murderers before an international criminal court? Because if we followed the Constitution at home and cooperated with the emerging international legal structure, we might get to a point where the Hussein regime's defense lawyers would call as their first witness George Bush, Sr., the person most responsible for giving Hussein biological and chemical weapons to use against the Iranians. Britain may have helped put the weapons of mass destruction in Hussein's hands too, so Prime Minister Blair might rather not have a trial. Can you hear Daddy Bush? "Who knew he'd kill his own citizens with the stuff? It was all a big mistake. He was supposed to use the chemicals and bioweapons on the Iranians."
Of course the preceding paragraph about what our policies have been or ought to be toward Iraq is mostly guesswork. Reporters for the corporate media do not do much investigative reporting anymore; they don't dig up ugly facts or ask difficult questions. But it seems like the Bush regime is shredding the U.S. Constitution and tearing up treaties with former allies because our nation's leaders are about to commit new crimes in order to cover up complicity in old ones. Only this time we won't be accomplices, or working with criminal allies—we will be the perpetrators.
Two postscripts: When the U.S. acts outside its own Constitution and in defiance of international law, it sends clear and encouraging signals to terrorists who can see that they are successfully destroying law and order and freedom in the U.S. and in the world. Similarly, when the U.S. declares support for a Palestinian state as the suicide terrorists increase the death toll in Israel, it sends clear and encouraging signals to terrorists that if you commit enough terrorism you will get your way eventually.
| 
