Honor and Country -- and a shocker!

[Political Waves]

Tim Russert, Meet the Press moderator, has died from a heart attack at 58; Tom Brokow   confirmed it. Hunting through the news today, I was already having difficulty selecting a topic -- but that trumps the rest, as a political news grab. Big Russ must be devastated; Arianna has lost a wrestling partner.

In similarly dramatic fashion, the weather issues have gotten even worse, and today we're being deluged again in the Pea Patch. Des Moines is being evacuated. Inflation is rising rapidly and the economy is tanking, with gas up 31% over last year -- McCain and Obama are light years away from one another on that topic. Here's a breakdown on their tax proposals. The Dubby's last tour in "Old Europe" as POTUS finds him embarrassing us, as usual, and stumping for his Iran attack. And I include this snip because I'm concerned; 90% of the panda's are in jeopardy because of the quake -- much Light on that, dearhearts.

But today we're going with the Big Story -- the return of habeas corpus ... to the rule of law ... in this US of A [and that's the last time I'll be italicizing it; I could be here all day formatting.] The Big Story is as much about the Supremes as it is about the Bushy coup and its egregious disrespect of our Constitution. This should serve as a potent reminder of the stakes in this election-- the Supremes are no spring chickens, to wit:

1) Stevens - 88 years old
2) Ginsburg - 75 years old
3) Kennedy - 72 years old
4) Scalia - 72 years old
5) Breyer - 70 years old

The younger Supremes, Roberts and Alito [approved for a lifetime of Federalism with NO FILIBUSTER by a cowed Congress] can be counted on to obstruct progressivism; Thomas joins them in their pursuit, a man so internally conflicted he could be Bush's twin. Since the older judges are in varying degrees of health, the new president will be appointing a minimum of one and perhaps as many as four.

I'm having a little Constitutional party in my head, today -- and I'm posting on this because in a political environment where so much is spinning, this critical victory could easily get lost -- but not in my world, where 'honor' is still primary.

Honor. Back in the 70's, when the spiritual awakening was still new, I went to a workshop where they had us draw a "life shield" -- intuiting the important focus of our lives to include them prominently, displayed like a family crest. Honor was in the middle of mine [leaving me with a lifetime to figure out exactly what that means to me. It sounds like some kind of crusading consciousness, I grant you; at this point, I guess I'll just have to acquiesce and say, "Well, duh!"]

But honor is not a verb to me, not a thing we work to get or scramble to earn or bestow for good works -- it's a touchstone that drives us internally, that refines us emotionally and that defines us in the daily shuffle of our lives. If we are not an honorable soul, if that is not our intention, then we have some messy and dysfunctional work ahead of us. To me, honor and character are Siamese-twins.

The character of the United States of America is determined by it's ability to behave honorably -- ask a world frantic for Barack Obama and frightened senseless by the Bushian psychosis of these last years. In all our years of growth and challenge, we have been guided and shaped by the imperative of our Constitution. There are a lot of things Bush has done that are hard to forgive, even though many of us appear more than ready to move along, but his manhandling of our guiding directive as an honorable nation I find criminal and unforgivable. That is the basis for the impeachment movement. Some things cannot be forgotten; nor should they be.

Yesterday, the Higher Angels whispered in Justice Kennedy's ear -- and we have some closure on this great betrayal, finally. Not that it changes much in Dubby's eyes ... he says we'll just have to pass a few new laws, now, to get around them. The brass of this idjit is stunning! Here are reads on the decision -- most satisfying, although each comes with a warning about how "iffy" this was ... and will remain for years to come, the High Court salted with archaic conservatives.

The weekend reads have to do with honor, as well -- don't miss these. The first is a breakdown of cultural issues by Peggy Noonan, which is another example of me posting interesting dribbling from the other side [and Wall Street Journal.] The woman has a good feel for the differences and a growing perspective, which is why I'm posting it; the Right is learning -- I guess that's the point. Yet [feigned surprise] at the end, she caves; and she sites McCain's old-fashioned sense of honor as the reason she does so. Which brings us to the next article.

The second piece is politically incorrect with a vengeance, and I'm thrilled to see it. I've been choking on my own bile as regards the continued "war hero" status of John McCain for months. I give him his due; he suffered, he served. He also capitalized on every option, played self-absorbed power-games from his platform of privilege, and now wants to use "character" and "experience" as his primary talking points.

His supporters are waving their Flag Pins and pumping themselves up on his Vietnam bona fides and I call bullshit! HERE'S John McSame's "character;" and his loyalty to Bush has been just as self-serving and calculated. The last piece calls bullshit, as well -- and about damned time. Share that one with any Independent who will listen, but skip the die-hard Republicans you know; they'd have to blow their brains out with the rifle that always rests on the coffee table or the truck-rack ... just within arms reach.

Honor -- it's immune to political quibble; we can honor our country only as we can honor what is done in its name. Yesterday, we came closer by miles to that possibility.

Jude



Bush Administration Says Detainee Trials To Continue
MARK SHERMAN, Huffington
June 13, 2008
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/13/bush-administration-says_n_106911.html

 
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court's decision on Guantanamo Bay will unleash a torrent of court filings from detainees seeking their freedom but won't affect the military trials planned for some terrorism suspects, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Friday.

The Bush administration disagrees strongly with the high court's decision that the foreigners held under indefinite detention at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba have the right to seek release in civilian court. President Bush said Thursday he would abide by the decision, but also said his administration was evaluating whether to respond to the court's ruling with new legislation.

In Brussels, Belgium, on Friday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he would reserve judgment on "what we ought to do next" at Guantanamo until he received briefings on the ruling.

"I have often said that ... we would like to close Guantanamo," Gates said. "I think that despite the fact that in many respects Guantanamo has become a state-of-the-art prison now, early reports of abuses and so on unquestionably were a black eye for the United States."

Thursday's much-anticipated 5-to-4 ruling was the third time the justices have repudiated Bush on his ambitious and hugely controversial schemes to hold the suspects outside the protections of U.S. law.

Speaking at a Group of Eight meeting of justice and home affairs ministers in Tokyo, Mukasey said, "I'm disappointed with the decision, in so far as I understand that it will result in hundreds of actions challenging the detention of enemy combatants to be moved to federal district court."

He added: "I think it bears emphasis that the court's decision does not concern military commission trials, which will continue to proceed. Instead it addresses the procedures that the Congress and the president put in place to permit enemy combatants to challenge their detention."

He said the Justice Department would comply with the ruling while studying the decision and "whether any legislation or any other action may be appropriate."

So far, 19 of the detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged Sept. 11 plotters, are facing military war crimes trials. The Pentagon has said it plans to try as many as 80 of the roughly 270 men held at Guantanamo.

But the lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's one-time driver, said he will seek dismissal of the charges against Hamdan based on the new ruling. A military judge had already delayed the trial's start to await the high court's decision.

"The entire legal framework under which Mr. Hamdan was to be tried has been turned on its head," said his lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer.

It was unclear whether a hearing at Guantanamo for Canadian Omar Khadr, charged with killing a U.S. Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan, would go forward next week as planned.

Charles Swift, the former Navy lawyer who used to represent Hamdan, said he believes the court removed any legal basis for keeping the Guantanamo facility open and that the military tribunals are "doomed."

Guantanamo generally and the tribunals were conceived on the idea that "constitutional protections wouldn't apply," Swift said. "The court said the Constitution applies. They're in big trouble."

In writing for the court majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged the terrorism threat the country faces _ the administration's justification for the detentions _ but he declared, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

In a blistering dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the decision "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Bush has argued the detentions are needed to protect the nation in a time of unprecedented threats from al-Qaida and other foreign terrorist groups. The president, in Rome on Thursday, said, "It was a deeply divided court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented." Kennedy said federal judges could ultimately order some detainees to be released, but he also said such orders would depend on security concerns and other circumstances. The ruling itself won't result in any immediate releases.

Lawyers for detainees differed over whether the ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for those who have not been charged. Of the roughly 270 men remaining at the prison, most are classed as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Some detainee lawyers said hearings could take place within a few months. But James Cohen, a Fordham University law professor who has two clients at Guantanamo, predicted Bush would continue seeking ways to resist the ruling.

"Nothing is going to happen between June 12 and Jan. 20," when the next president takes office, Cohen said.

Roughly 200 detainees have lawsuits on hold in federal court in Washington. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would call a special meeting of federal judges to address how to handle the cases. Detainees already facing trial are in a different category.

Human rights groups and many Democratic members of Congress celebrated the ruling as affirming the nation's commitment to the rule of law. Several Republican lawmakers called it a decision that put foreign terrorists' rights above the safety of the American people.

The administration opened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to hold enemy combatants, people suspected of ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

At its heart, the 70-page ruling says that the detainees have the same rights as anyone else in custody in the United States to contest their detention before a judge. Kennedy also said the system the administration has put in place to classify detainees as enemy combatants and review those decisions is not an adequate substitute for the right to go before a civilian judge.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his own dissent, criticized the majority for striking down what he called "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants."

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas also dissented.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens - the court's more liberal members - joined Kennedy to form the majority.

The court has ruled twice previously that people held at Guantanamo without charges can go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention. Each time, the administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to try to close the courthouse doors to the detainees. ++


Scalia: Court's Decision Restoring Habeas 'Will Almost Certainly Cause More Americans To Be Killed'
ThinkProgress
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/06/12/scalia-courts-decision-restoring-habeas-will-almost-certainly-cause-more-americans-to-be-killed/

In a landmark decision today, the Supreme Court ruled that habeas corpus protections apply to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. "We hold these petitioners do have the habeas corpus privilege," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion. The decision was a "a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies," SCOTUS Blog noted.

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, however, is outraged. In his dissenting opinion, he devoted an entire section to "a description of the disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today," a procedure "contrary to my usual practice," he admitted. Scalia adopted extreme rhetoric about the impacts of the decision, calling it a "self-invited…incursion into military affairs" that would "almost certainly" kill Americans. Some lowlights:

– "America is at war with radical Islamists. … Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq."

– "The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

– "Today the Court warps our Constitution."

– "The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today."

It is unlikely that the Supreme Court's decision will have the impacts that Scalia claims. As Kennedy explained, "Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law." Discussing the restoration of habeas at Guantanamo last year, Colin Powell noted:

The concern was, well, then they'll have access to lawyers, then they'll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn't that what our system's all about? And by the way, America, unfortunately, has too many people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus. And so we can handle bad people in our system.

But as a cheerleader for the administration's terrorism policies, Scalia's rhetoric isn't surprising. It is "absurd" to say that you "can't stick something under the fingernails," or "smack [a detainee] in the face," he said in February. "No. To the contrary," Scalia said when asked whether torture violates the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause. ++


Justice 5, Brutality 4
New York Times Editorial
June 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/13fri1.html

For years, with the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label "unlawful enemy combatants" and throw into never-ending detention.

Twice the Supreme Court swatted back his imperial overreaching, and twice Congress helped Mr. Bush try to open a gaping loophole in the Constitution. On Thursday, the court turned back the most recent effort to subvert justice with a stirring defense of habeas corpus, the right of anyone being held by the government to challenge his confinement before a judge.

The court ruled that the detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have that cherished right, and that the process for them to challenge their confinement is inadequate. It was a very good day for people who value freedom and abhor Mr. Bush's attempts to turn Guantánamo Bay into a constitutional-rights-free zone.

The right of habeas corpus is so central to the American legal system that it has its own clause in the Constitution: it cannot be suspended except "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

Despite this, the Bush administration repeatedly tried to strip away habeas rights. First, it herded prisoners who were seized in Afghanistan, and in other foreign countries, into the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay and claimed that since the base is on foreign territory, the detainees' habeas cases could not be heard in the federal courts. In 2004, the court rejected that argument, ruling that Guantánamo, which is under American control, is effectively part of the United States.

In 2006, the court handed the administration another defeat, ruling that it had relied improperly on the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to hold the detainees on Guantánamo without giving them habeas rights. Since then, Congress passed another law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that tried — and failed horribly — to fix the problems with the Detainee Treatment Act.

Now, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court has affirmed the detainees' habeas rights. The majority, in an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the Military Commissions Act violates the Suspension Clause, by eliminating habeas corpus although the requirements of the Constitution — invasion or rebellion — do not exist.

The court ruled that the military tribunals that are hearing the detainees' cases — the administration's weak alternative to habeas proceedings in a federal court — are not an adequate substitute. The hearings cut back on basic due process protections, like the right to counsel and the right to present evidence of innocence.

It was disturbing that four justices dissented from this eminently reasonable decision. The lead dissent, by Chief Justice John Roberts, dismisses habeas as "most fundamentally a procedural right." Chief Justice Roberts thinks the detainees receive such "generous" protections at their hearings that the majority should not have worried about whether they had habeas rights.

There is an enormous gulf between the substance and tone of the majority opinion, with its rich appreciation of the liberties that the founders wrote into the Constitution, and the what-is-all-the-fuss-about dissent. It is sobering to think that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States — a reminder that the composition of the court could depend on the outcome of this year's presidential election. The ruling is a major victory for civil liberties — but a timely reminder of how fragile they are. ++


One for the Constitution
Eugene Robinson, WaPo via TruthDig
Jun 12, 2008
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080612_one_for_the_constitution/

WASHINGTON—It shouldn't be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can't have individuals taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they've been unjustly imprisoned—not even on grounds of mistaken identity. But the president in question, sigh, is George W. Bush, who has taken a chainsaw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays in clearing brush at his Texas ranch.

So Thursday, for the third and apparently final time, the high court made clear that the Decider has no authority to trash the foundational principles of American jurisprudence. In ruling 5 to 4 that foreigners held at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in federal court, the court cited the Constitution and the centuries-old concept of habeas corpus. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion seems broad enough and definitive enough to end the Kafkaesque farce at Guantanamo once and for all.

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Kennedy wrote. Again, it's amazing that any president of the United States would need to have such a basic concept spelled out for him.

That reference to "extraordinary times" takes care of a specious argument that Bush and his legal minions have consistently tried to make—that when the nation is at war, as it has been since the 9/11 attacks, the president has extraordinary powers that allow him to do, well, basically anything he wants.

The Bush administration also has argued that the Guantanamo prisoners are "enemy combatants" who have no legal rights; that while U.S. citizens detained in the "war on terror" may have some rights, foreigners do not; and that Guantanamo is foreign soil, beyond the reach of U.S. judges. The court had no trouble seeing through all this smoke.

Twice before, the court has ordered Bush to respect the rule of law. In 2006, after the second ruling in favor of Guantanamo inmates' rights, the administration convinced Congress to pass a law stripping the inmates of any right to file habeas corpus petitions in the federal courts. Thursday's ruling struck down this law—and since the decision was based on the Constitution, it seemed to eliminate the possibility of new legislation that would let Bush continue his program of arbitrary, indefinite detention without judicial review.

The court also deemed inadequate the kangaroo-court tribunals that are held for Guantanamo inmates in lieu of proper court hearings. In the tribunals, an inmate is allowed to have a "personal representative" but not an actual defense lawyer—and the inmate has no right to see the evidence against him or confront his accusers.

Is it conceivable that the evidence against certain inmates might consist of witness statements that were obtained through the use of interrogation techniques involving painful coercion that international agreements classify as torture? Amazingly, that scenario is highly conceivable. Amazingly, it's also highly conceivable—even probable—that some of the estimated 270 inmates at Guantanamo, imprisoned for as long as six years, are innocent of any involvement in terrorism and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I say amazingly because it's still hard for me to believe that arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention and torture continue to be debated, as if there were pros and cons. The Supreme Court has now made clear that while justice and honor may be mere inconveniences for George W. Bush, they remain essential components of our national identity.

"The nation will live to regret what the court has done today," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a dissent, warning that the ruling "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Everyone hopes he's wrong, of course. But if the only thing that mattered was security, why would we bother to have an independent judiciary at all? Why would there be any constitutional or legal guarantees of due process for anyone? We could just lock up anyone who fit the demographic profile of the average armed robber, say, or anyone with psychological traits often displayed by embezzlers.

The Guantanamo decision will create headaches for the federal courts. The process of granting hearings to the detainees will be messy, imperfect and at times frustrating. I'm confident that in the end, the system will work. George W. Bush may not trust America's basic values and highest ideals, but I do. ++


Even George W. Bush Cannot Destory Habeas Corpus
Steven Bergstein, Psychsound, Planet Waves
http://www.psychsound.com/2008/06/i_always_wondered_how_the.html

I always wondered how the United States got away with establishing a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That's Cuba! Enemy territory. I can understand why the United States wants a base there. Our government has bases everywhere. But why does Cuba put up with it? Maybe because the country that has tried to kill Fidel Castro many times has the muscle to put bases and detention centers wherever it pleases.

But all the military might in the world can't stop the Constitution from applying to Guantanamo Bay. That's because the Executive Branch, where the President does his business, was reigned in on Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that even enemy combatants and detainees can challenge their detention under the Habeas Corpus rules which protect everyone else in U.S. territory.

Habeas Corpus is a latin phrase which means that you can ask a court to review the legality of your detention. It's one of the oldest legal concepts in Western Civilization. It's what separates the free from the oppressed, and when I say oppressed, I mean OPPRESSED, those who live under totalitarian regimes and can be swept off the streets for no reason and without any recourse. Without Habeas Corpus you can spend years in jail simply because you held different political views, or some other frivolous reason. No matter how bad the Bush administration or any other tyrant abuses power in the American political system, there's always Habeas Corpus.

Here is a summary of the ruling by the New York Times' excellent Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse:

The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration's handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, at the administration's behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.

Congress and the administration had passed a shortened alternative to a habeas procedure for the prisoners in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that procedure "falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute" because it failed to offer "the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus."

Justice Kennedy declared: "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

The decision . . . was categorical in its rejection of the administration's basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration's strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States Naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House that domestic law would never reach.

Here's the opinion, for those who care to muddle through the legal jargon [open link].

For international human rights lawyers, the decision handed down by the Supreme Court is groundbreaking, like Roe v. Wade for abortion rights activists or Brown v. Board of Education for domestic civil rights lawyers. What's most interesting is that the Court sees right through the justification for locating the detention center in another country. That tactic does not mean that the U.S. Constitutional protections of Habeas Corpus cannot apply.

The Supreme Court is consistently striking down the Bush administration's contorted legal rationales for the treatment of detainees in the War on Terror. This brings us back to Civics 101: separation of powers, a concept we all learned about but never really paid attention to. In fact, we would laugh at the concept that one branch is not allowed to get too powerful and that each branch of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) serves as a check on each other. Schoolkids got the point, but was this rock-paper-scissors theory really useful in real life? It is now. As one commentator notes in quoting from the opinion, "Even though the two political branches — the President and Congress — had agreed to take away the detainees' habeas rights, [Justice] Kennedy said those branches do not have 'the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.'"

The moral of the story is that the Bush presidency is out of control, and has done whatever it pleased in the name of security and, of course, politics. Separation of powers is no longer a cute theory of government. It prevents this country from falling into the abyss completely. ++


The Republic on a Knife's Edge
Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews
June 13, 2008
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/061208.html

There are two ways of looking at the landmark 5-4 Supreme Court decision recognizing the habeas corpus rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: As a stirring victory for individual liberty over collective fear – or as a reminder that the one more right-wing justice could make George W. Bush's imperial presidency "constitutional."

At the heart of the June 12 decision was the majority's recognition that President Bush and his political allies have been playing games with the Constitution by turning Guantanamo into a legal black hole for the indefinite imprisonment (or kangaroo-court trials) of people Bush deems "unlawful enemy combatants."

By the narrowest majority, the Supreme Court rejected Bush's legal loophole, declaring that the U.S. government cannot evade the constitutional tradition of judicial oversight simply by citing an indefinite "war on terror" and by placing detainees off-shore at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court's majority.

The majority also saw the Guantanamo loophole as a device used by the President and the Republican-controlled Congress of 2005-06 to evade the authority of civilian courts as well as the habeas corpus obligation for the Executive to justify a person's detention.

"The writ of habeas corpus is itself an indispensable mechanism for monitoring the separation of powers," the majority ruled, adding that it "must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain."

In a concurring opinion, Justice David Souter also noted the duration of many Guantanamo imprisonments, "some of the prisoners represented here today having been locked up for six years," he wrote.

However, four right-wing justices – Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito – saw nothing wrong in creating this modern-day Devil's Island outside the reach of traditional justice for the duration of the indefinite "war on terror."

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain also has vowed to appoint more justices in the mold of Bush's selections, Roberts and Alito.
If another Roberts or Alito replaces one of the five more moderate justices, the new right-wing majority would be in position to reverse the latest ruling.

Imperial Presidency

The four sitting right-wing justices repeatedly have embraced the Bush administration's radical notion that at a time of war – even one as vaguely defined as the "war on terror" – the President possesses "plenary" or unlimited powers as Commander in Chief.

As expressed in classified memos by John Yoo when he was a key lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, there should be, in essence, no limits on what a war-time President can do as long as he is asserting his duty to protect the nation.

Alito also is associated with this concept of a "unitary executive," holding that a President should control all regulatory authority, define the limits of laws via "signing statements" and – at his own discretion – override treaties, the will of Congress and even the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Under this theory, a President can cite his commander-in-chief powers to spy on citizens without warrants, imprison people without charges, authorize torture, order assassinations, and invade other countries without congressional approval.

With just one more Alito or Roberts, that view would claim control of the U.S. Supreme Court and allow a new five-to-four majority to, in effect, rewrite the Constitution.

The founding principles of the United States – that everyone possesses certain "unalienable" human rights and no one is above the law – would be history. [For details on these executive theories, see our book, Neck Deep.]

Dissenting Justices

In their dissents to the June 12 ruling, entitled "Boumediene v. Bush," the right-wing justices fashioned narrow arguments around the fact that previous courts had avoided extending habeas corpus – the right to challenge one's detention – to non-citizens outside U.S. territory.

As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his dissenting opinion:

"The majority is adamant that the Guantanamo detainees are entitled to the protections of habeas corpus – its opinion begins by deciding that question. I regard the issue as a difficult one, primarily because of the unique and unusual jurisdictional status of Guantanamo Bay."

Writing the principal dissent, Justice Scalia sought to turn the argument about Bush's alleged manipulation of habeas corpus back on the court majority.

"If the understood scope of the writ of habeas corpus was 'designed to restrain' (as the Court says) the actions of the Executive, the understood limits upon that scope were (as the Court seems not to grasp) just as much 'designed to restrain' the incursions of the Third Branch [i.e. the Judiciary].

"'Manipulation' of the territorial reach of the writ by the Judiciary poses just as much a threat to the proper separation of powers as 'manipulation' by the Executive," Scalia continued. "The understood limits upon the writ deny our jurisdiction over the habeas petitions brought by these enemy aliens, and entrust the President with the crucial wartime determinations about their status and continued confinement."

In other words, the right-wing court minority believes that the President should have the unilateral right to decide who should be defined as an "unlawful enemy combatant" and the nature of their incarceration for as long as the "war on terror" continues.

Given the advanced ages and questionable health of some Supreme Court justices, Election 2008 may well decide more than just who will be the new occupant of the White House.

It may well decide whether Bush's imperial presidency outlasts his time in office – and whether the concept of "unalienable rights" survives. ++


Memo to the Chief Justice: contempt for your fellow Justices is a Bad Thing(TM)
Brian Angliss, ScholarsAndRogues
June 12, 2008
http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2008/06/12/memo-to-the-chief-justice-contempt-for-your-fellow-justices-is-a-bad-thingtm/

 

weekend reads


Brave New World?
June 13, 2008
Peggy Noonan
http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html

And so it begins, the campaign proper. You probably guessed that there would be no letup in this relentless year, no break between the primaries and the general election, that both candidates would stay on the screen. You were right. They will not leave, and go, and rest. They feel they can't, it's inch by inch, slow and steady wins the race. This robs them of the power of disappearance. You disappear and then come back and people say, "Hey, look at that guy." They listen anew after a break in the drone.

Not this time. And maybe never again.

For Barack Obama this week, a Beltway setback. He chose for a key position a D.C. insider who got fat working the system. This was a poor decision by the candidate of change. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." But Jim Johnson was removed with dispatch, and the country didn't notice. Beltway bottom line: Mr. Obama the cool customer had a problem, removed the problem, has no problem.

John McCain had a worse time, with the famously awkward speech in front of the background whose color was variously compared to snot, puke and lime Jell-O. He was scored for not being adept with a teleprompter. The press knocked him, essentially, for not being smooth and manipulative enough. But if he were good at the teleprompter, they'd complain that he's too smooth and scripted.

The press will be nice to him again. When he's 17 points down.

It should not count against a man that he has not fully mastered the artifice of his profession. Then again, he should have nailed the prompter by now. Such things show a certain competence. Voters are slower to trust you with big things if they see a lack of skill in small things. In this vein, a suggestion. Podiums always seem to swallow Mr. McCain. He has limited mobility with his arms because of his torture in Vietnam. It restricts his ability to gesture. And he is not a big man. He often looks like he's flailing up there: I'm not waving, I'm drowning! His staff should build a podium for him, one that fits, and take it wherever he goes. For a seal, the great state of Arizona, which he has represented in the U.S. Senate for 22 years. Let him master the podium five months out. Other masteries will follow.

The lay of the land? Mr. Obama is ahead 47% to 41% in this week's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, and no one is surprised. Everyone knows he's ahead. Everyone knows this is a Democratic year. But I think there are two particular subtexts this year, or perhaps I should say texts. One, obviously, is youth versus age. This theme is the clearest it's been since 1960, when the old general who'd planned the Normandy invasion found himself replaced by a young man who had commanded a rickety patrol torpedo boat in World War II. You know that on some level, at some moment, Dwight D. Eisenhower looked at John F. Kennedy and thought: Punk.

But 2008 will also prove in part to be a decisive political contest between the Old America and the New America. Between the thing we were, and the thing we have been becoming for 40 years or so. (I'm not referring here to age. Some young Americans have Old America heads and souls; some old people are all for the New.)
Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New.
* * *
Roughly, broadly:

In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.

In the New America, love of country is a decision. It's one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.

Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.

The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn't decide, it decided. Now it's all on you. Old America, when life didn't work out: "Luck of the draw!" New America when life doesn't work: "I made bad choices!" Old America: "I had faith, and trust." New America: "You had limited autonomy!"

Old America: "We've been here three generations." New America: "You're still here?"

Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn't mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it. Old America: Politics is a duty. New America: Politics is life.

The Old America: Religion is good. The New America: Religion is problematic. The Old: Smoke 'em if you got 'em. The New: I'll sue.

Mr. McCain is the old world of concepts like "personal honor," of a manliness that was a style of being, of an attachment to the fact of higher principles.

Mr. Obama is the new world, which is marked in part by doubt as to the excellence of the old. It prizes ambivalence as proof of thoughtfulness, as evidence of a textured seriousness.

Both Old and New America honor sacrifice, but in the Old America it was more essential, more needed for survival both personally (don't buy today, save for tomorrow) and in larger ways.

The Old and New define sacrifice differently. An Old America opinion: Abjuring a life as a corporate lawyer and choosing instead community organizing, a job that does not pay you in money but will, if you have political ambitions, provide a base and help you win office, is not precisely a sacrifice. Political office will pay you in power and fame, which will be followed in time by money (see Clinton, Bill). This has more to do with timing than sacrifice. In fact, it's less a sacrifice than a strategy.

A New America answer: He didn't become a rich lawyer like everyone else—and that was a sacrifice! Old America: Five years in a cage—that's a sacrifice!

In the Old America, high value was put on education, but character trumped it.

That's how Lincoln got elected: Honest Abe had no formal schooling. In Mr. McCain's world, a Harvard Ph.D. is a very good thing, but it won't help you endure five years in Vietnam. It may be a comfort or an inspiration, but it won't see you through. Only character, and faith, can do that. And they are very Old America.
Old America: candidates for office wear ties. New America: Not if they're women. Old America: There's a place for formality, even the Beatles wore jackets!
* * *

I weigh this in favor of the Old America. Hard not to, for I remember it, and its sterling virtues. Maybe if you are 25 years old, your sense of the Old and New is different. In the Old America they were not enlightened about race and sex; they accepted grim factory lines and couldn't even begin to imagine the Internet. Fair enough. But I suspect the political playing out of a long-ongoing cultural and societal shift is part of the dynamic this year.

As to its implications for the race, we'll see. America is always looking forward, not back, it is always in search of the fresh and leaving the tried. That's how we started: We left tired old Europe and came to the new place, we settled the east and pushed West to the new place. We like new. It's in our genes. Hope we know where we're going, though. ++


John McCain: War Hero or North Vietnam's Go-To Collaborator?
From Glory Boy to PW Songbird
DOUGLAS VALENTINE, CounterPunch
Weekend Edition - June 13-15, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine06132008.html

[open link for footnotes]

If you have no idea what war is about, thank your gods.  It is not what you see in Mel Gibson movies, nor is it hidden within the Big Lie Big Brother tells you about Pat Tillman's heroic "Army of One" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When my father was in New Guinea with the 32nd Division in 1942, his fellow American soldiers would point their long Springfield rifles skywards and shoot at American pilots flying overhead.

"Glory Boys," the long-suffering ground troops called them.

The pilots had comfortable quarters beside the airstrip in Port Moresby.  When orders for a mission came down, they'd climb in their planes, rattle down the runway, and soar over the Owen Stanley Mountains with the clouds in spotless uniforms, breathing fresh clean air.  The Glory Boys weren't trapped in the broiling jungle, in the mud and pouring rain, their skin rotting away, chewed by ghastly insects, bitten by poisonous snakes, stricken with cerebral malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and a host of unknown diseases delivered by unknown parasites.

If the Fly Boys perished, it was in a blaze of glory, not from a landmine, or a misdirected American mortar, or a Japanese bayonet in the brain.

One day my father and his last remaining friend, Charlie Ferguson, were walking through the jungle up to the front line.  One the way they passed a group of bare-chested Aussies in khaki shorts sitting round a grindstone sharpening their knives.  Every once in a while one of the Aussies would hoist his rife and casually put a bullet into a Japanese sniper who had tied himself into the top of a nearby tree.  Not in any place that would outright kill him, but some place painful enough to make the point.

A little further toward the front line, my father and Charlie came upon Master Sergeant Harry Blackman, an adult man in his forties, regular army, a grizzled combat veteran.  A few days earlier in a fight with the Japanese, a young lieutenant, a "90-Day Wonder," had curled up in a fetal position when he should have been directing mortar fire.  As a result, US mortar rounds landed on several US soldiers.  Blackman, in front of everyone, took the lieutenant behind a tree and blew his brains out.

As my father and Charlie waked through the jungle they saw Harry Blackman perched on the lower limb of a huge tropical tree, babbling incoherently among the butterflies and flowering vines, driven stark raving mad by sorrow and jungle war with the Japanese.

Several days later my father was sent on a patrol into Japanese held territory.  He was the last man in a formation moving single file through the jungle.  Plagued by malaria and exhaustion, he kept falling behind.  Around noon, a group of Japanese soldiers sitting high up in trees dropped concussion grenades on the patrol.  As he lay on the ground, unable to move, my father watched the Japanese slide down the trees.  Starting with the point man on patrol, they pulled down the pants and castrated each man, before clubbing him to death with their rifle butts or running a bayonet into his gut.

War.  If you're a Glory Boy like John Sidney McCain III, you really have no idea what it is.  You drop bombs on cities, on civilians, maybe on enemy forces, maybe on your own troops.  Glory Boys like John McCain rarely get a taste of the horror they inflict on others.  Their suffering rarely extends beyond the high anxiety that they might get shot down and that some bombarded mob on the ground might take its revenge.

Magically, my father was spared that day when his patrol was slaughtered.  Against regulations, he had stolen a cross-swords patch and sewn it on his shirt sleeve. At the age of 16, he thought it looked cool.  On the morning of the patrol, when the new "90-Day Wonder" told him to take it off, my father said "Sure."   He and the lieutenant stared at each other for a while and then the lieutenant moved away.   Insubordination was the least of anyone's worries.  No one expected to survive the patrol, anyway.

When the Japanese who had ambushed the patrol got to my father, they stood poised to mutilate and kill him.  Then they saw the cross-swords patch.  They apparently felt that dear old dad was an important person with inside information about American forces.  Instead of killing him, they took him prisoner.   When they realized he was just a stupid kid, the Japanese sent him to a POW camp in the Philippines.

Being a POW is what my father and John McCain have in common; although their experience as POWs was as different as their class and their character.

Class indeed has privileges, and while the government refused to provide my combat-veteran father with medical benefits for his malaria, McCain, who spent ten hours of his life in mortal danger, was decorated with the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart.

And thus the "war hero" myth was born.

McNasty

In the fall of 1967, Navy pilot John McCain was routinely bombing Hanoi from an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. On October 26, he was trying to level a power plant in a heavily populated area when a surface-to-air missile knocked a wing off his jet.  Banged-up John McCain and what was left of plane splashed into Truc Bach Lake.

A compassionate Vietnamese civilian left his air raid shelter and swam out to McCain.  McCain's arm and leg were fractured and he was tangled up in his parachute underwater.  He was drowning.  The Vietnamese man saved McCain's sorry ass, and yet McCain has nothing but hatred for "the gooks" who allegedly tortured him. As he told reporters on his campaign bus (The Straight Talk Express) in 2000, "I will hate them as long as I live."

Americans have to hate people, and dehumanize them as "gooks" or "rag-heads" in order to drop bombs on them.  Stirring up such hatred is the forte of the US government, as witnessed by its Israeli-driven PR campaign against Arabs and Moslems.  That's why Bush and his media minions tied "brutal dictator" Saddam Hussein to 9/11 – so Americans would hate Iraqis enough to kill and abuse them in a thousand ways, everyday, for five years.  Or, according to McCain, for 100 years if necessary.

The flip side to the equation is that people generally hate those who drop bombs on them.  When the Germans dropped bombs on London, the Allies called it Terror Bombing.  The French resistance especially hated the Germans, especially after the Gestapo set up shop in occupied France in 1940.

Likewise, Iraqi and Afghani resistance fighters hate the Americans (who more and more resemble the Germans of 1940) for occupying their countries.  They especially hate our Gestapo – the CIA – and its torturers.  But that's War for you, and John McCain is lucky the locals didn't eat him alive – like Uzbek nationalists trapped in a horrid prison camp in Afghanistan nibbled on CIA officer John "Mike" Spann shortly after Spann summarily executed a prisoner.  Spann was killed in the ensuing riot, shortly before the CIA and its Afghan collaborators massacred the remaining Uzbek prisoners on 28 November 2001.

The Vietnamese had good reason to hate McCain.  On his previous 22 missions, he had dropped God knows how many bombs killing God knows how many innocent civilians.  "I am a war criminal," he confessed on "60 Minutes" in 1997. "I bombed innocent women and children."

If he is sincere when he says that, why isn't he being tried for war crimes by the U.S .Government?

In any event, the man who rescued McCain tried to ward off an angry mob, which stomped on McCain for a while until the local cops turned him over to the military. McCain was in pain, but suffering no mortal wounds.  He was, however, in enough pain to break down and start collaborating with the Vietnamese after three days in a hospital receiving treatment from qualified doctors – something no other POW ever enjoyed.

War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain's character…or lack thereof.

There are certainly degrees of collaboration.  As a famous novelist once asked, "If you're a barber and you cut a German's hair, does that make you a collaborator?"

Being an informant for the Gestapo, or its stepson the CIA in Iraq, and informing on the resistance and sending them to their death, is different than being a barber.  In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War Two, collaboration to that extent is an automatic death sentence.

The question is: "What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate his alleged torturers for the rest of his life?"

Put another way, how psychologically twisted is McCain?  And what actually happened to him in his POW camp that twisted him?  Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up?

Covering-up can take a lot of energy.  The truth is lurking in his subconscious, waiting to explode.  A number of US officials, including Andrew Card, have commented on McCain's inexplicable angry outbursts.

In a July 5 2006 NewsMax.com article, former Senator Bob Smith (R-NH), was quoted as having said about McCain: "I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues.... He would disagree about something and then explode."  Smith called it "irrational behavior. We've all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I've never seen anyone act like that."

So, you say, McCain has a short fuse behind the plastered TV smile.  So he calls his colleagues assholes and shit-heads.  In high school they called him "McNasty."  That's just how he is.  Always was, always will be.

Well, maybe.  And maybe it's not a quality we want in a president.  And maybe that repressed anger actually has its roots in a Vietnamese POW camp, where John McCain betrayed his forefathers and his country.

The Admiral's Bad Boy

In the forced-labor camp where my father was tortured by the Japanese, the POWs killed anyone who collaborated.  Indeed, the ranking POW in my father's camp, an English Major, made a deal with the Japanese guaranteeing that no one would attempt to escape.  When four prisoners escaped, the Major reported it.  The Japanese sent out a search party, which found the POWs and brought them back to camp, where they were beheaded on Christmas morning 1943.

The POWs held a war council that night.  They drew straws, and the three who got short were given a mission.  A few hours later, under cover of darkness, they crept to the major's hut.  My father had gotten one of the short straws and kept watch while the other two POWs strangled the Major in his sleep.

That's how it happens in real life.

McCain, in his carefully prepared statements, claims he was tortured while in solitary confinement, and that is why he signed a confession saying, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors."

However, on March 25,  1999, two of his fellow POWs, Ted Guy and Gordon "Swede" Larson told the Phoenix New Times that, while they could not guarantee that McCain was not physically harmed, they doubted it.

As Larson said, "My only contention with the McCain deal is that while he was at The Plantation, to the best of my knowledge and Ted's knowledge, he was not physically abused in any way. No one was in that camp. It was the camp that people were released from."

Guy and Larson's claims are given credence by McCain's vehement opposition to releasing the government's debriefings of Vietnam War POWs.  McCain gave Michael Isikoff a peek at his debriefs, and Isikoff declared there was "nothing incriminating" in them, apart from the redactions.

McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated.  By McCain's own account, after three or four days, he cracked.  He promised his Vietnamese captors, "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital."

His Vietnamese capturers soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line of American military elites. McCain's father, John Jr., and grandfather, John Sr., were both full Admirals. A destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, is named after both of them.

While his son was held captive in Hanoi, John McCain Jr., from 1968 to 1972, was the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Pacific Command; Admiral McCain was in charge of all US forces in the Pacific including those fighting in Vietnam.

One can only wonder when the concierge at the Hanoi Hilton started taking calls from Admiral McCain.  Rather quickly, one surmises, for the Vietnamese soon took John Boy McCain to a hospital reserved for Vietnamese officers.  Unlike his fellow POWs, he received care from a Soviet doctor.

"This poor stooge has propaganda value," the Vietnamese realized. The Admiral's bad boy was used to special treatment and his captors knew that. They were working him.

For his part, McCain acknowledges that the Vietnamese rushed him to a hospital, but denies he was given any "special medical treatment."

However….two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him.  It was not "name rank and serial number, or kill me," as specified by the military code of conduct.  McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of US pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships.

So McCain leveraged some details to get some medical attention.  That's not anything too contemptible.  And who among us civilians is to judge someone in the position?

On the other hand, according to one source, McCain's collaboration may have had very real consequences. Retired Army Colonel Earl Hopper, a veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, contends that the information that McCain divulged classified information North Vietnam used to hone their air defense system.

Hopper's son, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Earl Pearson Hopper was, like McCain, shot down over North Vietnam.  Hopper the younger, however, was declared "Missing in Action." Stemming from the loss of his son, the elder Hopper co-founded the National League of Families, an organization devoted to the return of Vietnam War POWs.

According to the elder Hopper, McCain told his North Vietnamese captors, "highly classified information, the most important of which was the package routes, which were routes used to bomb North Vietnam. He gave in detail the altitude they were flying, the direction, if they made a turn… he gave them what primary targets the United States was interested in." Hopper contends that the information McCain provided allowed the North Vietnamese to adjust their air-defenses.  As result, Hopper claims, the US lost sixty percent more aircraft and in 1968, "called off the bombing of North Vietnam, because of the information McCain had given to them."

The Psywar Stooge

McCain was held for five and half years.  Collaborating during the first two weeks might have been pragmatic, but he soon became North Vietnam's go-to collaborator for the next three years.  Given the quality of the military information he allegedly shared, his situation isn't as innocuous as the pragmatic French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier.  McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

This is the lesson of McCain's experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power.  The Vietnamese, like McCain's campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him and in return, he danced to their tune.

Not content with divulging military information, McCain provided his voice in radio broadcasts used by the North Vietnamese to demoralize American soldiers.

Vietnamese radio propagandists made good use out of McCain.  On June 4, 1969, a U.S. wire service headlined a story entitled "PW Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral."

The story reported that McCain collaborated in psywar offensives aimed at American servicemen. "The broadcast was beamed to American servicemen in South Vietnam as a part of a propaganda series attempting to counter charges by U.S. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird that American prisoners are being mistreated in North Vietnam."

On one occasion, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the top Vietnamese commander and a nationalist celebrity of the time, personally interviewed McCain.  His compliance during this command performance was a moment of affirmation for the Vietnamese.  His Vietnamese handlers thereafter used him regularly as prop at meetings with foreign delegations.

In the custody of enemy psywar specialists, McCain became what he is today: a professional psywar stooge.

It is impossible to prove exactly what happened to McCain short of traveling to Vietnam and tracking down his captors, and picking up thee trail where it begins. According to The Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain, McCain says he only collaborated when he brutally tortured by his Vietnamese captors and a wicked Cuban he referred to as Fidel.

He says his confession led him to a suicide attempt.

"In the anguished days right after my confession," McCain said in his autobiography Faith of My Fathers, "I had dreaded just such a discovery by my father."

But as McCain discovered, dear old dad did know.

"I only recently learned that the tape I dreamed I heard playing over the loudspeaker in my cell had been real; it had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father," McCain said.  "If I had known at the time my father had heard about my confession, I would have been distressed beyond imagination, and might not have recovered from the experience as quickly as I did."

But wait!  McCain did not commit suicide.  In fact, he's alive, running for President on the "war hero" ticket, and promoting more war everywhere.  The new McCain feels no distress at having been a collaborator or a war criminal – if he ever did. 

According to Fernando Barral, a Cuban psychologist who questioned McCain in January 1970, "McCain was "boastful" during their interview and "without remorse" for any civilian deaths that occurred "when he bombed Hanoi."  McCain has a similar recollection, writing in his [autobiography] that he responded, "No, I do not" when Barral asked if he felt remorse."

McCain told [Barral] that he had not been subjected to "physical or moral violence," and "lamented in the interview that 'if I hadn't been shot down, I would have become an admiral at a younger age than my father.'"

"Barral said McCain boasted that he was the best pilot in the Navy and that he wanted to be an astronaut." The Cuban psychologist concluded that McCain was [a] 'psychopath.'"  

"He felt superior to the Vietnamese up there in his plane, with all his training," Barral recalled.

Psychopath McCain emerges, now, as a contemptible elitist, stewing in the crucible of his class conscience, the ultimate right wing psywar stooge.

McJekyll and McHyde

There are no public records from other POWs to confirm McCain's self-aggrandizing claims, but his detractors, like fellow POWs Ted Guy and Gordon "Swede" Larson, and Colonel Hopper, have yet to be discredited or silenced by McCain's PR team.

Hopper, Guy and Larson are part of a larger movement concerned with the fate of the 2,000 American veterans still missing in Vietnam.  They've been pressing McCain to own up to his POW experience, drop the "war hero" posturing, and do more to provide a full accounting of the POWs and MIAs who were not as fortunate, privileged, or willing to collaborate as the would-be president.

McCain's supporters are trying to quiet detractors by ignoring them.  "Nobody believes these idiots. They're a bunch of jerks. Forget them," said Mark Salter, McCain's chief mythologist.   Salter is credited by casting McCain as a modern Teddy Roosevelt, "the war hero turned domestic reformer."

By in large the Salter strategy has worked. The American media accepts McCain's "war hero" myth as gospel and, in so doing, bolsters the "straight talk" image so essential to his success in politics.  In a recent TV interview with John Kerry, victim of the Swift Boat Heroes for Truth Movement in the last election, another "fortunate son," Chris Wallace, actually took umbrage when Kerry criticized McCain.  Son of media admiral Mike Wallace, Chris made Kerry admit that McCain was a hero.

When it comes to psywar, the Vietnamese have nothing on the good old USA.

McCain learned his lesson well from the Vietnamese propagandists who used him for their psywar projects.   But it's not the collaboration that makes John McCain unfit for office; it's the fact that he has managed to rewrite his collaboration into political capital. "He's a war hero, respect him, or die."

As a pedigree, the McCain family's stature rests on the status and prestige of its achievements in the military: rank, medals, and most importantly to John McCain's presidential campaign, the image of warrior masculinity: the straight talking maverick of the Republican Party, the 21st century rendering of Teddy Roosevelt.

Not exactly. In his current presidential campaign, he's cozying up to the hate-mongering Christian right he once criticized. He's reversed positions on so many issues that his Democratic rivals have assembled his contrasting statements into "The Great McCain Versus McCain Debates.

Underlying the Jekyll-Hyde reversals is McCain's hidden past of collaboration. Somewhere in the unplumbed human part of John Sidney McCain III, he knows his POW experience contradicts the war hero image he projects. This essential dishonesty, this lie of the soul, is a sign of a larger lack of character - like the major in my father's POW camp, but without the come-uppance.

McCain is not some principled leader, not a maverick cowboy fighting the powerful.  He's a sycophant. He believes in nothing but power and will do anything to attain it. He explodes in anger when challenged because, when a criticism hits to close to home, it goes straight to his deep-seeded shame.

McCain's handlers have turned his unspeakable reality into a myth worthy of Teddy Roosevelt.  No wonder the Glory Boy has stuck around Washington so long. ++


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