Moyers on Freedom

I just finished reading Bill Moyers's "Message to West Point," published by TomPaine.com on November 29, and I am so moved by what I just read that I feel I must feature it here and urgently recommend it to you to read. The piece contains substantial excerpts from Moyers's November 15 "Sol Feinstone Lecture on The Meaning of Freedom" delivered at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

As a comment I read somewhere put it, it's amazing that Moyers was allowed to give the lecture at West Point, he was so critical of the way the "bargain between the civilian authorties and the armed services" has been kept. He contends

that the army has, for the most part, kept its part of the bargain and that, at this moment, the civilian authorities whom you loyally obey, are shirking theirs.

"The last time Congress declared war," he said,

was in 1941. Since then presidents of the United States, including the one I served [Lyndon B. Johnson], have gotten Congress, occasionally under demonstrably false pretenses, to suspend Constitutional provisions that required them to get the consent of the people's representatives in order to conduct a war. They have been handed a blank check to send the armed forces into action at their personal discretion and on dubious Constitutional grounds.

Furthermore, the current President has made extra-Constitutional claims of authority by repeatedly acting as if he were Commander-in-Chief of the entire nation and not merely of the armed forces. Most dangerously to our moral honor and to your own welfare in the event of capture, he has likewise ordered the armed forces to violate clear mandates of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions by claiming a right to interpret them at his pleasure, so as to allow indefinite and secret detentions and torture. These claims contravene a basic principle usually made clear to recruits from their first day in service—that they may not obey an unlawful order. The President is attempting to have them violate that longstanding rule by personal definitions of what the law says and means.

I was particularly moved by Moyers's earlier description in the piece of the role of Thaddeus Kosciuszko in the American War of Independence. I'd forgotten most of what I'd learned about Kosciuszko in history classes, including his having been commissioned by General George Washington "to build the original fortifications for West Point." Moyers writes that

One historian called him "a mystical visionary of human rights." Thomas Jefferson wrote that Kosciuszko was "as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known." That phrase of Jefferson is often quoted, but if you read the actual letter, Jefferson goes on to say: "And of that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few and the rich alone."

Go to the TomPaine.com web page and read the excerpts from Moyers's lecture. It is one of the most passionate statements I've ever read, and made with Moyers's usual clarity and elegance.

Don't miss it!