Whaddya mean suspend the First Amendment?

The Obama administration this week released secret Bush administration memos that gave the president advice about possibly suspending provisions of the U.S. Constitution to fight the “war on terror” and war in general. These memos made news because they suggested that the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures could be pushed aside so that “the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants,” according to the N.Y. Times.

Scary stuff, suspending the Fourth Amendment, the one protection against a police state and military dictatorship. But equally troubling was the suggestion in these legal memorandums that ““First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” Read that again. The Bush administration’s lawyers were suggesting that the government can suspend the First Amendment in order to wage war. The memos are here. The First Amendment part is at page 24.

These suggestions were not put into place. Someone in the Bush administration probably realized these were untenable and that even a guy like Dick Cheney cannot go onto national television to tell the American people that the Constitution was being suspended.

These memos were written about six weeks after the September 11 attacks. Published reports have confirmed that the Bush administration was already thinking about war with Iraq in the wake of 9/11, and the president and his subordinates were beating the war drums for months on end before the war began in March 2003. The war is now considered a fraud by most rational people. Can you imagine suspending the First Amendment over the Iraq war, a lopsided invasion that was not undertaken to protected national security?

Suspending the Constitution during wartime is shocking, but not a new concept in our lifetime. In the mid-1980’s, when another Republican President, Ronald Reagan, was pummeling a third world country (Nicaragua) for unlawful and unjustified reasons, one of his national security assistants, Oliver North, had the same idea. This story broke in the Miami Herald in July 1987.

Here’s a summary:

National Security Council officer Colonel Oliver North heads the development of a secret contingency plan called REX 84. In the event of an emergency, the plan calls “for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency], [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments.” The plan, initially revealed in the Miami Herald in 1987, also reportedly calls for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps. North operates the program from a secure White House site, allegedly using a software program known as PROMIS. PROMIS was designed to track individuals, such as prisoners, by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record.”

As the attack against Nicaragua (through proxy armies like the contras rather than U.S. soldiers) was even less justified than war against Iraq, the 1987 story tells us that fascism is alive and well in this country and just bubbling under the surface. The Bush administration may have employed radical lawyers who had no regard for the First Amendment, but that’s not news. The Reagan administration, beloved by modern conservatives from coast to coast, also danced on the fringes of authoritarianism.