Strong prez, weak gov

The Price of Unchecked Power -- by John Young

WACO, Texas - Somewhere in the bowels of our government is a new Pentagon Papers waiting to be read.

The real story of what our leaders knew and what they were thinking when they planned to invade Iraq is waiting to be told.

A preview of that blockbuster is contained in a new book, "The Weapons Detective," by former U.N. weapons inspector Rod Barton. In addition to addressing the trumped-up case made for war, Barton, who served on the CIA-commissioned Iraq Survey Group, tells of how truth was bottled up.

As early as May 2003, claims of "mobile bioweapons labs" had been debunked by the CIA. A year afterward, an election year, that information was still being suppressed, he writes. A CIA officer said it was "politically not possible" to share the truth with the public.

A revelation of this sort presumably would be probed aggressively by a legislative branch that cared to use any of its checks on unbridged presidential power. Not this one.

Another election year has arrived with Congress in the balance. Though each campaign will be framed around varying issues and personalities, the issue of challenging a president will underlie all.

The unchecked power of this presidency "has weakened the constitutional order on which the American way of life depends."

Those words aren't from the American Civil Liberties Union. They're from the free-market, less-government Cato Institute, generally a durable friend of Republicans.

A Cato report analyzes and decries a "ceaseless push for power (by the Bush White House), unchecked by either the courts or Congress."

Where to begin? One place is a Boston Globe report that more than 750 times President Bush has attached statements to laws he signed claiming a president's authority to disobey them.

Other presidents have written such "signing statements" challenging laws passed by Congress. Bill Clinton wrote 140 over eight years. But Bush has lapped the field many times.

New laws aside, we have bedrock legal principles this White House has simply decided to ignore, such as habeas corpus.

Such rights have been suspended in war, as Lincoln did during the Civil War. But today's "war on terror" has been used, says the Cato report, to effectively pronounce "the entire world, including every inch of U.S. territory, a battlefield."

On warrantless wiretapping, the Cato scholars aren't satisfied with White House assertions that it's only about people with al-Qaida on speed-dial.

"If the president can surveil international calls without a warrant," said the Cato report, "can he (or his successor) issue a secret executive order to intercept purely domestic communications as well?" Oh, yes.

This is all about trust, because without a check on one man's power, like warrants, trust is all we have.

Relative to the White House's broad use of the term "enemy combatant" to hold people without trial, "the liberty of every American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White House," warns the report.

As we come into another election cycle the question must be asked: Is this a nation governed by men empowered by a political hold on the three branches of government? Or is this a nation of laws?

Should the political balance tip in Congress this fall, that body might rediscover its investigative function, as well as its outrage. An executive branch that literally has put itself above hundreds of the laws it signs might feel the need to involve the legislative branch, and the people, in the decisions it makes.

(John Young is opinion editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald.)