Rumsfeld's definition of freedom...

[Coldfire]

Originally posted by Coldfire and quoted out of context

I agree with you about the discrepancy in professionality when comparing the military briefings, and the political ones.

[Zoe]

I’m glad someone posted a link to the original press conference. Without it, I never would have seen another jewel from Rumsfeld:

“Meanwhile, we’re working to expand the flow of free information to the Iraqi people…We’re doing this because access to free information is critical to building a free society.”

And as we Americans all know, information has been so forthcoming from the current Bush administration.:rolleyes:

[mhendo]

Well, as is the case with most such things, there are differning opinions on either side of the legal and political divide, but these stories might help to convinve you that American liberties have been seriously challenged from within during the last year and a half.

First, from this September, 2002, Washington Post article:

In recent weeks some federal courts have begun to weigh in against the administration. The appeals court ruling last week was handed down after five district judges had ruled against various aspects of the president’s anti-terror campaign.

Bush is facing particularly stiff resistance to his assertion that the executive branch may designate certain U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants,” and hold them indefinitely, without charging them with a crime or permitting them access to an attorney. Two such detainees are being held at a navy brig in South Carolina: Yasser Esam Hamdi, who was born in the United States of Saudi parents, was captured in Afghanistan; Jose Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican who converted to militant Islam after a career as a petty criminal, was arrested by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Chicago on suspicion that he was part of a Qaeda plot to use a radiological bomb in the United States.

The courts should have no role in reviewing these designations, administration lawyers have argued, because they are inherently military decisions, which the executive branch is uniquely qualified - and empowered by the constitution - to make.

In terms of asserting executive authority, that claim “is possibly the most incautious thing Bush has done,” Sunstein said.

During still-unsettled litigation over Hamdi’s bid for a writ of habeas corpus, a federal district judge in Virginia, Robert Doumar, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, ordered that Hamdi get access to a lawyer and said the administration cannot hold him unless it lays out more of its evidence for the court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit overruled Doumar’s order granting Hamdi a lawyer, but that usually conservative court balked at the administration’s demand that the courts have no role in such cases, calling the argument “a sweeping proposition.”

Here’s another comment on these guys, from the St. Petersburg Times:

No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress.

Congress passed this law in 1971 in response to concerns the executive branch could overstep its authority during a national emergency and hold, without charge, Americans deemed dangerous or disloyal.

So why are two Americans in that very predicament today?

Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla are American citizens sitting in military brigs without charge or access to lawyers. Hamdi was picked up in Afghanistan, accused of fighting on behalf of the Taliban; and Padilla was arrested coming off a flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, suspected of plotting to release a dirty bomb in the United States.

If the allegations are true, these are unsympathetic men. But unlike the case of convicted American Taliban John Walker Lindh, the Bush administration won’t let these assertions be tested before an independent court.

And from this Human Rights Watch report:

Tiffanay Hughes, a U.S. citizen, and her husband, Ali Al-Maqtari, a Yemeni citizen, were searched and detained at an army base in Kentucky where she was a recruit on September 15, 2001, for no stated reason. She said that two days earlier, when she went to pick up her orders in Massachusetts, an officer told her repeatedly that she could not wear a hejab, a headdress used by many Muslim women. She protested and said it was a religious symbol. She said that the officer replied, “Don’t let people know that you’re Muslim. It’s dangerous.” Hughes believed that her identification card photo, in which she was wearing the hejab and which was allegedly posted at the army base guardhouse when she arrived there, and her speaking a foreign language (French) with her husband may have raised suspicions. Hughes was followed by three officers everywhere she went for almost two weeks while at the army base. The army encouraged her to take an honorable discharge, and she did so on September 28. Her husband was detained for fifty-two days, mostly in solitary confinement. He was charged with an immigration violation for ten days of “unlawful presence” in the United States while he changed from a visitor’s visa to a visa sponsored by his wife. He had been released on bond.

And, while this possibly falls more into the category of intimidation rather than outright violation of legal rights and civil liberties, this High Times article discusses some of the things the FBI focused on in the period after 9/11:

Barry Reingold, a 60-year-old San Francisco retiree, enjoys daily visits to the local gym, where he works out and talks politics with his friends and acquaintances. Since September 11th, those discussions, like the political discussions many Americans are now having, have gotten heated at times. Heated discussions in the new post-Sept. 11 America, however, can earn one a visit from the FBI.

Recently, two FBI agents paid a visit to Reingold’s home to question him about conversations he had been having at the gym. Someone in the gym, they explained to him, had reported that he had been, “talking about terrorism and September 11th, oil profits, capitalism and Afghanistan.” In an interview with Emil Guillermo, author and San Francisco television host, Reingold explained that he had been arguing with his gym mates about how “hundreds and thousands of workers [are] being laid off in the United States,” and how, “this war is not just about getting terrorists. It’s also about money and corporate oil profits.” During a heated argument one day, he called George W. Bush “a dog.”

<snip>

The FBI’s chilling visit to Reingold’s home was not an isolated incident. On Oct. 12, two Secret Service agents paid a visit to the Durham, NC apartment of A.J. Brown, a Durham Tech freshman attending college with the help of an American Civil Liberties Union scholarship. According to a report published in The Progressive, the agents told Brown, “We’re here because we have a report that you have un-American material in your apartment.” When Brown denied having any such material, the agents specified that they were specifically investigating reports that she had an “anti-American” poster hanging on her wall.

<snip>

In New York City, the Chashama art gallery and theater near Times Square leased billboard space to the Adbusters Media Foundation to display the “Corporate Flag,” an American flag with 30 corporate logos replacing the 50 stars. The flag dates back to the group’s July Fourth campaign to “declare independence from corporate rule.” The billboard admonished passersby to do the same, and listed the group’s Website, www.adbusters.org.

Adbusters sells smaller versions of the corporate flag at cost for $20 each. After July 4, they became fairly common. I fly one in front of my house on sunny days. Common or not, however, hosting a billboard-sized image of the corporate flag in New York these days is risky. A Department of Defense investigator visited Chashama, intent on finding out why they displayed the corporate flag, who paid for the billboard and who created the image?

All of these questions, which the DoD has no business asking, could easily have been answered by reading the billboard, which contained the Adbusters Website address. The visit, however, was more about intimidation than investigation. Images going against the jingoistic post-Sept. 11 grain have no business in Rudy Giuliani’s new Times Square.

<snip>

The story of Neil Godfrey is even stranger. On Oct. 10, the 22-year-old Philadelphia resident was en route to Phoenix to meet his family and head on to a vacation in Disneyland. After checking his luggage, he proceeded to his departure gate carrying nothing but reading material, a copy of The Nation and Edward Abbey’s novel Hayduke Lives. According to airport officials, it’s the novel, adorned with a picture of a hand grasping dynamite on the cover, which got Godfrey flagged by National Guardsmen patrolling the airport. He was detained for 45 minutes by an assortment of Guardsmen, Philadelphia police officers and Pennsylvania state troopers who diligently took notes as they thumbed through the book, asking him why he was reading it.

In the end, he was not allowed on his flight. A United Airlines employee explained that he was banned for three reasons. First was the book he was reading, second was the fact that he purchased his ticket online eight hours before the first hijacked plane hit the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, and third, because his driver’s license was expired.

What we read has suddenly become of interest to the government. The ominously named PATRIOT Act, which took effect in late October, gives the Feds authority to search the records of bookstores to ascertain what their customers are reading. The new regulation precludes any objections by criminalizing protest against such inquisitions. The bill clearly threatens booksellers with arrest if they disclose to anyone the fact that they were served with a government request for information.

Would you feel free if the government turned up at your door asking you to justify political comments made at a gym workout, or what poster you have on your walls? These people were not arrested, but this sort of thing seems, to me at least, to result in a decline in liberty.

I’m not sure of the final fate of this plan, critiqued in an August, 2002 edition of the Los Angeles Times, but it’s indicative aof a willingness to violate norms of due process and constitutional protections for US citizens:

Attorney General John Ashcroft’s announced desire for camps for US citizens he deems to be “enemy combatants” has moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace.

Ashcroft’s plan, disclosed last week but little publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants.

The proposed camp plan should trigger immediate congressional hearings and reconsideration of Ashcroft’s fitness for this 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.

The camp plan was forged at an optimistic time for Ashcroft’s small inner circle, which has been carefully watching two test cases to see whether this vision could become a reality. The cases of Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi will determine whether U.S. citizens can be held without charges and subject to the arbitrary and unchecked authority of the government.

Hamdi has been held without charge even though the facts of his case are virtually identical to those in the case of John Walker Lindh. Both Hamdi and Lindh were captured in Afghanistan as foot soldiers in Taliban units. Yet Lindh was given a lawyer and a trial, while Hamdi rots in a floating Navy brig in Norfolk, Va.

This week, the government refused to comply with a federal judge who ordered that he be given the underlying evidence justifying Hamdi’s treatment. The Justice Department has insisted that the judge must simply accept its declaration and cannot interfere with the president’s absolute authority in “a time of war.”

The question here is not whether it should be illegal for a US citizen to take up arms against the United States - obviously it should and it is - but whether that citizen has the right to due process and constitutional protections when he or she is caught. After all, this is the argument that some people have been making about a “free” society in this very thread - that it treats all of its citizens equally.

Also, i don’t think we should restrict this debate to US citizens. The authorities still obliged to follow certain principles and laws in dealing with illegal immigrants, resident aliens, and other non-citizens, and this Human Rights Watch report indicates that such principles and laws have been violated.

The US government has been on the wrong end of quite a few judicial rulings on this issue, including the one reported in this New York Times story from August last year:

A federal judge ruled today that the Bush administration had no right to conceal the identities of hundreds of people arrested after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and she ordered that most of their names be released within 15 days.

The ruling by Judge Gladys Kessler of Federal District Court dealt a significant setback to the government’s policy of secret detentions, mostly of immigrants, in connection with the Sept. 11 investigation. Judge Kessler rejected the Justice Department’s arguments that disclosure of the names would impede its investigation of terrorists.

She said that while it was the obligation of the executive branch to ensure the physical security of American citizens, “the first priority of the judicial branch must be to ensure that our government always operates within the statutory and constitutional constraints which distinguish a democracy from a dictatorship.”

“Unquestionably,” she added, “the public’s interest in learning the identity of those arrested and detained is essential to verifying whether the government is operating within the bounds of law.”

If you want some discussion about the USA PATRIOT act and its impact on civil liberties - something that many Democrat and Republicans are worried about - the ACLU has some interesting articles.

Again, as i said at the top, some of these issues are open to legal debate, but it certainly seems to me that many of the things discussed here have had a rather constraining effect on liberty in this country. YMMV.

[mhendo]

BTW, that last post was in response to milroyj.

[Coriolanus]

*Originally posted by mhendo *
**BTW, that last post was in response to milroyj. **

My goodness!

Does incautious mean “stupid”?

[Zoe]

Gee, mhendo, can’t you come up with more specific examples?

Nicely done!

[bjohn13]

Holy shit. I made a brief statement…an analogy, if you will…about part of my definition of freedom (one which I still stand by). I can’t seem to find the typo that got you so confused:

So, by your definition, a society that allows only a single religion, outlaws all others, and imprisons those who practice any religion except the approved one, must be a free society

Or say a society has a law prohibiting any speech that criticizes the government or rulers. People then break that law and are punished. This also, by your definition, must be a free society, as long as the population is aware that such speech is illegal.

A society whose laws require all women to cover themselves completely when in public, on pain of imprisonment or flogging, is also a free society. I mean, the society has a law, and the women who break it are just “punished once they are caught,” as you say.

Essentially, your legalistic definition means that, as long as something is made officially illegal, and people are only punished for breaking the law rather than simply carted away for no reason, then a society is free.

Now that was deep.

You must understand that I did not include any all inclusive statements in that post. Furthermore, you must also realize that what you say is somewhat true in a very minute detail. For instance, someone who has lived in a locked cellar for 50 years would indeed consider himself free once released even if he did not have the right to free speech or religion or was forced to wear a garmet over his face. Also, you must also realize that EVERY SINGLE LAW IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND is a restriction of freedom in some way.

Some laws are unjust. Therefore, the masses declare them to be “illegal laws” (to coin a phrase). In this sense, a person breaking a totalitarian law is not necessarily breaking a law per se since the law the individual is breaking is considered to be unjust.

Finally, we must realize how these laws come into being. Unjust laws have a way of being enforced before they are actually passed. Furthermore, “laws” that are passed to prevent people from breaking just laws are exactly the types of “laws” of which I am speaking. These laws are passed to prevent people from breaking laws that are in existance for the purpose of the “greater good”. These are the people who are punished before they actually break the law.

Yet, despite the apparent breadth of your definition, the United States does not qualify as a free society under your schema, because it also has the characteristic that you attribute to an unfree society. There are a number of people currently being held by the government who have committed no crime. The security round-ups since the 2001 terrorist attacks, which have included US citizens and legal visitors, held (and are holding) considerable numbers of people without charges, without access to a lawyer, without any proof of wrongdoing, and, in the opinion of many lawmakers, in violation of the constituion.

All this sounds a lot like your definition of an unfree society. And, if that’s what you’re saying about the US, i’m afraid that i have to agree with you right now, because the post-9/11 decline in liberty in this country has been rather depressing to watch.

With this, I do agree to an extent. I don’t think that the United States has undergone any massive inhumanitarian treatment of its citizens, but I was going to cite a few examples of how liberties have been taken away when I revisited this thread. However, you have already covered the two sources I was intending to cite in this regard.

What we are experiencing today is the tip of the iceberg (to coin a cliche) when regarding what a nation goes through on the way to becoming a totalitarian regime…the same process that almost any free nation goes through on the way to becoming an unfree nation.

[milroyj]

Wow, that was actually funny, mhendo! No really. You’ve got Hamdi and Padilla, terrorists, and (giggle) High Times as a source. That’s golden! And you people laugh at December. Tee hee.

Why don’t you grow up and try again?

The whole world doesn’t revolve around your leftist crap, in case you were wondering.

[wring]

you asked for evidence of Americans who’d lost rights, he delivered two who’ve been held for months w/o being charged, w/o access to lawyers etc. and more.

[Coriolanus]

*Originally posted by wring *
**you asked for evidence of Americans who’d lost rights, he delivered two who’ve been held for months w/o being charged, w/o access to lawyers etc. and more. **

Yeah, [milroyj]! Why don’t you grow up and post your 1000th post! :b

[milroyj]

*Originally posted by wring *
**you asked for evidence of Americans who’d lost rights, he delivered two who’ve been held for months w/o being charged, w/o access to lawyers etc. and more. **

I know, wring, but citing High Times? That’s got to be a first. Absurd!

[wring]

milroyj - he cited data about two cases. these facts are pretty fucking well known ya know. so, address the issue - you asked for evidence, there’s the two names of US citizens whose rights seem to have been violated quite substantially.

honestly when you made that post, my immediate thought was ‘what the fuck, that’s a soft ball pitch if I’ve ever seen one’ since the Padillo (sp?) case is so well known. (if not cared about).

[Coriolanus]

*Originally posted by milroyj *
**I know, wring, but citing High Times? That’s got to be a first. Absurd! **

The mainstream media has learned their reporters will be harassed, the CIA will hound their every move to discover and arrest their sources. At the very least, the wrath of Ari Fleischer will manifest itself when the president does not acknowledge your question.

Click here to googol for “Barry Reingold” Holy Fedayeen Shit! There’s lots of publications but they’re all leftists. There’s lots of them. Here’s one from the Christian Science Monitor:

Political Dissent Can Bring Federal Agents To The Door

Oh sure, the CSM believes the world revolves around their leftist crap.

CBS Evening News - Big Brother is listening

From The Village Voice: J Edgar Hoover Lives

I dunno all about Barry Reingold. The guy lives, despite Ashcroft’s Thought Police. Many US citizens are imprisoned without due process. Padilla has said enough incriminating stuff to lock him up - yet there’s thousands more.

[milroyj]

*Originally posted by Corbomite *
The mainstream media has learned their reporters will be harassed, the CIA will hound their every move to discover and arrest their sources.

Sorry, but we will need a cite that the CIA is arresting sources. Are there black helicopters in your yard?

From The Village Voice: J Edgar Hoover Lives

Citing the Village Voice is almost as funny as citing High Times. YMMV.

**Padilla has said enough incriminating stuff to lock him up - yet there’s thousands more. **

Do you have a cite for thousands of people being locked up?

[3trew]

*Originally posted by wring *
**milroyj - he cited data about two cases. these facts are pretty fucking well known ya know. so, address the issue - you asked for evidence, there’s the two names of US citizens whose rights seem to have been violated quite substantially.

**

[december]

In that same press confererence, Rumsfeld also discussed the the British action in Umm Qasr, where they, “cleared the mine of ports.” That may be funny, as is the quote in the OP, but these mis-statements have no significance.

[Gorsnak]

I’m sorry, december, I’m probably just overtired, but you’re going to have to explain how the quote in the OP becomes less than fucking stupid when two offending words are transposed.

[mhendo]

Before addressing the issues avoided so well by milroyj, i’ll quickly talk about the issue raised in the OP. As i’ve said before, i was not really seeking to score political points or to make a comment on the war; i was just trying to air my opinion about what i considered to be a pretty asinine comment made by Rumsfeld. I thought this was pretty clear in the OP, but in case it wasn’t, i made the point more clearly in response to manhattan and brutus, who were happy to use the thread as an excuse to further bash the anti-war crowd. By their deafening silence since then, these two morons have made their most intelligent contribution to this thread; would that they continue in permanent reticence.

Poor old december is so blinded by his adoration of the administration that he can’t see the difference between an error in which two words are transposed (“cleared the mine of ports”) and a statement that says that “free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.” If you go to the Department of Defense transcript of the press conference, you’ll see that they’ve inserted (sic) after the first example to indicate that it was a simple error. No such correction appears after the second example.

Thanks to those who have tried to point out to milroyj that, having received exactly the evidence that he asked for, he is being pretty unreasonable in his attempt to shift the goalposts yet again. I suppose when someone is completely devoid of principles, that is likely to happen. Let’s review the way this little fiasco has unfolded, shall we?

milroyj
Still, I’d like a cite for a single, solitary, U.S. citizen’s rights being denied. Do you have one?

Fair question. So i provided a response.

mhendo
[Long post addressing various issues, including the specific examples of Hamdi and Padilla, and the story of Tiffanay Hughes, as well as more general observation about increases in government surveillance and intrusiveness in the lives of US citizens and non-citizens.]

Well, milroyj decided that neither the examples nor the sources fit his criteria, and gave a fine display of total idiocy.

milroyj
**Wow, that was actually funny, mhendo! No really. You’ve got Hamdi and Padilla, terrorists, and (giggle) High Times as a source. That’s golden! And you people laugh at December. Tee hee.

Why don’t you grow up and try again?

The whole world doesn’t revolve around your leftist crap, in case you were wondering.
**

Well, being told to grow up is often considered an insult, but i find it strangely unworrying when it comes from someone who inserts “giggle” and “tee hee” in his posts.

His reply startled me, because i originally assumed that i was dealing with an adult, and was hoping for an interesting debate in which i might actually have to defend my beliefs and provide further evidence. For example, there are coherent and relevant arguments than can be made for reducing liberty in the interests of security, and even if i don’t agree with those arguments, i am quite willing to engage in debate over them and listen to their supporters. But poor old milroyj just drooled onto his keyboard and engaged in puerile blather.

I wasn’t the only one to notice his evasiveness.

wring
you asked for evidence of Americans who’d lost rights, he delivered two who’ve been held for months w/o being charged, w/o access to lawyers etc. and more.

Corbomite backed up this statement, and poor old milroyj then resorted to playing the man instead of the ball. Rather than engaging with the substance of the argument, all he had to offer was that one of my sources was unworthy of consideration.

milroyj
I know, wring, but citing High Times? That’s got to be a first. Absurd!

But not everyone was fooled by this lame attempt to shift the focus of the debate from substance to sources.

wring
**milroyj - he cited data about two cases. these facts are pretty fucking well known ya know. so, address the issue - you asked for evidence, there’s the two names of US citizens whose rights seem to have been violated quite substantially.

honestly when you made that post, my immediate thought was ‘what the fuck, that’s a soft ball pitch if I’ve ever seen one’ since the Padillo (sp?) case is so well known. (if not cared about).**

and

Corbomite
**The mainstream media has learned their reporters will be harassed, the CIA will hound their every move to discover and arrest their sources. At the very least, the wrath of Ari Fleischer will manifest itself when the president does not acknowledge your question.

Click here to googol for “Barry Reingold” Holy Fedayeen Shit! There’s lots of publications but they’re all leftists. There’s lots of them. Here’s one from the Christian Science Monitor:

Political Dissent Can Bring Federal Agents To The Door

Oh sure, the CSM believes the world revolves around their leftist crap.

CBS Evening News - Big Brother is listening

From The Village Voice: J Edgar Hoover Lives

I dunno all about Barry Reingold. The guy lives, despite Ashcroft’s Thought Police. Many US citizens are imprisoned without due process. Padilla has said enough incriminating stuff to lock him up - yet there’s thousands more.**

But unfortunately, poor old milroyj just doesn’t quite get the way that debate works. Instead of asking for a cite, receiving a cite, and then making further argument, all he does is continue to ask for cites, providing none of his own, and dismissing other people’s sources out of hand.

milroyj
**Sorry, but we will need a cite that the CIA is arresting sources. Are there black helicopters in your yard?

Citing the Village Voice is almost as funny as citing High Times. YMMV.

Do you have a cite for thousands of people being locked up?**

It’s hard to blame Corbomite for not returning with further citations, because milroyj has shown himself perfectly willing to ignore them, or to dismiss the sources themselves without once engaging the substance of the issue. Didn’t anyone ever tell you, milroyj, that when you have your head in the sand, all you’re displaying to the world is your ass?

But i’m always willing to give even the greatest dunces the benefit of the doubt. Maybe if i present milroyj (hereafter, “The Ostrich”) with even more evidence of what i believe to be incursions into Americans’ civil liberties, he might actually do me the courtesy of engaging in rational debate. In presenting this evidence, i will do my best to avoid any source that our esteemed media arbiter might deem to be below his notice. Although, if The Ostrich’s comments above are any indication, my evidence would only really qualify as demonstrating a threat to liberty if it involved the detention of thousands of god-fearing Republicans by CIA operatives in black helicopters, and were reported in the newsletter of the John Birch Society and on Fred Phelps’s website.

Maybe i’ll start with the two American citizens detained without counsel and in violation of their rights. The Ostrich dismissed this example out of hand, because these people are “terrorists.” Yet, as plenty of people have been trying to point out to John Ashcroft over the past months, it’s putting the cart before the horse to define someone as a terrorist without allowing them the due process that might determine whether or not the accusations are valid. As The Guardian (UK) noted in May last year:

At the top of the list of legal quandaries facing the attorney-general is Yasser Esam Hamdi, the second of the two “American Taliban”. Unlike the first, John Walker Lindh, who is set to stand trial in late August on charges including conspiracy to murder Americans abroad and conspiracy to assist terrorist groups, Hamdi is being held at a naval base in Virginia on legal grounds that the justice department has yet to explain.

The 22-year-old, captured in Afghanistan, was flown from detention in Guantanamo Bay to the US after he told interrogators he was born in Louisiana but had moved with his family to Saudi Arabia as a small child. As an American citizen, he could not be kept with other al-Qaida and Taliban detainees in Cuba, and has the right not to be held without charge or to face a military tribunal. Yet the authorities, for lack of evidence, have been unable to charge him with any criminal offence.

The Washington Post noted that Hamdi’s case jeopardises the essential protection of the justice system: that citizens who can’t be charged must be released. “This is a dangerous step… the indefinite detention of American citizens with no charge and no public legal justification is unacceptable,” the paper warned.

And that radical, subversive organization, the Cato Institute, had this to say about these cases:

Jose Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al-Muhajir, supposedly plotted to build and detonate a radiological “dirty bomb.” He is a U.S. citizen. Yet he’s being detained by the military – indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn’t been charged with any crime. Yaser Esam Hamdi is also a U.S. citizen. He, too, is being detained by the military – indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn’t been charged with any crime. Meanwhile, Zacarias Moussaoui, purportedly the 20th hijacker, is not a U.S. citizen. Neither is Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber. Both have attorneys. Both have been charged before federal civilian courts.

What gives? Four men: two citizens and two non-citizens. Is it possible that constitutional rights – like habeas corpus, which requires the government to justify continued detentions, and the Sixth Amendment, which assures a speedy and public jury trial with assistance of counsel – can be denied to citizens yet extended to non-citizens? That’s what the Bush administration would have us believe. Citizen Padilla’s treatment is perfectly legitimate, insists Attorney General John Ashcroft, because Padilla is an “enemy combatant” and there is “clear Supreme Court precedent” to handle those persons differently, even if they are citizens.

Ashcroft’s so-called clear precedent is a 1942 Supreme Court case, Ex Parte Quirin, which dealt with Nazi saboteurs, at least one of whom was a U.S. citizen. “Enemy combatants,” said the Court, are either lawful – for example, the regular army of a belligerent country – or unlawful – for example, terrorists. When lawful combatants are captured, they are POWs. As POWs, they cannot be tried (except for war crimes), they must be repatriated after hostilities are over, and they only have to provide their name, rank, and serial number if interrogated. Clearly, that’s not what the Justice Department has in mind for Padilla.

Unlawful combatants are different. When unlawful combatants are captured, they can be tried by a military tribunal. That’s what happened to the Nazi saboteurs in Quirin. But Padilla has not been charged much less tried. Indeed, the president’s executive order of November 2001 excludes U.S. citizens from the purview of military tribunals. If the president were to modify his order, the Quirin decision might provide legal authority for the military to try Padilla. But the decision provides no legal authority for detaining a citizen without an attorney solely for purposes of aggressive interrogation.

Moreover, the Constitution does not distinguish between the protections extended to ordinary citizens on one hand and unlawful-combatant citizens on the other. Nor does the Constitution distinguish between the crimes covered by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and the terrorist acts Padilla is suspected of planning. Still, the Quirin Court justified those distinctions – noting that Congress had formally declared war and thereby invoked articles of war that expressly authorized the trial of unlawful combatants by military tribunal. Today, the situation is very different. We’ve had virtually no input from Congress: no declaration of war, no authorization of tribunals, and no suspension of habeas corpus.

Even the long-haired, pot-smoking hippies at Business Week have weighed in on the Padilla case:

He is also an American citizen. And – war on terrorism or not – he deserves certain basic rights, including the right to a lawyer, the right to know the charges against him, and the right to a trial. The Bush Administration has another idea: It wants to keep Padilla in solitary confinement indefinitely, stripped of all his legal rights. The Justice Dept. candidly acknowledges it isn’t interested in ever charging him with anything. It just wants to keep him locked up so he can’t hurt anyone.

The government will give foreign nationals, such as French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui, the right to a trial. American John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan, will also get a trial. But American citizens such as Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, another U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan, have no rights at all. This is very dangerous.

Don’t get me wrong. I spend much of my day in an office just blocks from the White House and the Capitol. If somebody does succeed in pulling off another big terrorist attack, there’s a pretty fair chance I would be a victim. Thus, I’m very happy that the government is working overtime to stop another September 11.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has cut way too many corners here, however. We have a legal system in the U.S. that has worked pretty well for most of the past 220 years. The government gathers evidence against an alleged criminal. If the evidence is sufficient, the government charges him with a crime and tries him. And, if he is convicted, he is punished.

The Bush Administration has received much criticism for its treatment of Hamdi and Padilla, particularly because they are US citizens. Some lawyers believe, in fact, that the citizen-stripping provision of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (“PATRIOT II”) is a response to such criticism. This provision would allow the government to strip US citizens of their citizenship for certain activities, despite the fact that citizenship has been considered, since the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Afroyim vs. Rusk, a constitutional birthright that can only be relinquished voluntarily. I’m not sure if a lawyer, writing on a legal website, will be good enough evidence for The Ostrich, but in case it is, i offer the following from a March, 2003 FindLaw article by Joanne Mariner, a deputy director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch:

If the government is free to incarcerate American supporters of terrorist groups, why would it even want to strip them of their citizenship? One can only speculate. But perhaps, by expelling these people from the national community, the government believes that it can exclude them from public concern.

It may be, in fact, that Patriot II’s citizenship-stripping provision is the Bush Administration’s imaginative response to the criticism it has faced for its treatment of Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. Padilla and Hamdi, as you’ll recall, are the two American citizens that the government currently holds in incommunicado detention as “enemy combatants.” Although there are over 600 foreign citizens similarly detained at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay, there has been far more public outcry about the detention of Padilla and Hamdi than about all the other detainees combined.

The government would no doubt prefer that Padilla and Hamdi had no claim to U.S. citizenship. But to give the government the power to pick and choose among its citizens would reflect an unconstitutional - one might even say un-American - understanding of citizenship.

This Cato Institute article also refers to the liberty-reducing aiims of the Bush administration:

After 9/11, the FBI launched a campaign of secretive arrests. Bush also issued a military order that said he could deprive lawful permanent residents of jury trials. More recently, the president has maintained that any citizen he accuses of being involved in terrorism can be arrested and held incommunicado. No lawyer. No court hearing. The president’s lawyers are redefining the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus to be something more akin to a prisoner grievance about lousy food and cramped quarters.

<the post was too long, and had to be continued below>

[mhendo]

<continued from above>

Moving beyond the issue of US citizens, i notice that The Ostrich completely skipped over my argument regarding the violation of the rights of noncitizens. Exactly what constitutional rights noncitizens have is a matter of some debate but, as the Terrorism Answers website of the Council on Foreign Relations points out,

Broadly speaking, the Supreme Court has declared that the right to due process of law applies to both citizens and noncitizens. But questions of whether other rights apply to noncitizens have been interpreted differently throughout U.S. history. Many of these issues could ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.

Even if not every single constitutional right applies to noncitizens, they still have certain rights under US and international law and, as my earlier post pointed out, the Administration has been heavily criticised by civil libertarians and by judges in various court cases for its handling of noncitizens over the past eighteen months or so. As the Cato Institute says:

Soon after 9/11, about 1,200 noncitizens were detained in secret without evidence linking a single one of them to al-Qaida. The recurring questions were pretty basic. How many remained in custody? Who were they? What were the charges against them? What was the status of their cases? Where and under what circumstances were they being held? The Justice Department adamantly refused to provide any answers.

The Ostrich’s “arguments,” such as they are, seem to assume that liberty is only under threat if thousands of innocent people are being arrested and dragged into jail. He completely fails to address the way in which increased government surveillance and instrusion, as described in the piece i quoted from High Times (do you need to giggle again, Ostrich?), can serve to stifle liberty and encourage a climate of fear and self-censorship. The ACLU points out some of the changes taking place on Ashcroft’s watch:

Attorney General John Ashcroft has gutted restrictions on the FBI’s spying on domestic religious and political organizations. The new guidelines loosen some of the most fundamental controls on the conduct of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and represent yet another civil rights casualty of the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism.
The guidelines were originally imposed on the FBI in the 1970s when it was discovered that the Bureau had engaged in widespread unchecked domestic surveillance to monitor antiwar protesters, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, in an effort to undermine and discredit them.
Click Here to Read ACLU Report
The guidelines had regulated FBI activity in both foreign and domestic intelligence gathering, and had made it clear that constitutionally protected advocacy of unpopular ideas or political dissent alone could not serve as the basis for an investigation.

Under Ashcroft’s new guidelines, however, the FBI is free to send undercover agents to snoop on groups that gather at places like mosques or churches – even if there is not a shred of evidence that someone in the group has or plans to break the law. The FBI is also now allowed to openly monitor the Internet, credit card data and the books or pharmacy items anyone purchases.

And Vermont independent congressman Bernie Sanders is a sponsor of the Freedom to Read Protection Act, which seeks to defend first amendment rights against Ashcroft et al.'s incursions:

One of the cornerstones of our democracy is the right of Americans to criticize their government, and to read printed materials without fear of government monitoring and intrusion.

Yes, all of us are concerned about terrorism and all of us are determined to do all that we can to protect the American people from another terrorist attack. But, the threat of terrorism must not be used as an excuse by the government to intrude on our basic constitutional rights. We can fight terrorism, but we can do it at the same time as we protect the civil liberties that have made our country great.

Unfortunately, the Patriot Act has changed all that. Section 215 of the Patriot Act greatly expanded the FBI’s ability to get records from all businesses, including libraries and booksellers, without meeting the traditional standard needed to get a search warrant in the United States.

This is a very dangerous situation. Today, all the FBI has to claim is that the information they want is somehow relevant to an investigation to protect against international terrorism. This is an extremely low threshold for government intrusion and average Americans should be extremely concerned.

The reason they should care is that Section 215 does not just apply to terrorists or even foreigners or agents of foreign powers. Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the person whose records are being searched by the FBI can be anyone. The FBI doesn’t even have to say that it believes the person is involved in criminal activity or that the person is connected to a foreign power.

Even more frightening, the FBI can investigate American citizens based in part on an American’s exercise of his or her First Amendment Rights, such as writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper or reading books the government may not approve of.

And the traditional legal protections, that have been embodied in our Constitution for hundreds of years, no longer apply. The government can gain access to our reading records through the secret FISA court which was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 and which is off limits to the public. There’s no way to know how many times the FBI has spied on library or bookseller records or whose records they have reviewed.

I think the Cato Institute sums up the whole situation pretty well:

Of course, advocates of expanded executive power remind civil libertarians that President Bush is an honorable man who understands that the Constitution is made of more than tissue paper.

That argument is simply not persuasive - even to those who fervently share its underlying premise.

The policies that are put in place by this administration are precedent-setting.

Bush supporters need to reflect on the same powers in the hands of his predecessor or his successors.

Here’s the guiding principle: In the post-9/11 environment, no rational person believes that civil liberties are inviolable. After all, government’s primary obligation is to secure the lives of American citizens. But when government begins to chip away at our liberties, we must insist that it jump through a couple of hoops. First, government must offer compelling evidence that its new and intrusive programs will make us safer. Second, government must convince us that there is no less invasive means of attaining the same ends. In too many instances, those dual burdens have not been met

I doubt any of this will convince The Ostrich to pull his out of the sand (or his ass, for that matter) and actually engage in rational debate, but if it does, i’d be happy to hear his considered opinion on the issues at hand.

[Desmostylus]

Business Week? You must be kidding.

That was really well done, mhendo.