Bush's record, actions give reasons to 'object'

May 23, 2008 Bush's record, actions give reasons to 'object' By Sean Patrick O'Rourke After last month's announcement that President Bush will speak at Furman's commencement, members of the Furman community posted a letter titled "We Object" at http://www.furman.edu/bushvisit/petition.htm. Over 200 members of the faculty, staff and student body have signed the letter. It has prompted protest and controversy on campus and online, erroneous and derisive responses from and in The Greenville News, and an on-air statement that one of the protest's leaders should be "taken out." And though not a single substantive charge made in our initial letter has been contested, we are still asked why we object. Why? Because public officials and their administrations are vested with a public trust. They are obligated to follow and execute the law. They must act in the public's best interest. They are bound by moral standards. And when they act contrary to these standards they are answerable to the people, for when the actions of a public official and his administration become as odious as this president's, silence implies consent. It is to acquiesce to the awful, to condone the criminal. Our objection, then, is on moral and legal grounds. According to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, in the two years following 9-11, "President Bush and seven of his top officials made at least 935 false statements" about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions and Iraq's connection to al-Qaida's attacks. The study, "an exhaustive examination of the record, shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that ... led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." The consequences of that campaign are horrific. According to the Department of Defense, the war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4,000 U.S. military personnel and wounded over 13,000 more so severely that they are unable to return to duty. Estimates vary widely but all agree that tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed. Professors Linda Bilmes (Harvard) and Joseph Stiglitz (2001 Nobel Economics Laureate from Columbia) estimate that the war will cost more than $2 trillion, far more than the administration's misleadingly low estimates. And there is no end in sight. President Bush and his administration are also directly responsible for grave violations of international law and human rights. The Bush doctrine of pre-emption, concocted to justify war against Iraq (a country that did not attack us and posed no immediate international threat), contravenes Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, which limits war to self defense (Article 51). The Bush Military Commissions Act, by classifying prisoners of war as "unlawful enemy combatants" to permit their detention and interrogation, violates the due process and fair trial provisions of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. And the Bush policy of secret, "extraordinary rendition" and torture violates every standard of international law and morality -- but particularly the Convention against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and five separate articles of the Geneva Conventions. Consider U.S. law. President Bush has resisted the constitutional limitations on his powers. He has asserted executive privilege to withhold information about corporate influences on energy and environmental policy. He has appropriated, with the help of an acquiescent Congress, the congressional war-making powers for the executive. He has admitted violating U.S. electronic surveillance law in blatant disregard of our Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches and seizures. But the American Bar Association reports that the gravest threat to our constitutional separation of powers may be President Bush's unprecedented use of "signing statements." Instead of simply signing bills into law and executing them as he should, the president delivers statements in which he claims the authority to disobey more than 750 laws. President Bush has issued more signing statements than all previous presidents combined, even though a bipartisan ABA task force judged this practice "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers." Those of us at Furman, however, have been touched more directly by President Bush's disregard for intellectual inquiry, the environment and religious faith. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (including 20 Nobel laureates), President Bush systematically distorts and undermines scientific information when it runs counter to his policy goals. He has also accelerated a program to reclassify and thus remove from public access thousands of historical documents that should be available to scholars. These actions stand in direct opposition to the spirit of free and open inquiry at the heart of university life. Given Furman's emphasis on sustainable environmental practices, the Bush administration's habit of suppressing or ignoring empirical evidence of human contribution to global warming is particularly alarming. So too is the administration's resistance to greenhouse gas reduction plans, granting of tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies now earning record profits, and installation of coal, timber and mining lobbyists as the chief stewards and guardians of our public lands. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the report by David Kuo, former deputy director of President Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, that the administration cynically uses religion for political ends, mocking Christian leaders and "taking Jesus and reducing him to some precinct captain, to some get-out-the-vote guy." And yet, those of us who object to all this have been accused of politicizing the event, denying free speech, disrespecting the presidential office and undermining our students. Such irony. This president has broken trust with the American people and has done so with an unprecedented level of cynicism and arrogance. We have sought to remind him and others that even in places dominated by members of his own party, some Americans will not sit silently by. We will object. GUEST COLUMN Sean Patrick O'Rourke is a member of the Furman University faculty. He wrote this column on behalf of the 221 signatories to the "We Object" letter. He can be reached at sean.orourke@furman.edu. Wade Worthen and Paul Thomas of Furman University contributed to this piece.