From Claudia:
…Wake up, America! On July 15, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled by 5 votes to 4 in the case of Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli [.pdf] that the president can arrest U.S. citizens and legal residents inside the United States and imprison them indefinitely, without charge or trial, based solely on his assertion that they are “enemy combatants.” Have a little think about it, and you’ll see that the Fourth Circuit judges have just endorsed dictatorial powers.
…I leave the final words to Judge Motz, and her clear-eyed awareness of the injustice of the Marri verdict. “To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the president call them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution – and the country,” Judge Motz wrote. “For a court to uphold a claim to such extraordinary power would do more than render lifeless the Suspension Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the rights to criminal process in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments; it would effectively undermine all of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. It is that power – were a court to recognize it – that could lead all our laws ‘to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces.’ We refuse to recognize a claim to power that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.”
Example of our new justice system ….
He was then moved to a naval brig in Charleston, S.C., where he has now been held for five years and one month in complete isolation in a blacked-out cell in an otherwise unoccupied cell block. For the first 14 months of this imprisonment, when he received no visitors from outside the U.S. military or the security agencies, he was subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperature manipulation, frequently deprived of food and water, and interrogated repeatedly.
…In August 2003, representatives of the International Red Cross were finally allowed to visit Marri, and two months later he was permitted to meet with a lawyer, when he finally had the opportunity to explain that his interrogators had “threatened to send [him] to Egypt or to Saudi Arabia where, they told him, he would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front of him.”
…What’s particularly worrying about these charges is that, by the government’s own admission, the primary sources for its supposed evidence against Marri are confessions made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, during the three months following his capture in March 2003, when, as even the CIA has admitted, he was subjected to waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, which the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition at least had the honesty to call tortura del aqua.
End result …he had given false information about other people while being tortured…
Bob Responds:
This a very good comment by Mike Whitney. It sounds “on the money” to me.
Bob
Reality Check
The Democrats Are The Real Problem
By Mike Whitney
BLIND MANS LANE You’re going down Blind Mans Lane Don’t think it’s by any mistake Can’t see the nails and broken glass When you get that flat You’ll have to change that tire you’re riding on Don’t think it’s a bit of bad luck Son As many before you This lane is named after you It’s a place we all go I can talk til my anger has to run No need to hurt you by repeating myself We don’t know Til we are put to a stop There ain’t no going on Til you change that tire you’re riding on That’s what happens When you ride down Blind Mans Lane By: Roger Harkness
