Peace4UM This Week

[peace4um-admin at lists.mutualaid.org]

 = = = Peace Train = = = Peace Forum Announcements = = =
=====================================================================
 
MONDAY, Dec. 2 - Peace Forum Meeting and TEACH-IN with RAMZI KYSIA,
an Arab-American writer recently returned from a year in Iraq.  Ramzi
will help us prepare for our upcoming debate.  6:30 pm, Tydings 2106
 
TUESDAY, Dec. 3 - PEACE CAFE, hosted by AJACS, Arab-Jewish Action
Coalition of Students for a just peace in the holy land (whew!).
Movie, food and discussion - a place to safely and comfortably talk
about Israel and Palestine.  7 pm, Key 0106
 
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 4 - Body Bag Demo in DC, location TBA; a media
protest event against Exxon/Mobil and The War.  For more info, call
Manish at (301) 982-0729 or email mpant at wam.umd.edu

** WEDNESDAY, Dec. 4 - ACLU National Director Anthony Romero Speaks
** 7:30 pm in Grand Ballroom; Students free with ID, others $10.

In the name of fighting terrorism, the fascist Bushies and the 
spineless Democrats have put in place the foundations of a genuine
police state.  You can now be arrested secretly, declared an "enemy
combatant," held incommunicado with no access to a lawyer and no 
rights whatsoever, tortured, found guilty by two out of a three-man 
military tribunal, and executed in secret.  US citizenship means 
nothing in all this.  The government can and probably is recording
your email, websites visited, phone conversations, grades, purchases,
travel, etc. etc.  If you are a political activist, you are probably
on the watch list of people to be subjected to extra security checks
at airports.  So far the worst abuses have been confined to a limited
number of cases, although thousands have suffered, especially 
noncitizens and members of suspect religious or ethnic groups.  But
who can doubt that another attack of 9/11 scale or worse, or perhaps 
a string of lesser attacks, would be all the Bush fascists would need
to justify mass arrests and wholesale suppression of dissent?

I don't know if Anthony Romero is going to say all this quite so
starkly, but I'm sure it's what's on his mind.  Don't miss his talk.
 
=====================================================================
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58308-2002Nov30
washingtonpost.com 

In Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects 
Those Designated 'Combatants' Lose Legal Protections 

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 1, 2002; Page A01 

The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system
in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens
alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and
punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary
system, lawyers inside and outside the government say.

The elements of this new system are already familiar from
President Bush's orders and his aides' policy statements and
legal briefs: indefinite military detention for those designated
"enemy combatants," liberal use of "material witness"
warrants, counterintelligence-style wiretaps and searches led
by law enforcement officials and, for noncitizens, trial by
military commissions or deportation after strictly closed
hearings.

Only now, however, is it becoming clear how these elements
could ultimately interact.

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in
court cases, the administration, with approval of the special
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a
clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the
information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy
combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base.
Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the
detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

Administration officials, noting that they have chosen to
prosecute suspected Taliban member John Walker Lindh,
"shoe bomber" Richard Reid and alleged Sept. 11 conspirator
Zacarias Moussaoui in ordinary federal courts, say the
parallel system is meant to be used selectively, as a
complement to conventional processes, not as a substitute.
But, they say, the parallel system is necessary because
terrorism is a form of war as well as a form of crime, and it
must not only be punished after incidents occur, but also
prevented and disrupted through the gathering of timely
intelligence.

"I wouldn't call it an alternative system," said an
administration official who has helped devise the legal
response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "But it is
different than the criminal procedure system we all know and
love. It's a separate track for people we catch in the war."

At least one American has been shifted from the ordinary
legal system into the parallel one: alleged al Qaeda "dirty
bomb" plotter Jose Padilla, who is being held at a Navy brig,
without the right to communicate with a lawyer or anyone
else. U.S. officials have told the courts that they can detain
and interrogate him until the executive branch declares an end
to the war against terrorism.

The final outlines of this parallel system will be known only
after the courts, including probably the Supreme Court, have
settled a variety of issues being litigated. But the prospect of
such a system has triggered a fierce debate.

Civil libertarians accuse the Bush administration of an
executive-branch power grab that will erode the rights and
freedoms that terrorists are trying to destroy -- and that were
enhanced only recently in response to abuses during the civil
rights era, Vietnam and Watergate.

"They are trying to embed in law a vast expansion of
executive authority with no judicial oversight in the name of
national security," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for
National Security Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit
group that has challenged the administration approach in
court. "This is more tied to statutory legal authority than J.
Edgar Hoover's political spying, but that may make it more
dangerous. You could have the law serving as a vehicle for
all kinds of abuses."

Administration officials say that they are acting under ample
legal authority derived from statutes, court decisions and
wartime powers that the president possesses as commander
in chief under the Constitution.

"When you have a long period of time when you're not
engaged in a war, people tend to forget, or put in backs of
their minds, the necessity for certain types of government
action used when we are in danger, when we are facing
eyeball to eyeball a serious threat," Solicitor General
Theodore B. Olson, who leads the administration's
anti-terrorism legal team in the federal courts, said in an
interview. 

Broadly speaking, the debate between the administration and
its critics is not so much about the methods the government
seeks to employ as it is about who should act as a check
against potential abuses.

Executive Decisions 

Civil libertarians insist that the courts should searchingly
review Bush's actions, so that he is always held accountable
to an independent branch of government. Administration
officials, however, imply that the main check on the
president's performance in wartime is political -- that if the
public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or
ineffective, it will vote him out of office.

"At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone
will have to decide whether that [decision to designate
someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision,"
Olson said. "Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or
will it be the president of the United States, elected by the
people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity
to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of
those who work for him?"

Probably the most hotly disputed element of the
administration's approach is its contention that the president
alone can designate individuals, including U.S. citizens, as
enemy combatants, who can be detained with no access to
lawyers or family members unless and until the president
determines, in effect, that hostilities between the United
States and that individual have ended.

Padilla was held as a material witness for a month after his
May 8 arrest in Chicago before he was designated an enemy
combatant. He is one of two U.S. citizens being held as
enemy combatants at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. The
other is Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi Taliban fighter who was
captured by American troops in Afghanistan and sent to the
U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until it was discovered
that he was born in Louisiana. 

Attorneys are challenging their detentions in federal court.
While civil libertarians concede that the executive branch has
well-established authority to name and confine members of
enemy forces during wartime, they maintain that it is
unconstitutional to subject U.S. citizens to indefinite
confinement on little more than the president's declaration,
especially given the inherently open-ended nature of an
unconventional war against terrorism.

"The notion that the executive branch can decide by itself that
an American citizen can be put in a military camp,
incommunicado, is frightening," said Morton H. Halperin,
director of the Washington office of the Open Society
Institute. "They're entitled to hold him on the grounds that he
is in fact at war with the U.S., but there has to be an
opportunity for him to contest those facts."

However, the Bush administration, citing two World War
II-era cases -- the Supreme Court's ruling upholding a military
commission trial for a captured American-citizen Nazi
saboteur, and a later federal appeals court decision upholding
the imprisonment of an Italian American caught as a member
of Italian forces in Europe -- says there is ample precedent
for what it is doing.

Courts traditionally understand that they must defer to the
executive's greater expertise and capability when it comes to
looking at such facts and making such judgments in time of
war, Bush officials said. At most, courts have only the power
to review legal claims brought on behalf of detainees, such as
whether there is indeed a state of conflict between the United
States and the detainee.

In a recent legal brief, Olson argued that the detention of
people such as Hamdi or Padilla as enemy combatants is
"critical to gathering intelligence in connection with the overall
war effort."

Nor is there any requirement that the executive branch spell
out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy
combatant, Olson argues.

"There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end
this," Olson said in the interview. "There will be judgments
and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to
be made by the executive that are probably going to be
different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."

The federal courts have yet to deliver a definitive judgment on
the question. A federal district judge in Virginia, Robert G.
Doumar, was sharply critical of the administration, insisting
that Hamdi be permitted to consult an attorney. But he was
partially overruled by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th
Circuit, based in Richmond.

The 4th Circuit, however, said the administration's assertion
that courts should have absolutely no role in examining the
facts leading to an enemy combatant designation was
"sweeping." A decision from that court is pending as to how
much of a role a court could claim, if any. The matter could
well have to be settled in the Supreme Court.

Secret Surveillance 

The administration scored a victory recently when the U.S.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruled 3 to 0
that the USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress shortly after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, gives the Justice Department
authority to break down what had come to be known as "the
wall" separating criminal investigations from investigations of
foreign agents.

The ruling endorsed the administration's view that law
enforcement goals should be allowed to drive Justice
Department requests for special eavesdropping and search
warrants that had been thought to be reserved for
counterintelligence operations. But the court went further,
agreeing with the administration that "the wall" itself had no
real basis in pre-Patriot Act law. Instead, the court ruled, "the
wall" was a product of internal Justice Department guidelines
that were, in turn, based partly on erroneous interpretations of
the law by some courts.

There is no clear line between intelligence and crime in any
case, the court said, because any investigation of a spy ring
could ultimately lead to charging U.S. citizens with crimes
such as espionage.

The decision overruled an earlier one by the lower-level
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in which seven judges
sharply criticized past Justice Department misstatements in
applications for permission to do secret surveillance.

Administration officials say that the ruling permits what is
only sensible -- greater sharing of information between
federal prosecutors and federal counterintelligence officials. 

Thanks to enforcement of "the wall" by FBI lawyers, they
note, pre-Sept. 11 permission to search Moussaoui's computer
was not sought, a crucial missed opportunity to prevent the
attacks.

In practical terms, the ruling means that the attorney general
would still have to convince the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court that he has probable cause to believe that
a given subject of a wiretap or search is an agent of a foreign
terrorist group, a standard that is not dissimilar to the one
required for warrants in ordinary criminal cases.

Yet civil libertarians say that targets of such investigations
who end up being ordered out of the country or prosecuted
would lose a crucial right that they would have in the ordinary
criminal justice system -- the right to examine the
government's evidence justifying the initial warrant.

"So the government starts off using secret surveillance
information not to gather information upon which to make
policy, but to imprison or deport an individual, and then it
never gives the individual a fair chance to see if the
surveillance was lawful," Martin said.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/international/middleeast/02IRAQ.html

December 2, 2002

Allied Planes Bomb Site in Southern Iraq

By REUTERS

     BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 1 (Reuters) — Western
     warplanes bombed southern Iraq today in an attack that
Iraqi officials said killed four people at the offices of an oil
company but that the United States military said was aimed at
Iraqi air defenses.

Residents of the southern port city of Basra said warplanes
bombed administrative offices of the state-run Southern Oil
Company on the outskirts of the city around noon. The
company supervises part of Iraq's oil exports under the
oil-for-food deal with the United Nations.

An Iraqi military spokesman said four people were killed and
27 were wounded in the attack. An oil company official said
the casualties were company employees and passers-by.

The military spokesman said the planes also attacked two
other civilian targets in the south. He said Iraqi air defense
units had fired on the planes.

In a statement, the United States Central Command in
Tampa, Fla., said coalition aircraft had fired precision-guided
weapons at Iraqi air defense facilities near Basra. It said the
incident, in the southern no-flight zone, occurred after Iraqi
forces fired at coalition aircraft in the northern no-flight zone.

==================================================================
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61647-2002Dec1
washingtonpost.com 

Antiwar Effort Gains Momentum 
Growing Peace Movement's Ranks Include Some Unlikely Allies 

[Excellent coverage of the strong grass-roots movement!]