Sovereignty and Emergency

Political Theology, Islam and American Conservatism

Bryan S. Turner

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 4, (Agu. 2002), pp. 103–119.

Abstract:

The Huntington thesis of the clash of cultures and American foreign policy analysis are both aspects of the legacy of Carl Schmitt's distinction between friend and foe. This article explores Schmitt's political theology as the theoretical basis of modern politics in terms of the concepts of state sovereignty and the idea of a permanent emergency. Within this Schmittian framework, the analysis of Islam as presented by writers such as Huntington, Fukuyama and Barber is critically analysed. Their analysis of fundamentalism and political Islam fails to grasp the complexity and diversity of modern Islam. The article concludes by examining a number of social and economic processes that make the political division between friend and foe untenable.

Introduction:

THE ATTACK on New York on 11 September, the subsequent ‘war against terrorism’ in Afghanistan and the construction of the ‘evil axis’ have produced a flurry of commentary on the problems of American civilization and America’s global role. One consequence of 9/11 is that Islam now features very prominently in American foreign relations, and

debates about American foreign policy have been dominated by the theme of the clash of civilizations. The popular debate about the Huntington thesis has obscured its intellectual dependence on an academic tradition of political philosophy that sought to define sovereignty in terms of civilizational struggles between friend and foe, namely the legacy of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. It is not possible to understand fully the contemporary ‘state of emergency’ and ‘clash of civilizations’ without a re-appraisal inparticular of the political theology of Schmitt. While Jürgen Habermas (1989: 135) expressed the hope that the Anglo-Saxon world would escape contagion from the Schmittian revival, his optimism was probably premature. The attack on New York has made Schmitt’s ideas about state emergency, the crisis of liberalism, ‘decisionist politics’ and the division between friend and foe highly relevant to understanding contemporary American politics.

In this analysis of the current state of emergency, I outline Schmitt’s political theology of the friend/enemy distinction and examine recent commentaries on Islam as the Other. While Schmitt’s political theory provides a productive paradigm for understanding American politics, Schmitt has of course not been without his critics (Strauss, 1996). I concentrate in particular on his relationship to Strauss (Meier, 1995), who argued that Schmitt had not successfully broken out of the liberal paradigm, and his relation to Max Weber (1988) whose analysis of ‘Der Reichspräsident’ in 1919 provided the context for Schmitt’s analysis of sovereignty, legality and emergency powers. Both Strauss and Schmitt have commanded considerable attention from American political science and foreign policy analysts, but 9/11 has given this revival even greater relevance (McCormick, 1998). My discussion concludes by combining Schmitt and Strauss toprovide an understanding of the prominence of religion in Americanpolitical ideology.

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Bryan S. Turner is one of the world’s leading sociologists of religion; he has also devoted significant attention to sociological theory, the study of human rights, and the sociology of the body. In Vulnerability and Human Rights (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), he presents an interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion. His current research involves the role of religion in contemporary Asia and the changing nature of citizenship in a globalizing world. Turner has written, coauthored, or edited more than seventy books and more than two hundred articles and chapters. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Sage, 2008), first published in 1984, is in its third edition. He is also an

author or editor of The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, and The Sage Handbook of Sociology. He is a founding editor of the journals Body & Society, Citizenship Studies, and Journal of Classical Sociology. Turner comes to the GC from Wellesley College, where he was Alona Evans Distinguished Visiting Professor; he is also professor of social and political thought at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds and has been awarded the Doctor of Letters from both Flinders University in South Australia and the University of Cambridge.

http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/new_faculty/Turner.htm

The Sovereignty of the Political

Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism

S. Parvez Manzoor

Ironically, at a time when the liberal state and its attendant secularism seem to have totally triumphed over all their rivals, the political theorist is no longer insistent upon banishing the metaphysical from his discourse. In fact, there is a growing trend to make a distinction between politics and the political, between agency and regime, that allows the metaphysical a legitimate role in the definition of political identity. (The same fascination with philosophy, and protest against restrictive empiricism, is noticeable in other intellectual milieus, as evidenced by the occurrence of parallel terminology in French (la politique and le politique) and German (die Politik and das Politische).) Politics, according to this scheme, denotes the realm of partisan power struggles and is amenable to empirical research; the political, on the contrary, alludes to the quasi-metaphysical and transcendent bid to assign meaning and symbolic import to the polis; the former translates into policy, the latter into polity. This re-enchantment of the 'postmodern' political conscience, as it were, is not a gift of fundamentalism, nor does it display a longing for any theocratic scheme of things. On the contrary, it is the discovery of the mutuality of the existential and the transcendent orders of political reality, the symbiosis of existence and truth, that has been instrumental in restoring the unity of politics and ontology.

Works Discussed in this Essay:

The Concept of the Political. By Carl Schmitt. Tr. by George Schwab. The Rutger University press, New Brunnswick/New Jersey, 1976. Pp. 104.

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. By Carl Schmitt. Tr. by George Schwab. Cambridge, Massachuesetts, The MIT Press, 1985. Pp. 70.

Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism. By Renato Cristi. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1998. Pp. 252. ISBN 0-7083-1441-4.

The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy. By Heinrich Meier. Tr. by Marcus Brianard. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1998. Pp. 179. ISBN 0-226-51890-6.

Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. By Karl Löwith. Ed. By Richard Wolin. Tr. by Gary Steiner. Columbia University Press, New York, 1995. Pp. 304. ISBN0-231-08407-2.

Civilizational Transformation and the Muslim World. By Ahmet Davutoglu. Mahir Publications, Kuala Lumpur. Pp.136. ISBN983-70-0313-8.

Inter-Civilizational Relations and the Destiny of the West: Dialogue or Confrontation? By Victor Segesvary. Edwin Mellan press, Lewiston NY (USA), 1998. Pp. 354. ISBN 0-7734-8327-6.

Excerpt:

Karl Löwith cogently demonstrates that the political, and hence the existential, as a sovereign domain, as a norm unto itself, is 'meaningless' and cannot stand at the highest rung of the scale of human values - a conclusion with which no Muslim, indeed no believer, can disagree.

Löwith's book claims further attention from the Muslim reader on account of its penetrating analysis of the other fashionable trends of European philosophy that all terminate in the wasteland of nihilism - the bête noire of Islamic thought. He guides us through the intellectual and philosophical landscape of the dark times of the European past, times when another German thinker, Heidegger, annunciated his own nihilistic doctrine of Existenzphilosophie.

For Löwith, the intellectual affinities between Schmitt's political existentialism and Heidegger's philosophical existentialism are far from fortuitous. 'It is no accident', he asserts, 'if Heidegger's existential ontology corresponds to a political "decisionism" in Carl Schmitt, a decisionism that shifts the capacity for "Being-as-a-whole" of the Dasein which is always on its own to the "totality" of the state which is always one's own. The self-assertion of political existence, and to "freedom toward death" correspond the "sacrifice of life" in the political exigency of war. In both cases, the principle is the same, namely "facticity", i.e., what remains of life when one does away with all life-content.' Yet again are we reminded of the futility of all purely temporal - existential, occasional, decisionist -schemes of things and their inability to engender any ethic of right and wrong!

The Muslim interest in Carl Schmitt, I believe, is not for historical reasons, insofar as the context of his life does not eclipse the text of his thought. Schmittism may be a specifically European phenomenon that can only be understood and appraised against the background of philosophical nihilism and political uncertainty from which it emerges. Nevertheless, some of the

questions that Schmitt raises about politics, law and the state, and the very provocative answers that he gives to them, are the very stuff of political reflection and as such far transcend the narrow confines of his European context. From the moral point of view, he may be despicable and the normative import of his theories may be virtually nil, but it is as a phenomenologist of the political - he characterizes himself as the 'metaphysician of the political' - that his insights make demands on the Muslim thinker.

That he has been totally ignored by the Western 'Islamologue', or that Muslim writers show no awareness of his radical theories, is a fact that may be regretted but which may not daunt the critical Muslim thinker from making a direct and independent encounter with his thought. Carl Schmitt's problematic political philosophy, in my opinion, not only de-masks the duplicity of the dominant liberal ideology, it also helps us de-construct many of the peculiarities of fiqhi discourse that arouse the outsider's squeamish aversion and the insider's ingenuous perplexity. This last suggestion, namely to initiate, within the discourse of fiqh, a hermeneutical reflection that takes full cognizance of Schmitt's phenomenology of law, however, demands a much wider inquiry and deserves a far more extended comment than is possible within the scope of this review essay and may therefore be reserved for a future occasion.

Far less innocuous than any hermeneutical encounter between Schmitt and the fuqaha of the past, however, is the ghost of Schmitt that haunts Muslims here and now in the Islamophobic scenarios of a future 'clash of civilizations.' For there can be no doubt that this barbaric 'theory', wishful thinking if not a self-fulfilling prophecy, is nothing but a reincarnation of the infamous Schmittian 'friend-enemy' distinction that according to him constitutes the heart of political existence. Of the very few Muslim responses to this challenge, i.e., the deliberate, persistent and vicious cultivation of imagery and discourses that define Islam as the 'enemy', the one by Ahmet Davutoglu, Civilizational Transformation and the Muslim World, merits scholarly attention, not least because of its sophistication candour and optimism.

Through a panoramic, trans-cultural vision, Davutoglu surveys the mileposts of 'universal' history and detects in our own times an air of crisis, a moment of 'ontological insecurity', 'epistemological relavitity', 'ethico-material and ecological imbalances', etc. Perceiving also that a new, global civilization is emerging, Davutoglu resents the fact that historic animosities and perverse political interests of the West prevent Islam from playing a meaningful and legitimate role in this transformational process. The current world order, he rails, incorporates an inveterate and congenital form of anti-Islamism. He ends his sustained reflection, as strategic as it is philosophical, by exhorting the Muslims to develop civilizational visions and strategies to reclaim their rightful share in the future of humanity. All of this makes Davutoglu's rather terse statement both Isamically significant and ideationally rewarding.

In a similar vein, Victor Segesvary, a Hungarian emigré in the US who has been associated with the United Nations, meditates on the spiritual, moral and cultural state of the world. His is however a tract of meta-theory that incorporates, in the author's own idiosyncratic manner, philosophical insights, moral criticisms, utopian visions and religious homilies of almost every notable thinker under the sun. It is a Herculean effort, a formidable display of the author's

erudition, an eloquent testimony to his involvement with the future of our humanity, but, alas, it lacks focus and clarity. Notwithstanding its imposing, even intimidating, title, Segevary offers no 'political' blueprints for the future world which has experienced the 'collapse of the universalistic worldview.' On the contrary, he hopes that a new civilization will arise on the basis of an 'ontological/cosmic perspective.' It is a visionary reflection that should appeal to other visionaries!

For Muslims, who find themselves at the receiving end of civilizational polemics, the lesson of Carl Schmitt is precisely the political nature of the world-order, the duplicity of its institutions and the sanctimony of its moral crusaders. Universalism is the mask that hides the countenance of hegemony and might is the right of the elect. Carl Schmitt's thought, an authentic product of Western elf-reflection, opens up an intellectual space that allows us the luxury of indulging in counter-polemics. And yet, we must be weary of the polemical as well as the political. For the ultimate value that Islam stands for is not political but trans-political; the final aim of its mission is not the eradication, or subjugation, of its enemies, not the establishment of a universal state, not the sustenance of a global order of terror and economic exploitation, but the unity of man and peace in the city of humanity. Islam means sovereignty of the Transcendent and not of the political.

http :// www . algonet . se /~ pmanzoor / CarlSchmitt . htm

Dick Cheney's Éminence Grise

Barbara Boyd

Lyndon LaRouche is not the only Constitutional scholar to remark that President Bush's claim of absolute Presidential power, trumping any mere law or statute, and Cheney's Air Force II ramblings, come straight out of Carl Schmitt. Sanford V. Levinson, who holds dual professorships in law and government at the University of Texas, and is an eminent Constitutional scholar, wrote in the Summer 2004 issue of Daedalus that, "although some analysts have suggested that the Bush Administration has operated under the guidance of the ideas of German emigré Leo Strauss, it seems far more plausible to suggest that the true éminence grise of the administration, particularly with regard to issues surrounding the possible propriety of torture, is Schmitt."

In a similar vein, Scott Horton, chairman of the International Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association and adjunct Professor at Columbia University published a note on "Balkanization" on Nov. 7, titled "The Return of Carl Schmitt." In discussing Justice Departmentlawyer John Yoo's advice that the Executive Branch was not bound by the Geneva Conventions and similar international instruments in its conduct of the war in Iraq, Horton writes, "Yoo's public arguments and statements suggest the strong influence of one thinker: Carl Schmitt."

According to Schmitt, Horton notes, "the norms of international law respecting armed conflict ... are 'unrealistic' as applied to modern ideological warfare against an enemy not constrained by notions of a nation-state, adopting terrorist methods and fighting with irregular formations that hardly equate to traditional armies. For Schmitt, the key to successful prosecution of warfare against such a foe is demonization. The enemy must be seen as absolute. He must be stripped of all legal rights of whatever nature. The Executive must be free to use whatever tools he can find to fight and vanquish this foe.

And conversely, the power to prosecute the war must be vested without reservation in the Executive—in the words of Reich Ministerial Director Franz Schlegelberger (eerily echoed in a brief submission by Bush Administration Solicitor General Paul D. Clement) 'in time of war theExecutive is constituted the sole leader, the sole legislator, sole judge.' I take the liberty of substituting Yoo's word, Executive; for Schmitt or Schlegelberger, the word would, of course, have been Führer."

Who Was Carl Schmitt?

Born in 1899 to a Catholic working class family, Carl Schmitt studied jurisprudence at Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, and then served under the German general staff in World War I administering martial law.

Following this formative experience, Schmitt formed his central political idea: that how the state acts in the face of "concrete danger" or the "concrete situation," rather than any moral purpose, determines its legitimacy. The sovereign or legitimate dictator is the person who decides the "state of exception" in order to preserve order and protect the constitution. Committed to the world view of G.W.F. Hegel and Thomas Hobbes, in which man is "fallen" and "evil," Schmitt argues that all politics reduces itself to the relationship of "friend and foe."

In the Schmitt corpus, democracies based on "norms," legal rules, and the separation of powers are powerless when confronted by charismatic and powerful religious or political threats to their existence, such as the Bolsheviks. The existence of "exceptional situations" such as states of emergency, refute the very foundation of liberal political systems which are premised on pre-established laws and norms purportedly applicable to all possible situations. Schmitt mocked the idea that rational, endless legislative debate and discussion could generate the truth, noting that a social democrat when asked, "Christ or Barrabas?" would immediately seek consultation and then convene a commission to study the matter. The enlightened public sphere, the "city on the hill" in our American discourse, had disappeared in post-World War I Germany. For Schmitt, it had been superseded by the advent of mass markets, myth-making, and propaganda machinery, self-interested partisan assertion, and civilizational chaos and moral collapse.

From 1921 through 1933, as a law professor producing polemical tracts which were closely read, studied, and promoted by the synarchist banking crowd which sponsored Europe's fascist experiment, and then as a counselor in the governments of Brüning and von Papen, Schmittrelentlessly attacked and undermined the Weimar Constitution.

As early as 1922, Schmitt argued in Political Theology that the true sovereign is the individual or group who makes decisions in the exceptional situation. This individual or group, not the Constitution, is the sovereign. The most guidance a Constitution can provide is the stipulation of who can act in such a situation.

In The Concept of the Political, published in 1927, Schmitt asserted that the state's very identity and existence proceeds from the more fundamental or basic relationship between "friend and enemy," and that sovereignty is determined by the individual or entity who is able to define and protect society against the foe under conditions of existential threat. Rather than resort to norms, Schmitt stipulates, the sovereign resorts to the law of the battlefield or "concrete decisionism."

Throughout a long career, which continued until his death in 1985, Schmitt remained devoted to the Italian form of fascism under Mussolini which, Schmitt claimed, united the church, an authoritarian state, a free economy, and a powerful mythos which motivated the population.

The Transition to Constitutional 'Dictatorship'

Schmitt's principal weapon in deconstructing the German Constitution, however, was its Article 48 provision which allowed for the creation of a state of emergency and Presidential rule by executive order. In the Guardian of the Constitution, published in 1931, Schmitt argued thatArticle 48 conferred an unlimited authority in the German President to suspend the Constitution during a state of emergency, as long as he restored the Constitution when the emergency ended. Under Article 48, the President had inherent dictatorial powers as "protector of theConstitution," including the power to legislate, free from the need of parliamentary authorization. Since the President alone represents all of the people, resort to direct plebisites would resolve any doubts about democratic legitimacy under Presidential rule.

After Brüning's fall in 1932, Germany was governed by a Presidential dictatorship with Schmitt as its legal advisor. When the Nazis staged the Reichstag Fire on Feb. 27, 1933, of course, the stage had already been set for a relatively unremarkable legal transition from Schmitt's"commersarial" or temporary dictatorship to Schmitt's idea of a sovereign or permanent dictatorship.

On Feb. 28, 1933, Hitler utilized Article 48 to suspend the rights of his opponents, labelling them as terrorists. A frightened Parliament, believing that Germany was under attack by the Bolshevik hordes then passed enabling legislation legitimizing the dictatorship on March 23. In an article in the Deutsche Juristen Zeitung of March 25, Schmitt defended the enabling legislation, claiming that the Executive perogative now included the power to pass new Constitutional laws and declare the Weimar Constitution a dead letter. The new law was, Schmitt wrote, the expression of a "triumphant national revolution."

According to Schmitt, "the present government wants to be the expression of a unified national political will which seeks to put to an end the methods of the plural party state which were destructive of the state and the Constitution."

When Hitler slaughtered his political opponents in the "Night of the Long Knives," including Kurt von Schleicher, whom Schmitt had once declared a friend, Schmitt wrote in the Deutsche Juristen Zeitung in 1934 that,"The Fürhrer protects the law against the worst abuse when he, in the hour of danger, by virtue of his leadership, produces immediate justice. The true leader is, at the same time, always a judge."

In a propaganda piece published in Germany in 1936, and later in France, Schmitt characterized every government in post-World War I Europe as suppressing the constitutional distinction between legislative and executive powers because they needed to keep legislative powers "in harmony with the constant changes in the political, economic, and financial situation." The only unique thing about the Hitler Reich was that this process had reached its logical conclusion in Germany. In 1933, Germans had fully dispensed with conventional notions of the "separation of powers" by instituting a system of genuine "governmental legislation." It would be wrong, Schmitt said, to characterize this evolution as a "dictatorship." Rather, it represented the triumph of an older constitutional legality, one rooted in the thinking of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

During his service to the Nazis, Schmitt reported to Herman Göring and Hans Frank, supervising a project to purge German universities of any Jewish influences, and to conform all German law to Nazi theory.

Schmitt justified Hitler's aggression against other nations of Europe by claiming that Germany was creating a Grossraum, a sphere of influence, like the United States did with the Monroe Doctrine. When Schmitt fell out of favor with the SS, he travelled to Spain, Portugal, andItaly, under synarchist sponsorship providing lectures on how to continually legitimize the fascist governments of those nations. He refused de-Nazification after his arrest at the end of the war, arguing that he took no part in the actual administration of genocide but only provided "ideas," or "a diagnosis."

The U.S. Carl Schmitt Revival

The close relationship between Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and the explosive revival of Schmitt's works in the United States, funded by the same foundations which sponsor the Federalist Society in the 1980s and 1990s (see following article) suggest that Dick Cheney's advocacy of the Führerprinzip is not a matter of coincidence. Schmitt helped Strauss obtain a Rockefeller Foundation grant to come to the United States. Strauss and Schmitt collaborated on Schmitt's book, The Concept of the Political and on Strauss's book on Hobbes. Strauss's fawning letters to Schmitt continued long after the Nazis' ascent to power.

New York University Professor George Schwab produced two books on Schmitt in the 1970s, working with Schmitt himself to cleanse and minimize Schmitt's Nazi past for a U.S. audience. Schwab was a protégé of foreign policy "realist" Hans Morgenthau, also of the University of Chicago, and Schmitt's works proved useful in the 1970s dirty work of George Shultz and Henry Kissinger in overthrowing the Allende government in Chile, and establishing a bankers' dictatorship run through the University of Chicago and Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Jaime Guzman, an open and proud follower of Carl Schmitt, is widely recognized as the individual who provided popular legal legitimization for Chile's "constitutional coup," utilizing, Guzman states, the theories provided by Carl Schmitt. José Piñeras, the leader of Chile's socialsecurity reform, who toured the U.S. on behalf of George Bush's Social Security reform proposals, declares on the Internet that he was, "the closest friend" of Guzman.

In the late 1970s, a German Straussian, Heinrich Meier of the Siemens Stiftung, also began working on a major reformulation of Schmitt for purposes of the emerging Conservative Revolution. Concentrating on Schmitt's postwar diaries, his early work with Leo Strauss, andSchmitt's resurrection of the Spanish philosopher Donoso Cortes for purposes of legitimizing Franco, Meier recast Schmitt as the theoretician of permanent religious warfare or world civil war on behalf of the God of revealed religion, a theory which has chilling resemblance to the worldview expressed by George W. Bush.

In the 1980s and 1990s Schmitt became a staple on reading lists of U.S. colleges and universities in political science and philosophy, a revival which produced English translations of most of Schmitt's works, and reams of "scholarly" articles, conferences, and presentations.Funding for this project centered in the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and other neo-conservative foundations. Michael Joyce, who chaired the Bradley Foundation during this period, is a Straussian who started his career with Irving Kristol and the Institute for Educational Affairs—the same Foundation that provided seed funding for the Federalist Society. The English translations of both Meier books on Schmitt were published by the University of Chicago Press under grants from the Bradley Foundation, facilitated by Hillel Fradkin.

Fradkin, a Straussian, taught on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, was vice president of the Bradley Foundation from 1988-1998, a program officer at the Olin Foundation, heads a Straussian think tank in Israel called the Shalem Center, and recentlyreplaced Iran-Contra's Elliot Abrams as the head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

http :// www . larouchepub . com / other /2006/3301 c _ schmitt _ profile . html

March 4, 2009

Release of Memos Fuels Push for Inquiry Into Bush’s Terror-Fighting Policies

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and NEIL A . LEWIS

WASHINGTON — A day after releasing a set of Bush administration opinions that claimed sweeping presidential powers in fighting terrorism, the Obama administration faced new pressure on Tuesday to support a broad inquiry into interrogation, detention, surveillance and other practices under President George W . Bush .

Justice Department officials said they might soon release additional opinions on those subjects. But the disclosure of the nine formerly secret documents fueled calls by lawmakers for an independent commission to investigate and make public what the Bush administration did in the global campaign against terrorism.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr . , Democrat of Michigan, said the revelations, together with the release of new information about the Central Intelligence Agency ’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes , had underscored the need for a commission that would have the power to subpoena documents and testimony.

Officials who discussed the process spoke on the condition of anonymity because memorandums still under review might involve classified information. Among those that have not been disclosed but are believed to exist are a memorandum from the fall of 2001 justifying the National Security Agency ’s program of domestic surveillance without warrants and one from the summer of 2002 that listed specific harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding , that the C.I.A. was authorized to use.

The Justice Department officials said the decision to release the nine memorandums on Monday came after some of the opinions were sought in a civil lawsuit in California. They said department lawyers had determined that the opinions did not contain classified information.

The lawsuit was filed by Jose Padilla , a United States citizen who was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and detained for years as an enemy combatant before eventually being tried and convicted in a civilian criminal procedure. Mr. Padilla is suing John C . Yoo , a former Bush administration lawyer who was the author of many of the opinions justifying detention and interrogation policies.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday on whether to create a commission to look into the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy. The committee chairman, Senator Patrick J . Leahy , Democrat of Vermont, has already called for a commission, and another Democrat on the panel said Tuesday that he would support such an approach.

But David B. Rivkin Jr., an associate White House counsel under the first President Bush who is scheduled to testify at the hearing on Wednesday, said he planned to urge Congress not to move forward with that proposal, which he said would violate the rights of Bush administration officials and set them up for prosecutions by foreign courts.

“They want to pillory people,” Mr. Rivkin said. “They want to destroy their reputation. They want to drag them through the mud and single them out for foreign prosecutions. And if you get someone in a perjury trap, so much the better.”

President Obama has signaled a reluctance to open a wide-ranging investigation into his predecessor’s policies, saying he preferred to fix the policies and move on. In his first days in office, he issued executive orders requiring strict adherence to rules against torture. As a senator, he voted for legislation that brought surveillance efforts into alignment with federal statutes.

The increased calls for a greater public accounting come as the Justice Department’s internal ethics office is preparing to release a report that is expected to criticize sharply members of the Bush legal team who wrote memorandums purporting to provide legal justification for the use of harsh interrogation methods on detainees despite anti-torture laws and treaties, according to department and Congressional officials.

The Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department is examining whether certain political appointees in the department knowingly signed off on an unreasonable interpretation of the law to provide legal cover for a program sought by Bush White House officials.

The report is expected to focus on three former officials of the Office of Legal Counsel: Mr. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, now on leave at Chapman University, who was the principal author of opinions on national security matters from 2001 to 2003; Jay S. Bybee, who oversaw the counsel’s office during that period and is now a federal appeals court judge; and Steven G. Bradbury, who oversaw the counsel’s office in Mr. Bush’s second term.

Mr. Bradbury wrote two of the opinions released on Monday. Written last October and this January, they broadly repudiated the aggressive theory of virtually unlimited commander-in-chief power at the heart of Mr. Yoo’s memorandums.

Although he was a critic of Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury himself wrote three memorandums on the use of harsh interrogation techniques in 2005. Those documents are believed to be part of the Office of Professional Responsibility’s investigation.

In a footnote to Mr. Bradbury’s January memorandum that sharply criticized Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury signaled that he did not want a repudiation of Mr. Yoo’s legal reasoning to be used against him as part of the ethics inquiry.

Mr. Bradbury wrote that his retractions were not “intended to suggest in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the opinions in question” violated any “applicable standards of professional responsibility.”

http :// www . nytimes . com /2009/03/04/ washington /04 legal . html ?_ r =1& hp =& pagewanted = print

Dick Cheney Has a French Connection—To Fascism

Jeffrey Steinberg, Tony Papert, and Barbara Boyd

EIR's ongoing investigation into the "Straussian cabal" in and around the Bush Administration, which is behind the ongoing "American Empire" drive, has unearthed a major scandal, linking some of the leading players in the current drama to a notorious network of World War II and postwar outright Nazi collaborators. The central figure in the investigation is the life-long collaborator of neo-conservative "godfather" Leo Strauss—the Paris-based Russian emigré, Alexandre Kojève. Strauss and Kojève first met in Germany in 1928, and throughout Strauss's subsequent career in the United States—at the New School for Social Research, the University of Chicago, and St. John's College—Strauss funneled his leading disciples to Paris, to study under Kojève. Thus, for example, Strauss's top protégé and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz' teacher, the late Allan Bloom, made annual pilgrimages to Paris, from 1953 up until Kojève's death in 1968, to immerse himself in Kojève's Nietzschean fascist beliefs.

Although he taught for six years at the Sorbonne's École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) on the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Kojève's post-World War II nest was the French Economics Ministry, where he was an architect of the European Community. His informalseminars at his ministry office, however, were the finishing school for several generations of avowed American and European "Straussians," including Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History and the New Man, a Kojèvian diatribe, promoting Napoleon Bonaparte as thehero of modern history for having brought about the advent of a global one-world tyranny.

An American 'Synarchist Empire'?

EIR's investigation has established that Kojève was not only an ideologue of universal fascism, but he was also a leading figure in the most powerful fascist circles of 20th-Century France, the Synarchists.

Both French and American wartime and postwar military intelligence services probed the role of the Synarchists in France's Vichy government, and branded the underground secret movement as amply willing Nazi collaborationists. Indeed, the Movement for Synarchist Empire (MSE), founded in France in the early 1930s, was part of a Europe-wide apparatus of businessmen, bankers, and government officials, who were dedicated to a unified fascist Europe, and who chose to support Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party as their instrument.

U.S. Army, State Department, and FBI files from the World War II period labeled the French fascist circles of Kojève "Synarchist/Nazi- Communist." This was more than a reference to the 1938-1941 interlude of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which abruptly ended with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in May 1941. The Synarchists, while promoting a Europe-wide totalitarianism to crush the threat of "anarchy," had penetrated and financed all the political movements of the extreme left and extreme right, as well as the leading government ministries, particularly those dealing with economic and financial policy, as well as Franco-German relations. Thus, following his death, Kojève was identified by French intelligence as a 30-year Soviet agent, operating inside the French bureaucracy. His ostensible Soviet agentry overlapped with his recruitment into the Synarchist orbit in the mid-1930s.

The fact that Leo Strauss considered Kojève his intellectual partner, and the man who brought the element of "purgative violence" to Strauss' own esoteric power schemes, is of special significance, given the current dominant role that the Strauss-Kojève "kindergarten" is playing in Washington—promoting a U.S.A.-centered global empire, with many Synarchist features.

Among the leading Strauss disciples who dominate the war party in and around the Bush Administration are: Paul Wolfowitz, a personal protégé of Kojève student Allan Bloom; Rupert Murdoch-bankrolled neo-con propagandist William Kristol; Pentagon disinformation czar AbramShulsky; Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Attorney General John Ashcroft; Project for the New American Century director Gary Schmitt (he and Shulsky co-authored a paean to Strauss, titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence" which trashed CIA National Intelligence Board founder Sherman Kent); and "World War IV" propagandist Robert Kagan.

Within Israel, a parallel network of Straussian think tanks has emerged in recent years as the backbone of Ariel Sharon's own Jabotinskyite fascist regime. The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS)—which commissioned the now-infamous 1996 study,"A Clean Break," by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others, promoting perpetual war in the Middle East sparked by the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein—is one center of Strauss-Kojève influence in Israel.

Alexandre Kojève and his Synarchist cronies evaded postwar prosecution—leaving Vichy head of state Marshal Pétain to sit in the dock—and emerged as mainstays of the Fourth Republic bureaucratic elite. Yet Kojève personally never abandoned the universal fascist/Synarchist cause. He, along with Leo Strauss, played a major role in the postwar "rehabilitation" of leading Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. In 1955, Kojève addressed a group of Düsseldorf businessmen, atSchmitt's invitation, and Schmitt attempted to arrange a private meeting between Kojève and Hitler's former Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, the architect of the Nazi slave-labor system.

The 'Synarchist/Nazi-Communist' File

This extensive Nazi/Vichy collusion was well known to French and American patriotic military intelligence circles, who worked closely throughout World War II gathering in-depth information on the worst fascist/Synarchist elements within the Pétain government. Throughout the war, the United States maintained a diplomatic and military legation in Vichy, headed by some of President Franklin Roosevelt's most trusted associates.

In 1947, William L. Langer, a official of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), later a Harvard University professor, published an book-length account, Our Vichy Gamble (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), which was formally commissioned in 1944 by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The book was based on the entire classified files of OSS, the Department of State, and the War Department, as well as Langer's in-depth interviews with all the key FDR Administration policy players, including OSS founder Gen. William Donovan and the President Roosevelt. Langer's account of the highly controversial U.S. engagement with Vichy made it absolutely clear that the Synarchists were understood to be among the most hard-core Nazi collaborators and enthusiasts.

Speaking of Adm. Jean François Darlan, one of the leading pro-Hitler figures in the Vichy government, Langer wrote: "But Darlan's henchmen were not confined to the fleet. His policy of collaboration with Germany could count on more than enough eager supporters among Frenchindustrial and banking interests—in short, among those who even before the war, had turned to Nazi Germany and had looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from Communism. These were the elements which had originally backed Pétain and Weygand—elements that stuck to the program after both these men had begun to back away from it.

These people were as good fascists as any in Europe. They dreaded the Popular Front like the plague and were convinced that they could prosper even under Hitler's iron rod. Many of them had long had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of 'synarchy,' which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists. [French Prime MinisterPierre] Laval had long been associated with this group."

Langer identified the center of the French Synarchists as the Banque Worms et Cie. "To realize the extent to which members of the Banque Worms group had been taken into the government

by the Autumn of 1941," Langer wrote, "a brief survey of the council and of the Secretaries of State will be most profitable." At which point Langer listed dozens of top Vichy bureaucrats, particularly in the ministries in charge of industry, finance, and Franco-German relations, who were part of the Synarchist/Banque Worms group.

On March 29, 1944, William Donovan wrote a memo to President Roosevelt, recounting interviews he had recently conducted with several French Resistance leaders, who had underscored that the Synarchists were at the core of the Hitlerite grouping in Vichy.

Alexandre Kojève's personal role during the Vichy period is shrouded in mystery. His whereabouts from 1939 through the end of World War II are not publicly documented. However, French intelligence files show that one of his best students in the Sorbonne EPHE Hegel seminars, Robert Marjolin, was a leading member of the Synarchist/Worms group, who became France's Minister of Economics in 1945, and sponsored Kojève's own 20-year career at the ministry.

But the ultimate proof of Kojève's unrepentant, deeply held fascist/Synarchist views is to be found in his writings and teachings (see accompanying article).

Dick Cheney's Kindergarten

Kojève's rabid glorification of Jacobinism, Bonapartism, and purgative violence has clearly made its mark on the war party apparatus in and around the Cheney-Wolfowitz cabal. Defense Policy Board "revolution in military affairs" guru Newt Gingrich's recent violent attack on Secretary of State Colin Powell and the entire Near East Bureau of the State Department is one graphic incident of the group's impulse to purgative violence. Bloom intimate Wolfowitz' dozen-year promotion of Hitlerian "preventive war" is another, even more ominous example.

Leo Strauss, sensitive to postwar Americans' hatred for all things fascist, deceptively wrapped himself in the legacy of the Founding Fathers, for public consumption. He sent his favorite disciples to Paris—to Alexandre Kojève's salon—for the full fascist/Synarchist indoctrination. Despite that sleight of hand, the stench of historical fascism is too deep to rub off Wolfowitz, Kristol, Fukuyama, and the entire coterie of Dick Cheney-protected putschists, who would turn the U.S.A. into a sick parody of the first modern fascist empire, the France of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The fact that prominent present-day American Synarchists like Richard Perle and self-professed universal fascist Michael Ledeen have been waging a non-stop attack against French President Jacques Chirac and all things French is being increasingly viewed as a weak attempt to divert attention from their own, very nasty "French Connection."

http :// www . larouchepub . com / other /2003/3018 cheney _ fr _ conx . html

Carl Schmitt And The American Right

* Damon Linker * March 3, 2009 | 8:50 pm

Over at NRO's The Corner, Jonah "Liberals Were Fascists Before They Were Socialists" Goldberg joins with the conservative movement's house comedian Mark Steyn in ridiculing a book he hasn't read -- Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism:

Mark - James Piereson reviews Wolfe's book in the latest issue of Commentary (which, readers may like to know, has a fantastic essay by none other than Mark Steyn in it). I can't get behind the firewall, even though I'm a print subscriber, but Piereson's review is sober and contemptuous at the same time. Wolfe apparently thinks contemporary conservatives are disciples of Rousseau as much as, if not more, than they are followers of Burke. Moreover, neoconservatives are intellectual descendants of the romantic poets. Also, I learned from Piereson's review that Wolfe is still peddling his absurd claim that conservatives are followers of the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt (I scoffed at this a good while ago). The idea that the Bush adminsitration was comprised of closet Schmittians is most commonly touted by followers of Lyndon LaRouche.

Wolfe's arguments about Rousseau, Burke, and the romantic side of neoconservatism are all powerful and compelling (and I may have something more to say about them in a future post). But for now, let's take a moment to reflect on this business about Schmitt. I can certainly see why the right would want to ridicule and dismiss Wolfe's argument, since no one wants to be likened to Hitler's crown jurist. Yet the facts are these: Schmitt's primary contribution to political theory is the idea that in emergency situations, the rule of law can and must be suspended in favor of an executive act of decision about how to defend the political community against its existential enemies. This act, for Schmitt, is the supremely political act, and as such it transcends the standards of right and wrong, legal and illegal, that prevail under "normal" political conditions. It is thus incoherent to condemn such actions, since by definition they take place beyond categories that empower us to make moral and legal judgments.

Gee, sound familiar? For those who haven't been paying attention, this is precisely what our last Republican president, his vice president, and their enablers (such as David Addington and John Yoo) asserted for themselves in the years following 9/11 -- namely, that (in Andrew Sullivan's words) the president has "the inherent power to suspend both the First and the Fourth amendments," as well as "the power to seize anyone in the US or [the] world, [and] disappear and torture them" as he sees fit. Moreover, in none of these cases -- indeed, in no conceivable circumstance -- can the president be accused of breaking the law because the president's war powers automatically place him above the law. His sovereign decision -- whatever it is -- simply is the law of the land.

That is Schmittian decisionism, pure and simple. (Whether Yoo and Addington formulated their views on their own, by radicalizing the doctrine of the "unitary executive," or through reading

Schmitt by flashlight in a White House broom closet is irrelevant. The ideas are nearly identical, whatever their origins.) But Schmittian assumptions were hardly limited to the executive branch of the Bush administration during the past seven years. They were so widespread among conservative intellectuals, in fact, that most of them responded to the president's decisions with enthusiasm, putting their minds to work justifying and defending his extra-constitutional actions at nearly every turn, while also impugning the motives and patriotism of those who dared challenge the president's sovereign authority.

So I'd say that Alan Wolfe has a point.

http://www.tnr.com/print/blog/damon-linker/carl-schmitt-and-the-american-right