Outrage as President signs law to detain home-grown terror suspects indefinitely

http://olivialarosa.com/2011/12/outrage-as-president-signs-law-to-detain-home-grown-terror-suspects-indefinitely/

Alfermedi Cert Petition 11-10-2011

from Lawfareblog.com http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/11/almerfedi-cert-petition/

By Ritika Singh

(item 2 shifts the burden of proof from the government to the detainee. –ed.)

Contains links to the oral argument summary, April 11, government’s reply brief, the petitioner’s brief, and the government’s opening brief. 

The abstract follows below.

Almerfedi Cert Petition

by Ritika Singh

Hussain Salem Mohammed Almerfedi, a Guantanamo habeas petitioner, has filed a cert petition that presents the following questions:

1. Whether the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub. L. No. 107-40, § 2(a), 115 Stat. 224 (2001) (“AUMF’), orBoumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008), permits detention on the basis of three facts that are themselves not incriminating.

2. Whether the AUMF or Boumediene authorizes a standard of proof under which, if the government puts forward somecredible evidence justifying the detainee’s detention, the detainee, to prevail, must rebut government’s evidence.

3. Whether the Court of Appeals’ manifest unwillingness to allow Guantanamo detainees to prevail in their habeas corpus cases calls for the exercise of this Court’s supervisory power.

For our readers who’d like to get a complete overview of the case, here are Ben’s thoughts on the D.C. Circuit opinion from June 10, the oral argument summary from April 11, the government’s reply brief, the petitioner’s brief, and the government’s opening brief.

D. Lagutaris, ed.

Andy Worthington, author and filmmaker, on Guantanamo and Charly Gittings

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/

RIP Charly Gittings: We’ve Just Lost One of the Good Guys

I suggest going to Andy's site and reading the entire article.

’m saddened to report that on the night of July 14, Charly Gittings, the most tenacious opponent of the Bush administration and its crimes, passed away at the age of 57. I had never met Charly, but we had been in email contact since November 2008, and I had been aware of his work before that time. No one who has ever researched Guantánamo can have failed, at some point, to have come across Charly’s extraordinary “Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions” (PEGC), a vast archive of documents relating to the Bush administration crimes, consisting of legal opinions, memoranda, press statements, from the courts, the White House, the DoD, the DoJ, the State Department — all the evidence required to convict senior officials of war crimes.

At the foot of this post, I reproduce Charly’s “Political Biography,” in which he explained how his project began on November 13, 2001, when President Bush issued his original “Military Order – Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism,” a vile document that, years later, I too realized was central to the administration’s plot to shred every law that protected us from ourselves, and that protected our enemies — or random strangers — from torture, arbitrary detention and murder. Charly, however, was there at the beginning, urging his fellow Americans to uphold the laws they claimed to admire.

When I first struck up contact with Charly, he sent me a wonderful email that, on re-reading, captures his dedication to the law, and also sheds light on how, like many sensitive people in a world that has become increasingly coarse, violent and uncaring, he found it hard to dwell too much on the stories of the men — and boys — subjected to the Bush administration’s lawless and brutal experiment in unfettered executive power, and focused instead on law and policy, and his unwavering belief that America was led by war criminals.

Glad to meet you! I’ve heard of you and your book … I was very glad that you wrote your book, because I’d been studiously avoiding the idea of trying to write it myself for five years or so but definitely thought it would be good for someone to do it. My main focus has always been the legal and policy issues, and much as I sympathize with the detainees on a human level, the details of individual cases tend to overwhelm me a bit. I remember how I felt in early 2002 when I saw the pictures of the first detainees being transported to Gitmo — that told me everything I needed to know about Gitmo right then and there. I do pay attention, but have to keep a balance lest I drown in details … you probably get what I mean better than most would.

Eking Out Reality And Gonzales Denies Us Habeas Corpus

First a quote from a friend that rings so true in the "dis-information age":

Our universe is governed by fictions of all kinds: mass consumption, publicity, politics considered and managed like a branch of publicity, instantaneous translation of science and techniques into a popular imagery, confusion and telescopage of identities in the realm of consumer goods, right of pre-emption exercised by the television screen over every personal reaction to reality. We live at the interior of an enormous novel. It becomes less and less necessary for the writer to give fictional content to his works. The fiction is already there. The work of the novelist is to invent reality.
-J.G. Ballard, from the introduction of the French edition of Crash




From Amnesty International Email;


"The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or every citizen is granted or assured the right to habeas [corpus]. It doesn't say that."

If you guessed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, you're correct. In fact, the Constitution states that habeas corpus rights cannot be suspended except in times of rebellion or invasion. For centuries, this has meant that a person could challenge his or her detention in an independent court of law - unless those exceptional circumstances existed.

Gonzales's declaration should strike fear in all of us. His dangerous comments before the Senate Judiciary Committee betrayed the Constitutional rights he was sworn to protect as our nation's top law enforcement official...and defied common sense, too. Watch the video!

Book Review: Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 911

Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 911

Edited by Ann Fagan Ginger
NY, Prometheus Books, 2005
524 pages, $24

Order at the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute website, www.mcli.org, or ask your bookseller to carry the book.

Want to help your city report human rights violations to the UN? This books shows you how.

Challenging US Human Rights Violations Since 911 is a shocking chronicle of rights violations that have been perpetrated by the United States, in your name, since 911. Ann Fagan Ginger catalogs these violations, but also demonstrates for us that resistance is not futile, and tells us how to resist. Challenging will challenge the reader to question deeply the real aims of the Bush administration.

Informed people know that immigrants have been detained without warrant for months and years on end, and have been beaten, tortured, and died at the hands of the representatives of the United States government for no other reason than their country of origin. They also know that these unspeakable acts violate the U. S. Constitution and the international treaties that we have ratified. Ratified treaties do not represent some vague promise to comply with the terms of the treaty. Rather, they are the highest law of the land, in equal standing with the Constitution. How do we know that? The Constitution says so, in Article 4. In theory, most Americans agree with the aims of these treaties. After all, this is what liberty really means: the ability to walk the streets without having to carry identification papers or suffer illegitimate abuse simply because of how they look, and the right to express their views.

The terrible harms visited upon immigrants may fail to move certain readers. Shame on them. That logic is akin to saying that when a bank is robbed, it was asking for it. Just as disturbing and more numerous are the many violations visited upon American citizens. A man born an American citizen was demoted from his position in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2002 because he was of Lebanese extraction. When he filed a formal complaint, he was accused of having ties to terrorists. He filed suit and prevailed in court. Such denials of basic human rights and dignity are also very expensive for US taxpayers. He won a judgment of $305,000.00.

Ginger states that her explicit goal in writing this book is to mobilize shame. The mobilization of shame is a recurring phenomenon in our history, and leads to temporary improvements in conditions for the victim du jour and related groups. One need only look to recent history for examples of this mobilization. The Geneva Convention was developed in the aftermath of World War II, when the inhumane and deadly treatment of prisoners of war became public. World governments supposedly renounced genocide in the wake of the Holocaust. The House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), headed by the infamous Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, Jr., was dismantled and its aims discredited when decent Americans discovered that the targets of the committee were not a threat to anyone. Lives were destroyed in the quest to induce fear and control political expression by unconstitutional means.

It is time to mobilize shame again. This alarming yet ultimately hopeful book, read widely, should do the job. The reader will find clear and direct prose, unburdened by jargon, full of talking points.

The nearly 300 pages of reports of violations are just one aspect of this multifaceted work. Challenging provides the text of the laws violated, copious notes, and exhaustive documentation that should wear down the wall of ignorance built by the most dedicated know-nothing.

Challenging also contains a grassroots human rights advocate toolkit. Ginger’s forty-year-long dedication to framing issues in terms of the ratified treaties as well as US Constitutional Law provides a solid legal background for communities to engage their local governments in a dialog with the highest levels of US and UN governmental bodies. The United States has an obligation under the treaties it has ratified. It must submit reports on the state of human rights as stated in the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Bush administration has issued exactly zero requests to states for these reports. However, that does not mean that we cannot report on our own initiative.

The City of Berkeley recently took matters into its own hands, at the behest of the community members, and now submits an annual report of the condition of human rights in the city to the United States and the UN. You can do it too. Challenging shows you how.