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Court rejects torture-related case against Bush lawyer


By Terry Baynes, Reuters, via dailypress.com

(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday ruled that John Yoo, a former legal counsel to the Bush administration, is immune from a lawsuit by an American citizen convicted on terrorism charges who said he was tortured at a military jail in South Carolina.

Jose Padilla, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison in 2007, had accused Yoo of helping to formulate policies under which those designated as "enemy combatants" by the U.S. government were interrogated and detained.

The San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court decision which had allowed the suit to proceed.

The appeals court found it was unclear at the time of Yoo's tenure that designated enemy combatants were entitled to the same constitutional protections as other accused criminals. It was also not clearly established at the time that Padilla's treatment amounted to torture, the court ruled.

Padilla, a Muslim convert turned al Qaeda recruit, was arrested in Chicago on his return from abroad in 2002 and initially accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city.

He was never charged with planning such an attack, but President George W. Bush ordered authorities to hold him as an "enemy combatant" and interrogate him in a military brig where he was detained in isolation for 3-1/2 years.

Padilla and two co-defendants were convicted on charges of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people abroad, and providing material support for terrorism.

Padilla accused Yoo of overstepping his role as a lawyer to develop the interrogation policy. He sought a declaration that his designation as an enemy combatant, his military detention and his treatment in custody were unconstitutional.

In a separate case in January, another appeals court rejected a similar suit Padilla filed against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other officials. Padilla has appealed that case to the Supreme Court.

Miguel Estrada, a lawyer for Yoo, said in a statement that Padilla had "now lost before two separate courts of appeals, and will need to find a new hobby for his remaining time in prison."

The case before the 9th Circuit is Padilla et al v. Yoo, No. 09-16478.

(Reporting By Terry Baynes; Editing by David Storey)
 

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These Fascist Judges were the very same totalitarian, corrupt judges prosecuted by THE NUREMBERG NAZI TRIALS and Allied/U.S. forces.  Now it seems Amerika, Nato, Israel CAN COMMIT ANY ATROCITY, ANY CRIMINALITY, ANY FASCIST ACT, and the Judges NEGATE THE NUREMBERG PRINCIPLES, AGAINST WAR CRMES, TORTURE, PROTECTING FASCIST ELITES, FASCIST PRESIDENTS, WAR CRIMINALS.   Take down all clas parties, all class laws, duplicitous in nature, corrupt to the core, and replace them with universal social parties that enable social principles, independent, indivisible of thes Fascist class hierarchies.

JUST GOT SIBEL EDMONDS BOOK:   CLASSIFIED WOMEN.... MY COMMENT ON HER INTRODUCTION.


 


Sibel Edmonds and I have a similar starting position.   We are both born from other countries, She from Iran, myself from Germany, grown up in the culture of America.   I am much older, yet her own experience in the political culture of Amerika, produces shocks of reality, hidden histories, that cannot be hidden forever, if one has an inquisitive, intelligent mind.  For me the contradictions of Amerika and its totalitarian Empire policies became obvious to me in the Vietnam era, while for Sibel Edmonds, it came to her in the Bush era.


Sibel had to confront the contradiction of U.S. sponsored Fascism , support for the Fascist Shah, which was followed by the fundamentalist , totaliarin religious Shi ite clergy, reacting to U.S. FASCISM, yet still involved in their own religious, Patriarchal despotism.    It makes the point, like Syria, like Libya, like the post colonial dictatorships, or even Stalinist dictatorships, THAT SO LONG AS THEY ALL HAVE FAILED TO BREAK, BECOME INDEPENDENT, INDIVISIBLE, from dominant Western class forces, all they could hope to be was but a pale, imitation, totalitarian outcome, wher dictatorships have some RELATIVE independence from Western Fascism, but end up as DEFORMED, TOTALITARIAN, PARALLEL OUTCOMES, like the Stalinist dictatorship which only reproduced deformed, totalitarianism, imposed by the dominant class outcome.


Fascism like Stalinism resembles the parallel, false choices, totalitarian outcomes,  between the U.S. sponsored, support for the Fascist Shah serving Capitalism, and U.S. Empire and the religious totalitarian clerics, who thought that their resistance to U.S. Fascism , like Stalinism, or Post Colonial movements would give them independence.   Instead it was only a RELATIVE INDEPENDENCE, still producing the same parallel , totalitarian class deformed outcome, where Western Fascism goes after semi relative, independent dictatorships, still enslaving, like the U.S. Fascist Empire enslaving the whole world. Such false choices, are similar to the generic false choices imposed on the social massses, who vote for mainstream, class parties, that impose the same parallel corrupt, totalitarian choices, enslaving relations on the public.


Fleeing from Stalinism, a Western class outcome, (I was just a few years old)  is similar to Sibel Edmonds fleeing BOTH the U.S. sponsored Shh, and its counter outcome, totalitarian outcome, its fundamentalists, Patriarchal class despots, Shi ite in this case, again a product of Western Totalitarianism, producing direct totalitarianism by the U.S. and relative totalitarianism imposed by Western domination. Like Sibel, I had hight hopes for my two American Fathers, both military, who were linked to my German mother, who came to American in 1959.    The more I found out about Fascism, and its link to Western capitalism, class elites , world wide, the more I realized that Amerika had only substituted the German Fascist Empire, with its own Fascist, global Empire.   Sibel learned the same lessons I did during the Vietnam Era, that the class elites of Amerika and the West had degenerated into criminal corruption, Empire tyranny, and Fascist elites.  (THIS REPRESENTS HER INTRODUCTION, TO HOPE AND FAITH IN HUMANITY, IN AMERIKA, ONLY TO SEE ITS INVERTED REALITY, GLOBAL FASCISM)

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