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Habeas Corpus
Habeas Corpus | "Hey! Why am I in prision"?
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To determine whether or not a person is imprisoned lawfully and
whether or not he should be released from custody
A prisoner's ability to go to court to challenge the lawfulness of his detention. It's hard to overstate the importance of that right... The writ meant that the crown had to demonstrate to the courts that someone was being legally held, and not arbitrarily detained. Boston Globe |
This story has been buried by Foleygate, which is a crime in itself. I had the honor of hearing Daniel Ellsberg and John Siegenthaler Sr. speak last night and the key subject was journalism in today's political environment. We are one of the only countries in the world without an official secrets act, due in a large part to the uniqueness of our first amendment. Sadly this very bill puts us even closer to enacting such legislation and putting a muzzle on the media that would have prevented the extraordinary act of patriotism that Ellsberg exhibited, as well as those that followed in the entire Watergate scandal.
MSNBC Report | October 10, 2006
Keith Olbermann
Military Commission Act of 2006The president has now succeeded where no one has before. He’s managed to kill the writ of habeas corpus. Tonight, a special investigation, how that, in turn, kills nothing less than your Bill of Rights
Because the Mark Foley story began to break the night of September 28th, exploding the following day, many people may not have noticed a bill passed by the Senate that night.
Our third story on the Countdown tonight, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and what it does to something called "habeas corpus."
And before we reduce the very term "habeas corpus" to something vaguely recalled as sounding kinda like the cornerstone of freedom, or maybe kinda like a character from "Harry Potter," we thought a Countdown Special Investigation was in order.
Congress passed The Military Commissions Act to give Mr. Bush the power to deal effectively with America's enemies — those who seek to harm this country.
And he has been very clear about who that is:
"…for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America."
So the president said it was urgent that Congress send him this bill as quickly as possible, not for the politics of next month's elections, but for America.
"The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."
Because time was of the essence?and to ensure that the 9/11 families would wait no longer?as soon as he got the bill, President Bush whipped out his pen and immediately signed a statement saying he looks forward to signing the actual law…eventually.
He hasn't signed it yet, almost two weeks later, because he has been swamped by a series of campaign swings at which he has made up quotes from unnamed Democratic leaders, and because when he is actually at work, he's been signing so many other important bills, such as:
The Credit Rating Agency Reform Act;
the Third Higher Education Extension Act;
ratification requests for extradition treaties with Malta, Estonia and Latvia;
his proclamation of German-American Day;
the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Act;
and his proclamation of Leif Erikson Day.
Still, getting the Military Commissions Act to the President so he could immediately mull it over for two weeks was so important, some members of Congress didn't even read the bill before voting on it. Thus, has some of its minutiae, escaped scrutiny.
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One bit of trivia that caught our eye was the elimination of habeas corpus. which apparently used to be the right of anyone who's tossed in prison, to appear in court and say, "Hey, why am I in prison?"Why does habeas corpus hate America…and how is it so bad for us?
Mr. Bush says it gets in the way of him doing his job.
[video clip] Bush: "…we cannot be able to tell the American people we're doing our full job unless we have the tools necessary to do so. And this legislation passed in the House yesterday is a part of making sure that we do have the capacity to protect you.
Our most solemn job is the security of this country."
It may be solemn…
[video clip] Bush: "I do solemnly swear…"
But is that really his job? In this rarely seen footage, Mr. Bush is clearly heard describing a different job.
[video clip]…to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States..
Countdown has obtained a copy of this "Constitution of the United States."
And sources tell us it was originally snuck through the Constitutional Convention and state ratification in order to establish America's fundamental legal principles.
But this so-called Constitution is frustratingly vague about the right to trial. In fact, there's only one reference to habeas corpus at all. Quote: "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
But even Democrats who voted against the Military Commissions Act concede that it doesn't actually suspend habeas corpus.
[video clip] Leahy: The bill before the Senate would not merely suspend the great writ, the great writ of habeas corpus, it would eliminate it permanently.
And there is considerable debate whether the conditions for suspending habeas corpus, rebellion or invasion, have been met.
[video clip] Leahy: conditions for suspending habeas corpus have not been met.
[video clip] Kerry: We're not in a rebellion, nor are we being invaded.
[video clip] Specter: We do not have a rebellion or an invasion.
[video clip] Biden: The United States is neither in a state of rebellion nor invasion.
[video clip] Byrd: We are not in the midst of a rebellion, and there is no invasion.
Countdown has learned that habeas corpus actually predates the "Constitution," meaning it's not just pre-September 11th thinking, it's also pre-July 4th thinking.
In those days, no one imagined that enemy combatants might one day attack Americans on native soil.
In fact, Countdown has obtained a partially redacted copy of a colonial "declaration" indicating that back then, "depriving us of Trial by Jury" was actually considered sufficient cause to start a War of Independence, based on the then-fashionable idea that "liberty" was an unalienable right.
Today, thanks to modern, post-9/11 thinking, those rights are now fully alienable.
The reality is, without habeas corpus, a lot of other rights lose their meaning.
But if you look at the actual Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to that pesky Constitution — you'll see just how many remain.
Well, ok, Number One's gone.
If you're detained without trial, you lose your freedom of religion, speech, the press and assembly. And you can't petition the government for anything.
Number Two? While you're in prison, your right to keep and bear arms just may be infringed upon.
Even if you're in the NRA.
Three?
No forced sleepovers by soldiers at your house. OK. Three is unchanged.
Four?
You're definitely not secure against searches and seizures, with or without probable cause - and this isn't even limited to the guards.
Five… Grand juries and due process are obviously out.
Six. So are trials, let alone the right to counsel. Speedy trials? You want it when?
Seven. Hmmmm. I thought we covered "trials" and "juries" earlier.
Eight — So bail's kind of a moot point…
Nine: "Other" rights retained by the people. Well, if you can name them during your water-boarding, we'll consider them.
And Ten — powers not delegated to the United States federal government seem to have ended up there, anyway.
So as you can see, even without habeas corpus, at least one tenth of the Bill of Rights, I guess that's the Bill of "Right" now… remains virtually intact.
And we can rest easy knowing we will never, ever have to quarter soldiers in our homes… as long as the Third Amendment still stands strong.
The President can take care of that with a Signing Statement.
They Passed the Torture Bill, Gave Bush Wiretapping, and America is DeadBy Ian MacLeod Well folks, they’ve gone and done it: torture is now legal in the United States of America, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, and formerly illegal wiretapping is a fact of life. The people everyone in the world looks to for the moral high ground.
Until these "compassionate conservatives," those “Good Christians” who are so righteous and holy their leader talks to God, and God not only talks back to him, He sends him “gut feelings” all the time to guide him, and actually SPEAKS THROUGH HIM, he says, until they came to power, destroyed the Middle Class to create the Working Poor, and started an unjust, illegal, immoral, undeclared war, we were the quintessential example of ethical and humanitarian behavior, or at least many of us tried to be. Now we are the same as all the other third world countries: all power and necessities in the hand of the rich, everyone else scraping the dirt to get enough to survive one more day, and if someone annoys the Holy and Dreaded Rulers, they get "disappeared," tortured, and maybe they get returned, may be not. Maybe they turn up dead.
Now it is we who have to worry about the dreaded knock at the door (or kicked-in door) in the middle of the night, wondering when our turn will come next, when we will "disappear." After all, guilty or not, they need constant examples to keep the levels of fear up and keep their power over us visible always. They can always find thugs willing to beat someone’s head in, stick lit smokes in their ears, cut off or crush testicles, whatever seems expedient at the time. No matter that it doesn’t work ? it’s obviously FUN! For someone, at least. And now no one, especially not you, can demand to know why now, thanks to the most cowardly, bribable, biddable, easily-threatened Congress the United States has ever had the misfortune to have been tricked into voting for. Not that the President is any different, except that he’s the one who bribes, threatens, lies, steals or gets other to steal, does whatever he has to do in order to get what he wants. Not to get what his country, his people want, not certainly, to protect the Constitution as he swore an oath to do, not to protect his country, as he keeps claiming, but to get what HE wants.
Evil has come to live in, to BE, America.
We work harder for less than any others in the civilized Western world. We have more homeless, many of them highly skilled, many of them, sadly, children. We also have a vastly high per-capita murder rate, a whole new class to replace the Middle Class that built this country called the working poor, our already poorest-in-the-West school system is being deliberately dismantled, higher education is increasingly only for the scions of wealth (mostly because it does so little good in the job market now I suppose), and foreign professors are being refused entry into the country. Our health care system, once the best in the world, is a joke ? one in poor taste, as it costs many lives; our infant mortality rate is below that of some “third world” countries. In fact, another direction America is being railroaded in is that women will soon be property again. They will have no right to contraception of any sort, and if they get pregnant for any reason, their choices will be to deliver the child and probably live in poverty the rest of their lives, to have a potentially deadly and illegal abortion, die with the child and good riddance, or maybe to give the kid up for adoption. Our medication, especially for the old, costs more than in any other Western country because the industry itself wrote the law, including that the elders and disabled may not collectively bargain for more reasonable prices.
I had always thought, as we grew and learned and became an enlightened society, we would care for each other better and better, even, especially, the “least” of us: the poor, the sick, the weak, the ones with no voice. It seems I was wrong, but still, I for one do NOT want to go back to the Dark Ages, which appears to be exactly what the GOP is aiming for: all the worst of that time, and of this one.
Any creature in nature with no natural predators expands to the limits of the ecosystem given time, then attempts to expand beyond those limits, and a “die-back” period follows. Human or no, souls or no, we are part of and dependent on the ecology the Bush administration has been so casually selling off to industry, usually after having removed all protections against industrial pollution and overuse. Bush and Co are clearly descendents (and how it happens I don’t know) of the “trash” back in the hills some of my own ancestors are from. They would build the privy next to the well, or the river everyone needs for water, set their goats and chickens to run free in their own area and others’, leave garbage piled in the front yard to rot, chop down old trees needed as windbreaks for others, hunt an area out of one or two species completely, often taking only the best parts, and so on. They usually had dirt floors, only because they were too lazy to have anything else, and the dirt was a combination of dirt, vomit, garbage, urine, alcohol and anything else that passed through the place, as well as being a home for cockroaches, fleas, ticks, bedbugs and rats. They didn’t wash ? anything ? if they could help it; Pasteur was just some "Frog liar who likes to boss people." There was no peace anywhere near them, what with screaming and arguing at all hours. They were always in need of help from the community, and expected to get that help, while resenting it: their children went barefoot in winter, and their clothes were rags. They were foul-mouthed, illiterate, ignorant and proud of it. Then they would be blind-sided by sickness which often spread to the neighbors, fail to understand why the area had become a dustbowl, and they never understood why the surviving neighbors kicked them out of the area.
What people like that touch, they destroy. It seems to apply to literally everything, too: ethics, morals, cleanliness, laws, rules, common sense, caretaking so as to leave something for the future, health, honesty, honor… everything. If they wanted it, they took it ? and usually destroyed it in short order. If it bothered them, they destroyed it if they could, usually calling it "evil." Then there are the same people, but with “religion” added.
They had the “stink of piety”; it wasn’t "filth," they insisted, it was nothing but the good earth God created, and what he made the human body do for it’s own health. Parasites? If they weren’t healthy, they wouldn’t have ticks and such ? everybody knows they don’t feed off of an unhealthy body. As for the rest, the Lord made the earth for our use, and if he wants it to go dusty it’ll go dusty whatever we do. If He sends sickness to punish, it happens, and so on. Perhaps the most sadly hilarious part was that they always knew that they and they alone had the True Word of the Almighty, and EVERYONE should do as they did. In fact, given the chance, they’d force it. Nevermind that you THINK Jesus said to just move on if people wouldn’t listen ? they knew the Truth, and Christian or not, you’d better act like (their idea of) one.
They attended Town Counsel meetings and always tried to get “Godly” laws passed, some of them so far from reality they were laughed out. But no matter that they stole, or that half the grandkids’ father was the mother’s father as well, or that they habitually lied, or even murdered someone ? they knew the Truth, so they were God’s chosen.
They still act like that, but now that trash, or some of it, has, over the long years, merged somehow with those who gather wealth and power any way they can, by any means necessary, no matter who else gets hurt. The very best and the very worst, with all the wrong things combined. They have no honor, no compassion or empathy, little real intelligence, too much money and power for people in a democracy (because anywhere, as long as people are human, money IS power), and no scruples whatsoever. Worse, they are justified in everything they do because THEY ALONE KNOW THE TRUTH, AND ARE CHOSEN BY GOD TO SPREAD HIS WORD. Everyone else should be slaves to their beliefs and desires, because God chooses who is rich or healthy and who is poor and sickly, so they know their own by the second holiest sign there is: $.
If they can destroy the capacity of the earth to support human life, so much the better. They won’t have to suffer and die in what follows, because they will be “caught up in the air” with Jesus their Lord, bypassing death entirely. Then they can go to Heaven and have fun watching the rest of us suffer, first on Earth, then in Hell.
They probably would, too. Have fun. George loves mockingly imitating those he has executed.
And now Habeas Corpus is gone. Only for detainees, terrorists and agents of foreign powers, you say? Then consider this: those classifications apply to ANYONE THEY DECIDE THEY APPLY TO ? NO EVIDENCE NEEDED, EVER. Oh yes, and now (they believe) they can legally indulge in what the rest of the world calls torture; they’ve made the word mean something different here. Face it: they can now “disappear," torture and murder ANYONE AT ALL, hold ANYONE forever with no charges or evidence. THIS MEANS YOU! And to get the “evidence," the Republicans snuck some fine print into a bill with provisions which grant the administration authority to maintain permanent records on innocent U.S. citizens, granting the administration new authority to demand personal records without court review, and terminating any and all legal challenges to unlawful wiretapping. May those who voted for it rot in Hell, or in one of our new concentration camps!
The Rule of Law is dead in America.
Twelve Democrats joined with the Republicans in voting for this evil thing, except for Senator Chafee of Rhode Island. They are Tom Carper of Delaware, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Senator Menendez of New Jersey, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Senator Pryor of Arkansas, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
George Bush has made a good start: with the combination of laws like the PATRIOT Act, the destruction of the Hatch Act, the practical removal of most of the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment, the new black ops groups (Germany called them SS) which can operate inside the US, over 800 new concentration camps to put trouble-makers (dissenters) in (as slave labor; after all, they have to pay their own way as well as keep money rolling in for the rich), now the new Detainee Bill that is the ruin of Habeas Corpus along with the new wiretapping law, and add ? oh, there are many more, and they all together add up to one thing: NEAR ABSOLUTE IMPERIAL POWER in the hands of the president. What George Walker Bush, His Holiness the Emperor of the Holy Amerikan Empire, the One Who Murders Millions using the law ? of this land and others ? the One Through Whom God Speaks (he said so!), decrees, will happen, one way or another. He has never paid attention to the Will of the People anyway; if what he wants fails in one attempt, he has always tried another way, and another, until one works. If people object, why, he shows them statistics that say this is what the majority wants (totally fantasy, but who would dare question?). The angry, totalitarian, monstrously violent, monstrously self-righteous, monstrously cruel warping of Christianity called Dominionism he believes in is shot all through the government like a cancer, and it is insane.
They tolerate no criticism, no dissent or protest, while telling us (and the world) how free we are. They are vindictive, they lie without compunction, give orders and set policies that result in millions of deaths, steal elections as well as money (which they split amongst themselves and friends), and to make more money available as well as to better delineate the Will of God, they pull funding from the most needy and defenseless first. Trying to use the Rule of Law to deal with them works poorly if at all, because if they don’t own the legislators, judges or police, they just ignore it. They do the same thing, over and over, and when it fails, well, it’s obviously the fault of the faithless People, not their doing. The destruction was prophesied from the Beginning, and will continue until the End of the World. That is what MUST be. They intend to MAKE it be.
It never occurs to any of them that even if the prophesy is true, God might have His own timetable, and maybe they have no business trying to force His Hand.
After all, even if they’re too stupid to walk and breathe at the same time, they are God’s Chosen, and they alone know the Truth.
Ian MacLeod September 30th, 2006 Oregon - report |
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