Enemy combatants denied legal standing

Well, we get more, and more bad news from the Obama administration.

Do you all remember all the bash and blame acts that President Obama was playing aginast Ex-President Bush?...

Well now Ovama Justice Department lawyers are claiming that "there is no Constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad."

But it gets even worse, now the Obama administration, thanks to having the Supreme Court acquiesced to the requests of President Obama, and

in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a" person".

So now if anyone is a "suspected enemy combatant" they stop being a person in the eyes of the government, and they will cease to exist as a person in the United States. Which will mean the government/state can do whatever they want with such person, or people, even when there is no real evidence against them, and they are just "suspected" to be enemy combatants.

So who will be such "suspected enemy combatant"? Just take a wild guess.

If you scroll down at the following link you will find the following.

And still further: Barack Obama has now declared, openly, of his own free will, that he does not consider these captives to be "persons." They are, literally, sub-humans. And what makes them sub-humans? The fact that someone in the U.S. government has declared them to be "suspected enemy combatants." (And note: even the mere suspicion of being an "enemy combatant" can strip you of your personhood.)

But William Fisher noticed, and gave this report at Antiwar.com:
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."
[....]
Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" -- did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."
The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even be sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."

Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants."

All excerpts from above were taken from.
theragblog.blogspot.com...

All credit for the above excerpts, and information belong to Chris Floyd.

[edit on 21-12-2009 by ElectricUniverse]

Is there a link to the original decision instead of a blog?

What IS an Enemy Combatant???
Is it the library groups that met against war and were tracked by Bush? Little old ladies who wore red hats?
Peta? I worried a lot about this when the patriot act came out, now Obama has made it even broader!
Bush's chilling new definition of unlawful enemy combatant.

This definition as contained in the approved version of the Act, is substantially broader than that included in an earlier version (PDF), according to which a person so designated must also be

(A) part of or affiliated with a force or organization-including but not limited to al Qaeda, the Taliban, any international terrorist organization, or associated forces-engaged in hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents in violation of the law of war;

(B) to have committed a hostile act in aid of such a force or organization so engaged; or

(C) to have supported hostilities in aid of such a force or organization so engaged.
According to the definition approved by the Senate, you don't even have to be part of a terrorist organization. Nor does your "hostile" act have to be done to aid such a force; nor do you have to have supported such acts. Nor do you have to be in violation of the "law of war." Nor is there anywhere in the act where the term "hostilities" has itself been defined. For example, is an anti-war activist an unlawful enemy combatant? What about an American journalist who publishes leaked information damaging to the Bush administration? What about an anti-Bush blogger? In short, the definition is broad (and vague) enough to include any American citizen who is acting in a way the President deems "hostile" to the United States. As such, it is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation with greater potential to undermine freedom and democracy in America.

You see people this is the problem with unpatriotic terrorist lovers, when you you love terrorists more than America-




Flash forward six years


Agreed this is Bull, anyway you slice it

reply to post by habu71


Is
(hold on for link)


[edit on 21-12-2009 by Clearskies]

cant find it.

Originally posted by habu71
Is there a link to the original decision instead of a blog?

The original article was published by Chris Floyd. You can find in wikipedia the following about this journalist.

Chris Floyd (1958, Watertown, Tennessee, United States) is an American journalist and author best known for his blog of political news and commentary, Empire Burlesque. Floyd's writing has also appeared in CounterPunch, the The Ecologist, Anderson Valley Advertiser, The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Christian Science Monitor, the Baltimore Chronicle, the Bergen Record, and Truthout.org, among other publications. His November 2002 story, "Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism," was chosen as one of Project Censored's "Top 25 Stories of 2002/2003."

Floyd's work has also been anthologized in Media Democracy in Action: Censored 2004, and the I Hate Republicans Reader. A selection of articles from his blog were published as a collection, Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, 2001-2005.

en.wikipedia.org...

I will have to say Obama got this one right.
Amazing. He is a conservative when it comes to terrorizers. How cool is that!?

You can also find more at the following link.

The Holder Justice Department continued its quest to keep the Bush Administration’s program of extraordinary renditions out of the public eye with oral argument before the en banc Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday. So far the district court bowed to the government’s request to toss the suit out of secrecy concerns, while an appeals court panel saw through the government’s threadbare arguments and reversed, ordering the case to go to trial. The government responded by asking for the entire court of appeals to look at the question.
...................
Thus, what the Justice Department is asking of the Court of Appeals is extremely radical. It proposes to deny the right of individuals to seek compensation for claims that include torture and abuse—claims that they are permitted to bring under U.S. law, and which the government committed to allow them to bring by signing and ratifying the Convention Against Torture. Barack Obama delivered a ringing reaffirmation of those principles in Oslo last week. But Douglas Letter and his team are working feverishly to make President Obama into a liar. You’ll scan their briefs in vain for any recognition of the international commitments the United States has made not to torture, not to “disappear” individuals by holding them outside the course of law, and to hold government actors who engage in such criminal conduct to account for their misdeeds. Letter is working to subvert each of these commitments, and he starts by ignoring the fact that the commitments were ever made.
.............

harpers.org...

[edit on 21-12-2009 by ElectricUniverse]

reply to post by joey_hv



Why do people have to claim a person must be conservative when they do these things?...

Do you need to be reminded that Hitler was a Socialist?... Stalin, Lenin, Mao and a myriad of other cruel dictators were Socialists/Communists and committed, and some are still committing attrocious acts, and they thought, and many still think that an individual is not as important as "the whole". That the life of an individual, or a group of individuals, which happened to be millions, was not more important than "the whole", or "the nation" or "the revolution"...

[edit on 21-12-2009 by ElectricUniverse]

reply to post by ElectricUniverse


read the text, thanks....was there a link to the original data?

reply to post by joey_hv


IF the info is correct, it appears that bo had another reality check, once he got his clearance and additional briefings......Maybe he learned enough to finally realize that we have a massive threat....sorry liberals, reality is vastly differnet than your "wonderful world"....

reply to post by ElectricUniverse


Hitler was a conservative.
Taliban is conservative..yeay Uber conservatives.

reply to post by habu71


The only problem is that now this is being done to anyone who is "SUSPECTED" of being a terrorist... Obama himself has stated in the past that he wanted to find ways to make it legal to detain people EVEN IF THEY NEVER COMMITTED ANY CRIME...

This is being done not only to Islamic extremists but anyone who can be labeled by the Obama administration as a "POSSIBLE" or "SUSPECTED" terrorist, and to the Obama administration, and Obama himself such individual is not a person in the eyes of the Obama administration.

You keep asking for one link, you have to read the information in the links given which take you to other links.

You won't find this in just "one link", there is a copilation of events, bills made into law by the Obama administration, and even interviews done on Obama, and his administration who have stated that they will looking for ways to make "indefinite detention of suspected terrorists" legal, and possible.

We have had links even to interviews of Obama himself where he stated he wanted INDIFINITE DETENTION for "POSSIBLE" or "SUSPECTED" terrorists, EVEN IF THEY NEVE COMMITTED A CRIME IN THEIR LIFE....

The following is even from a Liberal journalist, and we have had threads about this a few months back.

www.youtube.com...

The Obama administration would only have to CLAIM such a person, or people are "possible terrorists" and they will no longer have any rights.

The label is too broad, and can be interpreted in many ways, and to many people....

Right now we have many Americans not liking the Obama administration, and what they have been doing and people are talking even about for example:

I may run for president of Texas

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: March 09, 2009
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

On Glenn Beck's radio show last week, I quipped in response to our wayward federal government, "I may run for president of Texas."

That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.

From the East Coast to the "Left Coast," America seems to be moving further and further from its founders' vision and government.

George Washington advised, "The great rule of conduct in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations [and] having with them as little political connection as possible." Yet the Obama administration just pledged $900 million in U.S. taxpayer-funded aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza and Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority.

www.wnd.com...

What the Obama administration has been doing is broadening the meaning of who can be a "terrorist" and by their labels any American can be a terrorist.

Do I need to remind you of the report by Janet Napolitano, and Homeland Security about "rightwing extremism", and who they claim could be a terrorist?...

The Report specifically mentions the following political beliefs that law enforcement should use to determine whether someone is a "rightwing extremist"?:

* Opposes restrictions on firearms
* Opposes lax immigration
* Opposes the policies of President Obama regarding immigration, citizenship and the expansion of social programs
* Opposes continuation of free trade agreements
* Opposes same-sex marriage
* Has paranoia of foreign regimes
* Fear of Communist regimes
* Opposes one world government
* Bemoans the decline of U.S. stature in the world.
* Upset with loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to China and India
* . . . and the list goes on

The Law Center is asking the court to declare that the DHS policy violates the First and Fifth Amendments, to permanently enjoin the Policy and its application to the plaintiffs' speech and other activities, and to award the plaintiffs their reasonable attorney's fees and costs for having to bring the lawsuit.

www.thomasmore.org...

[edit on 21-12-2009 by ElectricUniverse]

Originally posted by joey_hv
Hitler was a conservative.
Taliban is conservative..yeay Uber conservatives.

BS, his political belief was National SOCIALISM.....

BTW, the Taliban are not "conservatives" they have always been "Islamic extremists", and the same can be said of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.

As always someone who is ignorant of history, and event the reality of the present world has to claim people like Hitler "were conservative"....

You sir should actually learn to read real books about the history of people such as Hitler, and such groups as the Taliban....before you make any more inane, and rhetorical claims which are false.

"We are socialists, we are enemies of todays capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." --Adolf Hitler

(Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)
...............
Hitler was intent on having a community of mutual interest that desired mutual success instead of one that was divided over the control of money or differing values.

THE COMMON INTEREST BEFORE SELF-INTEREST -
THAT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE PROGRAM. BREAKING OF THE THRALDOM OF INTEREST - THAT IS THE KERNEL OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM.

constitutionalistnc.tripod.com...

Adolf Hitler's Speech at the
1927 Nuremberg Rally

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Our fellow party member Rosenberg began his speech by saying that it is critical for a nation that its territory correspond to its population. As he put it so well: "The nation needs space." How well we know that the fulfillment of this sentence has guided and determined the fate of our nation for many centuries. We know further that, save for a relatively short period of German history, we have not succeeded in the task. The question confronts us today as insistently as ever: No government, of whatever kind, can long escape dealing with it. Feeding a nation of 62 million means not only maintaining our agricultural productivity, but enlarging it to meet the needs of a growing population. This is true in many areas. We National Socialists maintain that industrial production is not the most important in terms of the future of the European peoples. In coming decades it will be increasingly difficult to increase production. It will reach a dead end as the governments that presently do not pay great heed to industrial production over time give themselves to industrialization.
.

www.calvin.edu...



[edit on 21-12-2009 by ElectricUniverse]

reply to post by ElectricUniverse

Een your signature is long winded.

Originally posted by joey_hv

Een your signature is long winded.

So you first start making false claims about "conservatives are all evil, and they cause all evilness", to then claiming Hitler was a conservative, and the Taliban, and now trying to dismiss somehow my signature?....

Perhaps you have no idea of who Samuel Adams was, and if you are living in the U.S., perhaps you should be doing even more research and pick up a history book or two before making more asinine claims...

Back to the topic.... The Obama administration does even more damage to freedom....

[edit on 21-12-2009 by ElectricUniverse]

Originally posted by joey_hv
I will have to say Obama got this one right.
Amazing. He is a conservative when it comes to terrorizers. How cool is that!?

Murder is pretty bad too. Should the state torture everyone who is suspected of murder, and deny them any legal standing to challenge what was done/is being done to them?

I guess drowning women to see if they were witches and burning those that survived would be a great idea too.

I once unearthed some information relevant to my country's security, and let ASIO know about it. I was thanked, told the info had been vital, but I was also followed, photographed and had my phone tapped and some-one watching my house. However if I'd been in America I couldn't have told anyone because I'd most likely have been deprived of all constitutional rights, locked up, and tortured in case I knew more than I was telling.

This "them and us" polarization does nothing to help a country's security. Instead it creates hatred, anger, violence, distrust and secrecy. - But this is no silly failure. This is achieving a fragmentation the power-mongers are happily manipulating to increase their power and remove ours.

One day the salad tossing sycophants who support this will find themselves treated as enemy combatants.

Orewlls 1984 "unperson" has come to the USSA... more awesome change, brother. It will soon be crimethink to suggest unpersons deserve rights... fewer martyrs that way.

Yet another abject disgrace that will go ignored or excused by most.

Guess which evil crappy country I experienced MORE true personal freedom? Martguerita Island Venezuela. Drink beer & walk a dog on the beach, personal amounts of drugs ok, no police checkpoints, girls walk around with their dirty flesh exposed and nobody cares, prostitution legal & regulated... perfect weather year round where where adults can be adults. Oh yea, gas was about 3 cents a liter.

bushbamas USA: land of the unperson, home of the torturers.. where all unpersons are created equally worthless and the innocent until proven guilty virtue has been replaced by "guilty if King obama says so"... gee thanks GOP & DNC, you guys are the best DC mafia ever!

Maybe the norway spiral was the vortex created by the founding fathers spinning in their graves?

Only people trying to break the law will use the words "enemy combatants' instead of Prisoner of War. If you use those words then you are either ignorant or part of the evil plan to circumvent the rule of law.