Bush
Final week, prosecutors and defence force counsel at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, completed iii weeks of plea negotiations. At the stop of the three weeks, the military judge presiding over the trials of the five plotters of the attacks on 9/11 signed an order reflecting that progress had been made and anticipating a continuation of the negotiations in May.
Amid the defendants is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the admitted and acknowledged mastermind of the attacks.
All v have been defendants in the same capital murder prosecution for ten years. None has had a jury trial. What were the lawyers negotiating?
Here is the backstory.
Shortly after the 9/eleven attacks, President George Due west. Bush-league opened a military prison at the U.Due south. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to house persons arrested for 9/xi-related attacks and other acts in what he chosen the war on terror.
Bush believed that since Cuba is outside the United States, the Constitution would not restrain the government there, federal laws would not apply there and federal judges could not interfere with the regime's behavior in that location.
Bush's CIA began a program of systematic torture of detainees by CIA and foreign intelligence personnel at and then-called black sites in foreign countries. Much of the torture was inflicted on people who knew naught of value to the CIA. The victims of CIA torture, whether they had information of value or not and whether they revealed what they had or not, were transferred to Gitmo.
Bush's extraconstitutional behavior embraced the fake belief -- soon corrected by the U.Southward. Supreme Court -- that it could confine detainees without charges for the rest of their lives.
While the foreign torture was existence conducted by the CIA on some detainees and others were being housed at Gitmo, the U.South. military tried its hand at torturing some of the prisoners information technology was supposed to exist protecting.
When FBI agents arrived at Gitmo to interrogate detainees and informed them of their correct to counsel, the torture stopped; it is a federal criminal offense. The prisoners secured lawyers who filed complaints with the U.S. Commune Court in Washington, D.C., which was assigned to hear these cases.
The complaints revealed horrific torture, and they were met with the government'due south horrific and tortured interpretations of the Constitution. In six cases that eventually constitute their style to the Supreme Court, the detainees argued that their constitutionally protected rights to due process had been violated.
The Bush administration argued that the judicial branch had no jurisdiction over the government's beliefs at Gitmo, because Gitmo is outside the U.S. It also argued that, even if federal courts did accept jurisdiction over the government at Gitmo, the detainees had no valid claims to present to the courts because the Constitution simply protects Americans.
Congress jumped into this fray by suspending the right to habeas corpus for those at Gitmo. The correct to habeas corpus is an ancient personal correct in which the prisoner may compel his jailer to bring the prisoner to a neutral guess and legally justify the prisoner's confinement. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus only when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may crave it.
The Bush assistants lost five of six Gitmo cases in the Supreme Court. The example it won involved the location at which a detainee who is an American citizen was to exist tried.
The jurisprudence of the remaining five cases held that wherever the authorities goes and confines people against their will, the Constitution goes with it, since all who do authorities power have taken an oath to practise so consistent with the Constitution. Moreover, since there was no invasion or rebellion at Gitmo, the suspension of habeas corpus was nullified.
The court held that since the two operative amendments to the Constitution -- the Quaternary and the 5th -- protect all "people" and every "person" from the government, their protections are not limited to Americans simply.
All this litigation eventually forced the government to commence the process for military jury trials with the full panoply of constitutional protections. Gitmo was established by Bush's executive club on Jan. 11, 2002. In xx years, there accept been no jury trials of any 9/eleven defendants.
Now, back to the electric current negotiations. They were initiated past the government because the Departments of Defense and Justice -- after continual changes of judicial and prosecutorial personnel -- now no longer want to effort anyone, peculiarly those defendants who take been tortured.
That's so because numerous armed forces judges at Gitmo take consistently ruled that defendants may amendment records of their torture and inform juries of it.
Those of us who believe that the Constitution ways what it says argued that 9/11 was a series of federal crimes and the defendants should have been accorded constitutional protection from Bush'due south torturers and tried in federal courts where their declared crimes occurred -- in New York Urban center, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Had the feds done that, these cases would have been completed, and the defendants either bedevilled or acquitted, and the government would not be spending $100 million a year on Gitmo. Simply Bush'south disdain for constitutional norms has wrecked the rule of law in these cases and made it nearly impossible to try any of them -- thus, the plea negotiations that are now under manner.
The lawyers are negotiating dropping the death penalty and protecting the defendants' religious liberties, medical treatment and fauna comforts in prison, in return for guilty pleas.
The fanaticism of George West. Bush -- under whose incompetent scout the attacks of 9/eleven occurred and who killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to produce regime modify because Saddam Hussein "tried to kill my daddy" -- continues to haunt and demean the American judicial system.
Because Bush irreparably assaulted the Constitution he swore to uphold, the government is afraid to endeavor the men who killed 3,000 Americans.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a erstwhile New Jersey Superior Court Judge, has published nine books on the U.S. Constitution.
This article originally appeared on New Bailiwick of jersey Herald: Andrew P. Napolitano: Bush and his torturers
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/bush-torturers-napolitano-080103656.html
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