George W. Bush v. The Constitution of the United States of America

By Michael J.W. Stickings

With Obama in the White House, the truth about his predecessor and the desecration of the Constitution that was so much a part of the Bush presidency is coming out:

The Obama administration threw open the curtain on years of Bush-era secrets Monday, revealing anti-terror memos that claimed exceptional search-and-seizure powers and divulging that the CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other treatment of terror suspects.

The Justice Department released nine legal opinions showing that, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration determined that certain constitutional rights would not apply during the coming fight. Within two weeks, government lawyers were already discussing ways to wiretap U.S. conversations without warrants.

The Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions, but the documents themselves had been closely held. By releasing them, President Barack Obama continued a house-cleaning of the previous administration's most contentious policies.

"Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech a few hours before the documents were released. "Not only is that school of thought misguided, I fear that in actuality it does more harm than good."

In waging its so-called war on terror, the Bush Administration, with the buck stopping at the very top (Cheney's desk, as well as Bush's), sacrificed some of America's core moral and political principles.

It is essential that its transgressions be aired in full so that what happened, including torture, not be repeated, that the CIA be held accountable for obstructing justice and for using Bush-approved interrogation "techniques," and that civil liberties not be traded off in future, "zero-sum," against what is deemed, wrongly and malevolently, to be America's national security interests.

Simply put, it is not in America's national security interests to be un-American.

As it was under Bush, it must not be under Obama.