WAR IS SWELL: By Sidney Blumenthal

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War is swell
Sept. 11 offered Bush a reason for being, and nothing will get in the way of his holy "war paradigm" -- not even the Constitution.

By Sidney Blumenthal

June 1, 2006 | Something that senior officials call the "war paradigm" is the Bush administration's central organizing principle. They do not use the phrase publicly, just among themselves, but they bend policy to serve it. After Sept. 11, 2001, they instantly adopted the war paradigm without any internal discussion. George W. Bush, who proclaimed, "I'm a war president" and insisted that he made decisions "with war on my mind," assumed the war paradigm as his natural state and right. According to its imperatives, the president in his wartime capacity as commander in chief makes and enforces laws as he sees fit, in effect as a sovereign, overriding the constitutional system of checks and balances. Some of the paradigm's expressions include Bush's fiats on the treatment of "war on terror" detainees, domestic surveillance, and international law and treaties, and his more than 750 signing statements appended to laws enacted by Congress that he claims he can implement as he chooses.

In the beginning, the elements of the war paradigm appeared to be expediencies, conceived as a series of emergency measures in the struggle against al-Qaida. But, in fact, their precepts were developed in law review articles before Sept. 11 by John Yoo, promoted to deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, where Vice President Cheney's office assigned him to write key secret memos on torture, surveillance and executive power. Once Bush approved them, the clerisy of neoconservative lawyers, at least as tightly knit as Opus Dei, put them into effect. The war paradigm is Bush's "Da Vinci Code," the difference being that its high priests acknowledge in private that it is real.

They fervently believe that the Constitution is fatally flawed and must be severely circumscribed. The Bush administration's "holy grail," another phrase officials use in private, is to remove suspects' rights to due process, speedy trial and exculpatory evidence. The war paradigm, which they contrast with a caricatured "law enforcement paradigm," is to be constantly strengthened to conduct a permanent war against terror, which can never be finally defeated. There is no exit strategy from emergency.

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Bush does not contemplate the slightest retreat from the war paradigm, which he embraces as his reason for being, regardless of the war's unpopularity. After his 2004 victory, he claimed he had had his "accountability moment." But the Constitution is an intricate mechanism of checks and balances that creates constant accountability. The question at the heart of Bush's politics is whether that can be indefinitely suspended and in the meantime the Constitution radically revised.

more at:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/06/01/bush_war/index.html