Deep Blade Journal

Ridiculous Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) held naked in hearing

This is a good example of what I was writing about in a post called “Cardassian justice” about a week ago.

TOM SULLIVAN (a lawyer representing men held for years in Gitmo w/o evidence): When they started out in these hearings, these [Combatant Status Review Tribunals], they were presumed guilty. There had already been a finding they were enemy combatants. The determination had been made. No witness or evidence was presented by the government. . . .

And then they put in some classified evidence. I’ve been down to the secure facility. It’s a joke. It’s a sham.

I’ve read the classified evidence. I’m not free to disclose it, but I can tell you it’s a sham.

There was no lawyer given to the defendants. They didn’t speak English, most of them. They were young men who had no training in law. There were no rules of evidence applicable. . . .

No cross-examination was allowed. There wasn’t any objection to physical evidence, because there wasn’t any produced.

Now, you call that due process, Your Honor? Do you?

This is a historic moment in our time. To suspend the writ of habeas corpus without hearings, rushing it through just before elections, where people are afraid to vote against this bill because somebody on the other side is going to hold up a TV commercial and criticize them for it, is phony.

Cornyn is more full of shit than practically any of the full-of-shit Republican senators. It’s a shame and a disgrace, a stain on America, the way these detainees are being handled.

The worst thing that would happen with this bill is that habeas corpus would be denied for the innocent people held by the US. (At least 85% of those held have no evidence against them, except perhaps for a finger pointed at them for bounty). This is so disturbing. I wish a Democrat would stand up against it.

Occupation at Olympia Snowe’s office in Bangor

Connie reads, in front of the Federal Building in Bangor, September 21

Below is an oped from Monday’s Bangor Daily News. It describes the Declaration of Peace, a call for our Congressional leaders to end the horrorible death and destruction caused by the occupation in Iraq with a “concrete, comprehensive and rapid withdrawal plan.”

Today, the unresponsive Snowe’s office was occupied and about a dozen activists were arrested in a non-violent protest. I’ll post some video later. Meanwhile, the oped:

Civil disobedience … again
By Nancy Galland and Richard Stander
Published Monday Sept. 18; Bangor Daily News

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago in 1773, after repeatedly petitioning the governor of Massachusetts for relief of disastrous taxes on tea, a large band of Bostonians seized three English ships full of tea and tossed it overboard. The Boston Tea Party was the first American Act of Civil Disobedience, and the spark that changed history for all of us.

Three years later, the American Revolution swept the British out of power. Since then, the American legacy of nonviolent civil disobedience has continued to change the history of this country in ways that have benefitted every one of us alive today: think Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Philip Berrigan and countless others whose courage to disobey the “law” brought peace, justice and equality to fruition when no other means proved effective.

Fast-forward to 2006: Sept. 21 is the deadline for Congress to respond to The Declaration of Peace, a nationally circulated pledge calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. If Congress does not act on a concrete, comprehensive and rapid withdrawal plan before they recess for fall elections, Declaration supporters will take to the streets in marches and rallies all over the country. Some, in the spirit of those who came before, will be led by conscience to engage in civil disobedience and risk arrest to signify their principled commitment to oppose this war of aggression.

These actions will continue throughout the week of Sept. 21-30. There is little hope that the members of Congress will meet the deadline.

In cities and towns all over Maine, including Bangor, large bands of people will gather to protest congressional failure to respond to the majority of Americans who do not support the war. On Sept. 30, a march and rally will be held from 1 p.m to 3 p.m. at the Waterfront Park in Bangor.

During the week, many who oppose Bush’s continued escalation of violence in Iraq, after three years of being ignored and denied an audience with Sen. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, will commit acts of conscience. Once again, people will be asking : Why do people commit civil disobedience?

Why do people choose to risk arrest, risk a criminal record, risk time from their lives and risk the consequences of conviction?

We put this question recently to a group of people who chose to commit acts of conscience on two recent occasions: first at the onset of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and again in December of last year. Some in this group are old enough to have been arrested during protests against the war in Vietnam, an opposition which ultimately brought about the end of the war, but not before more than 52,000 American and a million Vietnamese deaths, leaving a legacy of grief and regret.

Others are new to political activism. All are mature, reasonable people who hold positions of value in their communities: teachers, administrators, carpenters and builders, farmers, artists, parents and grandparents. Here are some of their thoughts about why they felt compelled, during these times, to commit civil disobedience:

– “The mass media aren’t covering the real costs of the war, nor the wide-spread opposition to it. We have to get the word out. The stakes keep rising and my anger with it. My fear is that where we go from here is even more frightening.”

– “I do it [civil disobedience] for my children and all children. To remain silent is to be complicit. We’ve tried every other means to reach our senators, without any meaningful response. It’s the last resort.”

– “Government is powerless against civil disobedience. It’s the best way I can think to show moral commitment, moral courage.”

– “I agree with the historian, Howard Zinn, that the problem is not ‘civil disobedience,’ but rather too much ‘civil obedience.’ Until a critical mass of people turn out in the streets and interrupt business as usual, no one will pay attention and things will just get worse.”

The week of Sept. 21-30 will offer an opportunity for everyone who believes in their heart that this war is wrong, that something must be done to stop it, to come out and let their feelings be known.

It is time to take a hard look at how ordinary people can influence history — or not.

FBI-listed terrorists free in America

Thirty years ago today a car bomb exploded on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC claiming the lives of Chilean diplomat Orlando Latelier and Institute for Policy Studies employee Ronni Karpen Moffitt. This terrorist act carried out by agents of then-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet often was considered the worst ever carried out on American soil, until 9/11/2001.

Democracy Now! carried an interview featuring Francisco Letelier, son of Orlando Letelier, and writer Peter Kornbluh. Kornbluh described some connections between the Latelier assassins and Cuban anti-Castro terrorists who currently are allowed to walk free in America:

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, there’s a loose connection. Anti-Castro Cubans that were part of an umbrella terrorist group, according to the FBI, were involved working with the Chilean secret police to assassinate the former foreign minister and former ambassador to Washington, Orlando Letelier, and his American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, 30 years ago this morning. And those same anti-Castro Cubans were part of a group that planned a series of terrorist attacks across Latin America in the summer of 1976, culminating in the infamous bombing of the Cubana Flight 455 on October 6. And that’s where largely the connection lies. [Luis Posada Carriles] was a mastermind of this attack, according to –the plane attack– according to declassified documents.

Posada for the moment is in detention, but could be freed soon to join Orlando Bosch, another of the Flight 455 bombers, now living freely in Florida.

Here’s a case where proven terrorists friendly to the US administration are treated very differently from persons from the wrong country and religion.

Insanity. Also unlikely (read the comments at that post).

See also here and here.

Bush & Pentagon would have power secretly to declare guilt for pre-crime

I’ve had for some time a desire to put together a serious post on the dangers of Bush’s legislation defining military commission for Terror War detainees that Congress is trying to push through following rebuke of the Administration in the Supreme Court Hamden decision. But science fiction references keep coming up in my head.

Some of us watched the old Star Trek Deep Space Nine series in the 1990s. One of the villain regimes in the series was Cardassia. There, if you were to be accused of a crime, the justice system proceeded something like this:

Let’s combine these obviously absurd notions of justice with “pre-crime”, from a different work of science fiction, Minority Report, made into a pretty bad movie starring Tom Cruise. Under pre-crime, the crimes for which you could be accused have not yet happened.

This is what President Bush says about Terror War suspects,

In some cases, we determine that individuals we have captured pose a significant threat, or may have intelligence that we and our allies need to have to prevent new attacks. Many are al Qaeda operatives or Taliban fighters trying to conceal their identities, and they withhold information that could save American lives. In these cases, it has been necessary to move these individuals to an environment where they can be held secretly, questioned by experts, and — when appropriate — prosecuted for terrorist acts.

Wow, pre-crime. The suspects can be “prosecuted for terrorist acts” just because “we [the president and presumably the Pentagon] determine that individuals we have captured pose a significant threat”.

The standard for detention, and probably conviction, is “could save American lives”, not “took lives”, as the regular notion of crime would suggest. Criminal law since the Magna Carta is out the window. A despotic executive now has the power to “determine” your status as a “threat”, even if the threat is just what he says is in your mind.

And what about the trial. Here we go back to strictly Cardassian standards. Here is what the president’s own sheet on Myth/Fact: The Administration’s Legislation to Create Military Commissions says:

…the new bill provides that before any classified evidence is introduced outside the accused’s presence, the head of the executive department that has classified the evidence must certify that sharing the evidence would harm national security…

Sure, there’s a ton of utterly meaningless qualifiers included with this sheet, but there is the bottom line–the evidence CAN be secret as soon as “the head of the executive department that has classified” it says so. Cardassian to be sure.

It is mildly relieving to hear that a small group of Republican Senators, including one of our own, Susan Collins from Maine, has stood up for the moment against Cardassian justice. A vote in the Armed Services Committee has rejected Bush’s bill.

But there is way too much silence, way too much cowering from the Republican accusations of “surrender” if Bush can not have his way, like what the insufferable Sen. Bill Frist issued last night on the News Hour:

…I can tell you where our interest is: It’s the safety and security of the American people.

It is going to be a wake-up call to the Democrats who basically belittle in many ways this war on terror, who do want to wave this white flag and surrender. And surrender is just simply not a solution, and that’s very likely going to play out here over the next several weeks, as we address these bills that you talked about on the floor of the Senate.

The Democrats need to start standing up and saying that the way to protect America is not to throw away the American system of justice for the Cardassian one, as Bush, Frist, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others think we should. Due process cannot be reduced to a mockery. We can not preserve our own desire to be free from terror by acting like a Terror state, the Cardassian state, where human rights of the accused are unprotected.

The accusations of “surrender” and “Democrats are more interested in the rights of terrorists than the safety of America” are so wrong headed. We cannot protect ourselves by violating the human rights of anyone we think looks like a terrorist and turning over our system of justice to a Cardassian executive authority.

Future of Iraq being decided in Abu Dhabi

Curious how some Bush-used notions appear in a release from an Iraqi deputy prime minister at a recent US-run conference in the UAE:

A top Iraqi official called for partnerships with international companies to boost his country’s oil industry on Sunday, saying Iraq’s emergence as a “secure petro-democracy” could quell rampant sectarian violence.

Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a Kurd, conceded disputes between local officials and the central government over who controls oil proceeds were one of many obstacles to making improvements. But he said he was hopeful that oil would be a “unifying force for Iraqis rather than a resource to fight over.”

He spoke of Iraq emerging as a “secure petro-democracy” with the strength to put an end to the violence that threatens to tear the country apart.

“I don’t underestimate the gravity of the situation in Iraq,” Saleh said during a U.N.- and U.S.-sponsored Iraq donor conference in the Emirates capital of Abu Dhabi. “We are in a very critical situation.” [emphasis added]

There are very curious things here. First, why does Iraq need to have a “US-sponsored” donor conference and be prodded quickly to sign over concessions over rights to its oil? As I have blogged before, Iraq should be in the driver seat, rather than give up control along with a great deal of its wealth to so-called PSAs, or production sharing agreements.

Also, the rhetorical positioning of oil-as-unifying-force seems to take right after President Bush, who said of Iraq’s oil on June 12 that it is “something that I view as a very positive part of Iraqi future” and that Iraq ought to “use the oil as a way to unite the country and ought to think about having a tangible fund for the people, so the people have faith in central government”.

It is difficult to know just what is going on here. Perhaps a clue appeared in the New York Times in a deeply-buried lead in a story about Vice President Cheney’s waning influence (thanks, Jonathan):

For instance, Mr. Bush has turned to another Washington insider, James A. Baker III, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state, for help as the co-chairman of an outside group developing options for dealing with Iraq. One group member said, “You get the sense that the president now realizes, perhaps a little late, that he needs Baker to find him an exit door.”

Wow. They recognize the need for new “options” and an “exit door”. Hardly seems like all this “stay the course” nonsense we’ve been hearing lately.

Here is a guess about what this means. The US, its puppets in Iraq who just happen to have a lot of influence in the oil sector, and the multinational oil companies are keen to get solid long-term contracts maximizing wealth extraction from the country, under the recognition that the political battle could be totally lost really soon. (Remember, Baker is the guy hired to work out Iraq’s mountain of debt, but quickly turned to double-dealing evidently at Iraq’s expense.) The assumption is that the oil will be pumping long after the current violence subsides, at which point the US can pull back and hope that the the constitution it imposed on Iraq will hold up to legal muster. Nothing is certain yet due to the resistance, so the troops have to stay in the meanwhile to at least hold the line of colonial control until the PSAs are the facts on the ground.