[Marxism] Ruling Favors British Guantanamo Detainees

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4100481.stm

TERROR DETAINEES WIN LORDS APPEAL

[By an eight to one majority the House of Lords law lords ruled that
detaining foreign terrorist suspects without trial breaks human rights
laws].

The law lords said [that the government's anti-terrorism measures] were
incompatible with European human rights laws. The men will stay behind
bars while ministers decide how to react.

. . . On Thursday, senior law lord Lord Bingham said the rules were
incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights as they
allowed detentions "in a way that discriminates on the ground of
nationality or immigration status".

Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead, in his ruling, said:

"Indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial is anathema in any
country which observes the rule of law. It deprives the detained person
of the protection a criminal trial is intended to afford."
______________

The decision is in a PDF file that can be downloaded from a sidebar
given in the article above. Although the above article's summary says
nothing about habeas corpus, if you open the PDF file of the decision
and search you will find several references to the British law of
habeas corpus.

While our laws are not the same the British, they are based on them by
the Common Law and by the specific references in the Declaration of
Independence and The Constitution as well as contemporaneous
interpretation by the founding "fathers."

Recent decisions before various U.S. courts of appeal are also
questioning the rationale behind the Guantanamo detentions justified by
the government's indefinite "war on terror."

Here are a few quotes from Jefferson and Hamilton who, despite their
differences, were in much more ideological harmony than commonly
assumed.

Brian Shannon
___________________

Jefferson on Habeas Corpus - "every man here, ALIEN or citizen"

"The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against
everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume." --Thomas
Jefferson to A. H. Rowan, 1798. ME 10:61

"Freedom of the person under the protection of the habeas corpus I deem
[one of the] essential principles of our government." --Thomas
Jefferson: 1st Inaugural Address, 1801. ME 3:322

"Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The
parties who may be arrested may be charged instantly with a well
defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public
safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on
less probable testimony in those than in other emergencies, let him be
taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues,
only giving him redress against the government for damages. Examine the
history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the
habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been
either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been
charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever
have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of
the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become
habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its
constant suspension." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME
7:97

"[The] bill of rights [should provide] clearly and without the aid of
sophisms for... the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus
laws." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787.

"The following [addition to the Bill of Rights] would have pleased
me:...No person shall be held in confinement more than __ days after he
shall have demanded and been refused a writ of habeas corpus by the
judge appointed by law, nor more than __ days after such a writ shall
have been served on the person holding him in confinement, and no order
given on due examination for his remandment or discharge, nor more than
__ hours in any place of a greater distance than __ miles from the
usual residence of some judge authorized to issue the writ of habeas
corpus; nor shall that writ be suspended for any term exceeding one
year, nor in any place more than __ miles distant from the station or
encampment of enemies or of insurgents." --Thomas Jefferson to James
Madison, 1789. ME 7:450, Papers 15:367

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1520.htm
____________

The Federalist, No. 84 [Alexander Hamilton]

It may well be a question whether these are not upon the whole, of
equal importance with any which are to be found in the constitution of
this state. The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus, the
prohibition of ex post facto laws, and of titles of nobility, to which
we have no corresponding provisions in our constitution, are perhaps
greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it contains.
The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact, or in other
words, the subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they
were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary
imprisonments have been in all ages the favourite and most formidable
instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious Blackstone in
reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital. "To bereave a man
of life (says he) or by violence to confiscate his estate, without
accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of
despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the
whole nation; but confinement of the person by secretly hurrying him to
goal, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public,
a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary
government." And as a remedy for this fatal evil, he is every where
peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas corpus act, which
in one place he calls "the BULWARK of the British constitution."
[Emphasis in original.]


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