by Stanley Rogouski
Two key ideas from the World Can’t Wait’s call were echoed
yesterday by none other than Al Gore. In a speech given to commemorate Martin
Luther King’s birthday, Gore strongly criticized George Bush’s use of the NSA
to spy on American citizens, noting that similar tactics were used against
Martin Luther King and the anti-war movement in the 1960s.
But the former Vice President actually went a step further.
He first noted that there have often been times in American
history where the President has radically curtailed civil liberties, the two
best examples being John Adams’ Alien and Sedition acts and Abraham Lincoln’s
suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Each time, however, a natural
equilibrium, a pendulum swing, brought us to our senses and led us to restore
those civil liberties that had been lost during the crisis.
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Text_of_Gore_speech_0116.html
‘) in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil
subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons
learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.’
This time, Gore argues, it will be different. There will be
no natural pendulum swing back in favor of civil libertarianism. Unlike the
Alien and Sedition Acts or the Suspension of Habeas corpus during the Civil
War, the authoritarianism of the Bush Regime will not reverse itself.
First, Bush is using the threat of terrorism to put the United States
on a permanent war footing. Robert E. Lee and The Army of Northern Virginia were
a far greater threat to Washington
than any terrorist attack, but Lee and Stonewall Jackson were a concrete, not
an abstract threat. Once defeated, you could no longer use them as a bogeyman
to threaten the American public. By declaring war on the idea of terrorism, not
on Al Qaeda, Bush has declared a war without end.
‘A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something
new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which
he has tried to place the country is going to “last for the rest of our
lives.”
The phrase is Gore’s, not mine, ‘something new’. The Bush
regime is using the threat of terrorism not only to pass a couple of temporary
measures restricting our freedom, but to overthrow the checks and balances written
into the Constitution. It is directly related to their messianic, theocratic
ideas of how to conduct foreign policy.
‘This effort to rework America’s carefully balanced
constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful
Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary
is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework
America’s foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral
authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to
establish dominance in the world.’
Gore’s speech is an important contribution but he does not
go far enough. Instead of merely suggesting that we set up a commission to
examine the abuses that he’s already so eloquently described, the former Vice
President needs to do what he should have back in 2000 when Bush stole the
election from under his nose, demand that Bush step down immediately. Gore is
an effective prosecutor, but without a mass movement to drive Bush out of
office, his speech will go down in history as a warning everybody in the future
wonders why none of us didn’t take more seriously.