Scott Horton’s piece on the Hamdan verdict is one of the better ones I’ve read so far. Do read the whole thing. Here are the standout passages:

So was the Hamdan case a “success,” a feather in the cap of the Bush Administration’s guardians of justice? Hardly. As Matt Waxman , who as a senior official in the Rumsfeld Pentagon helped craft this system, has acknowledged, there was another defendant in that courtroom standing alongside Salim Hamdan: it was the American justice system. Judgment will be taken by history, and the case was played to a global audience. The first returns are in, and they are not positive. Worse, the perceptions are likely to get harsher and more negative over time. Even before the verdict came in, observers around the world were focused on the Bush Administration’s own contempt for the military commissions process. It had announced that it was indifferent to the judgment of the commission—if Hamdan were acquitted, he could continue to be held for life, a Pentagon briefer acknowledged. The Hamdan prosecution reveals more about the Bush Administration and its fear and loathing of justice than it reveals about Hamdan.

After six and a half years in which the name “Guantánamo” has become badge of shame and humiliation, there has at last been a prosecution–of an individual whose role was at best completely peripheral. The former chief Guantánamo prosecutor has now openly acknowledged that an independent, objective prosecutor never would have charged Salim Hamdan, because he was an absolute nobody. This is not to say that Hamdan is an innocent, of course.
(more…)

Actually, our government is in the process of striking down “presumption of innocence,” with Guantanamo being their test site. If all works out well there (and, so far, it has), the right to a fair trial will be but a memory in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Go, Republicans - Yea, team!

Mexico adopts U.S.-style trials, presumption of innocence

Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Tuesday signed a broad judicial reform measure setting up U.S.-style public trials and establishing a presumption of innocence for defendants, the Associated Press reports.
Under the changes, enacted in a constitutional amendment, prosecutors and defense lawyers will have to argue their cases out in public court. Previously, trials involved closed-door hearings that relied on written evidence.

For what is the following quote attributed to?

“I think it’s one of the worst decisions in history. It opens up a whole new chapter and interpretation of our constitution.”

Is it:

• Women’s suffrage?
• The Fifteenth Amendment?
• Roe v. Wade?

Nope - It’s none of the above.

McCain slams Supreme Court on terrorist detainees

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday sharply denounced a Supreme Court decision that gave suspected terrorist detainees a right to seek their release in federal courts.

“I think it’s one of the worst decisions in history,” McCain said. “It opens up a whole new chapter and interpretation of our constitution.”

McCain is one of the authors of the 2006 Military Commissions Act which set up procedures for the handling of detainees. The act denied the detainees access to federal courts.

The Supreme Court on Thursday said that provision of the law violated the constitution.

Each of the cases listed above do have something in common though - disgruntled republicans. Food for thought.

My first question: who profits? Profits will go to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has spearheaded litigation on behalf of Guantanamo detainees. Preordering my copy!

Poems written by Guantanamo prisoners about their lives as captives of the United States have been compiled in a book that will be published this summer with an endorsement from a former U.S. poet laureate.

“Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak” is being published by the University of Iowa Press and will hit the shelves by August, the publisher said. The 84-page volume was assembled by lawyers representing captives held as suspected terrorists at the much-criticized U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

Marc Falkoff, an assistant law professor at Northern Illinois University who has represented 17 Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo, compiled the poems. He said most expressed religious faith, nostalgia for childhood homes or yearning for family.

Others are angry, disillusioned or questioning, like one written as a conversation with the surrounding sea.

More at Reuters

I hope you brought candles. Habeas corpus is 792 years young today

by Anthony D. Romero

The habeas story began in England’s Runnymede meadow on June 15, 1215, when dissident English nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, a contract limiting the power of the king in exchange for his right to rule. John later rejected the charter, prompting a civil war, but the contract would become one of the greatest legal documents in history.

The Great Writ of habeas corpus was among the rights articulated that day, and it has since evolved into a principal safeguard against arbitrary executive detention here in the United States. Though the writ of habeas corpus has stood for nearly eight centuries, it rarely has faced a threat as acute as it faces now.

This bedrock constitutional right is under siege, along with many other fundamental American liberties and freedoms, all in the name of national security and the president’s “commander-in-chief powers.” The Bush administration would like us all to believe that the threat of terrorism warrants a wholesale reinterpretation of our system of laws:

They claim that victims of government torture should have the courthouse doors closed to them, at the sole discretion of the president. They assert that the government has the power to wiretap without warrants, at the sole discretion of the president. They believe that the government has the power to kidnap people and send them on secret flights in the dead of night to foreign countries known to torture, at the sole discretion of the president. And, they insist that the government has the power to detain people indefinitely — in American prisons — without charges or any due process, at, you guessed it, the sole discretion of the president.

More at the Huffington Post

ZINIE CHEN SAMPSON, Associated Press Writer

RICHMOND, Va. - The Bush administration cannot legally detain a U.S. resident it believes is an al-Qaida sleeper agent without charging him, a divided federal appeals court ruled Monday. The court said sanctioning the indefinite detention of civilians would have “disastrous consequences for the constitution - and the country.”

In the 2-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident, of his constitutional rights to challenge his accusers in court.

It ruled the government must allow al-Marri to be released from military detention.

Al-Marri has been held in solitary confinement in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., since June 2003. The Qatar native has been detained since his December 2001 arrest at his home in Peoria, Ill., where he moved with his wife and five children a day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to study for a master’s degree.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the constitution - and the country,” the court panel said.

Al-Marri’s lawyers argued that the Military Commissions Act, passed last fall to establish military trials after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, doesn’t repeal the writ of habeas corpus - defendants’ traditional right to challenge their detention.

Source: Yahoo News

Aziz Huq
from “THE NATION”

Early this week, judge advocates halted two prosecutions in the Guantánamo military commissions established under the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA). This is not the first setback the Administration’s second-tier court system has hit; the Supreme Court invalidated an earlier iteration of the commissions in 2006. And it won’t be the last. But while this week’s setback likely will be speedily surmounted, it casts an unexpected light on the MCA’s real purposes, and what’s at stake when the Bush Administration plays politics with national security.

Understanding the significance of this week’s ruling means delving into a bit of procedural arcana. The devil in the MCA is, almost literally, in the details–and unless we attend closely to the rococo details of the statute, we’ll miss the ways in which the Administration intends to slowly erode our liberties.

At the beginning of this week, the military commissions’ two judges–Army Col. Peter Brownback and Navy Capt. Keith Allred–dismissed charges filed against Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan. The rulings focused on a question of categorization–basically, the judges found that Khadr and Hamdan had been wrongly classified. But how did this happen?

The MCA, which created the military commissions, states that only an alien who is an “unlawful enemy combatant” can be tried in a military commission. It also defines “unlawful enemy combatants” in tremendously sweeping terms to include anyone who has “materially supported hostilities.” Many civil libertarians, including myself, expressed grave concerns about the scope of this provision. Read in tandem with recent Supreme Court cases, it might be taken not merely as a gateway to trial by military commission but also as a sweeping new executive detention authority.

The MCA doesn’t say how a person gets designated as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” But all except one of the detainees at Guantánamo have already all been classified as enemy combatants by a procedure known as a CSRT, or Combatant Status Review Tribunal. (The one exception is a prisoner recently transferred to the base.) CSRTs are shoddy summary procedures in which the detainee has barely a role and cannot respond to the secret evidence used to detain him.

read more at THE NATION

This is MOST important!!! Make the calls!!!

Crossposted from Obsidian Wings

Via FDL, I see that Sen. Leahy is asking people to phone their Senators in support of S. 185, the Habeas Restoration Act. This bill does exactly what it says it does: it undoes the provisions of last year’s Military Commissions Act that deprived detainees of habeas corpus. I think that links to search results in Thomas, the congressional database, don’t work, but if you go here and look up S. 185, you’ll find it.

Leahy writes (via FDL):

“Many of you may recall the hasty passage of the Military Commissions Act in the weeks leading up to last year’s election, a bill that set new rules for trying detainees, in particular those currently being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The passage of this bill was a profound mistake, and its elimination of habeas corpus review was its worst error. Righting this wrong is one of my top priorities, and on the first day of this Congress I joined with Senator Arlen Specter to introduce the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act (S. 185). This bipartisan bill already has 17 cosponsors, but it faces a crucial vote in the Judiciary Committee this Thursday so we need your help.”

The bill is currently sponsored by the following Senators, in addition to Sen. Specter, who wrote it:

Sen Biden, Joseph R., Jr. [DE]
Sen Brown, Sherrod [OH]
Sen Cantwell, Maria [WA]
Sen Clinton, Hillary Rodham [NY]
Sen Dodd, Christopher J. [CT]
Sen Durbin, Richard [IL]
Sen Feingold, Russell D. [WI]
Sen Feinstein, Dianne [CA]
Sen Harkin, Tom [IA]
Sen Kennedy, Edward M. [MA]
Sen Kerry, John F. [MA]
Sen Lautenberg, Frank R. [NJ]
Sen Leahy, Patrick J. [VT]
Sen Levin, Carl [MI]
Sen Obama, Barack [IL]
Sen Rockefeller, John D., IV [WV]
Sen Salazar, Ken [CO]
Sen Whitehouse, Sheldon [RI]

FDL has compiled a list of toll-free numbers for the Capitol switchboard:

1 (800) 828 - 0498
1 (800) 459 - 1887
1 (800) 614 - 2803
1 (866) 340 - 9281
1 (866) 338 - 1015
1 (877) 851 - 6437

If you agree that habeas corpus should be restored to detainees — that everyone our government detains should have the right to ask the government to justify their detention in a court of law, so that the government cannot just toss people in prison without any accountability — then it would be worth giving your Senators a call. Thanks.

H/T Bat for the 411 on this!!

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

This article appeared in the April 27, 2007 edition of “The Guardian”

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security - remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” - didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realize.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilization”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilization as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

For the rest of the article and steps 2 - 10, click HERE

I say it all the time……..I can’t believe Bush is getting away with this shit.

NEW YORK (AP) - One year after his arrest, an Associated Press photographer is still being held at a prison camp in Iraq by U.S. military officials who have neither formally charged him with a crime nor made public any evidence of wrongdoing.

Bilal Hussein was taken prisoner in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi on April 12, 2006. Twelve months later, the U.S. military claims it is justified in continuing to imprison him merely because it considers him a security threat.

“April 12 is a sad anniversary for Bilal’s AP colleagues worldwide,” said the AP’s executive editor, Kathleen Carroll. “He has now been held by the U.S. military in Iraq for an entire year without formal charges or the due process that a democratic society demands.”

Paul Gardephe, the lawyer handling the case for the AP, recently returned from an extended visit to Iraq, where he spoke with military officials, journalists, Iraqi citizens and - for more than 40 hours - Hussein himself at the Camp Cropper prison near Baghdad’s airport.

“Bilal has done nothing to justify a year in detention without charges,” Gardephe said. “The military has not provided any credible evidence to support the various accusations of criminal conduct that it has made.”

Read more at The Guardian