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July 2008: Court upholds presidential powers of tyranny |
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Thursday, 17 July 2008 |
From a July 16, 2008, article on Salon.com:
Yesterday, the full Fourth Circuit appellate court, in a 5-4 ruling (.pdf), expanded that Draconian power even further. This ruling was issued in al-Marri's case, whose extraordinary plight I've previously written about
in detail. Al-Marri is a citizen of Qatar who, in 2001, was in the
United States legally, on a student visa. He was a computer science
graduate student at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he
had earned an undergraduate degree a decade earlier. In Peoria, he
lived with his wife and five children. Shortly after the 9/11 attack,
al-Marri was detained as a material witness and subsequently charged in a civilian court
with a variety of crimes relating to credit card fraud and making false
statements as part of the 9/11 investigation. He vehemently denied
those accusations, and -- in June, 2003 -- he was preparing for his
criminal trial, scheduled to begin the following month.
Suddenly -- a month before his trial was to begin -- George Bush
declared him to be an "enemy combatant" and ordered the U.S. military
to seize him from civilian officials and transfer him to military
custody. There -- in a South Carolina military brig -- al-Marri has
remained for the last five years, with no criminal charges having been
brought against him and no meaningful opportunity to contest his guilt
in a court of law. He has been kept in solitary confinement and denied any contact with the outside world other than his lawyers.
The Fourth Circuit's 5-4 ruling yesterday upheld the President's
authority to detain al-Marri in a military prison as an "enemy
combatant." What makes the ruling so striking is that -- unlike Hamdi
and Padilla -- not even the Bush administration claims that al-Marri
fought alongside the Taliban, fought against U.S. forces, or had even
been to Afghanistan. He's simply a civilian accused by the President of
being involved in a terrorist plot.
Read the full, extensive article on Salon.com and be afraid. Be very afraid. Cry for your country. Then pick yourself up and do something about it.
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