The Cost of America's Secret Wars, Then and Now

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

06 December 11

n Sunday, I went to early Mass at Gesu Church, the baronial old Jesuit pile on Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, and the place I would go on Sundays during college to ask the Lord for forgiveness for whatever several commandments I may have left in the shebeen the night before. During what we used to call The Prayer of the Faithful, which comes immediately after the Homily, we prayed for the souls of Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, and Dorothy Kazel, four Catholic missionaries who were beaten, raped, and murdered by a death squad in El Salvador in 1980. The death squad carried out this mission at the direct order of the Salvadoran government, a right-wing horror show of which President Ronald Reagan and his incoming administration were quite proud. When Republicans boast of Reagan's foreign policy triumphs, murder and rape is part of what they're talking about. The four women - American citizens and clergy, mind you - were brutalized on December 2. Last Sunday was the 31st anniversary of their deaths.

The case was a stench in the nostrils of the world. Once in office, the Reagan people lied their asses off - or, worse, blamed the nuns. Jeane Kirkpatrick said that the murdered women were "not just nuns. The nuns were political activists – on behalf of the [leftist opposition] Frente." Alexander Haig, Reagan's lunatic Secretary of State, opined that "the nuns may have run through a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire." (How beatings and rape occur during "an exchange of fire," Haig declined to explain.) The whole Central American operation was a rat's nest of blood and corruption, conducted largely in secret, often in direct contravention of both the Congress and the will of the American people. Its aroma has not improved through history, and its partisans have remained unusually fervent. Laura Ingraham, good Christian soul, once joked in an interview that she had gone to El Salvador and stayed at "The Four Dead Nuns Inn." This is the same Laura Ingraham to whom Ed Schlutz had to apologize for calling a "slut," because that is uncivil and unprofessional behavior. But joking about raped and murdered American citizens? What fun! Laura Ingraham is not a slut. She is, however, as indecent a pissant as ever has stepped before a microphone.

This is what secret wars are about. Secret wars are still wars. There will be atrocities. And, because this is the nature of all governments in all wars, these atrocities will be covered up and lied about. But the problem with secret wars is not that they are secret from the people on whom they are waged, or the people who simply live in the country where they are waged. As Doonesbury once memorably pointed out, the "secret bombing" of Cambodia wasn't any secret to the Cambodians. But secret wars, waged by the Executive branch beyond the reach of congressional oversight, inevitably lead to a deep and abiding corruption in the government of this country. It is unavoidable now. It was unavoidable in the 1980's, when Reagan and his band of geopolitical fantasts were running amok in Central America. And it was unavoidable in 1793, when James Madison warned us, quite clearly:

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man: not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

Hence it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war: hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.

Secret war is anathema to free government. Period. Now, you can argue that it's necessary, that the world has changed, that dangers come upon us too quickly, that the length and breadth of the evil in the world has made the perils Madison described quaint and irrelevant. You can do all that and people will applaud you and elect you president. But you cannot make the argument that secret wars conducted by the Executive are consonant with constitutional government, because they are not, and they never will be, and because, sooner or later, you wind up lying about the rape and murder of nuns.

(Hell, you can't really even argue that open warfare conducted by the Executive, even with fig-leaf legislation from a cowardly and compliant Congress, is consonant with constitutional government. The Founders would laugh at you.)

I bring all of this up because I just recently caught up with this piece in National Journal which describes how "comfortable" Barack Obama has become with waging his secret wars in Pakistan and in other places. Some of the quotes in the piece, especially from the people at the CIA, are mindbogglingly banal in their illustration of just how far from the Constitution our presidents have strayed, and how happy everyone is that they've done so....

One senior official inside the CIA is forthright about the issue, at least when speaking anonymously. "It's a lot simpler and easier for a sniper to shoot or to use a Predator to launch a lawful attack than to detain and interrogate prisoners," he says. "Once they're dead, then Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International doesn't bring a habeas [corpus] case for them. If we're not going to hold them, we're 'pure.' We may not have information or intelligence, but we do ensure that no one in the human-rights community is yelling and screaming at us." Well, god forbid that should happen. It might ruin an entire afternoon.

And, no, this is not about killing Osama bin Laden. This is about conducting a general war overseas in an ad hoc fashion entirely from within the Executive branch. The constitutional distance between what President Obama is doing and "The Enterprise," which was the Reagan administration's term for the foolishness that ended in the Iran-Contra scandal, is not vast.

We can applaud the president's "strong leadership" in this area. We can even re-elect him based on it. But it doesn't have anything to do with what we were designed as a nation to do. We can fool ourselves that all of this is constitutional, but it's not, and no hack White House lawyer can make it so. Secret wars are lies institutionalized and, sooner or later, we're all praying for the repose of the souls of nuns murdered so long ago that hardly anyone remembers them.