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EDITORIAL: Power: White House Supreme: White House Supreme

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 January 2006, 09:00 CST

By The Charleston Gazette, W.Va.

Jan. 17--REPEATEDLY, West Virginia's Sen. Robert C. Byrd has warned that the Bush White House is amassing ever-stronger power over America, treating Congress and the Supreme Court as puppets -- thereby damaging the heart of America's democracy, the checks and balances between executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Monday, former Vice President Al Gore voiced the same alarm in a Martin Luther King Day address at Constitution Hall in Washington -- supported, remarkably, by hard-right Republican Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman who has become a White House critic.

Gore said America's Bill of Rights and personal freedoms are menaced by "a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power." He cited the Bush administration's secret wiretapping of phone calls and e-mails, imprisonment of suspects without charge, provision of false information to Congress, torture of foreign detainees, and other abuses.

As for domestic surveillance, Gore said much about it remains hidden -- but "what we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently."

As for detainees, he said more than 100 foreign captives have "died while being tortured by executive-branch interrogators, and many more have been broken and humiliated." Yet investigators who examined the notorious Abu Ghraib prison "estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges."

After Congress passed Sen. John McCain's bill to prohibit further torture, the president signed it -- but declared "that he reserved the right not to comply with it," Gore noted.

As for false information, the former vice president said Bush twisted intelligence reports to induce Congress to approve the Iraq invasion he sought.

With his Republican Party in control of Congress, and his appointees gaining sway over the Supreme Court, the president dominates all three "independent" branches of government, Gore said.

He joined Barr in urging Congress and the attorney general to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether the White House's warrantless wiretaps were illegal.

However, since GOP control of Washington is almost total, don't hold your breath while waiting for such an examination of presidential power.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Charleston Gazette, W.Va.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Charleston Gazette

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