German car salesman Khaled Masri was kidnapped by the United States government, flown to American occupied Afghanistan, kept prisoner there for months and tortured. Yet, the five right wing justices on the United States Supreme Court, led by John Roberts, decided that they would refuse to hear his case.
In doing so, they implicitly agreed that the President of the United States can kill any lawsuit against the United States government whenever he wants to. All the President has to do is claim that state secrets are involved, without providing any evidence at all that this is the case.
In effect, this decision not to hear the case of Khaled Masri gives the President the power to do as he wishes, without being subject to the law.
This decision allows the President of the United States.
The Supreme Court of the United States has failed to protect the Constitution and the rule of law in the United States. The court has proven that it is in no sense an impartial judicial body, but has become a branch of the Republican Party.
The Supreme Court will do nothing to protect our rights, nothing to return America to a state in which constitutionally-guaranteed liberties are respected, nothing to hold the power of the President in check.
Americans have no course left but impeachment… but will Congress act?
Don’t hold your breath.
It looks like the rule of law only applies to the little people in America. For the power elites like George W. Bush, it’s anything goes.
The consequences of the paranoid worship of fear promoted by the Department of Homeland Security are this: Police are now electrocuting students for studying in school libraries without proper identification. You think I’m exaggerating? Watch the video you see below, which was captured by a witness with a cell phone video camera:
The student did nothing violent. He did not break the law. He was just trying to study in his own university’s library, when a security sweep of the library by armed police officers took place. There was no reason for the police officers to believe that any crimes were being committed in the library. No one had complained about any suspicious activity in the library. But, police officers started blustering through the library on the UCLA campus anyway, demanding that all students show them identification or be kicked out of the library.
The student you’ll hear screaming in pain in this video, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, refused to show his ID, because he didn’t believe that the police had the legal right to search him without cause. So, the police told him to leave. Tabatabainejad gathered his things into his backpack and was walking toward the exit, but the police followed him anyway, grabbed him, and started to electrocute him with a taser stun gun. The police electrocuted the student at least four or five times, even though Tabatabainejad did nothing violent.
Then, the police threatened other students who were witnesses, telling them that they would be shocked with the stun gun if they didn’t leave the scene of the brutality.
All this took place because the police said that they needed to establish security… in a library where students were peacefully reading books and writing term papers. This is an all-too-telling example of what the paranoid terror of Homeland Security has done to America. The war on terror has promoted terror right here in the United States of America.
What will the new Democratic Congress do to stop this new reign of terror? So far, it looks as if they will do nothing.
I ran across a bit of information today that caused me to reflect upon the movement to impeach and imprison Bush. According to a Zogby poll conducted recently, 58 percent of American voters would not want President George W. Bush to be impeached if conclusive evidence were presented that Bush purposefully lied in order to get America into the Iraq War.
What occurred to me as I read this information was that it will not be enough for those of us who want to impeach Bush and imprison him to find just a minimum amount of evidence necessary to convict Bush of a crime. We have to build up an emotionally compelling case that makes Bush look like a stereotypical criminal, not just a political creep.
The Republicans who impeached Bill Clinton made the mistake of impeaching him for behavior that just didn’t seem criminal. Getting a blow job and then lying about it may be technically against the law in a few circumstances, but to most Americans, it’s perfectly natural behavior.
Just so, we would make a mistake by impeaching Bush for merely attempting to push through a radical political agenda using illegal means. Americans expect politicians to do that.
No, when Americans think of criminals, they think primarily of murderers and thieves, or people who brutally attack little old ladies. Tax evasion doesn’t register a big reaction, and neither does insider stock trading. That’s a shame, because white collar crimes often cause more damage, but that’s the way it is. If we’re going to be successful in getting the American people to support an effort to impeach Bush, we’re going to have to find an overwhelming case against him that really makes Americans feel betrayed. Without that support, the effort will fail.
The material has been handed to us by Bush - he has committed several heinous crimes. But, it’s up to us to wrap it all up in a neat package that the public at large will understand and agree with.
Yes, the mission of the Imprison Bush web site is, as the name suggests, to work for the imprisonment of George W. Bush for his many crimes against the American people. Still, we’re not so focused that we’re inflexible.
That’s why, today, I’m making an addition to our call for the imprisonment of George W. Bush. Imprison Karl Rove too.
The world has learned this morning that Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s top political advisor, revealed the identity of an undercover CIA agent to someone outside the government. That’s a crime.
Karl Rove and the White House say it’s okay that Rove exposed the identity of the undercover CIA agent when he leaked the information out into the public, because he didn’t use the agent’s name. Oh no, he didn’t use the CIA agent’s name, he merely announced to the world that “Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife is an undercover CIA agent.”
Why did Karl Rove commit this crime? Rove used the information an attack against Joseph Wilson’s family in revenge for the testimony by Ambassador Wilson that there was no attempt by the Iraqi government to buy yellowcake uranium in order to build nuclear weapons.
Here was Ambassador Joseph Wilson, reporting the truth to the American government, a truth that, if it had been listened to, could have prevented the deaths of over 1,700 Americans. What did Bush and Rove do in retaliation? Instead of calling off the stupid idea of invading and occupying Iraq, Bush and Rove attacked an American ambassador and an undercover CIA agent!
Republicans have grown fond of calling American progressive traitors for doing nothing more than daring to request that the President of the United States follow the law. Turnabout is fair play, Republicans. When George W. Bush and Karl Rove broke the law to attack an American ambassador and an undercover CIA, Bush and Rove became traitors to the United States of America. Dirty, rotten, criminal traitors.
It’s been a much-ignored story in the corporate news media, but I think it’s important enough to bring to our readers’ attention: At the orders of the Bush Administration, scores of law-abiding people living within US borders have been taken prisoner and held secretly, without being charged with any crime, and without any of the necessary legal notification of the American people! I’ll just offer one quote from a report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on this crime against American liberty:
“Haste, incompetence and prejudice played a role in these detentions. Muslim men were arrested for little more than attending the same mosque as a September 11 hijacker or owning a box-cutter.”
While Bush is gearing up to exhort us all to “stay the course” in Iraq, and Condi comes on TV telling us about the “quiet process” of democratization in Iraq, keep reading page 10 of your local paper. That’s where you’ll read about the other “quiet process” going on in Iraq–the slide toward civil war. The Washington Post (6/15/05) reports that the Kurds, often touted by the Bush administration as the model Iraqi minority, have been snatching people off the streets and holding them without due process of law. Estimates of the number of captives range as high as 600, and the U.S. military admits to 180.
U.S. General Alan Gayhart has said, “I can tell you that the coalition forces absolutely do not condone it.” And what do they do to stop it? He didn’t say…
And who are these captives, grabbed off the streets in violation of Iraqi law? Mostly ethnic minorities: Sunnis, Shiites, and ethnic Turks. The very north of Iraq, sometimes referred to as “Iraqi Kurdistan,” or “Kurdistan” for short, has been autonomous for years. They’ve got their own army, their own police, even their own currency. What’s the major holdup on the constitution? The Kurds don’t want to give that all up.
So what’s wrong with an ethnic group banding together and forming its own government after the collapse of an authoritarian regime? Well, remember the former Yugoslavia? Lots can go wrong. It’s called Balkanization.
Right now, there are conflicting trends toward unification and Balkanization in Iraq, and it’s not at all clear which will eventually triumph. And just for the record, regardless of what Tom “Let’s-Escalate-The-War-Against-an-Insurgency-Because-That’s-Been-a-Good-Idea- Historically-Oh-By-the-Way-Isn’t-Enron-Fabulous” Freedman (my new name for him) says about my secret wishes, I really do want peace and democracy to prevail, everywhere. It’s really better for people than war and chaos. Of course, that won’t convince Tom “I-Know-What-Liberals-All-Secretly-Think-Even-Though-None-of-Them-Say-It” Freedman. But he’s on crack.
In any case, is this all Bush’s fault? How could he have possibly imagined that a multi-ethnic nation, in which an authoritarian central government is suddenly removed, might descend into civil wars of ethnic cleansing between enclaves divided along ethnic and religious lines? Gosh, I don’t know, you’d have to go all the way back to the 1990’s to see an example of that.
Why didn’t anybody warn the Bush administration about this? Oh, wait. They did.
Here’s what some people said before we invaded Iraq: “By decapitating the Iraqi dictatorship, we run the risk of Iraq as a nation collapsing into warring factions aligned around religion and ethnicity.”
Here’s what the Bush administration heard: “Blah, blah, blah. Henny Penny! Henny Penny! The sky is falling!”
Now here’s what people are asking the Bush administration: “What are your strategies for preventing Iraq from descending into full-scale civil war, and how do you plan to respond if it does?”
And here’s what the Bush administration hears: “Blah blah blah. Things were better under Saddam. We don’t believe in America or have confidence in its military.”
The Bush administration has pretty much made a policy of not grounding itself in the facts, listening to warnings, or learning from history. They say they don’t have to, they’re above that. Maybe we should all chip in and buy them a hearing aid, a history textbook, and a reality check. Oh, yeah, and a frickin’ clue.
Buried on page 13 of the paper, I find this very disturbing report:
According to Jean Ziegler of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the number of Iraqi children under the age of five suffering from “acute malnutrition” has nearly doubled under American occupation–from 4% in April 2003 to 7.7% last fall. More than 25% are going hungry. According to Ziegler, this is “a result of the war led by coalition forces” (AP, 3/31/05).
Meanwhile, the American press and public are transfixed by the morbid spectacle of a family fighting over the use of a feeding tube to keep a vegetative woman’s body alive. The press and politicians exploiting this family tragedy aren’t even focusing on principle or policy. The president–who couldn’t be bothered to break off his vacation for a briefing entitled “Al Qaeda Determined to Strike in the U.S.” or a tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands–rushed back from the ranch to pass a law that was rammed through Congress lickety split. The law applied only to Terry Schiavo.
What’s going on, America? Since when do we pass special laws for individual people? Democracies don’t do that. Even weirder, the new “culture of life” we’ve been hearing so much about doesn’t seem to extend to the children dying under our occupation. What happened to “no child left behind?”
Of course, Schiavo’s death was a tragedy. And the question of when to cease medical intervention in such cases is a difficult one for family and society alike. But when the issue of “life” focuses on frozen embryos and braindead bodies but ignores starving children, something is profoundly sick in the soul of America.
For years now, the Bush Administration has justified its illegal refusal to recognize the human rights of its prisoners by claiming that the people it holds prisoner and tortures are “the worst of the worst” - diabolical terrorists who are so evil and so wicked that the normal rule of law cannot be applied to them.
Of course, there’s a funny trick to that claim: So long as the Bush Administration continues to deny its prisoners the right to a fair trial, the American public really has no reason to believe that Bush’s prisoners are guilty of anything at all. The entire system of American law is built upon the idea that guilt is not determined by the whim of any politician, but by a rigorous process of trial by jury. Take out this element of American law, and there really isn’t any law left.
As it stands now, President George W. Bush has granted himself the power to declare anyone, American or not, an enemy of his government, and to create special exemptions from legal procedures whenever he decides it’s necessary. Oh, Bush always says that he has reasons, that he has evidence of guilt, but he insists that his reasons and his evidence are classified top secret. Most of the time, Bush won’t even let Congress see any of what he calls “evidence”.
Under such a lawless state, President Bush could grab your 16 year-old daughter, declare her an enemy of the state, and throw her into a prison like the one at Guantanamo Bay. You couldn’t do anything about it. Bush would just declare that he had secret evidence proving that she was planning a nuclear attack against Green Bay, Wisconsin. Well, how could you disprove that?
It turns out that there have been some good Americans attempting to do just that - to force the government to prove that what it says it’s keeping in secret is really there. Mostly, the Bush White House is able to stymie their efforts, but every now and then, they grab onto something.
The Washington Post grabbed onto something meaty in the basement lockers of the of the Bush Administration this week. What they found was that the Bush Administration has knowingly kept a man prisoner in Guantanamo Bay even though there is evidence that he is completely unconnnected to any terrorist plots by Al Quaida or any other terrorist groups.
The Bush Administration set up a military tribunal to determine whether Murat Kurnaz was, in fact, any threat to the United States. The tribunal looked at “the evidence”, and declared that Murat Kurnaz was one of “the worst of the worst”. The tribunal said that it had come to its decision based on secret evidence.
So, what was that secret evidence? Well, gosh, when the Washingon Post actually got ahold of it, they found out that the files that the military tribunal was keeping hidden from everybody actually proved that Murat Kurnaz was not guilty of anything at all!
Maybe you think I’m exaggerating the point. I’ll quote what the Washington Post has to say about the matter: “…that evidence, recently declassified and obtained by The Washington Post, shows that U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or terrorist activities.”
So, what do you think the Bush Administration has done with Kurnaz? Released him? No way! He’s still in Guantanamo Bay, being “interrogated” for information that he certainly does not have. Kurnaz doesn’t know anything more about Al Quaeda than you do, and he is no more an evildoer terrorist than you are, but the Bush Administration has kept him in prison, subjected to a brutal regimen of interrogation that may include torture - and done so by lying about “evidence” against him that never existed.
What does Bush’s military tribunal have to say for itself? The member of the tribunal say that it all makes sense, really, and somehow the evidence that proves his innocence really proves his guilt. Somehow. But they say that they can’t tell us how or why, because that’s, um, top secret.
Know the worst part of this story? The American people have largely responded to this story by saying merely: “Hm… Hey did you hear about Terri Schiavo?”
