Bob Bauman
Legal Counsel for The Sovereign Society
March 17, 2010
I voted for John McCain for president, (did I have a choice?), but I’m wondering whether the senior senator from Arizona has taken leave of his constitutional senses.
Ten days ago, McCain and his might-have-been 2008 vice presidential candidate, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Ct), introduced a bill entitled the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.”
A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the United States based on suspected activity. Read the bill here and then continue reading…
The bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States. It does so by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.
But the bill makes no distinction between “U.S. persons,” (defined as green card holders or U.S. citizens) and non-U.S. persons. Any of them (of us) could be arrested by the military!
March 20th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
by Andy Worthington
hat tip: Campaign for Liberty
Published 03/17/10
Republican Witch-hunters Embrace Dictatorship
Are there no depths to which conservatives will not sink in their ardent embrace of the war on terrorism? The latest monstrosity from the right came courtesy of Keep America Safe, a toxic organization headed by Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who recently put out a disgraceful TV ad, “Who Are the Al-Qaeda Seven?” The ad questioned the loyalty and patriotism of nine lawyers in the Justice Department who had represented prisoners at Guantánamo before joining the DoJ.
To be fair, Liz Cheney’s ad has backfired badly, drawing the ire not only of those on the left, but also of heavyweight conservatives, nineteen of whom signed a statement last week denouncing it, declaring, “We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications,” and adding that the attacks on the lawyers “undermine the Justice system more broadly,” by “delegitimizing” any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether that system is federal court trials or military commissions.
Those who signed the statement included former Solicitor General Ken Starr, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, former White House lawyer Brad Berenson, John Bellinger, the former legal adviser to the National Security Council and the State Department, and two former detainee policy officials in the Bush administration, Matthew Waxman, and Charles “Cully” Stimson, who, ironically, was himself forced to resign from the DoD in 2007 after starting a similar witch-hunt against corporate law firms whose lawyers represented prisoners at Guantánamo.
March 17th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
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