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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights this morning filed a lawsuit
in federal court against several Obama officials, including Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus. The suit is
brought on behalf of the survivors of three American citizens killed in
Yemen by the U.S. Government — killed specifically by the CIA and the
Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command — with no due process and
far from any battlefield: Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan (killed together
in a drone strike) and Awlaki’s teenaged son Abdulrahman (killed two
weeks later).
The suit alleges that the killing of these Americans
violates their Constitutional rights (including their Fifth Amendment
right to due process) because “the United States was not engaged in an
armed conflict with or within Yemen” and “these killings rely on vague
legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never
presented to the courts.”
Glenn: The most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime
in essence, the obama administration is saying that, if, in their infinite wisdom, they decided i was a threat to my country, they could deliberate in private about my fate and, without even giving me a chance to face my accusers or, even more egregiously, without informing me that the deliberation was taking place or even that i had been declared a threat, i could find myself walking down the street and suddenly be unceremoniously murdered in cold blood in broad daylight...
Here we have the Obama administration asserting what I genuinely
believe, without hyperbole, is the most extremist government
interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime — that
the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that the State cannot deprive you of your life without “due process of law” is fulfilled by completely secret, oversight-free “internal deliberations by the executive branch” — and it’s now barely something anyone (including me) even notices when The New York Times reports it (as the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer asked yesterday: “These Dems who think executive process is due process: Where were they when Bush needed help with warrantless wiretapping?” — or his indefinite detention scheme?)
[...]
Every year that these assaults on core liberties are entrenched and
expanded further — the Firth Amendment guarantee of due process “can be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch” –
the more normalized they become, the more invulnerable to challenge
they are, the more unlikely it is that they will ever be reversed. In
2006, Al Gore gave a speech
on the Bush/Cheney assault on the Constitution and asked: “If the
president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens
without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration,
kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?” What prompted Gore’s denunciation was mere eavesdropping and detention
without judicial review. That’s no longer controversial. Now we have
this question: if the U.S. President can openly declare the power to
order even the nation’s own citizens executed by the CIA in total
secrecy, without charges or a whiff of transparency or oversight, what
can’t he do?
an online acquaintance posted the following yesterday...
Reading this crap makes me want to leave the planet as soon as
possible.
The defense authorization bill that Congress passed and President Obama had threatened to veto will soon become law, a fact that should be met with public outrage. Human Rights Watch President Kenneth Roth, responding to Obama’s craven collapse on the bill’s most controversial provision, said, “By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed “the most recent changes give the president additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”
What rubbish, coming from a president who taught constitutional law. The point is not to hock our civil liberty to the discretion of the president, but rather to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain the highest office.
Sadly this flagrant subversion of the constitutionally guaranteed right to due process of law was opposed in the Senate by only seven senators, including libertarian Republican Rand Paul and progressive Independent Bernie Sanders.
That onerous provision of the defense budget bill, much discussed on the Internet but far less so in the mass media, assumes a permanent war against terrorism that extends the battlefield to our homeland. It reeks of a militarized state that threatens the foundations of our republican form of government.
[...]
What’s alarming is ... the ease with which an otherwise deadlocked Congress that can’t manage minimal funding for job creation and unemployment relief can find the money to fund at Cold War levels a massive sophisticated arsenal to defeat an enemy that no longer exists.
Throwing $662 billion, plus hundreds of billions more in non-Pentagon “security” programs, at what that other great-general-turned-president, Dwight Eisenhower, condemned as the “military-industrial complex,” with its tentacles in every congressional district, is an act of absurdity in a world bereft of a serious military challenge to the United States. Not even the best-funded terrorists can afford aircraft carriers.
[...]
We had every right to expect President Obama to stick to his word and veto this bill, not as a means of forcing a much needed bigger cut in government waste, but more urgently because its assault on the Constitution’s requirement of due process represents a direct threat to the freedom of the American people every bit as menacing as any we face from foreign enemies.
Historians will debate the exact date the Constitution no longer ruled America. When did it die in our hearts? When during the long slow decay did we pass from self-rule into oligarchy? When did we lose so many freedoms so that we were no longer a free people?
I believe that we passed that point this week. We need to think about our future. All paths from here lead into darkness of oligarchy; that seems unavoidable. Some of these paths may go up into the light again. Perhaps to a revived Second Republic, applying the paddles to shock Constitution back to life. Perhaps to a Third Republic.
[...]
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is its core. Without its protections the rest of document are little but pleasant sentiments.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Congress has in effect repealed these words, allowing the Executive to declare guilt (in secret), and jail indefinitely or execute — using the military. Be a good quiet peon and you have no reason to worry.
His presidency now a smoldering memory, Harper's contributing editor Scott Horton thinks that perhaps he wasn't kidding after all. In a March 3 column, Horton extrapolated on "George W. Bush's Disposable Constitution," expanding on his thoughts during a Thursday broadcast of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
Since the Monday release of nine previously-secret Bush administration legal memos claiming that the president has the power to ignore the Constitution when fighting terrorism, experts have almost unanimously denounced both their legal reasoning and their conclusions.
"These memos provide the very definition of tyranny," Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday. "These memos include everything that a petty despot would want."
Olbermann's Thursday guest was just as strident as Turley in his view of the prior administration.
"We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship," wrote Horton in his Harper's article.
I think essentially that the Leahy commission is an excuse for non-prosecution. It’s essentially saying, “Let’s put some stuff on the public record. Let’s immunize people. And then,” as he even said, “let’s turn the page and go forward.” That’s really an excuse for non-prosecution. And in the face of what we’ve seen in this country, which is essentially a coup d’etat, a presidential dictatorship and torture, it’s essentially a mouse-like reaction to what we’ve seen. And it’s being set up really by a liberal establishment that is really, in some ways, in many ways, on the same page as the establishment that actually carried out these laws. And it’s saying, “OK, let’s expose it, and then let’s move on.”
[...]
[T]here’s a lot of pressure in this country right now for prosecutions. I mean, the polls indicate that people want to see a criminal investigation. We’ve had open—open and notorious admissions of waterboarding by people like Cheney. And we know that waterboarding is torture, even according to Obama.
So, how do you diffuse that pressure? And one way you diffuse it is you set up a, quote, “truth commission” that’s going to give immunity to people. And then, as Leahy himself says—the word he used, I think, is that he objects to those “fixated” on prosecution. Well, you know, it’s a legal requirement that you prosecute torturers in your country. And yet, he calls us “fixated” on it and wants to make this excuse.
[...]
This is not about mistakes. This is about fundamental lawbreaking, about the disposal of the Constitution, and about the end of treaties. So I think, actually, that Leahy’s current proposal is extremely dangerous.
ratner goes on to spell out in detail the horrifying extent of what had been put in place under the bush administration...
[W]hat we see in these memos—and I recommend them to everybody, because you read these, you are seeing essentially the legal underpinnings of a police state or a dictatorship of the president. There’s no doubt about it. That’s what it is, and it’s not theoretical. ... [W]hat happened here was one of these memos said the military could operate in the United States, and operate in the United States despite the Posse Comitatus law, which prohibits the military from operating in the United States. And when it operates—this is really extraordinary—they can arrest and detain—“arrest” is not the right word—kidnap anyone they want and send them to a detention place anywhere in the world without any kind of law.
And then, on top of that, they can disregard the First Amendment. So this conversation we’re having right now, they could say, “Well, this is harmful to the national security of the United States”—that’s what these memos say—“this type of conversation is harmful, and we can ban this conversation.” And then they could put the military at the door to the firehouse and come in and say the Fourth Amendment, the one that protects us against unlawful searches, that the military could walk in here, search all of us and see if we have anything they don’t like on us. So, no First Amendment, no Fourth Amendment, no Fifth Amendment—essentially, the end of the Constitution and 225 years of constitutional history.
yes, it's hair-raising stuff, but nothing that folks like me and and number of others have been saying all along... something else that many of us have been saying is that we simply MUST have accountability for these shocking abuses... nothing else than facing facts square in the face is going to put this behind us...
International law applies to ALL the nations of the world, including the U.S. and George Bush
in a lengthy, well-researched, and well-written post in democratic underground, that co-blogger mettle was kind enough to point me to, poster time for change offers a comprehensive view of the prospects for holding george bush accountable for his crimes, despite the almost certain fact that it will not happen as a result of action taken in the united states...
U.S. law is irrelevant to the charge of war crimes or crimes against humanity
No doubt one major reason for George Bush’s vehemence in pushing through the Military Commissions Act (MCA) was to immunize himself against punishment for the many crimes he has committed. By legalizing Bush’s abuse of his prisoners, that MCA violates our Fifth and Sixth Amendment guarantees to due process and a fair trial, as well as the Geneva Convention requirements for the treatment of prisoners of war. Bush’s attempt to nullify the Congressional “torture ban” attached to the MCA by issuing a signing statement to the effect that he is not obligated to be restricted by it, signaled his intention to violate our Eighth Amendment protection against “cruel and unusual punishment”, as well as the Geneva Conventions and The international Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 1984.
Of course, neither the MCA nor any other law that Bush might demand or Congress might pass in the future either nullifies our Constitution or makes it legal to violate international law, as far as the international community of nations is concerned. As was made quite clear at the time the Nuremberg Tribunal was created, international law applies to ALL the nations of the world. As much as George Bush, Dick Cheney, or certain members of Congress or the U.S. public may not like it, those laws apply to our country now just as much as they applied to the Nazis for whom the Nuremberg Tribunal was created in 1945. Robert Jackson, the Chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg Tribunal, made that quite clear. He said:
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole … If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.
i've used a documentary film, the corporation, in my graduate seminars... in that film, there's an important segment tracing the course of events that led to corporations being given legal standing as "persons..." it's a fascinating piece, but i find that thom hartmann has done a much more in-depth study of that seriously distorted legal precedent and notes that it may reversible... well worth reading...
These non-living, non-breathing persons are now ... fully entitled to the protections that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote into the Bill of Rights to shield human persons from abuse by such powerful institutions as governments. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, in a recent and misguided effort, argued before the Supreme Court that corporations should have the free speech right to lie (or say anything else they want) that’s granted to humans by the First Amendment.
A few of the world’s largest corporations ... successfully claimed the protection of the First Amendment, then lobbied Congress and the FCC to relax local ownership rules so they could take control of our media. Once that was done, they claimed First Amendment free speech rights to tell us whatever serves their interest and call it “news” without consideration of its truthfulness or having to worry about giving fair and equal time to other viewpoints. They claim the protection of the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) so they can prevent the EPA and OSHA from inspecting factories for environmental or labor violations without first obtaining the corporation’s permission - which they say can be withheld for any reason.
They now have the protection of the Fifth Amendment so they are protected from double jeopardy and don’t have to answer questions about their own crimes. They now have the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment so they can sue local towns or counties or states that try to pass laws to protect local small businesses against their predations.
The structure for this displacement of humans by corporations under the constitution has been in place since 1886, but only since the 1980s have our largest corporations aggressively used the courts to claim human rights. (Interestingly, small and medium-sized corporations almost never use this argument: to them if corporate personhood vanished nothing would change.)
But a human backlash is now developing.
In ten Pennsylvania townships, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has helped local governments pass ordinances denying corporate personhood in order to block large corporate factory farms from setting up in areas previously the sole territory of family farms. In the city of Point Arena, California, voters passed a resolution declaring corporate personhood a threat to democracy, and encouraging a debate on it by other communities.
The Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), America’s oldest and most prestigious women’s rights group (founded in 1919 by Jane Addams, with two Nobel Prize Winners as past presidents), declared at their July, 2002 annual meeting the kick-off of a three-year “Abolish Corporate Personhood” educational and legislative campaign.
And elected officials across the nation are discovering that meaningful campaign finance reform, effective environmental protections, and human-friendly health-care will only happen when corporations can no longer use the extraordinary power of the Bill of Rights to insinuate themselves into politics and legislation.
i wasn't aware of the challenges that hartmann mentions... this is good news...
A presidential Executive Order issued on July 17th, repeals with the stroke of a pen the right to dissent and to oppose the Pentagon's military agenda in Iraq.
In substance, the Executive Order entitled "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq" provides the President with the authority to confiscate the assets of "certain persons" who oppose the US led war in Iraq:
"I have issued an Executive Order blocking property of persons determined to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people."
In substance, opposing the war becomes an illegal act. The Executive Order criminalizes the antiwar movement. It is intended to "blocking property" of US citizens and nationals. It targets those "Certain Persons" in America who oppose the Bush Administration's "peace and stability" program in Iraq, characterized, in plain English, by an illegal occupation and the continued killing of innocent civilians.
The Executive Order also targets those "Certain Persons" who are "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction", or who, again in plain English, are opposed to the confiscation and privatization of Iraq's oil resources, on behalf of the Anglo-American oil giants.
The order is also intended for anybody who opposes Bush's program of "political reform in Iraq", in other words, who questions the legitimacy of an Iraqi "government" installed by the occupation forces.
Moreover, those persons or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who provide bona fide humanitarian aid to Iraqi civilians, and who are not approved by the US Military or its lackeys in the US sponsored Iraqi puppet government are also liable to have their financial assets confiscated.
The executive order violates the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution. It repeals one of the fundamental tenets of US democracy, which is the right to free expression and dissent. The order has not been the object of discussion in the US Congress. Sofar, it has not been addressed by the US antiwar movement, in terms of a formal statement.
[...]
This latest executive order criminalizes the peace movement. It must be viewed in relation to various pieces of "anti-terrorist" legislation, the gamut of presidential and national security directives, etc., which are ultimately geared towards repealing constitutional government in the case of an impending "national emergency".
more food for serious thought and, preferably, serious action...
Murat Kurnaz, German born of Turkish parents, could be an expert witness and fact witness for any legislative or judicial procedure that would cast a cold eye on the transgressions of law, the Constitution or the fundamental precepts of human rights perpetrated by George Bush's terror warriors. Pick your amendment. Fifth: one is not compelled to be a witness against oneself, or deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law. Eighth: protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Fourteenth: the state cannot deprive someone of life, liberty or property without due process.
[...]
The legal process by which Kurnaz was freed from Guantánamo was, in a sense, irrelevant. It's not precedent-setting, because there is no effective process that provides detainees access to justice.
[...]
"No one gets out of Guantánamo by any legal process," [Kurnaz' attorney Baher Azmy from Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey] said. "Because there is none."
[...]
Kurnaz was released only because Azmy and his colleague in Germany, Bernhard Docke, took his case to the court of public opinion in Germany. Their skillful use of the media persuaded German chancellor Angela Merkel to prevail on George Bush to release Kurnaz.
after 5 years in guantánamo without being charged, this is how murat kurnaz was finally freed and sent home...
Wearing goggles that shut out all light, a soundproof headset and a mask that covered his mouth so he could not speak, spit or bite, the prisoner arrived at Ramstein Air Force Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany, under the tightest security. ... During the seventeen-hour ride, the prisoner was provided with neither food nor water. Nor was he allowed to stretch his legs or relieve himself.
[...]
He didn't know he'd been returned home to Germany until an American enlisted man removed his goggles and he saw three German policemen standing outside the airplane.
"He was dumped on German soil like some sort of alien," said Bernhard Docke, one of Kurnaz's attorneys, from the north German city of Bremen.
[...]
"They threw my clothes over the fence," Kurnaz said in an interview in his lawyer's office in Bremen. "They told me, get ready to move. I thought to another prison; then I was back in Germany." That the U.S. soldiers continued to curse and humiliate him during the flight from Guantánamo gave him reason to believe he wasn't flying home to freedom. "They treated me the same as always," he said. "Like I was the number one terrorist."
please, god, make the bad men in the white house go away...
The attorney general and Kyle Sampson attended those meetings. To the best of my recollection, I’ve never had a conversation with Karl Rove or Harriet Miers while I served at the Department of Justice. And I’m certain that I never spoke to either of them about the hiring or firing of any U.S. attorney.
Alberto Gonzales instituted the White House Judicial Selection Committee in the first weeks of the administration. Harriet Miers chaired the meetings once Gonzales left for the Department of Justice. Karl Rove is a member of the committee.
so, since you were white house liaison and DIDN'T have any conversations with Rove and Miers, who DID have the conversations...?
Susan Ralston takes the 5th on Abramoff and White House RNC email accounts
so, she's got some goodies on jack and his relationship with the white house and his bestest friend, karl rove...
"The subjects this morning that she will be unable to testify to...are the subjects of the relationship between Jack Abramoff and his associates and White House officials, including Ms. Ralston, and the subject of the use by White House officials of political e-mail accounts at the RNC," Ralston's lawyer, Bradford Berenson said, during the May 10 deposition. "She has material, useful information about both of those subjects."
[...]
"She is more than willing to provide it to the committee. However, she will, as we have previously discussed, require a grant of immunity before she is comfortable going forward," Berenson also said in the deposition.
give her immunity and then waterboard her until she tells us everything she knows...
Former counsel to Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department liaison to the White House Monica Goodling, who allegedly holds the “keys to the kingdom” of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, will testify before the House Judiciary Committee on May 23.
hey, monica... maybe gonzo will volunteer to help you prepare... after all, he's been through it twice now...
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