COUP d' ETAT IN WASHINGTON

final draft - so far
for posting, forwarding and other use



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               ANDRE    GUNDER      FRANK

Senior Fellow                                      Residence
World History Center                    One Longfellow Place
Northeastern University                            Apt. 3411
270 Holmes Hall                         Boston, MA 02114 USA
Boston, MA 02115 USA                    Tel:    617-948 2315
Tel: 617 - 373 4060                     Fax:    617-948 2316
Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/     e-mail:franka@fiu.edu

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June 17- 20, 2003

  COUP d' ETAT IN WASHINGTON
 and Silent Surrender in America and the World
  
                                by

                      Andre   Gunder   Frank
                                        

Be wary of conspiracy theories, beware of real conspiracies, and be aware
of a grab of power. It has happened in Washington and its instigators are
pursuing a policy of faits accomplis that attracts ever more people to
jump on the band wagon.Pat Buchanon howeve says that it has already
offended much of the American public.  The Bush administration has made a
real Coup d'Etat and achieved its apparently unknowing acceptance by
America and the World. Even Hitler and Mussolini came to power by
electoral routes and Stalin and Latin American dictators had to resort to
violence to make their coups d'etat. Bush and his small coterie required
none of these to get to the seat of power. Since then, he has repeatedly
and grossly violated his oath of ofice to "preserve, protect and defend
the Constitution of the United States."

THE COUP

To begin with, Bush's accession to the Presidency was in violation to the
Constitution. It is not that he received a minority of the popular vote,
because the Constitution provides for the President's election  by the
Electoral College. But Bush received the Electoral College vote by fraud,
for he lost the decisive popular and thereby electoral vote in
Florida. His brother Jeb as Governor of Florida with the help of Mrs
Harris as Secretary of State [ who it has been alleged  without evidence
was his lover, but who certainly herself declared that she expected high
political favors for her actions]  first deprived hundreds of thousands of
black and presumably Democratic voters of the vote through incarceration,
intimidation, and other means. The Republican Cuban Mafia sent its goon
squads physically to prevent a recount in Broward County. Mrs. Harris did
all she could, which was plenty, to interfere with recounts in other
counties in Florida. The alleged recounts that  were made were a
sham. They only recounted votes that were NOT counted in the first count
by voters who had been unable to punch holes all the way through the
voting cards without leaving the infamous hanging chads. Yet much more
importantly one either before the decision or afterwards when the
newspapers did it again, NO one   ever recounted the votes that HAD been
for the Democrats but were discounted because  voter mistakenly also
punched a second hole on a confusing ballot. Yet even the third and most
conservative candidate Pat Buchanon declared publicly that these duplicate
votes in heavily Jewish and Democratic counties were surely not for him
but for the  Democratic Party candidate. These votes [or even  half of
them if they had been allotted also to other candidates]  would have given
a decisive majority of the popular vote and therefore of the Electoral
College votes in Florida to the Democrats.  Yet they were never counted or
recounted for the Democrats.

In the end Bush was not elected, but was SElected in the Supreme Court by
the decisive political swing vote of Justice Kennedy. Justice Scalia's
vote was already in the bag and he bad two sons working for the Bush
campaign.The Supreme Court's appealed to the 14th amendment, which
guarantees due process of Law to all, was ironically biased. For it was
selectively applied without due process to squash the popular vote in
Florida, but the same due process procedures were not applied to
challenged votes in any other State. That in itself was already a defacto
coup d' etat.

Then, several members of the House of Representatives called for a
challenge of  the Electoral College under Constitutional provisions that
permit the Congress to do so if the challenge has the support of  at least
one member  of both houses. Yet they were  not joined by even a single
Senator, who would have made  the challenge legally effective. In other
words, the Congress simply acquiessed to this power grab by the Bush
administration through a Coup d'eat with the help of the Supreme Court
but in clear violation to the Constitution. 

That was the beginning of the violation of the Constitutional separation
of powers and checks and balances. Since then,  the Bush administration
has carried  these violations farther than any previous one in the history
of the United States. Not even President Lincoln in the Civil War, nor
President Roosevelt in the Second World War nor his previous attempt to
stack the Supreme Court, ever grabbed and concentrated as much power for
the executive branch while marginalizing the Legislative branch and the
Judiciary. 

Beware of Conspiracy Theories.  But be aware  that it was really
Vice-President elect Dick Cheney who then put together the   Bush
Administration, selecting whom to place in which positions of power,
especially in defense affairs. And beware of   PNAC, the Project for a New
American Century, which was  already lobbying Washington  with their plans
for a "Pax Americana" in 1992, 1997, and 2000 among other notable
dates. PNAC issued a long report in  September of 2000  entitled
"Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New
Century."  Its statement of principles  calls for a massive increase in
military power,  U.S. military domination of Eurasia to prevent the rise
of hostile powers;  and pre-emptive [not just pre-ventive] military action
against states suspected of developing weapons of mass
destruction.  PNAC's prescriptions have been converted into official US
policy and praxis by the Bush Administration. 
 
PNAC founding members and signatories of its statements include 
- Cheyney himself, 
- Lewis Libby, Cheney's top national security assistant and now
the Vice-President's chief-of-staff 
- Donald Rumsfeld, also a founding member, now Secretary of Defense 
- Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Defense Secretary and
arguably the groups ideologue 
- Elliot Abrams,  pardoned by Bush Sr. in the Iran/Contra scandal
and now member of the  National Security Council
- John Bolton,  Undersecretary for Arms Control and International
Security 
- Richard Perle, the most outspoken hawk in the  Reagan
administration who advocates dumping the United Nations,
then  chairman of the powerful Defense Policy Board, who was forced to
resign one of his positions over a conflict of interest scandal, 
- Randy Scheunemann, President of the Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq, who was Trent Lott's national security aide and who served as an
advisor to Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2001
- Bruce Jackson,  now  Chairman of PNAC and former  vice president
of weapons manufacturer Lockheed-Martin who headed the Republican Party
Platform subcommittee for National Security where he called for - as had
Wolfowitz for some years -  the removal of Saddam Hussein
- William Kristol, noted conservative writer for the Weekly
Standard, a magazine owned along with the most hawkish Fox News Network
owned by Ruppert Murdoch
- Norman Podhoretz, editor of the right wing Commentary
-  and others, like Robert Kaplan and Douglas Feith . 

The core group of PNAC now hold the highest positions of policy making
power in the Pentagon and much of it in the White House. They have also
planted one of their group in the State Department to keep an eye and
check on Colin Powell who is the only major foreign policy player who is
not a member of this inner sanctum. An interesting sidelight is that
Wolfowitz , Perle and Feith also went to Isralel to serve as advisors to
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's party, for whom they drew up a battle plan
against the Palestinians.  Behind them lies the strange ideological
bed-fellow political alliance of two of the most powerful lobbies in the
United States:  Organized Zionism and Christian Fundamentalism.  For good
measure , throw in the Cuban Mafia as well.

Another matter to consider  are some of the connections of these same
people with the private sector. Two examples should suffice to give a
general idea.  Cheney was chairman of Haliburton Inc., which in turn owns
Brown & Root and other habitual contractors of the Defense Department for
major construction and/or petroleum projects around the world. One of
these companies was awarded a 1 Billion dollar contract to re-build the
Iraqi oil fields in case they should be damaged in the war. Another, of
which the now "Prime Minister" of Afghanistan was a director,  is first in
line to build the proposed oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan  from
Central Asia to the Indian Ocean.  The Bush family and George W.  Bush
himself have long standing business relations with the Carlyle Group,
which also represents the Bin Laden family, including Osama, with whom
they have also maintained direct relations.

The White House and the Executive Branch generally has made full use of
its new power to serve its economic and  political allies.  Those who made
the largest campaign contributions have been handsomely rewarded  with
government hand-outs and regulations, or rather de-regulation.  The Bush
administration has issued at least 200 separate executive orders to roll
back regulations enacted by previous administrations, even Republican
ones, to protect the environment and/or Public Health and
Safety.  Executive Order has  received a whole new meaning: Special
interests write an order that is passed to the President for his
signature,  whereby mostly without knowing what he is doing he converts it
into an Executive Order. 

The Pentagon has petitioned the White House to exempt it from  existing
environmental protection regulations that hamper their disposal of spent
munitions and other hardware and thereby interfere with ''national
security. "  The President deliberately appointed as Secretary of the
Interior a person known for her ties to the timber and oil industries to
whose exploitation she seeks to open thousands of acres of federally owned
lands as well as  the Alaska Wilderness for the construction of a new
pipe-line - all in the interest of course of ''national security."   

THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND CONSTITUTION

More serious still, the Bush administration has shredded the Bill of
Rights, abrogated the Constitution, and even violates the age - old common
law of Habeus  Corpus,  which prohibits the detention  and holding of
anybody against his will without due process of law.  Elsewhere in the
Executive Branch, President Bush appointed and lent full support to
Attorney General John Ashcroft  who was already known for his racist and
authoritarian inclinations. Although many Senators had doubts about his
appointment, the Senate ratified it anyway.  Since then, Attorney General
Ashcroft and his staff have converted several arms of the Department of
Justice into those of a police state. The Executive has encouraged and
permitted the Attorney General and the Department of Justice Judiciary
Branch to violate the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on multiple
counts.  For instance,  the US Government already claims the right to
monitor all e-mail and to bug telephone conversations without  specific
judicial permission.

The Bush Administration brought Admiral Pointdexter back into government
after his participation in the Iran-Contra Scandal and lyiung about it to
Congress. His new mission is a  project,called Total Information Awareness
(TIA): to develop computers to monitor "vast quantities of data generated
by US civilians in their daily lives: Academic transcripts, ATM receipts,
prescription drugs, telephone calls,  driving licences, airline tickets,
parking permits, mortgage payments,  banking records, emails, website
visits and credit card slips" [The Guardian   November 23, 2002]. 

In  critique of all this and the Patriot Act, only the lone voice in
Congress of Representative Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio)  has asked  
 "How can we justify in effect   canceling 
- the First Amendment and the right of free speech, the right to peaceably
assemble? 
- the Fourth Amendment, probable cause, the prohibitions against
unreasonable search and seizure?
- the Fifth Amendment, nullifying due process, and allowing for indefinite
incarceration without a trial?
- the Sixth Amendment, the right to prompt and public trial? 
-  the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual
punishment?"
The fouteenth amendment guaratnteeing due process of law is being violated
every day.

 AND JUSTICE  FOR ALL?                                                   

The Constitution makes all the rights it guarantees extensive to anybody
in the US, but the Attorney General has declared that non- citizens are
not worthy of protection by the Constitution. We do not know yet how much
of a loss that is because the Department of Justice and its Immigration
and Naturalization Service[INS] have also proposed to divest naturalized
and even native-born American Citizens of their citizenship, again in
clear violation of the Constitution.  And even those who remain citizens
are under constant threat to have their rights violated without due
process under the fourteenth amendment, or to be detained in violation of
Habeus Corpus. They are denied representation by legal counsel and trial
in civil courts, as provided for by the Constitution. In particular,
hundreds of thousands of American residents and Citizens of Arab descent
or even of features that appear to individual agents of the Department of
Justice or the police's racial profiling as perhaps being Arab, or Muslim,
or who knows what else have been called in for questioning.  When they
appeared in Los Angles, they were detained without charge.  They now live
in constant fear of the infamous knock on the door at 3 AM that was made
infamous by Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's GPU. That is so if they are even
favored by a knock on the door before a blast of gunfire of shooting first
and asking questions later, which has also happened.

So far as we know of over 700 people who have remained in detention since
September 2001; though there may be many more, since nobody knows or says
where they are, or who they are, or what they are accused of. Indeed, only
a dozen of these have ever been charged with anything. The others remain
out of sight and out of mind except for their families who are not allowed
even to secure legal representation for them.  So do the innocent Afghani
prisoners brought in shackles to Guantanamo where it still keeps them
without accounting to anybody, and the countless ones still detained under
horrible conditions in Afghanistan. How come There is no public outcry
about any of these? Instead,  THE ASSOCIATED PRESS reports on June 18,
2003 that  Names of 9/11 Detainees Can Remain Secret,Court Rules," and
"Attorney General John Ashcroft hailed the ruling [in which] ...for the 
first time in U.S. history, a court has approved secret
arrests" [www..reuters.com/newsArticle]. 

On the other hand, the same Executive Branch has divested the Judiciary of
powers and the citizenry of judicial protection by illegally transferring
powers of the Judiciary to itself. Perhaps only the most visible tip of
the iceberg of this process is the Bush Administration and Pentagon
declaration that it will bring normally civil suits before military
tribunals that operate under rules of court marshal and other procedures
of Military "Justice"  that can order death sentences without
appeal. Moroever, the accused do not know whereof, cannot chose legal
counsel, and  their conversation with whom can be overheard by the
authorities. The prestigious very conservative publicist William Saffire
refers to them as ''kangaroo courts" and observes that "no longer does the
judicial branch and an independent jury stand between the government and
the accused. In lieu of those checks and balances central to
our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator,
prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist,
Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial'." 

THE LAND OF THE FREE

John Ashcroft has also issued instructions to the Department of Justice to
resist as far as possible the delivery of documents under the Freedom of
Information Act.  And the Executive itself has severely restricted the
kind and number of documents of its own that it is prepared to make
public.  In other words,  transparency  and therefore control or even
critique of the ever widening powers and their use by the Executive Branch
is itself being severely restricted. On the other hand, the Executive
Branch has multiplied its own access to information. During the
congressional debate on John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act, an American Civil
Liberties Union fact sheet on the bill's assaults on the Bill of Rights
revealed that Section 215 of the act "would grant FBI agents across the
country breathtaking authority to obtain an order from the FISA [Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act] court . . . requiring any
person or business to produce any books, records, documents, or
items."  That includes bookstores and public libraries being obliged to
divulge who is reading what. This is now the law, 

Alas, the Congress has been intimidated into passive acceptance of
virtually everything and anything the Executive proposes and demands.  It
passed the Patriot Act  that severely restricts civil liberties virtually
without reading it.  The proposed Patriot Act # 2 has not even bee
submitted to the Congress for study and yet the version leaked by the
Press suggests that it proposes even more of a police state than the first
one.  When the Leader of the Democratic Majority in the Senate voiced only
the mildest doubts about Bush's military moves, he was immediately
reprimanded by his Republican Majority Leader counterpart Lott, for ''how
dare he criticize the President in time of war!"  Both have been forced to
resign since then, but for scandals unconnected to that one. 

Moreover, the Executive has been more than secretive about the events and
circumstances of September 11, 2001; and the Congress has not launched any
serious inquiry of its own. Neither have the Media. There has not even
been any public inquiry or disclosure into the failure of the Air Force or
National Guard to scramble fighter aircraft to investigate the airliners
that had clearly gone off course.  That is every day routine standard
operating procedure, but it was called off or at least not enacted during
the 90 minutes that elapsed between the crash into the first World Trade
Tower and the one into the Pentagon - that is IF the Pentagon was damaged
by an aircraft which has been seriously questioned if only because no
evidence has ever been made public that it was hit by an airplane and not,
as some allege, by a missle.  Nor has the government given any account of
its receipt and disregard of multiple forewarnings from intelligence
agencies among its allies in Pakistan, Russia, Germany, France, Israel. In
other words, the very circumstances that allegedly require all these
domestic and foreign responses by the Bush Administration are themselves
wrapped in a shroud of self-imposed secrecy.
 
The violation of the Constitutional provisions for the separation of
powers is particularly flagrant regarding the powers reserved to the
Legislative Branch of the Congress and the Constitutional prohibition
against military action in domestic civil affairs.  Bush also disregards
the Constitutional provision that only Congress may declare war, and it
violates the 1976 War Powers act that Congress passed to regulate that
Constitutional provision after it had been grossly violated in the Vietnam
War. The Bush administration has de facto-also abrogated the 1878 Posse
Comitatus Act that prohibits military participation in the enforcement of
civil law, and it violates the general Constitutional provision against
the military action in domestic affairs.  Instead, the Bush Administration
has visibly mobilized the Armed Forces and National Guard around all US
airports and elsewhere, and the Pentagon is drawing up plans for its
intervention in endless domestic affairs. It stands to reason that the
machine gun toting military presence in the passenger areas of airports
has not added one iota to security but serves only to terrorize the public
into blind and passive acceptance of the violation of their civil rights
there and elsewhere. Even the government has stated repeatedly that any
other terrorist attack on the US is not likely to copy that of September
11, 2001 but to take totally different forms against which this military
presence would offer no defense. Indeed, it would not have prevented that
of September 11 either.  The pretext that the country is at war is being
used as cover for US government terror of its own at home and abroad; and
the country is being militarized as never before, not even in war time.

The Pentagon is extending its actions in American Civil Affairs ever more,
also by establishing a new office of Under Secretary of Defense for
Homeland Security, which then created a northern command to coordinate
military response to domestic threats. The Pentagon also has a new Under
Secretary for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, who said the existing
agencies will continue with their work but that his unit will ensure that
they are meeting the intelligence needs and priorities laid out by the
Pentagon, also at home [Boston Globe June 8, 2003].

PAX AMERICANA

The Pentagon is also expanding into previously unimagined places and roles
overseas.  There are now well over 100 US military bases around the world.  
and current US military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of
Africa, Colombia, the former Yugoslavia, South Korea, the Philippines, and
former Soviet states such as Georgia. The latest details, disclosed by the
Wall Street Journal on June 10th, include plans to increase U.S. forces in
Djibouti on the Horn of Africa across the Red Sea from Yemen, setting up
semi-permanent "forward bases" in Algeria, Morocco, and possibly Tunisia,
and smaller facilities in Senegal, Ghana, and Mali that could be used to
intervene in oil-rich West African countries, particularly Nigeria.
Similar bases--or what some call lily pads--are now being sought or
expanded in northern Australia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines,
Kenya, Georgia, Azerbaijan, throughout Central Asia, Poland, Romania,
Bulgaria, Qatar, even Vietnam, and Iraq. The new republics in former
Soviet Central Asia and the former Soviet satellite states in Eastern
Europe are a particularly strong magnets for U.S. military presence, and a
glance at the map will show that the US is systematically encircling
China. Moreover, the Pentagon military missions are marginalizing the
State Department diplomatic ones, with the senior military officer having
more resources and greater influence than the US ambassador [Boston Globe,
June 8 2003].

Even so, the Associated Press reports on February 24 that " senior U.S.
officials have been quietly dispatched in recent days to the capitals of
key Security Council countries where they are warning leaders to vote with
the United States on Iraq or risk "paying a heavy price."  Although this
kind of blackmail has been SOP in all American administrations, the Bush
Administration has carried the threat and practice to previously unheard
of new heights. President Bush declared in his State of the Union address
referring to the battle against terrorism,  as John Foster
Dulles  had during th Cold War, essentially that those who are
not with us, are against us - and will pay a heavy price.

"We are in the process of taking a fundamental look at our military
posture worldwide, including in the United States," said Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on a recent visit to Singapore, where he met with
military chiefs and defense ministers from throughout East Asia about
U.S. plans there. "We're facing a very different threat than any one we've
faced historically."  But recall that this is the same Wolfowitz of Arabia
talking who drew up his and PNAC's plans to face this ''different threat''
already in his  memos of 1992, 1997 and 2000.

THE LAW OF THE WEST

The Busch administration has also set aside centuries of International
law.  It wages illegal  war, prohibited by numerous international treaties
and by the United Nations Charter.   Indeed it makes war without even
declaring it, which even Hitler took the trouble to do. The US armed
forces wantonly violate Geneva conventions of crimes against humanity,
genocide, weapons of mass destruction such as  depleted uranium, cluster
bombs,  massive ''Daisy Cutter" bombs,  destruction of civilian facilities
to  provide as power, water, and sanitation, and even neutral
international waterways as when it deliberately blocked shipping on the
Danube. 

The Bush Administration [ though Presidents Clinton and Bush Sr. also
already earlier] have completely emasculated the United Nations
instruments and procedures set up by the US and its allies after World War
II to preserve the peace. Bush even had the gall to go to the UN and
charge it with dereliction of duty and of its reputation by failing to
give its stamp of approval for his War against Iraq - when the clear duty
of the UN and especially of its Security Council is not to make war but to
keep the peace.  His government and his lackey press mislead the public
into believing that a Security Council resolution could legalize his war.
The fact is that even with an SC resolution, his father's War against Iraq
in 1991 was in clear violation of Articles 2, 27, 41, 42, 43 and 53 of the
UN Charter, among others. The failure of the NATO states even to consult
the UN before going to War against Yugoslavia and as did President Clinton
and NATO, and then present President to wage War against Afghanistan
without the slightest provocation from its government, and then to make
War on Iraq in clear violation of the expressed desires of the UN
membership only illustrate the total abandonment of the UN as an
institution and instrument for peace.  On the contrary, after the US bombs
a country into shambles, it then goes to the UN to ask it to pick up the
pieces, or in plain English allegedly to legitimize the US military
occupation of the country it had just destroyed. But not only that,
violation of international law also constitutes ipso facto violation of
national law, because Senate ratification of an international treaty
converts it into US law as well.  Moreover, domestic democracy has been
sacrificed to waging international war as well, as when NATO did so
against Yugoslavia without even a single member country government
troubling itself to ask its parliament or Congress for authorization to do
so.

In a word,  the US has  replaced  existing International law by new Law IN
the West on the model of  its own old Law OF  the West.  Then in the 19th
century,  vigilante lynch mobs  formed ad hoc possees to go hang whomever
they wanted;  and now the US is  imposing this  Vigilante "Law" on the
rest of the world by force. And as the vigilantes  bought off or
terrorized the sheriff and the judge to ''legitimize" themselves,  so is
the US doing the same world wide in the real world as though in both
instances following the scripts of fictitious Spaghetti Western films. 
 
THE MEDIA

And what of the Fourth Estate - the Media?  They are strictly the
mouthpiece of the Administration.  Note their behavior at White House,
State Department, or Pentagon news conferences. All their questions are
limited to technicalities about the implementation of Administration
policies that are themselves accepted carte blanche. Never ever has any
representative of the media posed a question that challenges the basis of
the official policy in even the most timid way.  Indeed, not only what the
press says or does not say reflects the policy and press- releases of the
Administration.  The very Media selection of what is or is not ''news,''
e.g on the 630 Evening News of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and shame on PPS
for carrying the just as bad Jim Lehrer News Hour,   is a simple
reflection of what the White House or the State Department have declared
to be ''news'' that morning. No matter how world shaking an event, if it
has not shaken the piper, it does not merit mention by the media.  But
whatever the White House or the State Department declares to be news IS
news.   

Their pieces in the press are little better.  In a survey of op-eds in the
Washington POST over four months, Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
found twice as many columns for as against the war, and in February 2003
the count was 24 in favor and 10 against, while the POST itself brought 9
editorials of its own to support the war. And that was regarding a war
that had the highest popular opposition ever.The TV and radio talk shows
are even more dominated by defenders of Administration policy.  No matter
that the Administration cooks, blends,  massages and even simply invents
the news; as is finally emerging regarding the  non-existent weapons of
mass destruction, which were the alleged reason for waging War against
Iraq.
 

THE HOME OF THE BRAVE FROM 1984 TO 2003

George Orwell would have to regard his dire predictions of Big Brother for
1984 as a benign Alice in  a  charming Wonderland version of Animal Farm
compared to the 2003 Bush and Ashcroft reality of  double-think and
new-speak in which  however some are no longer equal than others, either
at home or abroad,  but still  WAR IS PEACE - really - the President said
so.