Who Made George W. Bush Our King?

you might want to look at this first
http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/charters_of_freedom/bill_of_rights/bill_of_rights.html

Who Made George W. Bush Our King?
He Can Designate Any of Us an Enemy Combatant
By Nat Hentoff
VillageVoice.com

Friday 25 July 2003

Courts have no higher duty than protection of the individual
freedoms
guaranteed by our Constitution. This is especially true in time of war,
when
our carefully crafted system of checks and balances must accommodate the

vital needs of national security while guarding the liberties the
Constitution promises all citizens. -- Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
judge
Diana Gribbon Motz, dissenting, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, July 9.

Some of the most glorious illuminations of the Bill of Rights in
American history have been contained in Supreme Court dissents by, among

others, Louis Brandeis, William Brennan, Hugo Black, and Thurgood
Marshall.
Equal to those was the stinging dissent by judge Diana Gribbon Motz when
the
Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (8 to 4) gave George W. Bush a fearsome
power that can be found nowhere in the Constitution--the sole authority
to
imprison an American citizen indefinitely without charges or access to a

lawyer.

This case is now on appeal to the Supreme Court, which will
determine
whether this president--or his successors until the end of the war on
terrorism--can subvert the Bill of Rights to the peril of all of us.

Judge Motz began her dissent--which got only a couple of lines in
the
brief coverage of the case in scattered media reporting--by stating
plainly
what the Bush administration has done to scuttle the Bill of Rights:

"For more than a year, a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi,
has
been labeled an enemy combatant and held in solitary confinement in a
Norfolk, Virginia, naval brig. He has not been charged with a crime, let

alone convicted of one. The Executive [the president] will not state
when,
if ever, he will be released. Nor has the Executive allowed Hamdi to
appear
in court, consult with counsel, or communicate in any way with the
outside
world."

I have not seen what I am about to quote from her dissent anywhere
in
the media. You might want to send what follows to your member of
Congress
and senator. Judge Motz said accusingly:

"I fear that [this court] may also have opened the door to the
indefinite detention, without access to a lawyer or the courts, of any
American citizen, even one captured on American soil, who the Executive
designates an 'enemy combatant,' as long as the Executive asserts that
the
area in which the citizen was detained was an 'active combat zone,' and
the
detainee, deprived of access to the courts and counsel, cannot dispute
this
fact." (Emphasis added).

As I have detailed in two previous columns ("A Citizen Shorn of All

Rights," Voice, January 1-7, 2003, and "Liberty's Court of Last Resort,"

Voice, January 29-February 4, 2003), Hamdi was taken into custody by the

Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and then declared an "enemy combatant"
by
order of George W. Bush on the flimsiest of "evidence" that he had been
a
soldier of the Taliban--an accusation that Hamdi has not been able to
rebut
in a court of alleged law.

Judge Motz is not engaging in scare tactics when she says that with
the
president having assumed the powers of an absolute monarch, in this kind
of
case, any American citizen can be hauled off an American street and
stripped
of all his or her rights. On June 5, Attorney General John Ashcroft
unequivocally told the House Judiciary Committee that the streets of
America
are now "a war zone."

Furthermore, The Washington Post--in a July 13, 2002, lead
editorial, a
year before the Motz Fourth Circuit dissent--warned of the increasing
tendency of the courts to defer to the dangerously overreaching
executive
branch:

"FBI Director Robert Mueller has said that a sizable number of
people
in this country are associated with terrorist groups, yet have so far
done
nothing wrong [so] there is therefore no basis to indict them. How many
of
them, one wonders, might the government [by bypassing the courts] hold
as
enemy combatants? And how many of them would later turn out to be
something
else entirely?"

But how much later would these innocent citizens--locked away until
the
war on terrorism is over--be let out?

This is an unprecedentedly serious assault, folks, on the core of
our
system of justice. As Judge Motz said in her passionate dissent, "[This
court's] decision marks the first time in our history that a federal
court
has approved the elimination of protections afforded a citizen by the
Constitution solely on the basis of the Executive's designation of that
citizen as an enemy combatant, without testing the accuracy of the
designation. Neither the Constitution nor controlling precedent
sanctions
this holding." (Emphasis added).

As for the government's "evidence" that Hamdi is an enemy
combatant,
Judge Motz emphasizes that all the Defense Department offered is a
two-page,
nine-paragraph statement by Michael Mobbs, a special adviser for policy
in
the Defense Department. The buck stops with Donald Rumsfeld.

As Judge Motz points out, the majority of the Fourth Circuit, in
its
"breathtaking holding" relying on the Mobbs declaration, ruled that it
is
"undisputed" that Hamdi was captured in a zone of active combat. This,
she
charges, is "pure hearsay . . . a thin reed on which to rest abrogation
of
constitutional rights, and one that collapses entirely upon examination.
For
Hamdi has never been given the opportunity to dispute any facts."

Before this case reached the Fourth Circuit, it was heard in
Federal
District Court--with Hamdi unable to be present or to communicate at all

with his public defender, Frank Dunham, who therefore could not contest
the
Mobbs declaration. Nevertheless, Judge Robert Doumar, a Reagan
appointee,
scathingly demolished the government's "evidence."

"A close inspection of the [Mobbs] declaration reveals that [it]
never
claims that Hamdi was fighting for the Taliban, nor that he was a member
of
the Taliban. . . . Is there anything in the Mobbs declaration that says
Hamdi ever fired a weapon?" (Emphasis added.)

In the January 9 New York Times, Elisa Massimino of the Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights exposed an earlier decision by a panel of the

Fourth Circuit to bow to Bush and to continue the stripping of Hamdi's
citizen's rights. "[The Fourth Circuit] seems to be saying that it has
no
role whatsoever in overseeing the administration's conduct of the war on

terrorism . . . the beginning and end of which is left solely to the
president's discretion."

Now, the full Fourth Circuit bench has handed George W. Bush the
crown
that George Washington disdained. What if the Supreme Court agrees? Bush

will be King George IV.

***
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
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