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This article appears in the October 2, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

LaRouche Denounces Obama's
`Unitary Executive' Fraud

by Nancy Spannaus

[PDF version of this article]

Sept. 23—By his recent statements, President Barack Obama has based his continuation of George W. Bush's 9/11 emergency powers on a supposed terror threat from Afghanistan. When he announced on Sept. 10 that he was continuing those emergency powers, he said: "Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on Sept. 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond Sept. 14, 2009."

But earlier, on Aug. 17, he had told the Veterans of Foreign Wars: "The insurgency in Afghanistan didn't just happen overnight, and we won't defeat it overnight. This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people."

President Obama's statement led Lyndon LaRouche to denounce his analysis as fraud.

Obama is continuing the 'Unitary Executive' dictatorial powers assumed by Bush after 9/11, on the grounds of an alleged threat of terror from Afghanistan. This is a complete fraud, even if possibly based on Obama's ignorance of the true situation. There is no terrorist threat to the United States from Afghanistan. General McChrystal's recent report is also a fraud in the same sense. U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan serves no national U.S. interest whatever. In fact, we can walk out of Afghanistan right now.

Like the Iraq invasion, the Afghanistan invasion never did serve any U.S. national interest. The George W. Bush Administration was manipulated into both invasions by the lies of Britain's Tony Blair. Both Iraq and Afghanistan exemplify those 'land wars in Asia' which have continually bled and debilitated the United States, to the advantage of our adversary, the British Empire, ever since soon after Franklin Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945.

In his time, President John F. Kennedy had had the good judgment to heed the warnings of Generals of the Army Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, against involving the United States in any other such long 'land war on the Asian mainland.' That was why he was murdered by British-linked networks: to allow the long U.S. war in Indochina to get under way.

Obama's assumption of 'Unitary Executive' powers because of an alleged Afghanistan emergency, must be denounced as a complete fraud.

More To Come

Generally identified as the Führerprinzip behind the Hitler dictatorship, the Unitary Executive concept implemented by Bush and Cheney actually derives from imperial law, and is the direct antithesis of the republican principles ensconced in the American Constitution and its Presidency.

The President's moves toward maintaining the Unitary Executive powers which he had denounced as a candidate, are by no means limited to the Afghan War. His attempt to assert his will against the Constitutional powers of the other branches of government, permeates his approach toward ramming through the health-care bill, and toward significant areas of law enforcement.

For example, it was reported by the New York Times Sept. 24, that Obama has quietly decided to bypass Congress, and allow the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charges. Rather than seek approval from Congress to hold some 50 Guantanamo detainees indefinitely, the Administration has decided that it has the authority to hold them under broad-ranging legislation passed in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001.

"The administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban," the Times' Peter Baker wrote. "In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies."

Historian Garry Wills has penned an article for an upcoming edition of The New York Review of Books, entitled, "Entangled Giant," which takes up precisely this issue. After reporting that Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced, and his successor promised change, Wills writes that it was clear that the powers attributed to the President by the theory of the Unitary Executive should not be exercised. But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed.

With respect to Obama, Wills writes: "At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that extraordinary rendition—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain. Obama's nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with [former Bush Justice Department counsel] John Yoo's claim, that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to battlefield law. On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking state secrets—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, did so. Obama refused to release photographs of enhanced interrogation. The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes.

"Even in areas outside national security," Wills continues, "the Obama administration quickly came to resemble Bush's. Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium."

Wills describes the Unitary Executive theory correctly, as an imperial system, and the President who operates on this basis, a "self-entangling giant." "On January 25, 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales signed a memo written by David Addington that called the Geneva Conventions quaint and obsolete. Perhaps, in the nuclear era, the Constitution has become quaint and obsolete. Nonetheless, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution."

No Time To Fool Around

In a statement issued Sept. 25, LaRouche weighed in again, on the Unitary Executive issue, as he had in his Sept. 8 webcast.

Tell the President he is in violation of the Constitution. The President can't bypass the Congress. If he continues to try to do so, he should be impeached. There should be an emergency impeachment. It is like the case of a reckless driver. You need to lift his license to drive.

There is, of course, the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court, stacked as it presently is with adherents of the Unitary Executive-loving Federalist Society, like Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sam Alito, would ratify the President's moves. But that would only increase our national crisis, LaRouche noted.

Any Supreme Court Justice who would nullify the Constitution loses his own authority. Such decisions will be ignored by all patriots. Any Supreme Court Justice who supports this theory should be expelled from the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court upholds it, the Supreme Court has nullified its own existence by nullifying the Constitution.

We are not fooling around with things now. We are not going to let them make a Hitler coup against the Constitution from the Supreme Court.

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