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Ref. : Letters to the editor
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02.07 Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering
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02.02 Ohio Tries to Escape Fate as a Dumping Ground for Fracking Fluid
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01.27 Apple, Electronics and Environmental Ills
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Ref. Dollars for Doctors - How Industry Money Reaches Physicians
Ref. 2010 Comparative Price Report Medical and Hospital Fees by Country - Graphics
Ref. Health at a Glance 2011 - OECD Indicators
Ref. : Why is Healthcare Absurdly Expensive in USA (Part 2) [Graphics] (Part 1 is here)
Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries
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02.02 ABC's Iran Propaganda
02.02 The Ongoing “Foxification” of the Wall Street Journal
01.30 While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower
01.29 Fox News psychiatrist: Newt Gingrich's affairs 'mean he might make a strong president'
01.22 ‘Shocking victory’: With SOPA shelved, Markos Moulitsas on a way forward for Internet policy - video
Daily The Daily Howler
02.05 Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
02.04 THE CAGING OF AMERICA
02.03 Senate Votes To Ban Its Members From Insider Trading... Kind Of
01.31 Senate clears way for vote on insider-trading ban
01.25 Why all the robo-signing? Shedding light on the shadow banking system
01.25 In Iraq, Haditha case is reminder of justice denied
01.22 Still Not Clear on SOPA & PIPA? Infographic w/Simple Explanations
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02.09 OPED: The White Underclass
02.09 EDITORIAL: A Terrible Transportation Bill
02.09 THE OBAMA MEMOS
02.06 Are Conservatives More Fearful Than Liberals?
02.04 Soaking the Poor, State by State
02.04 Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics
02.03 SUPERBOWL XLVI: Are You Ready for Some Football???
02.03 Buffett rules: Sheldon Whitehouse introduces the Paying a Fair Share Act - video
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02.01 Rich Patrons Are Major Source of Romney’s Cash
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01.30 Clashes in Oakland: 400 Arrests, Tear Gas, Flash-Bang Grenades
01.30 A European look at the US primaries - video
01.29 Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton
01.25 Inside Romney’s Tax Returns: A Reading Guide
01.24 ILLUSIONS: Being Led Down the Primrose Path...???
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01.24 THE OBAMA MEMOS
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02.08 Banks Paying Homeowners to Avoid Foreclosures
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02.07 Obama super PAC decision: President blesses fundraising for Priorities USA Action
02.06 How Privatizing Government Shovels Cash to Parasitic Corporations and Undermines Democracy
02.05 We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income
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02.02 The New American Divide
02.02 American Airlines proposes to end all four pension plans
02.01 Economics 101
01.30 New Strategy, Old Pentagon Budget
01.30 Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph
01.29 The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing
01.29 Made in the World
01.28 Sugar daddy Adelson could save $500 million in taxes if his boy Gingrich wins - video
01.28 How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’
01.27 Unemployment in Spain Rises to 22.9%
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01.25 Billionaires Occupy Davos as 0.01% Bemoan Inequality
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01.23 State Capitalism: The visible hand
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02.03 What the Occupy movement must learn from Sundance
02.02 US plans to halt Afghan combat role early surprise Kabul
01.31 TABLE TALK
01.30 With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war
01.30 UN panel aims for 'a future worth choosing'
01.26 Iran is ready to return to nuclear talks
01.24 Reagan’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide
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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.
