Civil Rights / Liberties

By Dave Lindorff

The ongoing and deepening global economic crisis, to which Barack Obama owes his presidential election victory, is no small thing, to be sure. It also presents us on the left with a lot of openings to press for progressive change.

Election spurs 'hundreds' of race threats, crimes
By Jesse Washington | MyWay.com

Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting "Assassinate Obama." Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.

There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

By Paul Richmond

My Medical Marijuana client was detained and charged by the U.S. Border Patrol at one of the new checkpoints on the Olympic Peninsula.

I sent a letter pointing out the questionable nature of these under the Fourth Amendment with supporting caselaw.

The U.S. Attorney responded by dropping charges and four others, then issuing a new policy that they wouldn't prosecute "small possession cases."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/387945_pot15.html

http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2008/nov/14/charges-dropped-against-pot-pa...

Priest Calls Vote for Obama a Mortal Sin
by David Walters | Washington Post.com

A Catholic priest in South Carolina has decided that the democratic act of casting a vote is, in some cases, a mortal sin. Therefore, he has decided that parishioners who voted for Barack Obama are not entitled to the grace of Jesus Christ through communion until they've done penance.

"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law," Rev. Jay Scott Newman wrote in a letter to parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville.

Students at the U of North Texas have protested the creation of "free speech zones" on campus with free speech head stones. They reserved every free speech zone on campus for a week and used them to collect thousands of signatures on a petition to get rid of the free speech zones. The school has agreed to eliminate the zones and consider the United States of America to again be a free speech zone.

Restoring America's Rights Record: Memo to the President-Elect
By Leila Nadya Sadat | Jurist

America's human rights record has been badly tarnished by seven years of abuse by the Bush Administration in its conduct of the war on terror, particularly as regards U.S. policy towards detainees. The United States has been criticized before the Torture Committee, the Human Rights Committee, the Inter American Commission, the European Parliament, many national courts and Parliaments and the international press. What should the new administration do to set matters right?

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

This week and into next, NorthCom and NORAD are conducting a joint exercise called "Vigilant Shield '09."

The focus will be on "homeland defense and civil support," a NorthCom press release states.

From November 12-18, it will be testing a "synchronized response of federal, state, local and international partners in preparation for homeland defense, homeland security, and civil support missions in the United States and abroad."

NorthCom is short for the Pentagon's Northern Command. President Bush created it in October 2002. (The Southern Command, or SouthCom, covers Latin America. Central Command, or CentCom, covers Iraq and Afghanistan. And the new AfriCom covers, well, you get the picture.)

By David Swanson

I think the peace movement and every justice movement in the United States should simply overwhelm Congress members during the next two months with one and only one demand: Pass the Employee Free Choice Act in January. This is, of course, the bill that the labor movement has been trying to pass for years, and that Democrats in Congress and President Elect Obama have committed to making law: http://aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca

By Dave Lindorff

The word is that Barack Obama, in keeping with his promise of a new post-Bush/Cheney era of “civility in government,” is telling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid not to eject the treacherous Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) from the Democratic caucus.

This is a terrible mistake. Joe Lieberman is a wretched example of a man without principle—a back-stabbing slimeball of a politician whose only allegience, apparently, besides to himself, is to Israel.

Now I don’t want anyone to think I’m some rabid anti-semite. My wife and kids are Jewish, we have good friends who are Israeli, and no, I don’t think the Jews run the media or the country. I do, however, think that Joe Lieberman thinks more about what, in his warped and shriveled worldview, is good for Israel, than about what is good for America.

Police: Woman Slain as She Tried to Leave KKK Rite | ABCNews.com
Sheriff: Woman in rural La. for KKK initiation killed after asking to be taken back to town

An Oklahoma woman invited to a rural Louisiana campsite for a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual was shot and killed after she asked to be taken back to town, the sheriff of a New Orleans suburb said Tuesday.

Eight people were arrested after authorities found the woman's body hidden under some brush, on the side of a road several miles from the remote campsite where the initiation was planned.

Investigators found weapons, several flags and six Klan robes at the campsite, St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain said in a news release.

Strain said the woman, whose identity was not released, was recruited over the Internet to participate in the ritual and then return to her home state to find other members for the white supremacist group.

Catholic bishops plan to forcefully confront Obama
By Manya Brachear | Chicago Tribune

America's Roman Catholic bishops, long one of the leading political forces against abortion, vowed on Tuesday to accept no compromise for the sake of unity until there is legal protection for the unborn.

About 300 prelates gathered here for their national meeting adopted a formal blessing for a child in the womb and advised Chicago's Cardinal Francis George as he drafted a post-election letter to America's Catholics. The moves were meant to tell the incoming Obama administration, which supports keeping abortion legal, that the nation's Catholic bishops are stepping up their opposition to abortion.

Call center for immigrants
Mexican government to run Tucson service for the 'most vulnerable'
By Mariana Alvarado | Arizona Daily Star

The Mexican government, citing concern about a growing anti-migrant climate in Arizona, is creating a telephone call center to take complaints and assist its citizens when they run into problems.

The call center, expected to open next week, will be in Tucson. It is the first of several that will eventually be set up in cities near the U.S.-Mexico border.

"It is in response to the demands of Mexicans living here in the U.S.," said Juan Manuel Calderón Jaimes, the Mexican consul here. "The call center for Arizona will serve our most vulnerable population, the undocumented."

Obama Planning US Trials for Guantanamo Prisoners
Obama plans US trials for Guantanamo detainees; idea for new court system draws criticism
By Matt Apuzzo and Lara Jakes Jordan | ABCNEws.com

President-elect Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a "sad chapter in American history" and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.

Under plans being put together in Obama's camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.

A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans aren't final.

The move would be a sharp deviation from the Bush administration, which established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at the Navy base in Cuba and strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States. Obama's Republican challenger, John McCain, had also pledged to close Guantanamo. But McCain opposed criminal trials, saying the Bush administration's tribunals should continue on U.S. soil.

by Linda Milazzo

According to the local Los Angeles newspaper, The Daily Breeze, California Congresswoman, Jane Harman, a blue dog conservative democrat, is up for a high level intelligence position in the Obama administration. The positions being considered are CIA Director, Director of National Intelligence, and Secretary of Homeland Security. If this speculation becomes fact, and Harman is appointed overseer of the freedoms of the American people, the people's freedoms are toast. Conservative Democrat Harman consistently legislates AGAINST participatory democracy and against personal freedom.

The most egregious example of Harman's disregard for participatory democracy is HR 1955 - the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" - a frightening bill she slipped in the House for passage just over a year ago. HR 1955 is so anti-dissent, so anti-freedom and so McCarthy-like in its establishment of citizen review Commissions that I've written on it twice - both times appealing to the public to stop passage of its Senate clone, S 1959, which luckily has not yet come up for vote. Unfortunately, Mrs. Harman was so covert when sneaking in "1955" that no citizens could lobby to stop it.

Can Barack Obama undo Bush's tangled legal legacy?
By Marisa Taylor and Michael Doyle | McClatchy Newspapers

"Once pardoned, officials implicated in the controversy would be required to discuss details of the policies because they'd be unable to assert their Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. The best person to lead such a commission? Levinson thinks it's John McCain, who condemned the interrogation techniques when he was running against Obama."

When Barack Obama becomes president in January, he'll confront the controversial legal legacy of the Bush administration.

Diane Nash was on front line of Civil Rights Movement
Freedom Awards ceremony lauds three

By Michael Lollar | Memphis Commercial Appeal

Diane Nash was one of the rare female leaders in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s but the least known winner of this year's Freedom Awards from the National Civil Rights Museum.

Nash, 70, of Chicago was living in Nashville in 1960 as a student at Fisk University. As a child, she had dreamed of being a nun. As an adult, her dreams turned to nonviolent civil disobedience.

Offended by prejudice in the South, Nash attended disobedience workshops and became a leader of Nashville's lunch counter sit-ins.

"I think there is no greater invention of the 20th century than Mohandas Gandhi's invention of a way of making social change without killing and maiming each other," Nash said this week. She was preparing to accept the National Freedom Award in a ceremony today honoring her along with former vice president Al Gore and blues legend B.B. King.

By Marjorie Cohn

Celebrations of Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States erupted in countries around the world. >From Europe to Africa to the Middle East, people were jubilant. After suffering though eight years of an administration that violated more human rights than any other in U.S. history, Obama spells hope for a new day.

While George W. Bush was President, I wrote Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, which chronicled his war of aggression, policy of torture, illegal killings, unlawful Guantánamo detentions, and secret spying on Americans. When the book was published, it seemed unimaginable that we could elect a President who would turn those policies around. But the election of Obama holds that potential.

High Court May Consider Legality of Detention
By Jerry Markon | Washington Post

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri was close to going on trial for fraud when prosecutors marched into an Illinois courtroom with a demand. Dismiss the charges, they said, because President Bush had just designated the defendant an enemy combatant.

Marri's attorneys protested, but U.S. Attorney Jan Paul Miller declared that the military had already taken custody of the Qatari national, now deemed an al-Qaeda sleeper agent. "There is no longer a judicial proceeding before this court," he said.

In an interview with Ma'ariv, Emanuel's father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, said he was convinced that his son's appointment would be good for Israel. "Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel," he was quoted as saying. "Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House." SOURCE.

Islamic civil rights group asks FBI to probe assault as hate crime

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 11/6/2008) A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on the FBI to launch a hate crime investigation into an Election Night assault on a New York Muslim by a gang allegedly angry that Barack Obama was elected president.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said media reports indicate that four “white men” beat a Muslim of Liberian heritage as he was walking near his Staten Island home. The victim said the alleged attackers jumped from a car and attacked him after shouting “Obama.” Local law enforcement authorities are investigating the attack as a hate crime.

SEE: Gang Angry at Barack Obama Win Beat Me, Says Staten Island Teen (NY Daily News)

Last night a change in this country took place that not too long ago many people said would never happen. An African-American was elected to the White House and by a major landslide, which gives him a mandate by the public to fulfill his promises. This landslide indicates the people have placed their hope with this man they call their president for a change in this country.

Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials
By Andy Worthington

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, as drawn at a Guantanamo hearing in 2004In any credible court system, the eve-of-election conviction of an associate of Osama bin Laden for producing promotional material for al-Qaeda, which directly encouraged impressionable young men to join a violent jihad against the United States, would be a resounding victory for the Bush administration. It would stand, however belatedly, as a last-minute acknowledgment that the administration, whose conduct in the “War on Terror” has been widely criticized for its almost indiscriminate extra-legal brutality, was at least capable of trying, sentencing and imprisoning one important al-Qaeda insider for war crimes before handing over the reins of power to a new administration.

But this is Guantánamo, and the court system is anything but credible. After four hours’ deliberation on Friday, the military jury in the trial of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (as presented, above, in a courtroom sketch in 2004, after his hair and beard had been shaved) announced today that it had convicted the 39-year old Yemeni on 17 counts of conspiracy, eight counts of solicitation to commit murder and 10 counts of providing material support for terrorism, and the judge, Air Force Col. Ronald Gregory, gave him a life sentence. However, when the trial began last Monday, I explained that, no matter what happened in the days that followed, the trial’s legitimacy had evaporated six months ago, when al-Bahlul refused to take part in what he regarded as a charade.

Washington, D.C. Is a Fourth Amendment-Free Zone
By Charles Peña | Independent Institute

While the Fourth Amendment guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons … and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures,” the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) made it clear earlier this week that the Constitution does not apply in D.C. According to Metro Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn, “Inspections could take place at any Metrorail station or Metrobus stop. They will be random, unannounced and focused on explosive detection.” While the justification supplied for ignoring the Constitution was one of deterring terrorists, the unfortunate reality is that this gross violation of rights is likely to be completely ineffective.

Judge orders White House to produce wiretap memos
By Joan Lowy | Associated Press

A judge has ordered the Justice Department to produce White House memos that provide the legal basis for the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 warrantless wiretapping program.

U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. signed an order Friday requiring the department to produce the memos by the White House legal counsel's office by Nov. 17. He said he will review the memos in private to determine if any information can be released publicly without violating attorney-client privilege or jeopardizing national security.

Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping.

Jury deliberates at Gitmo propaganda trial | MiamiHerald.com

A Pentagon prosecutor closed his war crimes case against an alleged al Qaeda propagandist Friday, calling the accused part of ''a band of lawless wretches'' who incited suicide bombers to kill Americans.

Jury deliberation began after lunch in the case of Ali Hamza al Bahlul, about 40, of Yemen. He is accused of three war crimes -- conspiracy, solicitation to murder and providing material support for terror -- in a 23-count charge sheet.

Prosecutors called 14 witnesses across four days, including interrogators, jailed ex-jihadists, and FBI forensic experts. The accused, who could be jailed for life, did not call a single defense witness. He also forbade his lawyer from cross-examining the government witnesses.

Judge Rejects Motion to Keep Bin Laden Driver Locked Up
by Jess Bravin | WSJ.com

A military judge rejected a Bush administration move to that could have kept Osama bin Laden's former driver locked up for an additional five years.

In August, a military jury sentenced the former driver, Salim Hamdan, to just five months plus time served, rather than the 30 years prosecutors sought.

The six-officer jury convicted Mr. Hamdan of providing support for terrorism by driving Mr. bin Laden around Afghanistan, but acquitted him of a more serious conspiracy charge. The jury, which was advised Mr. Hamdan would be credited for pretrial detention, calculated a sentence that set a release date of Dec. 31.

Jurors said the government failed to prove Mr. Hamdan, captured in November 2001 in Afghanistan, was anything but a minor functionary in the bin Laden organization.

Although prosecutors initially said they accepted the jury's verdict, in September they filed a motion contending that the judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, lacked authority to credit Mr. Hamdan for pretrial detention. The Defense Department released the motion earlier this month, after an inquiry from The Wall Street Journal.

Smith orders inquiry into MI5 and CIA torture claims
By Richard Norton-Taylor and Duncan Campbell | Guardian.co.UK

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, has asked the attorney general to investigate possible "criminal wrongdoing" by the MI5 and the CIA over its treatment of a British resident held in Guantánamo Bay, it was revealed tonight.

The dramatic development over allegations of collusion in torture and inhuman treatment follows a high court judgment which found that an MI5 officer participated in the unlawful interrogation of Binyam Mohamed. The MI5 officer interrogated Mohamed while he was being held in Pakistan in 2002.

CIA officers could face trial in Britain over torture allegations: Attorney General to investigate abuse claims
By Robert Verkaik | Independent.UK.com

Related video:

Senior CIA officers could be put on trial in Britain after it emerged last night that the Attorney General is to investigate allegations that a British resident held in Guantanamo Bay was brutally tortured, after being arrested and questioned by American forces following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has asked Baroness Scotland to consider bringing criminal proceedings against Americans allegedly responsible for the rendition and abuse of Binyam Mohamed, when he was held in prisons in Morocco and Afghanistan.

The development follows criticism of US prosecutors by British judges who have seen secret evidence of torture committed against Mr Mohamed, including allegations his torturers used a razor blade to repeatedly cut his penis. The Attorney's investigation is expected to include allegations that MI5 colluded in Mr Mohamed's rendition. Mr Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian national and British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, when he was questioned by an MI5 officer.

On Tuesday, Government lawyers wrote to the judges hearing Mr Mohamed's case against the UK government in the High Court. In the letter they said "the question of possible criminal wrongdoing to which these proceedings has given rise has been referred by the Home Secretary to the Attorney general for consideration as an independent minister of justice". Baroness Scotland has been sent secret witness statements given to the court and public interest immunity certificates for the proceedings.

Case marks first use of international standard • Move marks rejection of Bush lawyers' opinion
By Carol Rosenberg, McClatchy Newspapers

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - In a first, a military judge ruled yesterday that a Guantánamo detainee's confession was extracted through torture, and excluded it from the trial of a young Afghan detainee at the war court.

Afghan police threatened the family of teenager Mohammed Jawad while he was undergoing interrogation at a Kabul police station, said army colonel Stephen Henley, the judge, in a three-page ruling.

Jawad, now facing trial by military commission, is accused of throwing a grenade inside an Afghan bazaar in December 2002, which wounded two US soldiers and their Afghan interpreter. None was killed.

Henley found in the ruling that there was reason to believe Jawad was under the influence of drugs at the time of his capture and forced confession.

If anyone refuses to allow their bag to be searched, they will be permitted to simply leave, and presumably enter at a different station where they won't be searched. So, the whole point is to scare people, not to protect them.

Tony Teolis, Veterans For Peace, Delwin Anderson Memorial Chapter, http://vfpdc.blogspot.com writes: