Posted on 09/04/2002 12:22:02 PM PDT by dead
Jonathan Turley is a professor of constitutional and public-interest law at George Washington University Law School in D.C. He is also a defense attorney in national security cases and other matters, writes for a number of publications, and is often on television. He and I occasionally exchange leads on civil liberties stories, but I learn much more from him than he does from me.
For example, a Jonathan Turley column in the national edition of the August 14 Los Angeles Times ("Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision") begins:
"Attorney General John Ashcroft's announced desire for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be 'enemy combatants' has moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace." Actually, ever since General Ashcroft pushed the U.S. Patriot Act through an overwhelmingly supine Congress soon after September 11, he has subverted more elements of the Bill of Rights than any attorney general in American history.
Under the Justice Department's new definition of "enemy combatant"—which won the enthusiastic approval of the president and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—anyone defined as an "enemy combatant," very much including American citizens, can be held indefinitely by the government, without charges, a hearing, or a lawyer. In short, incommunicado.
Two American citizens—Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla—are currently locked up in military brigs as "enemy combatants." (Hamdi is in solitary in a windowless room.) As Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe said on ABC's Nightline (August 12):
"It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way. . . . And no court can even figure out whether we've got the wrong guy."
In Hamdi's case, the government claims it can hold him for interrogation in a floating navy brig off Norfolk, Virginia, as long as it needs to. When Federal District Judge Robert Doumar asked the man from the Justice Department how long Hamdi is going to be locked up without charges, the government lawyer said he couldn't answer that question. The Bush administration claims the judiciary has no right to even interfere.
Now more Americans are also going to be dispossessed of every fundamental legal right in our system of justice and put into camps. Jonathan Turley reports that Justice Department aides to General Ashcroft "have indicated that a 'high-level committee' will recommend which citizens are to be stripped of their constitutional rights and sent to Ashcroft's new camps."
It should be noted that Turley, who tries hard to respect due process, even in unpalatable situations, publicly defended Ashcroft during the latter's turbulent nomination battle, which is more than I did.
Again, in his Los Angeles Times column, Turley tries to be fair: "Of course Ashcroft is not considering camps on the order of the internment camps used to incarcerate Japanese American citizens in World War II. But he can be credited only with thinking smaller; we have learned from painful experience that unchecked authority, once tasted, easily becomes insatiable." (Emphasis added.)
Turley insists that "the proposed camp plan should trigger immediate Congressional hearings and reconsideration of Ashcroft's fitness for important office. Whereas Al Qaeda is a threat to the lives of our citizens, Ashcroft has become a clear and present threat to our liberties." (Emphasis added.)
On August 8, The Wall Street Journal, which much admires Ashcroft on its editorial pages, reported that "the Goose Creek, South Carolina, facility that houses [Jose] Padilla—mostly empty since it was designated in January to hold foreigners captured in the U.S. and facing military tribunals—now has a special wing that could be used to jail about 20 U.S. citizens if the government were to deem them enemy combatants, a senior administration official said." The Justice Department has told Turley that it has not denied this story. And space can be found in military installations for more "enemy combatants."
But once the camps are operating, can General Ashcroft be restrained from detaining—not in these special camps, but in regular lockups—any American investigated under suspicion of domestic terrorism under the new, elastic FBI guidelines for criminal investigations? From page three of these Ashcroft terrorism FBI guidelines:
"The nature of the conduct engaged in by a [terrorist] enterprise will justify an inference that the standard [for opening a criminal justice investigation] is satisfied, even if there are no known statements by participants that advocate or indicate planning for violence or other prohibited acts." (Emphasis added.) That conduct can be simply "intimidating" the government, according to the USA Patriot Act.
The new Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, shows the government, some years hence, imprisoning "pre-criminals" before they engage in, or even think of, terrorism. That may not be just fiction, folks.
Returning to General Ashcroft's plans for American enemy combatants, an August 8 New York Times editorial—written before those plans were revealed—said: "The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism."
Meanwhile, as the camps are being prepared, the braying Terry McAuliffe and the pack of Democratic presidential aspirants are campaigning on corporate crime, with no reference to the constitutional crimes being committed by Bush and Ashcroft. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis prophesied: "The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people." And an inert Democratic leadership. See you in a month, if I'm not an Ashcroft camper.
It's good that you both share all this knowledge with us.
How many ways have you and I and other FReepers pointed out how quickly and viciously our culture has been attacked? Shore up one front and the advancing columns attack our flanks at precisely those points where our fifth columnists (ACLU, trial lawyers, RepublicRat leaders) have cracked open our gates.
Yes, hop, we've quite a task set out before us. I think our troubles begin and end with our having permitted government to totally dissassociate itself from God, thereby providing schemers the opportunity to act as gods to fill The Void they, thusly, deliberately created. Statism on steroids. Big Brother without the humor.
I've suggested it's a humpty dumpty fate; my cousin, LCS, thinks we're outright doomed because we've lost our way. But many things which seem impossible become possible when we remember God only turns His back to us after we've turned our backs to Him.
We don't need any "mechanism" beyond the Constitution, if we can keep it.
That is not exactly my position. I believe that our fate is totally out of our hands, that our recovery will occur only through the Grace of God. However, this does not relieve us of the obligation to act as if we could determine our survival, to do what is right, if only to serve as an example to future free societies, after we pass away, that freedom and decency are worth fighting for, even if the odds for success are extremely low.
That is part of the reason for my love for the story in The Lord of the Rings, in which the characters fight to destroy the evil Ring of Power, even though most of them are only involved in what is a distraction, and the key figures seem to be in a hopeless position, and indeed do fail the test, but are saved by a fate determined by God.
redrock
What's in the article that you find ridiculous?
To: AppyPappy
"...This war mimics the Cold War in many ways and Ashcoroft is rightfully interpreting the laws that bind us in a way that both protect us from further terrorist attacks and protect our constitutional liberties. He and this administration deserve phenomenal credit for balancing the need to defend our naiton and the need to defend our liberties.
# 150 by eleni121
Any man who"interpetes" the law 180 degrees from the way it was written is not our friend.
Such a man is a tyrant, who sees no limits on his actions, and who sees citizens as chattel rather than as free men.
Despots throughout history have used "I will protect you" as an excuse to exert personal power. This "war on terror" serves that same purpose.
It's not "protection," it's a power grab.
Men are men, no matter their race, and all men have rights, even if those rights are being infringed upon.You'll get no argument from me on that. This is as it should be and always should have been. But in the eyes of the law, at one point, this was not the case. It was morally wrong, and was subsequently corrected.
Government can't take your rights away, but they can make asserting your rights downright hazardous to your health.Your moral rights? Yes, I'll agree with you. But those are entirely different than your legal rights; your rights under the law. Those are established by the government under which you live. This is why an issue of rights comes up with the US v. other lands.
A corrupt (i.e., immoral) government certainly makes it hard to assert your God-given rights. But they have nothing to do with your legal rights. As an example, in the US, your legal right to liberty cannot be abridged. However, in some foreign lands, your legal right to liberty most definitely can and will be abridged. Your moral right to liberty cannot be abridged; only deferred by a corrupt society.
There is a difference. Your legal rights are granted by the state; your moral rights are granted and guaranteed by God.
The purpose of the Founding Fathers was to protect all free men from the power of government.The purpose of the Founding Fathers was to protect all free men from the abuse of power of the state.
Everyone realized, even then, that slaves were men. The problem was that slaves were not FREE men. Slaves were considered to be "in bondage," so just as a man in prison was not free, so a slave was not free.At that point in time, slaves were not necessarily considered men. They were chattel. They were pack animals. They were considered sub-human. While some Christian men and women considered slaves to be human, many in this land did not. This is how they justified their continued acts of slavery, as well as their trade of slaves.
All men, by virtue of being men, should be free.You're singing to the choir here. No one here will disagree with you, least of all me.
Even in the United States no man, regardless of race, is safe from the threat of slavery without a Constitutional protection against slavery.Go back and read your Constitution. The 13th Amendment dealt specifically with the prohibition of chattel slavery within the US and environs.What we need is a Constitutional Amendment outlawing the practice of slavery.
More particularly: "Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
At the moment, I want to see all pilots armed. So does Barbara Boxer, but Pres. Bush does NOT want that. Does this mean, since I'm in agreement with a leftist, that my stance is wrong?
No one is right 100% of the time. And no political party holds a monopoly on what's right either.
If we fail to recognize that the terror comes from ISLAMIC JIHADISTS that are fully supported by the PEOPLE and the GOVERNMENTS of these nations, then we are wasting our time and money messing with a sitting duck like Saddam! If you remember as the Egyptian Islamic terrorists attacked the WTC in 1993, and our embassies in Africa, we simply sent a few cruise missiles against Sudan, and Afghanistan. We should have had Mubarak by the throat and dictated to him to shut down ALL the anti-American propaganda from his Islamists. If he is unable to deliver, then what good is he, or the three billion dollars per year that we are spending on him? My friend History is repeating itself again! As the world super-power, and with the world sympathy on our side, we should be able to shut down the Islamic movement! Instead, we are dancing around the issue, and screaming so loud that Islam is a “peaceful religion”!
I agree. However, I would have worded that sentence this way:
"Your legal rights are granted and protected by the state; your moral rights are granted and guaranteed by God."
This, then, would be consistent with the Declaration, even though the Declaration doesn't carry with it the force of law.
So it's really two sides of the same coin.
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