Bruce Fein argues that Obama has opted for the arrogance of empire. He also states, "The Bagram procedures are descendents of the Spanish Inquisition." Strong stuff.
http://www.slate.com/id/2215818/pagenum/all/#p2Czar Obama
The president's incredibly imperialist wielding of executive power.
By Bruce Fein
Posted Thursday, April 9, 2009, at 3:13 PM ET
President Barack Obama's claim to czarlike powers in a perpetual global war against international terrorism has been blunted by a judicial appointee of former President George W. Bush. Last week, in the case Fadi al Maqaleh, United States District Judge John D. Bates denied that President Obama could make suspected "enemy combatants" disappear into the Bagram Theater Internment Facility at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan without an opportunity for exoneration. (While President Obama has abandoned the term enemy combatant for Guantanamo Bay detainees, he has retained the label for detainees held elsewhere.)
Bates' ruling is a welcome check on an emerging pattern of mightily expansive claims of executive authority by the new administration. In early February, President Obama sought another imperial power before the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in the case Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan. The complaint alleged that the plaintiffs had been seized by American personnel, taken to airports, stripped, blindfolded, shackled to the floor of a Gulfstream V, and taken to destination countries for torture and harsh incarceration. The District Court dismissed the complaint because then-President Bush and Vice President Cheney argued that state secrets would be exposed if the case were litigated. During oral argument before the 9th Circuit, Obama echoed the state-secrets argument made by Bush and Cheney. Similarly, the president who promised "change" is wielding the tool of state secrets in aiming to dismiss, without the gathering of evidence, challenges to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, which entailed warrantless phone or e-mail interceptions of American citizens on American soil in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. This defense has failed before Judge Vaughn R. Walker in early rounds of the litigation. And, again, the state-secrets privilege is the administration's response, if ancillary to a defense of retroactive immunity, in a brief filed last week to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to sue Bush administration officials for the NSA's wiretapping.
In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability. Thus Mahar Arar, who was tortured by Syrian agents, allegedly with the complicity of U.S. intelligence or immigration agents, has been denied a judicial remedy, again based on the state-secrets rule, to hide the identifies of his U.S. government persecutors. Similarly, victims of torture authorized by the president or vice president would encounter the state-secrets bar if they sought redress. Disclosing the methods of torture, the government has argued, might enable al-Qaida detainees to prepare better psychologically or physically to resist the criminal abuse! Such reasoning more befits the pages of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago than the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in ex parte Milligan: "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government."
In the Bagram Prison litigation, Judge Bates summoned the observation of Alexander Hamilton writing in The Federalist 84: "
onfinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government." Accordingly, he held that enemy combatant detainees at Bagram who were captured outside Afghanistan and who were not Afghan citizens could challenge the constitutionality of their detentions in federal courts through writs of habeas corpus.
If President Obama had embraced the principles of a republic (which cares about injustice) instead of the arrogance of empire (which admires swagger), neither the habeas corpus nor state-secrets litigation would have been necessary.
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