| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 8:06 pm Post subject: WP Senate closer to ok detention of US citizens |
| CNN's Jack Cafferty on Bush imunity bill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTVXTkToPBU
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/03/141259
Legal Group Challenges Military Commissions Act
The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed the first legal challenge to the new Military Commissions Act passed by Congress last week. The legal group has filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of 25 detainees held at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan. The petition demands that the men be released or be charged with a crime. Some of the detainees have been held for years without ever receiving a hearing. Under the new bill – prisoners have no right to challenge their detention. On Monday, Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, warned about the dangers of the new law.
Bill Goodman: “No one can be held indefinitely, and if they are, they have a right to go in front of a magistrate or a judge and demand that the judge make a determination as to whether they’re charged with a crime and whether there’s any real evidence to hold them. And if there is not, the magistrate, the judge, can order the king, the police, the FBI, or anyone, or George W. Bush, the President of the United States, to let him go. That’s what habeas corpus is. Without it, we are virtually slaves to a police state.”
Bill Goodman spoke last night in New York at a rally sponsored by the group World Can’t Wait. On Thursday, World Can’t Wait is organizing emergency protests in over 170 towns and cities to condemn the government’s sanctioning of torture.
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Dean On Neocon Authoritarianism
Tuesday October 03rd 2006, 8:06 am
During a July appearance on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, former White House counsel to Nixon, John Dean, comes within a hair’s breadth of declaring the neocons have specifically created terrorism in order to run roughshod over our former republic. Of course, as ample documentation reveals, this is precisely what the neocons have done.
Dean’s interview is interesting as well because he describes the neocons as dangerous authoritarians who will do anything to remain in power and aggressively foist their agenda on the nation, even if it ultimately destroys the nation.
As the so-called “detainee bill,” more accurately characterized as the Habeas Corpus Murder bill, reveals, the neocons will sacrifice our republic without a second thought in order to realize their forever war agenda.
The Habeas Corpus Murder Bill is an obvious attempt to remove all constitutional restraint prior to the coming authoritarian clamp-down, as dissent will not be tolerated after the neocons shock and awe (with nukes) Iran in the anticipated kick-off of World War Four, a catastrophe that will demand the sort of imperious society Straussian neocons have dreamed of implementing for decades.
John Dean Interview on Neocons as followers... must watch!
John Dean talks about administration using terrorism and capitalizing on it and using it for its advantage ---> 7mins into video.
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan160.html
Welcome to Fascist America!
by Gene Callahan
My fellow Americans, it’s official now: We live in a fascist nation.
Now, the term "fascist" has been thrown around over the last fifty years in a loose way that has drained it of much of its meaning. If someone wanted to cut 5% off of a leftist professor's favourite welfare programme, the professor would call his opponent a "fascist." I’m not using the word like that. I mean honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned, 1930s style fascism, featuring such old favourites as:
* Secret prisons – they’re back!
* Torture – we’re doing it.
* Spying on all citizens.
* Arrests and indefinite imprisonment without trial.
* Rampant militarism.
* Secret detention.
* Enforced disappearance.
* Denial and restriction of habeas corpus.
* Prolonged incommunicado detention.
* Unfair trial procedures.
(This list was compiled partially based on the work of Amnesty International, available here.)
An absolutely mind-numbing response to complaints that our traditional legal system is being torn apart is the question, "So, you want to protect the rights of terrorists?"
Um, no, I want to protect the rights of non-terrorists who might be falsely accused of terrorism! That was sort of, you know, the whole idea of our legal system. I’m sure there was some neo-con around in the 1700s saying to Jefferson or Madison, "So, you want to protect the rights of murderers and robbers?" but luckily they ignored him.
We’ve now gotten to the point where Nazi Germany was, say, in 1934. Remember, at that time, if you had told a typical German what his government would do over the next ten years, he would have looked at you as a madman. After all, his land had been civilized for over a thousand years. His was the nation of Albertus Magnus, Gutenberg, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Bach, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Heisenberg, Reimann, Mann, Lessing, Herder, Handel, D?Leibniz, Gauss, Helmholtz – he could have gone on, but you get the point. His nation could not possibly descend into barbarism! If you tried to tell him he was living in a police state, he would have pointed out that his government had used its vast new powers very judiciously, and only against a few trouble-makers. So far.
It is interesting, in gauging the direction we are heading, to look at the proclamations of "respectable" opinion writers who support this administration. For instance, we have people at a "libertarian" think tank proclaiming that Moslems are not entitled to full civil rights in the US. (Perhaps we need to make them wear something special on their clothing like, say, a yellow star, so we know just who they are, hey?) But "conservatives" provide even more stunning examples of purely fascist reasoning. For example, conservative demagogue Ann Coulter has called for the editor of The NY Times to face the firing squad for his part in publicizing this administration's abuses of power. Let’s look at a recent column by Douglas MacKinnon at TownHall.com.
MacKinnon considers all of those involved in revealing the sordid collection of secret programmes that have been launched by the Bush administration as "traitors" who have publicized these schemes "purely because they don’t like the policies of the new president." Well, he’s right in that "they don’t like the policies" that they consider unconstitutional violations of our rights. Far from "aiding the enemy," these revelations aided us, the American people, by letting us know what our government has in store for us.
Consider what the point of classifying these programmes was in the first place, and who they were being kept secret from. The jihadists no doubt already knew about the secret prisons – their friends are in them! They surely knew that the war in Iraq has been helping their recruiting – it’s their recruiting! ("Praise be to Allah, Abdul, I read in The NY Times that it is the Iraq War that is sending us these thousands of new recruits – who knew?") They no doubt suspect they may be wiretapped – what they didn’t know was that all the rest of us are, as well. No, not one of these leaks helps terrorists, nor was one of them classified to stop terrorists from finding them out. We were the ones who weren’t supposed to find out about them.
MacKinnon continues: "And if even one American lost his or her life because of a leak, then I would want that person to be executed for treason."
So anyone who reveals our fascist government policies is a traitor who can be executed! This is obviously an attempt to intimidate the opposition so that our police state can be expanded without the annoying work stoppages caused by public outcry when the latest bit of construction is revealed. And just how does MacKinnon propose to show that some American lost his life because a journalist revealed that the US government tortures people across the globe, rather than, say, because the policies he supports have inspired a million new jihadists? Secret trial, perhaps? Or why even bother with trials for filthy traitors?
Herr Goebbels – oops, I mean MacKinnon – writes, "Until we severely punish those who leak classified information, then the traitors among us will not only continue to flourish, but will grow more brazen with the secrets they reveal."
Yes, what we ought to be able to do, you know, is simply seize anyone who even mentions our government’s "secret" prisons, and, without a trial, throw them in a secret prison! This is the logical conclusion of this fascist’s article, after all, since those who talk about the American Gulag are pretty much terrorists themselves.
Folks, this is coming real soon, and, once it does, domestic opposition is pretty much over. One journalist – that will be about all it takes – will be seized as a "terrorist" and thrown in the Gulag. The government may release him, but then another will simply disappear in the night in Iraq or Afghanistan, and rumors will circulate that he is being kept in a cage somewhere and waterboarded. No journalist lacking heroic courage will any longer be willing to seriously protest government policy.
America is full of decent people, who could never believe their own government could become fascist. So were Germany and Italy in the 1920s. But they became fascist anyway. They passed laws suspending civil liberties, but the government promised the frightened populace that those laws would only be used against targets like "Communist terrorists." And, a little bit at a time, the target kept getting bigger and bigger, slowly enough that the people who weren’t paying close attention never detected it.
And, next thing you know, there were millions of people dead! So, it turns out, it would have been worth paying attention after all.
October 4, 2006
Gene Callahan [send him mail], the author of Economics for Real People, is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a contributing columnist to LewRockwell.com. His first novel, PUCK, has just been published.
Copyright ? 2006 Gene Callahan
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From: "Ronald"
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:37:36 -0400
Subject: WP Senate closer to ok detention of US citizens
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/25/AR2006092501514_pf.html
Detainee Measure to Have Fewer Restrictions
White House Reaches Accord With Lawmakers
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 26, 2006; A01
Republican lawmakers and the White House agreed over the weekend to alter new legislation on military commissions to allow the United States to detain and try a wider range of foreign nationals than an earlier version of the bill permitted, according to government sources.
Lawmakers and administration officials announced last week that they had reached accord on the plan for the detention and military trials of suspected terrorists, and it is scheduled for a vote this week. But in recent days the Bush administration and its House allies successfully pressed for a less restrictive description of how the government could designate civilians as "unlawful enemy combatants," the sources said yesterday. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of negotiations over the bill.
The government has maintained since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that, based on its reading of the laws of war, anyone it labels an unlawful enemy combatant can be held indefinitely at military or CIA prisons. But Congress has not yet expressed its view on who is an unlawful combatant, and the Supreme Court has not ruled directly on the matter.
As a result, human rights experts expressed concern yesterday that the language in the new provision would be a precedent-setting congressional endorsement for the indefinite detention of anyone who, as the bill states, "has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" or its military allies.
The definition applies to foreigners living inside or outside the United States and does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant. It is broader than that in last week's version of the bill, which resulted from lengthy, closed-door negotiations between senior administration officials and dissident Republican senators. That version incorporated a definition backed by the Senate dissidents: those "engaged in hostilities against the United States."
The new provision, which would cover captives held by the CIA, is more expansive than the one incorporated by the Defense Department on Sept. 5 in new rules that govern the treatment of detainees in military custody. The military's definition of unlawful combatants covers only "those who engage in acts against the United States or its coalition partners in violation of the laws of war and customs of war during an armed conflict."
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said that by including those who "supported hostilities" -- rather than those who "engage in acts" against the United States -- the government intends the legislation to sanction its seizure and indefinite detention of people far from the battlefield.
Martin noted that "the administration kidnapped an innocent German citizen" and "held him incommunicado for months . . . because the CIA or Pentagon wrongly suspected him of terrorist ties." She was referring to Khalid al-Masri, who the Bush administration eventually acknowledged was detained on insufficient grounds.
Nothing in the proposed legislation -- which mostly concerns the creation of new military panels, known as "commissions, " to try terrorism suspects -- directly addresses such CIA apprehensions and "renditions. "
But the bill's new definition "would give the administration a stronger basis on which to argue that Congress has recognized that the battlefield is wherever the terrorist is, and they can seize people far from the area of combat, label them as unlawful enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely, " said Suzanne Spaulding, an assistant general counsel at the CIA from 1989 to 1995.
Traditionally, courts have found it reasonable for parties to armed conflicts to seize or try people they encounter on a battlefield, to keep them from returning to the hostilities, added Spaulding, who was also a general counsel for the House and Senate intelligence committees. "The Supreme Court could potentially look at this and say Congress has now defined how anyone anywhere in the world" is subject to detention and military trial, even when far from an active combat zone, she said.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "We are satisfied with the definition because it will allow us to prosecute the terrorists, and it also has important limitations that say a terrorist must have purposefully and materially supported terrorism."
Spokesmen for John W. Warner (R-Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) -- the senators leading negotiations with the Bush administration -- did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new language, but others on Capitol Hill said the three had accepted it.
Under a separate provision, those held by the CIA or the U.S. military as an unlawful enemy combatant would be barred from challenging their detention or the conditions of their treatment in U.S. courts unless they were first tried, convicted and appealed their conviction.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) yesterday assailed the provision as an unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus, which he said was allowable only "in time of rebellion or in time of invasion. And neither is present here."
He was joined by the committee's senior Democrat, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), who said that under the provision, legal U.S. immigrants could be held "until proven innocent, not until proven guilty."
Bruce Fein, a senior Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, testified against the provision at a Senate hearing. Kenneth W. Starr, a solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush, said in a letter to Specter that he concerned the legislation "may go too far in limiting habeas corpus relief."
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) defended the provision, saying alien enemy combatants are not "entitled to rights under the United States Constitution similar to those accorded to a defendant in a criminal lawsuit."
Congressional sources said Specter is unlikely to derail the compromise legislation over those objections.
Staff writer Michael A. Fletcher and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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Thinking about Neoconservatism:
http://www.vdare.com/macdonald/030918_neoconservatism.htm...
Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/04/06/neoconservatism-as-a-jewish-movement.php
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Rounding Up U.S. Citizens
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/14432
Submitted by davidswanson on Sat, 2006-09-30 22:48. Media
By Marjorie Cohn
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."
Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to protect us against terrorism. Frightened they might lose their majority in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill through Congress with little substantive debate.
Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.
The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. Congress has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion. The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.
Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps of other unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.
In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party's political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans.
The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under it.
The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous and malicious" with the intent to hold the government in "contempt or disrepute." The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams.
Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).
During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in "red-baiting."
One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States.
In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."
That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.
In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."
We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious jeopardy. Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published in 2007 by PoliPointPress.
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audio - Dr. Edwin Vieira re HR 6166 ( on Stadtmiller's RBN radio show Oct 2 '06)
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 10:57:45 -0700
hr 1 - stream or download (right Click 'Save To Target'):
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Stadt/0610/20061002_Mon_Stadtmiller1.mp3
hr 2 - stream or download (right Click 'Save To Target'):
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Stadt/0610/20061002_Mon_Stadtmiller2.mp3
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RBN RADIO - HR 6166: THE USA DETAINEE-TORTURE ACT: "We are now all at risk." Alfred Webre & D'Anne Burley - Sept.30
GUEST: Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd, a Yale Law graduate, has taught Constitutional Law (Civil Liberties) at the University of Texas, and is a former cooperating attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. He is presently International Director of the Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS) and the author of EXOPOLITICS.
hour 1 - stream or download(rightClick 'Save To Target')
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Burley/0609/20060930_Sat_Burley1.mp3
hour 2 - stream or download(rightClick 'Save To Target')
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Burley/0609/20060930_Sat_Burley2.mp3
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Burley06.html
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Detainee bill would railroad injustice
By Bruce Ackerman | Sept 29, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/ks2wt
http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060929/OPINION/60928016/1049
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The day freedom died in the United States of America
posted Sept 29 | Capitol Hill Blues | 35 Comments
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/content/2006/09/the_day_freedom.html
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Detainee bill lifts Bush's power to new heights
President now has legal authority even courts can't challenge
- Scott Shane, Adam Liptak, New York Times
Saturday, September 30, 2006
(09-30) 04:00 PDT Washington -- With the final passage through Congress of the detainee treatment bill, President Bush achieved a signal victory Friday, shoring up with legislation his determined campaign against terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts.
Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them -- albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment -- beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners.
Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this summer in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of White House policy. It does, however, grant detainees brought before military commissions limited protections initially opposed by the White House. The bill, which cleared a final procedural hurdle in the House on Friday and is likely to be signed into law next week by Bush, does more than allow the president to determine the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions; it strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges to his interpretation.
And it broadens the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" to include not only those who fight the United States, but also those who have "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." The latter group could include those accused of providing financial or other indirect support to terrorists, human rights groups say. The designation can be made by any "competent tribunal" created by the president or secretary of defense.
In very specific ways, the bill is a rejoinder to the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling, in which several justices said the absence of congressional authorization was a central flaw in the administration's approach. The new bill solves that problem, legal experts said.
"I think he can reasonably be confident that this statute answers the Supreme Court and puts him back in a position to prevent another attack, which is the goal of interrogation," said Douglas Kmiec, a conservative legal scholar at the Pepperdine University School of Law.
But lawsuits challenging the bill are inevitable, and critics say substantial parts of it may well be rejected by the Supreme Court.
Overall, the legislation reallocates power among the three branches of government, taking authority away from the judiciary and handing it to the president.
Bruce Ackerman, a critic of the administration and a professor of law and political science at Yale University, sharply criticized the bill but agreed that it strengthened the White House position.
"The president walked away with a lot more than most people thought," Ackerman said. He said the bill "further entrenches presidential power" and allows the administration to declare even a U.S. citizen an unlawful combatant subject to indefinite detention. "And it's not only about these prisoners," Ackerman said. "If Congress can strip courts of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial independence is threatened."
Even if the Supreme Court decides it has the power to hear challenges to the new law, the Bush administration has gained a crucial advantage. In adding a congressional imprimatur to a comprehensive set of procedures and tactics, lawmakers explicitly endorsed measures of the sort that in some other eras had been achieved by executive fiat. Earlier Supreme Court decisions have suggested that the president and Congress acting together in the national security arena can be an all but unstoppable force.
The debate over the limits of torture and the rules for military commissions dominated discussion of the bill until this week. Only in the last few days has broad attention turned to its redefinition of "unlawful enemy combatant" and its ban on habeas corpus petitions that suspects have traditionally used to challenge their incarceration.
Law professors will stay busy for months debating the implications. The most outspoken critics have compared the law's sweeping provisions to dark chapters in history, comparable to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the fragile years after the nation's founding and the internment of Japanese Americans in the midst of World War II.
Conservative legal experts, by contrast, said critics can no longer maintain that the Bush administration is guilty of unilateral executive overreaching. Congressional approval can cure many ills, Justice Robert Jackson wrote in his seminal concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube vs Sawyer, the 1952 case that struck down President Harry Truman's unilateral seizure of the nation's steel mills during the Korean War.
Supporters of the law, in fact, say that its critics will never be satisfied. "For years they've been saying that we don't like Bush doing things unilaterally, that we don't like Bush doing things piecemeal," said David Rivkin, a former Justice Department official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush.
How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If major terrorist plots in the United States are uncovered -- and surely if one succeeds -- it may vindicate the congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack. But if the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill.
Page A - 6
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/30/MNGNKLFO3P1.DTL
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Are You an Enemy Combatant?
Wednesday September 27th 2006, 1:08 pm
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=576
Slowly but surely, the Bush neocons and their perfidious allies in Congress are cobbling together a secret police apparatus that will eventually mirror Hitler?s Gestapo, Stalin?s NKVD, East Germany?s Stasi, and Chile?s Direcció® Žacional de Inteligencia, to cite but a few examples.
?The United States could detain more foreigners as enemy combatants under legislation Congress will debate this week after a last-minute change in the bill, lawmakers said on Tuesday,? reports Reuters. ?Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a key negotiator on the bill, said enemy combatants would now include those who provided money, weapons and other support for terrorist groups as well as those involved in actual operations.?
Of course, many would argue that the key word here is ?foreigners? and this legislation poses no threat to Americans. However, considering previous comments of ?key negotiator? Lindsey Graham, we can likely expect this legislation to be used against ?fifth columnists,? as the good senator from South Carolina deems all who oppose the neocon doctrine of forever war.
As Graham told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, ?the administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue fifth column movements?. And let me tell folks who are watching what a fifth column movement is. It is a movement known to every war where American citizens will sympathize with the enemy and collaborate with the enemy. And it?s happened in every war,? never mind that this particular war is undeclared. Naturally, for the neocons, simply opposing the ?war? in Iraq and the parallel ?war? against terrorism at home is an act of sympathizing with the enemy, that is to say ?al-Qaeda,? the black op pseudo gang crafted by the CIA and the Pentagon.
?Graham said U.S. citizens could not be deemed enemy combatants under the bill, but several human rights advocates said the language was so broad that they believed Americans could be detained under it. The Center for Constitutional Rights said even attorneys representing Guantanamo inmates could be deemed enemy combatants,? Reuters continues.
Of course, as everything changed on September 11, 2001, everything will change for the worse once again after the neocons shock and awe Iran, the Iranians retaliate by blocking the Strait of Hormuz with flaming oil tankers, thus sending oil prices through the ceiling and precipitating a world-wide economic crisis.
More than ever, our ?way of life? will be on the line and Bush and the neocons will demand you are either ?with us or with the terrorists? and the KBR-Halliburton camps will fill up with Graham?s ?fellow travelers? who ?sympathize with the enemy and collaborate with the enemy? simply due to the fact they will not be calling for mass murder and frantically waving their little plastic American flags made by slaves in China.
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Andrew Sullivan discusses HR 6166 below:
Scroll down below to Andrew Sullivan's mention of water boarding torture and how it was used in the Soviet gulag system according to Alexander Solzenitzen's Gulag Archipelago and Gulag Archipelago II books and is now being used by the US (per the neo-Bolshevik neocons via Cheney's office):
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0609/26/acd.02.html
DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Depriving prisoners of sleep, freezing them, making them feel they're drowning. Are they interrogation techniques, torture, or useful form of intelligence gathering?
Senator John McCain, former prisoner of war, tortured by the Vietnamese, calls them extreme and says they should never be used by U.S. interrogators.
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: It's clear we have to have the moral high ground and we cannot violate the Geneva Conventions.
FEYERICK: But U.S. interrogators have been using these techniques and others, expecting prisoners will talk and give useful information.
JOSHUA DRATEL, ATTORNEY FOR GUANTANAMO BAY DETAINEE: It doesn't take very much to get you disoriented and completely helpless to the point of capitulation.
FEYERICK: Lawyer Joshua Dratel represents one of the detainees at Guantanamo, who say his was abused.
DRATEL: If you are in a cell with a couple of people and they come back bruised and bloodied and you're next, you know what's coming.
FEYERICK: The bill does not specify which interrogation techniques would be banned. Critics say that would leave too much wiggle room for the White House and CIA. But McCain says the bill would cover methods such as water boarding, extreme hypothermia and sleep deprivation.
Greg Hartley, a former interrogator with the U.S. Army, walked us through how they actually work. First, water boarding. A prisoner may be inverted on a board, a soaking towel wrapped around the mouth, while water is poured on the head. GREG HARTLEY, FORMER U.S. ARMY INTERROGATOR: Water boarding is simply making a person think they're going to drown so their brain takes a hiatus and their body takes over. They get into a panic mode and most people will panic and suddenly start to confess.
FEYERICK: With hypothermia, prisoners are exposed to near- freezing temperatures and in come some cases sprayed with water. They lose control and shake violently.
HARTLEY: Hypothermia will confuse the circadian rhythm of the person, so it starts to really impact the way your brain works, the hormones released, all of those kinds of things.
FEYERICK: That can be combined with sleep deprivation, in which interrogators shine lights, play loud music and refuse to let prisoners sleep.
DRATEL: If they took away your clothes, put you in a stress position, meaning that, let's say they bound your hands and then bound hands to your feet so that you're hunched over in that position for hours at a time, four, five, six, hours in a room with very high air- conditioning, how much can a person stand before they say, what do you want to know?
FEYERICK: Military experts say the most reliable intelligence gathering doesn't come from using torture techniques, just the opposite. They say the best way of getting a prisoner to talk truthfully is to gain their trust.
HARTLEY: I constantly tell people if it feels like hazing, you have crossed a line because hazing is intended to cause a participant to quit. A prisoner can't quit.
FEYERICK (on camera): The Army's own manual prohibits both water boarding and extreme hypothermia. The CIA says it doesn't comment on interrogation methods. The military experts we spoke with point out that with the exception of water boarding, elite forces undergo extreme techniques during training so that they may know what to expect in the event they, themselves, are captured.
Deborah Feyerick, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Well, it's safe to say this bill's language, some of it wide open to interpretation, has touched off a lot of concern from Democrats and Republicans, libertarians and old line conservative.
It's also safe to say that there are smart and serious people out there who worry that these concerns are being steamrollered, and that as a country, we're not having the serious and plain spoken debate that the issue deserves.
Andrew Sullivan takes it one step further. He calls it legalizing tyranny and accuses the administration of debasing the language of freedom. I spoke to him earlier. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Andrew, what is it about this bill that concerns you so much? I mean, your writing on this has been incredibly impassioned.
ANDREW SULLIVAN, "TIME" CONTRIBUTOR: Well, first of all, we don't really know what's in the bill. It's very confusing. It seems as if it's deliberately confusing, and yet they're rushing it into law in the space of a few days.
And when you think of what issues are at stake in this law, namely, that the president of the united states can simply name anybody on the battlefield, off the battlefield, anywhere in the United States...
COOPER: U.S. citizen, non-U.S. citizen?
SULLIVAN: That's not clear either. Name them an illegal enemy competent, detain them indefinitely without charges and torture them by any usual sense of the word torture, at will. I mean, this -- the last person to be able to do this in America was King George III, and I can't believe that we are now returning to that with Congressional backing.
COOPER: You say, "Whatever else this is this is, it is not a constitutional democracy. It is a thinly-veiled military dictatorship, subject to only one control: the will of the Great Decider. And the war that justifies this astonishing attack on American liberty is permanent, without end."
SULLIVAN: Yes. The amazing thing about the provision as we now see is it, is that only one person, not the law, not the Congress, and no courts, only one person, the president, has the right to decide who is going to be detained. Not only that, but he can detain that person indefinitely. At best, they may get a military court at some point. They certainly have no habeas corpus rights, which goes right way back to Magna Carta, and they can be subject to being tortured.
COOPER: It is amazing that the U.S., you know, that President Bush still says America doesn't torture.
SULLIVAN: Well, the meaning of the word torture in the English language and under law is severe, mental or physical pain or suffering. Now if you strap somebody to a board upside down and pour water over their face or dunk their head in water until they're about to drown, then bring them out and you do that repeatedly and repeatedly, it's torture. It was done by the KGB. It's documented by Alexander Solzenitzen in the Gulag Archipelago. It's now being practiced and has been practiced, we know, by the president of the United States.
And in the negotiations with Senator McCain, they left this up to the discretion of the president.
COOPER: Your critics will say you sound like a liberal on this. You say this is actually an issue that conservatives should get behind.
SULIVAN: Look, conservatives have always believed that the most important thing in politics is protecting individual from excessive government power. And whenever conservatives say to me I'm a liberal, I say to them two words, President Hillary. What if -- this law will allow presidents from now, forever in this indefinite war to detain anybody at will for any reason. The potential for abuse of this power is enormous. And civil liberty conservatives and people like Bill Buckley or Bruce Fein, Jeffrey Hart or George Will, these people are concerned about the constitutional due process that this is violating.
COOPER: Why do you think, though, this story, this -- what is happening really hasn't gotten much attraction? I mean, people don't want to hear about it. I mean, I know the ratings for this segment are going to go down because people turn this stuff off.
SULLIVAN: That's how it always happens. People always, when these things occur, look the other way. People think it's always going to happen to someone else or they think that these people are somehow all terrorists. They're terror suspects.
90 percent of the people we detained in Abu Ghraib were innocent, it turned out, as the U.S. admitted. Dozens of people in Guantanamo were completely innocent, as the Army and military subsequently admitted.
So, there is no process to determine who is innocent or guilty in these matters. They're being detained without charges.
COOPER: You're writing a lot about it on the blog, AndrewSullivan.com. Andrew, appreciate you being on. Thanks.
SULLIVAN: Thank you so much, Anderson, for raising this issue.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 2, 2006
Are You an 'Unlawful Combatant'?
Maybe so…
by Justin Raimondo
There has been a great deal of discussion about the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [.pdf], recently passed by bothhouses of Congress, and most of it has to do with the provisions allowing torture of alien detainees, that is, of non-citizens apprehended in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq, and their treatment at the hands of their American captors. Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, all Republicans, grandstanded for weeks over the torture provisions, then capitulated. Another "Republican maverick," Arlen Specter, zeroed in on the real issue, however, when he said the bill would set us back 800 years by repealing the habeas corpus protections against arbitrary arrest and jailings – and then went ahead and voted for it, anyway.
Liberal opposition mainly centered around the morality – or, rather, immorality – of torture, but the debate largely ignored the ticking time-bomb at the heart of this legislation, scheduled to go off, perhaps, in tandem with some future crisis, e.g., another terrorist attack on American soil: the redefinition of the "unlawful combatant" concept that lays the foundations for this administration's reconstruction of the gulag. Here is the new, broadened definition, as enunciated in the legislation recently passed by the House:
"The term 'unlawful enemy combatant' means – (i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant (including a person who is part of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or associated forces); or (ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the president or the secretary of defense."
It doesn't say "alien" or "terrorist," although it specifically includes members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It says "person" – any person, including American citizens. As Bruce Ackerman, professor of law at Yale and author of Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism, puts it:
"Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."
Congress has now granted the president the powers of a dictator. The rest of the story of our slide into absolutism is merely a matter of filling in the details.
Our rulers will naturally continue to pretend that we live in a normal democratic country, that the Constitution still means something, and that nothing essential has really changed – but, of course, everything has changed, as the post-9/11 War Party has relentlessly argued, and we had better get used to it. Because if you very vocally and aggressively refuse to get used to it, they can and perhaps one day will come for you. As an Arab friend of mine puts it when describing the routine operations of Middle Eastern police states, "You will never see the light."
My Arab friend, a recent immigrant, lives in fear of arbitrary arrest, having been constantly exposed to the danger and possibility of it in his native land and during his travels through the Middle East, and it hasn't faded with his arrival in this country. He flinches every time he sees someone in uniform, glancing up fearfully as I open the door to a FedEx delivery guy, and tracks police cars out of the corner of his eye as they cruise down the street. He is forever posing hypothetical situations in which he becomes the victim of a policeman who confronts him – perhaps on grounds of looking "suspicious" – and the story invariably ends with his deportation. Or perhaps, he says, they will simply "take me" – and with this he simulates a cop grasping him by the neck – "and send me to Guantanamo. I will never see the light."
This kind of fear is understandable to Americans only on a very abstract level. We, after all, have no experience with a police state – not in the sense of a systematic totalitarian approach to repression – of which the European and Third World nations have plenty. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for all his elaborate and extensive wartime apparatus of political repression and propaganda, never even came close to the police-state methods of his European cousins-once-removed in Moscow, Berlin, and Rome. And the comic-opera machinations of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, while reprehensible, never approached the savage efficiency of the KGB – about the only efficient institution in Soviet society.
The closest we came was in 1798, with the imposition of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which legalized the deportation of alien residents and criminalized criticism of the government, particularly the president. The Acts were, in effect, a Federalist coup d'etat, in which the neo-royalists grouped around the Federalist Party sought to ditch the Constitution and repeal the American revolution.
The Federalist counter-revolution was carried out under the colors of "national security," of course, and in the shadow of war: as in the Bushian version, a fifth column of enemy aliens was a major target of the 1798 legislation. The Naturalization Act sought to limit support for the Jeffersonians by lengthening the residency requirements for immigrants: most new citizens of the youthful republic were instinctual Jeffersonians, drawn to the New World by the bright promise of liberty. The Alien Friends Act and the Alien Enemies Act, taken together, comprise a near-exact replica of the Military Commissions Act, mandating the seizure, detention, and deportation of male foreign nationals and resident aliens deemed hostile to the United States in wartime. The target: tens of thousands of French citizens residing in the U.S., who were unsympathetic to the Federalist cause. The real target of the coup leaders, however, wasn't a foreign-born fifth column, but a domestic one.
The Sedition Act made it illegal for anyone to write, print, publish, or speak against the government in a manner deemed "false, scandalous, and malicious" and designed to hold the authorities in "contempt or disrepute." In wartime, argued the Federalists, presaging our own red-state fascists, it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government, and several prominent journalists critical of the Federalists were tried, and some convicted. Opposition to the Sedition Act did much to fuel the subsequent Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1800.
I wonder if history will repeat itself, this time – or will we enter a timeline where the neo-Federalists finally succeed in their scheme to impose a dictatorship on American shores?
There is, of course, no equivalent of the Sedition Act of 1798 in the Military Commissions Act: only the seed of one, cited above. It establishes the principle that an American citizen may be seized and locked up in a military prison, stripped of the protections traditionally afforded him by the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, there is the question of how it will be enforced, and certainly there are numerous political factors to consider: repression without some degree of popular support is a risky business, as the Soviets came to understand only after it was too late. The administration must take all this into account before acting.
In the present legal and political atmosphere, however, it won't be long before this malignant seed sends its tendrils aboveground and blossoms into a full-grown and fearsome flower of evil. One has only to listen to the latest pronouncement from our Beloved Leader, out on the campaign trail, implying that the Democrats are dancing on the borderline between criticism and treason when they bring up the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Speaking to the Reserve Officers Association, he averred:
"Some have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that by fighting the terrorists – by fighting them in Iraq – we are making our people less secure here at home. This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we're provoking them."
Translation: A vote for the Democrats – or, rather, as the Great Decider would say, the "cut-and-run" Democrats – is a vote for al-Qaeda. Crude, and it remains to be seen how effective, yet this is not mere campaign rhetoric: Bush's equation of antiwar criticism with "the enemy's propaganda" is precisely the argument made by the radical ideologues who inhabit the fever swamps of organized neoconservatism. At their most feverish, the more excitable among them have theorized that the First Amendment is expendable when it comes to the "war on terrorism," and that speech that tends to "incite" violence in the form of terrorism can be legitimately curtailed. Certainly the Europeans – with recent legislation limiting speech in Britain, and "hate speech" laws endemic throughout the European Union – have made great strides along this road. In America, however, the new authoritarians have, until now, had a tougher row to hoe.
During the 1940s, the Justice Department – obeying the president's command to go after antiwar dissenters – launched a sedition trial that initially sought to indict prominent politicians and activists associated with the America First movement, but the radicals in the administration were reined in after the legal difficulties became all too apparent. The Justice Department wound up going after a group of 30 or so mostly harmless cranks, charging them with initiating a Nazi "conspiracy of ideas." Among the indicted was Lawrence Dennis, the noted writer and intellectual. The trial was a farce from beginning to end.
Under the Justice Department's legal theory, anyone who held views that in any way echoed or agreed with any aspect of Nazi ideology or pronouncements could be said to be engaged in "objectively" aiding the enemy. In this way, all the indicted individuals – many of whom had never laid eyes on their fellow "conspirators" – could be tied together, and then linked to an international network headquartered, naturally enough, in Berlin. These people had bought into "the enemy's propaganda" – and the Roosevelt administration was determined to jail them.
In the end, however, the drama of the trial petered out and descended into parody. Dragging on for months on end, with testimony mainly consisting of government attorneys reading the defendant's propagandistic efforts aloud, the Great Sedition Trial of 1940, which started with plenty of fanfare from the administration's amen corner, soon became a laughingstock, and then – fatally – a bore. When the judge died of a heart attack several months into the trial, the administration thought better of it and pulled in its horns.
One suspects, however, that this administration will not be so easily deterred. To begin with, they won't have to deal with a judge or bad publicity, because the "trial" will be conducted by a military tribunal, operating in secret. Secondly, the defendants will stand trial without benefit of constitutional protections normally afforded to all American citizens. I say "normally" because I am still living in the world before the passage of our modern-day Alien and Sedition Act, at least mentally. But it's a new world, now.
The exact contours of this strange new world are vague, but they are fast coming into painfully clear focus. As the president equates criticism of the Iraq war with "enemy propaganda," and the neocon media blares away at the theme of "dissent = treason" – or, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, "they're not antiwar, they're on the other side" – it isn't hard to imagine that we have a few sedition trials in our future.
My expectations are dire, although this could simply be my own subjective impression, a mood that will pass. I can't help feeling, however, a sense of gathering dread, attached not just to the Military Commissions Act but arising out of the political atmosphere surrounding its passage. I never could understand – in the sense of share – the fear of authority that emanates from my Arab friend every time he sees someone in uniform. Now, however, I am beginning to feel it myself – as we all will.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9779
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zionists and torture in Iraq:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/08/19/the-zionists-and-torture-in-iraq.php
Gitmo prisoners wrapped in Israeli flags post linked at following URL:
Zionists and Torture in Iraq
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/09/the-zionists-and-torture-in-iraq.php
Top British Official To Slam Guantanamo As "Shocking Affront To The Principles Of Democracy" (scroll down to page 1 of the comments section at the following blog entry):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/09/12/top-british-official-to-s_n_29301.html
-
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Oct 06, 2006 5:44 pm; edited 13 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 5:53 pm Post subject: |
| Subject: Finally agree with your position as you were very courageous to go public with such, Mr. Sullivan
To: andrewmsullivan
Mr. Sullivan,
Thank you for having the courage to address what you did on Anderson Cooper's CNN program last night. I don't agree with your support of the war for Israel and Halliburton in Iraq and beyond in the Middle East (with Iran soon to come if the JINSA/CSP/PNAC associated Neocons via Cheney's office can continue to get their way - see the 'Iran: The Next War' URL included below at your convenience), but you were absolutely accurate (excellent) with what you mentioned on Anderson's program as well as what you wrote below as your recent blog entry for www.andrewsullivan.com:
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Heads Up
26 Sep 2006 10:01 pm
I'll be on AC360 tonight, discussing the torture and detention-without-charge bill.
Talking and thinking this over, I'm trying to look on the bright side. The bill allows this president to continue torturing detainees (and possibly innocent ones). But it doesn't actually authorize the torture methods. And it doesn't formally breach Geneva. So "the program" continues in the shadows of Bush's shadow government. The truly disturbing part is that the only criterion for detaining anyone without charges - citizen or non-citizen, at home or anywhere in the world - is the president's discretion. If Rumsfeld decides you're an enemy combatant, you can be whisked away into a black hole, tortured, or have to prove your innocence in a military commission while he insists on your guilt. The "battlefield" is everywhere; and the war is endless. This is not, to put it mildly, what the founding fathers had in mind. It is one of the darkest hours for Western liberty in a very long time. And most conservatives are cheering. Watching habeas corpus go down the plughole is not something I ever thought I would have to contemplate. Well done, Osama. You won this one big time.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You might be interested in the exchange (included in the video short via the following link) with Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1bm2GPoFfg
Additional at following URL:
SCANDAL: 9/11 Commissioners Bowed to Pressure to Suppress Main Motive for the 9/11 Attacks:
http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2006/09/reviews-of-without-precedent-inside.html
Iran: The Next War (for Israel):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/28/iran-the-next-war-for-israel.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 5:54 pm Post subject: |
| From: "Corvuswire"
Subject: Last Chance To Tell House & Senate To Save Habeus Corpus
To: "TruePatriotsUnite" <truepatriotsunite@yahoogroups.com>
Last Chance To Tell House & Senate To Save Habeus Corpus
Please Take Action and Forward, Thank you
TAKE ACTION (please choose "FAX OPTION" because time is of the essence and it has greater impact):
http://actions.pfaw.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=enJHKINrFqG&b=848149&aid=7511
The detainee bill which doesn't allow the fundimental right of habeus corpus to be able to challenge their detention for those accused of aiding terrorists is being VOTED ON later TODAY! The White House also recently quietly broadened the definition of "enemy combatant" to include those financially support charities that give to terrorists and those who fight "US allies".
Human rights lawyers have complained that the definition is TOO BROAD: "This ominously broad definition of enemy combatants would mean that ALMOST ANYONE WHO ACTIVELY OPPOSES THE PRESIDENT OR GOVERNMENT COULD BE LOCKED UP INDEFINITELY," said Bill Goodman, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights
People for the American Way has a message you can send by their fax to Senate and House today.
You could ADD A LINE to say "Please support Specter's Habeus Corpus Amendment "
TAKE ACTION (please choose "FAX OPTION" because time is of the essence and it has greater impact):
http://actions.pfaw.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=enJHKINrFqG&b=848149&aid=7511
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http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 9:26 pm Post subject: |
| House approves bill on terror detainees
By ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY,
Associated Press Writer 6 minutes ago
The House approved legislation Wednesday giving the Bush administration authority to interrogate and prosecute terrorism detainees, moving President Bush to the edge of a pre-election victory with a key piece of his anti-terror plan.
The mostly party-line 253-168 vote in the Republican-run House came shortly after senators agreed to limit debate on their own nearly identical bill, all but assuring its passage on Thursday.
Republican leaders are hoping to work out differences and send Bush a final version before leaving town this weekend to campaign for the Nov. 7 congressional elections.
For nearly two weeks the GOP have been embarrassed as the White House and rebellious Republican senators have fought publicly over whether Bush's plan would give him too much authority. But they struck a compromise last Thursday, and Republicans are hoping approval will bolster their effort to cast themselves as strong on national security, a marquee issue this election year.
House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, all but dared Democrats to vote against the legislation.
"Will my Democrat friends work with Republicans to give the president the tools he needs to continue to stop terrorist attacks before they happen, or will they vote to force him to fight the terrorists with one arm tied behind his back?" he asked just before members cast their ballots.
Democrats opposed the bill by about a five-to-one margin, with many wanting to tone down the powers it would give to Bush and the limits it would impose on terror-war suspects' abilities to defend themselves during trials.
Said Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio: "This bill is everything we don't believe in."
The legislation would establish a military court system to prosecute terror suspects, a response to the Supreme Court ruling last June that Congress' blessing was necessary. While the bill would grant defendants more legal rights than they had under the administration's old system, it nevertheless would eliminate rights usually granted in civilian and military courts.
The measure also provides extensive definitions of war crimes such as torture, rape and biological experiments — but gives Bush broad authority to decide which other techniques U.S. interrogators can legally use. The provisions are intended to protect CIA interrogators from being prosecuted for war crimes.
With elections just weeks away, the debate over the legal handling of terrorists was often partisan with some Democrats contending the bill would approve torture.
"All Americans want to hold terrorists accountable, but if we try to redefine the nature of torture, whisk people into secret detention facilities and use secret evidence to convict them in special courts, our actions do in fact embolden our enemies," said Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va.
Others vehemently opposed language that would give the president wide latitude to interpret international standards of prisoner treatment and bar detainees from going to federal court to protest their treatment and detention under the right of habeas corpus. Supporters of the bill have said eliminating habeas corpus was intended to keep detainees from flooding federal courts with appeals.
The bill also gives the president the ability to interpret international standards for prisoner treatment when an act does not fall under the definition of a war crime, such as rape and torture.
"It gives too much leeway to the president," said Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa. "And I think when you tamper with the Geneva Conventions ... you hurt our ability to protect the troops."
Republicans defended the measure as sound.
"Is it perfect? No," said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (news, bio, voting record), R-Fla. "Do we have an obligation to pass it? Yes."
Republicans said time was critical so that terrorists could be brought to justice.
Lawmakers shrugged off multiple disruptions from citizens watching the floor debate from inside the Capitol.
As the House finished its bill, Senate leaders agreed to limit debate on their version of the measure. Four Democrats and Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania were given opportunities to offer amendments in the Senate, but all were expected to be rejected.
"Until Congress passes this legislation, terrorists ... cannot be tried for war crimes in the United States and the United States risks fighting a blind war without adequate intelligence," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. "That's simply unacceptable."
One amendment by Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., defeated 54-43, would have replaced the Senate measure with the version maverick GOP senators pushed through the Armed Services Committee two weeks ago before striking a deal with Bush. The White House had promised to block that committee bill, which was written by GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona, John Warner of Virginia and others, contending it would force an end to the CIA interrogation program.
Specter's amendment would strike the provision in the bill barring detainees from filing habeas corpus petitions | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2006 7:12 am Post subject: Are You an Enemy Combatant? |
| http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=576
Are You an Enemy Combatant?
Wednesday September 27th 2006, 1:08 pm
Slowly but surely, the Bush neocons and their perfidious allies in Congress are cobbling together a secret police apparatus that will eventually mirror Hitler’s Gestapo, Stalin’s NKVD, East Germany’s Stasi, and Chile’s Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia, to cite but a few examples.
“The United States could detain more foreigners as enemy combatants under legislation Congress will debate this week after a last-minute change in the bill, lawmakers said on Tuesday,” reports Reuters. “Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a key negotiator on the bill, said enemy combatants would now include those who provided money, weapons and other support for terrorist groups as well as those involved in actual operations.”
Of course, many would argue that the key word here is “foreigners” and this legislation poses no threat to Americans. However, considering previous comments of “key negotiator” Lindsey Graham, we can likely expect this legislation to be used against “fifth columnists,” as the good senator from South Carolina deems all who oppose the neocon doctrine of forever war.
As Graham told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, “the administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue fifth column movements…. And let me tell folks who are watching what a fifth column movement is. It is a movement known to every war where American citizens will sympathize with the enemy and collaborate with the enemy. And it’s happened in every war,” never mind that this particular war is undeclared. Naturally, for the neocons, simply opposing the “war” in Iraq and the parallel “war” against terrorism at home is an act of sympathizing with the enemy, that is to say “al-Qaeda,” the black op pseudo gang crafted by the CIA and the Pentagon.
“Graham said U.S. citizens could not be deemed enemy combatants under the bill, but several human rights advocates said the language was so broad that they believed Americans could be detained under it. The Center for Constitutional Rights said even attorneys representing Guantanamo inmates could be deemed enemy combatants,” Reuters continues.
Of course, as everything changed on September 11, 2001, everything will change for the worse once again after the neocons shock and awe Iran, the Iranians retaliate by blocking the Strait of Hormuz with flaming oil tankers, thus sending oil prices through the ceiling and precipitating a world-wide economic crisis.
More than ever, our “way of life” will be on the line and Bush and the neocons will demand you are either “with us or with the terrorists” and the KBR-Halliburton camps will fill up with Graham’s “fellow travelers” who “sympathize with the enemy and collaborate with the enemy” simply due to the fact they will not be calling for mass murder and frantically waving their little plastic American flags made by slaves in China. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2006 6:01 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/report.asp?ObjID=zQrItml3Gv&Content=845
Subject: President Given Undue Power to Silence Critics
ATTORNEYS FOR GUANTANAMO DETAINEES COULD BE DETAINED AS ENEMY COMBATANTS UNDER NEW LEGISLATION
President Given Undue Power to Silence Critics
Synopsis
On September 26, 2006, attorneys for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) determined that what appears to be the final version of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 could allow the government to detain the attorneys themselves as 'enemy combatants.' CCR Legal Director Bill Goodman said: "This ominously broad definition of enemy combatants would mean that almost anyone who actively opposes the President or the government could be locked up indefinitely. This bill makes a mockery of the rule of law."
The current version of the Military Commissions redefines an "unlawful enemy combatant" (UEC) so broadly that it could include anyone who organizes a march against the war in Iraq. The bill defines a UEC as "a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" or anyone who "has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense of the United States." The definition makes no reference to citizenship and therefore could be read to include any number of individuals, including:
CCR attorneys and other habeas counsel, Federal Public Defenders and military defense counsel for detainees at Guantánamo Bay
Any person who has given $5 to a charity working with orphans in Afghanistan that turns out to be associated in some fashion with someone who may be a member of the Taliban
The bill also currently includes provisions so sweeping that they strip U.S. courts of jurisdiction over habeas petitions by any non-citizen detained by the government anywhere. Because there is no geographic limitation in the bill's language, it would allow the President to detain any non-citizen without their ever having the chance to challenge their detention in court: "No court... shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination." Examples of people who could be detained indefinitely with no access to a court include:
A foreign tourist wearing an anti-Bush t-shirt at the Statue of Liberty
A protester at an immigration rally who has lived in the U.S. since she was six months old and is a lawful, permanent resident
CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren said: "This new version of the legislation grants the President frightening power to silence his critics. Habeas corpus is, like voting, one of the fundamental rights of democracy. The President's efforts to exercise the privilege of kings must be turned back, before the so-called 'war on terror' turns on our own citizens." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2006 6:51 pm Post subject: |
| BLACK THURSDAY FOR AMERICA / SEVEN DAGGERS IN THE HEART OF JUSTICE
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.
Remember this day well, September 28th 2006 ~ for it is the day that America sold out on its constitution and the light of democracy inorder to win a mid-term election.
The Administrations Detainee Investigation Bill, crafted by Darth Vader himself Dick Cheney, has just pushed through laws " that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws - while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. "
This bill plunges seven daggers into the heart of our American Justice system and all Americans should be alarmingly aware that we are now on the very edge of Fascism.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) sums up many American's, including my concern, saying, "This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American."
This New York Times editorial correctly says we are rushing off a cliff ~ and identifies the seven daggers that have severely wounded our constitution.
Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2006/09/29.html
Rushing off a Cliff
The New York Times | Editorial
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092806D.shtml
Thursday 28 September 2006
Here's what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election:
The Bush administration uses Republicans' fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws - while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists.
Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads.
Our democracy is the big loser.
Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists - because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That's pure propaganda.
Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.
It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush's shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency.
It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.
Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies.
Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.
These Are Some of the Bill's Biggest Flaws:
Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of "illegal enemy combatant" in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.
The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret - there's no requirement that this list be published.
Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.
Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.
Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable - already a contradiction in terms - and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.
Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr.Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.
Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.
There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine.
If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.
We don't blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they'll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won't remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.
They'll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio www.conscioustalk.net
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Sep 29, 2006 11:51 pm; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 6:56 am Post subject: US Senate backs terror trial bill |
| US Senate backs terror trial bill
The US Senate has passed controversial legislation endorsing President George W Bush's proposals to interrogate and prosecute foreign terror suspects.
The 65-34 vote followed Thursday's backing by the House of Representatives for almost identical legislation.
The new bill could be signed into law by the president within a few days.
Under the new legislation, special tribunals will be set up to question and try several hundred suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Correspondents say the new legislation is seen as an important signal by the Bush administration of its tough stance in its "war on terror" in the run-up to Congressional elections in November.
But human rights activists have expressed concern that the new tribunals might not give the same protection to suspects as the existing civil courts.
Legal standards
The legislation is a response to a Supreme Court ruling in June that the original military tribunals set up by the Bush administration to prosecute detainees were in violation of American and international law.
The new measures provide defendants with more legal rights than they had under the old system, but it eliminates their right to challenge their detention and treatment in federal court.
This longstanding tradition of our country about to be abandoned here is one of the great, great mistakes that I think history will record
Democratic Senator Chris Dodd
The bill forbids treatment of detainees that would constitute war crimes - such as torture, rape and biological experiments - but gives the president the authority to decide which other techniques interrogators can use.
However, during a heated debate, Democratic senators accused the administration of tearing up 200 years of legal standards by removing detainees rights such as habeus corpus - the right to challenge their own detention.
"This longstanding tradition of our country about to be abandoned here is one of the great, great mistakes that I think history will record," Democrat Chris Dodd told the Senate.
Others backed claims by human rights groups that fear that the complex set of rules will allow harsh techniques that border on torture - such as sleep deprivation.
"This bill gives an administration that lobbied for torture exactly what it wanted," said Senator John Kerry.
McCain backing
Republican Senator Kit Bond responded by accusing the Democrats of being soft on terrorism.
"Now some want to tie the hands of our terror fighters," he said. "They want to take away the tools we use to fight terror. To handcuff us. To hamper us in our fight to protect our families."
And Republican Senator John McCain, a former prisoner-of-war himself who had been critical of the Bush administration's earlier policy on foreign terror suspects, welcomed the bill's passage.
"I think what you'll see now after the president signs this bill is convening of tribunals to address these cases which are long overdue; a bolstering of the Geneva Conventions because of our renewed commitment to it; and I am convinced that because of this legislation certain, quote, techniques, unquote, such as water boarding, prolonged stress positions, long, extreme sleep deprivation, will not be allowed."
As a result of the Senate vote, the military tribunals could resume under the new guidelines in early 2007.
But there is the possibility that this new legislation could also be challenged in the Supreme Court.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/5390848.stm
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Sep 29, 2006 8:23 pm; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 8:22 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/29/150217
Friday, September 29th, 2006
Headlines for September 29, 2006
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- Detainee Bill Goes to White House Following Senate Approval
- House Re-Writes Wiretap Laws for Bush Spy Program
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Detainee Treatment Bill Goes to White House Following Senate Approval
The Senate has agreed to give President Bush extraordinary power to detain and try prisoners in the so-called war on terror. The legislation strips detainees of the right to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge their own detention or treatment. It gives the president the power to indefinitely detain anyone it deems to have provided material support to anti-U.S. hostilities. Secret and coerced evidence could be used to try detainees held in U.S. military prisons. The bill also immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for torturing detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year. The Senate passed the measure sixty five to thirty four. Twelve Democrats joined the Republican majority. The House passed virtually the same legislation on Wednesday. Legal groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, are already preparing to challenge the constitutionality of the law in court.
House Re-Writes Wiretap Laws for Bush Spy Program
In other news from Capitol Hill, the House has voted to re-write the country’s domestic wiretap laws to accommodate the Bush administration’s warrantless spying. The bill would change current law requiring a court order for the monitoring of incoming or outgoing communications in the United States. Court orders would be required only if a phone call or e-mail occurred within the US. Critics say that will lead to increased surveillance of citizens without court approval. A competing bill awaits a Senate vote.
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/29/150254
Friday, September 29th, 2006
“A Total Rollback Of Everything This Country Has Stood For”: Sen. Patrick Leahy Blasts Congressional Approval of Detainee Bill
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The Senate has agreed to give President Bush extraordinary power to detain and try prisoners in the so-called war on terror. The legislation strips detainees of the right to challenge their own detention and gives the President the power to detain them indefinitely. The bill also immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for torturing detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year. We get reaction from Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. [includes rush transcript]
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On Capitol Hill, the Senate has agreed to give President Bush extraordinary power to detain and try prisoners in the so-called war on terror. The editors of the New York Times described the law as tyrannical. They said its passage marks a low point in American democracy and that it is our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The legislation strips detainees of the right to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge their own detention or treatment. It gives the president the power to indefinitely detain anyone it deems to have provided material support to anti-U.S. hostilities. Secret and coerced evidence could be used to try detainees held in U.S. military prisons. The bill also immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for torturing detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year.
The Senate passed the measure sixty five to thirty four. Twelve Democrats joined the Republican majority. The House passed virtually the same legislation on Wednesday. Legal groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, are already preparing to challenge the constitutionality of the law in court.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. See Senator Leahy’s statement on the detainee bill here.
Michael Ratner. President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont condemned the legislation from the floor of the Senate.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: It grieves me to think that three decades in this body that I stand here in the Senate, knowing that we’re thinking of doing this. It is so wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American. It is designed to ensure the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power. The Supreme Court said, ‘You abused your power.’ He said, ‘Ha, we’ll fix that. We have a rubber stamp, a rubber stamp, Congress, that will just set that aside and give us power that nobody, no king or anybody else set foot in this land, ever thought of having.’
AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy speaking Thursday prior to the vote. He joins us now on the telephone. Welcome to Democracy Now!
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Thank you. It’s good to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us, Senator. Now, if you could explain exactly what this bill that the Senate has just approved with a number of Democrats joining with the Republicans, what exactly it does.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: First off, as you probably gathered from what I was saying on the floor, it’s a terrible bill. It removes as many checks and balances as possible so that any president can basically set the law, determine what laws they’ll follow and what laws they’ll break and not have anybody be able to question them on it.
In this case, the particular section I was speaking about at that point was the so-called habeas protection. Now, habeas corpus was first brought in the Magna Carta in the 1200s. It’s been a tenet of our rights as Americans. And what they're saying is that if you’re an alien, even if you’re in the United States legally, a legal alien, may have been here ten years, fifteen years, twenty years legally, if a determination is made by anybody in the executive that you may be a threat, they can hold you indefinitely, they could put you in Guantanamo, not bring any charges, not allow you to have a lawyer, not allow you to ever question what they’ve done, even in cases, as they now acknowledge, where they have large numbers of people in Guantanamo who are there by mistake, that they put you -- say you’re a college professor who has written on Islam or for whatever reason, and they lock you up. You’re not even allowed to question it. You’re not allowed to have a lawyer, not allowed to say, “Wait a minute, you’ve got the wrong person. Or you’ve got -- the one you’re looking for, their name is spelled similar to mine, but it’s not me.” It makes no difference. You have no recourse whatsoever.
This goes so much against everything we've ever done. Now, we’ve had some on the other side say, ‘Well, they're trying to give rights to terrorists.’ No, we’re just saying that the United States will follow the rules it has before and will protect rights of people. We’re not giving any new rights. We’re just saying that if, for example, if you picked up the wrong person, you at least have a chance to get somebody independent to make that judgment.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, on this issue of habeas corpus, I want to play a clip from yesterday’s Senate debate and have you respond. This is Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
SEN. JEFF SESSIONS: It was never, ever, ever, ever intended or imagined that during the War of 1812, that it British soldiers were captured burning of the Capitol of the United States, as they did, that they would have been given habeas corpus rights. It was never thought to be. habeas corpus was applied to citizens, really, at that time, and I believe that that’s so plain as to be without dispute.
AMY GOODMAN: Republican Senator Jeff Sessions. Senator Leahy, your response.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Well, I wish it was as plain as he says. Of course, in the Hamdan decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it very clear that it is available in somebody captured. In a case like what he was talking about, if somebody had been captured there and held in prison, and they said, “You have the wrong person,” they could at least raise it. And you also have, of course, under the Constitution, that habeas can be suspended if there is an invasion, if there is an insurrection. We have neither case here. Even the most conservative Republican legal thinkers have said this is not a case to suspend habeas corpus.
You know, they can set up all the straw men they want, but the fact is this allows the Bush administration to act totally arbitrarily with no court or anybody else to raise any questions about it. It allows them to cover up any mistakes they make. And this goes beyond just marking everything “secret,” as they do now. Every mistake they make, they just mark it “secret.” But this is even worse. This means somebody could be locked up for five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. They have the wrong person, and they have no rights to be able to say, “Hey guys, you’ve got the wrong person.” It goes against everything that we’ve done as Americans.
You know, when things like this were done during the Cold War in some of the Iron Curtain countries, I remember all the speeches on the Senate floor, Democrats and Republicans alike saying, “How horrible this is! Thank God we don’t do things like this in America.” I wish they’d go back and listen to some of their speeches at that time.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, this was not a close vote: 65 to 34. The twelve Democrats who joined with the Republicans, except for Senator Chafee of Rhode Island, the twelve Democrats are Tom Carper of Delaware, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, as well as Senator Menendez of New Jersey, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Senator Pryor of Arkansas, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. They joined with the Republicans. You are working very hard to get a Democratic majority in the Senate in these next elections and in Congress overall. What difference would it make?
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: In their defense, all but one of them voted with me when we moved to strike the habeas provisions out. That was the Specter-Leahy amendment, and we had, I think it was, 51-48, I think, was the final vote on that. All but one of the Democrats joined with me on that. If we had gotten three or four more Republicans, we would have at least struck out the habeas provision. There are -- you know, I --
AMY GOODMAN: But they voted for this bill without that, with the habeas provision being stripped out.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: I’ll let each one speak for themselves. The fact that the Republicans were virtually lockstep in it, though, should be what I would look at. And maybe we’re blessed in Vermont --
AMY GOODMAN: But that larger question, that larger question of, what would be any different if Democrats were in power?
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: For one thing, we would have been asking the questions about what’s been going on for six years. We’ve had a rubberstamp congress that automatically has given the President anything he wants, because nobody’s asked questions. Nobody’s asked the questions that are in the Woodward book that’s coming out this weekend, where you find all the mistakes were made because they will acknowledge no mistakes. The Republicans control both the House and the Senate. They will not call hearings. They won’t try to find out how did Halliburton walk off with billions of dollars in cost overruns in Iraq. Why did the Bush administration refuse to send the body armor our troops needed in Iraq? Why did they send inferior material?
And, of course, the two questions that the Congress would not ask, because the Republicans won’t allow it, is, why did 9/11 happen on George Bush's watch when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen? And secondly, when they had Osama bin Laden cornered, why didn’t they get him? Had there been an independent congress, one that could ask questions, these questions would have been asked years ago. We’d be much better off. We would have had the answers to that. I think with those answers, we would not have the fiasco we have in Iraq today, we would have caught Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan would be a more stable place, and the world would be safer.
AMY GOODMAN: Was President Bush on Capitol Hill yesterday?
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Oh, yes, indeed. You can always tell, because virtually the whole city comes to a screeching halt with the motorcades, although it’s sort of like that when Dick Cheney comes up to give orders to the Republican Caucus. He comes up with a 15 to 25 vehicle caravan. It’s amazing to watch.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was Bush doing yesterday on Capitol Hill?
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Oh, he was just telling them they had to vote this way. They had to vote. They couldn’t hand him a defeat. They had to go with him They had to trust him. It’ll get us past the election. We had offered a -- you know, five years ago, I and others had suggested there is a way to have military tribunals for the detainees, where it would meet all our standards and basic international standards. They rejected that. And now, five weeks before the elections, they say, ‘Oh, yes, we need something like that.’ No, basically what he was saying to them, don’t ask questions, get us past the elections, because if you ask questions, the answers are going to be embarrassing, and it could hurt you in the elections.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, we have to break for one minute. We ask you to stay with us. We’ll also be joined by CCR president, Center for Constitutional Rights president, Michael Ratner.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is president there. Michael Ratner, your response, as we speak with the senator about this groundbreaking legislation?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, I think Senator Leahy really got it right. I mean, what this bill authorizes is really the authority of an authoritarian despot to the president. I mean, what it gives him is the power, as the senator said, to detain any person anywhere in the world, citizen or non-citizen, whether living in the United States or anywhere else. I mean, what kind of authority is that? No checks and balances. Nothing. Now, if you’re a citizen, you still get your right of habeas corpus. If you’re a non-citizen, as the senator pointed out, you’re completely finished. Picked up, legal permanent resident in the United States, detained forever, no writ of habeas corpus.
It was incredibly shocking. I watched that vote yesterday. I had been in Washington for two or three days trying to line up the votes for Senator Leahy’s amendment that would have restored habeas. We thought we had them. We lost at 51 to 48. I have to tell you, Amy, I just -- I basically broke down at that point. I had been working like a dog on this thing. And there I saw the President come to Capitol Hill and persuade two or three or four of the Republicans who we thought we had to vote to strip habeas corpus from this legislation. It was a shock. I mean, an utter shock.
So you have this ability to detain anyone anywhere in the world. You deny them the writ of habeas corpus. And when they're in detention, you have a right to do all kinds of coercive techniques on them: hooding, stripping, anything really the president says goes, short of what he defines as torture. And then, if you are lucky enough to be tried, and I say “lucky enough,” because, for example, the 460 people the Center represents at Guantanamo may never get trials. In fact, only ten have even been charged. Those people, they’ve been stripped of their right to go to court and test their detention by habeas corpus. They’re just -- they’ve been there five years. Right now, under this legislation, they could be there forever.
Let me tell you, this bill will be struck down and struck down badly. But meanwhile, for two more years or whatever it’s going to take us to litigate it, we’re going to be litigating what was a basic right, as the senator said, since the Magna Carta of 1215, the right of any human being to test their detention in court. It’s one of the saddest days I’ve seen. You’ve called it “groundbreaking,” Amy. It’s really Constitution-breaking. It’s Constitution-shattering. It shatters really basic rights that we've had for a very long time.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, how long have you been a senator?
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: I’ve been there 32 years. I have to absolutely agree with what I just heard. I mean, this is -- it’s Kafka. But it’s more than that. It’s just a total rollback of everything this country has stood for. I mean, you have 100 people, very privileged, members of the Senate voting this way and with no realization of what it would be like if you were the one who was picked up. Maybe you’re guilty, but quite often, as we’ve seen, purely by accident and then held for years.
You know, I was a prosecutor for eight years. I prosecuted an awful lot of people, sent a lot of people to prison. But I did it arguing that everybody's rights had to be protected, because mistakes are often made. You want to make sure that if you’re prosecuting somebody, you’re prosecuting the right person. Here, they don't care whether mistakes are made or not.
And you have to stand up. I mean, it was a Vermonter -- you go way back in history -- it was a Vermonter who stood up against the Alien and Sedition Act, Matthew Lyon. He was prosecuted on that, put in jail, as a congressman, put in jail. And Vermont showed what they thought of these unconstitutional laws. We in Vermont reelected him, and eventually the laws fell down. There was another Vermonter, Ralph Flanders, who stood up to Joseph McCarthy and his reign of fear and stopped that. I mean, you have to stand. What has happened, here we are, a great powerful good nation, and we’re running scared. We’re willing to set aside all our values and running scared. What an example that is to the rest of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: You gave an example, Senator Leahy, when you talked about what would happen here. And, I mean, even the fact that “habeas corpus” is in Latin, I think, distances people. They don’t quite understand what this is about.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: “Bring the body.”
AMY GOODMAN: You gave a very -- sorry?
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: “Bring the body.”
AMY GOODMAN: You gave a very graphic example. You said, “Imagine you’re a law-abiding lawful permanent resident. In your spare time you do charitable fundraising for international relief agencies that lend a hand in disasters.” Take that story from there, the example you used.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: You send money. You don’t care which particular religious group or civic group it is. They’re doing humanitarian work. You send the money. It turns out that one of them is giving money to various Islamic causes that the United States is concerned about. They come to your house. Maybe somebody has called into one of these anonymous tipster lines, saying, “You know, this Amy Goodman. I’m somewhat worried about her, simply because she’s going -- and I think I’ve seen some Muslim-looking people coming to her house.” They come in there, and they say, “We want to talk to you.” They bring you downtown. You’re a legal alien, legal resident here. And you say, “Well, look, I’ve got my rights. I’d like to talk to a lawyer.” They say, “No, no. You don’t have any rights.” “Well, then I’m not going to talk to you.” “Well, then now we’re twice as concerned about you. We’re going to spirit you down to Guantanamo, and we’ll get back to in a few years.” And, I mean, that could actually happen under this. And these are not far-fetched ideas, as the professor knows. He’s seen similar things.
And with that, and I would love to continue this conversation, unfortunately I’ve got to go back to my day job, back to the judiciary. I think this is going to go down as one of those black marks in the Congress. You know, I wasn’t there at the time, but virtually everybody voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution. When I came to the Senate, you couldn’t find anybody there who thought that was a good idea. They knew it was a terrible mistake. You had members of congress supported the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II. Everybody knows that was a terrible mistake now. That day will come when everybody will look at this and say, “What were we thinking?”
AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Leahy, thanks very much for joining us. We only have about 30 seconds. Michael Ratner, president of Center for Constitutional Rights, your final comment on this.
MICHAEL RATNER: This was really, as the senator said, probably the worst piece of legislation I’ve seen in my 40-year career as a lawyer. The idea, and even the example Senator Leahy gave, of someone being picked up, you don’t need anything. The President can decide tomorrow that you, Amy, or me, or particularly a non-citizen, can be picked up, put in jail forever, essentially, and if you're a non-citizen in Guantanamo or anywhere else in the world, you never get a chance to go to court to test your detention. It’s an incredible thing, and any senator who voted for this, in my view, is essentially guilty, guilty, guilty of undermining basic fundamental rights and may well be guilty of war crimes, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, thanks very much for joining us, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 9:29 pm Post subject: |
| U.S. terrorism trials face court challenges
By James Vicini
Sat Sep 30, 9:26 AM ET
New military trial rules for terrorism suspects that President George W. Bush endorsed and Congress approved will draw vigorous court challenges and could be struck down for violating rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, critics and legal experts said.
The legal battle will likely be ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which could be troubled the rules unconstitutionally restrict the suspects' rights, they said.
They cited the bill's provisions that strip foreign suspects of the right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts, the broad definition of enemy combatants and what they described as unfair rules for military trials, including some use of hearsay and coerced evidence.
"I have no doubt that this is headed for the Supreme Court. Once again, the administration has overreached, and that makes it more likely that the court will strike it down," Stanford University law professor Jenny Martinez said.
"It allows the use of coerced evidence, which our laws have rejected since the founding of this country. It also denies noncitizens, including those in the U.S., access to court for fundamental human rights violations like torture," she said.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse defended the legislation as "plainly constitutional" and denied it foreclosed all judicial review.
'FAIR AND EFFECTIVE TRIALS'
"The military commissions established under the act provide the accused with the fundamental rights that will ensure fair and effective trials that fully satisfy all applicable standards under the Geneva Convention and our Constitution," he said.
The Supreme Court, by a 5-3 vote on June 29, struck down as illegal Bush's original system of military trials established after the September 11 attacks for prisoners at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The ruling said the administration could either rely on the traditional U.S. court-martial system or seek congressional approval of rules to prosecute and interrogate the prisoners. The issue has become a major political battle before the November 7 elections in which control of Congress is at stake.
Democrats and even some Republican lawmakers said taking away the prisoners' right to have habeas corpus hearings in federal court was unconstitutional and would be struck down by the Supreme Court. The experts agreed.
"I believe that the court will conclude that the habeas- stripping provision is unconstitutional," said Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington attorney and military law expert who is president of the National Institute of Military Justice.
The bill expands the definition of "enemy combatants" to those who provide weapons, money and other support to terrorist groups. It defines conspiracy as a war crime, although four Supreme Court members in the majority in June said it was not a war crime.
"Just because Congress puts a stamp of approval on something, it does not necessarily mean it will pass constitutional muster before the Supreme Court," said Scott Silliman, a Duke University law professor and executive director at its Center on Law Ethics and National Security.
He predicted the legality of the new rules would be a close issue for the courts. At the Supreme Court, it could come down to Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote with four liberals and four conservatives.
Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners, vowed to challenge the removal of the habeas corpus rights.
Ratner said such an opportunity could arise when the administration moves to dismiss pending Guantanamo cases in order to apply the new rules. Defense lawyers could then respond by challenging the rules' constitutionality. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
