This is wrong, wrong, wrong. I don’t care what horrible crime the guy is SUSPECTED of committing. The key word is SUSPECTED and in this country we used to have something called DUE PROCESS. Anybody remember that?
And since when does the President have the sole authority to hand pick individuals out of our criminal justice system? At the very least it should be a very large panel of individuals that might serve to provide some kind of checks and balances to the process. What an embarrassment to our country. (Add it to the list of Shrub embarassments, I guess.)
We’ve got a president that thinks he’s dictator. That makes our country a dictatorship. (Like the dictatorships we’re fighting against on the other side of the world.) Nice work Shrub.
Bush Declares Student an Enemy Combatant
By for the NY Times.
President Bush made a surprise decision today to remove a Qatari student from the criminal justice system and declare him an enemy combatant after prosecutors said new evidence linked him to another round of terrorist plots by Al Qaeda after Sept. 11.
The student, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, 37, had been held in civilian custody since late 2001, first as a material witness in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks and later on charges of lying to the F.B.I. and credit card fraud.
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Because he was declared an enemy combatant, Mr. Marri was moved from a prison in Illinois to a military brig in South Carolina, according to Lawrence S. Lustberg, who represented him in the criminal case. As an enemy combatant, Mr. Marri can be held indefinitely, and he has no access to a lawyer unless the military decides to bring charges, officials said…
Neither of the other two men publicly identified as enemy combatants, Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in fighting in Afghanistan, and Jose Padilla, suspected in a scheme to set off a “dirty bomb,” had faced criminal charges beforehand. Both are Americans…
“To just pluck someone from the criminal justice system and remove them from any of the protections of the legal system to me suggests a very troubling disregard for the rule of law,” said Jamie Fellner, the United States director for Human Rights Watch.
Mr. Lustberg, a private lawyer in Newark, said he planned to seek a reversal of the decision by filing a writ of habeas corpus in the federal court system in a few days.
Mr. Marri had been scheduled to go to trial next month in federal court in Illinois on the criminal charges pending against him, and Mr. Lustberg said, “We thought he had a powerful defense.”
Mr. Marri had apparently planned to argue that the charge he had lied to F.B.I. agents in interviews in late 2001 about his travels in the United States was based on a misunderstanding, and Mr. Lustberg said that notes from the bureau agents could bear that out…
Frank W. Dunham Jr., a standby lawyer for Mr. Moussaoui
>http://www.antiwar.com/justin/justincol.html
>
http://toughenough.org/huminski.html
“Dean’s Constitutional Hang-up”
http://www.counterpunch.org/frank08122003.html
“Is Dean a Criminal Too?”
http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=31720&group=webcast
In a 1997 Vt News Bureau interview, Dean admitted his desire to appoint
judges willing to subvert the bill of rights. Now the fallout from Dean’s
appointments are before the US 2nd Circuit at Foley Square, NYC in two
outrageous cases. Docket #s 03-7036, 02-6150, 02-6199, 02-6201 One case is
being prosecuted by Washington, DC first amendment attorney Robert
Corn-Revere against two of Dean’s judges for their banishment of a Vermont
“citizen-reporter” for life from all state courthouses because he criticized
one of Dean’s judicial appointees. The other case features Dean’s judges
violating Double Jeopardy, First Amendment, State law and the State
constitution. See Docket No. 99-445 (Vt. Dec. 13, 2000), aff’g, Docket No.
167-1-99 WmCr (Windham D. Ct. Aug. 30, 1999) Both cases have been briefed
before the Manhattan Court awaiting oral argument. Also filing a brief in
federal court against Dean’s appointees is the Thomas Jefferson Center For
The Protection of Freedom of Expression.
Below are links regarding Dean’s voicing his problem with the Bill of
Rights. He constantly complains about “legal technicalities” (i.e. the Bill
of Rights) as he did in the June 22 meet the press interview.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/government.shtml
http://www.txtriangle.com/archive/1049/coverstory.htm
A link to a story regarding the courthouse banishment case.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org//news.aspx?id=5354
or…
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=13300
A commentary on Dean’s subversion of the public defender system.
http://www.talkleft.com/archives/003681.html#003681
Dean’s statement on “re-evaluation” of our “civil liberties”.
http://rutlandherald.nybor.com/News/Story/33681.html
Criminal sentences doubled during Dean’s tenure as a result of his
appointments. I wonder how many of those serving these inflated sentences
were also subjugated to constitutional deprivations at the hands of Dean’s
Judicial appointees leading to their convictions? How many of those serving
inflated sentences were prejudiced by Deans’ subversion of the public
defender system mandated by the 6th amendment?
In the Meet the Press interview with Dean while discussing the death
penalty he stated,
“So I just-life without parole, which we have which I actually got passed
when I was lieutenant governor- the problem with life without parole is that
people get out for reasons that have nothing to do with justice. We had a
case where a guy who was a rapist, a serial sex offender, was convicted,
then was let out on what I would think and believe was a technicality, a new
trial was ordered and the victim wouldn’t come back and go through the
second trial. ”
http://www.msnbc.com/news/912159.asp?cp1=1
Now, according to Dean, the Bill of Rights (ie. legal technicalities) has
“nothing to do with justice”. In the above quote, is he saying that if
someone was unconstitutionally convicted it is better that the government
kill them before they can point out the constitutional problems with their
conviction?
A further commentary on Dean’s death penalty stand.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A1907-2003Jul2¬Found=true
and, noting the “anti-due-process” Dean message,
http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/930194.asp?0si=-&cp1=1#BODY
See 1994 Yale Law School commencement discussing the danger of our leaders dismissing the “provisions of the Bill of Rights as mere technicalities.”.
http://www.schr.org/reports/docs/Yale%2094.pdf
Scott Huminski
Cary, NC