| “There’s
a dictatorial flavor that comes into this matter,”
Conyers said, speaking of efforts of the current Bush
Administration. “This chipping away from what
we thought we had and what was in stone: the Civil Rights
Act, the Voter Rights Act, the ability of states to
process their own judicial cases without federal intervention—all
of these things mean we’re not where we were;
we’re slipping back and what we’re slipping
back into in the cumulative sense is something a little
bit scary.”
Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary
Committee, is the second-longest serving Democrat in
the House. Elected in 1964, he has been at the vanguard
of protecting civil rights and has fought from the progressive
left of the Democratic caucus.
“Most of my career has been spent making more
specific the guarantees and the rights and the privileges
of citizens and the limitations of government power,”
the congressman said. “We’re doing the reverse
now. We’re having the executive branch [wade]
more willy nilly into judicial matters, frequently into
legislative matters, and there’s a certain arrogance
that goes along with it.”
The Michigan Democrat also weighed in on his push for
an inquiry into whether the president had quietly decided
to invade Iraq in 2002, even while telling the nation
he was seeking to “disarm” Saddam Hussein.
Conyers says some have called upon him to push for
impeachment, but he avoided the term in conversation
with RAW
STORY. The congressman was a member of the Judiciary
Committee in its 1974 hearings on the Nixon’s
impeachment; he suggested that details of the Iraq deal
might trickle out as they did with Watergate under President
Nixon.
“For the president to be at one time misleading
the Congress about his intentions, and at the same time
working carefully with Prime Minister Blair and many
in his cabinet as the declassified memos now reveal,
as far as eight months before the war started, we don’t
just have deception,” Conyers remarked.
“This is a constitutional abuse of power, and
what we want to do, is first deal with this media silence,”
he continued, and spoke briefly about the forum he is
holding today on media bias. “We want to get to
why the media approaches this with such reluctance…
[it] begins to unfold something like Watergate did;
it appeared in page A35 of the Washington Post as a
three sentence story and of course it kept going on.”
Conyers demurred to say if he was considering a resolution
of inquiry, the first step in any impeachment process.
“Right now, we’re just trying to build
up more supportive evidence around the stories that
have come from the Sunday London Times,” the congressman
said. “A resolution of inquiry is possible. Some
have suggested censory mechanisms. But we don’t
know where all that is going.”
On the issue of civil liberties, RAW
STORY raised a question some readers have asked,
whether the congressman thought it was a reach to imagine
the turn by the current Administration to infringe about
personal privacy could result in something as drastic
as martial law.
“I’m not so sure that there’s a lot
of reaching necessary,” he remarked. “In
totality, we’re moving into a different kind of
country under different kind of law. For a president
who has won each of his two elections by two states
and each time the state that provided him with the margin
had the most violations and irregularities of voting
procedure of any other state in each election –
obviously Florida and Ohio – he’s acting
as if he had a mandate.”
Conyers also spoke briefly about the fracas surrounding
a Newsweek article that alleged U.S. investigators had
found American troops flushed a copy of the Quran down
the toilet. He called the bluster from the White House
a “public relations diversion,” which “takes
the heat off” torture scandals at the Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo Bay prisons.
The ranking Judiciary Democrat has called on Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor
to investigate whether the United States violated the
War Crimes or Anti-Torture Acts at prisons abroad. To
date, he has received no reply.
“It’s like if you don’t get an answer
and you keep knocking at the door,” he remarked.
“Maybe you’ll go away if we just don’t
say anything. We’ll just pretend we don’t
hear you and we’re not there … [But] we
think this is very important American history that deserves
its day in court, whether we’re right or whether
we’re wrong but we will not be ignored.”
A
COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT OF RAW STORY'S INTERVIEW WILL BE
AVAILABLE LATE TONIGHT OR TOMORROW... DEVELOPING...
Article originally published May 24, 2005. |
