Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (46 page)

Earmarking of defense spending has more than tripled since fiscal year 1995, and the Department of Defense’s black budget, which is secret from all citizens and virtually all members of Congress, was estimated at the end of 2005 at $28 billion per year: $14.2 billion for purchases of hardware and $13.7 billion in so-called research and development expenditures. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, in 1995 Congress approved 1,439 earmarked appropriations; in 2005, the number had risen to 13,998. Gordon Adams, director of security studies at George Washington University and a former White House budget director for national security, notes that members of such influential congressional committees as Intelligence and the Defense Subcommittees of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees “have a lot of power . . . and are sitting in a place where a lot of money flows... . There are huge opportunities here for politicians to tweak the system to their advantage. The smell of corruption is in the air.”
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Franklin Spinney, for thirty years a budget analyst in the Pentagon, said in a discussion with Bill Moyers, “The military-industrial-Congressional complex is a political economy with a big
P
and a little
E.
It’s very political in nature. Economic decisions, which should prevail in a normal market system, don’t prevail in the Pentagon, or in the military-industrial complex. So what we have is a system that essentially rewards its senior players.... We have a term for it, it’s a self-licking ice cream cone.”
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Moyers pointed out that pay for chief executive officers at Lockheed Martin went up from $5.8 million in 2000 to $25.3 million in 2002, at General Dynamics from $5.7 million in 2001 to $15.2 million in 2002, and at Northrop Grumman from $7.3 million in 2000 to $9.2 million in 2002.

Spinney explained that a main lobbying strategy of the military-industrial complex is to emphasize to members of Congress how many jobs are dependent on a particular contract being approved, rather than
the usefulness or feasibility of a weapon. Lobbyists’ letters and presentations to members of Congress always include maps showing precisely the communities that will be enriched by Pentagon spending and the funds they will receive.

Coming at it from a somewhat different political perspective is Winslow Wheeler, from 1996 to 2002 the senior analyst for national security on the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee and before that an aide to Senators Pete Domenici (Republican from New Mexico), Jacob Javits (Republican from New York), and Nancy Kassebaum (Republican from Kansas). After thirty years working on Capitol Hill, Wheeler retired and devoted himself to revealing the “systemic problems that reduce government to an exploitative system and make it possible for special interests to manipulate it at will.”
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He has documented how senators added $4 billion in useless “pork” projects to benefit their own states immediately after the 9/11 attacks, including Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat from West Virginia), who strongly opposed going to war against Iraq but nonetheless asked for funds to build an army museum in his home state. Senator Ted Stevens (Republican from Alaska), one of the stalwarts of the missile defense lobby because most of the ground-based interceptors are located in silos in his state, asked for post-9/11 funds to build parking garages (for automobiles, not missiles).

Wheeler’s major study,
Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security,
was not brought out by a leftist or liberal publisher but by the Naval Institute Press.
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He draws on his own experience to explain how dependent most members of Congress are on their staffs and how most staff officials spend their time inserting earmarks and add-ons to defense bills rather than actually trying to determine how the money of the people of the United States should be spent to achieve security. Between fiscal years 2001 and 2002, just as Wheeler’s career in the Senate was coming to an end, so-called add-ons—that is, unrequested spending for the Pentagon—jumped from $3.3 billion to $5.4 billion, not including, in 2002, $583 million for thirty-two projects added at the last minute by the House-Senate Conference Committee for items neither requested by the Pentagon nor included in the House or Senate bills.
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Wheeler presents numerous examples of how pork projects inserted into legislation to favor special interests undermined or took the place of serious defense projects. He notes that whereas defense appropriations bills in the 1980s
might have had as many as two or three hundred pork items, in 2005 or 2006 a bill contains thousands. His argument is that after more than two centuries, the system of checks and balances built into our government by the Constitution no longer works.

If the corruption of the legislative branch were not enough to scuttle the separation of powers, the Congress regularly goes out of its way to bow down to the president. After the press revealed that the National Security Agency was illegally eavesdropping on the private conversations of American citizens and that President Bush had trashed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the majority leadership in Congress introduced legislation that, in essence, would have retroactively forgiven him. As the
New York Times
editorialized, “Imagine being stopped for speeding and having the local legislature raise the limit so you won’t have to pay the fine. It sounds absurd, but it’s just what is happening to the 28-year-old law that prohibits the president from spying on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge. It’s a familiar pattern. President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the law he’s broken.”
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A Congress that is indifferent to the separation of powers has given up its raison d’etre as surely as the Roman Senate became a mere social club for old aristocrats paying obeisance to Augustus Caesar.

Similarly, even before President Bush undercut the McCain amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill with his signing statement, Republican senator Lindsey Graham contributed another amendment that removed the federal courts’ jurisdiction over Guantanamo prisoners who were hoping to challenge the legality of their detention. It states explicitly that “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider habeas corpus applications on behalf of those incarcerated by the Department of Defense in prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” The Senate passed this remarkably cruel piece of legislation by a vote of 49 to 42. It effectively repudiated the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in
Rasul v. Bush,
which gave non-U. S. citizens at Guantanamo the right to file claims based on habeas corpus in the federal courts. The legal scholar Brian Foley explains that habeas corpus forces the executive branch “to justify its detention of any person. It is a check for preventing the Executive from becoming too powerful. After all, an Executive that can jail anyone it dislikes, for as long as it likes, is a formidable power indeed.”
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An authority on American use of torture over the years, Alfred W. McCoy, adds, “Senator McCain’s now-compromised ban on cruel treatment of detainees was effectively eviscerated by Graham’s denial of legal redress. To nullify the landmark Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo is, in fact, American territory and so falls under the purview of U.S. courts, Graham also stipulated in the final legislation that ‘the term “United States,” when used in a geographic sense, does not include the United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay.’ In this way, he tried once again to deny detainees any legal basis for access to the courts. In effect, McCain’s motion more or less bans torture, but Graham’s removes any real mechanism for enforcing such a ban.”
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Senator Graham claimed that he was merely trying to increase the efficiency of the federal courts, that his amendment was necessary “to eliminate a blizzard of legal claims from prisoners that was tying up Department of Justice resources.”
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It is hard to imagine a lamer excuse for dishonoring such a well-established norm of American civil liberties. The Graham provision also explicitly gives the military officers who sit in judgment over Guantanamo prisoners in what the government calls “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” the right to use evidence obtained by torture. The effect of the law is, as Brian Foley argues, “to give the Executive unreviewable power.... A person can be captured, shackled, and sent to Guantanamo and never given a hearing.... He has no right to a hearing because he cannot enforce that right in a court. He can be tortured, because he cannot go to court to enforce a right not to be tortured.”
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On June 29, 2006, the Supreme Court complicated these matters by declaring that the Guantanamo military commissions that Bush had created without congressional authorization were, in fact, unconstitutional. The case,
Harridan v. Rumsfeld,
also repudiated the main provisions of Senator Graham’s law. However, the justices voted 5-3, with Bush’s new chief justice, John Roberts, not participating because he had ruled on the case as an appeals court justice, and the Republican Congress pledged to enact legislation that would allow Bush to proceed anyway with his drumhead courts.

The separation of powers that the Founders wrote into our Constitution as the main bulwark against dictatorship increasingly appears to be a dead letter, with the Congress no longer capable of asserting itself against presidential attempts to monopolize power. Corrupt and indifferent, the
Congress, which the Founders believed would be the leading branch of government, is simply not up to the task of confronting a modern Julius Caesar. As former representative Bob Barr, a conservative from Georgia, concludes, “The American people are going to have to say, ‘Enough of this business of justifying everything as necessary for the war on terror.’ Either the Constitution and the laws of this country mean something or they don’t. It is truly frightening what is going on in this country.”
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If the legislative branch of our government is broken—and it is hard to imagine how it could repair itself, given the massive interests that feed off it—the judicial branch is hardly less limited today in terms of its ability to maintain the balance. Even the Supreme Court’s most extraordinary power, its ability to nullify a law as unconstitutional, rests on precedent rather than constitutional stipulation, and lower courts, increasingly packed with right-wing judges, have little taste for going against the prevailing political winds. For example, on February 16, 2006, U.S. District Court judge David Trager dismissed a suit for damages by a thirty-five-year-old Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who in 2002 was seized by U.S. government agents at Kennedy Airport, New York, en route to Ottawa. Arar was shackled, hustled aboard a CIA airplane, and delivered to Syria, where he was tortured for ten months before being released. No charges were ever filed against him, and even his torturers declared that they had been unable to discover any evidence that might link him to a terror network. The case for compensation, not to mention an apology, seemed open and shut.

In dismissing Arar’s suit, Judge Trager wrote that foreign policy and national security issues raised by the U.S. government were “compelling” and that such matters were the purview of the executive branch and Congress, not the courts. He acknowledged that in sending Arar to Syria, the U.S. government knew he would be tortured—the State Department had already publicly detailed the Syrians’ capabilities and record as torturers.
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert asked, “If kidnapping and torturing an innocent man is O.K., what’s not O.K.?”
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The evidence strongly suggests that the legislative and judicial branches, having become so servile in the presence of the imperial presidency, have largely lost the ability to respond in a principled and independent manner. Could the people themselves restore constitutional
government? A grassroots movement to abolish the CIA, break the hold of the military-industrial complex, and establish public financing of elections may be theoretically conceivable but is unlikely given the conglomerate control of the mass media and the difficulties of mobilizing our large and diffuse population.

It is also possible that, at some future moment, the U.S. military could actually take over the government and declare a dictatorship (though they undoubtedly would find a gentler, more user-friendly name for it). That is how the Roman Republic ended. But I think it unlikely that the American military will go that route. In recent years, the officer corps has become more “professional,” as well as more political and more Republican in its sympathies, while the all-volunteer army has become an ever more separate institution in our society, its profile less and less like that of the general populace. Nonetheless, for the military voluntarily to move toward direct rule, its leaders would have to ignore their ties to civilian society, where the symbolic importance of constitutional legitimacy remains potent.

Rebellious officers might well worry about how the American people would react to such a move. Moreover, prosecutions of low-level military torturers from Abu Ghraib prison have demonstrated to enlisted ranks that obedience to illegal orders can result in their being punished, whereas officers go free. No one knows whether ordinary soldiers would obey clearly illegal orders to oust the elected government or whether the officer corps has sufficient confidence to issue such orders. For the time being at least, the highest medal for bravery and sacrifice in the American military is still the Congressional Medal of Honor, not the Victoria Cross, the Iron Cross, or the Order of Lenin. In addition, the present system already offers the military high command so much—in funds, prestige, and future employment via the military-industrial revolving door—that a perilous transition to anything like direct military rule would make little sense under reasonably normal conditions.

The likelihood is that the United States will maintain a facade of constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it. Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001-2. It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected
restoration of the American system, or for military rule, or simply for some new development we cannot yet imagine. Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of our standard of living, a loss of control over international affairs, a process of adjusting to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow exceptional compared to other nations. We will have to learn what it means to be a far poorer nation and the attitudes and manners that go with it. As Anatol Lieven, author of
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism,
concludes, “U.S. global power, as presently conceived by the overwhelming majority of the U.S. establishment, is unsustainable.... The empire can no longer raise enough taxes or soldiers, it is increasingly indebted, and key vassal states are no longer reliable The result is that the empire can no longer pay for enough of the professional troops it needs to fulfill its self-assumed imperial tasks.”
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