posted June 19, 2008 06:18 PM            

I never thought the United States Supreme Court would do so though.

It's time for the..so far...Republican wimps in the House of Representatives to prepare Articles of Impeachment against the 5 idiot Justices who voted for this outrage.

Their ruling means that where ever on Earth there's a US military base or even US military personnel and they take someone into custody who's trying to kill them or apparently anyone at all into custody, that person has the full rights of citizenship in American Courts bestowed on them.

What's next? Are US military personnel now also supposed to read terrorists their rights before questioning them? If they fail to do so, does that mean any information they get during questioning cannot be used against them in a trial?

Never, ever in the history of the United States has this been the law. The Courts have no authority to bestow the rights of citizenship on anyone. Nor do the Courts have any jurisdiction outside the borders of the United States.

Impeach these clowns. They're the usual suspects whenever the Constitution is being trashed.

Justice Kennedy: American idle
Posted: June 18, 2008
6:24 pm Eastern

Ann Coulter

After reading Justice Anthony Kennedy's recent majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, I feel like I need to install a "1984"-style Big Brother camera in my home so Kennedy can keep an eye on everything I do.

Until last week, the law had been that there were some places in the world where American courts had no jurisdiction. For example, U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over non-citizens who have never set foot in the United States.

But now, even aliens get special constitutional privileges merely for being caught on a battlefield trying to kill Americans. I think I prefer Canada's system of giving preference to non-citizens who have skills and assets.

If Justice Kennedy can review the procedures for detaining enemy combatants trying to kill Americans in the middle of a war, no place is safe. It's only a matter of time before the Supreme Court steps in to overrule Randy, Paula and Simon.

In the court's earlier attempts to stick its nose into such military operations as the detainment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo, the court dangled the possibility that it would eventually let go.

In its 2006 ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the court disallowed the Bush administration's combatant status review tribunals, but wrote: "Nothing prevents the president from returning to Congress to seek the authority (for trial by military commission) he believes necessary."

So Bush returned to Congress and sought authority for the military commissions he deemed necessary – just as the court had suggested – and Congress passed the Military Commissions Act. But as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent in the Boumediene case last week: It turns out the justices "were just kidding." This was the legal equivalent of the Supreme Court playing "got your nose!" with the commander in chief.

The majority opinion by Justice Kennedy in Boumediene held that it would be very troubling from the standpoint of "separation of powers" for there to be someplace in the world in which the political branches could operate without oversight from Justice Kennedy, one of the four powers of our government (the other three being the executive, legislative and judicial branches).

So now even procedures written by the legislative branch and signed into law by the executive branch have failed Kennedy's test. He says the law violates "separation of powers," which is true only if "separation of powers" means Justice Kennedy always gets final say.

Of course, before there is a "separation of powers" issue, there must be "power" to separate. As Justice Scalia points out, there is no general principle of separation of powers. There are a number of particular constitutional provisions that when added up are referred to, for short, as "separation of powers." But the general comes from the particular, not the other way around.

And the judiciary simply has no power over enemy combatants in wartime. Such power is committed to the executive as part of the commander in chief's power, and thus implicitly denied to the judiciary, just as is the power to declare war is unilaterally committed to Congress. As one law professor said to me, this is what happens when the swing justice is the dumb justice.

Kennedy's ruling thus effectively overturned the congressional declaration of war – the use of force resolution voted for by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, 75 other senators as well as 296 congressmen. If there's no war, then there are no enemy combatants. This is the diabolical arrogance of Kennedy's opinion.

We've been through this before: Should the military run the war or should the courts run the war?

I think the evidence is in.

The patriotic party says we are at war, and the Guantanamo detainees are enemy combatants. Approximately 10,000 prisoners were taken on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Of those, only about 800 ended up in Guantanamo, where their cases have been reviewed by military tribunals and hundreds have been released.

The detainees are not held because they are guilty; they're held to prevent them from returning to the battlefield against the U.S. Since being released, at least 30 Guantanamo detainees have returned to the battlefield, despite their promise to try not to kill any more Americans. I guess you can't trust anybody these days.

The treason party says the detainees are mostly charity workers who happened to be distributing cheese to the poor in Afghanistan when the war broke out, and it was their bad luck to be caught near the fighting.

They consider it self-evident that enemy combatants should have access to the same U.S. courts that recently acquitted R. Kelly of statutory rape despite the existence of a videotape. Good plan, liberals.

The New York Times article on the decision in Boumediene notes that some people "have asserted that those held at Guantanamo have fewer rights than people accused of crimes under American civilian and military law."

In the universal language of children: Duh.

The logical result of Boumediene is for the U.S. military to exert itself a little less trying to take enemy combatants alive. The military also might consider not sending the little darlings to the Guantanamo Spa and Resort.

Instead of playing soccer, volleyball, cards and checkers in Guantanamo, before returning to their cells with arrows pointed toward Mecca for their daily prayers, which are announced five times a day over a camp loudspeaker, the enemy combatants can rot in Egyptian prisons.

posted June 19, 2008 06:27 PM            

There's only one thing to do when a Supreme Court ruling appears to be outrageously unjust and wrongheaded – as was the case in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the court found in the Constitution a right of foreign enemy combatants to access hearings in civilian U.S. courts during wartime.

I decided to read the ruling for myself.

After doing so, I found there were two important but overlooked aspects of the decision:

The court not only found unconstitutional carefully crafted congressional legislation governing the way the rights of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay would be protected, it also reviewed a law specifically exempted by Congress from challenge by any federal court.

The court found the Constitution, and all of the protections it affords U.S. citizens, extends to the territory of Guantanamo Bay under U.S. jurisdiction and to any other foreign land so controlled by the U.S. military.
It is clear Congress, at the request of President Bush, set up a mechanism to ensure innocent men were not held at Guantanamo. Democrats and Republicans alike understood that, in wartime, special rules need to be developed to guard liberties while maintaining the nation's security. In so doing, Congress, apparently fearing just such a challenge by a federal court, specifically exempted its legislation from review by any court, as it is empowered to do in the Constitution.

That didn't stop the Supreme Court from intruding into a matter from which it was constitutionally forbidden.

In other words, the Supreme Court had no power to hear this case, let alone effectively overturn legislation approved by the Congress and signed by the president.

In doing so, the majority on the court issued some words that should chill every American's spine and grab the attention of the Congress, from which the court is usurping legislative authority.

"To hold that the political branches (Congress and the executive branch) may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say 'what the law is,'" wrote the majority in the syllabus to the decision.

So, it's official! This court believes a majority of five judges in black robes decides the law of the land, not the Congress of the United States with the consent of the president.

I'm simply astonished that no other journalist – no other pundit – has observed the coup d'etat that this decision represents in the American political system.

To make it clear, the Congress, anticipating just this kind of meddling in national security matters by the court, wrote legislation prohibiting it, as the Constitution permits it to do. The court ignored that restriction, meddled in national security matters that were not its business and verbally spanked the Congress, explaining, in most condescending fashion, that the "political branches" actually had no say in "what the law is."

Now, as to the matter of whether the Constitution applies at Gitmo, I have one other original observation to make: If the Constitution affords special civil protections to foreign enemy combatants at Gitmo, wouldn't it also afford special civil protections to foreign enemy combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan?

It seems like a simple question.

But, it's not.

Because if the Supreme Court's logic is carried to its natural conclusion, the war against Islamo-fascist terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, or any other theater of war, would, by necessity, come to an immediate end.

The U.S. military would not be permitted to take the life of enemy soldiers without first providing them with a writ of habeas corpus and a fair hearing in U.S. federal court. Those enemies would, of course, need to be read their Miranda rights before being arrested and provided with American Civil Liberties Union representation.

If the U.S. military is permitted to take lives in foreign theaters without due process, how could it be forbidden from simply detaining prisoners in other foreign theaters?

posted June 20, 2008 03:03 PM            

It's scary...there could end up being serious ethnic profiling when it comes to Arabs. Even is you look Arab,you can fall under suspicion.......heck especially if you express discontent with American policies. (Think of creative maladjustment like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about)

Heck.....I think that I look like I could pass for an Arab. Some thought I was of Middle Eastern descent,and a person even talked a bunch of smack to me online accusing me of being a "Paki" and I am going....WTF. It must be from the Portuguese and Spanish in me on my maternal Grandfather's side. After all,arabs occupied the Iberian Peninsula which consists of Spain and Portugal for 700 years.
My background consists of Black,Portuguese,English,German,French,Italian,Puerto Rican,Native American,and possibly Jewish (my maternal grandmother's mother's maidename was Rosenthal).

posted June 20, 2008 03:06 PM            

(This is the first part of the five-part Guantanamo: Beyond the Law series by McClatchy Newspapers . The full series is available at www.mcclatchydc.com)
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GARDEZ, Afghanistan - The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

They shouted "Allahu Akbar" - God is great - as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , after the Sept. 11, 2001 , terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy . Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men - and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds - whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan , Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials - primarily in Afghanistan - and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

While he was held at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base , Akhtiar said, "When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, 'What is my crime?' the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs."

The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.

Of course, Guantanamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed , the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who along with four other high-profile detainees faces military commission charges. Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al Qaida training camps.

But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court challenge, it's impossible to know how many of the 770 men who've been held there were terrorists.

A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy combatants" beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.

However, the administration's attempts to keep the detainees beyond the law came crashing down last week.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that detainees have the right to contest their cases in federal courts, and that a 2006 act of Congress forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional. "Some of these petitioners have been in custody for six years with no definitive judicial determination as to the legality of their detention," the court said in its 5-4 decision, overturning Bush administration policy and two acts of Congress that codified it.

One former administration official said the White House's initial policy and legal decisions "probably made instances of abuse more likely. ... My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that the old rules don't apply ... certainly some people read what was coming out of Washington : The gloves are off, this isn't a Geneva world anymore."

Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense Department , the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal and political sensitivities of the issue.

McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.

McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees' lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees' accounts.

The Pentagon declined to discuss the findings. It issued a statement Friday saying that military policy always has been to treat detainees humanely, to investigate credible complaints of abuse and to hold people accountable. The statement says that an al Qaida manual urges detainees to lie about prison conditions once they're released. "We typically do not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and present detainees," the statement said.

LITTLE INTELLIGENCE VALUE

The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn't belong there.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication - and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are - most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren't terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.

Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in 1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy . The Taliban burned down Akhtiar's house after he refused to ally his tribe with their government.

The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because they were given bad information by another Afghan who'd harbored a personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander against the Soviet military during the 1980s.

"In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a big role" in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer said.

He didn't want his name used, partly because he didn't want to offend the Western officials he works with and partly because Afghan intelligence officers are assassinated regularly.

"There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad intelligence," said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. "In the beginning, everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans ... the Americans were taking action without checking this information."

Nusrat Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him, put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost four weeks straight, Khan said.

By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan - who'd had at least two strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk - was half-mad and couldn't stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to Guantanamo on a stretcher.

Several Afghan officials, including the country's attorney general, later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo, wasn't a threat to anyone; he'd been turned in as an insurgent leader because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.

Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry -appointed district commander in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, a man who'd risked his life to help the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that province and now the governor of Kabul , said there was no question that local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan's brusque style, fed false information about him to local informants used by American troops.

The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy's findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson , refused to speak with McClatchy .

The Pentagon's only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy , and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.

"These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians," Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.

Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby , until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, said that detainees had supplied crucial information about al Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

"Included with the folks that were brought here in 2002 were, by and large, the main leadership of al Qaida and the Taliban," he said in a phone interview.

Buzby agreed, however, that some detainees were from the bottom rung.

"It's all about developing the mosaic ... there's value to both ends of the spectrum," he said.

Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy's conclusions squared with their own observations.

"As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless," a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military's slang for Guantanamo.

Guantanamo authorities periodically sent analysts at the U.S. Central Command "rap sheets on various prisoners and asked our assessment whether they merited continued confinement," said the analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "Over about three years, I assessed around 40 of these individuals, mostly Afghans. ... I only can remember recommending that ONE should be kept at GITMO."

'WAR COUNCIL' REWRITES DETAINEE LAW

At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.

"He said that we're not getting anything, and his thought was that we're not getting anything because there might not be anything to get," said Donald J. Guter , a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps at the time.

Many detainees were "swept up in the pot" by large operations conducted by Afghan troops allied with the Americans, said former Army Secretary White, who's now a partner at DKRW Energy, an energy company in Houston .

One of the Afghan detainees at Guantanamo, White recalled, was more than 80 years old.

Army Spc. Eric Barclais, who was a military intelligence interrogator at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan from September 2002 through January 2003 , told military investigators in sworn testimony that "We recommended lots of folks be released from (Bagram), but they were not. I believe some people ended up at (Guantanamo) that had no business being sent there."

"You have to understand some folks were detained because they got turned in by neighbors or family members who were feuding with them," Barclais said. "Yes, they had weapons. Everyone had weapons. Some were Soviet-era and could not even be fired."

A former Pentagon official told McClatchy that he was shocked at times by the backgrounds of men held at Guantanamo.

" 'Captured with weapon near the Pakistan border?' " the official said. "Are you kidding me?"

"The screening, the understanding of who we had was horrible," he said. "That's why we had so many useless people at Gitmo."

In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.

Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.

Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with few legal rights.

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers - along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush - should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld , the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002 , Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.

The Bush administration didn't launch a formal review of the detentions until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military tribunals at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ruling last week said that the tribunals were deeply flawed, but it didn't close them down.

In late 2004, Pentagon officials decided to restrict further interrogations at Guantanamo to detainees who were considered "high value" for their suspected knowledge of terrorist groups or their potential of returning to the battlefield, according to Matthew Waxman , who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, the Defense Department's head official for detainee matters, from August 2004 to December 2005 .

"Maybe three-quarters of the detainees by 2005 were no longer regularly interrogated," said Waxman, who's now a law professor at Columbia University .

At that time, about 500 men were still being held at Guantanamo.

So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six detainees - less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who've been at Guantanamo - with direct involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks; they dropped the charges in one case. Those few cases are now in question after the high court's ruling Thursday.

About 500 detainees - nearly two out of three - have been released.

During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar had some advice for the U.S. officers seated before him.

"I wish," he said, "that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are."

HOW FOOT SOLDIERS, FARMERS GOT SWEPT UP

How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:

After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan , leaving the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts who knew nothing about global terrorism.

The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties - advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 - there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees' backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees - 22 out of 66 - whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who'd been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan , a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.

American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan , a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.

Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren't present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080618/wl_mcclatchy/2969800_1