How The Bush Administration Follows The Law

There are a bunch of reports out in this past week that show the reckless disregard for the laws of the United States displayed by the Bush Administration. Consider this:

• The inspector general for the Justice Department has found that the FBI has misused the Patriot Act by failing to comply with internal regulations in an astonishing 10% of all "national security letters," which allow them to obtain personal telephone, email and bank records of suspected terrorists.

• The Bush Administration deliberately removed 3 citizens from a 2004 re-election event in Denver as part of White House policy, despite the fact that the three had tickets to the event, did nothing to disrupt it and were solely removed for having an anti-Bush bumper sticker.

• FEMA will have to sell 40,000 trailer homes, which never reached families in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for 40 cents on the dollar, and many of the others have rotted away and sunk into the mud in various storage sites.

• The head of the US General Services Administration is under investigation for cronyism, giving jobs to favored friends and using the agency to help Republican candidates.

• Internal memos at the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service demand that officials not talk about climate change or the endagered habitat of polar bears.

• Secret CIA interrogations were held at a former Soviet site in Poland, and US and British officials asked the Polish government to keep it quiet, according to secret memos. In addition, Human Rights Watch has found that scores of detainees are missing and unaccounted for at either CIA prisons or Guantanamo.

This is all in the space of ONE WEEK, and it includes corruption, cronyism, politicizing federal services and organizations, ripping off the American taxpayers, breaking statutes and regulations governing conduct, impinging on American's civil liberties, disappearing prisoners, crushing dissent, and violating maybe every single Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Just a snapshot. And as they say, a fish rots from the head down. Here's Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

That the FBI is abusing its NSL power is entirely unsurprising (more on that below), but the real story here -- and it is quite significant -- has not even been mentioned by any of these news reports. The only person (that I've seen) to have noted the most significant aspect of these revelations is Silent Patriot at Crooks & Liars, who very astutely recalls that the NSL reporting requirements imposed by Congress were precisely the provisions which President Bush expressly proclaimed he could ignore when he issued a "signing statement" as part of the enactment of the Patriot Act's renewal into law. Put another way, the law which the FBI has now been found to be violating is the very law which George Bush publicly declared he has the power to ignore [...]

The Bush administration has created vast and permanent data bases to collect and store evidence revealing the private activities of millions of American citizens. When the FBI obtains information essentially in secret -- with no judicial oversight -- that information is stored in those data bases. This is all being done by the executive branch with no safeguards and no oversight, and the little oversight that Congress has required has been defiantly and publicly brushed aside by the President, who sees legal requirements as nothing more than suggestions or options which he will recognize only if he chooses to. That is the constitutional crisis that we have endured under virtually the entire Bush presidency -- the crisis which, for the most part, our mainstream political and media elite have collectively decided not to acknowledge.

The story here is not merely that the FBI is breaking the law and abusing these powers. That has long been predicted and, to some degree, even documented. The story is that the FBI is ignoring the very legal obligations which George Bush vowed were not obligations at all, but mere suggestions to be accepted only if he willed it. It is yet another vivid example proving that the President's ideology of lawlessness exists not merely in theory, but as the governing doctrine under which the executive branch has acted, time and again and as deliberately as possible, in violation of whatever laws it deems inconvenient.

The biggest question for a new President in 2008 is whether or not they will sanction this culture of lawlessness, or if they will disavow the concept of the unitary executive and the ability to nullify American law through signing statements. Only then will we have a return to the American system of government as we know it. All of these examples of Administration lawbreaking can be traced back to the fact that the chief executive holds the law in contempt, and views it as subservient to his objectives and policies. Until we change that mindset, we can hardly be said to be living in a democracy.