Editorial Oct. 24, 2007 - From the Port Townsend (WA) Leader

I've included this because I think they did a rather eloquent job of describing the situation.

THE COMMON PEOPLE

It took common people - farmers, brewers, printers, silversmiths - to write the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights some 218 years ago. And it looks as if it's up to the common people to try to defend those principles.

Somebody has to step up here.

The Bush administration mocks each provision of the Bill of Rights that protects private citizens from their government, and likewise pushes past constitutional constraints that protect other branches of government from the presidency.

Meanwhile, most federal courts equivocate their way to approve most of these actions, and Congress, even though in control of the opposition party, dithers and compromises away our basic rights for fear of accusations of being soft on terror. The media, meanwhile, fawns and yawns its way through this immense power grab, distracted by the search for another faux pas by Britney Spears or startling new evidence about who killed Princess Diana.

The good news comes out of 12 jurors in a Dallas courtroom on Monday. The jury sat and listened for two months to the testimony of federal agents, Israeli intelligence officers, wiretaps, videotapes and saw thousands of documents produced by government prosecutors. They worked their way through 197 counts of charges against a charitable fundraising organization called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Muslim organization that says it directs funds to the construction of hospitals and providing food for the poor in Palestine.

The Bush Administration closed the group down and froze its assets in December 2001 for supposedly financing terror attacks and murder around the world. The case against the Holy Land Foundation was the largest prosecution case by the U.S. government against an Islamic fundraising group.

Instead, a jury of common people told the judge, after two months of testimony and 19 days of sifting through testimony and evidence, that they were ready to acquit three of five defendants on almost all charges and could not reach a verdict on the other defendants or charges. The judge declared a mistrial and threw the case out.

The U.S. attorney involved said the government will attempt to retry the case. We'll see how another group of common people deals with this intricate set of facts and assumptions in the future.

One must thank God - or Madison, Adams and Jefferson - that the judgment of common people was written into our Constitution and basic legal codes. It was done for times like these, when almost every branch of officialdom gets stampeded into dangerous over-reaction.

Consider:

The man President Bush named to replace the disgraced Alberto Gonzalez as attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey, is in confirmation hearings in Washington, D.C. Asked if he thought the president was subject to federal statutes, Mukasey equivocated that it would depend on "whether what goes outside the statute nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the country." Read those words carefully. In other words, it's up to Bush to decide which laws he will obey and which he will ignore if he feels it's in the national interest. In fewer words, laws aren't binding on this president. He is above the law.

This is not really a shocking admission. Instead it's a plain statement of how this White House has actually operated since late 2001. It has operated on the assumption that presidential decisions trump our nation's laws - even those designed to constrain presidential power. So far they've stared down the few voices of opposition and gotten away with it.

In spite of the fact that Mukasey lacks the guile to not state the obvious, it looks as though the Democratic-controlled Congress will amble along and approve him. That prediction comes after a long and continuing march of appeasement and caving in to pressure from the White House, despite a lot of tough talk following the Democrats' takeover of Congress in the last election. That takeover, by the way, surprised the Democrats as much as anyone, again courtesy of the common people who voted that November Tuesday of 2006.

The opposition-controlled Congress also appears on the verge of granting immunity to huge telephone companies that illegally assisted the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping of the phones, cell phones and email of common American citizens over the past six years. AT&T, Verizon and others have been sued by customers who claim that the decision of the companies to open up their internal switching computers to warrantless wiretaps by the National Security Agency violated federal privacy laws.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, has already passed a bill that would retroactively grant immunity to those companies from their customers' lawsuits. The bill would also add some restrictions on eavesdropping via a secret court, whose rulings can't be known because of course they're secret. House Democrats are resisting the immunity section - although presenting terms on which they might accept it.

Rockefeller, by the way, is reported to have accepted $42,000 in political contributions this year alone from executives and lawyers for AT&T and Verizon.

The Bush administration acts as if it can cajole and manhandle Congress, apparently with justification. When it runs into a contrary individual it can't silence, other tactics come into play.

That's what former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson found in 2002 when he was about the only credible high-level government official who spoke out prior to the invasion of Iraq to say the Bush justification that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons appeared to be garbage.

Within days, an effort to destroy Wilson was launched from at least Vice President Dick Cheney's office. This included illegally identifying Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, as an undercover CIA agent. That put in danger her life and those of her sources in various countries around the world. In her just-published book, she describes how she was then denied protection by the CIA and had her federal taxes audited by the IRS. She has since left government service, becoming a common person again, probably not a minute too soon.

Bush was quick to offer his protection in the Wilson case, however. He offered it in the form of a commuted sentence in July to Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, who was the only person to be convicted in this case of outing a CIA agent, for perjury. Now there's justice.

The wisdom of the people who wrote our nation's basic legal code remains intact. Executive power, especially in a time of high passion, must be restrained. Even the powerful must live within the law. The fact that our institutions forget this from time to time is a pattern we have seen before. Ultimately it's up to the common people to remember that freedom and liberty are not nouns, but verbs. They require constant vigilance and constant effort. Eventually little wins by the common people will add up to something significant.

It would seem there are few other alternatives.

- Scott Wilson