For those illegally held in jail we have a court decision to hail…
posted by Bill Arnett @ 1:56 PM Permalink
…because, unbelievably bush's SCOTUS has ruled that the constitution of the US still means something and that all those illegally detained persons being held by the government may challenge their confinement in US Courts.
THE RULE OF LAW WON. There is hope for America after all!
See this article
from the NYT that has the details:
Foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in United States courts, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.
“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.[…]
In a harsh rebuke of the Bush administration, the justices rejected the administration’s argument that the individual protections provided by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 were more than adequate..
“The costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody,” Justice Kennedy wrote, assuming the pivotal role that some court-watchers had foreseen.
The issues that were weighed in Thursday’s ruling went to the very heart of the separation-of-powers foundation of the United States Constitution. “To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say ‘what the law is,’ ” Justice Kennedy wrote, citing language in the 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison, in which the Supreme Court articulated its power to review acts of Congress.[…]
The ruling on Thursday focused in large part on the centuries old writ of habeas corpus (“you have the body,” in Latin), a means by which prisoners can challenge their incarceration. Noting that the Constitution provides for suspension of the writ only in times of rebellion or invasion, Justice Kennedy called it “an indispensable mechanism for monitoring the separation of powers.”[…]
The head of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of prisoners at Guantánamo, hailed the ruling. “The Supreme Court has finally brought an end to one of our nation’s most egregious injustices,” Vincent Warren, the organization’s executive director, told The Associated Press.[…]
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, applauded the ruling. “Today, the Supreme Court affirmed what almost everyone but the administration and their defenders in Congress always knew,” he said. “The Constitution and the rule of law bind all of us even in extraordinary times of war. No one is above the Constitution.”
In the words of a well-known actor, "Yippee kiyay, motherf*cker!"
This puts the final nail into the coffin of gw bush's illegal detention of so-called "enemy combatants,", restores habeas corpus, and means that as these people are heard in our courts all the other illegal acts of bush, such as endless torture, will be dragged out into the light of day so all Americans and the world will see bush for exactly what he is: a cruel, petty despot that wanted more power than any king or emperor in history, at least since 1200 A.D. and the signing of the Magna Carta, upon which in many instances our own constitution is based.
This is the BIG ONE for the Rule of Law and all Americans owe a debt to the US Supreme Court.
Labels: bill of rights, constitution, Crime, criminal justice system, dictatorship, foreign policy, history, Supreme Court
Those that rant, can't…
posted by Bill Arnett @ 1:10 PM Permalink
…I hope everyone listens to bush rant and rave about his desire for unrestricted surveillance and retroactive immunity for himself and telecom companies that were beginning to tap everyone's communications before 9/11, when it was clearly illegal to do so. (See: Think Progress
posting)
He already runs third grade diplomacy and sounds more like a spoiled petulant child everyday.
If he is running a "clean" eavesdropping operation he has always had all the laws he ever needed to conduct such surveillance through the FISA court, which already allows unrestricted access to foreign calls between person not within the U.S. But it seems to be his ability to have an unrestricted ability to surveil Americans without a warrant and help from Big Telecom to aid in that effort.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Labels: bad laws, big brother, bill of rights, Bush, disinformation, NSA, surveillance, technology, Terrorism
Don't ask why, be glad they're too broke to pry…
posted by Bill Arnett @ 2:36 PM Permalink
From
The Huffington Post we now find that the black hole known as Iraq is devouring so much money that the FBI is losing it's ability to spy on us:
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.
A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.
In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation "was halted due to untimely payment," the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government's most sensitive and secretive criminal investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.
"We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.
More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.
It must be rough trying to establish yourself as America's first King, as bush is, and
not be able to pay the bills for your most likely illegal surveillance of those you wish to govern.While bush is battling for immunity for the telecom companies the companies repay him by cutting off his surveillance for a lack of payment! Will they "forgive" the government's lack of payment if they are granted immunity? Is this a telecom power play or is America just to broke to pay its spying bills?
What sweet, rich irony.
Labels: bill of rights, Bush, conspiracy, disinformation, Economy, FBI, hypocrisy, irony, snark, spying, surveillance
A Lack of Intelligence
posted by The Sailor @ 8:01 PM Permalink
Intelligence Chief Decries Constraints
Court orders in January that brought President Bush's warrantless terrorist surveillance program under existing law have limited the intelligence that agencies can collect, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee yesterday.
"We are actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting," McConnell said during an unusual public session of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the administration's proposal to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).
The intelligence collection program was secretly instituted under presidential authority shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was disclosed by the news media in December 2005.
[...]
In January, the administration agreed to bring the program under the oversight of the secret FISA court, which approves warrants in terrorism and espionage investigations. That reversed Bush's position that he had the authority to order the program on his own. In a January letter to some lawmakers, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said the administration was satisfied the new arrangement would have the "speed and agility" to protect the nation from terrorists.
[...]
The FISA court almost never turns down a warrant request. Data for 2006 show that it signed off on 2,176 warrants, the Associated Press reported yesterday. One application for a warrant was denied in part, and 73 required changes before being approved.
But wait, there's more!
Administration Pulls Back on Surveillance Agreement
Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.
[...]
Several Democratic lawmakers expressed frustration on Tuesday that the administration had not provided documents related to the National Security Agency program, which the White House called the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
[...]
"To this day, we have never been provided the presidential authorization that cleared that program to go or the attorney general-Department of Justice opinions that declared it to be lawful," said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island.
Labels: bill of rights, Bush, GWOT, more Bush lies
Call them Kreskin
posted by The Vidiot @ 7:55 AM Permalink
Here's a
predictable prediction.
Excerpt: Lawyers envision more suicides and despair at Guantanamo Bay if the U.S. Justice Department succeeds in severely restricting access to detainees by defense attorneys, virtually the only contact inmates have with the outside world.
Labels: bill of rights, Gitmo, Torture
