[Peace-discuss] Unbelievable

[C. G. Estabrook]

Administration Continues to Cling to Precedent of Slavery, Genocide, and Illegal 
Belligerency to Legitimize Its Actions
By: emptywheel Monday April 11, 2011 6:04 am


It has increasingly become clear that the Obama Administration treats the 
category of “terrorist” more flexibly than the Bush Administration did. With the 
introduction of the term “countering violent extremism,” for example, the 
Administration broadened the potential application of terrorist tools to those 
who were simply, according to them, “extremists.” Then there’s the odd treatment 
of a bunch of Colombian right wing terrorists, who were extradited on drug 
charges (but not terrorism), and then entirely disappeared from the docket, with 
allegations that at least one of them had been freed. And while the Obama 
Administration has charged some white people with using WMD (a terrorism crime), 
the disparity in its use is stark.

Carol Rosenberg has been tracking another telling example of the Obama 
Administration’s flexible interpretations of terrorist-like activity: DOD’s 
citation of a legally suspect ruling about an attack on Seminoles as precedent 
for trying material support for terrorism in military commissions.

Pentagon prosecutors touched off a protest — and issued an apology this week — 
for likening the Seminole Indians in Spanish Florida to al Qaeda in documents 
defending Guantánamo’s military commissions.

Citing precedents, prosecutors reached back into the Indian Wars in arguments at 
an appeals panel in Washington D.C. Specifically, they invoked an 1818 military 
commission convened by Gen. Andrew Jackson after U.S. forces invaded 
then-Spanish Florida to stop black slaves from fleeing through a porous border — 
then executed two British men for helping the Seminole Indians.

Navy Capt. Edward S. White also wrote this in a prosecution brief:

“Not only was the Seminole belligerency unlawful, but, much like modern-day al 
Qaeda, the very way in which the Seminoles waged war against U.S. targets itself 
violate the customs and usages of war.”

In other words, our government is siding with slavery, genocide of Native 
Americans, and Andrew Jackson’s illegal belligerency–it is citing our own 
country’s illegal behavior–to find some support for the claim that material 
support is a military crime.

Not surprisingly, the Seminole tribe objected (see Rosenberg’s collection of 
documents in the case here). And now Jeh Johnson (he of the claim that Martin 
Luther King would have empathized with the attacks on Afghans) has apologized to 
the tribe–but reiterated our reliance on the precedent.

The Pentagon’s top lawyer has sent the Seminole Tribe of Florida what amounts to 
an apology for Guantánamo war court lawyers likening al Qaida to the Native 
American tribe in 1818.

But Defense Department general counsel Jeh Johnson made clear in the single-page 
letter that the U.S. government was standing by its precedent from Gen. Andrew 
Jackson’s Indian Wars in its bid to uphold the life-time conviction of Osama bin 
Laden’s media secretary at Guantánamo’s Camp Justice.

And so it is that our government clings desperately to one of the darkest 
chapters of our history to legitimize its current actions. Rather than reflect 
on what that means–how damning it is that we can point only to Andrew Jackson’s 
illegal treatment of Native Americans to justify our current conduct–the 
government says simply, “a precedent is a precedent!”

Apparently, our country has learned nothing in the last 200 years.