'Suspected Enemy Combatant' no Longer a 'Person'

[MikeWB]

Supremes : 'Suspected Enemy Combatant' no Longer a 'Person'


Portrait of a non-person. Image from girloftomorrow.

Dred Scott redux:
Enemy combatants denied legal standing
...once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared 'non-persons' and have their liberty stripped away...
By Chris Floyd / December 19, 2009

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person."

They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving "process stories" that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat -- and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right.

But William Fisher noticed, and gave this report at Antiwar.com:
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal Monday to review a lower court's dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees' lawyers charged Tuesday that the country's highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."
[....]
Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" -- did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees' claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military's detention of suspected enemy combatants."
The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even be sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."

Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants."

And still further: Barack Obama has now declared, openly, of his own free will, that he does not consider these captives to be "persons." They are, literally, sub-humans. And what makes them sub-humans? The fact that someone in the U.S. government has declared them to be "suspected enemy combatants." (And note: even the mere suspicion of being an "enemy combatant" can strip you of your personhood.)

This is what President Barack Obama believes -- believes so strongly that he has put the full weight of the government behind a relentless series of court actions to preserve, protect and defend these arbitrary powers. (For a glimpse at just a sliver of such cases, go here.)

One co-counsel on the case, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, zeroed in on the noxious quintessence of the position taken by the Court, and by our first African-American president: its chilling resemblance to the notorious Dred Scott ruling of 1857, which upheld the principle of slavery. As Fisher notes:

"Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not 'persons' within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow," he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants — whether or not they were slaves — were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

And now, once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared "non-persons" and have their liberty stripped away -- and their torturers and tormentors protected and coddled by authority -- at a moment's notice, with no charges, no defense, no redress, on nothing more than the suspicion that they might be an "enemy combatant," according to the arbitrary definition of the state.

Barack Obama has had the audacity to declare himself the heir and embodiment of the lifework of Martin Luther King. Can this declaration of a whole new principle of universal slavery really be what King was dreaming of? Is this the vision he saw on the other side of the mountain? Or is not the nightmarish inversion of the ideal of a better, more just, more humane world that so many have died for, in so many places, down through the centuries?

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Thanks Mike,

This is simply "Star Chamber"-Protocols Jew crap like in Cromwellian England or the Soviet Union.

Like the recent Interpol legalism changes... giving them free trespassing... the Criminal Obama Puppet administration is enhancing the Criminal Bush Administration's "Star Chamber" Legalisms to reduce any traditional rights.  I guess the Zionistas like Rahm E. see the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as some sort of European Legal traditions to strip away at this point in their fulfillment of their Jew Protocols.

 I'm sure the same cretins that created did 9/11, launched the Wars, and created the  DHS with the help of ADL-AIPAC-NeoCon policy criminals are running these changes behind the scenes.  It has nothing to do with party affiliation.  It is simply a Jew-Zio power grab, plain and simple.  Legally we are now no different than when the Idiots ran the Soviet Union and enslaved the Russian people under their agenda.

America used to a "sword of Justice" of sorts with protections under Law, now the Protocol Jews have dulled it into a club to attack their enemies with and they don't care how it gets tarnished.

The Star Chamber and the US Constitution  - Camera stellata

Court sessions were held in secret, with no indictments, no right of appeal, no juries, and no witnesses. Evidence was presented in writing.

As the U.S. Supreme Court described it, "the Star Chamber has, for centuries, symbolized disregard of basic individual rights. The Star Chamber not merely allowed, but required, defendants to have counsel. The defendant's answer to an indictment was not accepted unless it was signed by counsel. When counsel refused to sign the answer, for whatever reason, the defendant was considered to have confessed." Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806, 821-22 (1975).

The historical abuses of the Star Chamber are considered a primary motivating force behind the protections against compelled self-incrimination embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[7] The meaning of "compelled testimony" under the Fifth Amendment—i.e., the conditions under which a defendant is allowed to "take the Fifth"—is thus often interpreted via reference to the inquisitorial methods of the Star Chamber.[8]

[Anonymous]

The courts would like every one to think only a PERSON may bring a tort action against another PERSON.
NOT TRUE!!
Joe John Blow may bring an action against Joe Don Won in federal court.
Whereas,
Joe John Blow may not bring an action against JOE JOHN WON.
And of course as always, JOE JOHN WON can not bring an action against Joe John Blow.
A non-person can bring an action under common law suit against another non-person (man).
A corporation (JOE) can not bring an action against a man(Joe).
Follow me on that one? :lol:  :lol:  :lol:

[Anonymous]

It all hinges on what capacity the plaintiff has chosen to move against the defendant.
In normal times JOE JOHN TERRORIST would move against the DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
But, in these times Joe John Terrorist would have to move against the man....Barrack Hussein Obama, who, by the way...has no state immunity.
THE PRESIDENT BARRACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, the corporation has immunity from suit.
Just send Barrack Hussein Obama a bill.
If Barrack Hussein Obama fails to pay or dispute then, file a statement of claim against Barrack Hussein Obama in a non-representative style.
I am quite confident the Supreme court did not rule leaving no remedy as that would be an open ended claim that there is no law.
No Supreme court justice would ever do that.
So...I suggest one look for the remedy....within the ruling because, its there.