SimpleSimon
08-02-2002, 11:59 PM
http://www.msnbc.com/news/789263.asp#BODY
Originally published on MSNBC:
<center>Judge orders U.S. to ID detainees
Justice Department denounces order as aiding terrorism</center>
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — A federal judge gave the government 15 days Friday to disclose the names of people detained in the investigation of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In an extraordinary attack on the judicial branch, the Justice Department denounced the judge, saying her order “increases the risk of future terrorist threats to our nation.”
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S power to arrest and hold individuals is an extraordinary one,” U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said in a 45-page ruling. “Here, the government has used its arrest power to detain individuals as part of an investigation that is widespread in its scope and secrecy.”
Kessler said she would allow only two exceptions. On a case-by-case basis, she will consider allowing the government to keep a detainee’s name secret if the detainee is a material witness to a terror investigation. And she said she would allow the government to withhold a name if the detainee requested it.
Kessler also ordered the government to release the names of attorneys representing the detainees. She said lawyers, unlike suspects, have no expectation of privacy and are well equipped to “handle their own affairs.”
But Kessler did uphold the government’s right to keep secret the locations where detainees are being held. She said there was a significant risk that those prisons could be targeted by people angered by the detentions.
SECRET ARRESTS WRONG
Kessler wrote that government affidavits “nowhere declare that some or all of the detainees have connections to terrorism,” meaning it was “pure speculation” that identifying them would harm an investigation of alleged terrorist activity.
Such secret arrests are “a concept odious to a democratic society,” Kessler wrote, quoting from a ruling in a 1969 case.
She found that while Sept. 11 was “truly a day of infamy in our national history,” the judicial system was obligated to “ensure that our government always operates within the scrutiny and constitutional constraints which distinguish a democracy from a dictatorship.”
The Justice Department did not not immediately say whether it would appeal the ruling. But in a remarkably pointed statement it released late Friday afternoon, government lawyers excoriated Kessler’s order.
“The Department of Justice believes today’s ruling impedes one of the most important federal law enforcement investigations in history, harms our efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the heinous attacks of September 11 and increases the risk of future terrorist threats to our nation,” the department said.
It accused Kessler of opening the door for lawyers to “provide valuable information to terrorists seeking to cause even greater harm to the safety of the American people.”
By contrast, the ruling was welcomed by the lead attorney bringing the lawsuit, Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.
“The ruling is a vindication of our basic liberties: The government may not arrest people in secret, the courts will stop government abuses, and the tragic events of September 11 may not be used as an excuse to suspend basic rights and round up the most vulnerable members of our society,” she said.
RIGHTS GROUPS DEMAND INFORMATION
Kessler, who was appointed to the D.C. Circuit bench by President Bill Clinton, ordered the Justice Department in May to update and clarify data about the detainees after civil liberties groups sued for more information. The groups, which included the Center for National Security Studies and the American Civil Liberties Union, demanded the names of all those being held and information on where they were being held.
More than 1,100 people, most of them Arab and Muslim men, have been rounded up since the Sept. 11 attacks, most on immigration violations. In a court filing in May, the government said it was still holding at least 147 of them. More recent numbers have not been released.
The detainees at issue in this case are separate from the 600 or so being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Another federal judge ruled Wednesday that they had no right to trial before the U.S. courts because Cuba is outside the United States.
If you would like to read the entire order (45 pages of legalese) go here:
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/01-2500.pdf
Finally, a federal judge shows some integrity, and some understanding of our constitution and rule of law.
Now ask yourself this: Do you think the Bush administration will comply with her order?
We have here the elements of a constitutional crisis of epic proportions, which may well answer the loaded question: Is Dubya a constitutional executive, or is he a despot?
See also:
Originally published in MSNBC:
<center> Judge bars detainees from courts
Guantanamo prisoners found to have no right to trial</center>
WASHINGTON, July 31 — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that foreign nationals captured in Afghanistan and held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have no right to trial before U.S. courts, finding that because Cuba is outside the United States, the legal system has no jurisdiction.
THE RULING bolsters the Bush administration’s contention that the United States can hold the nearly 600 men captured in Afghanistan indefinitely in Cuba without interference from the courts. Federal prosecutors had worried that a victory by the 15 foreign nationals who brought the case would lead to other lawsuits by detainees held in Cuba.
Lawyers for the families of the men — 12 Kuwaiti nationals, two British citizens and an Australian — filed two lawsuits against the Bush administration, demanding their release from “unlawful custody,” the right to confer with their lawyers in private and an end to all interrogations while the case was pending.
But U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly dismissed the suits. “The court concludes that the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is outside the sovereign territory of the United States,” she ruled, adding that writs of habeas corpus were unavailable to aliens held outside U.S. territory.
NO P.O.W. PROTECTIONS
In November, the Bush administration ordered that the detainees be held as “enemy combatants” ineligible for international protections afforded prisoners of war on the ground that they were among the most dangerous Taliban and al-Qaida fighters captured during the U.S.-led battle in Afghanistan.
No treaty or U.S. law grants prisoners like those at Camp X-ray the right to a lawyer. That would change if they were charged with a crime, but the administration has created a system of military tribunals specifically to try the detainees outside the criminal courts.
The lawsuits argued that President Bush’s Nov. 13 executive order violated the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, to which any foreign nationals are entitled. Among other things, they accused Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert and Col. Terry Carrico of withholding the right to an attorney from the prisoners.
Lehnert is commander of the task force running the detention operation, and Carrico is commandant of Camp X-ray.
The petitions listed numerous efforts by the three men’s families to contact them, which U.S. officials “either rebuffed or ignored.” The men have been allowed to write letters to their families, screened by U.S. officials, in which they asked for lawyers.
LAWYERS DISAPPOINTED
Attorneys for the men’s families said the situation could lead to their being denied representation even as they appeared before a tribunal with the authority to impose the death penalty.
Barbara Olshansky, a legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the civil rights group representing the men, said the judge based her decision on “irrelevant and ill-reasoned” precedents.
“We find the decision extremely troubling,” Olshansky said. “The court has left the petitioners in legal limbo without recourse. They are being held at the unfettered discretion of the United States and have nowhere to turn.”
The attorneys argued that the men were entitled to the same rights as Cuban citizens who have requested political asylum and gained entry into the United States.
But “the crucial distinction in [Cuban citizens’] rights as aliens is that [they] had been given some form of process by the government of the United States,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “Once the United States made determinations that the migrants had a credible fear of political persecution and could claim asylum in the United States, these migrants became vested with a liberty interest that the government was unable to simply deny without due process of law.”
Because the men at Guantanamo have not been charged with any crime, Lollar-Kotelly wrote, there is no due process they can be deprived of.
Kollar-Kotelly also took issue with the plaintiffs’ argument that the detainees would be held indefinitely, stating that global courts and the United Nations had the power to inquire about where detainees are being held and for how long.
Now here’s a federal judge who is a good little team player.
I’d like to know exactly what international Court or UN Agency or Tribunal he has in mind. The U.S. has refused to subject itself to the World Court.
Originally published on MSNBC:
<center>Judge orders U.S. to ID detainees
Justice Department denounces order as aiding terrorism</center>
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — A federal judge gave the government 15 days Friday to disclose the names of people detained in the investigation of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In an extraordinary attack on the judicial branch, the Justice Department denounced the judge, saying her order “increases the risk of future terrorist threats to our nation.”
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S power to arrest and hold individuals is an extraordinary one,” U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said in a 45-page ruling. “Here, the government has used its arrest power to detain individuals as part of an investigation that is widespread in its scope and secrecy.”
Kessler said she would allow only two exceptions. On a case-by-case basis, she will consider allowing the government to keep a detainee’s name secret if the detainee is a material witness to a terror investigation. And she said she would allow the government to withhold a name if the detainee requested it.
Kessler also ordered the government to release the names of attorneys representing the detainees. She said lawyers, unlike suspects, have no expectation of privacy and are well equipped to “handle their own affairs.”
But Kessler did uphold the government’s right to keep secret the locations where detainees are being held. She said there was a significant risk that those prisons could be targeted by people angered by the detentions.
SECRET ARRESTS WRONG
Kessler wrote that government affidavits “nowhere declare that some or all of the detainees have connections to terrorism,” meaning it was “pure speculation” that identifying them would harm an investigation of alleged terrorist activity.
Such secret arrests are “a concept odious to a democratic society,” Kessler wrote, quoting from a ruling in a 1969 case.
She found that while Sept. 11 was “truly a day of infamy in our national history,” the judicial system was obligated to “ensure that our government always operates within the scrutiny and constitutional constraints which distinguish a democracy from a dictatorship.”
The Justice Department did not not immediately say whether it would appeal the ruling. But in a remarkably pointed statement it released late Friday afternoon, government lawyers excoriated Kessler’s order.
“The Department of Justice believes today’s ruling impedes one of the most important federal law enforcement investigations in history, harms our efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the heinous attacks of September 11 and increases the risk of future terrorist threats to our nation,” the department said.
It accused Kessler of opening the door for lawyers to “provide valuable information to terrorists seeking to cause even greater harm to the safety of the American people.”
By contrast, the ruling was welcomed by the lead attorney bringing the lawsuit, Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.
“The ruling is a vindication of our basic liberties: The government may not arrest people in secret, the courts will stop government abuses, and the tragic events of September 11 may not be used as an excuse to suspend basic rights and round up the most vulnerable members of our society,” she said.
RIGHTS GROUPS DEMAND INFORMATION
Kessler, who was appointed to the D.C. Circuit bench by President Bill Clinton, ordered the Justice Department in May to update and clarify data about the detainees after civil liberties groups sued for more information. The groups, which included the Center for National Security Studies and the American Civil Liberties Union, demanded the names of all those being held and information on where they were being held.
More than 1,100 people, most of them Arab and Muslim men, have been rounded up since the Sept. 11 attacks, most on immigration violations. In a court filing in May, the government said it was still holding at least 147 of them. More recent numbers have not been released.
The detainees at issue in this case are separate from the 600 or so being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Another federal judge ruled Wednesday that they had no right to trial before the U.S. courts because Cuba is outside the United States.
If you would like to read the entire order (45 pages of legalese) go here:
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/01-2500.pdf
Finally, a federal judge shows some integrity, and some understanding of our constitution and rule of law.
Now ask yourself this: Do you think the Bush administration will comply with her order?
We have here the elements of a constitutional crisis of epic proportions, which may well answer the loaded question: Is Dubya a constitutional executive, or is he a despot?
See also:
Originally published in MSNBC:
<center> Judge bars detainees from courts
Guantanamo prisoners found to have no right to trial</center>
WASHINGTON, July 31 — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that foreign nationals captured in Afghanistan and held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have no right to trial before U.S. courts, finding that because Cuba is outside the United States, the legal system has no jurisdiction.
THE RULING bolsters the Bush administration’s contention that the United States can hold the nearly 600 men captured in Afghanistan indefinitely in Cuba without interference from the courts. Federal prosecutors had worried that a victory by the 15 foreign nationals who brought the case would lead to other lawsuits by detainees held in Cuba.
Lawyers for the families of the men — 12 Kuwaiti nationals, two British citizens and an Australian — filed two lawsuits against the Bush administration, demanding their release from “unlawful custody,” the right to confer with their lawyers in private and an end to all interrogations while the case was pending.
But U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly dismissed the suits. “The court concludes that the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is outside the sovereign territory of the United States,” she ruled, adding that writs of habeas corpus were unavailable to aliens held outside U.S. territory.
NO P.O.W. PROTECTIONS
In November, the Bush administration ordered that the detainees be held as “enemy combatants” ineligible for international protections afforded prisoners of war on the ground that they were among the most dangerous Taliban and al-Qaida fighters captured during the U.S.-led battle in Afghanistan.
No treaty or U.S. law grants prisoners like those at Camp X-ray the right to a lawyer. That would change if they were charged with a crime, but the administration has created a system of military tribunals specifically to try the detainees outside the criminal courts.
The lawsuits argued that President Bush’s Nov. 13 executive order violated the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, to which any foreign nationals are entitled. Among other things, they accused Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert and Col. Terry Carrico of withholding the right to an attorney from the prisoners.
Lehnert is commander of the task force running the detention operation, and Carrico is commandant of Camp X-ray.
The petitions listed numerous efforts by the three men’s families to contact them, which U.S. officials “either rebuffed or ignored.” The men have been allowed to write letters to their families, screened by U.S. officials, in which they asked for lawyers.
LAWYERS DISAPPOINTED
Attorneys for the men’s families said the situation could lead to their being denied representation even as they appeared before a tribunal with the authority to impose the death penalty.
Barbara Olshansky, a legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the civil rights group representing the men, said the judge based her decision on “irrelevant and ill-reasoned” precedents.
“We find the decision extremely troubling,” Olshansky said. “The court has left the petitioners in legal limbo without recourse. They are being held at the unfettered discretion of the United States and have nowhere to turn.”
The attorneys argued that the men were entitled to the same rights as Cuban citizens who have requested political asylum and gained entry into the United States.
But “the crucial distinction in [Cuban citizens’] rights as aliens is that [they] had been given some form of process by the government of the United States,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “Once the United States made determinations that the migrants had a credible fear of political persecution and could claim asylum in the United States, these migrants became vested with a liberty interest that the government was unable to simply deny without due process of law.”
Because the men at Guantanamo have not been charged with any crime, Lollar-Kotelly wrote, there is no due process they can be deprived of.
Kollar-Kotelly also took issue with the plaintiffs’ argument that the detainees would be held indefinitely, stating that global courts and the United Nations had the power to inquire about where detainees are being held and for how long.
Now here’s a federal judge who is a good little team player.
I’d like to know exactly what international Court or UN Agency or Tribunal he has in mind. The U.S. has refused to subject itself to the World Court.