[Peace-discuss] Indefinite imprisonment unconstitutional, impeachable

[unionyes]

Yeah Carl,

I never thought I would ever say this, but I miss the retard Bush.

He was So easy to see through and make fun of.

Obama is a slick operator.

He is very articulate and charimatic and I can't help myself to want to 
believe him when he speaks.
But the facts speak otherwise !

One has to give credit to the ruling class.
They found the perfect replacement for Bush, but I have been talking to a 
lot of working people I work with ( both Black and White ) and they are NOT 
happy with Obama !

The ruling class is begining to realize that they are entering another 
crisis situation and only one year into the coporate product Obama's term.

The old 19th century Union creed seems as appropriate now as it was over 100 
years ago, for ALL of us who want to see this madness stop.

Educate !...Agitate !....Organize !....
and Mobilize !

Long Live the Revolution,
Death to the corporate empire !

David Johnson

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 7:30 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Indefinite imprisonment 
unconstitutional,impeachable


[What a fraud Obama is.  The supposed apostle of change is worse than his
predecessor in this matter.  Who does he think he is, simply to set aside 
the
Constitution on trials?  The Democrats may do so badly this fall that a 
serious
impeachment campaign can be built against his unconstitutional 
olicies.  --CGE]


Published on Friday, January 22, 2010 by Salon.com
Obama to Indefinitely Imprison Detainees without Charges
by Glenn Greenwald

One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the 
administration's
indefinite imprisoning of "War on Terror" detainees without charges of any 
kind.
  So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against 
this
policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object:  a "legal black 
hole."
Liberal editorial pages routinely cited the refusal to charge the 
detainees -- 
not the interrogation practices there -- in order to brand the camp a 
"dungeon,"
a "gulag," a "tropical purgatory," and a "black-hole embarrassment."  As 
late as
2007, Democratic Senators like Pat Leahy, on the floor of the Senate, cited 
the
due-process-free imprisonments to rail against Guantanamo as "a national
disgrace, an international embarrassment to us and to our ideals, and a
festering threat to our security," as well as "a legal black hole that 
dishonors
our principles."  Leahy echoed the Democratic consensus when he said:

The Administration consistently insists that these detainees pose a threat 
to
the safety of Americans. Vice President Cheney said that the other day. If 
that
is true, there must be credible evidence to support it. If there is such
evidence, then they should prosecute these people.

Leahy also insisted that the Constitution assigns the power to regulate
detentions to Congress, not the President, and thus cited Bush's refusal to 
seek
Congressional authorization for these detentions as a prime example of 
Bush's
abuse of executive power and shredding of the Constitution.

But all year along, Barack Obama -- even as he called for the closing of
Guantanamo -- has been strongly implying that he will retain George Bush's
due-process-free system by continuing to imprison detainees without charges 
of
any kind.  In his May "civil liberties" speech cynically delivered at the
National Archives in front of the U.S. Constitution, Obama announced that he
would seek from Congress a law authorizing and governing the President's 
power
to imprison detainees indefinitely and without charges.  But in September, 
the
administration announced he changed his mind:  rather than seek a law
authorizing these detentions, he would instead simply claim that Congress
already "implicitly" authorized these powers when it enacted the 2001 AUMF
against Al Qaeda -- thereby, as The New York Times put it, "adopting one of 
the
arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about
detention policies."

Today, The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports:

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials
nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a
high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute 
but
too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

The Washington Post says that these decisions "represent the first time that 
the
administration has clarified how many detainees it considers too dangerous 
to
release but unprosecutable because officials fear trials could compromise
intelligence-gathering and because detainees could challenge evidence 
obtained
through coercion."  Once that rationale is accepted, it necessarily applies 
not
only to past detainees but future ones as well:  the administration is 
claiming
the power to imprison whomever it wants without charges whenever it believes
that -- even in the face of the horrendously broad "material support for
terrorism" laws the Congress has enacted -- it cannot prove in any tribunal 
that
the individual has actually done anything wrong.  They are simply decreed by
presidential fiat to be "too dangerous to release."  Perhaps worst of all, 
it
converts what was once a leading prong in the radical Bush/Cheney assault on 
the
Constitution -- the Presidential power to indefinitely imprison people 
without
charges -- into complete bipartisan consensus, permanently removed from the
realm of establishment controversy.

There are roughly 200 prisoners left at the camp, which means roughly 25% 
will
be held without any charges at all.  Using the administration's perverse
multi-tiered justice system, the rest will either be tried in a real court, 
sent
to a military commission or released.  What this means, among other things, 
is
that the President's long-touted policy of closing Guantanamo is a total 
sham:
the essence of that "legal black hole" -- indefinite detention without 
charges
-- will remain fully in place, perhaps ludicrously and dangerously shifted 
to a
different locale (onto U.S. soil) but otherwise fully in tact.  The U.S. 
Supreme
Court ruled in 2008 that the Military Commissions Act unconstitutionally 
denied
the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees -- a principle the Obama
administration has vigorously resisted when it comes to Bagram detainees --  
but
mere habeas corpus review does not come close to a real trial, which the 
Bill of
Rights guarantees to all "persons" (not only "Americans") before the State 
can
keep them locked in a cage.

Numerous Democrats have spent the year justifying Obama's desire for 
indefinite
detention with dubious excuses that would have been unthinkable to hear from
them during the Bush years.  I addressed all of those excuses in full back 
in
May, here.  As but one example, the claim most commonly cited to justify 
Obama's
actions -- these detainees can't be convicted because the evidence against 
them
is "tainted" by torture -- is:  (a) completely unproven; (b) completely 
immoral
(it's one of the longest-standing principles of Western justice that
tortured-obtained evidence can't be used to justify imprisonment); and (c)
completely contradictory (Democrats spent years claiming, and still do, that
torture doesn't work and produces unreliable evidence; if that's true, who 
could
possibly justify indefinitely imprisoning someone based on 
torture-obtained -- 
i.e., inherently unreliable -- evidence?).  Whatever else is true, both 
Obama's
policy and the rationale -- we must imprison Terrorists without charges 
because
there's no evidence to convict them but they're somehow still deemed too
dangerous to release -- is exactly what the Bush/Cheney faction endlessly
repeated to justify its "legal black hole."

But no matter.  If there's one thing we've seen repeatedly all year long, 
it's
that many Democrats simply do not believe in the axiom best expressed by The 
New
York Times' Bob Herbert when he said that "Americans should recoil as one
against the idea of preventive detention."   As Herbert wrote:  "policies 
that
were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in 
the
White House."  That precept should be too self-evident to require expression 
and
yet is widely rejected.  Hence, exactly that which very recently was 
condemned
as "a dungeon, a gulag, a tropical purgatory, and a black-hole 
embarrassment" is
now magically transformed into a beacon of sober pragmatism from a man -- a
Constitutional Scholar -- solemnly devoted to restoring America's Standing 
and
Values.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/22-5

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