As the primary recipient of information and intelligence regarding what happens around the world, and about the own military’s activities abroad, the executive branch become hard to challenge. By claiming that it is acting upon information only it has access to, those heading the executive branch can ask people to take their word that what they claim they have to do is vital to the survival of the nation.
Whether the hijacked planes, and the death and damage they were utilized for, were the result of insider omission or commission on the side of the US government – one thing is certain.
9/11 became the name of a tidal wave that would provide the force needed for the people in the White House and Congress who had worked to carve out more room for presidential supremacy. The haste and emotional fervor, and the war time powers of the president, would make it possible to move more aggressively than what had been possible before. Claiming that national security was at stake, legislation could be rushed through without even what little challenging a minority opposition could have mustered
Walls set by law and conventions were deconstructed to facilitate more unity among agencies within the executive branch, not in itself necessarily a bad thing and certainly understandable in light of what seemed to be the massive failures in intelligence sharing and communication leading up to the 9/11.
The executive branch and all its components would emerge more streamlined and unified in its responses to the commands of the President.
It seems that this was a step towards obtaining the optimum of a unitary executive implementation - an executive branch virtually a closed community and ultimately responsible only onto itself and containing within itself oversight, decision-making, execution and accountability.
The nature of the designated enemy in ensuing war was entirely up to the executive branch to describe to the people – as only it had full access to intelligence reports.
The enemy turned out to be eternal, without borders, willing and able to use all aspects of social life for its motives – economy, information, communication, transportation, military. The same, as it became clear, was true of the war - and thus of the powers of the presidency according to the men with the plan for a unitary executive.
There can be no doubt when looking at the behavior of decisions made and behavior of the President and his staff following the declaration of “war on terror”, that all efforts made to expand the powers of the executive branch, and the supreme control of the President over that branch and those powers, intensified.
There is little doubt, as well, that these efforts had been underway and planned for some time before 9/11 as unveiled plans have shown.
With time and public outcry over what was seen as clear failures of the government in general and the administration in particular, it became more difficult to push and make creative interpretations of the law without getting unwanted attention and push back. Popular opinion and anger set a path for Democrats to reclaim political voice and seats, and whether they were pushed to it or always had been wanting to many of them began challenging and questioning decisions and actions taken by the administration under the auspices of national security.
One of the aspects of this systematic and planned attempt at extending the power of the executive was the matter of what was often referred to as the “Warrantless Wiretapping”.
President Bush, in 2001, secretly set up several secret programs – many of them still secret – that involved gathering of information and communication between people both within and outside USA, Americans and foreigners.
One program that was leaked was his so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program to wiretap. But it included Americans, which would require a warrant from the Foreign Surveillance Court – a designated body with the exclusive authority to review and approve of reasons for intercepting communication where one or more parties are located inside the USA. A violation of FISA is a felony and each violation can result in five years in prison. Even though all this was revealed by then, Congress approved of a much broader program by the passing of the Protect America Act than even the Terrorist Surveillance Program. In practice they not only legalized what Bush was doing before, but made it very unlikely that the Bush administration officials will be brought to justice for what seemed obvious felonies that they had been committing since 2001.
This all occurred even though in August 2007 Congress had a majority of Democrats in both houses.
On August 06 2007 Independent media broadcast Democracy Now featured Glenn Greenwald, political - legal blogger for Salon.com, who is also a constitutional attorney, and Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild.
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