INTERNMENT CAMPS IN PLACE

For such power as encompassed in the Patriot Act to be concentrated in the hands of the US attorney general prompts questions concerning the person in that position. The public should closely scrutinize attorney general's integrity, ambition and philosophical outlook.
A brief look at former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who first supervised this new act, reveals some disturbing facts. These facts were conveniently ignored or downplayed by a mass media cowed in the patriotic furor following the 9/11 attacks.
In 2000, the Democratic governor of Missouri, Mel Carnahan, was battling Ashcroft for a US Senate seat. Carnahan died in a small plane crash. His wife, Jean, was not with him. Jean agreed to fill the seat for her late husband should he win it and Missouri voters delivered a blow to Ashcroft by casting their votes for a dead man, a clear indication of the respect held for Ashcroft in his home state.
A distinct warning about Ashcroft and what was to come came long before the 2001 terror attacks. In testimony opposing the nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general given on January 16, 2001, Dr. Debra H. Freeman, a contributing editor of Executive Intelligence Review, warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that Ashcroft would bring under the guise of “crisis management” a “form of brutal bureaucratic fascism on the United States that bears striking similarities to the conditions under which Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933.”
Until the 9/11 attacks, Ashcroft who had been most noticeable to the American public when he ordered an exposed breast covered on the statue called The Spirit of Justice that stands in the Justice Department's Hall of Justice, rapidly patched together a spate of antiterrorism laws, most of which would never have made it through Congress under normal circumstances. He was already warping US laws beyond recognition by detaining without trial as many as 1,200 persons, most in violation of immigration laws. Many were later released without charges being filed against them.
But at least one vision of Ashcroft was absolutely outrageous. In a little publicized announcement in August 2002, Ashcroft said he wanted the power to strip American citizens of their constitutional rights, including access to the court system, and indefinitely imprisoned them in interment camps on his word that they were “enemy combatants.”
“The proposed camp plan should trigger immediate congressional hearings and reconsideration of Ashcroft's fitness for this important office,” declared Jonathan Turley, a professor of constitutional law at George Washington University Law School who actively supported Ashcroft during his contentious nomination hearing. “Whereas al Qaeda is a threat to the lives of our citizens, Ashcroft has become a clear and present threat to our liberties.”
An example of the unevenness of Ashcroft justice was seen in the treatment of two Americans captured while fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan—John Walker Lindh and Yaser Esam Hamdi. Lindh was given a lawyer and a trial where he plea bargained for a reduced prison sentence. Hamdi, a Louisiana-born prisoner captured in Afghanistan and held in the US detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, was transferred to a Navy brig floating off the Virginia coast where he remained indefinitely.
When a federal judge ordered that the Justice Department present evidence justifying Hamdi's treatment, the government simply refused to comply, insisting that the judge could not interfere with the president's “absolute authority in a time of war.” Then when Hamdi's father filed a habeas corpus petition in the United States District Court for Norfolk, VA, the court, though never denying outright that Hamdi had no right to habeas corpus, nevertheless claimed only Hamdi himself could bring the habeas petition. Such action while being held incommunicado is obviously impossible.
It appeared that the Bush administration attempted intimidation as prosecution motions warned that any judge who opposed the government's action risked “a conflict of military and judicial opinion highly comforting to the enemies of the United States.” This wording was most interesting as the US Constitution defines treason as giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy.
On top of all this, Hamdi was denied access to legal representation prompting a lower-court judge, Reagan appointee Robert Doumar, to state, “I tried valiantly to find a case of any kind, in any court, where a lawyer couldn't meet with a client.…This case sets the most interesting precedent in relation to that which has ever existed in Anglo-American jurisprudence since the days of the Star Chamber.”
Hamdi was released and deported to Saudi Arabia in October 2004 after agreeing to renounce his US citizenship accepting restrictions on his travel to several Middle East nations such as Israel, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He also was required to promise not to sue the US government over his captivity.
Then there's the case of another American citizen Jose Padilla, the “dirty” bomber. Padilla was arrested after federal authorities claimed they learned he was planning to construct a radioactive bomb. However, the Bush administration some time later quietly admitted they had no evidence that Padilla actually was planning anything like that. “What is clear [in this case] is that Padilla is an American citizen and was arrested in the United States—two facts that should trigger the full application of constitutional rights,” said law professor Jonathan Turley.
“If you think this law applies only to foreign nationals, think again,” admonished columnist Doreen Miller. “Jose Padilla, although by no means a model US-born citizen, had his civil rights stripped from him [in May 2002] just by Ashcroft's uttering the magic words, ‘enemy combatant’ and ‘suspected terrorist.’ To this day, no solid evidence has been produced to substantiate Ashcroft's claims—neither bomb parts, nor bomb assembly instructions, nor any plans or maps of intended strike areas.”
Padilla was shunted about by the federal government for nearly four years until early in 2005, when a federal judge ruled that Padilla had to be charged with a crime or released. It was only then that Padilla was transferred from military authority to the criminal justice system.
After ongoing argument over his legal status by both prosecutors and defense attorneys, on August 16, 2007 Padilla was found guilty by a federal jury of conspiring to kill people in overseas battle while funding and supporting terrorism. The so-called “dirty bomber,” however, was neither charged nor convicted of this crime. His 17-year prison sentence was on appeal in 2010.
According to Internet commentator Mike Whitney, “Padilla became the test case for shattering the Bill of Rights with one withering blow. It has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectation. There's no chance that the Supreme Court will retry the case and draw more attention to the shocking details of this judicial coup; they already punted once before preferring to pass it along to the lower court. Rather, the meaning of the case will be ignored until the president needs to exercise the newly bestowed powers of supreme leader. That authority is now firmly rooted in the legal precedent established by the Padilla ruling.”
“Okay, now let's play a game,” wrote columnist Carl Worden. “Replace the name Jose Padilla with Carl Worden. I get picked up and thrown into a military brig where I don't get my call or a visit with my attorney. I am being held without charges as an ‘enemy combatant’ and the government does not have to appear in open court to present evidence at my arraignment, and they don't have to release me until hostilities have ended—which in the case of the War on Terrorism, that would translate into a life sentence. In the meantime, they can say anything about me they want—but they don't have to prove it. They will probably allege a conspiracy of some sort, which means they don't have to produce hard evidence like illegal weapons or explosives. They will throw in a couple of verifiable facts for credibility purposes, such as my membership in the Southern Oregon Militia and my outspoken ‘anti-government,’ ‘Right Wing Extremist’ rhetoric. They will display the weapons I own…they will claim I had bomb-making supplies and equipment in my garage when they searched my premises [common household materials can be construed as bomb-making supplies]. That's right. They found my diabolical [ammunition] reloading bench…Now replace my name with yours and play the same game.”
Worden's scenario gets to the heart of cases like Padilla. Such persons may be of dark complexion, absolute creeps or religious freaks. But if the American people allow their individual rights to be trampled, then no one is safe. Libertarians clearly see that the only way to guarantee freedom and liberty is to see that laws are applied equally without exceptions, even in deplorable cases.
“We are only now getting a full vision of Ashcroft's America,” mused Professor Turley after a study of the attorney general's activities. “Ashcroft [was] a catalyst for constitutional devolution, encouraging citizens to accept autocratic rule as their only way of avoiding massive terrorist attacks. His greatest problem has been preserving a level of panic and fear necessary to induce a free people to surrender rights so dearly won by their ancestors,” he added. “Every generation has had Ashcrofts who view our laws and traditions as mere obstructions rather than protections in times of peril. But before we allow Ashcroft to denude our own constitutional landscape, we must take a stand and have the courage to say, ‘Enough.’ Every generation has its test of principle in which people of good faith can no longer remain silent in the face of authoritarian ambition. If we cannot join together to fight the abomination of American camps, we have already lost what we're defending.”
Even the New York Times editorialized, “The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism.”
Writer Nat Hentoff grumbled, “It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O’Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way…and no court can even figure out whether we've got the wrong guy.”
When asked what the Founding Fathers might say about the Bush-Ashcroft vision for the Patriot Act, Congressman Paul laughed and said, “Our forefathers would think it's time for a revolution. This is why they revolted in the first place. They revolted against much more mild oppression.”
Troublesome questions also followed Alberto R. Gonzales, who was sworn in as the nation's 80th attorney general on February 3, 2005. Gonzales, a former White House counsel to President George W. Bush, immediately played the terror card in his initial remarks to Justice Department employees. He noted they have “a special obligation to protect America against future acts of terrorism. We will continue to make that our top priority while remaining consistent with our values and legal obligations. That will be the lodestar that guides us in our efforts at the department.”
Prior to serving in the White House, he served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Texas. Before his appointment to the Texas Supreme Court in 1999, he served as Texas’ 100th secretary of state from December 2, 1997 to January 10, 1999. Among his many duties as secretary of state, Gonzales was a senior advisor to then-Governor Bush, chief elections officer, and the governor's lead liaison on Mexico and border issues.
Upon taking up his new office, Gonzales was immediately assailed for a series of questionable decisions as White House counsel. In August 2002, following meetings between Gonzales and other Bush administration officials, a Justice Department memo was issued explaining that laws prohibiting torture of prisoners do “not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.” The memo added that only “injury such as death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions…constitute torture.”
Earlier that year, Gonzales had written a memo arguing that al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were not subject to the provisions of the Geneva Convention because “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war” which “renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” Many members of the military, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned that ignoring the Geneva Convention might well prove dangerous to future US soldiers captured by the enemy. In fact, a federal judge ruled, “President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions.”
Gonzales’ lack of concern over the rights of prisoners may have begun in the days when he served as chief legal counsel for then-Texas Governor George W. Bush. In his official capacity, it was Gonzales who sent Bush memos concerning the facts of all death penalty cases. Bush would then decide who lived and who died. Note that it was during this time that Texas gained national notoriety for the number of death penalties. According to a study of Gonzales’ memos, Atlantic Monthly concluded, “Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.” According to this study, Gonzales’ memos “seemed attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration—one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions.”
Gonzales also caused controversy in 1996 when as counsel to Texas Governor Bush he helped keep Bush from jury duty, a service which would have required Bush to disclose his then-secret 1976 conviction for drunken driving in Maine. Gonzales suggested to the judge and defense lawyer that if Bush served, then as governor, he would not be able to pardon the defendant in the future.
Like others in the Bush administration, Gonzales came under fire for his close relationships with energy corporations, including the failed giant, Enron. According to The Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research and educational institute, Gonzales accrued about $100,000 from the energy industry in 2002, the same year that he authored a Texas Supreme Court opinion, which “handed the energy industry one of its biggest Texas legal victories in recent history.” After entering the White House with Bush, it was Gonzales who worked hard to keep secret the meetings held by Cheney's energy task force.
Succeeding Gonzales, who resigned in August 2007 amid controversies over government-sanctioned torture, illegal eavesdropping and even allegations of perjury before Congress, was US District Court Judge Michael Bernard Mukasey, the jurist who presided over the court case of Jose Padilla as well as the insurance claims of Larry Silverstein for the loss of the World Trade Center towers.
Although constitutionally guaranteed the position for life, Mukasey resigned his judgeship in August 2006, to return to private law practice. Yet one year later accepted President Bush's offer to become attorney general replacing Gonzales. In 2009, ethics complaints were filed against Mukasey and others for their support of Bush administration policies on torture.
President Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, is the first African-American to hold that position. Holder voiced opposition to the Patriot Act saying its abuses are “bad ultimately for law enforcement and will cost us the support of the American people.” He also criticized the euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques,” torture to most citizens, and the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, stating, “This disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive in our struggle against terrorism.”
Persons with a secretive and conspiring mindset, when they are allowed in positions such as US attorney general, are especially worrisome when considered within the rapid growth of eavesdropping and surveillance technology available today.