15 Years after 9/11, can we Recover our Republic?

11 Responses

1. 

   Thank you for this presentation & analysis, Juan.

   As someone who’s been an activist about something (or many things) in every decade since the ’60’s, it’s all long term work.

   In America, everyone has an opinion on the ideal President and/or favorite politician/celebrity they would like to see as President.

   No one cares about state legislature races, hardly anyone cares about city?county council races.

   Change comes from working on the big ideals and also working as painstakingly as possible on the small details simultaneously, for as long as possible.

   And for what it’s worth, I have a “resume bullet” of having proposed and co-moderated a (very successful) workshop on “Avoiding Burnout in Political Work” at a big lefty gathering on the Left Coast back in the day.

2. 

   The US government does not have constitutional authority to engage in foreign wars, except under treaty. The Constitution states clearly that all federal powers not enumerated therein are reserved by the states and the people, and the only military powers are to repel invasions and suppress insurrections. The only exceptions are Letters of Marque (allowing arrest of persons elsewhere for crimes in the US) and Letters of Reprisal (authorizing attacks upon named armed entities, usually pirate ships). So foreign wars are not within the federal powers except by treaty.

   The AUMF is a Letter of Marque to arrest specific 9/11 attackers, and a vague Letter of Reprisal, sufficient for a limited expedition to attack the Bin Laden compound. It is not sufficient to attack Saudi Arabia as the source of the attackers, despite all of the evidence of state connections, because the US government has no such authority. It is not sufficient to invade Afghanistan simply because AlQaeda was there as well as in Pakistan which we could not invade because it is a nuclear power. It has no connection at all with Iraq, a war for which GW Bush & co should be tried by the ICJ at the Hague as war criminals.

   To enlist NATO as the treaty excuse to invade Afghanistan is to pretend that it was designed for long-distance counter-terror purposes. It was intended purely for mutual defense against major aggressions by nations. Its existence now is dangerous for the United States, because it is a temptation for the classic tyrants over demopcracy against whom Aristotle warned, who must create foreign enemies to demand domestic power as false protectors, and to accuse their opponents of disloyalty. It should be disbanded or strictly limited to repelling invasions, like the US federal powers.

   Terrorism at a long distance is ordinarily a small-scale operation, well suited to letters of marque and reprisal, with operations limited to the scale on which we were attacked, even when sourced by a large insurgency. If we suffered many attacks in the US, the question would be why we have large enemies far away if we are not attacking them. In the case of AlQaeda it was because the US had been engaged in unconstitutional secret wars. If the US had not engaged in unconstitutional secret political wars around the world, it would never have had a motive to push the definition of Letters of Reprisal to include entire nations far away, and US tyrants warmongers would not have had an excuse to abuse the NATO treaty.

   Secret political wars are the reason that we have lost America. To eliminate those we must eliminate large secret agencies, we must eliminate dominance of foreign policy by the executive branch by making constitutional checks and balances work properly, and we must eliminate the control of mass media and elections by economic concentrations.

3. 

   Dr. Cole’s question is not a rhetorical one. The coils of corporatism cinch more tightly round the earth. Wise men rue democracy

4. 

   professor cole,
   thank you. you have said all there is to say right here. the aumf is an obscenity.

   obama ran for president as the antiwar candidate. he has turned out to be anything but. progressives are asleep while he drops bombs all over the place. i myself was asleep for most of his presidency. it required the primaries of this past year and the obliteration of the large iraqi city of ramadi to wake me to the truth. obama is the trojan horse of the antiwar movement.

   on 9-11, i want to give thanks and respect to a true american hero, chelsea manning. manning is being tortured and abused in a military brig while serving a 35 year sentence for exposing just a few of the pentagon’s warcrimes. it is a national disgrace. manning must be freed.

   president obama has the power to undo this disgusting injustice. he could do it today to honor national heroes. but of course, he won’t.

5. 

   It has been long perceived that Rome’s move from a citizen to a standing army, initiated by Marius at the end of the 2nd century BC, marks the point from which the ancient republican democracy headed towards the empire, and your Founding Fathers were likely well grounded in Roman history and had good reason to seek to avoid that irreversible development.

   • 

     Yes, they were so grounded in history, but also could not conceive of a population so readily deceived as to permit a large standing military force in time of peace.. From Federalist Papers no. 26:

     “An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties, could only be formed by progressive augmentations; which would suppose, not merely a temporary combination between the legislature and the executive, but a continued conspiracy for a series of time. Is it probable that such a combination would exist at all?”

     “If such suppositions could even be reasonably made, still the concealment of the design, for any duration, would be impracticable.”

     “But the question again recurs, upon what pretense could he [the Executive] be put in possession of a force of that magnitude in time of peace?”

     “It is impossible that the people could be long deceived; and the destruction of the project, and of the projectors, would quickly follow the discovery.”

     • 

       The pretense, of course, is that there is never a time of peace, but rather a permanent cause of fear, a cold war or a persistent global war on terror, the conjuring of which requires oligarchy control of the mass media and thereby elections.

       This is the fearmongering of the tyrants over democracy, against which Aristotle warned.

6. 

   And just this week, Mr Trump said he was (while cutting taxes in half) going to “expand the military.” Perhaps a 13th aircraft carrier? Or a few more squadrons of F-35 fighter planes (at approximately $100 million each). Good grief; it’s already insane, and he wants to make it worse.

   • 

     In this regard, the person running against Trump is no different in substance-unless you go by the surface. The republic of the founding fathers’ (particularly Washington, Jefferson, and perhaps later Lincoln and FDR) imaginings has been caught in the dragnet of our grand military-industrial-education-media complex.

7. 

   Who can spend an hour listening to a radio program about the AUMF? But this Radio Lab swim in the AUMF pool is rewarding.

   link to radiolab.org

8. 

   It’s scary enough to have all this power in Obama’s hands, or in Hillary’s. But it is starting to look like the keys to the kingdom are about to be handed over to one Donald J. Trump, a self-absorbed egotist who lies constantly for personal gain, a supremely manipulative con artist who has been involved in 3,500 lawsuits, who vindictively goes after anyone who says something he doesn’t like, who openly admires “strongmen” Putin and Kim Jong Un, who talks of the wholesale removal of generals.

   Obama in building all this up even more (the drones, the NSA, the special ops; fracking, TPP, Obamacare) no doubt thought it would all be passed on to Hillary who is knowledgeable, intelligent and “moderate” and would continue his relatively predictable path. Ooops. So many things can really go off the rails, and as Snowden says, the
   Pres who comes next can decide to “flip that switch”:
   link to thelibertarianrepublic.com