The Conscience of Abe’s Turn freedom of speech, defense, and life

Nine secret, Bush-era documents that the Obama administration released this week demonstrate the hubris of a powerful government and the danger posed by it.

Some of these documents are among the dozens of memos that the ACLU has been suing the Department of Justice to release. To echo Glenn Greenwald from last year: “Yet again, the ACLU has performed the function which Congress and the media are intended to perform but do not.”

One of the legal opinions, written in October 2001 by John Yoo, a lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel, one who needs a Conscience, argued that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to military activities inside the United States. That is, the federal government thought it could get away with illegal searches and seizures and spying on innocent U.S. citizens, all without a warrant, as long as it could make it look like part of a military operation.

Yoo also advised that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war,” without saying specifically how that might play out, adding that the fight against “terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”  read more »

While the Obama-administration DOJ’s right hand is investigating whether Bush torture-memo authors should be disciplined, its left hand is still upholding the very same torture policies.

The impression I get is what I expected to see: even though the administration has changed, the government is still being filled with the same paranoid babble that characterized the Bush administration, and the doofuses are afraid to dismiss it too quickly. Or rather, in a word: politics.

• A federal appeals court ordered the continued imprisonment of 17 Chinese ethnic Uighurs, who have been detained without charge for over seven years at Guantánamo Bay, despite the fact that the U.S. government no longer considers them “enemy combatants” and even admitted that it does not have the authority to detain them.

• The government is still wrestling with the case of Ali al-Marri, a U.S. citizen who has been detained indefinitely without trial.

• The Pentagon concluded that “the Guantánamo Bay prison complies with the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva conventions.” (They must be looking at a different version than the one I’m familiar with, which specifically disallows “violence to life and person, in particular… cruel treatment and torture; … outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”)

• Obama’s new DOJ continue to regurgitate the Bush-era claims of “state secrets” in the Jeppesen case of 5 men who were kidnapped and tortured by the CIA.

• And the DOJ is still trying to gum up the ACLU’s effort to help Mohammed Jawad, a Guantánamo prisoner who has been unlawfully held by U.S. government since he was a teenager. (See also this post on Mohammed Jawad’s case.)

Yes, President Obama ordered that military commission proceedings be stopped, but the government is still pursuing a last-minute effort by the Bush administration to deny Jawad his right to challenge his imprisonment in a court of law.  read more »

Brian Wilson on his radio show at WSPD yesterday talked with Jim Bovard about a recent Washington Post article about sending U.S. troops to the U.S. “The U.S. military,” according to the Post, “expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe.”

Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security.  read more »

Jacob Hornberger writes about the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been locked up in South Carolina, in the same facility in which Jose Padilla (the American) was incarcerated and tortured.

Here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, we have long argued against the assumption and exercise of the “enemy combatant” power, even with the right of habeas corpus. We have pointed out that those who were arguing that President Bush could be trusted with such power were misguided and short-sighted. We have said that such dictatorial power is irreconcilable with the principles of a free society. We have emphasized that the issue wasn’t whether Bush should be trusted with such power but rather whether one’s worst enemy should be trusted with such power.

But conservatives never thought the day would arrive when they would lose power to a Democratic president…

Then, conservatives’ worst fear materialized — the election of a Democrat and, even worse from their perspective, one, they said, whose middle name was Hussein, whose father was a Muslim, who had ties to terrorists, and who associated with an extremist Christian preacher. He’s the man who now wields the omnipotent powers that, thanks to conservatives, were traded to the president and the military for the aura of “safety” from “the terrorists.”

(Click here to read the whole article.)

-TimK

P.S. He also continues on that theme in this post.

I’ve been pondering this question ever since before the election, and I have not been hopeful.

During the campaign, Obama’s “civil rights” plank had more to do with removing rights than restoring them. Quoting from that page, he wants to:  read more »

The photographs show detainee abuse by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In September, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the government to release the photos as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking information on the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody overseas. Now, the Bush administration petitioned to appeal the order.

“This petition is a transparent attempt to delay accountability for the widespread abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody abroad by keeping the public in the dark,” said Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU. “These photographs demonstrate that the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody abroad was not aberrational and not confined to Abu Ghraib, but the result of policies adopted by the highest-ranking officials in the administration. The immediate release of these photos is critical to bringing an end to the Bush administration’s torture policies and for preventing prisoner abuse in the future.”  read more »

Stories like this are the reason why we have reason for optimism in this country. This story is also one of the reasons why the ACLU is listed under “The Conscience of America,” because they inform of us police-state-like actions in the U.S. and use the tools at their disposal to stop them.

In 2005, it was reported that Bush had told the NSA it could warrantless surveillance of Americans. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get government documents about this spying-on-Americans program.

The government ignored them. Tactic 1: If the people ask you for internal documentation that would make you look bad, pretend you didn’t hear them.

So the ACLU sued.  read more »

Miguel Contreras posts at The Narcosphere that the Department of Homeland Security has made it an official policy not to speak to Barack Obama’s transition team.

Miguel is concerned that this might make things difficult for Obama’s new DHS appointees.

Meanwhile, I feel a little ray of hope that maybe in fact it might.  read more »

If you think that President Obama will fix the mess that George W. Bush left us with, you might want to think again.

An article by Jim Babka at DownsizeDC.org reminds us of another good man who was appointed to power, and how his power contributed to this mess George W. Bush left us with. I’m talking about Alan Greenspan, who used to espouse sound-money principles, but who changed his tune once he joined the Fed.

What happened? The power of his office corrupted him.

Alan Greenspan was one of the many contributors to the boom and bust cycle in general, and to the current boom and bust in particular. Greenspan clearly knew better…

The free market philosophy was the victim of Greenspan’s betrayals, and now, like a battering husband, Greenspan has blamed the victim for the consequences of what he did.

The politicians will use this final betrayal to further expand their power, reduce your freedom, and increase government meddling in the economy. They will be able to use the words of the “great free market guru,” Alan Greenspan, to justify their actions.

(Read the whole article at DownsizeDC.org.)

It works the same for any office, even the presidency. Don’t expect Obama to be able to do anything to fix the mess past presidents have left us with. In fact, expect the opposite. Expect things to get much worse. Expect Obama to infringe our civil liberties more, to restrict free speech more, to demand more and more power for federal agents, and then to blame us for all of it. Because he’s not a god; he’s just another mortal man, a man with power.

-TimK

In case you missed it: Another instance of truth is so much more brutal than fiction, and another example of how the so-called corruption of the fictional Abe’s Turn cannot yet begin to approach reality.

In brief, 100 police put down a peaceful protest march by Iraq war veterans at Hofstra University during the McCain/Obama debate. The veterans were marching in protest of the war and asking questions they wanted the presidential candidates to answer. A police horse trampled Nick Morgan, Iraq war veteran, on his ribs and face, breaking his orbital in three places. He was then affirmatively denied medical treatment. Much more at the links below.

Now, there’s a petition on Nick Morgan’s behalf, denouncing the treatment these veterans suffered at the hands of the Abe’s Turn cops, and demanding charges against him be dropped and a public apology be issued.  read more »