PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche: Obama Is
Now Facing His Watergate
June 16, 2011 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.
Lyndon LaRouche today said that the bipartisan Congressional revolt against President Barack Obama's flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Act is just like the early moments of the Watergating of President Richard Nixon. "It is just the beginning, but the parallels to Watergate are unmistakable," LaRouche commented.
Since the beginning of the week, a bipartisan upsurge has put President Obama on the spot, for his lying attempts to avoid his Constitutional responsibilities to go to Congress in order to obtain permission to take the nation to war in Libya.
A senior U.S. intelligence source with close ties to the Obama White House was blunt in commenting this morning: "President Obama is in violation of the War Powers Act and the Federal Constitution. His argument that the U.S. military involvement in Libya is a 'humanitarian intervention' is an evasion. The United States, as of last week, had spent $718 million on the Libya military operation. By next week, the amount will have passed $1 billion." He added that, without direct U.S. military involvement, NATO would be unable to carry out the Libya operations. "Seventy-five percent of all NATO operations involve U.S. capabilities. Without the U.S., the NATO military operation cannot be sustained."
LaRouche noted the irony that this week marked the 40th anniversary of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, revealing the extent of the American involvement in Vietnam. "The Pentagon Papers were part of the early mosaic of Watergate, and Daniel Ellsberg was correct in saying that Nixon would have been jealous of President Obama's seeming ability to get away with serious violations of the Constitution. But now, we have bipartisan action in the Congress to restore Constitutional rule. And that is, I believe, the beginning of the end for the Obama Presidency."
The senior intelligence source emphasized that the Obama White House arrogantly mis-read the situation in Congress, anticipating that a bipartisan non-binding resolution by Senators John McCain and John Kerry would allow the President to bypass the War Powers Act requirements. But a June 5th Washington Post op-ed by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put the fundamental Constitutional issues so squarely on the table, that McCain and Kerry withdrew their draft resolution of support for the continuation of the Libya mission. That helped spark the bipartisan revolt that we are now seeing, in the passage of the Brad Sherman amendment, barring any funding of the Libya mission, and in the bipartisan Federal law suit, filed on Wednesday, to bar the President from continuing the Libya war, on the grounds that it violates Article I Section 8 of our Federal Constitution, giving Congress the sole authority to declare war.
Reflecting the same bipartisan revolt, on June 8 Senators Jim Webb (D-VA) and Bob Corker (R-TN) introduced a joint Senate resolution challenging President Obama's unconstitutional act of initiating U.S. military action in Libya without Congressional approval.
In introducing S.J. Res. 13, Sen. Webb emphasized that what is at stake, is "whether a President—any President—can unilaterally begin, and continue, a military campaign for reasons that he alone defines as meeting the demanding standards worthy of risking American lives and expending billions of dollars of our taxpayers' money."
In an interview with MSNBC June 9, Sen. Webb warned of the dangers of allowing the precedent to be set, in which a President can use the argument of "humanitarian crises" to justify military interventions. That is not how the United States government is supposed to work, he said. This sets "a very broad standard as a precedent, when we're looking to the future of a President making a unilateral decision to use military force, and then not seeking at the appropriate time the approval of the Congress."
