By Patrick Martin:
Bush seeks to extend Guantánamo procedures to American citizensSee also here.1 August 2006
In draft legislation prepared in response to last month’s Supreme Court decision against the use of military tribunals for US prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, the Bush administration proposes to extend the practice of indefinite detention and summary trial by military commissions to include American citizens.
According to press accounts Friday, based on leaks from those with access to the draft, the bill would essentially legalize the military tribunals in the form decreed by Bush in 2001, with only minor changes, while for the first time making US citizens as well as foreign nationals subject to such summary proceedings.
The tribunals, commissions of active-duty military personnel under orders of the president as commander-in-chief, would have the power to impose death sentences based on secret evidence and in proceedings from which the defendants could be excluded whenever military judges decided this was “necessary to protect national security.”
The Washington Post reported that the draft legislation had initially reaffirmed the 2001 Bush order that limited the jurisdiction of the military commissions to “alien enemy combatants.”
This language was crossed out, the newspaper said, and replaced by language giving the commissions authority to try anyone “engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” regardless of nationality.
USA: black music and prisons: here.
*American Prison Camps Are on the Way*
by Marjorie Cohn
AlterNet
October 9, 2006
Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is constructing a
huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of
Bush’s “unlawful enemy combatants.” Americans are certain to be among
them.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of
detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush
administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed
that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S.
citizens, “unlawful enemy combatants.”
Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to
protect us against terrorism. Frightened they might lose their majority
in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill
through Congress with little substantive debate.
Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush’s list of
“terrorist” organizations, or who speaks out against the government’s
policies could be declared an “unlawful enemy combatant” and imprisoned
indefinitely. That includes American citizens.
The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have
been declared enemy combatants. Congress has the constitutional power to
suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion. The
habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and the
Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.
Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps of other
unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national
crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.
In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war,
passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the
Federalist Party’s political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the
time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most
immigrants sympathized with the Republicans.
The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation
of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States.
Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been
expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never
used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any
non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S.
government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under
it.
The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote,
printed, published, or spoke anything “false, scandalous and malicious”
with the intent to hold the government in “contempt or disrepute.” The
Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the
government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition
Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the
Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against
Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and
newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams.
Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of
fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of
1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the
forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II,
and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).
During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the
perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread
illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an
unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and
lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in
“red-baiting.” One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A.
Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime of
domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government
policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United
States.
In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of
Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States.
Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would “lie
about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can
bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”
That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides
the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he
determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown &
Root, a subsidiary of Cheney’s Halliburton, is constructing a huge
facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of
undesirables.
In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis
cautioned, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious
encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer,
speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans “they need to watch
what they say, watch what they do.”
We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of
our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious
jeopardy. Benjamin Franklin’s prescient warning should give us pause:
“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security,
deserve neither liberty or security.”
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is
president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S.
representative to the executive committee of the American Association of
Jurists. Her new book, “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has
Defied the Law,” will be published in 2007 by PoliPointPress.
Read this at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/42458/
Comment by Administrator — October 10, 2006 @ 12:46 pm