This is wrong, wrong, wrong. I don’t care what horrible crime the guy is SUSPECTED of committing. The key word is SUSPECTED and in this country we used to have something called DUE PROCESS. Anybody remember that?
And since when does the President have the sole authority to hand pick individuals out of our criminal justice system? At the very least it should be a very large panel of individuals that might serve to provide some kind of checks and balances to the process. What an embarrassment to our country. (Add it to the list of Shrub embarassments, I guess.)
We’ve got a president that thinks he’s dictator. That makes our country a dictatorship. (Like the dictatorships we’re fighting against on the other side of the world.) Nice work Shrub.
Bush Declares Student an Enemy Combatant
By for the NY Times.

President Bush made a surprise decision today to remove a Qatari student from the criminal justice system and declare him an enemy combatant after prosecutors said new evidence linked him to another round of terrorist plots by Al Qaeda after Sept. 11.
The student, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, 37, had been held in civilian custody since late 2001, first as a material witness in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks and later on charges of lying to the F.B.I. and credit card fraud.
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Because he was declared an enemy combatant, Mr. Marri was moved from a prison in Illinois to a military brig in South Carolina, according to Lawrence S. Lustberg, who represented him in the criminal case. As an enemy combatant, Mr. Marri can be held indefinitely, and he has no access to a lawyer unless the military decides to bring charges, officials said…
Neither of the other two men publicly identified as enemy combatants, Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in fighting in Afghanistan, and Jose Padilla, suspected in a scheme to set off a “dirty bomb,” had faced criminal charges beforehand. Both are Americans…
“To just pluck someone from the criminal justice system and remove them from any of the protections of the legal system to me suggests a very troubling disregard for the rule of law,” said Jamie Fellner, the United States director for Human Rights Watch.
Mr. Lustberg, a private lawyer in Newark, said he planned to seek a reversal of the decision by filing a writ of habeas corpus in the federal court system in a few days.
Mr. Marri had been scheduled to go to trial next month in federal court in Illinois on the criminal charges pending against him, and Mr. Lustberg said, “We thought he had a powerful defense.”
Mr. Marri had apparently planned to argue that the charge he had lied to F.B.I. agents in interviews in late 2001 about his travels in the United States was based on a misunderstanding, and Mr. Lustberg said that notes from the bureau agents could bear that out…
Frank W. Dunham Jr., a standby lawyer for Mr. Moussaoui

The Shrub Administration is “floating” its plans to convert Guantanamo Bay into a ‘Death Camp,’ where prisoners are sentenced to death and executed, without ever being given a chance to defend themselves, on a regular basis.
Experts say that this has always been the plan.
I’m not sure what we can do about this yet guys, but be assured that it’s on the radar and I’ll be letting you know what action we can take to oppose this over the days and weeks to come.
US plans death camp
In the Courier Mail.

THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber.
Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday.
The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians.
The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months.
General Miller said building a death row was one plan. Another was to have a permanent jail, with possibly an execution chamber.
The Mail on Sunday reported the move is seen as logical by the US, which has been attacked worldwide for breaching the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war since it established the camp at a naval base to hold alleged terrorists from Afghanistan.
But it has horrified human rights groups and lawyers representing detainees…
American law professor Jonathan Turley, who has led US civil rights group protests against the military tribunals planned to hear cases at Guantanamo Bay, said: “It is not surprising the authorities are building a death row because they have said they plan to try capital cases before these tribunals.
“This camp was created to execute people. The administration has no interest in long-term prison sentences for people it regards as hard-core terrorists.”

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Iran-Contra Figure Plays Key Role on Mideast
By Michael Dobbs For The Washington Post.

A cycle of disgrace and redemption has brought one of Washington’s most accomplished — and controversial — bureaucratic infighters back to the center of U.S. foreign policy decision-making.
When Elliott Abrams stood in front of a federal judge in October 1991 and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress, few imagined he would ever return to government. At age 43, he had become one of the casualties of the Iran-contra scandal, detested by Democrats for his combative political style and mistrusted by human rights activists for playing down the crimes of right-wing dictatorships in Central America.
Twelve years later, Abrams is helping to shape White House policies toward many of the world’s trouble spots. Appointed in December as President Bush’s senior adviser on the Middle East, his responsibilities extend from Algeria to Iran. But nowhere is his influence more evident than on the Arab-Israeli peace process…

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It’s not just that the people the Shrub is nominating have arguably unfavorable biases — no one is even mentioning the seemingly obvious fact that these people just aren’t qualified to be appellate judges.
Let’s take this latest case, Claude Allen. Does it even follow any stretch of the imagination that a former Press Secretary for a Senator turned Health and Human services appointee would be eligible for a position as a Federal Appellate Judge?
Bush pick for appeals court called gays ‘queers’ Allen, an abstinence-only advocate, would serve on Md., Va. court
Claude Allen, nominated by President Bush to the 4th Circuit, was a supporter of conservative Sen. Jesse Helms and once referred to gays as ‘queers.’
By Lou Chibbaro Jr. for the Houston Voice.

President Bush this week nominated Claude A. Allen, a supporter of conservative former Sen. Jesse Helms, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Maryland and Virginia.
Allen, 42, becomes the eighth federal judicial nominee named by Bush to hold views considered hostile to gay civil rights, according to the Alliance for Justice, a progressive watchdog group that monitors judicial appointments.
Allen, whose nomination was announced on April 28, has been one of the Bush administration’s leading advocates for abstinence-only programs aimed at curtailing the spread of AIDS in his current job as deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
In 1984, he served as press secretary for the re-election campaign of U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), considered one of the strongest opponents of gay civil rights among all members of Congress at the time. Helms and his supporters attacked then-Gov. James Hunt, Helms’ Democratic opponent, for receiving campaign support from gays.
According to the National Journal, when Hunt responded by saying Helms was being backed by right-wing radicals, an angered Allen replied that Hunt had links “with the queers.” Helms retired from the Senate in January.
“Fair-minded senators should be very concerned about Allen’s radical record of opposition to a woman’s right to choose, equal rights for gays and lesbians, and his unfounded and dangerous belief that denying students access to proper sex education will keep them safe,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice.

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