No Way Out

When Innocence Is No Defense.

If we can just pry our eyes away from the disaster that is the US economy, I'd like to bring your attention back to the equally disastrous US 'justice' system. The story began with some good news, as reported on Tuesday by the BBC:

Anger over Guantanamo Bay ruling

The White House has reacted angrily after a judge ordered that 17 Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay should be released into the United States. District Judge Ricardo Urbina said the US could not hold the 17 as they were no longer considered enemy combatants. The Uighurs were cleared for release in 2004 but the US says they may face persecution if returned to China.

The White House said the ruling could set a precedent that would allow "sworn enemies" to seek US entry. The government says the 17 also pose a security risk if released into the US. Lawyers for the Bush administration have argued that federal judges do not have authority to order the release into the US of Guantanamo detainees.

Analysts say the ruling is a rebuke for the US government and could set the stage for the release of dozens more detained at the military jail in Cuba.
[...]
They have been held at Guantanamo for nearly seven years. The judge said there was no evidence that they were "enemy combatants" or a security risk.

"Because the constitution prohibits indefinite detentions without cause, the continued detention is unlawful," he said.

So the good news was that finally these 17 detainees - who in 2004 were found NOT to be enemies of the United States, who had NEVER been charged with any crime - were ordered released from their Kafkaesque imprisonment at the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison facility, aka America's Gulag. Never mind the outrageous fact that these people had been captured and detained without cause to begin with in 2001, never mind that they had been illegally held for nearly seven years. They were ordered to be released, and that was good news not just in itself, but because it demonstrated that the Constitution still held sway in America, and the rule of law had some force.

I mean really, any legal system that would tolerate someone being confined for seven years for no reason whatsoever is not worthy of the name. Any judge who would countenance such a thing is not fit to administer a traffic court. Which is why anyone with a conscience should have been outraged to the max to read the follow-up story on Wednesday, reported by the BBC and Reuters.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Wednesday temporarily blocked the release of 17 Chinese Muslims held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The appeals court granted the Bush administration's emergency request for a stay of a federal judge's order that the members of the Uighur ethnic group be released into the United States at the end of this week.
[...]
The three-judge panel said it granted the stay only to give the appeals court more time to consider the dispute. The court ordered that briefs be filed by both sides on various dates through October 16.
[...]
Lawyers for the detainees opposed the request and said granting the stay would prolong the imprisonment of the Uighurs "by months and perhaps years." They said, "The government has delayed long enough."

There are two elements of this case that merit further examination. The first is the problem, "if we release these people, where do they go?" And that problem arises from the circumstances of their capture. The Bush administration has maintained that if they cannot be returned home and no other country will take them, they should stay at Guantanamo. (BBC article)

The 17 Uighurs had been living in a camp in Afghanistan during the US-led military campaign that began in October 2001. They fled into the mountains and were held by Pakistani authorities who handed them over to the US. Beijing has demanded that all Uighurs held at Guantanamo be repatriated to China. Many Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang in western China want greater autonomy for the region and some want independence. Beijing has waged a campaign against what it calls their violent separatist activities.

These people are from China, and were not in Afghanistan or Pakistan legally. So they can't be returned there, and they can't go back to China because they would probably be executed for their 'violent separatist activities.' The Bush administration refuses to recognize their responsibility for the Uighurs' current circumstances and continues to maintain, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, that they would be a security risk if released on US territory. (There is apparently a small Uighur community in the US willing to take them in.)

The second element that should be examined concerns the merits of the administration's argument, "that federal judges do not have authority to order the release into the US of Guantanamo detainees." WTF!?! If federal judges don't have the authority to determine the legality of actions taken by the military the country can only be described as being under martial law. There is some indication here that the Bush White House considers the courts to be intruding on his 'unitary executive' powers as the Commander in Chief During Times of War. The problem is, the constitution makes it plain that only Congress has the authority to declare war, which it has not done. Even if it had, there is ample precedent from prior wars that the courts do indeed have authority over the president when the latter's actions are unconstitutional, as they clearly are here. So if there is a Separation of Powers issue here, the intrusion is purely on Bush's behalf.

There is another related story that makes this not only infuriating but terrifying.
From Raw Story:

ACLU: Bush admin tried to create 'Gitmo inside the US'

The US military was using the same procedures employed at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison at other facilities inside the United States where US citizens and legal residents were detained, according to documents released Wednesday.

At least one Navy officer was concerned that a detainee was being slowly driven insane by the policies, which prohibited detainees from having items such as shoes or socks, according to 91 pages of e-mails between officers at military brigs in Virginia and South Carolina released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"These documents are the first clear confirmation of what we've suspected all along, that the brig was run as a prison beyond the law. There was an effort to create a Gitmo inside the United States," Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU's National Security Project in New York told the Associated Press, using the slang word for the U.S. naval facility in Cuba.
[...]
“Guantánamo was designed as a law-free zone, a place where the government could do whatever it wanted without having to worry about whether it was legal,” said Jonathan Freiman, an attorney with the Lowenstein Clinic at Yale. “It didn’t take long for that sort of lawlessness to be brought home to our own country. Who knows how much further America would have gone if the Supreme Court hadn’t stepped in to stop incommunicado detentions in 2004?”

Ask not for whom the cell door clanks. It could very well clank for you.

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UPDATE:Glenn Greenwald discussed the Uighur case with Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU HERE.

TAGS: Guantanamo Bay, Uighurs, Illegal Detention, Bush Police State

Justice Denied

Maher Arar is back in the news.
From CBC.ca:

A U.S. court ruled Monday that a complaint by Maher Arar, a Canadian who accuses U.S. authorities of illegally deporting him to Syria, where he was tortured, cannot be heard in federal court.

Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria, was stopped at a New York airport on his way home from vacation in September 2002. U.S. officials accused him of links to al-Qaeda and deported him to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for months.

He claims those who sent him to Syria recklessly and knowingly intended to subject him to torture. Before he was secretly whisked away to Syria, he was confined for 12 days in New York and alleges he had to endure cruel, inhumane and degrading conditions.

Arar had argued his constitutional rights were violated when he was confined without access to a lawyer or the court system and then forcibly returned to Syria, where U.S. authorities had reason to believe he would be tortured.

But the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, affirming a lower court decision, ruled two to one Monday that Arar's claims that it was a violation of due process to send him to Syria could not be heard in federal court.

"Arar has not adequately established federal subject matter jurisdiction over his request for a judgment declaring that defendants acted illegally by removing him to Syria so that Syrian authorities could interrogate him under torture," Reuters reported the ruling as saying.

The court concluded that adjudicating the claims would interfere with sensitive matters of foreign policy and national security. It also said that Arar, as a foreigner who had not been formally admitted to the U.S., had no constitutional due process rights.

(For more on the history of this case see CBC.ca's In Depth coverage of the story
from the beginning, and all the posts done here at Les Enrages that refer to Arar's case.)

Please note the section in bold above. To attach the correct language to it, Maher Arar was kidnapped by the FBI on September 26, 2002. That's right, kidnapped. To characterize the event as an arrest lends it a dignity it simply doesn't deserve. No arrest warrant was issued or applied for. No formal charges were laid. No habeas corpus hearing was ever held. That Arar was denied his constitutional rights seems to be a given, or in legal terms he has a prima facie case.

I'd like to make a point that I think is simple but important and often ignored. The distinction between kidnap and arrest is NOT that the latter is carried out by a government and the former by a criminal. It is that an arrest is conducted under the scrutiny of the court system and follows due process. That badges may have been flashed and so forth only adds the phrase "under color of authority" to the crime.

In fact in every detail we see that the US government and its agencies has scrupulously avoided any judicial review of these acts. That smacks of a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Bush Department of Justice. Arar should seek criminal charges against anyone involved in this sordid episode, up to and including the Attorney General at the time (John Ashcroft) and the subsequent AG (Alberto Gonzales) for not charging the kidnappers. That might just send a powerful message to Michael Mukasey, the current AG. He must know that his tenure will not last beyond the installation of a Democratic government next January.

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But the sad truth of it is, the Maher Arar case is just a tiny element of a much bigger story. Much, much bigger. As Station Agent says in this post,

If ever a subject needed a definitive book written about it, the U.S. Attorneys Purge is it. The problem is coming up with a thesis for the book because the sheer evil genius of the purge is that it works for the Bush administration on so many levels that to take just one motive and run with it would leave so many other wings of the scandal behind.

Yes, the Prosecutors' Purge Scandal would by itself provide material for a major book, a tome, nay an encyclopedia - the author of which would be confronted with an overwhelming amount of evidence of criminal obstruction of justice by Bu$hCo™. But even that is only a small element in the much larger story of the perversion of justice on every level in BushMerika.

Think for instance of the $BILLIONs that have gone missing in Iraq ‡, on top of the $BILLIONS that have been distributed to crony organizations with little or no actual work having been done. Consider the various gang rapes that Blackwater and KBR employees have gotten away with scot free in a lawless environment that Paul Bremer set up to help enable Bush crimes there. (‡= TPM Muckraker posted this story on just how the administration has dodged investigation of corruption in Iraq while I was writing this piece. Instant update.)

It's as if the Bush administration wants to strip Lady Justice herself and subject her to various humiliating stress positions. Perverts!

Behind it all we see the same theme applied over and over and over - the appointment of people into key positions who will ignore the plain language of the law in order to get a result that is politically expedient to the GOP and their corporate masters. They are not looking for officers of the court, they're looking for accessories after the fact at every level up to and especially including seats on the Supreme Court, and the office of Attorney General. This is croniest at the worst imaginable, the wholesale appointment of partisan hacks into the very positions that are meant to monitor and prevent government abuses.

And in every case another theme is the connecting thread. The GOP, government agents and their corporate partners in crime ALWAYS avoid responsibility. Examples include Scooter Libby, Blackwater, KBR, the telecoms, and of course the FBI agents who kidnapped Maher Arar. The principle in play is that you are innocent even after having been proven guilty. And there are plenty of victims like Maher Arar and Jamie Leigh Jones who will continue to be denied justice in both civil and criminal courts because that's how Bu$hCo™ set it up.

On the other side of the coin are those who have been persecuted without proper cause by the Bush Department of Injustice. Examples include Don Siegelman, Dr. Cyril Wecht, Dr. Bernard Rottschaefer, plus hundreds of Iraqis, Afghanis, Uyghurs, and an assortment of suspicious-looking brown people who have been subjected to unbelievably dehumanizing abuse up to and including murder. Of whom Maher Arar is just one.

And all of them prosecuted persecuted under the guiding principle of the Bush DOJ: Forget about being assumed innocent until proven guilty. If you're not one of us, you're guilty until proven otherwise, maybe even long after proven otherwise. Most astonishingly, even if the Bushlicking Supreme Court rules that you are being denied your rights, the Bushlicking Department of Justice (or in the case of Military Commissions the Department of Defense) will continue to hold you in confinement.

That's how Bu$hCo™ set it up. They have in fact committed one huge horrific crime in order to enable the commission of a multitude of other crimes. It is an obstruction of justice case the scope of which the world has never known, and which the very mechanisms of justice are unprepared to correct.

For a blogger to merely list all of the perversions of justice that the Bush administration has perpetrated would be a monumental task. It would take the resources of an entire government department (such as DOJ if it wasn't itself a major part of the problem) years, maybe decades just to sort it all out. Something on the order of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

Simply put, the entire Bush regime could be accurately described as the crime of the millennium - unlikely to be surpassed before the year 3001. The case of Maher Arar will be seen as a mere speck of shit in the great stinking pile that has been created by The Bush Department of Injustice.

“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration
has committed war crimes.
The only question that remains to be answered is whether those
who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
-- Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba --

TAGS: Maher Arar, Police State, Injustice, High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Judge Fired in Khadr Case

From CBC.ca:

The U.S. military judge presiding over the trial of Canadian terrorism suspect Omar Khadr has been fired, said Khadr's lawyer.

In a news release issued Thursday, Lt.-Cmdr. William C. Kuebler said the judge, Col. Peter Brownback, was replaced after threatening to suspend proceedings in the case earlier this month.

Brownback told prosecutors they had to provide Khadr's defence lawyers with records of his confinement at the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or he would suspend the proceedings.

Kuebler, Khadr's U.S. military-appointed lawyer, said he learned Brownback had been fired in an email from the chief judge of the U.S. military commissions, Col. Ralph Kohlmann. Kuebler's news release also included an email sent Wednesday by lead prosecutor Maj. Jeff Groharing, which complained of numerous delays in trial proceedings.

Kuebler told CBCNews.ca he believes the prosecution hopes the change will "speed things up."

The trial of Omar Khadr as an armed enemy combatant has been a showcase for all the ways that Bu$hCo™ can twist the concept of 'justice' out of shape until it's beyond recognition. To begin with, under international convention Khadr, who was only 15 years old when captured should never been treated as a soldier under international conventions, but as a VICTIM of war. He barely survived the wounds he suffered when two rounds hit him IN THE BACK as he tried to flee American soldiers.

Not a pretty sight, is it? Adding insult to injury the government locked him up as an enemy combatant and he eventually wound up in Guantanamo Bay, facing charges for murdering a US marine sergeant by lobbing a hand grenade during a firefight. There are a couple of inconvenient facts that contradict that conclusion, and in any kind of non-Kafkaesque world he'd have been exonerated long ago.

The first fact was that Khadr was captured in a building that also contained another brown-skinned Muslim, who may have been the one to have tossed the grenade. The other person, an adult, was killed when he was also shot by the same marines infuriated by the death of their corpsman. So he could have just as well been the man for whose crime Omar is standing trial. But the other fact is even more inconvenient. There were no grenades found inside the hut where Khadr and his companion were holed up, but the US forces were using them. It was most likely a case of 'friendly' fire. (Now THERE is an oxymoron for you.)

So Khadr's adolescence and brief adulthood have been dominated by this travesty of justice created by the Military Commissions Act, a travesty in its own right. Normal civilian courts were not corrupt enough for the Bush administration, even with prosecutors and judges having been purged of all but 'loyal Bushies.' Even the military courts that might have saluted, said, "Sir, yes sir!" and done whatever they were ordered could not be relied upon to be sufficiently compliant. A whole new legal mechanism had to be created for the occasion, one whose rules could be adjusted in the prosecutions favor as the trial went along. The situation is so corrupted and devoid of normal legal niceties that even the former lead prosecutor has criticized the process openly. From TPMmuckraker:

The current chief judge there has written that the military tribunals have “credibility problems." And the former chief prosecutor, after resigning, publicly criticized the system as "deeply politicized."

Now that former prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, has given more evidence of that politicization in an interview with The Nation after the six Gitmo detainees were charged. Davis says that in an August, 2005 meeting with William Haynes, then the Pentagon's general counsel, Haynes seemed to completely discount the possibility of the military tribunals acquitting any of the detainees. Now, of course, Haynes has been installed as the official overseeing the whole process, both the prosecutors and the defense. From The Nation:

"[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions.'"

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions' chain of command. "Everyone has opinions," Davis says. "But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders."

I'm no lawyer, but when the outcome of a trial becomes dependent upon how it looks politically for the government rather than on the facts of the case, something is terribly wrong. When I first blogged about Omar Khadr back in June of last year, it was to announce that the charges against him had been dropped. The travesty then was that the dropping of all charges did not mean that Khadr was going to be released. That's right, even though it was ruled that the Military Commissions didn't have the authority to try Khadr, the US government could still hold him in a cell indefinitely. This is why the MCA is such a piece of vile shit, it purports to suspend habeas corpus in DIRECT violation of the US Constitution (Article 1, section 9.) The clowns currently masquerading as the US Supreme Court have refused to rule on this issue, to their eternal shame.

Five months later came the news that the Khadr trial had begun, accompanied by protests from Khadr's defense that the prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence from an eyewitness. In a normal civilian court that would have led to the charges being thrown out of court and the prosecutor facing sanctions, possibly even disbarment. This is serious shit, or so I'm led to believe.

There has been a glimmer of hope in Khadr's case recently. One development had the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) rule that Khadr's defense would have access to documents generated when Canadian officials interviewed him at Guantanamo. The other, much more significant, was the move Col. Brownback was making to dismiss the case. And then he gets fired. I'm trying to think of a way that political interference could be more blatantly signaled than that, but I'm having a hard time of it. This latest move reaches a new low even for the Bush administration.

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A couple of excerpts from Guantanamo's Child give just a glimpse of the humiliation and pain that this young man has suffered in his brief life.

There were raw scars on his chest where there had once been two deep holes. Shrapnel had punctured the skin along his arms and legs. While the nicks and scrapes can sometimes look minor, they have a cruel habit of causing pain for years to come. Doctors will often not remove embedded shrapnel, preferring to allow the body to work on its own to eject foreign objects. While considered safer than extraction, it is incredibly painful as the shrapnel works its way to the surface, eventually bursting through like blood blisters.
[...]

The guards left him in the interrogation booth for hours, short-shackled with his ankles and wrists bound together and secured to a bolt on the floor. Unable to move, he eventually urinated and was left in a pool of urine on the floor.

When the MPs returned and found the soiled teenager, Omar's lawyers later said, the guards poured pine oil cleaner on his chest and the floor. Keeping him short-shackled, the guards used Omar as a human mop to clean up the mess. Omar was returned to his cell and for two days the guards refused to give him fresh clothes.

When and if the Bush crime family is ever put on trial for war crimes, I expect the Khadr case to be particularly problematic for the defense.

~~~UPDATE:

Oh, and one other thing. Colonel Brown can hardly be considered to be a civil libertarian upstart in this case, or he would have tossed it long ago on any one of a number of points of law. As this story shows, he was dismissive of America's obligation under international treaty with regard to Khadr's status as a child soldier when he was captured.

Colonel Peter Brownback issued a brief ruling in which he described the international statutes dealing with the protection of children involved in armed conflict as “interesting as a matter of policy,” but made it clear that they would have no impact on the kangaroo court proceedings organized by the White House and the Pentagon at Guantanamo.

That story was from less than three weeks ago. Brownback has been ruling in favor of the administration in nearly every instance up until now. But he takes one step out of line and look what happens. It speaks volumes.

TAGS: Omar Khadr, Guantanamo Bay, Military Commissions, Travesty of Justice

The End of America

I'm experiencing somewhat more than my usual rage today. Frankly I'm pretty disappointed at the lukewarm response to my recent post about the failure in the Senate to gain a cloture vote for the Habeas Corpus Restoration bill sponsored by Chris Dodd and Patrick Leahy. I've been concerned about this cornerstone of human rights since the odious Military Commissions Act gutted its authority last year.

Simply stated, without habeas all other rights are moot - you need a day in court to state your case. They don't call it the Great Writ for nothing.

People, you've got to stop acting like the United States of America is somehow inoculated against tyranny. Remember, Germany was a constitutional democracy before Hitler's Nazis took over. And as Naomi Wolf pointed out on The Colbert Report last night, there is a blueprint for the overthrow of legitimate government by dictators. And Bu$hCo are following it religiously.

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning.
George Bush reads it like an operations manual.

Watch the Video

You can read the blueprint in this review of her book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot in The Guardian. It's full of hard to confront what ifs.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

It ain't gonna carry itself.

TAGS: Fascism, Tyranny, Police State
Naomi Wolf, The End of America

The Road BACK to Democracy

Runs Through HERE

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UPDATED AND BUMPED: MEASURE FAILS CLOTURE

For Gawd's sake, this is sickening. 43 Republican Senators, including 'independent' Joe Lieberman (who for reasons known only to himself still wants to be identified as a Democrat) voted to block this bill. Nicole Belle's report from Crooks and Liars:

Let’s be clear and unvarnished…44 of our Senators hate the Constitution and basic civil rights. They do not believe in the fundamental right of due process. RestoreHabeas.org has the breakdown.

Absolutely unacceptable. With all the horrors that we hear about Hamdan, about suicides, about innocent people rounded up for bounties and left to rot in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it is absolutely immoral that 44 senators feel that entrusting basic civil rights of any person to the Bush administration is the way to go. Senator Dodd has not given up the fight:

“America’s moral standing, and with it the security of the United States, suffered another setback today, atop a pile of setbacks that has accumulated over the past six years. The outcome of this vote is both symbolic and tragic. Each of us in the Senate faced a decision either to cast a vote in favor of helping to restore America’s reputation in the world, or to help dig deeper the hole of utter disrespect for the rule of law that the Bush Administration has created. Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues chose the latter, and my disappointment runs deep. But I will not rest my case with this vote. Instead, this defeat will only deepen my resolve to restore the rule of law and with it American security, for far too much is at stake - for every American - to simply give up the fight.”

Damn, that is hard to take. Every one of these 44 traitors (click for list) swore to uphold and defend the Constitution. Tell me, how does this do that?

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Senators Patrick Leahy and Chris Dodd have re-introduced the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, an attempt to correct possibly the biggest legislative mistake since the Alabama State Legislature re-defined the value of pi* to be 3.000 in keeping with an obscure bible passage. Simply stated, without habeas all other rights are moot - you need a day in court to state your case. They don't call it the Great Writ for nothing.

Habeas corpus was recklessly undermined in last year’s Military Commissions Act. Like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the elimination of habeas rights was an action driven by fear, and it was a stain on America’s reputation in the world. This is a time of testing. Future generations will look back to examine the choices we made during a time when security was too often invoked as a watchword to convince us to slacken our defense of liberty and the rule of law.

The Great Writ of habeas corpus is the legal process that guarantees an opportunity to go to court and challenge the abuse of power by the Government. The Military Commissions Act rolled back these protections by eliminating that right, permanently, for any non-citizen labeled an enemy combatant. In fact, a detainee does not have to be found to be an enemy combatant; it is enough for the Government to say someone is “awaiting” determination of that status.

The sweep of this habeas provision goes far beyond the few hundred detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay, and it includes an estimated 12 million lawful permanent residents in the United States today. These are people who work and pay taxes, people who abide by our laws and should be entitled to fair treatment. Under this law, any of these people can be detained, forever, without any ability to challenge their detention in court.

This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.

The suspension of habeas was part of the Military Commissions Act, which conspires with the USA PATRIOT Act, the stacking of the Supreme Court with partisan ideologues, and purging US Attorneys to make way for friendly Bushies to turn the USA into something other than a nation of laws, not men. America, before our very eyes, is devolving into nothing more than a tract of occupied territory separating Canada from Mexico.

While we're on the subject, let me re-iterate something about this subject. As I have said before, this legislation is demonstrably unconstitutional. From Article I, section 9: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." What part of that is hard to understand? There IS a process for amending the Constitution, Article V:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

Which means, my friends that EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE of someone being deprived of their rights is ILLEGAL, though the partisan ideologues of the Supreme Court REFUSED TO EVEN CONSIDER THE MATTER. If men who have sworn oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution conspire to undermine it, who WILL defend it?

One thing is certain. Keep a close eye on those in the legislative branch who fail to back this bill. They are anti-democratic, un-American, even fascistic; and I would say treasonous. There is no argument in favor of this continuing outrage that doesn't go down a road leading away from all democratic, indeed all civilized values.

As Senator Leahy said so beautifully in his statement,

"Whether you are an individual soldier, or a great Nation,
it is difficult to defend the higher ground by taking the lower road."

That's a road you just don't want to go down.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Firedoglake has info on a phone campaign to let your representatives in Washington know how you feel about this here and here. The Constitution needs your help NOW. You don't expect those who swore to defend and protect it to do so without your goading, do you?

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* - They didn't really re-define the value of pi, that's just an urban myth. Which makes the Military Commissions Act the worst legislative mistake in American history, bar none.

TAGS: Constitution, Habeas Kaput, Patrick Leahy, Chris Dodd

Cross-posted at Ice Station Tango

The "Real Verdict on Jose Padilla"?

I know that this is somewhat out of character--you know...a serious post--but bear with me. I promise not to do this too often.

In yesterday's Washington Post, Jenny Martinez, a Standford University law professor and lawyer for Jose Padilla (though not in his criminal trial), tries to detect the silver lining in the ruling. Setting aside that Padilla was convicted on flimsy evidence, by what appears to have been a biased jury, of a far different crime than the one that precipitated his detention and torture, Dr. Martinez spins the trial as a triumph over the Bu$hCo's attempt to dismantle our judicial system:

The trial showed that our federal courts are perfectly capable of dealing with terrorism cases... The Bush administration has claimed since Sept. 11 that the federal courts cannot be trusted with terrorism matters. It has argued that we should scrap our centuries-old constitutional protections and replace our system of checks and balances with one awarding the executive complete discretion to lock up whomever he wants, for however long he deems appropriate. The Founders rejected that kind of arbitrary and oppressive power. And the federal court in Florida has shown how weak the administration's case for abandoning the Constitution really is.

But the stark reality remains. Regardless what this trial showed, the Bush Administration does have the power to lock up Americans indefinitely and without recourse. That power was affirmed by the Supreme Court, and consider how much it worse it would have been for Padilla had he been arrested in late 2006 rather than 2002. In 2006, with its recently granted authority to co-opt the assets of anyone who opposes its so-called "wartime" policies, the administration could have decimated the Padilla family's finances long before the man ever came to trial. The net of punishment could have snared every member of his immediate family, perhaps even his friends and associates.

We now live in a nation of punishment without charges--conviction without trial--which is very convenient for the administration, as it saves them the embarrassment of bungling the prosecution of terrorism cases, and Dr. Martinez' sunny assessment does nothing to obscure that truth.

TAGS: Jose Padilla, Indefinite Detention, Constitution, in Tatters

Enemy of the State

Bu$hCo Grabs More Domestic Spying Power

Now that they've gotten the spineless DINOcrat-controlled Congress to cave on their NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Program(s?), the Bush crime family is moving on to bigger and better things. Well higher and more expensive anyway - enabling law enforcement agencies to use imagery acquired from spy satellites on US soil. From the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the U.S.

The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.
...
Access to the high-tech surveillance tools would, for the first time, allow Homeland Security and law-enforcement officials to see real-time, high-resolution images and data, which would allow them, for example, to identify smuggler staging areas, a gang safehouse, or possibly even a building being used by would-be terrorists to manufacture chemical weapons.
...
Unlike electronic eavesdropping, which is subject to legislative and some judicial control, this use of spy satellites is largely uncharted territory. Although the courts have permitted warrantless aerial searches of private property by law-enforcement aircraft, there are no cases involving the use of satellite technology.

In recent years, some military experts have questioned whether domestic use of such satellites would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The act bars the military from engaging in law-enforcement activity inside the U.S., and the satellites were predominantly built for and owned by the Defense Department.

If you watched the 1998 film Enemy of the State, you may remember the tagline, "It's not paranoia if they're really after you."

If you didn't see the film, spoiler alert! Will Smith is pursued by rogue elements of the US intelligence community after unknowingly coming into possession of evidence implicating the head of the NSA (played by John Voight) in the murder of a recalcitrant Senator. They track him using every means - wiretaps, bugs put in his clothing, and satellites - until he enlists the aid of retired spook Gene Hackman, who helps him shake the tail. It's a good movie, and I recommend it.

The only thing different between reality and this movie is that now you could remove the word 'rogue' from the first sentence of the preceding paragraph. Now OFFICIAL NSA types could hunt you down like a dog using government resources, and there's nothing you could do about it.

Some civil-liberties activists worry that without proper oversight, only those inside the National Application Office will know what is being monitored from space.

"You are talking about enormous power," said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group advocating privacy rights in the digital age. "Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous."

Mr. Allen, the DHS intelligence chief, says the department is cognizant of the civil-rights and privacy concerns, which is why he plans to take time before providing law-enforcement agencies with access to the data. He says DHS will have a team of lawyers to review requests for access or use of the systems.

"This all has to be vetted through a legal process," he says. "We have to get this right because we don't want civil-rights and civil-liberties advocates to have concerns that this is being misused in ways which were not intended."

Vetted through a legal process? Like the FISA courts, you mean? We all know how well that works when the government wants to ignore it.

TAGS: Surveillance, Spy Satellites, Privacy
Fourth Amendment Violations

Bush's Secretive Executive Orders Fuel Suspicion

Columnist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts sees two possible short term political futures.

In one future, the Republican Party is destroyed electorally due to their support of an extremely unpopular president.

This outcome is evident to any observer, Democrat or Republican.

In the other future, a terrorist attack followed by the activation of several executive orders (like this creepy son of a bee right here) making Bush the only political power in America, gets the Republicans off the hook by rendering democracy irrelevant or even dismantled.

I don't think the government was behind 9/11. I don't think the government will attack us or intentionally allow an attack before the 2008 election.

But of the ten white men running for the Republican nomination, nine of them all seem to know something. Of the 49 of them in the Senate only a few even give lipservice to ending the war even when they know it may cost them even their safest seats.

Then we have Rick Santorum's recent comments and Michael Chertoff's gut.

Roberts writes:

Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?

Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's (sic) going to have a very different view of this war."

Like every political cliffhanger, we won't know until we know. But if a dictatorship is only a couple of chess moves away, isn't the system badly in need of renewal?

UPDATE: Listen to Thom Hartmann interview Paul Craig Roberts.

TAGS: Paul Craig Roberts, Democracy, Election 2008, Executive Orders

That Goddamn Piece of Paper

...Some More Historical Perspective

Maybe as the only Canadian member of the unruly mob, I shouldn't be the one writing this essay - but maybe my outsider's perspective will bring something new to the table.

You be the judge.

At some early time in my life, probably in public school, I became aware that Canada did not have anything equivalent to your Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or Bill of Rights. Canada as a nation was defined by an act of BRITISH Parliament called the BNA (British North America) Act of 1867. Frankly, I have always found that to be outrageous, and somewhat shameful. Some of these concerns were addressed with the Canada Act of 1982, with its attendant Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While this 'repatriated' the Constitution in Canada, I still feel your documents are better than ours.

And I'll tell you why.

Prior to the founding of the United States, legal systems were based on the theory of Divine Right. The law was all about the government telling the people what they could and couldn't do. The U.S. Constitution set that premise on its ear, declaring that the will of the people should limit what government could and couldn't do. That is a radical and some may say sublime departure from what went before. OK, some would argue that the Magna Carta did that, but the premise of the Great Charter was still that power flowed from above, so it's not the same thing at all. Most importantly, in my view at least, the U.S. Constitution denied the leader the ability to claim authority based on a special connection to God. And hey, ya gotta love that strong opening, "We The People."

So what the heck went wrong? The government is now regularly doing exactly those things that the constitution supposedly prevents them from doing. President Bush loudly and proudly claims that his decisions ARE based on some special communication with God, and therefore beyond questioning. Shouldn't this trigger some corrective mechanism? Shouldn't something be happening to reverse this? Why isn't SOMEbody doing someTHING?

The situation brings to mind a quote from one of the most cynical men of the twentieth century, Joseph Stalin. "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" One might well ask how many divisions the Constitution brings to the fight. And the answer, in theory, would be all the divisions in the country. The President, Congressmen, Senators, Supreme Court Justices, and every commissioned officer in the United States Armed Services must take an oath to 'uphold and defend' the Constitution against 'all enemies foreign and domestic.' That, one would imagine, should be more than enough, in theory. Sadly, as some sage said, "In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice they are very different."

In practice, the honorable men that the Founders assumed would be taking all these oaths are not as abundant anymore as one would wish. I feel certain that George W. Bush, who is know to have referred to the Constitution as 'That Goddamn piece of paper', cannot be believed to have given serious consideration to his oath to defend and uphold same. Other oath-takers who have drop-kicked their Constitutional obligations into the nearest drainage ditch sit on the Supreme Court, fill seats in both houses of the legislature (and on both sides of the aisle in those houses), and fill key positions like, say, the Attorney General for example. I would say the majority of posts on this blog contain concrete demonstrations of how these men have dishonored themselves and their positions in all three branches of government.

Checks and balances my ass!

To their credit, the framers of The Constitution of The United States of America created a layered defense for liberty and the rights of man. One can readily see though how the assumptions that they made are no longer pertinent. The first assumption Is that the Chief Executive would recognize his position as a sworn servant of the people. Puh-leeese!! The Chimpster has shown no respect for any one of the 300,000,000 citizens of the country he is destroying.

The one thing the framers never considered when writing the Constitution was the idea that all three branches of government could ever become complicit in the same highjacking of democratic values. It rather erodes the layered defense that they provided with the model of checks and balances.

American fascism really became a fait accompli with the appointment of John Roberts as Chief Justice. The two then Republican-controlled branches of the government had effectively conspired to subvert the third. Worse, they did so in a manner that could not be corrected even when the Democrats regained the majority in the legislature. Worst, John Roberts being a young man this could have an impact extending into the next thirty or forty years. Any hope that democracy can be restored through the ballot box during the next election, even with an overwhelming Democratic majority ignores this depressing fact.

And oh, what abundant rewards the fascist bastards have already reaped from their subversion of the Justice System.

As I pointed out earlier, the administration, when they had Republican control of both houses, pushed legislation that is overtly unconstitutional (For example: the USA PATRIOT Act, Military Commissions Act, etc, or any of the dozens of signing statements through which pResident Bush intrudes on legislative authority.) - secure in the knowledge that the US Supreme Court could simply do what they did in the case of the MCA 'torture bill.' They didn't stick their necks out and rule to let the offending law stand. That would be a patent and obvious abuse of authority, and quite likely impeachable. Any law student, or for that matter any high school civics student could see through such an act. This would leave FIVE conservative justices vulnerable.

No, what they did was in its own way even more odious. They simply refused to even consider any test case. In such an instance, where the Supreme Court has not declared a law to be unconstitutional, said law remains in full force. Not a bad play, really - treason by sin of ommission.

Similarly, much Republican wrongdoing has been overlooked by the Gonzales Department of Justice. There are quite likely a number of Republican Congressmen, and at least a couple of Senators who would be in jail today if not for the inaction and outright OBSTRUCTION of justice represented most prominently by the Prosecutors' Purge affair. Again, treason by sin of ommission.

Anyone who doesn't see malice aforethought in this is simply not paying attention. Or more likely, they have been grotesquely misinformed by the mainstream media - which by the way was considered to be the last layer in the layered defense of democracy envisioned by Jefferson, Madison, et. al. Or more precisely, they saw a general population ("We The People") properly informed by a free press to be that last layer. And they most certainly saw the final remedy for the subversion of the Constitution and Justice System to be the same remedy they had taken against the intolerable actions of King George, and beautifully expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

If the people of the United States of America don't rise up against their oppressors, and soon, very soon, it may be too late - not only for your country, but for the rest of the world as well. It's time to ask yourself the question, "how many defenders does the Constitution have?"

TAGS: Constitution, Declaration of Independence, American Revolution, V 2.0

Charges Against Khadr Dropped

...But He Will Still Remain in Guantanamo

Well, this is one for the books. According to this report from CBC News,

An American military judge abruptly dropped all charges on Monday against Omar Khadr, although it's unlikely to mean freedom for the only Canadian at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

A bit of background is in order. Khadr is the only Canadian citizen in Guantanamo. He was arrested FIVE YEARS AGO in Afghanistan, and accused of throwing a hand grenade that killed Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, described by the CBC as a Marine medic. Sounds fishy to me. The Marines don't have their own medics, and rely on Navy Corpsmen for that function. But I won't distract you further with what is probably just an honest mistake by the CBC.

Khadr was wounded in the firefight that led to his, mmm, what do you call it exactly? Arrest? Capture? Detention? Anyway, it looks like the judge couldn't find a way to shoehorn a claim of jurisdiction over the prisoner.

When Khadr arrived at Guantanamo five years ago, he was classified by a military panel as an "enemy combatant."

But under the new Military Commission Act, revised and passed by the U.S. Congress in October 2006, the military commissions only have jurisdiction to try "unlawful enemy combatants."

CBC News's Bill Gillespie, reporting from Guantanamo, said Khadr's classification as an enemy combatant means he was a fighting on the battlefield, but not necessarily acting unlawfully.

Gillespie said it is unclear what will happen to Khadr now, although it is unlikely he will be released.

"A greater possibility is that he will be sent back to another panel who will again review his status and perhaps then come up with a definition that gives the court jurisdiction," Gillespie said.

Khadr's sister said she is still holding out hope Khadr will be able to return to Canada.

What is one to make of this? On one hand, it's almost as if the rule of law has emerged to exert its authority over the proceedings of the military commissions created to deal with these 380 'prisoners' (only a handful of whom have ever been charged with anything.) There seems to be some repudiation of Bu$hCo™'s unconstitutional and vile creation of new law to deal with these people somewhere in this.

On the other hand, this dropping of the charges seems to be yet another instance of the government avoiding any possibility of this being tested in a Supreme Court showdown, because they KNOW they would lose. The treatment of these prisoners has been unlawful and unconstitutional since day one on a number of counts. The Bush solution to this hinges on their designation being as ill-defined as possible. They are not acknowledged as enemy soldiers, because that would bring in the authority of the Geneva Conventions. Nor are they criminal defendants, because they would then clearly enjoy habeas corpus rights. And of course, whatever rights they might have are nullified by the fact that Guantanamo is not on US soil, but in Cuba. It's the most elaborate legal shell game to come along since the Soviet gulags.

One thing is certain - no ruling, even total exoneration for these Guantanamo kidnap victims (cause that's what they are if you think about it) ever results in any of them actually being released. That just stinks.

Did you ever think that they are just practicing techniques on these people that they fully intend to apply to everybody?

UPDATE: By now you probably know that a very similar ruling has been made in the case of Salim Hamdan, another Guantanamo detainee. It was the Supreme Court's ruling against the government in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that led to the infamous and unconstitutional Military Commissions Act. Among the odious provisions of the MCA was the effective suspension of habeas corpus in US law. The US Supreme Court's refusal to consider the constitutionality of the MCA was a clear breach of their duty under the law, IMO. Holding people prisoners without legal justification is a practice that was repudiated by the Constitution, and moreover by English Common Law going back centuries.

Hamdan and Khadr are the only two inmates charged with any offense since the passing of the MCA. Reactions to the decision - from Patrick Leahy, via Think Progress; from the White House via MSNBC.

TAGS: Omar Khadr, Guantanamo Bay, American Gulag, Jackboot Foreign Policy

"So Long As I'm the Dictator"

Bush is Getting All His Ducks in a Row

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier,

just so long as I'm the dictator."

— George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2000

The state of affairs that then President-elect Bush desired even before taking office has come one step closer with the new National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive. To provide the White House with your IP address click here to read the official May 9th press release. No? That's smart of you. OK then, click here for the story from Roguegovernment.com.

The directive released on May 9th, 2007 has gone almost unnoticed by the mainstream and alternative media.. ..In this directive, Bush declares that in the event of a “Catastrophic Emergency” the President will be entrusted with leading the activities to ensure constitutional government. The language in this directive would in effect make the President a dictator in the case of such an emergency..

..The language written in the directive is disturbing because it doesn’t say that the President will work with the other branches of government equally to ensure a constitutional government is protected. It says clearly that there will be a cooperative effort among the three branches that will be coordinated by the President. If the President is coordinating these efforts it effectively puts him in charge of every branch. The language in the directive is entirely Orwellian in nature making it seem that it is a cooperative effort between all three branches but than it says that the President is in charge of the cooperative effort.

Yeah, right. In Bushspeak, as we all know, 'cooperation' means you submit to Bush's will, without the slightest compromise from him. A situation only likely to get worse after the disastrous 'compromise' the legislative branch just made over funding Bush's continuing war crimes in Iraq.

What is he afraid of anyway, that his lapdog Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will suddenly learn to stand up on his hind legs? That the very Supreme Court that sElected him as pResident in Dec. 2000 (made even more subservient by two more Bush appointees) will suddenly apply the rule of law over their Republican blood oath of loyalty? Or that the spineless Democratic Congress and Senate will suddenly evolve from their current status as free floating jellyfish?

Truth be told, even without this directive Bush is a de facto dictator already. With the power to arbitrarily name anyone, citizen of the US or not, as an 'enemy combatant' and have that person or persons incarcerated indefinitely without charges, habeas corpus rights, or access to an attorney, what more power does he need? Never mind that this power is entirely unconstitutional, as long as the Supreme Court refuses to hear a defining case on the matter, and as long as the police and military continue to accept Bush's chain of command as valid, it doesn't matter, does it?

It is insane that this directive claims that its purpose is to define procedures to protect a working constitutional government when the very language in the document destroys what a working constitutional government is supposed to be. A working constitutional government contains a separation of powers between three equally powerful branches and this directive states that the executive branch has the power to coordinate the activities of the other branches. This directive is a clear violation of constitutional separation of powers and there should be angry protests from our legislators about this anti-American garbage that came from the President.

I agree, there should definitely be angry protests over this. But there weren't angry protests over the Military Commissions Act, there weren't angry protests over Guantanamo, nor Abu Ghraib, nor the rendition program. Not only are legislators silent over these matters, but so are the execrable Corporate Owned Media bobbleheads, and most lamentably the American public themselves. Personally, I'm getting sick and tired of hearing or reading the phrase, "clear violation of constitutional separation of powers" practically every day with no-one voicing anything like an effective expression of disapproval. I know, there's been some clamoring, but I said effective.

Perhaps some new tactics have to be contemplated. Maybe if voters in some strong progressive states agitated for secession it might have some effect. The fact is, the compact promised in the Constitution of the United States of America has been broken. All it would take is a declaration of that fact from a few state legislatures, and at the very least some of Bu$hCo™'s most egregious malfeasance could be, I don't know, at least mentioned by CNN reporters or something.

In related news that I find nearly as lamentable is this analysis of a Scotusblog report on the prospect of one branch of government that has already fallen into Republican hands in a way that the 2008 elections cannot reverse. The next President will choose two or three Supreme Court Justices. Yeah, that's right. So as useless as the Democrats are showing themselves to be, the American electorate has no choice but to put them into power in '08, the consequences of not doing so being too grave to contemplate.

For those of you not inclined to plumb the depths of Supreme Court analysis, a brief summary:

1-The next President will select two or three new Supreme Court justices in his or her first term.

2-All three will come from the Court’s liberal wing.

This is disturbing in the extreme. I always knew this election would be important to the makeup of the court because, to a certain extent, every election is, and also because Justice Stevens is 87. What I did not know is that Justice Souter, at 67 a relatively young Justice, is itching to retire.

Yet another compelling reason for progressives to look to any and all means to find a way to block Bu$hCo™ from their nefarious aims. It's like Dr. Evil was President Dr. Evil or something.

I don't know. I'm grasping at straws here. I'm that desperate to find some way out of this mess. One thing I fear to be a sad and frightening truth, if progressives in America don't find a way to get their ducks in a row, and soon, it may very well be too late.

TAGS: Bush Dictatorship, Police State, Politics of Fear
Lowlife Republican Scumbags

Impeach Now

MSNBC Poll Shows Overwhelming Support

Come on Congressional Democrats, get the lead out. Listen up. Get off the stump, and go to work, fercryinoutloud!! We are tired of lame excuses. Sure, you say that the narrow majority in the Senate would preclude a conviction, but at least consider the political upside.

• You'd be wildly popular for showing some guts for a change.
• The Senate trial would bring the issues of malfeasance before the American public in a way the media could not ignore.
• Senators up for re-election in 2008 would be put on the spot. Could they vote to support an unpopular President after overwhelming evidence of criminal behavior had been presented in the news? I think not.

Those last two points are key to bringing normalcy back to politics in the United States. Without a healthy news media, you can forget about true democracy. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out, it is ESSENTIAL that the voter be given the true facts upon which to base his electoral decision. That hasn't been happening since Reagan gutted the Fairness Doctrine. A public trial of a sitting President and Vice President would be so important to the American public that even FOX "news" and ABC/Disney might consider reporting the facts for a change. If they don't, they can face the consequences of losing their broadcast licenses after the Democratic landslide in '08. And if you DO impeach, you can count on that landslide. Should they elect to lie or spin the news in Bu$hCo™'s favor, they could even face charges of involvement in a criminal conspiracy to subvert the process of democracy. And that's TREASON. (cue image of a blindfolded Rupert Murdoch being offered a cigarette)

Finally, there are many more GOP senators than Democrats in the 2008 cohort up for re-election. I think it's 21 and 12 respectively. (Update: It is. Click for a list.)That is a major opportunity to put a lock on the upper house that will last until 2014. To ignore such a golden opportunity hardly sends a signal to the public that you're in it to win it, now does it? Just the opposite in fact, it at least hints that you are complacent in;

• the erosion of democracy
• the rigging of elections
• the subversion of Justice
• the selling out of the middle class to corporate interests
• being led lied into an unjustified, wasteful war of aggression
• the WAR CRIMES this administration is guilty of
• the suspension of habeas corpus
• illegal wiretapping of citizens
• torture and murder of uncharged 'suspects'
• a wholesale culture of corruption that is basically 'government for sale'

There comes a point where complacency becomes complicity, and you are very near to that point, beyond it in the opinions of some. When Russ Feingold called for a motion of censure over the NSA wiretapping where were you? Most of you sat on your hands, and the issue died, along with the fourth amendment. A LOT of you supported the odious Military Commissions Act, the most blatant outrage against Constitutional principles since the Constitution was drawn up in 1787. And some of you supported the traitor Joe LIEberman against Ned Lamont, not only in the primary, but in the election itself, after the Republicans had endorsed him for Gawd's sake! I could go on. I could go on and on.

If you want to earn back our trust, you must impeach Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales.

YOU MUST IMPEACH!! Can't hear me?

YOU MUST IMPEACH!! Dammit,

YOU MUST IMPEACH!!

Update: You simply must visit the comments thread on this post, where I have taken this argument considerably further on second thought. You really should visit comments on this site anyway, sometimes that's where the best stuff is happening.

Cross-posted to Ice Station Tango.
TAGS: Impeach Bush, Impeach Cheney, Impeach Gonzales, Investigations

Supreme Court Jesters

...And Obscene Court Gestures

Perhaps one should be a little pleased with the Supreme Court's recent decision to allow the Environmental Protection Agency to actually, ahem, protect the freakin' environment. On balance I would give that up to have them rule on the constitutionality of the odious Military Commissions Act. As the BBC reports, they have recently decided not to decide this vital issue.

The US Supreme Court has said it will not decide whether detainees held at Guantanamo have the right to challenge their detention in US federal courts.

The decision means the court will not rule on the constitutionality of an anti-terror law pushed through Congress by President George W Bush last year.

The provision in question states that Guantanamo Bay inmates cannot challenge their detention in US civil courts.

Many of the 385 detainees at the camp have been held for five years or more.

None has yet been able to challenge their detention in a US civil court.

The provision stripping detainees of their right to mount a legal challenge to their confinement was upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington in February.

The court's majority opinion was that "the will of Congress" should prevail and that habeas corpus did not apply to foreign nationals being held at Guantanamo Bay because it is not US soil.

Now, I don't have a law degree or anything, but it seems a simple enough task to interpret the clear language of Article 1, section 9 of the Constitution with regard to the Military Commissions Act passed on Sept. 28, 2006. (NYT news story), (Amnesty International response)

"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."

Since what we're dealing with here is in fact a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and an ex post facto law (one that purports to take effect before it was passed), the matter seems to have been settled back in 1787. So that only leaves one issue as far as I can see, "that habeas corpus did not apply to foreign nationals being held at Guantanamo Bay because it is not US soil." And once again, I'm not at all impressed with the validity of this argument. What they're saying in effect is that US jurisdiction does not apply in this case - but wait, what they're REALLY saying is that jurisdiction applies so far as the government is concerned, but not so far as the detainees' rights are concerned.

This is a continuation of a trend in BushAmerika towards an institutionally asymmetrical application of legal principle, just as in the comparison I recently made between Monica Goodling's rights and those of detainee David Hicks. This abomination of a government continues to rely on the most tissue-thin of specious arguments, proffered by a gaggle of cronies similar to Alberto Gonzales - who recently testified in the Senate that the Constitutional guarantee not to suspend habeas corpus does not indicate that habeas corpus is a guaranteed right. This kind of reasoning should be met with an instant response of, "whoo boy, what the heck are YOU on?"

As far as the court's unusual respect for "the will of Congress" is concerned, I'm quite certain that Congress does NOT have the authority to amend the Constitution. So who are these clowns that Bushie and his father have appointed to the US Supreme Court? Bozos in expensive Italian suits, they should all be sent to a circus stuffed into the same Austin Mini. At least that would yield a laugh for the kiddies. They sure aren't looking anything like qualified lawyers from where I'm standing.

One other thing I think is really important and likely to be skipped over. The court is claiming that they are not making a decision here, but from a practical standpoint I can hardly imagine anything more deceptive. The detainees are not being released, nor are they being afforded an appearance before the court, so a de facto decision has been reached - from the point of view of the detainees, very emphatically so.

Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were joined by George H. W. Bush pick David Souter in dissenting this decision, Breyer writing, "I believe these questions deserve this court's immediate attention." The rest of the court, ALL REPUBLICAN APPOINTEES (Roberts and Alito by Junior, Kennedy by Reagan, Stevens by Ford and Clarence Thomas by Poppy) join with Reagan appointee Antonin Scalia in collectively making an obscene gesture towards the rule of law that can be interpreted to mean, "Go F#@k Yourself!"

One other thing. The court could have accepted this case and then ruled in the government's favor. There are two reasons this did not happen, both of them as sinister as they are cynical. The first is obvious. They are reluctant for political reasons to signal to the public that a police state has fully entrenched itself on American soil. The second is even more disturbing. By withholding final judgement on this issue the court gives a level of authority to President Bush that it can later deny to any Democratic successor.

I can hardly imagine anything more partisan than that, nor any more grievous example of the asymmetrical application of the law that I lamented above. The really sad thing is, recent history has shown that the administration is probably even now hatching something even worse. When someone respects the law as a concept, they see it as the glue that holds civilized society together. When someone like Bush, Gonzales, Scalia, or these other Republican-appointed toadies thinks of the law, they only see an armed thug in a uniform, willing to do their bidding.

Update: you may also want to read this excellent post from Marjorie Cohn at Counterpunch: Coming up Short on Habeas Corpus for Gitmo Detainees

TAGS: Supreme Court, Detainees, Constitution, Police State

A Ray of Light

News From the Front in the Real War of Terror

On the thread about Chris Dodd's efforts to restore habeas corpus to the American judicial system, GL responded with, "A ray of light breaking through the clouds?" Perhaps, but it may have been little more than the bright line that one detects along the edge of a closed door in a very dark room. A decision rendered by a federal judge in the Jose Padilla case may signal the opening of that door, if only by the slightest crack. With the light may come some much needed air into the room.

As reported by BBC News,

"A US citizen suspected of being an al-Qaeda conspirator is mentally unfit to stand trial, a psychiatrist for his defence has said.

Speaking at a hearing to determine Jose Padilla's competence, Angela Hegarty said he lacked the capacity to assist his counsel in the case."

Padilla was most recently in the news when he was photographed blindfolded and wearing sound-blocking earmuffs on a trip to the dentist. The inhuman sensory deprivation that he has been subjected to for 3½ years is the direct cause of his current mental incompetence. Naomi Klein of Alternet has more details. This is a link I put up in the hope you will actually click on it and read Naomi's entire shocking post.

"Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an 'enemy combatant' and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a 'truth serum,' a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.. ..These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of 'extraordinary rendition' carried out by the CIA, as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan"

She observes, "America has deliberately driven hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners insane. Now it is being held to account in a Miami court." Let's hope so. The Bush administration has made a habit of ignoring court decisions, including Supreme Court decisions, that didn't go their way. Bu$hCo™ ARE the terrorists, as this case clearly shows, and they are waging a war against the American people and the rule of law. Did I mention, Padilla is an American citizen, arrested on American soil, who has never been anywhere near any armed conflict? His arrest was way before the MCA was passed, and has been a textbook case of abuse of power. For a point of comparison, read Maher Arar's personal account of the way he was treated, in CounterPunch. Clearly this is all part of a wide-ranging program approved at the highest levels of government - they can't blame everything on Lynndie England.

In other related news, the Toronto Star reported Friday on a UNANIMOUS Canadian Supreme Court decision striking down the government's use of so-called 'security certificates' to detain and deport non-citizens suspected of terrorism ties. Turns out the certificate system is in conflict with Canada' Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Kudos to the Supreme Court of Canada - must be all that clean air up here.

In other other news, Les Enragés.org drew the attention of, and a link from Chris Dodd's blog for a piece we ran about Senator Dodd sponsoring the Effective Terrorist Prosecution Act, which aims to reverse the worst aspects of the Military Commissions Act (aka The War Criminals' Protection Act.) Kudos again, senator.

Scroll down the sidebar for a link to RestoreHabeas.org - it's our biggest graphic link, the Statue of Liberty in chains courtesy of Project for the OLD American Century. And it should be our biggest graphic, because it's our biggest concern. If further erosion of the Bill of Rights is allowed, the United States of America will exist in name only - a large expanse of North American real estate keeping Canada and Mexico from bumping into one another.

To reiterate: Restore Habeas, Repeal the MCA, and defend the Constitution. Dammit!

TAGS: Jose Padilla, Torture, Human Rights, Abuse of Power