Can We Salvage This Presidency?

LaRouche Interviewed on British Radio

Stop Ashcroft's 'Himmler II' Bill— — While You Still Can

From Volume 2, Issue Number 12 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Mar. 24, 2003

LATEST FROM LAROUCHE

Can We Salvage This Presidency?

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. — Tuesday, March 18, 2003

President George W. Bush's threat to go war, issued last evening, challenges all thinking patriots of our republic to redouble our efforts to salvage both our Constitution, and a pathetically erring sitting President himself, from this folly.

First, we must emphasize two facts concerning the personal behavioral aspects of the President's decision. First, factually, this President's well-known, limited emotional and intellectual capacities for coping with reality, are most clearly expressed by his Administration's hysterical efforts to deny both the reality of the presently accelerating collapse of the U.S. economy, and the most obvious of the related realities of the world strategic situation. Second, factually, a malicious pack of advisors, only typified by such Leo Straussian "Children of Satan" as Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, and William Kristol, have succeeded in exploiting these weaknesses of the President upon whom they prey, to induce him to act not only against the advice of the relevant professionally qualified advisors in these and related domestic and foreign affairs, but to have adopted what had been proven publicly as lies, lies which have been among the obviously integral goads of his own manic, flight-forward lurch, toward a needless and reckless war of incalculable ultimate consequences.

As a matter of policy, I must state the following summary characterizations of the immoral character of the military action now threatened by the President.

1. The President has now virtually committed himself to launch an internationally outlawed "preventive war." The chief precedents for such a form of war are those of Adolf Hitler, as against Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Poland in 1939. Even worse, the chief apologists for this internationally outlawed behavior, are those like Vice President Cheney, Attorney General Ashcroft, and others, whose public arguments for Nazi-like "preventive" nuclear and other wars, and also for Nazi-like police-state law in the U.S.A. itself, are directly reflections of the influence of former Professor Leo Strauss's promotion of the Nazi law doctrine of Strauss's own sponsor, the Carl Schmitt who had been the author of the Weimar emergency law which was used to establish Hitler as dictator.

2. The President's commitment creates the spectacle of the world's greatest military power crushing a ruined and relatively helpless people of an impoverished nation with less than one-tenth the population of the U.S.A. Under those circumstances, the argument that Iraq threatens the U.S.A., is cause for remedial action by the relevant statesmen's psychiatrists, not "preventive" force of arms against the pitiable intended victim of the military attack.

3. The possibility of general security of this planet is typified by what now depends upon the accelerating trends toward long-term economic cooperation among the principal and other nations of continental Eurasia, and a growing orientation of the ruined United Kingdom toward partnership in such long-term Eurasian development.

Under the real condition of a planet stricken by the hopeless economic condition of the post-1971 world monetary-financial system, the welfare and security of all humanity requires any sane President of the U.S.A. to seek to play a leading contributing role in bringing about a new economic prosperity based upon the imperative of all our nation's great Presidents: an enduring community of principle among the respectively perfectly sovereign republics of the planet.

If we can free an erring President Bush from the grip of those "Children of Satan" who are otherwise associated with Conrad Black's Hudson Institute's "Bull Moose" project for 2004, that happier condition of our planet is now in reach. To that end, constructive forms of cooperation with our European partners, is presently the first line of defense of our own national security.

LaRouche Interviewed on British Radio

The following interview was given by Lyndon LaRouche to [TALKSPORT RADIO-1053AM/1089AM],www.talksport.net. in the United Kingdom at 12:15 a.m., Wednesday, March 19 (11:15 p.m. U.K. time, Tuesday March 18). The host, James Whale, previously interviewed LaRouche during the 2000 Presidential campaign.

INTERVIEWER: Now, George Bush last night issued Saddam Hussein with a 48-hour deadline, "Get out of Iraq, or die." His view is unequivocal: There is no more time for diplomacy. It's time to get out now, while you still can. Support for an attack in this country is growing. But in the States, the mood has always been pro-war.

But I'm joined on the line now, by an American politician who says that a U.S.-led invasion on Iraq will have disastrous consequences for the world. Lyndon LaRouche, a U.S. Presidential candidate for 2004. Mr. LaRouche, welcome to the program.

LAROUCHE: Thank you very much.

INTERVIEWER: Now, I believe you're actually in Germany at the moment.

LAROUCHE: Oh yes, I've been having some conferences and meetings here.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, you're not visiting the troops or giving some kind of succor to the U.S. Armed Forces.

LAROUCHE: Well, I'm sympathetic to the regular professional military, and the poor bloke that has to go out there to do the fighting. But to some of the people who are doing the pushing, who have a good record as draft dodgers, I'm not too sympathetic.

INTERVIEWER: Now, Mr. LaRouche, it seems to us here in the U.K., that there are no dissenting voices in the U.S. That's not exactly right, is it?

LAROUCHE: I think we were cut off a bit.

INTERVIEWER: I'm sorry. I was going to say, seems to us here in the U.K., that there are no dissenting voices against this war, in the U. S.

LAROUCHE: Oh, there are lots of them. As a matter of fact, the majority of the U.S. population, apart from the leading mass media, the mass media, is against the war generally, the majority. There's a minority, a powerful minority, and some of the media—the New York Times, for example, is an exception to that, at least in its own way, sort of a Liberal Imperialist exception to the madness of the fellows who are controlling Bush.

But there is really a sense, in the military, in the ranks around government, the Executive branch, in cowards in the Congress, both parties, the Republican and Democratic Party, and some who are not cowards, such as Senator Byrd, or Senator Kennedy. There's real opposition to this, very strong opposition in the United States, but a very powerful impulse for it.

INTERVIEWER: How have we found ourselves in this situation in the 21st century, when you would think that we would have learned from the history lessons of the past, to avoid this kind of situation?

LAROUCHE: Well, I think we have, and we haven't. I don't think George Bush really knows what he's doing. I think there's a certain emotional factor there, which his motives are quite independent of what those who are pushing him, such as Dick Cheney, for example, represent.

Yes, this is a comparable situation. We're now in an economic crisis, worldwide, comparable to '29-'33, and we find a threat of Hitlers coming along, or people who think that way. For example, this idea of preventive war, we recall from 1938 against Czechoslovakia by Hitler, and against Poland in 1939. And there's no difference, essentially, between the proposed attack on Iraq, and what was proposed by Hitler, in terms of military policy, against Czechoslovakia and Poland.

On top of that, there is no need for the war. There's no problem in Iraq, which is a real problem, which we couldn't handle with the tremendous support, and the tremendous alliance, which exists in Europe and the United States, and elsewhere, for example. We agree we're going to deal with the problem. We have enough strength—we don't have to worry. There's no threat to us, from a nation of very poor and ruined 30 million, against our nation, which is powerful, and has over 300 million. It's just nonsense.

The problem here is, as in '29-33, when you get into this kind of period, of economic breakdown, you get instability, where if you don't pay attention to the economic problem promptly enough, you're likely to have some blokes come up with the idea of a dictator. And that's the tendency around the heirs of a famous professor Leo Strauss, in the United States, whose ideas are predominant among all of the hard-core warhawks around the Bush Administration.

So, that's the danger.

And the other danger was raised by the French Prime Minister and President. The issue here is not Iraq. The issue is the impulse of some people in the United States, to create a crazy utopian imperial effort, at this time, in the process of breaking relations with Europe. Now, if the United States, which is a very poor country now, really, on the inside, but has great imperial power—or has had it—is going to recover, it's going to depend upon European cooperation with Eurasia, in new trade relations, and I think that many people in the United Kingdom are determined not to break from continental Europe, at a time that England has its financial problems too, and perhaps the growth that was stimulated by Eurasian cooperation, might solve the problem there. It certainly would help us here.

INTERVIEWER: You see, Mr. LaRouche, I think you say something interesting, that perhaps the British don't realize, and that is, that America is, by and large, quite a poor country.

LAROUCHE: Yes. We decided, back ... we were the most powerful nation in the world, until we decided back in the middle '60s, some of us, to shift to a imperial consumer society, like ancient Rome, as opposed to being a producer society. Over the past nearly 40 years, we have destroyed our internal productive capability, and relied upon our overreach of power, and financial power, and our ability to dictate, to extract what we wished to consume, at low prices, from virtual slave, or near-slave, labor in other parts of the world.

So we have become a kind of Roman imperial parasite, in this respect. And we are now a very poor nation. We must rebuild, we must understand this is nonsense, and go back to what we used to do, and realize, at the same time, that Europe, for example, which made the same mistake—beginning with the Heath administration, the first Heath government, back then—that this policy must be reversed. We must go back to being productive nations, take care of the general welfare of our population, make fine cooperation with our partners in Eurasia and elsewhere, and rebuild the world economy. It may take a little time, but it's the only thing worth doing.

INTERVIEWER: You see, I drew a parallel on this show the other night, to America becoming the new Roman Empire, and drawing the conclusion from this, that what happened to the Roman Empire, is a fate that could beset the USA, if they're not very careful.

LAROUCHE: Oh, most certainly. As I've said to a number of people, the United States' mistake in going to this kind of empire, they fail to realize that the Romans started their empire at the height of their military power, and physical power. We have gotten into the business at the fag end of ours. It's not a good time to start an empire.

INTERVIEWER: (chuckles) Tell me what George W. Bush's chances of getting into the White House for a second term are.

LAROUCHE: Right now, less than zero.

INTERVIEWER: Less than zero.

LAROUCHE: Yes. Because what he's bringing upon us.... We all realize, I think, those of us who are informed, what kind of catastrophe an otherwise apparently successful destruction of Iraq would mean. What it would unleash in the world. The attack on Iraq is not a war, it's a detonator of war, which I think every sensible military person in the United Kingdom, for example, would agree with me on that. We don't want it.

So I think it's complete foolishness. I don't think the President, of course, is the most brilliant person we've ever had in that office. I don't think that he understands exactly what he's doing. He's a person of strong emotions, a very vindictive person, and I think, in this case, is lunging ahead out of sense of frustration over the U.S. economy, which is not behaving itself, as far as he's concerned.

INTERVIEWER: The thing that worries me, and I think a lot of people, more about this, is that a single man, albeit, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world, actually is able to bring the world to this situation, without anybody checking him.

LAROUCHE: Well, I think if you go back to the First World War—you had the British Monarchy, the French, the fools of the German monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and the Czarist monarchy, in particular, acted like fools. There were forces at that time, in all of these countries, which didn't want the show. But it happened.

Now, in our case, we have a system of government which is very good, but it has a flaw in it, which is unavoidable. We have one man, a President, who embodies the executive power of the Presidency. Not exclusively. He's only a sitting President. Therefore, in these situations, the question is, will the Presidency, in particular—which has many people who are involved in various official, and other, functions—will the Presidency act to shape the behavior of the President in making his decisions? When the Presidency does not function, then an individual President can go out of control. So, that's the danger right now.

INTERVIEWER: We are in this position simply because George Bush and Tony Blair themselves want this to happen, and they are able to make it happen, even if a large majority of the populations of their countries disagree.

LAROUCHE: I think the situation is not hopeless. I will curse, in a sense, the cowardice and negligence of many of my friends in the United States, and abroad, that they didn't take the problem seriously enough in a timely fashion. But I think that what happened this weekend, with the President's declaration of this 48-hour notice and so forth, startled people, and there's suddenly a surge of belated activity, in the political parties in the United States, among institutions, and around the world. Let us stop this thing. The meeting which is to occur tomorrow at the United Nations Security Council, may be significant in giving some answers to what might be done. But I see a determination to jam this thing up, and stop it. It may not succeed, but it's the only show worth seeing.

INTERVIEWER: Lyndon LaRouche, thank you very much indeed for spending time with me this evening.

LAROUCHE: Thank you.

Stop Ashcroft's 'Himmler II' Bill— — While You Still Can — by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

This statement was released on March 16 by the Presidential candidate's political committee, LaRouche in 2004, for circulation as a mass leaflet.

Imagine!

The United States' war-machine invades Iraq. Baghdad is bombed simultaneously with thousands of cruise missiles. Violent anti-American demonstrations break out around the world. Bloody rioting threatens to topple several Middle Eastern governments. Then, a series of terrorist incidents hit U.S. facilities and personnel abroad. Television screens around the world brutalize the eyes of viewers with images of dead children in Baghdad. Around the world, the unrest and rioting builds up.

Imagine?

What will happen next? Imagine!

Attorney General John Ashcroft is on television to announce that the FBI has foiled a major terrorist plot inside the United States, a plot which he alleges would have killed thousands of Americans. He paints a picture of something on a scale equal to the Sept. 11, 2001 events. Ashcroft declares that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies require strengthened powers to prevent terrorist attacks under these wartime conditions. Today the President will submit new emergency anti-terrorism legislation to Congress for immediate passage.

That evening, President Bush will address the nation, to demand that Congress immediately pass the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003," or members of Congress will be held accountable for the deaths of thousands of Americans, in attacks which he says terrorists are now planning on U.S. soil.

Panicked members of Congress will rush through the new anti-terrorist legislation. Only a handful of dissenting votes will resist. Most members have been too terrified to read the bill that they just passed. The new law gives sweeping new powers to the Justice Department and FBI, the same kinds of powers which Carl Schmitt's Notverordnung doctrine delivered to Adolf Hitler on Feb. 28, 1933. After that, the members of the Congress will never vote against any bill which Ashcroft demands.

The connection is not accidental. Attorney General Ashcroft was indoctrinated in this by disciples of Chicago University professor Leo Strauss, who owed his own career to that same Carl Schmitt. Ashcroft, like Vice President Dick Cheney, uses the exact same, Leo Strauss-copied arguments of Carl Schmitt, the same arguments which transformed Hitler into a dictator on Feb. 28, 1933. With the passage of that Act, the United States would have given rebirth to Nazi Heinrich Himmler's police-state/concentration-camp system inside the U.S.A. itself.

What 'Patriot II' Would Do

None of the above is fiction; it is real, and ready to go. For months, staffers in John Ashcroft's Justice Department have been drafting and putting the finishing touches on a sequel to the 2001 "USA/Patriot Act"—which has become known as "Patriot II," or better named "Heinrich Himmler II." When members of the Senate Judiciary Committee inquired as to rumors that a new anti-terrorism bill was being drafted, the Justice Department lied, denying that any such legislation was in preparation.

Don't be surprised! In January 2001, during the fight to block the confirmation of John Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General, Lyndon LaRouche warned that, under crisis conditions, Ashcroft would be used to force through dictatorial measures comparable to the 1933 Nazi emergency laws in Germany—the infamous Notverordnungen. LaRouche warned that it was not simply Ashcroft's role as head of the Justice Department that would be so dangerous, but his role as a leading member of a crisis-management team in the Administration as a whole.

That has been borne out, by, for example, Ashcroft's role in crafting the Pentagon's "enemy combatant" justification for holding terrorist suspects—including U.S. citizens—incommunicado in military custody, removing them from the jurisdiction of the civilian courts. Likewise, Ashcroft's role in the unwarranted spreading of panic and hysteria by the new Department of Homeland Security, as in Nazi Germany.

Ashcroft is aiming at you.

Don't think for a moment that the new powers being sought by Ashcroft are only aimed at foreign terrorists and immigrants. While the first, post-9/11 round of dragnets and secret detentions chiefly targetted Arabs and Muslims in the United States, the proposed "Patriot II" would give the Justice Department the power to wield those same powers against all U.S. citizens. For example:

1. It loosens the present requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) pertaining to "national security" wiretaps and break-ins. Currently it is required that the target be shown to be an agent of a "foreign power" or organization. In the new bill, the definition of "foreign power" can include unaffiliated individuals who are not shown to be acting on behalf of a foreign government or international organization.

2. Individuals could be subject to FISA surveillance simply if they are suspected of gathering information for a foreign power; the existing requirement that the activities potentially violate Federal law, is eliminated.

3. Purely domestic activity could be the subject of secret "national security" investigation. A new category of domestic security, or domestic intelligence-gathering, is created, which allows secret surveillance; this includes "conspiratorial activities threatening the national security interest"—a category so incredibly broad that political activity could easily fall under it.

4. The standards for "pen registers" (obtaining a record of phone numbers called by an individual, and records of Internet-mail addresses used or websites visited by an individual) are enormously loosened, so that the target need not have any connection to terrorism. All that is necessary is that the target be used "to obtain foreign intelligence information."

5. An American citizen could be stripped of his citizenship and expatriated, if the Justice Department "infers" from his conduct that he is giving material support to an organization designated as "terrorist" by the government—even though the person believed he was supporting legitimate activity.

Blanket of Secrecy Over the Law

The "Patriot II" bill would also wipe out some traditional due-process guarantees, invade personal privacy, and further throw a blanket of secrecy over legal proceedings:

1. The use of secret arrests and detentions, and the exemption of records of arrests and detentions from public disclosure, will be expanded.

2. In cases involving classified information, the use of ex parte and in camera proceedings—in which prosecutors can secretly submit information to the court—is allowed upon a prosecutor's request. Thus, an accused person or his lawyer is unable to challenge the government's information, because it is given to the judge in a closed, back-room proceeding.

3. The use of so-called "Administrative Subpoenas" and "National Security Letters," allowing the government to obtain financial and other types of records without a court order, will be expanded, and disclosure of such a non-court subpoena is prohibited.

4. Presently, a person receiving a grand jury subpoena and testifying before a grand jury is permitted to publicly discuss the fact that he has been subpoenaed, and what happened in the grand jury. The new bill would gag such witnesses, and prohibit them from responding to false information or smears leaked to the press by prosecutors—a common occurrence. A witness could not talk to his family, friends, news media, or even his Congressman.

5. The new law will instantaneously wipe out a number of court orders limiting spying and surveillance of political activity, which were the result of lawsuits arising out of unconstitutional, "Cointelpro"-type police and FBI programs in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ashcroft's Indoctrination

Do you wish to see into the strange mind of Attorney General Ashcroft? What ticks there? Look at the late Chicago University's leading fascist ideologue, Ashcroft's Professor Leo Strauss.

The state of mind behind such proposals, is indicated by the following background, here presented only in bare outline. Recent news stories in Germany and the U.S.A. named John Ashcroft as one of a number of prominent protégés of the late philosopher Leo Strauss. Others named were: now-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (a leading advocate of war against Iraq for the past 12 years); Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; neo-conservative warhawk William Kristol of the Weekly Standard; former Secretary of Education William Bennett; and National Review publisher William Buckley.

Although Strauss was nominally a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, he was actually one of a network of Frankfurt School Jews, such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, who, lacking the prerequisites of a Nazi Party card, left to spread their decadent philosophy against the United States which they hated as "The New Weimar." Strauss came to the United States in the 1930s under the personal sponsorship of Carl Schmitt, the "Crown Jurist of the Third Reich," who provided the legal rationales for the devolution of Weimar Germany into the dictatorial Nazi state.

Strauss, in his long academic career in the United States, never abandoned his fealty to the three most notorious shapers of the Nazi philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Schmitt. Carl Schmitt, in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, contended—as do the Straussians today—that it is essential to define an "enemy" for the population to fight; only a belief in a mortal enemy can unify the population, and invest a regime with meaning. Today, for John Ashcroft, not only do the "terrorists" constitute that required enemy; but also, those who complain about his police-state methods.

Recall Ashcroft's statement during a Senate hearing in December 2001: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies."

Ashcroft's "Himmler II" legislation would give draconian, Gestapo-type powers to the Justice Department, to deal with those whom the Attorney General defines as giving aid to terrorists by opposing the Administration's war drive, or by complaining of "lost liberty."

While you are still a citizen, make the Congress stop him, now!

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