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Ref. : Local Newsbriefs
Ref. : Letters to the editor
03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries
03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim
03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare!
03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm
02.24 Obama’s New Plan
02.21 Time to Pass the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009
03.16 WPost Blames Obama First, on Israel
03.16 Letter to the New York Times' Editor: Stovepiping To Persia
03.12 Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion
03.11 NYT and the ACORN Hoax
03.05 Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq
03.03 It's Snow News
03.03 The Woeful Washington Post
02.28 The NYT Veers Neocon
02.18 US Media Replays Iraq Fiasco on Iran
Ref. : The Daily Howler
02.26 America's Supremes: Court Over Constitution
03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives"
03.09 Thinking About Countings
03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism
02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium
02.24 The Last Flight of Joe Stack
02.22 Thinking About Sadie
02.18 All Systems Go: No Dysfunction in Profitable Afghan Enterprise
03.16 America's Secret Prisons
03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem
03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue
03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children
03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session
03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid
03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda
02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery
02.23 Israeli Unaccountability and Denial: Suppressing the Practice of Torture
02.22 American Genocides: is Haiti Next?
02.18 Israeli Abusive Administrative Detentions
02.16 MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program
03.14 The Crisis in America's Telecommunications Network
03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource
03.05 Is the Recovery Real?
03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You
03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction"
03.01 Thinking About Fees
02.22 Campaigning for State-Owned Banks
02.22 Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do
02.19 Obama’s Stealth Entitlement Commission
02.19 Selling Out America to Wall Street
03.15 Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception
03.03 Muslim Disunity
03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation
02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist
02.24 The Dubai Hit
02.22 Holland Has Had Enough: Killing of Innocent Civilians Goes On Apace in Afghanistan
02.19 The Placeman Cometh: New IAEA Chief Stokes Iran War Fever for the Bush-Obama Regime
COMMENTARY:
Who Is 'Any Person' in Tribunal Law?
“This law does not apply to American citizens,” the Times editorial stated, “but it does apply to other legal United States residents. And it chips away at the foundations of the judicial system in ways that all Americans should find threatening.” [NYT, Oct. 19, 2006]
Another provision of the law states that “any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy [presumably U.S. military allies, such as Great Britain and Israel], shall be punished as a military commission ... may direct.” [Emphases added]
If the Times is correct that “this law does not apply to American citizens,” why does it contain language referring to “any person” and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting “in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States”?
Who has “an allegiance or duty to the United States” if not an American citizen? That provision would not presumably apply to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, nor would it apply generally to foreign citizens. This section of the law appears to be singling out American citizens.
Besides allowing for “any person” to go into Bush’s system, the law prohibits detainees once inside the system from appealing to the traditional American courts until a defendant is fully prosecuted and sentenced, which could translate into an indefinite imprisonment since there are no timetables for Bush’s tribunal process to play out.
The law states that once a person is detained, “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever ... relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions.”
That court-stripping provision – barring “any claim or cause of action whatsoever” – would seem to deny American citizens habeas corpus rights just as it does for non-citizens. If a person can’t file a motion with a court, he can’t assert any constitutional rights, including habeas corpus.
Other constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights – such as a speedy trial, the right to reasonable bail and the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” – would seem to be beyond an American detainee’s reach as well.
Though the New York Times suggests that the new law “chips away at the foundations of the judicial system,” the law actually seems to obliterate the old judicial system.
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed ... and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; [and] to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses.”By contrast, in Bush’s system, there are no guarantees of either a speedy or a public trial. Secrecy dominates in a process run by U.S. military officers whose careers depend on the favor of the Commander in Chief.
Under the new law, the military judge “may close to the public all or a portion of the proceedings” if he deems that the evidence must be kept secret for national security reasons. Those concerns can be conveyed to the judge through ex parte – or one-sided – communications from the prosecutor or a government representative.
The judge also can exclude the accused from the trial if there are safety concerns or if the defendant is disruptive. Plus, the judge can admit evidence obtained through coercion if he determines it “possesses sufficient probative value” and “the interests of justice would best be served by admission of the statement into evidence.”
The law permits, too, the introduction of secret evidence “while protecting from disclosure the sources, methods, or activities by which the United States acquired the evidence if the military judge finds that ... the evidence is reliable.”
During trial, the prosecutor would have the additional right to assert a “national security privilege” that could stop “the examination of any witness,” presumably by the defense if the questioning touched on any sensitive matter.
In effect, what the new law appears to do is to create a parallel “star chamber” system for the prosecution, imprisonment and elimination of enemies of the state, whether those enemies are foreign or domestic.
Once these detainees are locked up at Guantanamo Bay or some other prison facility, they could be held incommunicado and denied access to civilian courts under the law’s court-stripping provision.
It could take years before the U.S. Supreme Court even addresses these detentions and – given the increasingly right-wing make-up of the Court – there would be no assurance that the justices wouldn’t endorse the President’s extraordinary powers.
The Times also might want to take note of the curious provision in the law that would jail “any person” who “collects or attempts to collect information by clandestine means or while acting under false pretenses, for the purpose of conveying such information to an enemy of the United States.”
Since the Bush administration and its political allies often have accused the New York Times of collecting and publishing information, from confidential sources, that is helpful to U.S. enemies – for instance, the stories about Bush’s secret wiretapping program – this provision arguably could apply to Times reporters and editors.
This “spying” provision not only puts alleged offenders into Bush’s special legal system but it could result in the offenders being sentenced to death.
So, before assuring American citizens that they’re safe from Bush’s draconian system, the Times editors might check on why these “any person” provisions were put into the law. For more than two centuries, the civilian U.S. legal system has handled similar crimes, including allegations of spying and charges of Americans aiding foreign enemies.
Yet now, under the cloak of setting up military tribunals to try al-Qaeda suspects and other so-called “unlawful enemy combatants,” Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have effectively created a parallel legal system for “any person” – American citizen or otherwise – who crosses some line and becomes an enemy of the state.
The Times editors may believe that to raise these concerns is alarmist. But over the past six years, Bush and his administration have routinely stretched legal language to aggrandize their power, not the other way around.
There are a multitude of reasons to think that Bush will now interpret every legal ambiguity in the new law in his favor, as granting him the broadest possible powers over people he perceives as his enemies.
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This story was published on October 19, 2006.
