Alberto Gonzales: there is no habeus corpus

[widebody911]

All your corpus are belong to us

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/19/gonzales-habeas/

there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution -Alberto Gonzales

[Jim Richards]

It's nice that Arlen Specter is there to slap his a$$ back. Gonzales is scarey.

[island_dude]

That is truly chilling. He really said it! He also admitted that he hadn't read the constitution recently. It was a really scary bit of analysis. Most attemting to define a line around the smallest subset of people who are entitled to the protections of habeus corpus.

This administration really scares me sometimes

[HardDrive]

We have some scary motherf*ckers in the whitehouse at this point.

It is the conservative in me that is screaming bloody murder when I read this. These guys are more for 'big government' intruding into your private life than any liberal.

[Dan in Pasadena]

Originally posted by HardDrive
We have some scary motherf*ckers in the whitehouse at this point.

I'm amazed we got three repsonses and no one attempted to defend this point of view. Awesome.

[on-ramp]

are we sure Alberto Gonzales didn't just cross the border? is he an illegal immigrant?

The founding fathers designed the constitution to protect us from people like Gonzales, Cheney and Bush.

[nostatic]

Originally posted by Dan in Pasadena
I'm amazed we got three repsonses and no one attempted to defend this point of view. Awesome.

fint isn't home from work yet

[turbo6bar]

Don't worry, guys. If you aren't a Muslim, you have little chance of being locked up indefinitely.

[on2wheels52]

While we're talking about the Gonzales, hows Elio been latley?
Jim

[Jeff Higgins]

Sounds like another lawyer picking the fly***** out of the pepper. Totally ignoring the implied and generally understood meaning of the words in question, he is technically correct. The fact that he has decided to use this tactic is somewhat reminiscent of "it depends on what 'is' is". We should not allow lawyers of any stripe to have a hand in our government, for any reason. They will be our undoing.

[dafischer]

Originally posted by island_dude
This administration really scares me sometimes

This administration scares me most of the time.

[widebody911]

I'm surprised that the Fint/Reardon/Snowman junta haven't jumped in. I guess Anne Coulter hasn't published anything on this yet

[Jim Richards]

Maybe we need to invade Cuba so we can expand Gitmo for all the people B2, Cheney and Gonzales want to imprision w/o habeus corpus.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by turbo6bar
Don't worry, guys. If you aren't a Muslim, you have little chance of being locked up indefinitely.

I dunno, Joe says mean men are coming to get me any day now.

On the other hand, Gonzales is using the Lincoln precedent to put forward this idea. The latest law passed by Congress seems to support this withdrawal of Habeas Corpus as well, stating that anyone can be arrested by the military now and tried before a military tribunal.

The Militaristic Democratic Dictatorship is almost upon us. When Hilary Clinton is elected, it will be complete.

[fastpat]

Another article on this travesty of an Attorney General.

Our Soviet Attorney General

by Thomas R. Eddlem

Sometimes officials of the Bush Administration have me wondering who really won the Cold War.

Such was the case when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18th, in his conversation about habeas corpus with Senator Arlen Specter (R-Penn.):

Of course, Gonzales is partly right. There is no specific "grant" of habeas corpus in the Constitution, because inalienable rights are not doled out by government. America’s founding fathers didn't believe governments grant rights. Instead, they believed (to quote Thomas Jefferson) that "all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." God, not government, grants rights according to the thinking and language of the founders. That’s why George Mason wrote – when framing the Bill of Rights – that "Congress shall make no law" abridging our rights rather than "Every individual is granted" such-and-such a right. The difference is key, because anything government has the legitimate power to give you, it also has the power to take away. The founders said that our rights were unalienable, unable to be removed by the power of government.

And nothing – other than life itself – is more essential than the right to liberty. Habeas corpus simply says that government must produce some proof of a crime before locking up a man and taking away his liberty.

Gonzales’ candid remarks reveal the totalitarian worldview of the evil men who currently infest the White House. Gonzales is saying that unless the Constitution explicitly grants all citizens a right, these rights can be taken away by the president – or perhaps even that these rights never existed in the first place.

Let’s take Gonzales’ philosophy to its logical conclusion. Americans would therefore enjoy no right to freedom of speech because there is, to use Gonzales' language, no language in the Constitution that says: "Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to free speech." After all, the Constitution's First Amendment simply says that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." It never claimed to grant a right; all it said was that congress can't abridge it. So that leaves the president and the courts free to do whatever they want in taking our rights away.

The same exact thing could be said of most rights protected by the Constitution: the right to freedom of the press, assembly, religion, the security against unreasonable search and seizure, the guarantee of a jury trial, and so on. None of these, according to Gonzales’ new legal theory, exist as rights for Americans because the Constitution has not "granted" them.

Sovietizing America

It’s not difficult to find a clear example of a constitution where government – not God – "grants" rights to citizens: The constitution of the old Soviet Union did that. The 1977 Soviet Constitution "granted" many rights (here are two examples):

"Article 54: Citizens of the USSR are guaranteed inviolability of the person. No one may be arrested except by a court decision or on the warrant of a procurator….

"Article 56: The privacy of citizens, and of their correspondence, telephone conversations, and telegraphic communications is protected by law."

The communist Chinese Constitution of 1982 has virtually identical language:

"Article 37: the freedom of person of citizens of the People’s Republic of China is inviolable. No citizen may be arrested except with the approval or by decision of a people’s procuratorate or by a decision of a people’s court, and arrests may be made by a public security organ….

"Article 40: The freedom and privacy of correspondence of citizens of the People’s Republic of China are protected by law."

Gonzales is about as serious about protecting the U.S. Bill of Rights as the Soviets of the old USSR were about protecting the rights of citizens there.

No, scratch that. Gonzales is worse than the Soviets and the Chinese.

The Chinese and the Soviets at least said the rights existed, even if they regularly violated them. Gonzales denies their existence. Moreover, agents of the Soviet state bear less moral culpability because they feared for their own lives and safety if they didn’t violate the rights of citizens. Gonzales has no such pressure on him to violate our rights.

Gonzales doesn’t even have the luxury of lying his way out of his statement that habeas corpus isn’t in the Constitution. The Bush Administration has fought three habeas cases all the way to the Supreme Court, including two on American citizens (Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi) and one foreigner (Hamdan). Gonzales was only articulating the policy the Bush Administration has followed for the past five years.

The Bush Administration has openly challenged the American people, and said that we have no rights.

These evil men need to be impeached. After that, we should perform a fumigation and an exorcism at the White House to clean it out fully.

If we remain inactive, the abuses will escalate and they will eventually come after you, dear reader.

January 23, 2007

Thomas R. Eddlem is a radio talk show host and freelance writer, and writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American magazine and AntiWar.com. He is a graduate of Stonehill College and resides in southeastern Massachusetts. Oh, and he hates tyranny – especially in his native land.

[kach22i]

Gonzales is nuts.

[Jim Richards]

Come on guys...quit pickin' on my wonderful AG.

[Dan in Pasadena]

Originally posted by kach22i
Gonzales is nuts.

Oh he's a lot worse than nuts. He's dangerous and his "logic" is dangerous. For the average workaday American that perhaps doesn't think about these things ordinarily, his way of thinking is very, very dangerous.

[Moneyguy1]

Power corrupts.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[m21sniper]

Originally posted by HardDrive
We have some scary motherf*ckers in the whitehouse at this point.

It is the conservative in me that is screaming bloody murder when I read this. These guys are more for 'big government' intruding into your private life than any liberal.

I agree.

The current bunch really ARE facists, plain and simple. The only thing more terrifying is the Dems siezing all 3 houses of power and going on a 2nd Amendment shredding binge as a result of the stupidity of W and his merry men.

And SCOTUS is even more power-grabbing then the others. Congress or the Prez would never dream of publically passing the eminent domain laws that SCOTUS has recently 're-written'.

Whatever, baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.