On his second full day in office, President Barack Obama made a major gesture toward restoring the Constitution and the rule of law by signing two executive orders: one closed the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the other restored America to the company of civilized nations by closing so-called "black sites" that facilitated state-sanctioned torture.
Nice start, and the credit goes both to Obama and to the millions of Americans who stood up and took risks to fight against gathering tyranny. But it is not enough. There is a speech that we still need to hear, detailing five tasks that, in order to repair the damage to liberty caused by the previous administration, he must pursue as quickly as he handled the first two executive orders. Its substance should be something like the following:
"My fellow Americans, the Founders had the wisdom to guarantee our freedoms in many ways. They could not guarantee our souls. That is up to us and how we act.
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| President Barack Obama puts his Blackberry device away as he waves during a walk to the Oval Office on returning to the White House in Washington, DC, January 29, 2009, after attending a performance at his daughter's school. Obama was allowed to keep the Blackberry after security modifications were added. AFP |
"In every major religion, a version of the following question is asked: what does it profit us to gain wealth and power if we lose our moral values? In the past eight years, we have colluded with acts that jeopardized the very soul of our nation. The greatest crime we committed or tolerated was the savaging of our cherished Constitution.
"Without our Constitution, America is just another world power made great by wealth and weapons instead of by values and convictions; so we are at risk of collapse when our wealth and weapons fail us. It is our Constitution that is our true wealth and the true guarantee of our nation's endurance.
"After closing Guantánamo Bay and forbidding torture, we must repeal the Patriot Act, thereby restoring the Constitution's restraints against warrantless wiretapping and surveillance.
"Second, though we have closed the prisons, we must seek the forgiveness of our fellow nations for the horrors that we committed or with which we colluded by engaging in state-sanctioned torture and "extraordinary rendition" of detainees to countries that torture. I am appointing a commission to establish a truth and reconciliation process to put the accounting of these horrors before our own consciences and before the world.
"Third, we must have a special prosecutor to prosecute the culpable. Many in the military or the intelligence services now fear criminal liability for actions they took at the behest of those at the top of the chain of command. But the proper course of action is that taken in Nuremberg, The Hague, Sierra Leone, and after the Bosnian conflict: prosecute those who designed, approved, and implemented the policy of torture and rendition, however high the chain of commission goes - including the lawyers who justified legal perversions that led to torture and murder - rather than targeting those farther down the chain of command.
"Fourth, let us once again outlaw the presence of the military on our streets, as the Founders intended. On October 7, 2008, more than 3,000 American troops were deployed from Iraq to the United States, in violation of Posse Comitatus, which has protected us from military policing for a century, and in violation of the Insurrection Act, which protected us for the century before that. Today, there are 20,000 soldiers - not accountable to the people, but only to the executive - on our streets.
"The danger of that situation is why the Founders adopted the Second Amendment, which is meant to restrict domestic policing to militia - the National Guard and civilian police - that are answerable to the people. America is neither a battlefield nor a police state, so we should send our soldiers to the actual front or else back home to their families.
"Finally, we must ensure that this darkness never descends again. Half of American children grow up with no civic education. Half of states no longer teach civics - the study of our Republic and how it works - in middle school. So half of incoming American college students don't know what our democracy is, let alone how to defend it when it is threatened. I call on states throughout the land to re-institute the study of US civics so that we will produce citizens who understand our legacy and can defend liberty and the Constitution when it is threatened.
"Join me in accomplishing these next five tasks, and we can look at ourselves in the mirror again, recognizing ourselves as true Americans."
* Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009. Exclusive to The Sunday Times
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