The Glade 4.0

Like I've said, Obama/Holder is putting the United States on trial, and will use the courts to go after Bush so he doesn't take the hit in the polls. And I have no doubt that the evidence trail will "end" at Bush even if the trail extends back through the office all the way to Carter or earlier. Yes, I feel this is entirely political. More Chicago gotcha politics.

The new tool of terrorism is going to be to tie up our own courts against us. It will be yet another front in the war of attricion.


http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-na ... efendants/

NEW YORK — The five men facing trial in the Sept. 11 attacks will plead not guilty so that they can air their criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, the lawyer for one of the defendants said.

Scott Fenstermaker, the lawyer for accused terrorist Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, said Sunday the men would not deny their role in the 2001 attacks but "would explain what happened and why they did it."

The U.S. Justice Department announced earlier this month that Ali and four other men accused of murdering nearly 3,000 people in the deadliest terrorist attack in the U.S. will face a civilian federal trial just blocks from the site of the destroyed World Trade Center.

Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, is a nephew of professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Mohammed, Ali and the others will explain "their assessment of American foreign policy," Fenstermaker said.

"Their assessment is negative," he said.

Fenstermaker met with Ali last week at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He has not spoken with the others but said the men have discussed the trial among themselves.

Fenstermaker was first quoted in The New York Times in Sunday's editions.

Critics of Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try the men in a New York City civilian courthouse have warned that the trial would provide the defendants with a propaganda platform.

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said Sunday that while the men may attempt to use the trial to express their views, "we have full confidence in the ability of the courts and in particular the federal judge who may preside over the trial to ensure that the proceeding is conducted appropriately and with minimal disruption, as federal courts have done in the past."

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Holder for hours about his decision to send the five 9/11 suspects to New York for trial.

Critics of Holder's decision — mostly Republicans — argued the trial will give Mohammed and his co-defendants a world stage to spout hateful rhetoric. Holder said such concerns are misplaced, and any pronouncements by the suspects would only make them look worse.

"I have every confidence that the nation and the world will see him for the coward that he is," Holder told the committee. "I'm not scared of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has to say at trial — and no one else needs to be, either."

The attorney general said he does not believe holding the trial in New York — at a federal courthouse that has seen a number of high-profile terrorism trials in recent decades — will increase the risk of terror attacks there.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

You know, it's gotta suck to be Bush right now. Both the prosecution and the defense are interested in nailing him to the wall and making him responsible.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I think it'd be really interesting to see some foreign law enforcement agency try to come arrest Bush, or Cheney. They'd better be VERY secretive about it and have him out of the country before anyone knows about it.

I feel the strategy will be to get "evidence" which will be sealed due to "national security" and dangled out to poison the well right about Presidential election time. That will give Obama the ability to run again as "Not Bush". I also feel the "evidence" will be used to ensure that Republicans throw the race again. However I also see these moves being countered by the "rogue" perception of Palin being cultivated at the moment. If she's an outsider to the Republicans by pissing them off then she's immune to the Obamas "Not Bush" strategy. If Obamas moves don't pan out she can be quickly brought back into the fold and packaged for sale as a Big Tent Republican.

Really sickening. Both sides of the fence have big dogs who crap all over the yard.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Not really. They just have to ask Obama's permission before they do it. Former Presidents are protected by the Secret Service, which reports to the sitting President. If Obama decides that letting them get tried will benefit him politically, and that the benefit is greater than the risk he anticipates of allowing his own protection to be passed on to his successor, the only stir will be in the populace.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Nah Obama won't allow that precedent to be set. He should at least have some level of self preservation instincts since he's offing a lot of civilians with his Predator attacks.

He will allow Bush to be prosecuted up to the tipping point of it creating a precedent that could be used against him, then he will yank Holders leash and offer public clemency to Bush if Bush apologizes to the nation. I swear it's a damned soap opera, but thats just my take on it.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

That may be, but I'm thinking a lot of ordinary citizens would not stand still for it. The populace will be something to be feared.

By confering the rights of US citizens on these men, it garentees one of two things.

1) Aquittal. US citizens have the right to be Mirandized, and certainly the right not to be tortured. Given this, any sane judge would have to throw the case out.

2) Given a conviction, this would create a terrible precident under which US citizen could be legally tortured.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

It would do none of those things.

A) They have not been tortured

B) The things often referred to as "torture" that were done to them were not done by any part of the law enforcement/criminal justice system, and the information gained that way can't be used in court anyhow. That was done in order to get information to be used for national defense, and was done by national defense organizations (note that's not necessarily the military).

When people are captured in the pursuit of national defense the niceties of criminal justice only have to be observed in regards to their captivity when it is for the purpose of convicting them, and in regards to gathering information from them, when it is to be used for criminal trial.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye, it's long past time you finally admitted these men were tortured. Anyone who has willingly undergone water boarding outside of interrogation and knowing full well that they were not going die has called the practice torture. KSM was waterboarded 180 times. He was tortured. Please, it's absolutely senseless to try and say that water boarding is not torture. It's untrue, it's inaccurate, and it's misleading.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I'm sure after the second or third time he realize he wasn't gonna die. No different then a roller coaster imho

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

So what?

That just makes any evidence obtained in that process inadmissable in court.

At this point though, 8 years later, I'm pretty much beyond caring what we do with the guy.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I'll reference something I just read to address the above point:

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

No, it isn't. We've been over this time and time again, and all you're doing is blatantly begging the question. It is not torture; the mere fact that it can be safely given to people for demonstrational purposes proves this.

It's high time you stopped trying to prove things by assertion. I've given lengthy reasons why it isn't torture, and all you've ever done is repeat the broken-record argument.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I can get on board with waterboarding not being torture, but keeping someone in a soaked 49-degree cell for months, depriving them of sleep for months, or forcing them into stress positions for days certainly qualifies. We definitely don't do any of that to our own personnel.

Are you sure?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Fine. Discard the use of the loaded language. I don't wish to turn this into a "what constitutes torture" debate. Lets just use the term, "waterboarding".

I know that under current law, the government is not allowed to waterboard it's citizens.

What this trial does is confer domestic constitutional provisions to these detainees. That is the precedent this creates.

My point stands.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Fair enough



While it grants them the rights in criminal proceedings that citizens have, it does not actually make them citizens. Moreover, since they were not captured, detained or waterboarded by any criminal justice agency nor for any criminal justice purpose, it creates no such precedent.

The CIA and the military, and whatever other agencies have been involved and to what degree, are not law enforcement agencies and in fact are generally prohibited from acting in any law enforcement capacity domestically. When they did these things, they were not for any law enforcement purpose. This means that there was no obligation to follow any law enforcement protocol to avoid the "fruit of the poisonous tree" problem, but it also means no information gained can be used for prosecution, unless it is obtained again following strictly the standards for obtaining criminal evidence.

Since practically all crimes that U.S. citizens commit happen doemstically, do not pertain to national defense, have no value in national defense, do not fall into the purview of external national security agencies, and these agencies lack the resources to **** around with such things unnecessarily anyhow, the point does not stand. It might create a precedent if a U.S. citizens is apprehended abroad such as John Walker Lindh, but even in that case nothing obtained under anything but standard criminal justice procedure could not be admitted.

In other words, no, the point does not stand.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

DE:

I disagree. The hall-mark of modern American liberalism is that all people not only hold equal rights, but that American legal rights are, infact, those rights. Furthermore, that a major role of the US government is to install those rights.

This is an opportunity to do so.

We will just have to wait and see how this all plays out.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

A) I really don't care if its a hallmark of American Liberalism
B) As I've explained, I don't see any reason to think that legal rights in regard to criminal prosecution in any way are affected by people being held by agencies engaged in national defense. As long as the information gained does not cross-pollinate into the criminal justice system, it really doesn't matter.



I certainly hope we don't. There has been an appalling trend since the end of WWII to believe that national defense should be regulated and conducted in the same way as law enforcement, to the some point that some nations arrogantly set up things like the Hague, the ICC, etc. All of these things need to be disbanded and the idea that criminal justice applies when one decides to attack another nation needs to be squashed.



Indeed.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This is a show-trial, nothing more. Those that argue for due-process are mistaken. Obama will not release these men if acquitted. Will not. I'm going to laugh and laugh and laugh if one gets acquitted.

Now, keep in mind, I am all about the due process. I think these men should be tried in US courts, then the defense attourneys immediately ask for a mistrial, then the judge grant it on the grounds their civil rights were violated in captivity. Then released in the destination of their choice, with their financial compensation for the abuses. How would that be for a **** you to both administrations?

Obama is only trying these men because he's desperate to come up with some solution for these detainees - he's about to blow his self-appointed deadline for closing guatanamo, and he's grasping at straws.

If they are aquitted, and not released...

That would be a political, international, domestic, and establishment of legal precedent that lives in the realm of the absurd.

It can't and won't happen.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

It would establish nothing of the kind. If they were held they'd be held as a matter of national defense, by agencies having nothing to do with law enforcement , and for reasons having nothing to do with crime or punishment.

The idea that because a person is held in captivity by the United States that they are necessarily held for, or for reasons related to, criminal justice, does not match with long established precedent regarding a range of reasons people have been captured in a variety of circumstances.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

So... the US should be in the business of imprisoning people who are found not guilty?

How does that jive with any idea or embodiment, distant past or present, of liberalism?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Good ole Stare Decises. Somehow an appeal to tradition makes everything ok.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville