[Mb-civic] EXCELLENT AND TIMELY: Gore's Challenge - David S. Broder - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Gore's Challenge

By David S. Broder
Thursday, January 19, 2006; A19

Former vice president Al Gore has turned himself into a one-man grand 
jury, ready to indict the Bush administration for any number of crimes 
against the Constitution. Whether you agree with Gore's conclusions or 
not, the speech that the 2000 Democratic nominee for president gave this 
week in Washington was as comprehensive a rundown of George W. Bush's 
ventures to the limits of executive authority as anyone could hope to find.

Gore is hardly an objective observer. Having outpolled Bush in the 
popular vote only to see his apparent victory taken from him by a 
divided Supreme Court, Gore cannot be expected to be dispassionate about 
the way Bush is operating as president. His speech is just an 
indictment. The proof of the charges can come only in congressional 
hearings and, ultimately, in the courts.

But even after discounting for political motivations, it seems to me 
that Gore has done a service by laying out the case as clearly and 
copiously as he has done. His overall charge is that Bush has 
systematically broken the laws and bent the Constitution by his actions 
in the areas of national security and domestic anti-terrorism. He is not 
the first to make that complaint. My e-mail has included many messages 
from people who have leaped far ahead of the evidence and concluded that 
Bush should be impeached and removed from office for actions they deem 
illegal.

Gore stops well short of that point and contents himself with citing the 
cases that cause many others concern. The first -- and to my mind 
weakest -- instance is the claim that Bush took the nation to war on the 
basis of false intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. 
But there is no clear evidence as yet that Bush willfully concocted or 
knowingly distorted the intelligence he received about Saddam Hussein's 
military programs. Interpretations of that intelligence varied within 
the government, but the Clinton administration, of which Gore was an 
important part, came to the same conclusions that Bush did -- and so did 
other governments in the Western alliance.

It is a reach to attempt to make a crime of a policy misjudgment.

But the other cases Gore cited are more troubling. The Abu Ghraib prison 
abuse scandal, for which only low-level military personnel have been 
punished, traces back through higher and untouched levels of command to 
the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House, all of which 
failed in their duties to ensure that the occupation forces were 
adhering to recognized international standards for the treatment of 
prisoners.

Similarly, the administration's resistance to setting and enforcing 
clear prohibitions on torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the 
war on terrorism raises legitimate questions about its willingness to 
adhere to the rule of law. From the first days after Sept. 11, Bush has 
appeared to believe that he is essentially unconstrained. His oddly 
equivocal recent signing statement on John McCain's legislation banning 
such tactics seemed to say he could ignore the plain terms of the law.

If Judge Samuel Alito is right that no one is above the law, then Bush's 
supposition deserves to be challenged.

Gore's final example -- on which he has lots of company among legal 
scholars -- is the contention that Bush broke the law in ordering the 
National Security Agency to monitor domestic phone calls without a 
warrant from the court Congress had created to supervise all such 
wiretapping. If -- as the Justice Department and the White House insist 
-- the president can flout that law, then it is hard to imagine what 
power he cannot assert.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has summoned Attorney 
General Alberto Gonzales to a hearing on the warrantless wiretap issue, 
and that hearing should be the occasion for a broad exploration of the 
willingness of this administration to be constrained by the Constitution 
and the laws.

The committee should keep the attorney general on the witness stand as 
long as it takes -- as long as it spent examining the qualifications of 
Judge Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, if it comes to that. The 
stakes for the country are that high.

Gore is certainly right about one thing. When he challenged the members 
of Congress to "start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of 
government you're supposed to be," he was issuing a call of conscience 
that goes well beyond any partisan criticism.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011801874.html?nav=hcmodule
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