Web Letters: Dismantling the Imperial Presidency

Wonderful piece, but I respectfully suggest "infamous" and "mis-aphorism."

Cimino Cole

Warkworth, Aotearoa

Thank you for posting this article online. I hope it is a harbinger of the storm's passing.

Buried beneath the talk of executive power are the terrible secrets of the Bush putsch: the 2000 Florida and Ohio elections, the push for war with Iraq, the anthrax scare and the 9/11 strike. Did the CIA sodomize children to pressure their mothers to tell where their husbands were, as alluded to by Seymour Hersh on 6/8/4? Once these are outed in their entirety, the rational for the excesses will appear as an accessory to the crime of the millennium and an attempted theft of our democracy. It is no coincidence that the Bush cabal eschews the courts for resolution of the mega-crimes that occurred on their watch, because it is in the courts that crimes are exposed and the true nature of events is unraveled.

Presidential pardons are a temporary stalling device at best. The pardons cannot forever exempt former officeholders and officers from being called to testify about events in which they were conspirators, but those being prosecuted are not pardoned, unless Bush pardons all those involved in stolen elections, the anthrax events, 9/11 and the engineering of the Iraq war. The "torture," secrecy and spying are only the tools of the criminals to hide their crimes. Pardons tell where the bodies are buried, as they did with Liddy. Pardons probably strip perpetrators of their Fifth Amendment rights.

Thomas Ward

Detroit , MI

At the Nuremberg trials, Robert Jackson, the US Supreme Court Justice, said "if [the law] is to serve a useful purpose, it must [also] condemn aggression by any other nation [besides Germany], including those which sit here in judgement."

Those who create the conditions for atrocities are just as responsible as those who commit such atrocities. Bush et al. must not only be prosecuted for violations of the Constitution but for launching a war of aggression, as Hitler did on Poland. They also must be prosecuted for using banned weapons, e.g., napalm, and knowingly bombing civilians. These are acts against humanity itself. In our silence, we will be complicit in these war crimes, if only because we financed the war.

No matter how well Obama restores the economy and other lapses in our breakdown, the rest of the world will never forgive and receive us on the world stage with open arms again. We will be hated and reviled, and ignored as persona non grata. Our arrogance, the origins of our decline and fall, will then justify our true downfall.

stanley hersh

new york city, NY

Woven through the author's aricle is the unspoken anxiety that Obama may not change and do the "right things." Unfortunately, history has shown us that there are no perfect leaders and the trappings of power are intoxicating.

As "The Who" sang a couple of decades ago: "I'll tip my hat to the new constitution/ Take a bow for the new revolution/ Smile and grin at the change all around/ Pick up my guitar and play / Just like yesterday/ Then I'll get on my knees and pray/ We don't get fooled again/ Don't get fooled again"

"Meet the new boss/ Same as the old boss"

The era of Obamessiah has begun. We will be duly disappointed.

Robert Haynes

Chula Vista, CA

One of President Obama's problems will be the classical problem of a defeated general staff: they cannot accept failure. After WWI, the German General Staff, with the cooperation of the Weimar politicians and the industrialists, propagated the "stab in the back" excuse: The German Army had not lost on the battlefield. They were betrayed at home by communists and Jewish saboteurs. After our invasions of southeast Asia failed, the same forces--military and industrial--promoted the fiction that we were defeated because the politicians held back our military. From what? Nuclear war?! Now, that we hsve lost the colonization ("bringing them democracy") of Iraq and are losing the occupation of Afghanistan, our military will blame anyone it can find: the antiwar left--even Donald Rumsfeld!

Obama knows that he cannot just remove our troops. That he calls "irreponsible." What Obama considers responsible is increasing the troop in Afghanistan, a Muslim country that just loves to have Americans present. What a dilemma! To continue encouraging the recruitments to Al Qaeda by the presence of American forces or to withdraw and rely on the US Department of Homeland Security! A tough choice!

Alvin D. Hofer

Saint Petersburg, FL