Posted on 08/09/2009 8:27:43 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
The Obama administration is fighting on multiple fronts - in courts in San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and London - to keep an official veil of secrecy over the treatment of a former prisoner who says he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
The administration has asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco to reconsider its ruling allowing Binyam Mohamed and four other former or current prisoners to sue a Bay Area company for allegedly flying them to overseas torture chambers for the CIA.
Obama administration lawyers also argued that Mohamed's attorneys had violated secrecy procedures by writing a letter to President Obama, accompanied by a blacked-out document, asking him to disclose their client's treatment. A federal judge ordered Mohamed's lawyers to answer contempt-of-court charges in May that were punishable by up to six months in jail, but has since dropped those charges. Britain threatened
Most recently, a British government lawyer told her nation's High Court last month that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had threatened to limit U.S. intelligence-sharing with Great Britain if the court disclosed details of Mohamed's treatment in Guantanamo.
The British court declared in August 2008 that there was evidence Mohamed had been tortured, but deleted the details from its public version of the ruling at the Bush administration's insistence.
The court is now considering requests from lawyers for Mohamed and the news media to make the details public in a case over alleged British participation in his mistreatment.
According to a transcript of the court's July 29 hearing, Lord Justice John Thomas said there was "nothing in the paragraphs (about the U.S. government's treatment of Mohamed) that could conceivably identify anything that is of a national security interest."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
The thing that gets me is that the left is fighting us in court (and setting new precedents in many cases) any chance they get.
How come our side doesn’t do the same?
I’m referring specifically to the usurpation of power by the federal government based on the 10th amendment.
Defenders of the federal government cite the “commerce clause” as their basis.
How can that rather tenuous “basis” trump the explicit and strong language in the 10th amendment limiting the federal government to very specific powers.
Don’t we have some legal minds on our side that can convincingly argue this case??
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