Congress Should Rescind the State of Emergency Declared by Bush

George Washington’s Blog | Wednesday July 30, 2008

The White House suspended the Constitution and implemented Continuity of Government Plans on 9/11, based upon a declared state of national emergency. Bush has continually renewed the declared state of emergency up to and including today. See this.

The White House has done everything it could to scare people and convince them that America is under attack, as a way to justify the yearly renewal of the declared state of emergency and the continuing unconstitutional seizure of power by the executive branch.

In other words, the ongoing state of emergency is both the result of fearmongering and the justification for tyranny.

But Congress has the power to revoke the state of emergency.

Specifically, the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. Sections 1601-1651 (passed in 1976), gives Congress the power to countermand a presidential declaration of national emergency. Indeed, in 1976, Congress rescinded all of the declarations of national emergency made since World War II, as many of them had been on the books for years and were giving the executive unrestricted powers which were undermining the Constitution.

So in addition to impeachment, contempt for ignoring subpoenas, and a host of other powers, Congress can countermand Bush’s declarations of national emergency since 2001.

With the declared state of emergency over, Continuity of Government Plans cannot remain in effect, and Congress is suddenly in a much stronger position to reign in Bush and Cheney.

Note to legal scholars: In 1983, the Supreme Court struck down a portion of Congress’ power to countermand a declaration of national emergency. But Congress got around that ruling by amending the National Emergencies Act in 1985 to confirm Congress’ power to countermand – through a joint resolution between the House and Senate – a declaration of emergency by the president (see this).

Moreover, in 2007, the Bush Administration tried to ignore the National Emergencies Act by issuing National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 51. But that dog won’t hunt. The Constitution does not allow the president to unilaterally cut Congress out of the picture.

Investigation into Whether America Is Still a Constitutional Government

The United States has been in a declared state of emergency from September 2001, to the present.

On September 11, 2001, the government declared a state of emergency. That declared state of emergency was formally put in writing on 9/14/2001:

 

 

“A national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001 . . . .”

That declared state of emergency has continued in full force and effect from 9/11 to the present. For example, the White House website states:

“Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, the Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines flight 93, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, last extended on September 5, 2006, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2007. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.”

A separate announcement on the White House website states:

“Because the actions of these persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States, the national emergency declared on September 23, 2001, and the measures adopted on that date to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 23, 2007. Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency with respect to persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism.”

See also this.

Acts of War

AP photo / Brennan Linsley

Scott Ritter | TruthDig | July 29, 2008

The war between the United States and Iran is on. American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities that result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation’s sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned and Americans were being subjected to Iranian-funded covert actions that took the lives of Americans, on American soil, and destroyed American property and livelihood. Many Americans remain unaware of what is transpiring abroad in their name. Many of those who are cognizant of these activities are supportive of them, an outgrowth of misguided sentiment which holds Iran accountable for a list of grievances used by the U.S. government to justify the ongoing global war on terror. Iran, we are told, is not just a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, but is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world today.

Much of the information behind this is being promulgated by Israel, which has a vested interest in seeing Iran neutralized as a potential threat. But Israel is joined by another source, even more puzzling in terms of its broad-based acceptance in the world of American journalism: the Mujahadeen-e Khalk, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group sworn to overthrow the theocracy in Tehran. The CIA today provides material support to the actions of the MEK inside Iran. The recent spate of explosions in Iran, including a particularly devastating “accident” involving a military convoy transporting ammunition in downtown Tehran, appears to be linked to an MEK operation; its agents working inside munitions manufacturing plants deliberately are committing acts of sabotage which lead to such explosions. If CIA money and planning support are behind these actions, the agency’s backing constitutes nothing less than an act of war on the part of the United States against Iran.

The Military-Industrial Complex: It’s Much Later Than You Think

Chalmers Johnson | TomDispatch.com | July 27, 2008

Most Americans have a rough idea what the term “military-industrial complex” means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime,” he said, “or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea … We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions … We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications … We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Although Eisenhower’s reference to the military-industrial complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its “unwarranted influence” has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances.

From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was building up his “arsenal of democracy,” down to the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations—often termed a “partnership”—between the high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable.

Trials Of Henry Kissinger

Brzezinski: McCain would start WWIV

Press TV | Sunday, July 27, 2008

Former White House national security adviser says if John McCain becomes the next US president the world will move toward World War IV.

Former US President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski criticized US officials in Senator McCain’s camp for pushing the presumptive Republican nominee toward a radical foreign policy on issues such as Iran.

Brzezinski described McCain’s presidency as an ‘appalling concept’ as it would lead to the World War IV, arguing that from the viewpoint of figures surrounding the Arizona senator the Cold War counted as World War III.

“Well, if McCain is president and if his Secretary of State is Joe Lieberman and his Secretary of Defense is [Rudolph] Giuliani, we will be moving towards the World War IV that they have been both favoring and predicting,” Brzezinski cautioned.

Earlier in October 2007, President George W. Bush, who has endorsed John McCain, warned of the eruption of World War III should Iran continue uranium enrichment.

Andrew Klavan of the WSJ is the Joker!

Right, so it was clear that things were going to change a bit at The Wall Street Journal when it became a part of the Murdochian Empire, but this is a little much: In this somewhat startling essay, Andrew Klavan sees a “W” where others see Batman’s bat symbol in “The Dark Knight” and believes the film is a “paean of praise” to President Bush.

Andrew Klavan | WSJ | July 25, 2008

Andrew Klavan

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”

Warner Bros. Pictures
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

The Necessary War

by William S. Lind

May 25, 2008

Pat Buchanan’s new book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, is causing a stir, which is a good thing. Buchanan argues that both World War I and World War II were unnecessary wars; that Britain bears at least as much responsibility for both as Germany; that Winston Churchill was “the indispensable man” in reducing Britain from a world-encircling empire to “a cottage by the sea – to live out her declining years;” and that the consequence of the Western civil war that encompassed both World Wars (I would add the Cold War as well) has been the fall of the West.

Buchanan is correct on all counts. His book represents a counterattack in the necessary war, the war to introduce Americans to genuine history. At present, most Americans know only a comic-book version of history, one in which Germany deliberately started both World Wars as part of a drive to conquer the world, a drive stopped when valiant American armies defeated the German army. And, oh yes, some Brit named Churchill beat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. Thanks to the victories of the freedom-loving allies, we now live in the best of all possible worlds, where everyone can be a “democracy.”

Nothing of the comic-book version of history is true, not even the Battle of Britain bit. Curiously, the key British records from the Battle of Britain remain classified “secret”; it seems the RAF was on the ropes. Buchanan goes after the rest of it with spirit and zest, demolishing it utterly. As Colonel House told Woodrow Wilson after talking extensively with Kaiser Wilhelm in 1915, the Kaiser neither wanted nor expected war. I have seen the last, desperate telegram he sent the Tsar, trying to avoid a general European war. He was mocked for years before the war by many Germans as the “Peace Kaiser” because in crisis after crisis he backed down. Kaiser Wilhelm knew, as did Theodore Roosevelt, that a World War would cost the West its world dominance.

Because World War I was unnecessary, so was World War II, which was really a resumption of World War I. Buchanan goes further and argues that had Britain and France not offered a wildly imprudent guarantee to Poland in the spring of 1939, there would have been no war in the West. Hitler wanted to fight Stalin, not the Western powers. That too is true, but Buchanan makes one assumption I am not so sure of, namely that Germany would have defeated the USSR. As it was, World War II was fought mostly in the east, and it was the Red Army, not the comparatively small British and American armies, that defeated the Wehrmacht. Could Stalin have done it alone? Maybe.

In both World Wars, the U.S. came out a winner because it left most of the fighting to others. In World War I, Germany was defeated by the (under international law, illegal) starvation blockade. The French army bore the brunt of the war in the west. Buchanan’s debunking of Churchill is thorough and valuable. Churchill was brilliant, forceful, imprudent, and often wrong. A howler for war both in 1914 and 1939, he may not have sought to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, but it was his own fault he did so. Prudence, which means evaluating prospective actions in terms of their probable long-term effects, is conservatives’ first political principle, and the debacles created by Churchill illustrate why. At heart, he was far more Whig than Tory. Burke would have loathed him.

Buchanan’s historical revisionism is welcome on several counts. The neo-cons have elevated an unhistorical Churchill into the patron of interventionism, selling him in Washington and elsewhere like saints’ bones. It is a snare for the simple, with George W. Bush numbered among them.

Debunking comic-book history and replacing it with the real thing is vital if America is to avoid the dual trap of cultural Marxism and Brave New World. As ideologues and totalitarians everywhere have long known, if you can cut a people off from their past, you can do whatever you want with them. We need a similar debunking of the comic book history of the Civil War now fed to Americans, in which it was all about slavery.

Buchanan’s relevance comes from the sad fact that America is now duplicating Churchill’s central error, imprudence. We have entered into two wars with little thought for their long-term consequences. Washington hands out guarantees, similar to Britain’s to Poland, all over the world like penny candy, with no consideration of where they may lead. We give less thought to the potential future consequences of our actions than the average Mayfly. All that matters is receiving the applause of dunces and pleasing the SMEC.

Britain did the same thing twice, in 1914 and 1939. It is perhaps not too much to infer that Little England will be followed by Little America.

July 3, 2008

William Lind is an analyst based in Washington, DC.

Copyright © 2008 William S. Lind

Kill, Burn & Loot (6/6)

From Martial Law, Inc. KBR: A Halliburton Subsidiary, by Andrew G. Marshall:

KBR and Concentration Camps:

The New York Times reported in 2003, that, “Since the attacks of Sept. 11, Kellogg Brown & Root has won significant additional business from the federal government and the Pentagon. It has built cells for detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and is the exclusive logistics supplier for the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation and fuel transportation.” In 2005, the Independent reported that, “A subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services group once led by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, has won a $30m (£16m) contract to help build a new permanent prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

FEMA Concentration Camp for families in Taylor, Texas

On January 24, 2006, KBR, which was still a subsidiary of Halliburton at the time, got a contract from the Department of Homeland Security, “to support the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency.” The press release on KBR’s website further stated that the contract has a “maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term, consisting of a one-year based period and four one-year options, the competitively awarded contract will be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. KBR held the previous ICE contract from 2000 through 2005.” The Executive Director of the KBR Government and Infrastructure division was quoted in the release as saying the contract, “builds on our extremely strong track record in the arena of emergency operations support.”

Beech Grove Indiana FEMA Camp – April 5 2006

The contract awarded to KBR, a construction firm, “provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” [Emphasis added]. Further, “The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster,” [Emphasis added].

As author, professor and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott notes in his book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, “On February 6, 2007, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the fiscal year 2007 federal budget would allocate more than $400 million to add sixty-seven hundred additional detention beds (an increase of 32 percent over 2006).” Scott goes on to state that this was “in partial fulfillment of an ambitious ten-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named Endgame, authorized in 2003,” whose goal was to “remove all removable aliens,” as well as “potential terrorists.”

Oliver North Questioned – Rex 84 Exposed During Iran Contra

As Scott wrote in an article shortly after the KBR contract was issued in 2006, “the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North’s controversial Rex-84 ‘readiness exercise’ in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary ‘refugees,’ in the context of ‘uncontrolled population movements’ over the Mexican border into the United States.” Scott quoted Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 as a military analyst leaked the “Pentagon Papers” about the military’s activities in Vietnam, as saying, “Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters,” and that, “They’ve already done this on a smaller scale, with the ’special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo.”

Fema railcar

A recent San Francisco Chronicle article, co-authored by a former US Congressman, reported that, “Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.”

Fema train

Conclusion

As the preparations of martial law are being put in place, it is of vital important to identify the specific corporations involved in this process.

Administrations change, politicians go in and out of power, but the corporation is a consistent powerhouse. In this case, KBR has been a force to be reckoned with since the rise of Lyndon Johnson. Today, it has reached new heights. It was necessary to examine the recent history of this company’s activities, much the same as identifying a person’s own history and experiences to account for their present personality: so as to better understand their actions today. Given KBR’s history related to war and violence, more light should be shed on their current activities with the Department of Homeland Security, as morality is not a concept KBR seems to understand.

How the war on Terror is a war on American Ideals

Democracy Now | July 18, 2008

We spend the hour with New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Jane Mayer about her new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. In the book, Mayer reveals a secret report by the International Red Cross warned the Bush administration last year that the CIA’s treatment of prisoners categorically constituted torture and could make Bush administration officials who approved the torture methods guilty of war crimes. Mayer also reveals that the Bush administration ignored warnings from the CIA six years ago that up to a third of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake. [includes rush transcript]

How the war on Terror is a war on American Ideals-1/5

How the war on Terror is a war on American Ideals-2/5

How the war on Terror is a war on American Ideals-3/5

How the war on Terror is a war on American Ideals-4/5

How the war on Terror is a war on American Ideals-5/5