Habeas Is A Right

I read this over at Emptywheel this morning:

"A potentially explosive new court filing by the lawyers for Lakhdar Boumediene and five other Guantanamo detainees suggests that the Bush administration ordered the Bosnian government to arrest and hold the men after an exhaustive Bosnian investigation had found them innocent of any terrorism related activity and had ordered their release, in order to use them as props in Bush's January 2002 State of the Union speech.

The filing--"Lakhdar Boumediene, et al., Petitioners, v. George W. Bush, President of the United States, et al., Respondents, Petitioners' Public Traverse to the Government's Return to the Petition for Habeas Corpus"--lays out the case that the Bush administration threatened at the highest levels to withdraw diplomatic and military aid to the Balkan nation if Bosnia released the men, which its own three-month investigation had found innocent of any terrorism charges in the days leading up to Bush's January 2002 State of the Union.

Faced with the threats of the withdrawal of aid and that if it released the men, the White House would order NATO troops to detain them, Bosnia transferred the men under duress to the custody of the US government in January 2002. Ten days later, Bush used sixteen words to warn Americans that, in "cooperation" with the Bosnian government, it had captured terrorists who had planned to bomb the US embassy in Sarajevo: "Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy," Bush told the nation.

But, six years later, the detainees' petition says, after the US Supreme Court has sided with the detainees and ordered the US to give the detainees habeas corpus rights, the Bush administration has failed to repeat the embassy plot charges that Bush used in his State of the Union address, or to produce credible evidence of why the men should be held as enemy combatants."

click here for the full transcript of the petition.

Perry Ferrell, of Jane's Addiction, sang "Idiots Rule" , on the "Nothing's Shocking" album, and both those phrases and the lyrics seem to emerge as the Bush/Cheney anthem. After eight years of destroying the very fabric of our nation with their crimes against humanity, failure to adhere to international treaties, and overt dismissal of NATO regulations, the only shock to me will be if they are ever actually held accountable for any of their many impressionable crimes.
Bush has actually violated several US laws including:

• Title 50 United States Code, Section 1805, the FISA law regulating wiretaps.
• Title 18 United States Code, Section 113C, the Federal Torture Act
• Title 18 United States Code, Section 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States Congress about Iraq



According to the US Constitution, international treaties are part of the Supreme Law of the Land. Bush has violated:

• • the UN Charter by invading Iraq,
  • the Geneva Convention by torturing prisoners and holding them without access to counsel.
• Here is an analysis of what constitutes an impeachable offense.