For those whose recollections of high school or college are foggy:
… The writ of habeas corpus is actually the lynchpin of a free society. Take away this great writ and all other rights – such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, gun ownership, due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments – become meaningless. [emphasis added]
Yes, now, effectively eroded via the new law.
Dark days ahead.
What new law?
Yes please, what new law?
EDIT: Sorry, I hit the link and read the first few paragraphs. Once it started with the “let’s assume” stuff it lost me. Habeas Corpus has been suspended before in the Civil War. Libros don’t like to talk about that and that and the powers given to FDR in WWII. Rather they and the libs are so caught up in their “vision” of a perfect world/society they can’t get past their dislike for Bush and cowboy up to fight the real enemy. Just my humble opinon of course.
Low Drag,
I disagree with your contention that this is a “liberal” issue. As wrong as they are on most topics, the Patriot Act and other decisions in the “War on Terror” (mostly copied from the “War on some Drugs”) are time-bombs waiting for the next President that wants to become a dictator.
I think George Bush will use these powers only as necessary and for our common good; but I don’t trust Hillary or Kerry to do so.
M_P
When I said “libros” I meant libertarians.
Libertarians have some good ideas but when it comes to practical implementation they seem to fall down and fall back on idealism rather than reality.
However I do agree that laws need to be written for the “worst case” scenario and not count on having an ethical president and congress.
I think the Patriot Act is OK. If someone is calling you from over seas on a watch list, your phone call is crossing international borders. Therefore, you never had the right to expect privacy. The US Feder Govt has the power and authority granted by the Constitution to regulate, restrict, and conduct searches on all US border crossings and commerce. That goes for your phone calls as well. As for domestic spying, there is nothing new other than they can tap any phone you are on, not just the one you own. This makes total sense. They are not tapping your phone, they are tapping you. This is the way it should have always been. They still need a warrant to do it. Warrentless searches only occurr if you have contact with someone on the watch list and via that contact they have evidence to pursue you. However, they must within a certain period of time file for the warrant and, if not granted, all gained evidence is inadmissable in court. As for holding an enemy combatant without trial, if you are not on the field of battle, you have nothing to worry about. I have yet to read the specific language that states otherwise.
Enemy combatants have never been given the right of habeas corpus. Terrorists, at least foreign ones, are enemy combatants.
+1 You are correct. Only uniformed soldiers on the field of battle have rights under the International Peace Conference, Hague Convention and Geneva Convention. All others are enemy combatants and can be killed for no reason at all if they are found with weapons.
Annex to the Convention
REGULATIONS RESPECTING THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS
OF WAR ON LAND
SECTION I
ON BELLIGERENTS
CHAPTER I
The Qualifications of Belligerents
Article 1.
The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:
To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
To carry arms openly; and
To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
In countries where militia or volunteer corps constitute the army, or form part of it, they are included under the denomination “army.”
Art. 2.
The inhabitants of a territory which has not been occupied, who, on the approach of the enemy, spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading troops without having had time to organize themselves in accordance with Article 1, shall be regarded as belligerents if they carry arms openly and if they respect the laws and customs of war.
Art. 3.
The armed forces of the belligerent parties may consist of combatants and non-combatants. In the case of capture by the enemy, both have a right to be treated as prisoners of war.
Non-combatants must be spontanous and non-sustained in their status. In the case of Iraq, they only have a couple of days to get organized. Once there is no military officer in power, the ablity for non-combatants to be classified as belligerents no longer exists.
The Patriot Act does not begin to cross the boundaries that Lincoln or FDR during times of war while their administrations were seated. Yes, I too believe that Bush will apply the provisions with careful thought and in the spirit of which they were intended. That is also why the second amendment must be strongly support and maintained. As Lincoln also said…it is not just the right of a people to over throw a tyannical government, but it is their DUTY.
Web could be terror training camp in U.S., politician says
BOSTON (Reuters) - Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday.
“We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the Internet,” Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting of International Association of the Chiefs of Police.
“They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination,” Chertoff said. “Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites.”
Chertoff pointed to the July 7, 2005 attacks on London’s transit system, which killed 56 people, as an example a home-grown threat.
To help gather intelligence on possible home-grown attackers, Chertoff said Homeland Security would deploy 20 field agents this fiscal year into “intelligence fusion centers,” where they would work with local police agencies.
By the end of the next fiscal year, he said the department aims to up that to 35 staffers.
One could argue that the Republic ended at Appomattox Court House. “These United States” became “The United States” just as Patrick Henry prophesied.
Lincoln was no friend of liberty. Rather than drinking the Kool-aid we got in public school, try reading [i]Lincoln Unmasked.[/i]
War Is Peace
Freedom Is Slavery
Ignorance Is Strength
IIRC our Founding Fathers first started with a confederacy, and that culture survived until the Civil War.
The Civil War gave us a sense of nation that simply was not there prior to the war.
“Thus, Lincoln ‘saved’ the union in the same sense that a man saves his marital union by violently forcing his wife back into the home and threatening to shoot her if she leaves again. The union may well be saved, but it is not the kind of union that existed on their wedding day. That union no longer exists. The union of the founding fathers ceased to exist in April of 1865.”
Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Lincoln Unmasked,, Crown Forum Books, October 2006, page 26.
This one did. He may be the only one who ever will, though.
In the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, argued before the United States Supreme Court in March 2006, Salim Ahmed Hamdan petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, challenging the lawfulness of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to try him for alleged war crimes before a military commission convened under special orders issued by the President of the United States, rather than before a court-martial convened under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. On June 29, 2006, in a 5-3 ruling the Supreme Court of the United States rejected Congress’s attempts to strip the court of jurisdiction over habeas corpus appeals by detainees at Guantánamo Bay, although Congress had previously passed the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which took effect on December 30, 2005:
New legislation removes such cases from the jurisdiction of federal courts:
“[N]o court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” §1005(e)(1), 119 Stat. 2742.
By the way, governments don’t grant rights; they can take them away. Have you ever read, “…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,…”?
Exactly, I’ve been trying to explain to my friends that such a vague policy can be interpreted differently by the next guy/hildebeast. If we allow our policies to be that vague, we might as well handcuff ourselves and walk right into jail if Hillary gets elected.
So far, the war on terror means to most Americans a war against bad guys with guns and bombs who just happen to be muslim. We haven’t defined our enemy at all. This means the next pres. can go ahead and say “look at those conservatives, with their guns, and heck, they’re even religious too! Lock em up!”
The Gov agents taking your lighter and lip balm today are the parents of the the agents kicking in your door in a few years.
The federal government can suck my dick.
M_P
NOT liberal, libertian.
A war was going to be waged due to slavery post 1791. The ideas contained within the founding documents had huge contradictions.
My favorite Lincoln detractor comment is how the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves then in the next breath say how he abused the Constitution. It’s always worth a good chuckle.
The Emancipation Proclamation “freed” slaves only in areas the Union did not oontrol. Where the Union controlled (including the border states that did not secede), folks kept their slaves to the end of the conflict. (My wife’s folks in Kentucky kept their slaves until 1865.) Lincoln did eviscerate the Constitution: he suspended habeas corpus while courts were open (subsequently struck down by the Supreme Court), imprisoned Northern dissenters in military prisons without due process (including newspaper editors and owners as well as destroying their presses), initiated a naval blockade (an act of war at international law) without a declaration of war, etc.
This makes you chuckle?
There was a tariff war brewing for 37 years prior to Fort Sumter. Andrew Jackson almost went to war against South Carolna in 1833 when that state nullified the 1828 Tariff of Abominations and refused to collect tariffs. Protectionist tariffs fall most heavily on agriculural producers who receive market price for their goods but must pay higher prices fo manufactured goods from whatever source. The Morill Tariff was signed into law two days before Lincoln’s inauguration, doubling the tax.
In his First Inaugural Speech:
…On the issue of slavery he was 100% accomodating, going so far as to pledge his support for a constitutioal amendment that would forever ban the federal government from interfering with Southern slavery. But on tariff collection he was ncompromising and dictatorial. “[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it is forced upon the national authority.”
What was he talkng about? Failure to collect the tariff, that’s what. After making the obligatory statement that it was his obligation to “possess the property and places belonging to the Government” he further stated that it was his duty “to collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using force against or among people anywhere.” In other words, Pay Up or Die. Fail to collect the tariff, as South Carolinians did in 1828 [sic], and there will be a military invasion. He would not back off when it came to tax collection, as President Andrew Jackson had done three decades earlier.[ Lincoln Unmasked, p. 126.