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Posted on 01/21/2002 6:04:57 AM PST by Arkle
A US judge is agreeing to consider a petition which challenges the detention of the 'unlawful combatants' at Guantanamo Naval Base.
It was filed at a US District Court in Los Angeles and is the first court challenge of the imprisonment of suspected al-Qaida members.
The document demands the American government brings them before a court and define the charges against them.
The action is backed by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and other civil rights advocates.
The judge will have to decide whether a US District Court, which typically is restricted to a geographical area, has jurisdiction over prisoners held in Cuban territory leased to the American government. He also will have to determine if the petitioners, who are all from Los Angeles, have legal standing to pursue the case.
The petition was prepared on behalf of about 110 al-Qaida suspects who were taken into custody in Afghanistan and transferred to the base in Cuba. Thirty-four other detainees arrived at the base from Afghanistan, pushing the total to 144.
The petition alleges the detainees are being held in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution. It seeks due-process guarantees and seeks to block any transfer of the detainees from the base.
A coalition of clergy, professors and civil rights attorneys had the petition filed by attorney Stephen Yagman, a civil rights lawyer. The coalition includes Mr Clark, who has pursued a variety of causes in recent years, including helping onetime Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic fight war-crimes charges.
"These individuals were brought out of their country in shackles, drugged, gagged and blindfolded, and are being held in open-air cages in Cuba," said coalition member Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of Southern California. "Someone should be asserting their rights under international law."
US Attorney General John Ashcroft has said the detainees are being held for questioning and some could face a military tribunal, while others could be referred to criminal courts.
I'll bet that this is one of the most liberal, leftist, America hating judges in the U.S. Any takers?
If Bin Ladin himself were captured, anti-American Ramsey Clark would be championing his innocence, and even perhaps attempting to organize a DC-based Bin Ladin memorial fountain.
No doubt they judge shopped before filing this petition so I have little doubt this judge will rule he has jurisdiction over al-Qaida suspects and rules they must be released.
and his pet (why is the action in California?) judge should be told that what happens to al-Qaida suspects outside the U.S. is none of the judge's business.
For if it is, the judge is in charge of the U.S. military and can require it to, for example, vacate Afghanistan . . .
Baloney. The man is pro-terrorist, anti-American:
This from Salon in 1999:
Ramsey Clark, the war criminal's best friend
The former U.S. attorney general has become the tool of left-wing cultists who defend Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Rwandan torturers as anti-imperialist heroes.
By Ian Williams
June 21, 1999 | In the most morbidly literal way, NATO forces are "sniffing out" more mass graves than alliance spokesman Jamie Shea ever suspected. Dog-eaten sticks of bone poke from putrescent pits on television screens. So it is not surprising that on July 31 New York will see the opening of a commission of inquiry for an international war crimes tribunal. What may surprise some is that its target is NATO's war crimes.
Those who know him will be less surprised that the inspiration for this circus is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whom one long-standing colleague described as "a good man gone ga-ga -- at least 25 years ago." Many liberals and leftists cut Clark a considerable degree of slack. For a start he is almost the only person the American left has had in high public office since World War II, even if it was a retrospective success, since his long march leftward only began afterward. His views as the former attorney general are listened to with a respect that would be accorded to few others with such eccentric opinions. As a revered spokesman of the left, he is a perfect symbol for its near-impotence in American politics today.
Everyone who has dealings with Clark uses the word "nice" to describe him. But he often sides with people whom no one with a full deck would call nice. (Clark did not respond to a Salon News interview request.) Many former friends, more in sorrow than in anger, trace his present positions to the company he keeps: the International Action Center, which proclaims him its founder but seems entirely in the thrall of an obscure Trotskyist sect, the Workers World Party. Whoever writes his scripts, there is little doubt what Ramsey Clark is against now -- any manifestation of the power of the state he once served at the height of the Vietnam War.
At the end of 1998 Clark attended a human rights conference in Baghdad, Iraq, where in his keynote speech he pointed out how "the governments of the rich nations, primarily the United States, England and France," dominated the wording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which showed "little concern for economic, social and cultural rights." The social and cultural rights claimed by his Iraqi hosts include the right to hang opponents in public at the airport, or poison thousands of Kurds and torture and execute any opponent of the regime. And on the legality of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the silence is deafening.
When I was stationed at GTMO, it was my understanding that, if a civilian contract worker commited a crime against another civilian contract worker, the jurisdiction would fall to the civilian courts in Norfolk, Virginia.
Regardless of the issue of whether a civilian court has jurisdiction over the detention of unlawful combatants, the jurisdiction would definitely not fall to a California court.
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