Gold9472
05-26-2005, 12:52 PM
Interview transcript: Veteran Democrat says country's direction raises red flags
http://rawstory.com/exclusives/alexandrovna/transcript_conyers_dictatorial_flavor_525
This interview with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) was conducted by RAW STORY's John Byrne and Larisa Alexandrovna.
Congressman John Conyers (D-MI): Conyers, reporting for duty. Good afternoon.
Raw Story's John Byrne: Good afternoon. Congressman, you are holding a forum to discuss media bias and reform on Tuesday. Can you speak more about your concerns with regard to the mainstream media and the reasons for putting together this forum?
Conyers: It’s time we really began to examine more carefully than we have, how the media blithely ignores the big issues. And it’s very hard for the American citizenry, who is dependent on the media to find out what is going on, to get behind the veil to examine what [the media] is doing and what they’re not doing and by what process they determine what’s newsworthy and what isn’t. And we’ve got a wonderful group of people coming on. David Brock, who used to work with the conservatives until his conscience and finally overcame him, is going to honor us by being there and of course Al Franken, who nobody messes with, Randi Rhodes, Mark Lloyd, and Steve Rendell, but the whole idea is that we continue this battle to get the facts and the real story out there.
Byrne: Why are we not getting it?
Conyers: A lot of people ask me “why aren’t you guys doing this?” and I say, good night, we are doing it. But I guess it is like a tree cut in the forest, if you nobody hears it, it is not being done. This is just another part of our responsibility, to get accuracy out and also let our citizens know what’s really happening and how the media has been intimidated, browbeaten and corrupted by the government itself.
Byrne: There was a piece in the Sunday Times of London over the weekend where it mentioned that you would be sending a delegation to investigate the Downing Street memo. You were quoted as saying that the minutes of that meeting raise “very serious questions about an abuse of power ... it is a very serious constitutional matter.” As a constitutional matter, where do you see recourse in Congress?
Conyers: Well, first of all, the right to declare war is exclusively reserved under Article I section II, of course, to the Congress. That said, 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 classified memos now reveal, as far as eight months before the war started—we don’t just have deception, we have a matter that we have to examine whether had members [of Congress] known that the President was already planning a war with Iraq before he came to Congress, we would have never gone along with it and many of my colleagues have now told me as much.
Now that does not take away from the fact that many people suspected all along, since it wasn’t very mysterious that wherever Iraq had, it couldn’t amount to something jeopardizing the national security and safety of the United States and its citizens because their neighbors, many of whom are not friendly to Iraq, would have been sure to let us know about that much earlier.
So this is a serious matter. This is a constitutional abuse of power, and what we want to do, is first deal with this media silence. Here we are back to our forum tomorrow. We want to try to get to why the media approaches this with such reluctance.
Here is a hugely important question that begins to unfold something like Watergate did, where it appeared in page A35 of the Washington Post as a three sentence story and of course it kept going on. Just from a psychological point of view if the, if this [memo] wasn’t accurate, it would seem to me that the president and through his press secretaries would be bellyaching all over the place about them being unfairly painted in this London Sunday Times story, inaccurate, or not true. But you don’t get that. On the other side of the water, you get the people over there saying, of course it’s true. So the second thing we have to do is prove that we’re on solid ground and also conduct investigations and if necessary hearings that will lead us to find more supporting evidence in addition to august London Sunday Times; there’s probably some other things that will come to our attention with a little more work on our part.
Raw Story's Larisa Alexandrovna: A handful of individuals have thrown around the word impeachment surrounding the president’s actions, including former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts. Others have called attention to allegations of manipulated intelligence reports, war profiteering, and misuse of appropriated funds. Do you feel we have reached the level of what would be considered “high crimes and misdemeanors” given already what we know?
Conyers: Well, I don’t want to comment on that. I think it is more appropriate for me to continue the initial pursuit, which we have not completed yet. But others are talking about it. It is being discussed. It’s very hard not to think of this as a serious abuse of power.
Byrne: Would a resolution of inquiry be another means by which you could conduct further investigations?
Conyers: We haven’t decided on what we will do yet. Right now we are just trying to build more supportive evidence around the stories that have come from the Sunday London Times. A resolution of inquiry is possible. Some have suggested censory mechanisms. But we don’t know where all that is going, but I am not predicting anything right now. It is far more important that we continue the important work. If it weren’t for me and the number of members of Congress who have joined me, namely 88 plus myself, we wouldn’t be where we are. I am so proud that it took many members only a glance at this letter, to say sign me on it.
Alexandrovna: Some Raw Story readers have expressed a great deal of concern about what they see as a serious and aggressive consolidation of powers. Some have gone so far as to express concern about possible martial law. Do you think these concerns are valid or are people simply reaching?
Conyers: I’m not so sure that there’s a lot of reaching necessary. It’s being said all over that when you add up all of these incursions on the constitution itself and the amendments thereto: on the attacks on the Voter Rights Act; the question of national ID that refers to, for the first time, a federal database instead of states controlling the licensing itself; when you look at the audacity of the executive branch to remove questions from the judiciary and reassign them as they choose. We’re talking about the violation of the doctrine of the separation of powers, which is a very serious matter.
And in their 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 one state 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—then he’s acting as if he had a mandate. And he won Ohio by 22 electoral votes; had 60,000 votes switched, he wouldn’t be president.
In Florida it was even less, and if the Supreme Court had not come in the most unusual stretch of judicial imagination hey had ever exercised to prevent recounting the ballots, he might not have even won the first time. So we’re having a person acting under the assumption or trying to make you believe that he has a majority and a mandate and he doesn’t have it at all.
Alexandrovna: When you say “we’re moving into a different kind of country under different kind of laws,” what exactly are we moving toward?
Conyers: There is a dictatorial flavor that comes into this matter. This chipping away from what we thought that we had and what was in stone: the Civil Rights Act; the Voting 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.
Byrne: You mention a “dictatorial flavor” and “a little bit scary” in describing where we are slipping to; do you have a sense of where we’re slipping?
Conyers: I have a clear sense of what we’re slipping away from. 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. We are doing the reverse now. We’re having the executive branch move willy nilly into judicial matters, frequently into legislative matters, and there’s a certain arrogance that goes along with it.
How can the president be defending a member of Congress whose conduct in the political arena is really breathtaking? Here we’re engineering, we’re going back in—for the first time in our history and arbitrarily re-districting congressional districts, that have already been created by the courts themselves, by judicial decree. And they’re saying, “we don’t care, they did that a couple of years ago.”
You have the filibuster now has got everything tied up in legislative branch of government. They’re saying we want a majority that does not even have to worry about any safeguards afforded the minority.
And all of these things don’t have a name for them, but they don’t make you more comfortable. They’re not what we think the majority of people really want. We’re literally at a religious war, Larisa, and they say if you don’t like our judges, that’s because we’re religious and your not. It gives me pause when you take all of these things in their totality.
End Part I
http://rawstory.com/exclusives/alexandrovna/transcript_conyers_dictatorial_flavor_525
This interview with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) was conducted by RAW STORY's John Byrne and Larisa Alexandrovna.
Congressman John Conyers (D-MI): Conyers, reporting for duty. Good afternoon.
Raw Story's John Byrne: Good afternoon. Congressman, you are holding a forum to discuss media bias and reform on Tuesday. Can you speak more about your concerns with regard to the mainstream media and the reasons for putting together this forum?
Conyers: It’s time we really began to examine more carefully than we have, how the media blithely ignores the big issues. And it’s very hard for the American citizenry, who is dependent on the media to find out what is going on, to get behind the veil to examine what [the media] is doing and what they’re not doing and by what process they determine what’s newsworthy and what isn’t. And we’ve got a wonderful group of people coming on. David Brock, who used to work with the conservatives until his conscience and finally overcame him, is going to honor us by being there and of course Al Franken, who nobody messes with, Randi Rhodes, Mark Lloyd, and Steve Rendell, but the whole idea is that we continue this battle to get the facts and the real story out there.
Byrne: Why are we not getting it?
Conyers: A lot of people ask me “why aren’t you guys doing this?” and I say, good night, we are doing it. But I guess it is like a tree cut in the forest, if you nobody hears it, it is not being done. This is just another part of our responsibility, to get accuracy out and also let our citizens know what’s really happening and how the media has been intimidated, browbeaten and corrupted by the government itself.
Byrne: There was a piece in the Sunday Times of London over the weekend where it mentioned that you would be sending a delegation to investigate the Downing Street memo. You were quoted as saying that the minutes of that meeting raise “very serious questions about an abuse of power ... it is a very serious constitutional matter.” As a constitutional matter, where do you see recourse in Congress?
Conyers: Well, first of all, the right to declare war is exclusively reserved under Article I section II, of course, to the Congress. That said, 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 classified memos now reveal, as far as eight months before the war started—we don’t just have deception, we have a matter that we have to examine whether had members [of Congress] known that the President was already planning a war with Iraq before he came to Congress, we would have never gone along with it and many of my colleagues have now told me as much.
Now that does not take away from the fact that many people suspected all along, since it wasn’t very mysterious that wherever Iraq had, it couldn’t amount to something jeopardizing the national security and safety of the United States and its citizens because their neighbors, many of whom are not friendly to Iraq, would have been sure to let us know about that much earlier.
So this is a serious matter. This is a constitutional abuse of power, and what we want to do, is first deal with this media silence. Here we are back to our forum tomorrow. We want to try to get to why the media approaches this with such reluctance.
Here is a hugely important question that begins to unfold something like Watergate did, where it appeared in page A35 of the Washington Post as a three sentence story and of course it kept going on. Just from a psychological point of view if the, if this [memo] wasn’t accurate, it would seem to me that the president and through his press secretaries would be bellyaching all over the place about them being unfairly painted in this London Sunday Times story, inaccurate, or not true. But you don’t get that. On the other side of the water, you get the people over there saying, of course it’s true. So the second thing we have to do is prove that we’re on solid ground and also conduct investigations and if necessary hearings that will lead us to find more supporting evidence in addition to august London Sunday Times; there’s probably some other things that will come to our attention with a little more work on our part.
Raw Story's Larisa Alexandrovna: A handful of individuals have thrown around the word impeachment surrounding the president’s actions, including former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts. Others have called attention to allegations of manipulated intelligence reports, war profiteering, and misuse of appropriated funds. Do you feel we have reached the level of what would be considered “high crimes and misdemeanors” given already what we know?
Conyers: Well, I don’t want to comment on that. I think it is more appropriate for me to continue the initial pursuit, which we have not completed yet. But others are talking about it. It is being discussed. It’s very hard not to think of this as a serious abuse of power.
Byrne: Would a resolution of inquiry be another means by which you could conduct further investigations?
Conyers: We haven’t decided on what we will do yet. Right now we are just trying to build more supportive evidence around the stories that have come from the Sunday London Times. A resolution of inquiry is possible. Some have suggested censory mechanisms. But we don’t know where all that is going, but I am not predicting anything right now. It is far more important that we continue the important work. If it weren’t for me and the number of members of Congress who have joined me, namely 88 plus myself, we wouldn’t be where we are. I am so proud that it took many members only a glance at this letter, to say sign me on it.
Alexandrovna: Some Raw Story readers have expressed a great deal of concern about what they see as a serious and aggressive consolidation of powers. Some have gone so far as to express concern about possible martial law. Do you think these concerns are valid or are people simply reaching?
Conyers: I’m not so sure that there’s a lot of reaching necessary. It’s being said all over that when you add up all of these incursions on the constitution itself and the amendments thereto: on the attacks on the Voter Rights Act; the question of national ID that refers to, for the first time, a federal database instead of states controlling the licensing itself; when you look at the audacity of the executive branch to remove questions from the judiciary and reassign them as they choose. We’re talking about the violation of the doctrine of the separation of powers, which is a very serious matter.
And in their 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 one state 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—then he’s acting as if he had a mandate. And he won Ohio by 22 electoral votes; had 60,000 votes switched, he wouldn’t be president.
In Florida it was even less, and if the Supreme Court had not come in the most unusual stretch of judicial imagination hey had ever exercised to prevent recounting the ballots, he might not have even won the first time. So we’re having a person acting under the assumption or trying to make you believe that he has a majority and a mandate and he doesn’t have it at all.
Alexandrovna: When you say “we’re moving into a different kind of country under different kind of laws,” what exactly are we moving toward?
Conyers: There is a dictatorial flavor that comes into this matter. This chipping away from what we thought that we had and what was in stone: the Civil Rights Act; the Voting 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.
Byrne: You mention a “dictatorial flavor” and “a little bit scary” in describing where we are slipping to; do you have a sense of where we’re slipping?
Conyers: I have a clear sense of what we’re slipping away from. 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. We are doing the reverse now. We’re having the executive branch move willy nilly into judicial matters, frequently into legislative matters, and there’s a certain arrogance that goes along with it.
How can the president be defending a member of Congress whose conduct in the political arena is really breathtaking? Here we’re engineering, we’re going back in—for the first time in our history and arbitrarily re-districting congressional districts, that have already been created by the courts themselves, by judicial decree. And they’re saying, “we don’t care, they did that a couple of years ago.”
You have the filibuster now has got everything tied up in legislative branch of government. They’re saying we want a majority that does not even have to worry about any safeguards afforded the minority.
And all of these things don’t have a name for them, but they don’t make you more comfortable. They’re not what we think the majority of people really want. We’re literally at a religious war, Larisa, and they say if you don’t like our judges, that’s because we’re religious and your not. It gives me pause when you take all of these things in their totality.
End Part I