Cheney and Bush Declare Autonomous Dictatorial Powers
Steve Watson | --
The Vice President and the President have casually declared their offices to be independent of the executive branch and completely autonomous, with Dick Cheney also attempting to abolish agencies his office is supposed to be accountable to.
Last week the -- reported:
Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”
As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President’s position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President’s staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President’s executive order.
In his letter to the Vice President, Chairman Waxman writes: “I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions. … [i]t would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials.”
The documents released by the committee reveal that Cheney’s office has not cooperated with an office at the National Archives and Records Administration which is responsible for overseeing the protection of classified material by the executive branch.
As the
--, Cheney’s staff have consistently declared themselves above the law by not filing reports on their possession of classified data and even blocking an inspection of their office in 2004. The documents also reveal that after the Archives office demanded cooperation earlier this year, Cheney’s staff proposed eliminating it altogether.
While Cheney has declared his office outside of the executive branch he has
-- from the bill that funds the
executive branch. Instead of challenging Cheney’s absurd declaration of autonomy, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel is now seeking an amendment to the Financial Services and General
Government Appropriations bill in order to cut the funding to Cheney’s office and thus legally separate it from the executive branch.
“The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal
case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive
branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot
ignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice President
should be consistent.” Emanuel has said.
In addition to Cheney’s office declaring itself exempt from oversight, President Bush’s office has also claimed it has the same status.
The
--:
An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending an existing order — requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn’t specifically say so, Bush’s order was not meant to apply to the vice president’s office or the president’s office, a White House spokesman said.
It has now become chillingly clear that the President and the Vice President believe that they have absolute power over the Government of the United States and cannot be held accountable to anybody.
Previously Dick Cheney has declared both himself and Bush
--, stating last year that “vice president and president and constitutional officers don’t appear before the Congress.”
It is also now clear that Bush and Cheney have broken literally hundreds of laws because they see themselves as outside of them. Last April the
--:
President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ”whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
The Constitution assigns power to Congress to write the laws and asserts that the president has an obligation ”to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ”execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional.
Take the “torture ban”, which was approved last year, for example. After approving the bill, Bush
--” giving his own interpretation of what the law meant and giving him the right to bypass it if he so wished.
Bush and Cheney are vastly expanding Presidential power and creating provisions that set their offices up as dictatorial bodies.
Just last month new legislation was signed which declares that in the event of a “catastrophic event”, the President can take total control over the government and the country, bypassing all other levels of government at the state, federal, local, territorial and tribal levels, and thus ensuring total unprecedented dictatorial power.
The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, which also places the Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of domestic “security”, was signed on May 9th without the approval or oversight of Congress and seemingly supercedes the National Emergency Act which allows the president to declare a national emergency but also requires that Congress have the authority to “modify, rescind, or render dormant” such emergency authority if it believes the president has acted inappropriately.
--, who has studied the directive also states that it makes no reference to Congress and “its language appears to negate any requirement that the president submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists.”
In other words the new directive excludes Congress altogether from governance in a state of emergency.
While alluding to the “enduring constitutional government”, the directive actually ensures the end of constitutional government as each branch, the executive, legislative and judicial, are stripped of equal authority and must answer directly and solely to the President.
The mainstream media has not reported on the directive and the White House has refused to comment.
-- that a high-level group of government and military officials has been quietly preparing an emergency survival program named “The Day After,” which would effectively end civil liberties and implement a system of martial law in the event of a catastrophic attack on a U.S. city.
Though anathema to any notion of liberty or freedom, this new legislation has not come out of the blue, it is merely an open declaration of the infrastructure of martial law that the federal government has been building since the turn of the last century, which was first publicly codified in the
--under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Senate Report 93-549, which was presented at the first session of the 93rd Congress, outlines just a handful of the declared national emergencies or martial law declarations that preceded the latest one.
“Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency. In fact, there are now in effect four presidentially-proclaimed states of national emergency: In addition to the national emergency declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, there are also the national emergency proclaimed by President Harry S. Truman on December 16, 1950, during the Korean conflict, and the states of national emergency declared by President Richard M. Nixon on March 23, 1970, and August 15, 1971.”
In alliance with these open declarations of martial law and the 1947 National Security Act, bills such as the Patriot Act, the John Warner Defense Authorization Act and the Military Commissions Act have all put the final jigsaw pieces in place to complete an infrastructure of dictatorship since 9/11.
We’re already living under an infrastructure of martial law and have been since 1933, all that remains for it to be fully implemented is a big enough natural disaster, mass terror attack or other catastrophe that will cause the necessary carnage and panic that affords the federal government enough leeway to implement open dictatorship with the least possible resistance.
New revelations that Cheney and Bush have openly declared themselves to be have total power and the ability to bypass law and oversight should be a code red emergency. They are moving to implement everything necessary for a total takeover should a catalyst event provide the opportunity. Given that this administration has a history of cooking up its own catalysts we should be very wary indeed.
Paul Joseph Watson contributed research to this article.
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Non Executive Entity Cheney To Assert Executive Privilege
Maintains he does not belong to Executive branch but will still abuse it's perks to escape oversight
Three weeks ago -- that for the past four years Dick Cheney's office has declared itself above the law by claiming it was not part of the executive branch, despite -- from the bill that funds the executive branch. Now letters out of Cheney's office indicate that it is to attempt to make an independent assertion of executive privilege, contradicting its previous statements and seemingly just making up the law as it goes along.
The implication was contained within a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in relation to an extension, which has been granted, to comply with a subpoena on documents related to the NSA domestic spying program. As reported by -- today:
Counsel to the Vice President Shannen Coffin appeared to imply that Cheney's office may assert executive privilege after it finishes reviewing documents that are responsive to the committee's subpoena. The documents are due today.
"While the Office of the Vice President reserves legal protections that apply in this matter, we look forward to working to meet the Committee's needs for information and on legislative matters to protect the Nation," Coffin wrote.
So Cheney's office is maintaining that it is not part of the executive branch, yet now it is going to continue to invoke executive privilege. Which is it to be?
Cheney has come under fire -- for abusing executive privilege and it is now clear that his office considers it to be merely a tool to avoid oversight and accountability.
Furthermore, as --, Vice Dean and Professor of Law at Columbia University, has asserted:
Nor is it clear... that the Vice President can assert executive privilege. The Constitution vests the Executive Power in the President. So long as the President remains healthy, the Vice President has no constitutionally assigned executive function. As far as the Constitution is concerned, the Vice President's role is legislative in nature: to preside over and break ties in the Senate.
The documents released three weeks ago by the -- revealed that Cheney's office has not cooperated with an office at the National Archives and Records Administration which is responsible for overseeing the protection of classified material by the executive branch.
Clearly the reason Cheney's office continued to declare itself autonomous, also -- it is supposed to be accountable to, was the fact that a key component of the presidential order Cheney's office was defying included mandatory on-site inspections. At least one of those inspections would have come at a particularly delicate time — when Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and other aides were under criminal investigation for their suspected roles in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Libby's trial has brought Cheney's role to center stage. According to evidence and testimony, Cheney selectively leaked and declassified intelligence information to bolster the administration's case for war and later to defend against charges that he had misrepresented prewar intelligence.
Even former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham has stated:
"It's hard to believe that the chief of staff to the vice president was acting as a rogue agent. What we have learned from the trial validates the suspicion that Libby was not just operating as a lone ranger. He was carrying out what the vice president wanted him to do, which was to besmirch Joe Wilson. I think Libby has been a conspirator in one of the most reprehensible and damaging breaches of American security in modern history."
Back in March a spokesman for the jury that convicted Libby -- immediately afterward that many felt sympathy for him and believed he was only the "fall guy."
Denis Collins said they believed that Vice President Cheney did "task him to talk to reporters" and out Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
However this will all seemingly go down the memory hole. Libby will now skip jail and Cheney himself will face no recrimination, not even a cursory investigation.
We have been reminded time and time again by the criminals in office that they consider themselves subject to no law or oversight.
Dick Cheney has previously declared both himself and President Bush --, stating last year that "vice president and president and constitutional officers don’t appear before the Congress.”
It is also now clear that Bush and Cheney have -- because they see themselves as outside of their reach.
The Constitution assigns power to Congress to write the laws and asserts that the president has an obligation ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.
Bush and Cheney are vastly expanding Presidential power and creating provisions that set their offices up as dictatorial bodies. Two months ago new legislation was signed which declares that in the event of a "catastrophic event", the President can take total control over the government and the country, bypassing all other levels of government at the state, federal, local, territorial and tribal levels, and thus ensuring total unprecedented dictatorial power.
The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, which also places the Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of domestic "security", was signed on May 9th without the approval or oversight of Congress and seemingly supercedes the National Emergency Act which allows the president to declare a national emergency but also requires that Congress have the authority to "modify, rescind, or render dormant" such emergency authority if it believes the president has acted inappropriately.
It has now become chillingly clear that the President and the Vice President believe that they have absolute power over the Government of the United States and cannot be held accountable to anybody.
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Quote: Cheney’s staff have consistently declared themselves above the law by not filing reports on their possession of classified data and even blocking an inspection of their office in 2004
Quote: It has now become chillingly clear that the President and the Vice President believe that they have absolute power over the Government of the United States and cannot be held accountable to anybody.
like i said before a friggin DESPOT
Despotism is a form of government by a single authority, either an -- or --, which rules with absolute political power. In its classical form, a despotism is a state where one single person, called a Despot, wields all the power and authority, and everyone else is considered their slaveLast edited by quandary121; Jul 23rd, 2008 at 02:30 PM..
The National Continuity Coordinator, in consultation with the heads of appropriate executive departments and agencies, will lead the development of a National Continuity Implementation Plan (Plan), which shall include prioritized goals and objectives, a concept of operations, performance metrics by which to measure continuity readiness, procedures for continuity and incident management activities, and clear direction to executive department and agency continuity coordinators, as well as guidance to promote interoperability of Federal Government continuity programs and procedures with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate. The Plan shall be submitted to the President for approval not later than 90 days after the date of this directive.