Laws are for suckers?


This week a federal judge threw out the attempt by a
group of United States congressmen to seek a court
judgment against the Clinton administration's clear
violation of the War Powers Act. Judge Friedman of the
U.S. District Court of Columbia granted President
Clinton's motion to dismiss the suit, filed by 31 members
of Congress, on the grounds that the congressmen had
no standing before the court since Congress had
appropriated funds for the war, did not vote to end U.
S. involvement in Kosovo, and that all 213 members
who voted to end our involvement were not plaintiffs.

The decision will, of course, be appealed, even as the
war in Kosovo appears to come to an end. In legal
terms this could very well result in the dismissal of the
appeal of the War Powers case on the grounds that it is
now a moot point.

But it is not at all a moot point for America. The
decision is one more clear demonstration that laws
increasingly mean nothing to American ruling elites. We
are quickly ceasing to be a republic, because we have a
government not of laws, but of power. Everything in our
national life is coming to be determined by the arbitrary
possession of power. As this more and more becomes
the case, deep abuses of property and person will soon
follow.

I think there is no longer any doubt that we are moving
into such a period of arbitrary and lawless rule. The
decision of the judge in dismissing the War Powers Act
case is an excellent example of how much of the rule of
law we have already lost, because it flies in the face of
the explicit, absolutely clear wording of the War Powers
Act itself.

Here is the operative clause of the War Powers Act:

Within 60 calendar days after a report is submitted or is
required to be submitted pursuant to section 4(a)(1),
whichever is earlier, the President shall terminate any
use of United States Armed Forces with respect to
which such report was submitted or was required to be
submitted, unless Congress (1)has declared war, or has
enacted a specific authorization for such use of United
States Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such 60
day period, or (3) is physically unable to meet as a
result of an armed attack upon the United States.

Judge Friedman noted that the Congress had
appropriated funds for the war, did not vote to end
involvement, etc. But all of this is entirely irrelevant
under the plain terms of the War Powers Act itself. The
law clearly requires a resolution specifically approving
and authorizing the deployment of forces, which has not
been passed. The absence of a resolution saying that we
should end the bombing means nothing.

The authors of the War Powers Act quite competently
anticipated arguments such as the one Judge Friedman
tries to make. They therefore wrote into the language of
the bill words that clearly require explicit congressional
authorization for certain uses of the armed forces. It is
this requirement that President Clinton has simply
ignored, and which the judge labors to help him avoid.
But the claim that anything but an explicit congressional
authorization can be construed as satisfying the
requirements of the War Powers Act is explicitly
rejected in the act itself.

In section 8(a) the following language is used:

Authority to introduce United States Armed Forces into
hostilities or into situations where an involvement with
hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances shall
not be inferred from any provision of law, whether or
not in effect before the date of the enactment of this joint
resolution, including any provision contained in any
appropriation act, unless such provision specifically
authorizes the introduction of United States Armed
Forces into hostilities or into such situations, and stating
that it is intended to constitute specific statutory
authorization within the meaning of this joint resolution.

Could they have been any clearer? The War Powers
Act explicitly says that no act of the Congress can be
construed as the authorization required under the act
unless it is explicitly so stated -- which, of course, has
not been done by the Congress in this case.

There is simply no doubt about it -- the president is in
violation of the law, and the judge simply ignored the
specific wording of the law in order to come to a ruling
that is essentially lawless and arbitrary. Do we have
laws in this country any more? Or do we have tyranny?

What about the Republican leadership in Congress?
Speaker Hastert is doing his best to rally support for a
budget that satisfies liberals in the Democrat and
Republican parties. And while pushing for that kind of
triumph of liberalism, he refuses to join with his
colleagues in seeking enforcement of a law passed
specifically to protect the crucial role of the Congress in
protecting our liberty. Hastert and the so-called
"leadership" ARE the problem. If they were willing to
take up the issue and put it before the American people,
it would have to be addressed. Instead they are
permitting it to be swept aside as if it doesn't matter, and
are thereby themselves showing utter contempt for the
law.

Faced with this kind of action by the president, inaction
by the Congress, and dereliction of duty by the courts,
we face the question of whether we have any longer in
this country a government of laws, or have permitted
instead the formation of a government of arbitrary
power in which the people we elect do whatever they
can get away with, in contravention of our basic rights
and liberties, and of the requirements of the integrity of
our Constitutional system. It appears that our elites in
the Congress and the White House are now simply
lawless, with no respect for the explicit terms of the law.
No one is even trying to argue that what the president
has done in Yugoslavia is within the limits of the War
Powers Act. It is simply being ignored. This is to
manifest a kind of lawlessness that is deeply dangerous
to the survival of a free people.

How will we prevent this attitude of lawlessness from
pervading the entire society? When people see that
those who are in positions of power and responsibility
-- particularly those who are entrusted with the
enforcement and making of the law -- are themselves
showing no respect for the law, a natural question starts
to arise in their minds: "Why should we obey the law?
Why shouldn't we be doing whatever we can get away
with?"

When this becomes the general mentality of a society,
there is not enough law enforcement power in the
universe to make laws effective. How can lawfulness be
enforced against a people who have decided that they
are simply going to do whatever they can get away
with? Such a society quickly degenerates into a
condition vacillating between anarchy and oppression,
becoming a living nightmare for all who live within it.

This was evident in the account given by Republican
impeachment counsel David Schippers, who told
"Human Events" that a Republican Senate leader had
turned to Henry Hyde during a discussion about the
impeachment trial -- right after the senators had taken
their individual oaths of integrity in the trial -- and said
that even if they had proof that Bill Clinton had "raped a
woman, stood up and shot her dead," he would still not
be removed from office. The principle underlying this
comment is that where there is power, there is impunity.
If this becomes the operative principle in the halls of
American power, then there will remain no law, but only
lawless power. But if one lives in a society with only
lawless power -- a jungle -- one quickly develops the
mentality that justifies doing whatever must be done in
order to survive. Insofar as there is any order, any rule,
it is the rule of necessity, and that necessity is inevitably
extended to justify whatever can be gotten away with in
order to serve arbitrary ends and purposes.

Such a mentality, of course, is the criminal mentality, par
excellence -- it is the mentality that characterizes people
who live on the wrong side of the law. It is, of course,
the very soul of the Clinton era of government. But if
those who are charged with making and carrying out the
law adopt a posture that shows no respect at all for the
content and substance of the law, they thereby
recommend this lawless and criminal mentality to
everyone else, and it becomes the ethos of the whole
society.

Reading the judge's decision, I was disturbed most of all
by the fact that he had made a ruling as if the War
Powers Act simply didn't exist -- as though the wording
of the act meant nothing. He bases his decision on an
approach that is explicitly dealt with in the law --
anticipated and rejected. One could not arrive at this
decision without simply disregarding the clear and
explicit terms of the law. Of course, to disregard the
terms of the law is to be lawless -- to substitute your
private whim for the law. But when whim replaces law,
results depend merely on the force used to pursue the
various whims. That, in turn, means a society that is
essentially in a state of war between competing forces.
Those who have less force will lose; those with more
force will win. Under such circumstances, it seems to
most people only prudent to move quickly to gather as
much force as possible for the struggles of life. Society
quickly becomes a war of all against all, as Thomas
Hobbes described it. We return to a situation without
government or civil society.

Our smug elites appear to assume that the habit of being
law-abiding is so deeply engrained in our people that
their own awful example will have no corrupting effect,
but this is not true. In every generation the habit of being
law-abiding has to be reestablished. It must be
reestablished by the subtle effect of what people see
and hear all around them. We will successfully produce
a new generation of law-abiding people only if the
general tone and culture of our society continues to
support a law-abiding attitude. But it is now clear that
there is not any longer a law-abiding attitude of any kind
at the highest levels of the land. This new situation is a
prominent and standing invitation to all citizens to
conclude that it is a "sucker's bet" to obey any law that
they can get away with breaking. Under the
circumstances, people will not only begin to calculate
what they can and cannot get away with; they will also
begin to cultivate the associations and other means they
will need to break the law with greater impunity. And on
it goes until society is simply the war of lawless against
lawless, an unfit place for decent human life.

The political elites who are leading us down this road
also seem to forget that their own authority comes from
the law. Perhaps they should think about this, however.
As we lose our respect for the law, why would we
retain respect for those the law puts into authority over
us?

Perhaps they are anticipating a loss of respect for lawful
authority, however, and this explains the increasing
urgency with which the gun control agenda is being
pursued. The effort to disarm American citizens must be
seen in the context of the increasingly clear and evident
lawlessness amongst our political elites. A political elite
that is determined to act without respect for any law in
its abuse of power will quickly realize that it must attain
a monopoly on force. Only with such a monopoly will a
lawless elite be able effectively to do whatever it
pleases. So the prelude to successful maintenance of a
lawless government is to disarm the citizenry. Is it an
accident that the effort to induce us to surrender our
means of self-defense is increasing along with the signs
that our elites have adopted a lawless attitude?

But the question at stake in the War Powers case is
critical not just as a sign of the overall trend toward
lawlessness, but also in its own right. If our elites ignore
the requirement that the people be consulted through
their representatives about going to war, then we no
longer have any protection against the abuse of the
war-making power -- a power uniquely suited to justify
the institutions of the mechanisms of tyranny. The
dispute about President Clinton's lawless refusal to seek
authorization for his war in Yugoslavia is thus vital to us.
Inadequate as it may be, the War Powers Act was an
attempt by Congress to preserve a prerogative vital to
OUR liberty -- the constraint that is placed on the
executive power in matters of peace and war, so that
the executive cannot drag us into wars on whim,
personal ambition, and so he cannot manipulate
circumstances to keep us in a situation of perpetual war
that would be utterly destructive of our personal rights
and liberties.

Our Founders carefully engineered our Constitutional
system of government in order to achieve the
inestimable blessings of self-government, and now -- bit
by bit and piece by piece -- we are throwing away the
safeguards built into that system to protect our liberty.
We are approaching the point where the most
fundamental things are being given away. We must
speak out against this utter disregard of the very laws
that are aimed at safeguarding fundamental institutional
aspects of our liberty and our ability to secure ourselves
from the abuses of government power.

We approach a future in which a lawless governmental
elite will have succeeded in arrogating to itself a
monopoly on the instruments of force in the society, and
disarmed us so that we can no longer defend ourselves
against their depredations. Our political elite is showing
itself every day to be increasingly lawless, and at the
same time that they cease to be bound in conscience by
respect for the law, they are increasingly asking us to
give up the means of defending ourselves against
forceful abuses of power.

We will not be immune from the hard choices that such
a situation presents to us. If we mean to remain free, we
must decide to tame the beasts of tyranny that are
growing stronger before our eyes. We must move
vigorously to tame the government that should be our
servant, and we must do so in the name of law,
self-government, and the truths of the human moral
nature that make liberty worth dying for.

Washington Plans Kosovo Free of Serbs



After the so-called peace plan for Kosovo had been promulgated, and subsequently
celebrated by part of our political public, U.S. officials made it perfectly clear AGAIN
that the genuine goal of their initiatives, both peaceful and offensive, was that
Kosovo should become a U.S.-controlled part of Serbia, and that the least possible
number of Serbs should remain in the province. The fact that the U.S. occupation of
Kosovo, that is part of Serbia, will be wrapped in the NATO and U.N. flags is of no
significance whatsoever.

What is important is that Washington no longer conceals its intentions by at least
cheap, ostensibly humanistic rhetoric. Thus, the Pentagon Spokesman Kenneth
Bacon, suffering from either superfluous cynicism or the lack of sanity, said that
"Kosovo will not longer be a happy place for the Serbs, so they will leave it together
with the army and police."He added, "the Serbs will be allowed to go," thereby
showing that the Washington has already accepted the Kosovo citizens as the U.S.
subjects. In fact, Bacon’s statement has brought nothing new at all. It is just a small
remembrance of U.S. officials’ words during the Serbs’ exodus from Krajina. At the
same time, Bacon’s statement is to underline an undeniable fact – it would have been
much less ethnic tensions and conflicts in the Balkans, if they had not been stirred up
and invigorated by Washington’s military and political strategists, particularly after
the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Serbs have to accept the U.S. occupation without harbouring any illusions about
its true nature, just like they had accepted the Ottoman conquests. Those who are
trying to make the occupation look like liberation, act just like those Serbs under the
Ottoman rule, who are known for the notorious name of "poturica" (converts to
Islam).

What was won?


Administration and NATO spokesmen, with the
complicity of most of the media, are spinning this week's
delayed agreement to cease hostilities in Yugoslavia as a
victory -- perhaps not overwhelming or resounding but
satisfying nonetheless -- for the NATO strategy of
bombing the country Slobodan Milosevic misrules into
submission. The more incautious among them are even
beginning to make a case for the hoary old saw that you
can't win a real victory in a real war without ground
troops. Maybe bombing is sufficient after all. It is not
difficult to wonder, however, whether anything at all was
won by this war.

The proposed Rambouillet agreement of last March
contained two (well, at least two but two main ones)
notable deal-breakers people in NATO had to know
Milosevic would not go for. First, was the promise that
Kosovo would have some sort of semi-autonomous status
within Yugoslavia (enforced by NATO occupation
troops) followed by a referendum in which outright
independence was an option. Second, was that the
occupation troops (let's not grant the phony term
"peace-keepers'' a shred of credence) would be
NATO-commanded and NATO-led rather than operating
under the auspices of the United Nations with Russians
playing at least some role.

Milosevic rebuffed the proposal as was expected. NATO
conducted its jolly little air war -- 34,000 sorties, they say,
at a cost they're willing to admit of around $3 billion.
Then came the peace agreement. After all that bombing,
all that degradation of military capability, was NATO able
to impose its deal-breaking demands on Milosevic? Not
exactly.

There's no mention of Kosovo independence in the new
agreement. There's even a promise that the territory will
remain under formal Yugoslav sovereignty, which is
unlikely to mollify the greatly strengthened Kosovo
Liberation Army (which NATO has committed to disarm
or de-militarize or something relatively foggy).

And the G-8 nations made sure the document was
submitted to the United Nations for approval. While the
precise provenance of the occupation army is still a bit
hazy, it will have some U.N. sanction and is supposed to
contain at least some Russians. It is likely, of course, that
NATO rather than some other international organization
will have effective command and control. But the NATO
countries had to offer some fig leaves to a Milosevic who
was hardly feeling thoroughly beaten -- indeed, the
agreement is being spun on Yugoslav TV as a Yugoslav
victory.

So if you didn't get the two provisions that were
considered so important that NATO had to unleash untold
tons of bombs on the territory of an internationally
recognized sovereign nation outside NATO's borders,
what was the point of all that bombing?

And we haven't even mentioned the fact that the
bombing triggered ethnic cleansing on a scale that would
almost certainly not have occurred in the absence of
bombing, killed a number of the Kosovar civilians who
were supposed to be the people NATO was protecting,
triggered hostility to the United States and the West along
the entire political spectrum in Russia, made the Chinese
bolder in their hostility, made the entire region less stable
and exposed to the world the fact that United States
leaders like to talk tough but have no taste for war on the
ground.

Now comes the really expensive part. The West -- read,
American taxpayers -- will have to reconstruct the
damage done in Kosovar, a task likely to cost much more
over a longer period of time than the $3 billion spent on
the bombing campaign. They will try to rebuild a society
in which the wealthiest and best educated of the refugees
will be the least likely to want to return rather than to stay
in exile in more comfortable, less stressful circumstances.
Thus the rebuilding effort will lack significant indigenous
resources.

I'm indebted to radio talk show host Lowell Ponte for
reminding me that the famous ancient general, Pyrrhus,
was an Illyrian, an ancient clan to which modern
Albanians like to trace their ancestry. Pyrrhus fought for
the Greek Empire against the up-and-coming Roman
Empire and did win two victories that so depleted his
sources and resources that he feared yet another victory
would undo him altogether. From his name comes the
term "Pyrrhic victory'' for a victory that feels a lot more
like a defeat. That seems to be what NATO has won.

I think the mixture of Serbian, Russian, and NATO forces that are present in Pristina right now creates an extremely volatile situation. I predict the sh!t is going to hit the fan. There is too much resentment towards each other for something to not happen. Let's just pray that it will be insignificant and not full scale ground war. What do you all think? Personal opinions, not articles please.

not that i should be mistaken for someone overly well-informed, like some others here, but


it came to mind that the russians rolled in first with visions of having been 2nd to roll into berlin in '45.... heck, there's been frequent echoes of WWII throughout this tragic farce/farcical tragedy...


guido stands a good chance of being correct i fear. and oh, what sense it'll make and oh, the good that'll come of it...


and when everyone's done pitching their fit, perhaps those left in that shadow of a country can fight over who's got the biggest pile of rubble.