- Reader Walter passed along this distressing sighting
from Chris Floyd's blog.
-
- American civil liberties were gutted last week, and the
media failed to report it.
-
- Anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected
enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no
longer a "person."
-
- The development? If the president or one of his subordinates
declares someone to be an "enemy combatant" (the 21st century
version of "enemy of the state") he is denied any protection
of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away,
incarcerated, tortured, "disappeared," you name it. Floyd's
commentary:
- (http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1887-
- dred-scott-redux-obama-and-the-supremes-stand-up-for-slavery.html)
-
- After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration,
the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request 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." They will
simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights,
no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever - save whatever modicum of
process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time,
with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.
-
- It is hard to overstate the significance of this horrid
decision. The fact that the Supreme Court authorized this land grab says
we no longer have an independent judiciary, that the Supreme Court itself
is gutting the protections supposedly provided by the legal system. Per
Floyd:
-
- In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution
did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely
220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing
effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that
is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.
-
- Now Floyd saw this mainly as an issue of the treatment
of enemy combatants and Obama hypocrisy about torture, which is bad enough:
-
- 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.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.
-
- Yves here. The implications are FAR worse. Anyone can
be stripped, with NO RECOURSE, of all their legal rights on a Presidential
say so. Readers in the US no longer have any security under the law.
-
- Roman citizens enjoyed a right to a trial, a right of
appeal, and could not be tortured, whipped, or executed except if found
guilty of treason, and anyone charged with treason could demand a trial
in Rome. We have regressed more than 2000 years with this appalling ruling.
-
- http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/12/supreme-court-guts-due-process-protection.html
-
-
- Comment
- Mary Sparrowdancer
12-21-9
This is not "Naked Capitalism," It is NAKED COMMUNISM. It is
the Communists who have systematically gutted all rights and abolished
the Constitution in the US. Wake up, people. http://www.rense.com/general88/uscom.htm
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