habeas corpus rigor mortis

I can always count on a "headline" provided by America Online as I log on to give me a fit, whether through a liberal use of exclamation signs in a story about michael jackson, or through the implied incredulous disapproving tsk-tsk tone of "ah mah gawd! they want LAWYERS!!! what next??!!?? a silver marzipan on a golden platter? (that's a paraphrased Russian colloquialism used to mean that someone's requests are unreasonable and ridiculous)" like here:

WAR DETAINEES SEEK COURT ACCESS

WASHINGTON (Dec. 2) - Detainees in the war on terrorism are fighting for access to American courts, contending they should not be held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without seeing a lawyer and without being charged with a crime.

The Bush administration was arguing in a federal appeals court here Monday that 12 Kuwaitis, two Australians and two British Muslims captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks are ``unlawful combatants.''

Siding with Justice Department lawyers, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled four months ago that the Guantanamo detainees have no right to court hearings, meaning the military can hold them indefinitely without filing charges.

The prisoners are not in the United States and thus do not fall under the jurisdiction of federal courts, the judge said.

Guantanamo has nearly 600 detainees.

The Justice Department and Kollar-Kotelly are relying on a 1950 Supreme Court ruling involving German nationals in World War II convicted before a military commission and held in a prison in Germany.

Like the Germans, the Guantanamo detainees ``are `actual enemies, active in the hostile service of an enemy power''' and they lack standing in U.S. courts, the Justice Department said in recent court papers.

The two cases are completely different, lawyers for the detainees and their families responded.

``It is one thing to acknowledge ... that enemy aliens in the active service of a hostile state cannot seek post-conviction relief in the federal courts,'' they said in a court filing. ``But it is quite another to suggest ... that any alien ... may be deprived of their liberty indefinitely by the United States military, with no legal process, simply by the expedient of bringing them to Guantanamo Bay.''

``Congress has never so much as intimated, let alone made a `plain statement,' that aliens detained outside the 50 states have no right to seek the writ of habeas corpus,'' the filing said. The appeals court should ``recognize Guantanamo Bay for what it is: a fully American enclave with `the basic attributes of full territorial sovereignty.'''

The U.S. military announced late last year that the 45-square-mile base on the southeastern tip of Cuba, the oldest U.S. overseas outpost, was the destination for Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners.

The United States leased the land for the base from Cuba in 1903 for 2,000 gold coins a year, now valued at $4,085. Washington pays that amount every year, but Fidel Castro's government refuses to cash the checks.

The base is surrounded by 17.4 miles of fence line and a corresponding Cuban fence line and minefield.

As for the detainees in the appeals court case:

The 12 Kuwaitis were in Afghanistan doing charity work and weren't there to fight, their families have said.

British Muslims Asif Iqbal, who is in his early 20s, and Shafiq Rasul, who is in his mid-20s, flew to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan just days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

There is little doubt that Australian David Hicks, 26, had joined the Taliban when he was captured by U.S.-backed Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan, Australian Prime Minister John Howard has said. Hicks' family denies that he trained with al-Qaida. Australian newspapers have published photos of Hicks as a freckled 10-year-old schoolboy alongside a picture of him as a bazooka-toting soldier taken during a stint in Kosovo, where he fought with Muslims in the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Australian Mamdouh Habib, 47, was captured by U.S. forces in Pakistan on suspicion of links to al-Qaida. Habib's wife denies any al-Qaida connection. The couple have four children.

Habib's Sydney-based attorney, Stephen Hopper, told Australian television that Habib, who also holds Egyptian citizenship, visited New York in 1991 and met a man who later was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Subsequently, another man convicted in the 1993 bombing called Habib in Australia a couple of times trying to get him to raise money for his defense, Hopper said.

The other Guantanamo prisoners are from more than 40 countries and include about 60 Pakistanis and some 100 Saudi Arabians. A handful of Afghan and Pakistani detainees have been sent home from Guantanamo after being cleared of terrorist suspicions.

12/02/02 01:19 EST

right, war detaininees, in the murkily declared war (de facto, de jure, propaganda, accountability, policy, warmongering, all collapsed into one big ball of stink) with German war prisoners as precedent...well, during WWII, the US also put the Japanese in internment camps. hey, anyone seen the movie “The Siege”???

(no subject)

man, it's just a double-fisted-assault-on-legal-procedure kind of morning. like eminem said, "pass the KY, let's get ready for some intense serious ass-fucking."

U.S. Supreme Court could make Miranda warnings thing of the past

Sunday, December

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- For five years, Oliverio Martinez has been blind and paralyzed as the result of a police shooting. Now he is at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case that could determine whether decades of restraints on police interrogations should be discarded.
The blanket requirement for a Miranda warning to all suspects that they have the right to remain silent could end up in the rubbish bin of legal history if the court concludes police were justified in aggressively questioning the gravely wounded Martinez while he screamed in agony.
"I am dying! ... What are you doing to me?" Martinez is heard screaming on a recording of the persistent interrogation by police Sgt. Ben Chavez in Oxnard, a city of 182,000 about 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
"If you are going to die, tell me what happened," the officer said. He continued the questioning in an ambulance and an emergency room while Martinez pleaded for treatment. At times, he left the room to allow medical personnel to work, but he returned and continued pressing for answers.
No Miranda warning was given.
A ruling that minimizes defendants' rights would be useful to the administration, which supports Oxnard's appeal, in its questioning of terrorism suspects, experts said.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a federal judge that the confession was coerced and cannot be used as evidence against Martinez in his excessive-force civil case against the city. It said Chavez should have known that questioning a man who had been shot five times, was crying out for treatment and had been given no Miranda warning was a violation of his constitutional rights.
Oxnard appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear arguments in the case Wednesday.
The U.S. Justice Department filed a friend-of-the-court brief along with police organizations and the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation contending that unfettered police questioning is allowable so long as the information obtained from a suspect is not used against that person in court.
Opponents of the government position say a ruling diluting the Miranda protections would be another nail in the coffin of individual rights sacrificed in the interest of rooting out terrorists.
"This is a case to be concerned about," said Charles Weisselberg, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor. "To see the (U.S.) solicitor general arguing that there's no right to be free from coercive interrogation is pretty aggressive."
On Nov. 28, 1997, Martinez, a farm worker, was riding his bicycle through a field where police were questioning a man suspected of selling drugs. The police ordered Martinez to stop. When an officer found a sheathed knife in his waistband, they scuffled and the officer's partner, perceiving that Martinez was reaching for the officer's gun, shot him five times, in the eyes, spine and legs.
Chavez eventually got an acknowledgment from Martinez that he did grab for the officer's gun. But Martinez's lawyers said that statement was coerced and is inadmissible in the damage case that Martinez filed.
Martinez was never charged with a crime.
The Oxnard appeal argues that the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination applies only at a criminal trial and the 14th Amendment guarantee of due process of law is violated only if the questioning of a suspect is so excessive that it "shocks the conscience" of the community.
Martinez is represented by R. Samuel Paz, a frequent critic of police practices.
"I think it will turn on whether the court is going to stand up and say what it said before," Paz said, "that the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments protect people, and that we do have rights that extend beyond having a coerced confession admitted into a criminal case."
Martinez, 34, blind and paraplegic, lives in a one-room trailer in a remote rural area, tended by his father.
"It's tragic," said Alan E. Wisotsky, the lawyer for the city of Oxnard, "but you can't look at it from a philanthropic standpoint. He tried to kill police officers or they thought he was trying to kill them .... Does the tape (of the interrogation) sound bad? Yes, the guy is in agony. But the questioning was to get at the truth."
The Miranda warning takes its name from the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in a 1966 case involving the use of a confession in the rape prosecution of Ernesto Miranda.
"A generation of Americans has grown up since 1966 confident that, if brought to the police station for questioning, we have the right to remain silent, that the police will warn us of that right and, above all, that they will respect its exercise," said a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Martinez by the American Civil Liberties Union and California Attorneys for Criminal Justice.
"... If petitioners' theory of the Fifth Amendment is correct, then the public's confidence has been misplaced for all these decades and is about to be shattered," it said.

US Propaganda vs Russian Propaganda--a mini-discourse analysis

I think the phrasing is really interesting in these two articles. "Iraq complains" headline prsents it as exaggerating and petulant...The final paragraph of the CNN article says that other memeber of security council “disagree” with the US point of view, which downplays the situation and makes it sound like a friendly theoretical abstract argument, rather than US being all street vigilante and above the UN law in its foreign policy.
The Russian article gets on its own soapbox, hurrying to stick it in that The Pentagon denies the attack (well, obviously they don’t now, since it’s all carefully worded and spin-doctored on CNN) and the final paragraph is some truly old-school “this is what you should think!” kind of journalism that bloomed under the Soviet regime.

oy vey.


from CNN.com


Iraq complains to U.N. over raid

Monday, December 2, 2002 Posted: 5:52 AM EST (1052 GMT)

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) -- Iraq has complained to the United Nations over a Western air raid on its southern port city of Basra and urged the world body to end U.S. and British patrols over the country.
Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, in a letter to U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan, described Sunday's raid as part of "barbaric terrorist aggression" against Iraq.
Iraqi officials said on Monday the bombing killed four people at oil company offices. The U.S. military insisted its planes had launched "precision-guided" weapons at Iraqi air defences and that they always took pains to avoid hitting civilians.
The United States and Britain enforce two "no-fly" zones over northern and southern Iraq.
"Until you take measures to end this barbaric terrorist aggression and lay the full responsibility for it on the governments of the United States and Britain, the Iraqi people and its army would continue to practice Iraq's legitimate right of self defence," Sabri said in the letter.
Monday's letter was the second from Sabri to Annan in two days on the no-fly zones.
In a letter on Sunday before the Basra attack, Sabri said: "The raids by American and British planes on Iraq cities and villages and the infrastructure of the Republic of Iraq...is state terrorism, wanton aggression and rude interference in Iraq's internal affairs," the letter said.
Sabri also blasted London and Washington for dropping thousands of leaflets demanding Iraqi soldiers stop firing at U.S. and British planes.
Sunday's letter lists eight raids between October 22 and November 17.
Sabri sent a similar letter to Annan and the Security Council last month.
The zones were set up after the 1991 Gulf War to protect a Kurdish enclave in the north and Shi'ite Muslims in the south from attack by President Saddam Hussein's military.
Iraq does not recognise the zones.
U.S. officials say continued firing at patrolling Western jets by Iraqi defences is a violation of a November 8 U.N. resolution aimed at ridding Iraq of any nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Other members of the U.N. Security Council, including Britain, disagree with that view.

from http://english.pravda.ru

16:31 2002-12-01

US Warplanes in Missile Attack on Iraqi Oil Refinery
Residents in Basra, southern Iraq, claim that US warplanes launched two missiles at an oil refinery on Sunday, killing at least eight people and injuring “around 20”. The offices of the oil-for-food programme were destroyed.

Passers-by were showered with splinters of glass as US warplanes inexplicably launched two missiles at a civilian target in Basra, a state-owned oil refinery. The eye-witness reports have not been confirmed by the Pentagon, which denies any knowledge of the incident.

Being true, this attack is a monstrous act of piracy, a criminal and murderous intrusion into the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, a violation of international law and of the rights of Iraq as a State, a heinous provocation at a time when diplomacy is the order of the day in the rest of the international community.