War is Holy, This I Know -- For Dear Leader Tells Me So

Ed Schultz's ancestor, celebrating the Anschluss? "He's my Leader! That's all I need to know!"

 "I take President Obama's word for it that troops will not be engaged on the ground," eructated MSNBC's Ed Schultz, rebuking investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill for fomenting doubts about the wisdom of the Dear Leader's war in Libya. When Scahill made a passing reference to "your President Obama," Schultz morphed into a portlier, more articulate version of Sean Hannity: "`My' President Obama? Is he your president, too? Jeremy, is he your president, too?"

 

A suitable response to hectoring of this kind from a certified cultist would be the following:


"I am not a member of the U.S. military, which means that I do not have a commander-in-chief. I am not an employee of the executive branch of the federal government, which means that the occupant of the White House is not my supervisor. Mr. Obama does not preside over me in any sense that I recognize. To the extent we have any relationship at all, Mr. Obama should be considered my subordinate, one of the hired help. He certainly doesn't have any moral or legal standing to pretend that he can order me to do anything, and if I had the opportunity I would place him under citizen's arrest for his crimes against the Constitution, individual liberty, and the peace of nations -- of which his criminal assault on Libya is the most recent but hardly the only example."
 
There was a time, perhaps five of six years ago, when Ed Schultz was a genuinely independent radio commentator of a left-leaning populist bent. I doubt that the Ed Schultz of 2005 would recognize the triple-jointed sycophant who began the segment with Scahill by utterling the following homily on the theme of the Leader Principle: "This isn't Bush-talk, this is totally different from Iraq.... The president has gone on record saying that Libyan agents have killed Americans -- that's all as an American I need to hear; let's get it done."



The doctrine of citizenship-as-submission to the Dear Leader's divine will is indeed "Bush talk" of the most obnoxious variety. It was preached with remarkable clarity during a July 11, 2006 exchange between Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Steven Bradbury, at the time head of the Office of Legal Counsel for the "Justice" Department.

At issue was the Wee Emperor's deliberate misrepresentation of the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, which did impose some trivial (and largely ignored) restrictions on the treatment of the detainees who are held illegally at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Bradbury insisted that because the Hamdan ruling "does implicitly recognize we're in a war," it effectively authorizes the president to do anything he wants to anyone of his choosing, since such decisions are supposedly permissible "under the law of war."

Leahy pointed out that the Hamdan decision -- whatever its faults -- explicitly rejected the Bush administration's claim of illimitable war powers, and upbraided the OLC for giving Bush the "cockamamie idea" that such a claim had been validated in that ruling.

"Was the president right or was he wrong?" Leahy demanded of Bradbury.

"The president is always right," oozed Bradbury in reply.

The Leader speaks, the Leader lies.

 The instrument has yet to be invented that can identify a substantive difference between Bradbury's statement and Ed Schultz's insistence that an unsupported presidential assertion is sufficient authority to justify an aggressive war. 

A slightly less acute version of the same leader-cult mentality was exhibited by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones magazine. Drum's endorsement of Obama's illegal war in Libya rests heavily on what I've come to call the Gnostic Fallacy -- namely, that the president is invested with prophetic powers giving him wisdom and insight mere mortals don't possess:


"If it had been my call, I wouldn't have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and I still do."

In matters of power, Thomas Jefferson advised, "let us hear no more of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." Modern collectivists, of both the Red State Fascist and Blue State Bombardier varieties, insist that the president himself is the Living Constitution, and that our duty is to make his will our law -- as long as their respective faction controls the White House, of course.

Bradbury, Schultz, and Drum reiterated a doctrine of executive authority under which the Leader "shapes the collective will of the people within himself," and his subjects are "bound to [him] in loyalty and obedience. The authority of the [Leader] is not limited by checks and controls ... but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited."

Leader Worship, circa 2003...

This, of course, was the official definition of Fuhrerprinzip -- the "Leader Principle," as found in The Organization Book of the National Socialist Workers Party. It is also a bedrock organizing principle of the National (or, since 2002, the Homeland) Security State.



John Yoo, the unindicted war criminal who composed most of the key memoranda outlining the Bush administration's doctrine of unlimited presidential war powers, has conferred his blessing on Obama's war in Libya. It is Yoo's position is that while it is wise for a president to seek political support from Congress, he doesn't need that body's "constitutional permission" to commit the U.S. government to war.

A few days after Yoo endorsed Obama's war, Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, suggested that Congress should consider a resolution "authorizing" the war. Unless Levin has access to Doc Brown's flux capacitor-equipped DeLorean, what he is proposing is a purely Orwellian exercise in "rectifying" the record to conform to Dear Leader's will.

“I’m interested in a vote authorizing military action,” Levin said on March 29 — a week and a half after the missiles had started to fly, and most likely months after CIA and Special Forces operators had been insinuated into Libya, Ed Schultz's ingenuous faith in Obama's assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. “The president said he’d welcome it and I think it would be helpful," Levin continued. "It’d show public support for the effort. And that’s always useful."

The Constitution doesn’t describe a congressional declaration of war as a “useful” gesture to ratify an ongoing military campaign; it dictates that such a declaration is mandatory before the government of the United States commits itself to military action against another country.

Were this an actual constitutional republic, public support for a formally declared war, expressed through an appropriate vote by elected representatives before the war began, would be mandatory. This is something both Obama and Biden acknowledged as Senators; in fact, Biden went so far as to describe presidential usurpation of congressional war powers as an impeachable offense. Now we’re told that a useless resolution issued well after the fact would be taken as a binding statement of “public support,” which is “useful” but materially irrelevant to the actions of our rulers.

... Leader Worship, circa 2009.

 The only material check on presidential war-making ability, according to John Yoo and people of his repulsive ilk, is the power of the purse: Congress has the ability to de-fund military operations once they have begun. 

 Of course, this creates a perverse incentive for presidents to use military personnel as hostages -- deploying them in a war zone and then indignantly accusing Congress of betraying "our gallant and intrepid heroes on the front lines, oh may they be blessed forever" if the body moves to de-fund the war. 

As if in anticipation of such action by Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- who seems to be channeling Dick Cheney --told Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) during a classified briefing that the administration would ignore any congressional effort intended to end, restrain, or limit the war in Libya. Some of the administration's critics have described this as a threat to violate the War Powers Act of 1973, a peculiar little enactment intended to "restrain" the power of the president to do something he isn't authorized to do at all in the first place -- namely, to wage undeclared wars abroad.

Clinton displayed a certain forthright arrogance in telling congressmen that they wouldn't be permitted to end Mr. Obama's war. However, her statement is firmly rooted in a bipartisan doctrine of totalitarian presidential war powers -- one that would likely withstand a Supreme Court challenge, given that the current Chief Justice, John Roberts, has explicitly endorsed it.

On February 19, 1984, Roberts -- at the time a special assistant to White House Counsel Fred Fielding -- wrote a memo entitled "War Powers Problem" that examined a bill conferring benefits on veterans of the Reagan administration's disastrous military venture in Lebanon. The time of service covered by that bill would run from August 20, 1982, until "the date the operation ends" -- with the latter date to be determined either by presidential proclamation or by a concurrent resolution in Congress.

 For Roberts, the idea of Congress acting to end a military conflict would be an impermissible encroachment on what he considered to be the plenary war powers of the president. "I do not think we would want to concede any definite role for Congress in termination [of] the Lebanon operation, even by joint resolution presented to the president," he wrote.

"Your memo suggests that Congress is powerless to stop a president who is going to conduct an unauthorized war," observed Senator Leahy during Roberts's September 2005 confirmation hearings. "You're saying you don't want to concede any ability to let Congress stop a war."

"Do we have the power to terminate a war?" persisted Leahy (whose zeal to restrain the imperial presidency dimmed perceptibly after January 20, 2009). "We have the power to declare war. Do we have the power to terminate war?"

Roberts took refuge in dissimulation:

"Senator, that's a question that I don't think can be answered in the abstract. You need to know the particular circumstances and exactly what the facts are and what the legislation would be like.... The argument on the executive side will rely on authority as commander in chief and whatever authorities derive from that."

Of course, under the Constitution -- which, admittedly, has no tangible relationship to the exercise of governmental power in our current system -- all of the president's war powers are derivative. This includes his temporary role as commander-in-chief of the U.S. government's military forces when called into service by Congress, which has the sole and exclusive power to declare war and to issue regulations governing the military. 

That's what the Constitution says on the matter. However, Roberts -- like all other proponents of Fuhrerprinzip -- insists that the president's war powers are "not limited by checks and controls," as the definitive expression of that doctrine put it (albeit in the original German). In fact, the Bush administration -- building on a string of precedents going back to the Vietnam War -- actually held that the president has the authority to spend un-allocated funds to continue military operations even after Congress refuses to continue appropriating money for a war.

In 2007, Congress and the White House were at loggerheads over a "supplemental" spending bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Insisting that "We expect there to be no strings on our commanders," Bush threatened to veto a spending measure that called for an end to the Iraq war by no later than September 2008. 

As the impasse deepened, a fascinating proposal was offered by economics pundit Stan Collender, an executive vice president for the PR firm Burson-Marsteller -- which received some very lucrative Iraq War agitprop contracts (and, appropriately, has made a fortune  sanitizing some of the world's most hideous dictatorships). Writing in the National Journal, Collender suggested that the administration could invoke the "Feed and Forage Act of 1861" in order to permit the Pentagon to continue procuring war materiel in the absence of an actual congressional appropriation.

The Lincoln-era Feed and Forage Act, Collender insisted, "turns the federal budget world on its head. The standard procurement process is for obligations to be incurred by a federal department or agency only after an appropriation is enacted. Food [sic] and Forage allows funds to be obligated before the appropriation is in place. In other words, the deadlines the White House keeps using for the Iraq war supplemental are irrelevant. Indeed, the Pentagon may have already begun to obligate funds for this purpose while the debate on the supplemental is continuing."

An analysis of the issue published by OMB Watch pointed out that on at least a half-dozen occasions since 1968, the Feed and Forage Act was used to fund ongoing military operations. "The act gives the military, at its own discretion and in the absence of appropriations, some power to obligate the federal government to purchase goods and services during emergencies for use through the end of the fiscal year," explained the analysis. 

None of the "emergencies" described in the report involved an actual threat to the United States -- but this is entirely proper, since the text of the measure "does not expand upon conditions or circumstances that would constitute an `emergency,' relying instead on case-by-case determinations." A 1994 GAO Report entitled "Analysis of Options for Funding Contingency Operations" concluded that the Feed and Forage Act endows the Pentagon with "virtually unlimited contract authority" to purchase whatever it deems necessary to continue a war.

"With this understanding, it seems more than plausible that President Bush could use the powers in the Feed and Forage Act to sustain U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan once other sources of funding have run out," concludes the report. This is to say that thanks to this measure -- an legacy of Abraham Lincoln's war to conquer the independent South -- the president and the Pentagon can continue to spend money in defiance of a congressional decision to de-fund a military operation.

What this means is that under present arrangements, Congress is not only denied a role in declaring war, it has no effective means of ending an undeclared war.  But this is troubling only to those heresy-riddled souls who refuse to submit to the infallible judgment of our Blessed Leader.

Obiter Dicta

My apologies for delaying the promised report on the outrageous Maryanne Godboldo case in Detroit; I'm still working on the piece, and hopefully I'll be able to publish it within the next several days.

I should acknowledge that the expression "triple-jointed sycophant," used above to describe the wretched Ed Schultz, was inspired by a line from Eric Metaxas's superb biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, which I would love to review if the opportunity presents itself.

My sincere thanks for your help in keeping Pro Libertate on-line! God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!

"Liberation," Then and Now

A representative of the "Coalition of the Willing" confronts an ungrateful Iraqi.*

(Warning: In the essay that follows there is one historically accurate vulgarism.)


Oliver Otis Howard was, by most accounts, an earnest Christian and a genuinely decent man -- in the conduct of his private affairs, in any case. Like too many American Christians, however, O.O. Howard built a mental "Wall of Separation" between the principles he professed and his conduct as an agent of the State.

In 1874, Howard, who lost his right arm to amputation after it was repeatedly wounded during the War Between the States, was given command of the "Department of Columbia." That territory stretched from Canada to the northern California border, and from the Bitterroot Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Whatever his official job description, Howard's chief task was to expropriate those Indian communities whose ancestral lands, though supposedly protected by treaty, were coveted by American settlers.

Under the so-called "Peace Policy" instituted in 1868 by President U.S. Grant, control over the various Indian tribes had been apportioned to the leaders of various religious denominations, whose task was to "Christianize" the natives; in practice that meant teaching them to adopt the transitory customs of mid-19th century America, and to submit without question to Washington's rule.

That program, incidentally, illustrates that there is nothing new about "Faith-Based" federal patronage, or the use of "Clergy Response Teams" to preach unconditional servility to the State.

Howard was selected to rule the Department of Columbia, in part, because he was Presbyterian, and that denomination had been given control over several Indian tribes in the Northwest, including the Nez Perce. Decades earlier, many of the Nez Perce, eager to learn from the "Book of Heaven" to which they had been introduced by Lewis and Clark, had become Presbyterians.

Some Nez Perce bands had not only become Christians, but had fully adapted to the Euro-American culture. Others, such as the band led by Tuekakas became increasingly disenchanted over the duplicity and corruption of the American government. American settlers took what they want without fear of punishment under the law that the US officials promised would protect both white and Indian alike. And the government kept revising its agreements with the Nez Perce with the obvious intent of driving them from their lands altogether.

Although he had gratefully accepted the Gospel, taken a Christian name, and received baptism, Tuekakas was driven from the faith by the violent, arrogant hypocrisy of the white men who professed the name of Christ. He eventually burned his copy of the Book of Heaven, bitterly remarking that it obviously meant nothing to the men who had shared it with him.

Seeking to protect his band's ancestral homeland in Oregon's Wallowa Valley, Teukakas set up cairns of rocks at the borders of his land. Those landmarks meant nothing to politically protected settlers, who blithely trespassed, grazed their stock on Nez Perce lands, and took what they cared to of its game and other wealth.


"If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian...we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself." --

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce

On his deathbed he warned his son -- the sober, eloquent, and noble man known as Chief Joseph -- about the serpentine dishonesty and implacable opportunism of the white man's government. Don't take the government's money, Tuekakas warned, and refuse even so much as to touch a document presented by a government official, lest it be said you agreed to what was printed on it.

"Never accept any gifts, or they will say that you have sold something," "Old Joseph" advised his attentive son. "A few years more, and white men will be all around you. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. This country holds your father's body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother."

Joseph was faithful to that charge: He never sold out. Instead, the federal government induced a Quisling from another band -- in one of God's little jokes, the sell-out was named "Lawyer" -- to "sell" the lands belonging to Joseph's band.

It fell to Gen. O.O. Howard, a man who read The Book of Heaven regularly, to do the dirty work of evicting Chief Joseph's people from lands they had never sold and that were theirs by supposedly solemn treaty. He was to provide the force behind the government's fraud, carried out to enhance the profits of politically connected commercial interest and to win the political support of the "values voters" who were pouring into the Northwest. The latter group was composed of people who professed to believe that by driving Indians off their lands they were carrying out a divinely ordained mission to promote "Christian civilization."

Howard discovered that Joseph was (in the words of Kent Nerburn, from his superb recent book) "an oak tree among the reeds and willows." Determined to keep the peace and preserve his people's homeland, Joseph was a fierce, persuasive, and effective negotiator who simply wouldn't fall for any of Washington's ruses.

In 1876, Howard announced that a "special commission" would be formed to bring about an "independent" and "fair" settlement of the land dispute. All of the commissioners were white; three members of the five-man panel were federal officials from Washington. Summoned to Lapwai, Idaho for a council with the commission, Joseph yielded not one inch.

"All I can say is I love my country," he told the panel. "We will not sell the land. We will not give up the land."

After failing to intimidate Joseph and his allies into surrender, Howard decided that the time had come for undisguised force. In May 1877 he summoned Joseph and the chiefs representing the other Nez Perce hold-outs to another conference in Lapwai. On that occasion, the task of speaking for the Nez Perce fell on Toohoolhoolzote, a large man who had little of Joseph's preternatural patience but a certain rough eloquence of his own.


When Toohoolhoolzote once again began reciting the Nez Perce position, Howard interrupted him. Gen. Howard laid the matter before the chiefs in blunt terms: They were to vacate their lands and relocate to the reservation. No other course of action would be permitted.


"Who are you to tell me what to do?" demanded Toohoolhoolzote. "What person pretends to divide the land and put me on it?"

"I am that man," Howard asserted, abandoning all pretense of diplomacy.

"I am chief here!" exclaimed Toohoolhoolzote. "No man can come here and tell me anything I must do. Go back to your own country. Tell them you are chief there. I am chief here."

As a Christian, Oliver Otis Howard must have known that it was the Nez Perce who were clearly in the right. As an employee of the State, however, Gen. O.O. Howard was committed to carrying out his task, at whatever cost to principle.

"My orders are plain and will be executed," Howard declared, his decision protected by his mental Wall of Separation. "You will go onto the [reservation] land, or I will send soldiers to put you on it."

As would be the case with any man possessing a particle of dignity, Toohoolhoolzote -- by this time an elderly man, albeit still a vigorous one -- was not going to yield in the face of Howard's threat, and he explained this in characteristically colorful language.


"I am a man. I have a prick. You will not tell me what to do."


WELL.... Certainly THAT kind of offense just couldn't go unpunished. Gen. Howard -- who had no compunctions against taking part in the vulgar, obvious theft of Nez Perce land, or over threatening to kill those who resisted that theft -- simply couldn't countenance this breach of Christian decorum. He had Toohoolhoolzote seized and imprisoned.


Howard's threat and his seizure of Chief Toohoolhoolzote constituted an act known to the Nez Perce as "showing the rifle." Open warfare soon flared between the Nez Perce, who were fighting on their home soil to repel lawless invaders, and the U.S. Army. This led to the eviction of the Nez Perce from the Wallowa Valley, retaliatory massacres of white settlers, and the storied 1,500-mile fighting retreat of a handful of Nez Perce under the care of Chief Joseph. The Nez Perce were cut off by the army just short of the Canadian border, and freedom, and then dragged thousands of miles to Indian Territory in Oklahoma.


















"The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are--perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." --

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, surrendering to General Nelson Miles at Bear's Paw, October 5, 1877.


The Nez Perce were eventually permitted to return to the Northwest from exile in Oklahoma, but despite Joseph's repeated entreaties -- in which he used the notoriety he had earned to plead the cause of his people -- he was never permitted to return to his stolen homeland.

Today, notes Nerburn, Chief Joseph "is not a historical figure but a cultural commodity, a brand name"; the American Ruling Establishment has a perverse genius for commodifying the victims of its conquests. (The British elite has displayed the same depraved gift in its cultural treatment of the conquered Highland Scots after Culloden.)

I find myself pondering three different, but related questions:

*Do supporters of the Global Democratic Revolution anticipate a time when Iraqis, Iranians, and other restive peoples will be rendered docile, confined to reservations, and considered fit to be treated with the same condescending sentimentality now routinely directed at American Indians?

*Wouldn't it be healthy for those who believe that Washington should "Christianize" and "liberate" the Middle East to review the unvarnished history of how that project turned out back when it was called "Manifest Destiny"?

*Have those targeted for "liberation" read American history a bit more carefully than most Americans, and, if so, might this help explain the vigor with which they resist our government's armed benevolence?
_______________

* I received the following very welcome correction from a good friend (and brother in Christ) currently serving in Iraq: "Your latest blog entry where you say a U.S soldier is chewing out that Iraqi? That ain't a us soldier. Wrong uniform, wrong body armor, and wrong weapon.
Looks like an Iraqi army guy, or someone else, but definitely not a US soldier."

Given the small stature of the individual in question, I think it's likely he's an Iraqi, which would make him the equivalent of the "Treaty Indians" who carried out police functions during Washington's 19th Century conquest of the Indians.

Be sure to check out The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.