Impeach Bush
Bush should be impeached if he implements the secret military court. That's dictatorship. The way to deal with enemy soldiers is to put them in prison camps, not hold secret trials. Prisoners of war have rights. If you take them out and shoot them after a secret trial, you are a war criminal. Charles Brown
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The question is how to set this up. My current favorite track is to have a collection of lawyers representing arab-americans held incommunicado together with either the NLG or ACLU join some kind of legal action. This is why I keep nagging on about habeas corpus.
The Merryman decision against Lincoln claimed that only Congress had the right to suspend HC. If that is still considered valid, then Bush has violated the separation of powers, since Congress did not grant him that right. If Bush also persists in maintaining the right to use military tribunals without judicial review or appeal, then he has in effect taken over powers given separately to the judiciary and congressional branches of government.
These are already accomplished facts, that is, matters of standing orders and regulation so they can be attacked through legal means immediately. Also, these issues are of a much higher order of magnitude than Clinton's perjury in a civil law suit. These are rather about the basic foundations of government, separation of powers, and the fundamental right of people to be a liberty unless charged with or convicted of a crime.
I am sure there will be some kind of formal challenge mounted against some of these executive orders. But judging from my conversations at work today, which included a former clerk to a justice on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (a wheelchair rugby player), very few people understand the nature of these issues and just how threatening they are. They continue to believe that Ahmed Ben Ya-Ya or whoever, will face these problems, and not them. First they came for the ..., but I was not ... and so forth.
I have no hope at all that a legal challenge would actually succeed, since the nazis on the supreme court would be the final arbiters. So the point would be to force the whole rightwing rat's nest into a constitutional confrontation. After all, it's barely a year since the very same assholes manipulated the national election to get their twisted spawn into the White House, and now here he is suspending habeas corpus, nullifying civil rights, violating the separation of powers, and launching wars against unspecified enemies of empire.
This entire spectrum of US domestic and foreign reactions is completely out of range relative to the attacks in NYC and DC. And of course as the Afghanistan front seems to be devolving into a series of murky atrocities (Mazar e Sharif) and stagnated political intrigues (Berlin), so Iraq and Somalia are next?
Chuck Grimes