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Stop Guantanamo terror trials, says Obama

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

Newly-installed President Barack Obama wasted no time in getting down to business today after his administration requested a halt to controversial military trials at Guantanamo Bay.

Hours after his historic inauguration as the first black president of the United States, Mr Obama appeared to quickly honour his vow to act over the terror-suspect holding camp in Cuba.

He has previously said he will close Guantanamo, home to widely criticised war-crimes trials created by former President George Bush and Congress in 2006.

The suspension request came from the US Department of Defence, which said it was seeking a 120-day halt to the war crimes trials at the camp pending a review by Mr Obama.

It was announced as the new president danced the night away with his wife at a series of inaugural balls, and as his new team put the brakes on all pending regulations that the Bush regime tried to push through in its last days. That order went out shortly after Mr Obama’s inauguration yesterday, in a memorandum signed by new White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Aides had previously suggested that the new Commander-in-Chief would immediately launch into the job, with a raft of policy announcements expected by the end of the week.

The 47-year-old former senator was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States in front of vast crowds of people in Washington yesterday, with millions more glued to TV coverage around the world.

During his inaugural speech in Washington, Mr Obama alluded to the task before him.

In an address which impressed rather than wowed, given its speaker’s known oratory skills, the president vowed to address the challenges that faced America, a county in “the midst of crisis”, he said.

Laying out the problems, Mr Obama said the country had a “badly weakened” economy and was at war against “a far-reaching network of violence and hatred”.

He said: “The challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.

“But know this, America – they will be met.”

Mr Obama invoked the spirit of America’s pioneers during the 20-minute address.

It was, he said, “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things” who had carried the country “up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom”.

“Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life.

He spoke in front of a Washington audience, estimated to be more than a million people. Many, many more were listening around the world to the new president’s words.

Mr Obama appeared to acknowledge that work needed to be done to improve America’s tarnished image overseas.

As such he pledged to seek “a new way forward” with the Muslim world based on “mutual interest and mutual respect”.

He said he would “begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan”.

How he intends to achieve this is likely to be high up his agenda as he comes to grips with the job ahead of him.

Today he is due to meet high-ranking military officials to discuss the Iraq war, a senior aide said.

Mr Obama is also expected to assemble a team to look at ways of moving forward the stalled Middle East peace process. He recently told USA Today that he would address the issue on “Day One” of his presidency.

An announcement on the actual closure of Guantanamo Bay and a reversal of George Bush’s overseas abortion policy have also been put forward as early contenders for policy actions.

The US military currently has charges pending against 21 men at Guantanamo and officials have said they intended to charge dozens more.

Pre-trial hearings in two cases – the trial of five men charged in the 9/11 attacks and Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan – were due to take place this week.

But before setting to work on the nuts and bolts of running a country, Mr Obama will first attend a national prayer service in Washington.

The Rev Dr Sharon Watkins will deliver the sermon at the multi-faith event - the first woman to do so at the traditional inauguration event.

WalesOnline

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Cheney hints at pardon for President Bush

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

BNN |

With the Bush administration in its final days questions are being asked whether the president will be investigated over a number of concerns.

Thoseconcerns include the legitimacy, legality, and constitutionality of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; the controversial eavesdropping by the NSA of U.S. citizens; the authorization of the use of torture; and the treatment and processing of detainees at prisons in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

While there are impeachment proceedings underway in the House of Representatives, they have been sidelined by the global financial crisis, and will be overtaken by the end of the Bush presidency on January 20.

There are many however who believe the president and members of his administration should be pursued. Officials in the Department of Defense have reportedly been pressing the Obaaa transition team to take action to demonstrate that justice will be served, and to restore America’s image in the world.

There are others that say it is time to move on, and the healing of the nation from the tumultuous times of the Bush years will be advanced by not opening up old issues.

Barack Obama has given some hope to those that are interested in the former. he has said he will promptly review actions by the Bush administration “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” he has said.

However he has also said, “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Dick Cheney seemingly is one of those that wants to move on as he unexpectedly raised, and drew parallels with, President Ford’s pardon of former President Nixon this week, hinting that similar treatment should be afforded President Bush.

On Monday the vice president was asked about some of the issues that have given rise to some of the major concerns, on Sean Hannity’s Radio program.

“Well, let me ask you this, as you look back on the presidency,” said Hannity, “I think the President, through the prism of history, is going to be viewed as a very principled, successful President. And that would include you being Vice President, because I don’t think, I think most people’s memories are short. I think most people have forgotten the mood of the country after 9/11. I think there were many, many decisions that were made, tougher interrogations, Gitmo, the Patriot Act, that have all contributed to making this country safer. We seem to forget all those tough battles, and that was the biggest focus obviously of the administration.”

“Do you believe, as I do, that history will be kind to you guys?” asked Hannity.

“Right,” said Cheney. “No, I do. I think - I had the experience with Jerry Ford. I came in, went to work here the day he got sworn in as President, worked with him throughout his time there. I’ll always remember, of course, what happened when he made the decision to pardon Richard Nixon. And he dropped 30 points in the polls in a week.”

“And at the time a lot of people were outraged about that decision,” said Cheney. “But, in fact, thirty years later we look back on it, and nearly everybody has come around to the point of view that it was exactly the right thing to do. It was a courageous thing to do, because he knew it might well cost him the next election in ‘76, but he went ahead and did it anyway because he thought it was right for the country.”

“And I think there are parallels there in terms of George Bush,” said the vice president.

“I think that when people have an opportunity to look back and sort of ignore the emotions of the moment, which tend to dominate now, especially in the mainstream media, and look with some time and be able to pause and reflect on it, that the decisions he has made and the things he has done in terms of liberating fity million people and protecting the country and taking down a big part of the al-Qaeda organization, etc., etc., etc., I think he will be well regarded,” said Cheney.

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Why We Must Prosecute Bush and His Administration for War Crimes

Friday, December 19th, 2008

By Mike Ferner

During the rush to get the Nuremberg Tribunals underway, the Soviet delegation wanted the tribunal’s historic decisions to have legitimacy only for the Nazis. U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Robert Jackson, serving as the chief prosecutor for the Allies, strong-armed the Soviets until the very beginning of the tribunal before changing their mind.

In his opening statement Jackson very purposely stipulated, “Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”

Can there be a better reason for prosecuting George Bush and his administration for war crimes than those words from the chief prosecutor of the Nazis, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, with the full support of the U.S. government? Robert Jackson’s words and the values this nation claims to stand for provide sufficient moral basis for putting Bush and Cheney, their underlings who implemented their policies and the perverted legal minds who justified them all in the dock. If those are not sufficient reasons, there is a long list of binding law and treaties — written in black and white in surprisingly plain English.

Bush imagined, and his attorneys advised, that he could simply wave aside these laws with “they don’t apply.” Imagine how a judge would treat even a simple traffic court defendant who brazenly stated the law was only a quaint notion, just “words on paper?”

Masses of people and an embarrassingly small number of their elected representatives in this country read the law for themselves and demanded otherwise, only to be silenced by the Guardians of Reality in the corporate news media.

But it’s all there, where it has been for 220 years, the Constitution’s “supremacy clause,” Article II, section 4, and in the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18USC §2441). They provide the authority to make additional treaties legally binding — no matter how much former White House lawyers David Addington and John Yoo may object.

Those additional treaties include among others, the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg rulings, the Laws and Customs of War on Land and UN General Assembly Resolution 3314. To give just a snapshot of how serious these laws are, consider this portion of 18 USC 2441 which defines a war crime as “a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party…” The guilty can be “fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.”

Here, Justice Jackson answers another question about war crimes — who bears the greater responsibility: those who committed barbaric acts in the field or those who created the conditions for barbarism?

The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank that does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war.

And yet it is not just because Bush violated the Constitution and federal law that he and his lieutenants must be prosecuted.

At Nuremberg, the foremost crime identified was starting a “war of aggression,” later codified by U.N. Resolution 3314, Art. 5, as “a crime against international peace.” Launching a war of aggression, as Hitler did against Poland, is considered so monstrous that the nation responsible can then be charged with “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” spelled out in detail in the Geneva Conventions. As Tom Paine said long before the U.N. formalized the definition of aggression, “He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of Hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.

A small sampling of the contagion of Hell let loose by Bush includes illegally invading a sovereign state, using banned weapons such as white phosphorous and napalm, bombing hospitals and civilian infrastructure, withholding aid and medical supplies, terrorizing and knowingly killing civilians, torturing prisoners, killing a million people and displacing four million more in Iraq alone.

Following World War II, humanity resolved that wars do more than spark a series of loathsome, individual crimes. Leaders responsible for a war actually commit crimes against the entirety of humanity. They inflict harm on every human being, something that must be put right before humanity can be restored.

There is a final reason why we must prosecute Bush and Co. It is not what some argue, although they point to a serious danger: that Bush trashed the law and usurped powers, encouraging future presidents to expand where he left off. Such reasons are about George Bush and those who hold the office after him, but in the final analysis this is about us.

We are complicit in the horrors of this administration. We can claim neither ignorance nor innocence. We are complicit by the very fact that we are citizens of the United States, more so because we paid for the war, and even more so for this reason. Listen to a village sheik I met in Iraq describe it better than I ever could.

I met this man in a small farming village one afternoon in early 2004. He described how he and a dozen others were swept up in a raid by the U.S. Army and detained on a bare patch of ground surrounded by concertina wire. They had no shelter and but six blankets. They dug a hole with their hands for a toilet. They had to beg for water until one time it rained for three days straight and they remained on that open ground. He somehow found the graciousness to say he understood there was a difference between the American people and our government. Then through his tears he added, “But you say you live in a democracy. How can this be happening to us?”

Do we? Whether or not we bring our own government officials to justice for their crimes will determine the answer.

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US lawmaker accuses Bush of secrecy over Iraq deal

Friday, November 21st, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is refusing to make public the security pact it has signed with Iraq, even though it has already been published in full in an Iraqi newspaper, a congressional hearing was told Wednesday.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were holding a closed briefing for U.S. House members on the pact signed Monday that sets a 2011 deadline for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq.

Rep. Bill Delahunt, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations and Human Rights, before the closed briefing called it “insulting and an after-thought,” after the Bush administration earlier rebuffed calls for Congress to be consulted during year-long negotiations on the agreement.

The administration has said it will not seek congressional approval for the deal. It has been in a hurry to finalize the pact, which Iraqi lawmakers still must approve, before the U.N. mandate under which U.S. troops operate expires Dec. 31.

Delahunt, who has urged President George W. Bush to renew the U.N. mandate rather than sign a bilateral agreement with Iraq, held the eighth in a series of hearings on the Status of Forces Agreement.

He said the Bush administration had turned down an invitation to attend the open hearing, saying it was a “sensitive time.” Experts testifying before his subcommittee were forced to rely on an unofficial English translation of the security deal.

“Even now the National Security Council has requested that we do not show this document to our witnesses or release it to the public. Now that’s incredible — meantime the Iraqi government has posted this document on its media website,” Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, said.

He was referring to the Iraqi government-funded al-Sabah newspaper, whose Arabic version of the deal is also the source of the only known unofficial English translation, by the anti-war American Friends Service Committee.

“There is something bizarre about the text being disseminated to the Iraqi people and we are being told we cannot distribute the English-language version of the agreement,” said Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

JOINT MILITARY CENTER

According to the unofficial version, the United States and Iraq are to set up a joint committee to oversee and coordinate all offensive U.S. military operations.

“All such military operations that are carried out pursuant to this agreement shall be conducted with the agreement of the government of Iraq. Such operations shall be fully coordinated with Iraqi authorities,” the translated document says.

Oona Hathaway, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said it appeared the agreement would give the joint committee operational control over U.S. military operations. If so, that would be “unprecedented and extremely unusual,” she said.

“The president can enter into agreements on his own but this agreement goes far beyond the president’s independent constitutional powers,” Hathaway said.

She said challenging the legality of the agreement was compounded by the vagueness of much of its wording. She said standard SOFAs are several hundred pages, but the Iraqi one was a little over 20 pages.

On the controversial issue of Iraqi criminal jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers, the unofficial English version says Iraq will have that right “when such crimes are committed outside agreed facilities and outside duty status.” It does not define “duty status.”

But any U.S. service members arrested or detained by Iraqi forces will be kept in U.S. custody pending trial, it says.

In the future, U.S. forces will not be able to arrest Iraqis without Iraqi approval, and those detained must be handed over to Iraqi authorities within 24 hours, requirements that could potentially complicate military operations, Michael Matheson, a former State Department legal adviser told the hearing.

(Editing by Vicki Allen)

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Will International Law Reach Bush?

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

By Peter Dyer |

Q: What do Radovan Karadzic, former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and George W. Bush have in common? A: Each lives under the slowly growing shadow of a body of international criminal law.

This law is evolving towards the ultimate goal of holding even the most powerful leaders personally accountable for crimes committed by the State.

It is manifested in international agreements and statutes such as the Geneva Conventions, case law, two ad hoc war crimes tribunals (Yugoslavia and Rwanda), and a permanent International Criminal Court.

Radovan Karadzic, former Bosnian Serb President, has been arrested and now awaits trial in The Hague before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (I.C.T.Y.) on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Dominique de Villepin is one of 33 French military and political leaders who have recently been accused in a report released by the Rwandan government of arming and advising Hutu leaders in the genocide and crimes against humanity of 1994.

(At the time Rwanda was a French client state and de Villepin was chief aide to French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe. The 500-page report, based on a two-year investigation, accuses both men of crimes including enabling the genocide by violating a United Nations Security Council Arms Embargo against Rwanda.)

George W. Bush in March 2003 ordered “Operation Shock and Awe” (though officially dubbed “Operation: Iraqi Freedom”) – the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq – presenting the world with a clear prima facie case of aggression.

Aggression, in the words of the judgment delivered at the first Nuremberg Trial, is “the supreme international crime” because it unleashes all the other devastation and inhumanity of war.

Personal accountability by state leaders for the crime of aggression – initiating an unprovoked war – is the most profound as well as the most difficult goal of the continuing evolution of international criminal law.

For this reason, and because President Bush is head of the world’s most powerful state, clearly the shadow of the law is at present less ominous to him than to Karadzic or perhaps to de Villepin.

But there is no statute of limitations for any of these crimes. Things change over time, often unpredictably. And the international community has been working steadily towards this difficult goal for decades.

No doubt the work will continue.

Nuremberg Precedent

Although the effort to hold leaders personally responsible for crimes of state goes back to the late 19th century, the first significant watershed was the 1946 judgment of the first Nuremberg trial.

A panel of judges from the U.S., U.K., France and the Soviet Union held German leaders personally responsible and punished them for crimes of state, including aggression.

The roots of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals are largely in Nuremberg as are those of the International Criminal Court, although neither ad hoc tribunal charter included aggression.

One of the most significant achievements of the Yugoslavia Tribunal was the first ever indictment of an acting head of state, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, for crimes committed while still in office.

According to the I.C.T.Y. Web site, “the question is no longer whether leaders should be held accountable, but rather how can they be called to account.”

A major problem with the two courts was that they were each temporary responses to a specific set of separate circumstances which had considerable legal overlap.

The ad hoc approach was clearly limited by issues of logistics, expenses and repetition, many of which could have been more effectively addressed by a permanent court.

The achievements of the two tribunals as well as their limitations gave new impetus to the decades-old effort to establish a permanent International Criminal Court.

On July 17, 1998, the great majority of countries of the world voted in Rome, 120 to 7 with 21 abstentions, to establish the International Criminal Court. With the signature and ratification of 60 states the International Criminal Court came into being on July 1, 2002.

Six years later, as of last June 1, 106 countries have ratified the Rome Statute. Written into the Statute is a provision for member states to meet seven years after the entry into force (2009) to consider amendments.

Because the Statute is the result of decades of evolution and five weeks of intense negotiations between 148 countries, it is full of compromises. Even so, it is remarkable.

Never before has the world community united to create an institution invested with legal authority to write, adjudicate and enforce international criminal law. And, despite compromises, it is remarkable for the degree to which so many were able to agree on some basics.

Most important among these is a set of “core crimes” over which the Court has jurisdiction. These are: 1) genocide, 2) crimes against humanity, 3) war crimes and 4) aggression (the waging of aggressive war).

Conflict over Definition

Unfortunately, the Rome conference was unable to agree on a definition of aggression.

Unwilling to leave out “the supreme international crime” containing within itself the “accumulated evil of the whole,” the conference compromised, including aggression among the ”core crimes” but leaving it undefined in anticipation of a future amendment defining the crime and setting out conditions for jurisdiction.

One of the weaker aspects of the Statute is, of course, enforcement. As American Professor Leila Nadya Sadat, a delegate to the Rome conference wrote: “Here classic paradigms of sovereignty in which each state is master of its territory prevail. …The I.C.C.’s ability to effectively enforce international criminal law remains an open question.”

Unfortunately, a major obstacle to the I.C.C., enforcement and otherwise, has been the United States. The U.S. was one of seven countries which voted against the Statute — part of a list which included Iraq, Libya, Israel, Qatar and Yemen. Despite the vote, President Clinton signed the Statute on Dec. 31, 2000.

Less than two years later President George W. Bush “unsigned it.”

Other countries such as Russia and Egypt have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. Still others such as China and India remain opposed.

If major countries such as Russia, China, India and especially the U.S. ever do decide to join and throw their considerable weight behind the I.C.C. here are a few examples of what the organization may eventually be capable of:

–”Treaty crimes” such as hijacking and narcotics trafficking, while not yet covered by the Statute, are slated to be discussed and possibly defined and amended into the Rome Statue as early as 2009. There would be an international institution with the legal power to apprehend, try and punish future Osama Bin Ladens without the catastrophic destruction and waste of war.

–The genocide visited by Saddam Hussein upon the Iraqi Kurds (1984-1991) perhaps could have been stopped, or at least punished upon authorization by the Security Council.

–There will be a venue for resolving murky situations such as the recent violence in Georgia, where a court of law could be the only place to finally decide if and when aggression and/or other crimes occurred and who was responsible.

–Assuming that aggression is eventually defined and fully included in the Rome Statute, those who initiate wars of aggression, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, will do so knowing there is at least the legal possibility of arrest, trial and prison.

Ironically the United States led the way in establishing the precedent for this when the Allies at Nuremberg tried and punished Germans for aggression and other crimes.

At the moment, the prospect of an American president sitting in the dock of the International Criminal Court seems remote.

It should be remembered, however, that in 1973, nobody would have believed that 33 years later General Augusto Pinochet would die under house arrest in Chile, facing trial on charges of human rights abuses, including kidnapping and murder, committed during the dark days of Chile’s military government.

A lot can happen in three decades. Leaders come and go. Power ebbs and flows. National and international perspectives and relationships change.

Imagine the chilling effect the real prospect of arrest, trial and prison for starting a war would have on a head of state considering aggression. Such a simple and powerful deterrent could move humanity significantly closer to realizing the original vision of the United Nations: a world without war.

There simply can be no lasting peace without justice.

To quote Professor Sadat, “As humanity struggles to overcome its darkest impulses in this new millennium, impulses that led not only to the slaughter of hundreds of millions during the 20th century, but threaten our very survival, the creation of effective international institutions and regimes is essential … to transform the prohibitions on the commission of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression into real tools to deter the cruel and powerful.”

Next year in New York, the I.C.C. Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression is scheduled to conclude their work on a definition of aggression for inclusion as an amendment to the Rome Statute.

A review conference of the full I.C.C. Assembly will convene in 2010 to consider this and other amendments.

The work continues.

Peter Dyer is a freelance journalist who moved with his wife from California to New Zealand in 2004. He can be reached at p.dyer@inspire.net.nz .

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British NASA hacker to face U.S. trial

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

LONDON (Reuters) - A British computer expert faces up to 70 years in jail after losing his fight on Wednesday against extradition to the United States, where he is accused of “the biggest military hack of all time”.

Gary McKinnon was arrested in 2002 after U.S. prosecutors charged him with illegally accessing computers, including Pentagon, U.S. army, navy and NASA systems, and causing $700,000 (353,500 pounds) worth of damage.

McKinnon told Reuters in 2006 he was just a computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens really existed and became obsessed with trawling large military networks for proof.

However, the House of Lords, ruled that the gravity of the alleged offences should not be understated and they would carry a maximum life sentence under English law.

McKinnon’s lawyers had argued that sending him to the United States would breach his human rights, be an abuse of the English court process and should be barred as his extradition was sought “for the purpose of prosecuting him on account of his nationality or political opinions”.

A district court ruled in May 2006 that he should be extradited, a decision upheld at London’s High Court in April 2007. But in October three of Britain’s top judges gave McKinnon permission to take his case to the House of Lords.

If found guilty in the United States, McKinnon could face up to 70 years in prison and fines of up to $1.75 million.

Using his own computer at home in London, McKinnon hacked into 97 computers belonging to and used by the U.S. government between February 2001 and March 2002.

McKinnon is accused of causing the entire U.S. Army’s Military District of Washington network of more than 2,000 computers to be shut down for 24 hours.

Using a limited 56K dial-up modem and the hacking name “Solo” he found many U.S. security systems used an insecure Microsoft Windows programme with no password protection.

He then bought off-the-shelf software and scanned military networks, saying he found expert testimonies from senior figures reporting that technology obtained from extra-terrestrials did exist.

At the time of his indictment, Paul McNulty, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said: “Mr McKinnon is charged with the biggest military computer hack of all time.”

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Justice report faults illegal use of politics in hiring federal prosecutors, judges

Monday, July 28th, 2008

RAW STORY | A new Justice Department report concludes that politics illegally influenced the hiring of career prosecutors and immigration judges, and largely lays the blame on top aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Monday’s report singles out the department’s former White House liaison, Monica Goodling, for violating federal law and Justice Department policy by discriminating against job applicants who weren’t Republican or conservative loyalists.

The full 146-page Justice Department report is available here (.pdf)

It is not improper to consider political or ideological affiliations in making hiring decisions for political positions. However, both Department policy and federal law prohibit discrimination in hiring for career positions on the basis of political affiliations.

Our investigation found that Goodling improperly subjected candidates for certain career positions to the same politically based evaluation she used on candidates for political positions, in violation of federal law and Department policy.

The report does not indicate whether Goodling or former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson could face any charges. None of those involved in the discriminatory hiring still work at Justice, meaning they will avoid any department penalties.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said he is debating whether to file perjury charges against the reports’ implicated officials, who may have lied to Congress during investigations of the Justice Department’s politicization.

“Today’s report describes ‘systematic’ violations of federal law by several former leaders of the Department of Justice,” Conyers said in a news release. “Apparently, the political screening was so pervasive that even qualified Republican applicants were rejected from Department positions because they were ‘not Republican enough’ for Monica Goodling and others. The report also makes clear that the cost to our nation of these apparent crimes was severe, as qualified individuals were rejected for key positions in the fight against terrorism and other critical Department jobs for no reason other than political whim. The Report also indicates that Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and Alberto Gonzales may have lied to the Congress about these matters. I have directed my staff to closely review this matter and to consider whether a criminal referral for perjury is needed.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy used the report to slam the White House.

“Rather than strengthening our national security, the Department of Justice appears to have bent to the political will of the administration,” the Vermont Democrat said in a release sent to reporters Monday morning. “Further, the report reveals that the ‘principal source’ for politically vetted candidates considered for important positions as immigration judges was the White House– a clear indication of the untoward political influence of the Bush administration on traditionally non-political appointments.”

Justice investigators said that Goodling, at least, may lose her license to practice law as a result of the findings.

The report said Gonzales was largely unaware of the hiring decisions by two of his most trusted aides. It also said his aides’ decisions weeded out Democrats and that Goodling also rejected at least one job applicant who was a lesbian.

Leahy accused the political influence of stretching higher into the administration and he suggested top officials were simply trying to pin the blame on underlings.

“Like some in the administration who would place blame for the actions at Abu Ghraib solely onto the shoulders of a few bad apples, the Attorney General has tried to dismiss the Inspector General’s first report on politicization issued last month as documenting the actions of just a few bad apples,” Leahy said. “But it was obvious from that first report, and becomes more so with this second joint IG/OPR report, that the problems of politicization at the Department are rooted deeper than that. In this report, we once again see that the Bush administration has allowed politics to affect and infect the nation’s chief law enforcement agency’s priorities.”

The report marks the culmination of a yearlong investigation by Justice’s Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility into whether Republican politics were driving hiring polices at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency that is expected to be above partisan politics. The department’s inspector general is scheduled to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday.

The investigation is one of several that examine accusations of White House political meddling within the Justice Department. Those accusations were initially driven by the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in late 2006 and culminated with Gonzales’ resignation under fire as attorney general last September.

The man who replaced Gonzales, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, said he is “of course disturbed” by the findings.

“I have said many times, both to members of the public and to department employees, it is neither permissible nor acceptable to consider political affiliations in the hiring of career department employees,” Mukasey said in a statement shortly after the report was released Monday morning. “And I have acted, and will continue to act, to ensure that my words are translated into reality so that the conduct described in this report does not occur again at the department.”

With wire reports

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Court Backs Bush on Military Detentions

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

By ADAM LIPTAK | President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.

But a second, overlapping 5-to-4 majority of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruled that Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., must be given an additional opportunity to challenge his detention in federal court there. An earlier court proceeding, in which the government had presented only a sworn statement from a defense intelligence official, was inadequate, the second majority ruled.

The decision was a victory for the Bush administration, which had maintained that a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force after the Sept. 11 attacks granted the president the power to detain people living in the United States.

The court effectively reversed a divided three-judge panel of its own members, which ruled last year that the government lacked the power to detain civilians legally in the United States as enemy combatants. That panel ordered the government either to charge Mr. Marri or to release him. The case is likely to reach the Supreme Court.

How helpful the decision will be to Mr. Marri remains to be seen, as the majority that granted him some relief was notably vague about what the new court proceeding should look like. In that respect, Tuesday’s decision resembled last month’s decision from the United States Supreme Court granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Marri is the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant. The government contended, in a declaration from the defense intelligence official, Jeffrey N. Rapp, that Mr. Marri was a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.

Mr. Marri was arrested on Dec. 12, 2001, in Peoria, Ill., where he was living with his family and studying computer science. He was charged with credit-card fraud and lying to federal agents, and was on the verge of a trial on those charges when he was moved to military detention in 2003.

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said the decision properly recognized “the president’s authority to capture and detain Al Qaeda agents who, like the 9/11 hijackers, come to this country to commit or facilitate warlike acts against American civilians.”

Mr. Roehrkasse added that while the department believed that Mr. Marri “had already received all the process he was due,” its lawyers were “studying the court’s decision and will respond to Mr. Marri’s contentions” before the trial judge.

Jonathan L. Hafetz, a lawyer for Mr. Marri with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, called the Fourth Circuit’s decision deeply disturbing.

“This decision means the president can pick up any person in the country — citizen or legal resident — and lock them up for years without the most basic safeguard in the Constitution, the right to a criminal trial,” Mr. Hafetz said.

The 216-page decision included seven opinions, none of which commanded a majority. The only common ground was four unsigned paragraphs at the beginning of the decision summarizing the result.

The Fourth Circuit is generally considered the nation’s most conservative federal appeals court. The closely divided and complex decision in a major terrorism case therefore came as something of a surprise.

Mr. Marri’s unusual situation played a role, said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University. Mr. Marri “was lawfully present in the U.S. and then arrested and held here, as opposed to being a noncitizen captured in a foreign land,” Professor Chesney said. “This consideration makes his case more difficult even in the eyes of relatively conservative jurists.”

The five judges who ruled that the president has the authority to detain people captured in the United States offered differing criteria for who might be subject to such detention.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said the president might detain members of organizations or nations against which Congress had authorized the use of force who mean to harm people or property to further military goals.

To reverse the trial judge’s decision allowing Mr. Marri’s detention to continue “because he was not captured on a foreign battlefield or foreign soil,” Judge Wilkinson wrote, “is akin to a judicial declaration that Congress and the executive may fight only the last war.”

Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, writing for herself and three other judges, disagreed, saying that Mr. Marri was at most a civilian criminal who may be prosecuted in the courts but not detained by the executive branch.

“This does not mean that al Marri, or similarly situated American citizens, would have to be freed,” Judge Motz wrote. “Like others accused of terrorist activity in this country, from the Oklahoma City bombers to the convicted September 11th conspirator [Zacarias Moussaoui] they could be tried on criminal charges and, if convicted, punished severely. But the government would not be able to subject them to indefinite military detention.”

Judge William B. Traxler Jr. was the swing vote. He agreed that Mr. Marri was subject to detention if what the government said about him was true. But Judge Traxler broke with the judges who voted against Mr. Marri across the board. Those judges said Mr. Marri had already had an adequate opportunity to challenge his detention in court, in the proceeding based on Mr. Rapp’s statement. Judge Traxler said that Mr. Marri must be given a fair and meaningful opportunity to see and refute “the most reliable evidence” against him, subject to national security and other concerns.

The four judges who would have ordered Mr. Marri’s release from military custody — Judges Motz, Roger L. Gregory, M. Blaine Michael and Robert B. King — agreed to join an order returning the case to the trial court based on Judge Traxler’s middle ground. They did so, Judge Motz wrote, “to give practical effect to the conclusions of the majority of the court who reject the government’s position.”

But Judge Gregory expressed frustration over the net effect of the exercise. “There is no concrete guidance as to what further process is due” Mr. Marri, he wrote.

All of the judges who would have denied Mr. Marri any relief — Judges Wilkinson, Karen J. Williams, Paul V. Niemeyer and Allyson K. Duncan — were appointed by Republican presidents; all who would have granted him full relief were appointed by Democrats. Judge Traxler was appointed to the appeals court by President Bill Clinton.

In the conclusion of his long opinion, Judge Wilkinson said terrorism cases presented courts with special challenges.

“We may never know,” he said, “whether we have struck the proper balance between liberty and security, because we do not know every action the executive is taking and we do not know every threat global terror networks have in store.”

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Sweden passes ‘Big Brother bill’

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Press TV | Swedish lawmakers vote in favor of a controversial bill allowing all emails and phone calls to be monitored over ’security issues’. Lawmakers voted late on Wednesday on one of the most divisive subjects in Sweden in recent years.

The bill was narrowly passed after a few revisions were made with 143 votes in favor, 138 opposed and one parliamentarian abstaining.

Critics of the bill have slammed the proposal as an attack on civil liberties that would create a “Big brother” state, while supporters say it is necessary to protect the country from foreign threats.

Meanwhile, the new law is due to take effect on January 1, 2009 and will allow the National Defense Radio Establishment (FRA) - a civilian agency despite its name - to tap all cross-border Internet and telephone communication, AFP reported.

However, even though the government has said that only cross-border communications would be monitored, all communications risk getting caught in the net since some internet servers are located abroad and FRA would need to check all emails to establish whether they have crossed the border.

At the moment, FRA is only allowed to check military radio communications but with the new law, they will be able to listen in to all cross-border telephone calls, as well as reading people’s emails and text messages.

The Defense Ministry has meanwhile defended the new law by insisting that the new legislation is necessary in today’s changed world, where communications are increasingly transmitted through fiber-optic cables.

Critics of the new law, including human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and even the former head of the Swedish intelligence agency Saepo, had prior to Wednesday’s revision argued that it didn’t go far enough in protecting individual rights.

However the government for its part insists that it has addressed all concerns by its last minute amendments of the law that adds more independent and parliamentary controls to FRA’s work.

SM/RE

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LAW SCHOOL TO ORGANIZE BUSH WAR CRIMES TRIAL

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

By Sherwood Ross | A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover .

“This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred,” said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. “It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth.”

“We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice,” Velvel said. “And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s.”

Velvel said past practice has been to allow U.S. officials responsible for war crimes in Viet Nam and elsewhere to enjoy immunity from prosecution upon leaving office. “President Johnson retired to his Texas ranch and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was named to head the World Bank; Richard Nixon retired to San Clemente and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was allowed to grow richer and richer,” Velvel said.

He noted in the years since the prosecution and punishment of German and Japanese leaders after World War Two those nation’s leaders changed their countries’ aggressor cultures. One cannot discount contributory cause and effect here, he said.

“For Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo to spend years in jail or go to the gallows for their crimes would be a powerful lesson to future American leaders,” Velvel said.

The conference will take up such issues as the nature of domestic and international crimes committed; which high-level Bush officials, including Federal judges and Members of Congress, are chargeable with war crimes; which foreign and domestic tribunals can be used to prosecute them; and the setting up of an umbrella coordinating committee with representatives of legal groups concerned about the war crimes such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, among others.

The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover was established in 1988 to provide an affordable, quality legal education to minorities, immigrants and students from low-income households that might otherwise be denied the opportunity to obtain a legal education and practice law. Its founder, Dean Velvel, has been honored by the National Law Journal and cited in various publications for his contributions to the reform of legal education.

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High Court: Gitmo Detainees Have Rights in Court

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

By MARK SHERMAN | The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

The justices handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The vote was 5-4, with the court’s liberal justices in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some who have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The administration opened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to hold enemy combatants, people suspected of ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

The Guantanamo prison has been harshly criticized at home and abroad for the detentions themselves and the aggressive interrogations that were conducted there.

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John Major to speak against 42 day terror law

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

By Rosa Prince | Sir John Major, the former Prime Minister, is preparing to make a rare intervention into domestic policies by speaking out against Government plans to increase detention without trial to 42 days.

In private, Sir John has been telling friends for some time that he believes the plans to be profoundly illiberal and counter productive in the campaign to stamp out home-grown terrorism.

He plans to go public with his concerns, in what will be one of his first forays into current political debates since he was swept from power in 1997.

As a respected elder statesman, Sir John’s words are likely to provide a significant boost to those opposing the Government’s attempts to force the 42 day increase through the Commons next week.

His experiences as a broker of the early stages of the peace process in Northern Ireland give him a unique insight into governing in the face of an on-going terrorist threat.

A friend of the former Prime Minister told The Daily Telegraph: “Sir John has always been very reluctant to stray into domestic politics, but the 42 day proposals are so clearly unjust that he feels the time has come to speak up.

“He knows exactly what it is like to sit at Number 10 and worry that innocent citizens could fall victim to a terrorist bomb plot at any time.

“In fact, unlike Gordon Brown, he has actually been the victim of an attempted assassination, when the IRA mortared Downing Street.

“But Sir John feels that if we compromise with our civil liberties, particularly over something as crucial as detention without trial, then the terrorists will have won the battle.

“He hopes that MPs from all political parties will have the courage to stand firm on this, and not give the terrorists a boost by sacrificing this important aspect of the British way of life.”

Sir John’s intervention comes as the Government does everything possible to apply pressure on reluctant Labour MPs to back the 42 day legislation, which comes before the Commons on Wednesday.

Earlier this week, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, won over a number of potential rebels with a persuasive speech to the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The Daily Telegraph understands that she closed her address with an appeal to party loyalty, telling MPs: “I need you.”

One minister who supports the legislation said: “We have not won the argument in any way, but we will still win the vote, ironically because the Government is in so much trouble in other ways.

“Jacqui’s speech really had an impact, and the backbenchers are openly saying that they will hold their nose and vote for it because Gordon can’t take any more rebellions.”

Meanwhile, leaders of the Church of England have written to MPs saying they remain opposed to the extension of detention without charge to 42 days, despite the concessions given by the Government earlier this week.

In a letter, the Church said: “We believe that a convincing case for the extension of the maximum period of detention without charge beyond 28 days has not been made out. This central point has not been addressed in the various “concessions” or adjustments to the proposal offered by the Government in recent weeks. We believe that any extension beyond 28 days will unacceptably disturb the balance between the liberty of the individual and the needs of national security.”

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U.S. defends removal of Guantanamo judge

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

By Michelle Shephard | The military judge in charge of the U.S. war crimes trials at Guantanamo Bay is defending the removal of the army colonel who presided over Omar Khadr’s case as critics of the process and the Canadian suspect’s lawyers continue to cry foul.

In a statement yesterday, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann said Col. Peter Brownback was removed because the army had turned down an application to extend his active-duty status.

“It is my understanding that this decision was based on a number of manpower management considerations unrelated to the military commission process,” Kohlmann wrote, noting that “as a general rule, it is inappropriate” to comment on such matters but that the controversy convinced him to speak out.

“My detailing of another judge,” he wrote, “was completely unrelated to any actions that Col. Brownback has taken in this or any other case.”

The surprise announcement of Brownback’s retirement came in an email to senior officials last Thursday. Khadr’s military lawyer, navy Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler then forwarded the email to the media, speculating that Brownback’s removal was politically motivated.

While Brownback has denied dozens of the defence’s motions – most importantly, one to dismiss the proceedings because Khadr should be treated as a child soldier and rehabilitated not prosecuted – he has also repeatedly frustrated the prosecution’s attempts to set a trial date.

There’s a push from the Pentagon to have a trial completed before the Nov. 4 U.S. presidential election in an effort to salvage Guantanamo’s tarnished reputation and criticism about the indefinite imprisonment of terrorism suspects without trial.

Kohlmann’s comments yesterday did not end the debate. Soon after his statement was made public, Kuebler sent a press release saying the explanation “raised more questions than answers.”

“Brownback was the judge on one of the first two commission cases to go to trial – are we really supposed to believe that `manpower management considerations’ would cause the army to remove him from such a high-visibility, high-priority assignment?” he asked.

Toronto-born Khadr, now 21, was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan in July 2002 following a firefight with U.S. forces. The Pentagon has charged him with five war crimes, including murder in the death of Sgt. Christopher Speer.

He is expected to return to court June 18 for a pre-trial hearing.

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New High In U.S. Prison Numbers

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

By N.C. Aizenman | More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.

The report compiled and analyzed data from several sources, including the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and Bureau of Prisons and each state’s department of corrections. It did not include individuals detained for noncriminal immigration violations.

Although studies generally find that imprisoning more offenders reduces crime, the effect may be less influential than changes in the unemployment rate, wages, the ratio of police officers to residents and the proportion of young people in the population, report co-author Adam Gelb said.

In addition, when it comes to preventing repeat offenses by nonviolent criminals — who make up about half of the incarcerated population — less-expensive punishments such as community supervision, electronic monitoring and mandatory drug counseling might prove as much or more effective than jail.

For instance, Florida, which has almost doubled its prison population over the past 15 years, has experienced a smaller drop in crime than New York, which, after a brief increase, has reduced its number of inmates to below the 1993 level.

“There is no question that putting violent and chronic offenders behind bars lowers the crime rate and provides punishment that is well deserved,” said Gelb, who as director of the Center’s Public Safety Performance Project advises states on developing alternatives to incarceration. “On the other hand, there are large numbers of people behind bars who could be supervised in the community safely and effectively at a much lower cost — while also paying taxes, paying restitution to their victims and paying child support.”

Sociologist James Q. Wilson, who in the 1980s helped develop the “broken windows” theory that smaller crimes must be punished to deter more serious ones, agreed that sentences for some drug crimes were too long. However, Wilson disagreed that the rise in the U.S. prison population should be considered a cause for alarm: “The fact that we have a large prison population by itself is not a central problem because it has contributed to the extraordinary increase in public safety we have had in this country.”

About 91 percent of incarcerated adults are under state or local jurisdiction. And the report also documents the tradeoffs state governments have faced as they devote larger shares of their budgets to house them. For instance, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased 127 percent; spending on higher education rose 21 percent.

Five states — Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware — now spend as much as or more on corrections as on higher education. Locally, Maryland is near the top, spending 74 cents on corrections for every dollar it spends on higher education. Virginia spends 60 cents on the dollar.

Despite reaching its latest milestone, the nation’s incarcerated population has been growing more slowly since 2000 than it did during the 1990s, when harsher sentencing laws began to take effect. These included a 1986 federal law (since revised) mandating prison terms for crack cocaine offenses that were up to eight times as long as for those involving powder cocaine. In the 1990s, many states adopted “three-strikes-you’re-out” laws and curtailed the powers of parole boards.

Many state systems also send offenders back to prison for technical violations of their parole or probation, such as failing a drug test or missing an appointment with a supervisory officer. A 2005 study of California’s system, for example, found that more than two-thirds of parolees were being returned to prison within three years of release, 40 percent for technical infractions.

“We’re just stuck in this carousel that people get off of, then get right back on again,” said Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton, who as New York City police commissioner in the 1990s oversaw a significant reduction in crime.

Because of these policy shifts, the nationwide prison population swelled by about 80 percent from 1990 to 2000, increasing by as much as 86,000 a year. By contrast, from 2007 to 2008, that population increased by 25,000, a 2 percent rise.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently issued decisions giving judges more leeway under mandatory sentencing laws, and a number of states — including Texas, which has the country’s second-highest incarceration rate — are seeking to reduce their prison population by adopting alternative punishments.

Last year, Maryland officials began developing a new risk-assessment system to ensure that low-level offenders are not kept in jail longer than necessary, said Shannon Avery, executive director of a policy planning division of the state’s Department of Public Safety.

“That’s what you have to do when you don’t have enormous amounts of tax dollars available for building prisons,” she said.

Among the early innovators that states can look to is Virginia, which overhauled its system for sentencing nonviolent offenders in the mid-1990s. Although the state’s incarceration rate remains relatively high, Virginia has managed to slow the growth of its prison population substantially and reduce the share of its budget spent on corrections while still reducing its crime rate.

State judges use a point system to weigh factors believed to predict a lawbreaker’s likelihood of becoming a repeat offender or otherwise pose a threat to public safety. Those deemed low risk are given alternative sentences. As a result, the share of Virginia prison beds occupied by nonviolent convicts has dropped, from 40 percent in 1994 to 23 percent in 2007.

“The idea is to make a distinction between the people we’re afraid of and the ones we’re just ticked off at,” said Rick Kern, director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission. “Not that you shouldn’t punish them. But if it’s going to cost $27,500 a year to keep them locked up, then maybe we should be smarter about how we do it.”

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Students Denied Legal Aid

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

SchNews | Reckon students are all bone-idle skiving filth who haven’t even got the wit to tie their shoelaces properly? Well then you’d be in disagreement with Judge Parsons (of Brighton magistrates). He’s just refused legal aid to seven students up in front of his bench for ‘aggravated tresspass’ (punishable by up to three months inside) on the grounds that “they are intelligent enough to represent themselves”.

The seven are accused of D-locking and supergluing to EDO MBM’s infamous factory of death in Brighton on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War. Despite the fact that the student protesters are all in their first year and none are studying law, the judge is perhaps paying the defendants a compliment in considering them equal in legal know-how to a barrister (who study for around six years before they are considered ready to defend their clients). They are under stringent bail conditions to stay away from EDO MBMs factories.

Of course legal aid is gradually being whittled away for all of us (See SchNEWS 618). But the decision to cut off the supply this time is interesting in the light of how many cases against EDO protestors have ended in failure for the authorities (See SchNEWS 535). Campaign spokesman Andy Beckett told SchNEWS “By robbing these defendants of their rights to adequate legal representation, the authorities are launching an attack on our campaign as a whole. They’ve been forced to drop cases when it looked as if evidence of police collusion with the factory owners was about to emerge. But that evidence only emerged after careful examination by trained solicitors. The whole thing smacks of a desperate attempt to secure convictions against supporters of our successful campaign”.

The National Union of Students is up in arms at this abuse of the student’s status to trick them out of their right to legal representation. In the words of the USSU education officer; “That students are being denied legal assistance simply because they are students is disgraceful. A fair and public trial is a human right. When students take on international arms dealers without legal representation it is laughable to claim that the proceedings could be fair or equal. At a time when civil liberties are under attack nationally, this court is specifically targeting students as an isolated and disempowered group.”

To support the defendants, fight for civil liberties and take action against the arms trade join Smash EDO at the Carnival Against The Arms Trade…

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under War & Terrorism News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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