Ranking member of the House Judiciary Cmte. John Conyers and his staff are assembling a blistering followup to last year’s report “The Constitution in Crisis.” Though the Administration’s power grab has met some effective resistance in 2006, Conyers warns in his preview report that “the unfortunate reality is we are a long way from being out of the constitutional woods under the dangerous combination of an imperial Bush presidency and a compliant GOP Congress.”
The preview Report, released August 1, 2006, contains a 14-page “distillation of the findings” of an upcoming 370-page comprehensive document prepared by Conyers’ House Judiciary Committee staff. The full Report will identify “substantial evidence that the [administration] misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq; … manipulated intelligence information…; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of the Administration; and approved unlawful domestic surveillance,” according to Conyers.
The findings of Conyers' preview Report should startle anyone concerned about Justice. Conyers puts it in historical context: “Unlike previous threats to civil liberties posed by the Civil War (suspension of habeas corpus and eviction of Jews from portions of the Southern States); World War I (anti-immigrant “Palmer Raids”); World War II (internment of Japanese Americans); and, the Vietnam War (COINTELPRO); the risks to our citizens’ rights today are potentially more grave, as the war on terror has no specific end point.” (A comparison could also be made to the of the McCarthy era's political repression and racist atmosphere.)
“Perhaps most importantly,” concludes Conyers, “while the Bush Administration has warned that ‘Americans need to be watch what they say’ and charged that those who question their actions are ‘giving ammunition to America’s enemies,’ Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us ‘there comes a time when silence is betrayal.’ In my judgment, that time has come.”
