The gangster’s brief: The Barr Doctrine, Noriega and Maduro |
US President Donald Trump might leave an impression of violent novelty, at least for the leader of a nominal liberal democracy, soiling international relations with the gangster’s touch. This sense of iconoclasm is misplaced. While his conduct regarding the abduction of Nicolás Maduro certainly dumps mightily on the precepts of international law, legal advisors in the US government have been constructing, with a mixture of deviousness and disingenuousness, the rationale for just that very thing over decades. Ditto the justifications for torture that will forever blight the administration of George W. Bush, and theories that elevate the presidential office above the scrutiny of Congressional and courts.
During his tenure as Assistant Attorney General between 1989 and 1990, when he led the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, William J. Barr, who went on to serve as Attorney General twice, wrote classified memoranda that amounted to something of a doctrine, and a nasty one at that. Legitimising the abduction of the troublesome General Manuel Noriega and the US invasion of Panama in 1989, the doctrine is inherently undemocratic, more in keeping with the blood girdled traditions of Nazi jurisprudence than the enlightened jottings of Thomas Paine. But its product is also axiomatic to the exercise of imperial power which, as it grows, becomes less accountable and more erratic. When the US ceased to be a small, manageable republic along the lines of Montesquieu’s ideal state, enlarging its borders through purchase, dispossession and conquest, the centralisation of power made the executive hungry and rebellious. This culminated in what Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. called in 1973 the Imperial Presidency, a system of rule contemptuous of constitutionalism in embracing “a conception of presidential power so........