Freedom House

Freedom House
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Monday, December 26, 2005 - 12:00 AM

Editorial

Respect the law, Mr. President

REVELATIONS of Bush administration spying on U.S. citizens are shocking enough, but they are particularly alarming as a part of a broader pattern of ignoring or interpreting the law as it sees fit.

President George Bush, and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, argue for expansive executive powers without regard to laws passed by Congress or respect for its oversight role.

The failure of the majority Republican Party to assert that responsibility is all the more disturbing. The latest case involves the failure of the administration to secure warrants from a special court prior to using wiretaps and other technical means to monitor communications between U.S. citizens and people abroad or from a foreign county to the U.S.
Subsequently, it was reported those sophisticated electronic devices have also picked up purely domestic communications by accident.

Too often, in too many circumstances, the administration behaves as if the laws of the land do not apply — or it simply chooses to ignore them.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was created to put secret requests for eavesdropping or searches before a judge. They were routinely approved. Regulations even provided a 72-hour window for the government to act before it explained itself and sought retroactive permission.

One of the judges has resigned to protest Bush's secret, 4-year-old order for warrantless spying that evades the court, The Washington Post reported.

The Bush administration again and again appears to be making it up as it goes along, mining the Justice Department for sympathetic legal interpretations or simply plowing ahead.

Terrorism suspects were defined as enemy combatants to give them an extra-legal veneer so they could be kept out of the U.S. court system, denied fundamental rights, carted off to compliant nations for interrogation or stuck in limbo, ironically, on the island of Cuba.

The U.S. has suffered legal and humanitarian scandals over the use of torture. International agreements and our own domestic laws have been flouted.

After the administration's spying was exposed, the president refused to discuss the matter for security reasons. The next day, he delivered lengthy defenses of the indefensible.

Take away the names, and the policies sound more like Vladimir Putin than Thomas Jefferson. The administration is emboldened to push the limits and create new boundaries because there is no congressional oversight by Republicans.

This is dangerous territory.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
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Champion Of Freedom?
Bush and the Year In Democracy

By Fred HiattMonday, December 26, 2005; A39

In 2005, President Bush set before the nation the goal of "ending tyranny in our world." In 2006, he is scheduled to attend the first meeting of Group of Eight leaders in Russia, which spent this year positioning itself as a leader of the world's pro-tyranny camp.

At best, Bush's attendance in St. Petersburg in July will demonstrate the complexities of claiming freedom-promotion as the central goal of foreign policy. At worst, it will be seen as proof that Bush's commitment to liberty is highly situational.

Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that tracks trends in liberty more closely than anyone else, insists that 2005 actually was a pretty good year. There are 89 free countries, 58 partly free and 45 not free, by its tally. Trends were positive in 27 countries, negative in only nine: "The global picture thus suggests that the past year was one of the most successful for freedom since Freedom House began measuring world freedom in 1972," the organization maintained.

Maybe so. There were obvious bright spots: elections in Liberia and Iraq, the inauguration of a democratically chosen president in Ukraine, stirrings of political change in Egypt and the Palestinian Authority.

But even those bright spots had shadows. The gainers in Arab elections were Islamist parties that may or may not be committed to the democratic process. The elected government in Ukraine faced internal and external pressures. Liberia's president will need help from wealthier countries that she may not receive.

And there seemed to be plenty of dark spots without silver linings. Bush undermined his own credibility as a champion of freedom with his refusal to abjure torture, his purchasing of positive news in Iraq and his secret detention policies.

High oil prices meanwhile lubricated the foreign policies of autocrats from Venezuela to Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia to Azerbaijan. In Africa, Uganda's ruler, once seen as a hope of the continent, threw his likely electoral opponent in jail; just this past weekend, Egypt's craven leader did the same. Nigeria's elected president was reported to be flirting with tearing up his constitution to grab a third term.

In South America, another elected president, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, consolidated one-party rule and moved to export his brand of populist autocracy to neighboring nations.

The Nelson Mandela of Asia, Burma's Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, finished the year as she began it, under house arrest and cut off from the world by her country's military dictators. North Koreans remained imprisoned inside a totalitarian nightmare, and their immediate neighbors (South Korea, China, Russia) didn't seem to care much.

The contradictions between China's economic growth and its lack of rule of law grew more acute -- but China's new-generation leaders, who many had hoped would promote political reform and freedom of expression, squelched them instead.

Russia, a major oil exporter, found its energy revenue sufficient to prop up friendly dictators and even to buy a German ex-chancellor. President Vladimir Putin at year's end was poised to stifle the last outpost of uncontrolled civil society, with a law regulating nongovernmental organizations.

The president and his ruling clique of former KGB agents already had brought television, provincial government, business and parliament under their control.

And Putin was not only a non-democrat at home; he was an active anti-democrat in the world. He threatened to raise gas prices for Ukraine's democrats and lower them for Belarus's dictator. He embraced Uzbekistan's strongman for bloodily suppressing a Tiananmen-like demonstration. He orchestrated phony elections in war-ravaged Chechnya. He saw democracy as a threat, at home and abroad.

So how does he come to be hosting the Group of Eight -- what used to be known as the club of leading industrialized democracies? Bill Clinton, who pressed to expand what was then the G-7 to include Boris Yeltsin's Russia, said he offered membership so that Yeltsin "would agree to NATO expansion and the NATO-Russian partnership." And when finance ministers objected that Russia's shrunken economy didn't rate inclusion, Clinton argued that "being in it would symbolize Russia's importance to the future and strengthen Yeltsin at home."

Whatever the merits of those arguments at the time, the tactics didn't work. The prospect of membership in Western "clubs" isn't inducing much cooperation, and democracy was not given a chance to gel. Russia remains "important to the future," of course, but its economy is smaller than those of non-G-8 democracies India and Brazil, and certainly smaller than China's.

St. Petersburg is lovely in July, and a U.S. president has to maintain a relationship with Russia's leader, come what may. Still, maybe Bush ought to think about spending his summer holiday with a host who shares his freedom agenda. There ought to be plenty of options in the Group of 89.

fredhiatt@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company