The spectacle of presidential impeachment has captivated the mainstream media machine in the U.S., if not all its consumers. But what is the message that is being conveyed by this impeachment process? Is it that the U.S. president is not above the law? That the president must obey the Constitution? That the president cannot get away with lying to or misleading the North American public over matters of grave import to the nation?
Hardly.
In fact, the Congress, the U.S. judiciary, the mainstream media, and President Clinton all stand firmly in mutual solidarity on the critical importance of official governmental prevarication, deception and censorship concerning a vast number of issues in fields of discourse from war, domestic surveillance and police murder to corporate control of legislation, the real effects of NAFTA and GATT on North American workers, and the dangers of both the nuclear power industry & the launch of nuclear space probes.
What's really happening? Despite the fact that President Clinton has been a better salesman for the neoliberal agenda than the Republican-controlled Congress, there is so much hatred of Bill and Hillary Clinton throughout its ranks that the Republicans have been willing to sacrifice just about anything else in their efforts to drive Clinton from power. Republican efforts to engineer what could amount to a "coup by Special Prosecutor" have often even taken precedence over the Republican version of the neoliberal agenda of "free trade" (for corporations, not for the vast public), the "down-sizing" or elimination of the social welfare system (to produce a more compliant work force), and the criminal-ization & suppression of any social resistance.
Our current situation results from a convergence of many forces. But the spectacle of House impeachment hearings and a Senate trial over a set of charges that range from trivial to petty in political and Constitutional content could never have come to pass without the active complicity of the major players in the national media.
It has been demonstrated all along in opinion poll after poll that the majority of the U.S. population has had no desire to follow the process through which Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr has pursued Bill and Hillary Clinton through $40 million worth of investigations—from the original, trumped-up Whitewater charges to the embarrassingly opportunistic sexual life of the President. And it is impossible to believe that the entire process could ever have continued and evolved through years of dead-ends and ludicrous fantasies (for example, the much-alleged but always evidenceless charges that Vincent Foster was murdered) without mainstream media encouragement and collusion (the latter especially involving leaks from the Special Prosecutor and his personnel).
Yet, amazingly, all this has happened during the same period in which President Clinton has committed crimes of enormous scope and of genuinely Constitutional import with barely a single official voice being raised in opposition.
The problem is that the U.S. Congress, the judiciary, the president and the mass media are all in perfect agreement that these genuine crimes—both potentially impeachable offenses and international war crimes—must be defended, extended and celebrated, rather than investigated, publicized and tried.
By any rational interpretation of Constitutional law, President Clinton's repeated military attacks on Iraq, as well as his bombings of Afghanistan and the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, are impeachable offenses. They violate the Constitutional provision giving the U.S. Congress the sole power to declare war (unless there is a direct attack on the U.S.). And they violate the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (meant to prevent undeclared wars like that in Vietnam) as well.
They also indisputably constitute international war crimes. The U.S. never obtained U.N. Security Council approval for its unilateral decisions to bomb Iraq for allegedly violating the U.N. inspection program. Nor did the U.S. have any international legal standing to bomb Afghanistan or Sudan. In fact all of these military actions constitute state terrorist attacks more lethal and more dangerous in their potential effects than the vast majority of actions ever labeled "terrorist" by the mainstream media.
If the mass media were to invest as much energy and manpower in the investigation of these obvious and really-existing crimes—both as impeachable offenses and as international war crimes—as they have in the scandal-mongering of the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky affairs, the U.S. public would be calling for the impeachment of President Clinton. And maybe the world community would be calling for his trial in an international court.
But such a scenario is impossible in reality because the mainstream media do not exist to serve the public, but to serve the massive corporate and state power which corrupts our world.
Jason McQuinn, Editor
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Updated: 7/3/1999
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