Chris Hedges: The Polite Conference Rooms Where Liberties Are Saved and Lost

[marmar]

from truthdig:



The Polite Conference Rooms Where Liberties Are Saved and Lost

Posted on Mar 26, 2012
By Chris Hedges


I spent four hours in a third-floor conference room at 86 Chambers St. in Manhattan on Friday as I underwent a government deposition. Benjamin H. Torrance, an assistant U.S. attorney, carried out the questioning as part of the government’s effort to decide whether it will challenge my standing as a plaintiff in the lawsuit I have brought with others against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta over the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known as the Homeland Battlefield Bill.

The NDAA implodes our most cherished constitutional protections. It permits the military to function on U.S. soil as a civilian law enforcement agency. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to selectively suspend due process and habeas corpus for citizens. The law can be used to detain people deemed threats to national security, including dissidents whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, and hold them until what is termed “the end of the hostilities.” Even the name itself—the Homeland Battlefield Bill—suggests the totalitarian concept that endless war has to be waged within “the homeland” against internal enemies as well as foreign enemies.

Judge Katherine B. Forrest, in a session starting at 9 a.m. Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, will determine if I have standing and if the case can go forward. The attorneys handling my case, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, will ask, if I am granted standing, for a temporary injunction against the Homeland Battlefield Bill. An injunction would, in effect, nullify the law and set into motion a fierce duel between two very unequal adversaries—on the one hand, the U.S. government and, on the other, myself, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, the Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir and three other activists and journalists. All have joined me as plaintiffs and begun to mobilize resistance to the law through groups such as Stop NDAA.

The deposition was, as these things go, conducted civilly. Afran and Mayer, the attorneys bringing the suit on my behalf, were present. I was asked detailed questions by Torrance about my interpretation of Section 1021 and Section 1022 of the NDAA. I was asked about my relationships and contacts with groups on the U.S. State Department terrorism list. I was asked about my specific conflicts with the U.S. government when I was a foreign correspondent, a period in which I reported from El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Middle East, the Balkans and other places. And I was asked how the NDAA law had impeded my work. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_polite_conference_rooms_where_liberties_are_saved_and_lost_20120326/

[saras]

1. Good luck. It's a profoundly important question, and a really awful law.

[marmar]

2. Shameless self-kick

[chill_wind]

6. Here's another.

K & R

[gratuitous]

3. Don't worry

If your freedom is really at risk, our military will bust in and protect it. Because that's what our military does, according to everybody in front of a microphone in our popular media. So, if the military isn't there fightin' and protectin' your freedom, then it must not really be in any danger. Q to the E to the motherfuckin' D!

[Jim Lane]

4. K&R

With regard to the standing argument being considered by the Department of Justice, I wonder -- the person who would clearly have standing would be someone who's actually detained under the law. Would that detainee, however, be allowed access to a lawyer and the ability to bring a habeas corpus petition? If not, then denying standing to Hedges and his co-plaintiffs would have the practical effect of completely insulating this law from judicial review.

[geek tragedy]

5. NDAA does nothing to restrict habeas corpus

rights.

[Jim Lane]

7. Well, that's what I'm questioning.

Suppose someone is detained pursuant to these provisions. He starts rattling the bars of the cell and demanding to speak to a lawyer so that he can file a habeas petition and get out. What happens?

Possibility #1: He gets to see a lawyer, who files a habeas petition and gets him out. In that case the law seems rather pointless. A would-be terrorist who was a genuine threat would just be harassed by being taken out of circulation for a day or so.

Possibility #2: He's told that, as a special detainee, he's not allowed to have visitors, including lawyers, at least not just yet, or his lawyer is told that the court doesn't have jurisdiction to hear a detainee's habeas petition, or the court hears the petition but rules that the military's assertion of a national security interest is, by itself, sufficient to establish probable cause . In any of these cases, the detainee may still have a technical right to habeas corpus but, as a practical matter, it will be meaningless.

I haven't studied NDAA enough to know these details, but I hope the Hedges suit survives any standing challenge and proceeds to a decision on the merits. That should be illuminating. If you believe that NDAA is consistent with habeas corpus, then you should also oppose a dismissal on grounds of standing.

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. "It permits the military to function on U.S. soil as a civilian law enforcement agency."

Why the hell don't people GET that????
kick...and rec. and kick again.

[dixiegrrrrl]

9. Yet, ironically, Sen Wyden introduced a resolution for freedom of the press---in Syria!

S.Res. 391: A resolution condemning violence by the Government of Syria against journalists, and expressing
the sense of the Senate on freedom of the press in Syria.

Sponsor:
Sen. Ron Wyden

while Hedges points out how the press HERE is muzzled in a myriad of ways.