Your name has been a constant for me over the years now for providing accurate and important information re Bush GWOT and the prisoners at Guantánamo. Your coverage, for instance, on the al-Marri decision is head and shoulders over anything else I could find.

Here’s Valtin’s site:
http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/

Andy: I cannot thank you enough. This is a truly superb piece, which pulls together so many angles and insights (such as the isolation and coerced evidence), which go beyond the decision. And it’s beautifully written.

Bingo. I would go still further: to the extent that the United States Supreme Court decided to duck the question of the outrageous executive fiat detention of Padilla in 2004 (and that with the allegedly more reasonable O’Connor and Rehnquist then in place instead of the automaton Roberts and the weasel Alito). The High Court decided that the burning question raised by Padilla was a venue issue. That moment, the United States, was de facto a dictatorship at that very moment, and I said as much. Jonathan Hafetz more or less confirmed this when I interviewed him, confirming that all “live” Padilla issues applied to Mr. al-Marri.

Of course, a little remembered detail of Mr. Padilla’s original case was that the district court judge, now Attorney General of the United States Michael Mukasey, ostensibly recognized Padilla’s right to counsel but implicitly recognized the heretofore-not-recognized-in-American-jurisprudence “executive bypass of the Constution;” Mukasey was then duly reversed by New York’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals (holding “charge or release”… no exceptions), duly eviscerated over… venue.

And yet while another federal appeals court noted in Parhat that the government does not get to make up the facts and law just because “it says it thrice”… what are we to make of the Supreme Court trio of Rasul, Hamdan and Boumediene resulting in, well, nothing: hundreds remain at GTMO, thousands more in Afghanistan, Iraq, and God knows where, with the precedent of arbitrary detention of citizens (Padilla) and lawful residents (al-Marri) alive and well, especially in the 4th Circuit, home of the naval brig where the government is most likely to consign anyone it wants.

It seems 9-11 really, really changed everything, while we Americans just sat here and let it. I hope I live long enough for the folly this has been to be recognized, and institutional reforms put in place to be sure that it is all reversed, and never repeated, and those responsible for this willy-nilly needless sacrifice of Constitutional principles duly brought to justice.

Amazing that the Magna Carta is being nullified in a land that resisted such measures from its former colonial boss. But much like all civilian liberties that were suspended in Germany in the nineteen thirties.

Many thanks for your sterling work, and for keeping us all informed on the progress of the doomsday clock. From your all-too-vivid description of the events leading to the indefinite incarceration of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, it looks to me as if the USA has not moved on since the Salem Witch Trials.

First, someone (KSM) is denounced as a witch. Then he is routinely tortured, until he gives the torturers some names. Then, the process is repeated for each of those names. At least there is good job security for the torturers — I can see no reason why or how this process should ever come to an end.

Nor can I see any reason why those people’s membership of the human race should not be rescinded by the rest of us — those who still have consciences (if only residual ones).

Best wishes
Tom Welsh
Basingstoke, England

The 4th Circuit has recently been rendering bizarre, leftward decisions due to its lack of appointments to replace retiring members. Thus, several panels of three judges have rendered leftward decisions, only to be over-ruled by full panels. If we can only hang on a few more months without any appointments, we may see a complete transformation of this panel from the right-wing rubber-stamp that it has been for the last 20 years.

William Loeffler

I then wrote back:

That would be good, William. Reading through the ruling, I was shocked at how extraordinarily divided the opinions were – although that also seems to be part of the confusion sown by inventing a whole new quasi-legal system after 9/11.
Thanks for the comment. May I post it on my website?

And I received the following reply:

Yes. I practice in the Circuit and we have been going back and forth from getting terrible to great decisions (obviously I am a classical liberal in the line of John Stuart Mill) with respect to the sentencing guidelines, drugs and exclusionary evidence. I believe the Washington Post did an article on this about a year ago.

Due to the anticipation of a Democrat in the White House and bitter in-fighting between two contiguous states, Virginia and Maryland that really do not like each other, over appointments in the 4th Circuit (which is composed of West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina — your state had to have a proper British name for your state to be included in this Circuit, lol), the 4th Circuit has been slow to replace retiring judges.

Plus, about the only “nice” thing George Bush ever did was that he allowed Gregory, an African-American, whom you mention in your article and who was only an interim, unconfirmed, Clinton judge, to stay on and receive a full lifetime appointment as a judge, and that amounted to an additional liberal appointment.

This isn’t necessarily pertinent to the above, but the U.S. has gone from being one of the most liberal to being one of the least liberal countries in the world in the last 30 years. In 1975, we were one of the few countries that did not have the death penalty. I believe that a lot of this has to do with our particular apportionment methods which may just about be at the point of shifting leftward again as enough people from the liberal Northeast states are now moving to fairly large states like Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Colorado to shift the nation leftward again. Paradoxically, at first, such movement made these states have an even more conservative influence but once it reaches a certain level, the states and their representatives will (are) becoming more moderate.