Gotta give it to these fascists, they don't waste any time
using their new weapons:
Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
It doesn't make any sense to bold any of that text. It's all equally mindblowing when you consider Bush and his associates have engineered the neutralization of a 900 year old legal concept.
In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.
---
Immediately after Bush signed the act into law Tuesday, the Justice Department sent a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit asserting the new authorities and informing the court that it no longer had jurisdiction over a combined habeas case that had been under consideration since 2004. The U.S. District Court cases, which had been stayed pending the appeals court decision, were similarly invalid, the administration informed that court on Wednesday.
Bush is the face, but you know this is the work of the unitary vice-executive:
The administration's persistence on the issue "demonstrates how difficult it is for the courts to enforce [the clause] in the face of a resolute executive branch that is bound and determined to resist it," said Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor involved in the detainee cases.
Nixon's revenge indeed!
If you can think of anyone who can possibly defend this legislation that allows the disappearing of people, tell them about Jose Padilla, a US citizen, born in Brooklyn, New York, not an immigrant, held by his government as an enemy combatant, without charges, from May 8 2002 to November 22, 2005. This could be them, it could be any of us, and now we can be disappeared.