The begining of the New World Order or a Police State?(long read)

Taken from here
By Charles Lane

The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say.

The elements of this new system are already familiar from President Bush\'s orders and his aides\' policy statements and legal briefs: indefinite military detention for those designated "enemy combatants," liberal use of "material witness" warrants, counterintelligence-style wiretaps and searches led by law enforcement officials and, for noncitizens, trial by military commissions or deportation after strictly closed hearings.

Only now, however, is it becoming clear how these elements could ultimately interact.

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen\'s home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

Administration officials, noting that they have chosen to prosecute suspected Taliban member John Walker Lindh, "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui in ordinary federal courts, say the parallel system is meant to be used selectively, as a complement to conventional processes, not as a substitute. But, they say, the parallel system is necessary because terrorism is a form of war as well as a form of crime, and it must not only be punished after incidents occur, but also prevented and disrupted through the gathering of timely intelligence.

"I wouldn\'t call it an alternative system," said an administration official who has helped devise the legal response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "But it is different than the criminal procedure system we all know and love. It\'s a separate track for people we catch in the war."

At least one American has been shifted from the ordinary legal system into the parallel one: alleged al Qaeda "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla, who is being held at a Navy brig, without the right to communicate with a lawyer or anyone else. U.S. officials have told the courts that they can detain and interrogate him until the executive branch declares an end to the war against terrorism.

The final outlines of this parallel system will be known only after the courts, including probably the Supreme Court, have settled a variety of issues being litigated. But the prospect of such a system has triggered a fierce debate.

Civil libertarians accuse the Bush administration of an executive-branch power grab that will erode the rights and freedoms that terrorists are trying to destroy -- and that were enhanced only recently in response to abuses during the civil rights era, Vietnam and Watergate.

"They are trying to embed in law a vast expansion of executive authority with no judicial oversight in the name of national security," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit group that has challenged the administration approach in court. "This is more tied to statutory legal authority than J. Edgar Hoover\'s political spying, but that may make it more dangerous. You could have the law serving as a vehicle for all kinds of abuses."

Administration officials say that they are acting under ample legal authority derived from statutes, court decisions and wartime powers that the president possesses as commander in chief under the Constitution.

"When you have a long period of time when you\'re not engaged in a war, people tend to forget, or put in backs of their minds, the necessity for certain types of government action used when we are in danger, when we are facing eyeball to eyeball a serious threat," Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, who leads the administration\'s anti-terrorism legal team in the federal courts, said in an interview.

Broadly speaking, the debate between the administration and its critics is not so much about the methods the government seeks to employ as it is about who should act as a check against potential abuses.

Executive Decisions

Civil libertarians insist that the courts should searchingly review Bush\'s actions,

so that he is always held accountable to an independent branch of government. Administration officials, however, imply that the main check on the president\'s performance in wartime is political -- that if the public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or ineffective, it will vote him out of office.

"At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone will have to decide whether that [decision to designate someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision," Olson said. "Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?"

Probably the most hotly disputed element of the administration\'s approach is its contention that the president alone can designate individuals, including U.S. citizens, as enemy combatants, who can be detained with no access to lawyers or family members unless and until the president determines, in effect, that hostilities between the United States and that individual have ended.

Padilla was held as a material witness for a month after his May 8 arrest in Chicago before he was designated an enemy combatant. He is one of two U.S. citizens being held as enemy combatants at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. The other is Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi Taliban fighter who was captured by American troops in Afghanistan and sent to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until it was discovered that he was born in Louisiana.

Attorneys are challenging their detentions in federal court. While civil libertarians concede that the executive branch has well-established authority to name and confine members of enemy forces during wartime, they maintain that it is unconstitutional to subject U.S. citizens to indefinite confinement on little more than the president\'s declaration, especially given the inherently open-ended nature of an unconventional war against terrorism.

"The notion that the executive branch can decide by itself that an American citizen can be put in a military camp, incommunicado, is frightening," said Morton H. Halperin, director of the Washington office of the Open Society Institute. "They\'re entitled to hold him on the grounds that he is in fact at war with the U.S., but there has to be an opportunity for him to contest those facts."

However, the Bush administration, citing two World War II-era cases -- the Supreme Court\'s ruling upholding a military commission trial for a captured American-citizen Nazi saboteur, and a later federal appeals court decision upholding the imprisonment of an Italian American caught as a member of Italian forces in Europe -- says there is ample precedent for what it is doing.

Courts traditionally understand that they must defer to the executive\'s greater expertise and capability when it comes to looking at such facts and making such judgments in time of war, Bush officials said. At most, courts have only the power to review legal claims brought on behalf of detainees, such as whether there is indeed a state of conflict between the United States and the detainee.

In a recent legal brief, Olson argued that the detention of people such as Hamdi or Padilla as enemy combatants is "critical to gathering intelligence in connection with the overall war effort."

Nor is there any requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant, Olson argues.

"There won\'t be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this," Olson said in the interview. "There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."

The federal courts have yet to deliver a definitive judgment on the question. A federal district judge in Virginia, Robert G. Doumar, was sharply critical of the administration, insisting that Hamdi be permitted to consult an attorney. But he was partially overruled by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond.

The 4th Circuit, however, said the administration\'s assertion that courts should have absolutely no role in examining the facts leading to an enemy combatant designation was "sweeping." A decision from that court is pending as to how much of a role a court could claim, if any. The matter could well have to be settled in the Supreme Court.

Secret Surveillance

The administration scored a victory recently when the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruled 3 to 0 that the USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, gives the Justice Department authority to break down what had come to be known as "the wall" separating criminal investigations from investigations of foreign agents.

The ruling endorsed the administration\'s view that law enforcement goals should be allowed to drive Justice Department requests for special eavesdropping and search warrants that had been thought to be reserved for counterintelligence operations. But the court went further, agreeing with the administration that "the wall" itself had no real basis in pre-Patriot Act law. Instead, the court ruled, "the wall" was a product of internal Justice Department guidelines that were, in turn, based partly on erroneous interpretations of the law by some courts.

There is no clear line between intelligence and crime in any case, the court said, because any investigation of a spy ring could ultimately lead to charging U.S. citizens with crimes such as espionage.

The decision overruled an earlier one by the lower-level Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in which seven judges sharply criticized past Justice Department misstatements in applications for permission to do secret surveillance.

Administration officials say that the ruling permits what is only sensible -- greater sharing of information between federal prosecutors and federal counterintelligence officials.

Thanks to enforcement of "the wall" by FBI lawyers, they note, pre-Sept. 11 permission to search Moussaoui\'s computer was not sought, a crucial missed opportunity to prevent the attacks.

In practical terms, the ruling means that the attorney general would still have to convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that he has probable cause to believe that a given subject of a wiretap or search is an agent of a foreign terrorist group, a standard that is not dissimilar to the one required for warrants in ordinary criminal cases.

Yet civil libertarians say that targets of such investigations who end up being ordered out of the country or prosecuted would lose a crucial right that they would have in the ordinary criminal justice system -- the right to examine the government\'s evidence justifying the initial warrant.

"So the government starts off using secret surveillance information not to gather information upon which to make policy, but to imprison or deport an individual, and then it never gives the individual a fair chance to see if the surveillance was lawful," Martin said.

I don\'t find a thing wrong with this considering the times we live in.  There are too many loopholes in the judicial and immigration process for terrorist to enter and live in this country.  People will  claim their civil liberties and rights are being destroyed, but who will really be effected by this?  

This country already has too many freedoms and something like this is acceptable.  If one is trying to launch a terrorist act in this country why should their citizenship play a factor?  

The paranoid among us will claim it gives the government free reign to spy on us... Once again I ask... who among us will this effect?

In reality this won\'t affect our lives unless someone is plotting something criminal anyway.

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I\'ve seen this comin\' for awhile. Everything screams that we are becoming a more and more policed state and this is just the tip of the iceberg. That is not to say that I agree with it - I think it would be one of the worst things for this country and if it is passed, I would seriously consider moving .

The Bush Administration and Bush himself are maybe the worst thing for this country. I have always said this and this only conforms my thought even more. Power hungry? Very.

This country has gone to a hell in a hand basket and will only get worse. Goodbye America and hello Hell. The nation of policed state and dead idea\'s.

Gohan, check this out. I didnt read what you posted completely, but looks like this stuff goes hand in hand.

http://www.psx2central.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26334

Originally posted by GigaShadow
I don\'t find a thing wrong with this considering the times we live in.  There are too many loopholes in the judicial and immigration process for terrorist to enter and live in this country.  People will  claim their civil liberties and rights are being destroyed, but who will really be effected by this?  

This country already has too many freedoms and something like this is acceptable.  If one is trying to launch a terrorist act in this country why should their citizenship play a factor?  

The paranoid among us will claim it gives the government free reign to spy on us... Once again I ask... who among us will this effect?

In reality this won\'t affect our lives unless someone is plotting something criminal anyway.

You have got to be ****ing kidding me.  The fact that people can be detained indefinitely with no proof of them doing anything wrong, with no due process, with the terms of their detainment not being spelled out, and with the courts having no authority over it doesn\'t seem wrong or unamerican to you?  Who of us will this effect?  The fact is, we don\'t know.  But what if you were framed, or wrongfully accused, and you had no chance to even show that you were innocent?  God, I swear, I honestly think Bush is one of the worst presidents we have ever had.  This bullshit is horrible.  He has taken 9/11, and used it to push bullshit through again and again.  This just crosses a line.

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Thank God someone agree\'s with me. The man has used and abused 9/11 for his own personal agendas and power.

Originally posted by shockwaves


You have got to be ****ing kidding me.  The fact that people can be detained indefinitely with no proof of them doing anything wrong, with no due process, with the terms of their detainment not being spelled out, and with the courts having no authority over it doesn\'t seem wrong or unamerican to you?  Who of us will this effect?  The fact is, we don\'t know.  But what if you were framed, or wrongfully accused, and you had no chance to even show that you were innocent?  God, I swear, I honestly think Bush is one of the worst presidents we have ever had.  This bullshit is horrible.  He has taken 9/11, and used it to push bullshit through again and again.  This just crosses a line.

I just noticed you turned 18 this year.  Go figure you would be so up in arms about this.  Did you vote in the last election?  How would you know what other presidents have done first hand?  Seven years ago people bitched how bad Clinton was.  You were what... 11???  How closely did you pay attention to anything regarding politics in this country back then?  I swear most of those who bitch don\'t even vote, let alone write a letter to their representative to do anything about it.  

To those who say age doesn\'t matter regarding political issues I strongly disagree.  If you are under 18, you don\'t pay property taxes, you don\'t vote, you don\'t have kids... I could go on and on.  I guess its the trendy thing to do when you are young.  Hate the government and especially a Republican president.  The political apathy in this country is deep, especially among the younger voting generation.  Does anyone ever wonder why the 1950\'s were considered to America\'s greatest?  Because people actually cared about their country and one another.  You don\'t see that anymore.    

Back to the topic... If you aren\'t doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about.  Getting framed   ?  Who is going to frame you shockwaves?  You look at this proposal in such black and white terms.  It isn\'t so cut and dry as you may think.  Yes it does bypass the courts, but it still isn\'t as easy as you think to just grab someone and hold them - especially if they are innocent.  This isn\'t the Gestapo after all.

What "bullshit" has Bush passed through because of 9/11?  List it and how it has effected you.  This law will not effect anyone who isn\'t doing something they shouldn\'t.  Would you rather have the government not monitor suspicious activity?

As Ace or someone said a while back some of you really must look up in the sky for black helicopters. :rolleyes:

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I\'m not paranoid about being framed. I just think it is wrong that the goverment has this much power. The idea of this country was so that one goverment would not control the people to this degree - and yet look what is happening. We are at an all time high of a policed state and losing freedoms day by day.

Now George W. Bush has issued his war on terrorism - that wasn\'t enough and he never did get Bin Laden, so what does he do? He suspects Sadam may have weapons of mass destruction, let\'s start another war.  Nevermind the fact that we should not be starting wars on mere suspsicion. Nevermind the fact that he claims "the smoking gun will be in the form of a mushroom cloud" - yet we are the ones who have used weapons of mass destruction in a time of crisis. He has done nothing for this country except put us into a further hole and make us regress.

I will agree with you that the 50\'s was a good time because people did care about the country and people did want to make a difference. Now\'a\'days, people don\'t see a point to voting. It\'s a  high-rated popularity contest and nothing more.

I don\'t look for black helicopters but I do think this country has went to hell in a handbasket.

I agree this country is going to pot LIC, but for different reasons.  I wish the government didn\'t have to be so big, but with the world the way it is today its a reality.  Before 9/11 no one would have believed we could be attacked like that, but it happened and it has made us all a bit uneasy.  Everyone questions the actions and policies of our governent because there are too many special interest groups whining about this and that.  You didn\'t have that back in the 1950\'s.  America had a self identity then, but with immigration and liberal policies, it has lost a lot of that.  Yes, some good came out of the 60\'s, ie civil rights, etc... but I fear more harm came out as well.  We don\'t have a national language (which makes me sick) and the Constitution keeps being reinterpreted on an almost yearly basis.    

Iraq should have been taken care of back during Desert Storm, but once again the UN mandate limited the scope of that operation.  Now we have to go back and do it again.  Why you say?  I believe better safe than sorry.  Saddam has called for the destruction of Israel an the US, what makes you think if he develops a nuke that he wouldn\'t give it to some Islamic extremists?  As far as us using weapons of mass destruction - it was a different era and the world was at war.  You can\'t compare a terrorist setting off a nuclear weapon in a western city with the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan.  Are they teaching revisionist history in school now a days?  

What has Bush done to "put this country into a deeper hole" as you put it?  Don\'t blame the economy on him.  The economy was in a slide while Clinton was still in office.

Wow Giga, I respect you.  Because anyone who will discount my opinions based almost exclusively on my age must be much more mature and well informed than I am :Rolleyes:

Yes, I voted.  I voted Green.  From the way you have posted, I\'d guess that you have your own opinions on what this says about me, but save it.

By the way, I love the way you tell me I wouldn\'t know anything about stuff that has happened in this country before my time, then go on to rave about how great the 50s were.  Remind me, how old were you at that point?  Oh yeah, you weren\'t born yet.  You wanna play the age card?  Fine, go ahead.  But I\'ll tell you right now, you\'re wrong to do so.  A person of any age can be a lot more mature and well informed than someone twenty years older.

As for what he\'s pushed though, and how it\'s effected me...let\'s see:
1. The most obvious...he is using 9/11 to go after Iraq.  He is creating a war that we do not need to fight.  How does this effect me?  Well unlike you, I\'m of drafting age.  Hell, I\'d say that\'s one way in which my views are more valid than yours, because that\'s a piece of our nation that I could potentially participate in, and you wouldn\'t.

2. I might as well stay on the topic.  These proposed laws, coupled with the homeland security measures, are robbing us of our liberties, that Americans historically have charished.  The framming example wasn\'t a concern, it was an example of an extreme situation to prove a point.  The real problem though...the government doesn\'t even need a reason to detain someone, or investigate someone, under these new laws.  These provide the government with a way to legally deny due process to anyone they see fit.  The point isn\'t whether it will effect me or not.  If a law was passed making rape legal, it probably wouldn\'t effect me either.  I probably won\'t be raped in such a situation.  That doesn\'t make it right though.  Laws like this are being put in place for a reason.  The point is, what does it matter if they affect me?  The point is, they affect someone, and with laws like this, they could only affect someone in a bad way.  Although, thank you for taking this position.  It\'s this me first, "if it doesn\'t affect me, I don\'t care" attitude that makes me hate people of your political beliefs so much.  And how, exactly, would you know how easy it would be for them to grab someone out of the blue, and detain them?  After all, once this passes, it will be perfectly legal.  So who\'s to say this doesn\'t change, or at least start to change the way things are in this country, for the worse?

3. I could go on and on...from tax policies to budget changes.  The fact is, this stuff isn\'t displayed to the public, as it should be.  What the public gets is the war on terror, the "fearless president, doing what he can to protect the innocent US citizens".  This war on terror, and the aftermath of 9/11 has been deliberately used to hide what the government is actually doing from the public.

Oh, and you\'re right, if a nation like Iraq were to nuke us, it would be different from what we did to Japan.  How?  Japan wasn\'t bombing us at the time.

Originally posted by GigaShadow


I just noticed you turned 18 this year.  Go figure you would be so up in arms about this.  Did you vote in the last election?  How would you know what other presidents have done first hand?  Seven years ago people bitched how bad Clinton was.  You were what... 11???  How closely did you pay attention to anything regarding politics in this country back then?  I swear most of those who bitch don\'t even vote, let alone write a letter to their representative to do anything about it.  

To those who say age doesn\'t matter regarding political issues I strongly disagree.  If you are under 18, you don\'t pay property taxes, you don\'t vote, you don\'t have kids... I could go on and on.  I guess its the trendy thing to do when you are young.  Hate the government and especially a Republican president.  The political apathy in this country is deep, especially among the younger voting generation.  Does anyone ever wonder why the 1950\'s were considered to America\'s greatest?  Because people actually cared about their country and one another.  You don\'t see that anymore.    

Alright, I\'d say something about the topic, but being that it\'s a school night, I\'m goona be going to bed after what I have to say about this nonsense that you\'ve stated.

You know what you sound like? An older sibling. It doesn\'t matter if you\'re right, but being that you\'re younger, you don\'t matter. Seriously, if that\'s your entire argument to turn down Tony, then you\'ve got nothing. Talking about the 1950\'s was even better, because even though you weren\'t around back then, you automatically ate it up. Ignorance at it\'s finest.

I mean seriously, is that all you got? Your republican ways have clouded your judgement, and being that the republican party is full of a lot of old people anyway, you have automatically gone with the fact that younger people do in fact not matter. Idiocy.

Now, again, I\'m not going to say anything really ON topic, but I probably will later. Hell, I didn\'t agree with anything you said anyway, so I\'ll just get to it after school.

See Yuz.

Originally posted by ROL Jamas

Ignorance at it\'s finest.  

Ignorance?  That works, but I\'d be more inclined to call it hypocracy.

First of all shockwaves, it is widely known that the 1950\'s and early 1960\'s were a time of great prosperity for this country.  Anyone can learn that in school, so your reference to saying Bush is the "worst" president really doesn\'t hold water since you haven\'t experienced any others - try Jimmy Carter who is widely viewed as the worst president of the past 50 years.  

Once again I ask you what liberty have you lost since 9/11???  You haven\'t lost one.  No this law won\'t affect me in a "bad way" so no I don\'t mind it and actually think it is good that our government is diligent when it comes to threats within our borders.  It is people of your political preferences that I despise - those that claim the government is inherently evil and obviously can\'t do anything positive.  Does another, more devestating attack have to happen for you to realize that certain laws have to modified???  Or will you continue to bury your head in the sand?

Yes I would like to hear your list of tax policies and budget changes.  Frankly I was glad to recieve my tax cut this past year.  Tell us all what the public doesn\'t know shockwaves.  Tell us your source as well!  

Oh yes you are scared of a draft... I haven\'t seen anything regarding reactivating the draft so you don\'t have to worry slacker.  Before you say, but you don\'t have to worry... I put in my 4 years thank you.  You exemplify what is tragically wrong with your generation.  You don\'t know the meaning of patriotic or self sacrifice.  

Lastly, are you so blind or ignorant that you don\'t think Japan\'s attack on Pearl Harbor was wrong?  Do you not know who started World War 2???    No Japan wasn\'t bombing us at the time, they were just shooting at our troops and wouldn\'t surrender.  Maybe if you were an 18 year old marine back in 1945 getting ready to invade Japan itself you would have thanked whomever that those two bombs were dropped.  Think about that one, while you worry about being drafted.

Originally posted by ROL Jamas



I mean seriously, is that all you got? Your republican ways have clouded your judgement, and being that the republican party is full of a lot of old people anyway, you have automatically gone with the fact that younger people do in fact not matter. Idiocy.

Now, again, I\'m not going to say anything really ON topic, but I probably will later. Hell, I didn\'t agree with anything you said anyway, so I\'ll just get to it after school.

See Yuz.

Thats right ROL you don\'t matter.  What have you done to better this country other than bitch about the government on a message board?  Unfortunately, the biggest whiners are the ones who never do anything to improve a situation.  Now go to bed, go to school, learn some things an come back and discuss.  Why am I even responding to you regarding this topic?