No! No! No!!!
Oh, HELL no! The Lib’s are rising, the energy is turning and I don’t care how desperate the attempts by those fading from power to keep us in check — ENOUGH ALREADY!
We have already seen, up close and personal, what a rogue executive looks like [and I hope to see more explicit details of the entire Bush coup in the near future, with all manner of players under indictment; the last piece in this collection is by a blogger who thinks as do I, you will enjoy it -- don't miss.] Placing any more power in Bush’s [or ANY president's] hands is frikkin’ unthinkable!
And that is exactly what Mukasey [trust-me-I'm-not-Gonzales] is asking for now, urging Congress to step around the Supreme’s on torture and unitary powers. Any more bright ’short-timer’ ideas should be put in the round file immediately, along with chewing gum, rumpled Ding-Dong wrappers and missives from John [Whack-a-Mole] McCain asking for your support.
The Pub Righty’s are trembling rabbits, standing in the headlight of an oncoming freight train of democratic pushback — they’re scrambling to vote in their own self-interest at this point, tossing their party line onto the tracks. If this notion gains any sort of legs whatsoever, I will alert you. Now is the time to exert our influence, such as it is.
Excellent collection today — Mukasey, Bob Herbert on Jane Meyer’s book, info on the latest heinous rout of civil liberties, spec on the Dubby’s pardon privilege and what’s going on with Gitmo. All ‘need to know’ stuff.
By the way … I will be putting my little dog down tomorrow so the blog will go dark for a bit. Widget, a miniature long-hair Doxy, is sixteen — he was, and is, extraordinary, and that’s not just my opinion; he has as many friends as I do. In some other dimension, he is a Joy Dragon. This will make a mighty hole in the energy, here, already depleted by Meeshka’s loss earlier in the year. He’s depending on my maturity in this, and I’m depending on his grace — I ask your prayers.
Jude
Mukasey Calls On Congress to Subvert Constitution
Attorney General Wants New Declaration of War Allowing Indefinite Detention and Concealment of Torture
7/21/2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WASHINGTON, DC - In an enormous executive branch power grab, Attorney General Michael Mukasey called on Congress today to authorize indefinite detention through a new declaration of armed conflict. Mukasey also proposed that Congress subvert the right of habeas corpus with a new scheme of procedures that will hide the Bush administration’s past wrongdoing - an action that would undermine the constitutional guarantee of due process and conceal systematic torture and abuse of detainees.
“Mukasey is asking Congress to expand and extend the war on terror forever. Anyone that this president or the next one declares to be a terrorist could then be held indefinitely without a trial,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This is clearly the last gasp of an administration desperate to rationalize what is a failed legal scheme that was correctly rejected four times by the Supreme Court. With as little as five work weeks left in this Congress, there are more important issues than helping the lame-duck president cook up an indefensible plan to lock people up forever and throw away the key with no due process rights and limited judicial review.”
“The attorney general’s proposal would hide the torture and abuse conducted since 9/11,” Fredrickson said. “This is one more effort to cover up the illegal activities authorized by the president and his administration. Attorney General Mukasey might be ok with helping in a cover-up, but there is no reason to think that Congress will assist him.”
“Congress won’t fall for this latest Bush administration plan to cover up its wrongdoing. At the same time that the House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether high-level Bush White House officials may have committed crimes of torture and abuse, Mukasey has the arrogance to ask Congress to give him the power to detain people without trial and hide torture and abuse from the courts,” said ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel Christopher Anders. He added, “He wants a new declaration of a worldwide armed conflict in order to hold people without trial, and then under the guise of protecting ’sources and methods’ from judges who have decades of experience trying dangerous international terrorists, Mukasey asks Congress essentially to bury the evidence.”
“There is simply no need to invent yet another set of legal rules to govern the detention and trial of prisoners held on national security grounds, and the rules that the attorney general is proposing are fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution. The prisoners at Guantanamo, some of whom have been held without charges for more than six years, should be allowed a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention in court. The handful of prisoners that have actually been charged with crimes should be tried under rules that conform to the Constitution and that the rest of the world will recognize as fair,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. ++
Mukasey Urges Legislation For Guantanamo Trials
Ari Shapiro, NPR
July 22, 2008
Attorney General Michael Mukasey says he wants Congress, not judges, to make policy on how Guantanamo detainees may challenge their detention. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against the Bush administration three times in cases related to processing Guantanamo detainees.
In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Mukasey said the recent Supreme Court ruling granting detainees court access, “left many significant questions open.” He argued that those questions are best answered by lawmakers, not judges.
“Today, I am urging Congress to act,” Mukasey said. “Judges play an important role in deciding whether a chosen policy is consistent with our laws and the Constitution, but it is our elected leaders who have the responsibility for making policy choices in the first instance.”
He urged lawmakers to set up the rules for some 200 habeas corpus petitions that are currently pending before the U.S. District Court in Washington. Those are petitions by Guantanamo detainees who say they are being wrongfully imprisoned. Mukasey said these hearings raise significant national security concerns.
Mukasey said lawmakers should, for example, establish rules for handling classified evidence against detainees.
“For the sake of national security, we cannot turn habeas corpus proceedings into a smorgasbord of classified information for our enemies,” he said.
Mukasey also asked Congress to dictate that courts cannot order a detainee to be released into the United States. He said detainees should only be allowed to testify at their hearings via video link from Guantanamo Bay, and he said detainees should not be able to call American troops to testify as witnesses.
Mukasey is “calling on Congress to essentially not let the courts do their jobs,” said Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Guantanamo detainees.
Warren argues that judges can resolve all of the issues Mukasey mentioned in his speech. In some cases, Warren says, they already have. For example, Mukasey said all of the habeas corpus petitions should be heard in one district court. The petitions have already been consolidated before the federal district court in Washington.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, says the White House did not consult with the committee on the speech or notify them that Mukasey would be making this announcement. Leahy said he doubts that Congress can pass such a law during an election year in the final months of the Bush administration.
“I don’t know how we’d ever get anything this complex and get the kind of consensus needed to get something passed,” Leahy told NPR in a phone interview.
Mukasey was more optimistic. In answer to a question after his speech, he said, “Congress has talented legislators,” adding “Together, I’m sure we can craft legislation.”
The chief judge for the court handling these hearings is Royce Lamberth. Lamberth said guidance from Congress is always welcome. “Because we are on a fast track, however, such guidance sooner rather than later would certainly be most helpful,” Lamberth said. ++
Mukasey the Obstructionist
Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Madness and Shame
BOB HERBERT, NYT
July 22, 2008
You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney but without the vice president’s sense of humor.
In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.
She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: “No one stood to his right.” Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: “He doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington’s existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration’s Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror — regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say — was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.
This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, known as “black sites.”
Ms. Mayer wrote: “The legal doctrine that Addington espoused — that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it — rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared.”
When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.
To get a sense of the heights of madness scaled in this anything-goes atmosphere, consider a brainstorming meeting held by military officials at Guantánamo. Ms. Mayer said the meeting was called to come up with ways to crack through the resistance of detainees.
“One source of ideas,” she wrote, “was the popular television show ‘24.’ On that show as Ms. Mayer noted, “torture always worked. It saved America on a weekly basis.”
I felt as if I was in Never-Never Land as I read: “In conversation with British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, the top military lawyer in Guantánamo, Diane Beaver, said quite earnestly that Jack Bauer ‘gave people lots of ideas’ as they sought for interrogation models.”
Donald Rumsfeld described the detainees at Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst.” A more sober assessment has since been reached by many respected observers. Ms. Mayer mentioned a study conducted by attorneys and law students at the Seton Hall University Law School.
“After reviewing 517 of the Guantánamo detainees’ cases in depth,” she said, “they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”
The U.S. shamed itself on George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s watch, and David Addington and others like him were willing to manipulate the law like Silly Putty to give them the legal cover they desired. Ms. Mayer noted that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late historian, believed that “the Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”
After reflecting on major breakdowns of law that occurred in prior administrations, including the Watergate disaster, Mr. Schlesinger told Ms. Mayer: “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world — ever.”
Americans still have not come to grips with this disastrous stain on the nation’s soul. It’s important that the whole truth eventually come out, and as many of the wrongs as possible be rectified.
Ms. Mayer, as much as anyone, is doing her part to pull back the curtain on the awful reality. “The Dark Side” is essential reading for those who think they can stand the truth. ++
Court Confirms President’s Dictatorial Powers in Case of US “Enemy Combatant” Ali al-Marri
Andy Worthington, HuffPo
July 21, 2008
Wake up, America! On July 15, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled by 5 votes to 4 in the case of Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli (PDF) that the President can arrest US citizens and legal residents inside the United States and imprison them indefinitely, without charge or trial, based solely on his assertion that they are “enemy combatants.” Have a little think about it, and you’ll see that the Fourth Circuit judges have just endorsed dictatorial powers.
In the words of Judge William B. Traxler, whose swing vote confirmed the court’s otherwise divided ruling, “the Constitution generally affords all persons detained by the government the right to be charged and tried in a criminal proceeding for suspected wrongdoing, and it prohibits the government from subjecting individuals arrested inside the United States to military detention unless they fall within certain narrow exceptions … The detention of enemy combatants during military hostilities, however, is such an exception. If properly designated an enemy combatant pursuant to legal authority of the President, such persons may be detained without charge or criminal proceedings for the duration of the relevant hostilities.”
As was pointed out by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, who was steadfastly opposed to the majority verdict (and whose opinion was endorsed by Judges M. Blane Michael, Robert B. King and Roger L. Gregory), “the duration of the relevant hostilities” is a disturbingly open-ended prospect. After citing the 2007 State of the Union Address, in which the President claimed that ‘[t]he war on terror we fight today is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others,’” Judge Motz noted, “Unlike detention for the duration of a traditional armed conflict between nations, detention for the length of a ‘war on terror’ has no bounds.”
The Court of Appeals made its extraordinary ruling in relation to a habeas corpus claim in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, whose story I reported at length here. To recap briefly, al-Marri, a Qatari national who had studied in Peoria, Illinois in 1991, returned to the United States in September 2001, with his US residency in order, to pursue post-graduate studies, bringing his family — his wife and five children — with him.
Three months later he was arrested and charged with fraud and making false statements to the FBI, but in June 2003, a month before he was due to stand trial for these charges in a federal court, the prosecution dropped the charges and informed the court that he was to be held as an “enemy combatant” instead.
He was then moved to a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he has now been held for five years and one month in complete isolation in a blacked-out cell in an otherwise unoccupied cell block. For the first 14 months of this imprisonment, he was subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperature manipulation, frequently deprived of food and water, and interrogated repeatedly.
In August 2003, representatives of the International Red Cross were finally allowed to visit al-Marri, and two months later he was permitted to meet with a lawyer, when he finally had the opportunity to explain that his interrogators had “threatened to send [him] to Egypt or to Saudi Arabia where, they told him, he would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front of him.”
Based on advice given to Donald Rumsfeld by Defense Department lawyers regarding the use of isolation at Guantánamo, when the lawyers warned that it was “not known to have been generally used for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days,” al-Marri has now been held in solitary confinement for 67 times longer than the amount of time recommended by the Pentagon’s own lawyers (this figure includes the six months that he spent in isolation in Peoria County Jail and the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York, before being transferred to Charleston).
It is, therefore, unsurprising that his lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, has explained that he is suffering from “severe damage to his mental and emotional well-being, including hypersensitivity to external stimuli, manic behavior, difficulty concentrating and thinking, obsessional thinking, difficulties with impulse control, difficulty sleeping, difficulty keeping track of time, and agitation.”
So what is Ali al-Marri supposed to have done to justify being held in solitary confinement for almost as long as the duration of the Second World War? The presidential order declaring him an “enemy combatant” stated simply that he was closely associated with al-Qaeda and presented “a continuing, present, and grave danger to the national security of the United States.” Elaborating, in subsequent statements, the government has claimed that he was part of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, who had been instructed to carry out further terrorist attacks in the United States, targeting reservoirs, the New York Stock Exchange and military academies.
What’s particularly worrying about these charges is that, by the government’s own admission, the primary sources for its supposed evidence against al-Marri are confessions made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, during the three months following his capture in March 2003, when, as even the CIA has admitted, he was subjected to waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, which the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition at least had the honesty to call “tortura del aqua.”
As I discussed at length in an article last summer, KSM stated during his tribunal at Guantánamo in March 2007 that he had given false information about other people while being tortured, and, although he was not allowed to elaborate, I traced several possible victims of these false confessions, including Majid Khan, one of 13 supposedly “high-value” detainees transferred with KSM to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman and philanthropist held in Guantánamo, and his son Uzair, who was convicted in the United States on dubious charges in November 2005, and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
As I also stated last November, “It’s possible, therefore, that al-Marri is another victim of KSM’s tangled web of tortured confessions, but whether or not this is true, the correct venue for such discussions is in a court of law, and not in leaks and proclamations from an administration that appears to be intent on holding him without charge or trial for the rest of his life.”
When I wrote these words, it seemed possible that the Fourth Circuit judges would act to prevent al-Marri from having the dubious distinction of being the last “enemy combatant” on the US mainland, and would put pressure on the government to transfer him to a federal prison to face a trial in a US court, as happened with Jose Padilla, a US citizen and one of two other “enemy combatants” imprisoned without charge or trial — the other being Yaser Hamdi, a US-born Saudi, who was held in Guantánamo until it was ascertained that he held US citizenship. In Hamdi’s case, however, a brief stay at the Charleston brig was followed by a deal that allowed him to return to Saudi Arabia.
In June 2007, a panel of three Fourth Circuit judges dealt a blow to the administration’s claims by ruling that “the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants.’” Last week’s decision followed a successful appeal by the government, but when the Fourth Circuit court met en banc to reconsider al-Marri’s case in October, it seemed possible that they would uphold the panel’s June verdict. When Judge Michael asked the government’s representative, Gregory J. Barre, “How long can you keep this man in custody?” and Garre replied that it could “go on for a long time,” depending on the duration of the “war” with al-Qaeda, Judge Michael stated, “It looks like a lifetime.”
I now realize, of course, that it was always highly improbable that the Fourth Circuit court — widely regarded as the most right-wing court in the country — would end Ali al-Marri’s legal limbo, although it was somewhat ironic that, in a separate ruling, the swing-voting Judge Traxler ruled in al-Marri’s favor when it came to a decision to grant him some as yet unspecified ability to challenge the basis of his definition as an “enemy combatant.”
This, at least, earned him the gratitude of Judge Motz, who stated that “the evidentiary proceedings envisaged by Judge Traxler will at least place the burden on the Government to make an initial showing that ‘the normal due process protections available to all within this country’ are impractical or unduly burdensome in al-Marri’s case and that the hearsay declaration that constitutes the Government’s only evidence against al-Marri is ‘the most reliable available evidence’ supporting the Government’s allegations.”
In other respects, however, the court only added to its reputation as a defender of the indefensible. Not content with endorsing the President’s dictatorial right to imprison “enemy combatants” without charge or trial on the US mainland, the judges responsible for the majority verdict ruled that the President did not even have to allege, as he did with Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, that an “enemy combatant” had either been in Afghanistan or had ever raised arms against US forces.
The injustice of this was pointed out in the opinion of Judge Motz, who stated that, “unlike Hamdi and Padilla, al-Marri is not alleged to have been part of a Taliban unit, not alleged to have stood alongside the Taliban or the armed forces of any other enemy nation, not alleged to have been on the battlefield during the war in Afghanistan, not alleged to have even been in Afghanistan during the armed conflict, and not alleged to have engaged in combat with United States forces anywhere in the world.”
Judge Motz added, however, “With regret, we recognize that this view does not command a majority of the court. Our colleagues hold that the President can order the military to seize from his home and indefinitely detain anyone — including an American citizen — even though he has never affiliated with an enemy nation, fought alongside any nation’s armed forces, or borne arms against the United States anywhere in the world. We cannot agree that in a broad and general statute, Congress silently authorized a detention power that so vastly exceeds all traditional bounds. No existing law permits this extraordinary exercise of executive power.”
Disturbingly, as Judge Motz mentioned above, the court also indicated its presumption that its ruling applies not just to legal residents like Ali al-Marri, but to US citizens as well. Judge Traxler noted, “it is likely that the constitutional rights our court determines exist, or do not exist, for al-Marri will apply equally to our own citizens under like circumstances,” and Judge Motz explained that the lack of distinction between citizens and residents had become apparent at oral argument, when the government “finally acknowledged that an alien legally resident in the United States, like al-Marri, has the same Fifth Amendment due process rights as an American citizen. For this reason, the Government had to concede that if al-Marri can be detained as an enemy combatant, then the Government can also detain any American citizen on the same showing and through the same process.”
We have, to be honest, been here before. In September 2005, a three-member panel upheld, in Padilla’s case, the President’s power to hold US citizens indefinitely without charge or trial (PDF). This verdict was never tested, as the government took Padilla out of the brig and into the court system (where he was convicted in January) before the Supreme Court could rule on his case, but as Glenn Greenwald noted in an article in Salon, the upshot is that the 2005 Padilla verdict still stands. To that extent, all that has changed now is that the Fourth Circuit court has reinforced its former ruling en banc.
Al-Marri’s lawyers will doubtless appeal, and, if justice still counts for anything, his case will go all the way to the Supreme Court. However, it remains incomprehensible to me that the whole sorry saga has lasted for so long already. As Jonathan Hafetz and his colleagues explained last November when they presented their arguments to the Fourth Circuit judges (and as Judge Motz noted last week), the President “lacks the legal authority to designate and detain al-Marri as an ‘enemy combatant’ for two principal reasons”: firstly, because the Constitution “prohibits the military imprisonment of civilians arrested in the United States and outside an active battlefield,” and secondly, because, although a district court previously held that the President was authorized to detain al-Marri under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (the September 2001 law authorizing the President to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those involved in any way with the 9/11 attacks), Congress explicitly prohibited “the indefinite detention without charge of suspected alien terrorists in the United States” in the Patriot Act, which followed five weeks later.
That seems pretty clear to me. In the “War on Terror,” however, as I learned during my research for The Guantánamo Files, all forms of logical thought — sometimes in the courts, most of the time in military custody, and as a permanent fixture in the war rooms where torture was endorsed — have been engulfed in a fog of fear and barbarism.
I leave the final words to Judge Motz, and her clear-eyed awareness of the injustice of the al-Marri verdict. “To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President call them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country,” Judge Motz wrote. “For a court to uphold a claim to such extraordinary power would do more than render lifeless the Suspension Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the rights to criminal process in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments; it would effectively undermine all of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. It is that power — were a court to recognize it — that could lead all our laws ‘to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces.’ We refuse to recognize a claim to power that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.”
Unless Ali al-Marri is allowed a meaningful review of his status as an “enemy combatant,” Judge Motz’s fears have already come true. ++
The White House wins a disturbing legal victory
International Herald Tribune Editorial
July 20, 2008
The Bush administration has been a waging a fierce battle for the power to lock people up indefinitely simply on the president’s say-so. It scored a disturbing victory last week when a federal appeals court ruled that it could continue to detain Ali al-Marri, who has been held for more than five years as an enemy combatant. The decision gives the president sweeping power to deprive anyone - citizens as well as noncitizens - of their freedom. The Supreme Court should reverse this terrible ruling.
Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar legally residing in the United States, was initially arrested in his home in Peoria, Illinois, on ordinary criminal charges, then imprisoned by military authorities.
The government, which says he has ties to Al Qaeda, designated him an enemy combatant, even though it never alleged that he was in an army or carried arms on a battlefield. He was held on the basis of extremely thin hearsay evidence.
Last year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, Virginia, declared that the government could not hold al-Marri, or any other civilian, simply on the president’s orders. If it wanted to prosecute him, the court ruled, it could do so in the civilian court system.
That was the right answer. Unfortunately, last week the full 4th Circuit reversed the decision, and with a tangle of difficult-to-decipher opinions, upheld the government’s right to hold al-Marri indefinitely. The court ruled that al-Marri must be given greater rights to challenge his detention. But this part of the decision is weak, and he is unlikely to get the sort of procedural protections necessary to ensure that justice is done.
The implications are breathtaking. The designation “enemy combatant,” which should apply only to people captured on a battlefield, can now be applied to people detained inside the United States. Even though al-Marri is not a U.S. citizen, the court’s reasoning appears to apply equally to citizens.
Equally troubling, the ruling supports President George W. Bush’s ludicrous argument that when Congress authorized the use of force against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, it gave the president essentially unlimited powers. If a president ever wants to round up Americans on vague charges and detain them indefinitely, this ruling gives him a dangerous green light.
Al-Marri’s lawyers say they will ask the Supreme Court to review the ruling. Without doubt, it should. The case raises critically important issues for a free society, and the 4th Circuit’s convoluted set of opinions is too confusing to give proper guidance to other courts, the executive branch, or the people.
The jumble reflects how badly the administration has butchered the law in this area. People accused of bad deeds should be tried in court - not in sham proceedings. They should be put in jail - not in secret detention. If they are not proved guilty, they should be set free. It is up to the Supreme Court to restore these principles of American justice. ++
A Quiet Coup: Cheney/Bush’s Steps To Martial Law
Ed Ciaccio, BuzzFlash
Mon, 07/21/2008
If U.S. corporate media were not complicit in the Quiet Coup staged by Neoconservatives of BOTH major political parties since December 2000, we would have been thoroughly informed about all of the following, with their implications and ramifications. But corporate media has so much to gain by its complicity, and so much to lose by fulfilling its responsibility in a supposed democracy, that it has gone along with the misinformation, neglect, and cover-ups.
The Democrats refused to contest either the 2000 or 2004 elections, despite glaring irregularities and violations of precedence. Democrats have continued to vote for most of the Cheney/Bush agenda, both foreign and domestic, over the last seven and a half years, with very few exceptions.
Democrats, except for Cynthia McKinney (now Green Party candidate for president), Dennis Kucinich, and Robert Wexler, have refused to support impeachment hearings for Cheney’s and Bush’s many, many gross violations of Constitutional and international law, let alone their war crimes. In fact, Democratic leaders themselves have been complicit in some of these war crimes, and most Democrats continue to vote funding for the illegal wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, refusing to question the sanity and legality of Bush’s “Global War on Terror.”
For an outline of the steps to fascism, gleaned from history, see “Fascist America in 10 easy steps” by Naomi Wolf.
The following events and actions are actual and historical, not theoretical, and are by no means exhaustive:
Cheney/Bush’s Steps To Martial Law (as of July 21, 2008):
1. Stealing the 2000 presidential election in Florida (with the help of Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was also co-chair of the Florida Bush Election Campaign, and the five regressive Supreme Court Justices appointed by Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, Sr.)
2. 9/11/01 attacks (Bush had been warned numerous times since Jan. 2001)
3. Bush’s GWOT - Global war on Terror (”You’re either with us, or with the terrorists!”)
4. Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (only one member of Congress voted against it)
5. Patriot Act I (obviously prepared well in advance of the 9/11 attacks, it was rushed into law before most members of Congress had read it)
6. Bush’s hundreds of “signing statements” basically negating laws passed by Congress with which he disagreed
7. Stealing the 2004 presidential election in Ohio (with the help of Ohio’s Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, also co-chair of the “Committee to re-elect George W. Bush”)
8. Bush’s multiple violations of the original FISA law (revealed Dec., 2005 and admitted by Bush himself)
9. Bush’s Homeland Security contract to KBR for construction of “detention centers” across the U.S.
10. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
11. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 (see, especially, Section 1076)
12. National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20
13. H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (the “Thought Crime Act”) passed the House 404 to 6, with 22 not voting; Democratic Representative Jane Harman, its prime sponsor, was one notable Democrat who was privy to Bush Administration torture information in 2002. Its Senate counterpart, S. 1959, is still in committee.
14. FISA “Reform” Act (not only granted retroactive AND FUTURE immunity to telecoms for their complicity in Bush’s violations of the original FISA Law, but also, implicitly, to Bush, as well as gutting the Fourth Amendment guarantee of privacy).
15. Federal 4th Circuit Appeals Court gives the president sweeping power to deprive anyone — citizens as well as noncitizens — of their freedom. The designation “enemy combatant,” which should apply only to people captured on a battlefield, can now be applied to ANY people detained inside the United States.
As a result of these steps, the president now has much more power than ever before in U.S. history, certainly more than our Constitution allows him, according to most Constitutional scholars such as Jonathan Turley, Glenn Greenwald, Bruce Fein, and John Dean.
The important question is, what, if anything, will the new president, Obama or McCain, do to reverse any of these steps (except for numbers 1, 2, and 7, obviously)? ++
Conservative Lawyers Urge Bush To Issue ‘Pre-Emptive Pardons’ To Officials Involved In Illegal Programs
Think Progress
7/22/08
The New York Times reported this weekend that “[f]elons are asking President Bush for pardons and commutations at historic levels as he nears his final months in office, a time when many other presidents have granted a flurry of clemency requests.” However the Times noted that despite commuting Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, applicants “should expect to be disappointed” because Bush “has made little use of his clemency power” compared to past presidents.
Except perhaps if you participated in any illegal activity involving the Bush administration’s controversial counterterrorism programs. According to the Times, “several members of the conservative legal community” in Washington D.C. are urging Bush to issue “pre-emptive pardons” to those involved so as to “not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills”:
Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.
Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. […]
“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”
Stuart Taylor, Jr., a constitutional law fellow at Brookings, agrees, saying in a recent Newsweek column that investigations into the Bush administration’s “high level ‘war crimes’” are a “bad idea” and instead called for a “truth commission”:
A criminal investigation would only hinder efforts to determine the truth, and preclude any apologies. It would spur those who know the most to take the Fifth. Any prosecutions would also touch off years of partisan warfare. […]
Absent pardons, pressure to go after GOP “war criminals” would make it very hard to unite Americans of all stripes behind solutions to the many economic and social challenges facing the country.
In fact, the conservative D.C. lawyer circuit may just get its wish. The White House “would not say whether the administration was considering pre-emptive pardons, nor whether it would rule them out.” (HT: Dan Froomkin) ++
Gitmo judge: No ‘coercive’ questioning evidence
Military jurist bars some statements in case against former bin Laden driver
AP via MSNBC
7/21/08
Excuse Me While I Entertain My Favorite Fantasy
tucsonlib, BuzzFlash
Mon, 07/21/2008
President Obama decides to take advantage of the vast powers bequeathed to him by the previous administration, and issues a series of Presidential Directives. The Obama Presidency:
Day 1. President Obama declares victory in Iraq and begins withdrawing our troops.
Day 2. President Obama declares “Medicare for All”. ALL medical, dental and prescription costs will be covered for all Americans. No more need for “Medicare Supplemental Insurance” either. Everything means everything. The money saved from ending the war and repealing the tax cuts for the rich will pretty much take care of the funding.
Day 3. President Obama initiates the largest public works program in American history. Emphasis will be on repairing and modernizing the country’s infrastructure, as well as building the world’s most advanced high-speed passenger rail system. Millions of jobs are created overnight.
Day 4. President Obama orders a moratorium on all coal-fired and nuclear power plants. Challenges the American people and U.S. corporations to move from a petroleum-based economy to one based on renewable energy sources within ten years.
Day 5. Instructs Attorney General Vincent Bugliosi to issue criminal indictments against Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rove. Also against the Supreme Court Justices who were complicit in stealing the 2000 election. The mass arrests are to be televised live, and the accused held without bail (due to the seriousness of their crimes) until trial.
Day 6. President Obama takes whatever steps are necessary to repair the damage done to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing that neither he nor any future President will ever again have the unilateral power to do what he just did.
Day 7. President Obama rests. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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