Black Breath of the Nazgûl

Jul 23, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Corruption, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values, War

Black Breath of the Nazgûl

AKA Phillip Ruddock  AKA ‘Dock Vader

How dare ordinary ‘people’ have “views!” 

 

Asked on Southern Cross radio whether the case was a mess, he replied:
“No, what I think has happened is that people who have views about the nature of the law are determined to try and bring it into disrepute. That’s what I think is happening.”

Yes, that is exactly what is happening in some quarters.

Those who believe that they own the law and that the law is a tool for re-election, or for legal validation of unethical and immoral policy, or for the pursuit of personal agendas, are certainly bringing it into disrepute.

Elsewhere, what is happening is that — by revealing information about the way the law is being used and abused, and by debating processes and procedures — people who care about the law and its already tenuous relationship with “justice” are illustrating how the law is a bad law, how the law is being used disreputably and how the law in general is being debauched by the government and its stooges.

For your interest, if any, here are the relevant sections of the Crimes Act that relate to Haneef’s charge:

102.7 Providing support to a terrorist organisation…..

(2) A person commits an offence if:

(a) the person intentionally provides to an organisation support or resources that would help the organisation engage in an activity described in paragraph (a) of the definition of terrorist organisation in this Division; and(b) the organisation is a terrorist organisation; and(c) the person is reckless as to whether the organisation is a terrorist organisation.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 15 years.

_________________
terrorist organisation means:

(a) an organisation that is directly or indirectly engaged in, preparing, planning, assisting in or fostering the doing of a terrorist act (whether or not a terrorist act occurs); or
(b) an organisation that is specified by the regulations for the purposes of this paragraph (see subsections (2), (3) and (4)).

_________________

“member” of an organisation includes:

(a) a person who is an informal member of the organisation; and

(b) a person who has taken steps to become a member of the organisation; and

(c) in the case of an organisation that is a body corporate–a director or an officer of the body corporate.

_________________

terrorist act means an action or threat of action where:

(a) the action falls within subsection (2) and does not fall within subsection (3); and

(b) the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause; and (c) the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of:

(i) coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country; or

(ii) intimidating the public or a section of the public.

_________________
(2) Action falls within this subsection if it:

(a) causes serious harm that is physical harm to a person; or

(b) causes serious damage to property; or

(c) causes a person’s death; or(

d) endangers a person’s life, other than the life of the person taking the action; or

(e) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public; or(

f) seriously interferes with, seriously disrupts, or destroys, an electronic system including, but not limited to:

(i) an information system; or

(ii) a telecommunications system; or

(iii) a financial system; or

(iv) a system used for the delivery of essential government services; or

(v) a system used for, or by, an essential public utility; or

(vi) a system used for, or by, a transport system.

(3) Action falls within this subsection if it:

(a) is advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action; and

(b) is not intended:

(i) to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person; or

(ii) to cause a person’s death; or

(iii) to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action; or

(iv) to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.

Note that the law clearly requires you to satisfy yourself  that any person to whom you render a service or a “resource” which may conceivably assist a member of a terrorist organisation to perform, or conceive, or plan, or prepare, or assist a terrorist act — a packet of nails, say, or a bottle of Ammonia, or a map, or a tank of petrol — is not a member of a terrorist organisation. And the evidentiary burden that you took sufficient steps to satisfy yourself of this probably rests with you.

Luckily for the government, it could be argued (although we don’t) that the Government itself would be guilty of a “threat made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause”, “coercing, or influencing by intimidation”, “intimidating the public or a section of the public” if it weren’t for subsection (3).

On the other hand, it could also be argued, surely (although we don’t), that the government’s invasion of Iraq was intended “to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person and to cause a person’s death, and to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action” (who was safe in Canberra), and “to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public” (at least the Iraqi public).

You can be charged for what you did today…

Jul 18, 2007 | Australian Values, Democracy, Immigration, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Terrorism, Values

You can be charged for what you did today…

 

So here’s what Haneef was formally charged with on 14 July 2007, as revealed by Tony Jones on Lateline on Tuesday night:

“…intentionally providing resources to a terrorist organisation consisting of persons including Sabeel Ahmed and Kafeel Ahmed, his cousins, being reckless as to whether the organisation was a terrorist organisation”.

1.   “intentionally providing resources”
I went to the bank today. They intentionally provided me with resources.
I bought a sandwich at lunchtime and was intentionally provided with that resource.
Some months ago I bought a mobile phone. The mobile shop assistant intentionally provided me with that resource, and with a sim-card.

2.   “a terrorist organisation”
No-one, least of all Haneef, has yet been charged, either here or in Britain, with being a member of a terrorist organisation. Sabeel Ahmed, the second-cousin to whom Haneef gave the sim-card, has not been charged with being a member of a terrorist organisation.
There is no terrorist organisation yet established by British charges. It is an imputation and it is an improper imputation.

3.   “being reckless as to whether the organisation was a terrorist organisation”
This is extraordinary.

Firstly, “whether the organisation” presumes that Haneef’s cousins were –  and that Haneef knew they were – an “organisation”.

I suppose your family is “an organisation” in some sense of the word.

He is not charged that he knew they were a terrorist organisation, which he cannot be accused of since the British have not even charged the “organisation” with being a terrorist organisation and any such “terrorist organisation” would have to be established in a British court.

Haneef is not charged with recklessly providing resources to a terrorist organisation. He is charged with being reckless as to whether  the “organisation” — which has not been established in law — was a terrorist organisation.

How can he be charged with being reckless as to whether or not he was providing resources to a terrorist organisation, if not even the British, let alone Australia, know or have yet shown whether it is one or not?

 

The whole thing does not make sense.

However, the inference which must unavoidably be drawn is this:

My sandwich shop assistant and bank teller and mobile phone shop assistant were reckless today in providing resources to me without considering whether I might or might not be part of a terrorist organisation.

They asked me no questions in this respect at all.

You probably provided services, resources, to numerous people today and you did this with reckless disregard as to whether or not they were terrorists or constituted part of a terrorist organisation.

If you provided resources of any sort which the AFP might decide to deem to be “resources”, then you, and I, and almost all of us could be charged with exactly the same “offence” as Haneef, remembering that it is not necessary that such an “organisation” need be proved to exist in any jurisdiction. Or to be a proscribed organisation at all. It is enough for Mick Keelty or the AFP generally, or Philip Ruddock, or Kevin Andrews, merely to think it might be or could be. Or want it to be.

Seriously, given the right set of circumstances you could be charged at any time for doing what everyone does every day.

Ruddock, true to form, waffled and sidetracked and failed to answer questions. Asked about the “section 503A protected information” on the basis of which apparently Andrews cancelled Haneef’s visa, Ruddock could not – would not – say that the information which is not available to Haneef or his lawyers is inadmissible in court.

So Haneef has no rights to challenge the secret information on which he is detained and accused.

And neither do we Australians have the right to make our own judgment on that information.

We can on these grounds have little doubt that the game in play is a coalition re-election exercise.

Well, “this dog don’t hunt”.

So please save us from the Howards and Ruddocks and Andrewses saying one more time, “Trust me, I’m a politician”.

And for christs sake, when will the Labor Party stand up for what’s right for once?

Pardon Us – We Missed the Logic

Jul 17, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Corruption, Democracy, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Values

Pardon Us – We Missed the Logic

We’re just a bit confused 

 

Dr Haneef has been charged with recklessly providing resources to a terrorist organisation (to wit, a sim card). The alleged recklessness occurred in the UK. It did not take place in Australia.

There is no suggestion, as far as we can know, that Haneef has broken any law in Australia.

No-one in Britain has yet been found guilty of being a terrorist or part of a “terrorist organisation”.

The British allegations are still ‘allegations’.

The charge against Haneef therefore presumes the British suspects are guilty and that they are, or are part of, a terrorist organisation. 

They may well be, but that is not how the law in both our countries is supposed to work. Australia, in any case, simply cannot, has no authority to, determine the guilt or innocence of a person in a foreign jurisdiction. That is done by courts and juries in the jurisdiction where they are charged. Or can they? It does seem, logically, that they have indeed predetermined that guilt given the charge against Haneef.

This presumption of guilt then would/will prejudice the trial of Haneef’s cousin to whom he gave the sim card. Could Haneef’s cousin conceivably claim the impossibility of a fair trial on the basis of the charges against Haneef?

And what then, or what if the British suspects are simply found not guilty? Haneef could not then be found to have provided resources to a terrorist organisation. (And before you say “that’s not going to happen, of course they are guilty”, remember that you are not entitled to presume that, nor to act on the presumption of guilt.)

The correct course of action after Haneef’s interrogation, which involved a British police officer, was surely to allow the British to use any information that was discovered to request the extradition of Haneef to Britain. As far as we know they have made no such request. If they had thought that there was sufficient evidence to justify such a request, they would have made it, wouldn’t they, the alleged offence having been committed in the British jurisdiction?

Why does all this matter? Is it to protect terrorists? Absolutely not.

It is that, as we have already noted, if we wish to protect our own liberty and freedom we must also protect the rights of our enemies. If we do not we establish a precedent that will come back to bite us. If we do not honour and cherish our own legal values – like justice, due process, habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence – then we practise and invite the practice of oppression in all our lives and we become as oppressive as the regimes and ideologies from which we seek to protect ourselves, using the threat of those odious regimes as an excuse.

If, of course, you were Mick [“Let’s show those drug-running kids some real Indonesian-style ‘Life or Death’ justice”] Keelty and his mates, you might just think that it was a bugger that the law gets in the way of justice. And that’s our system.

And we’ll tell you what. We don’t want Mick Keelty to protect us, or John Howard, or Kevin Andrews.

We want our system, our values and our way of life to protect us.

Haneef, Whores, ‘Howard with Hair’

Jul 16, 2007 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Democracy, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, Values

Haneef, Whores, ‘Howard with Hair’

 

“This glorious fat trout of an election godsend…”

 

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”,
~  Thomas Paine, great American patriot 

In March 2007, Deputy Secretary, Bob Correll, of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIC) wrote to Values Australia, charging that Values Australia was offensive and could “seriously damage” Australia’s international reputation.

Values Australia responded that DIC’s “callous disregard for humanity, basic morality and decency…have resulted all by themselves in immeasurably more damage to Australia’s reputation than the Values Australia website could possibly do…”, enumerating some of the more egregious examples.

We now say that DIC is at it again, with Haneef.

Former New South Wales Liberal Party leader John Dowd QC says Australia’s reputation is at stake after the Federal Government’s action.

Mr Dowd says the international community will now be questioning Australia’s credibility after the government’s move.

“This is a high-profile international series of cases,” he said.

“People in other television stations – the Al Jazeeras and so on – that go to millions of people throughout the world, are going to know that in Australia, the executive comes in and takes people into custody, even after the courts have allowed them out.”

  

Here is what we think:

The government is blatantly using Mohammed Haneef to push its – now desperate – re-election agenda.

Many MSM commentators claim AFP Commissioner, Mick Keelty, is dead straight, “meticulous” and so on. We, on the other hand, can understand how people might think that the AFP has been irreparably politicised and is doing John Howard’s bidding.

Keelty is reported to have stressed that Haneef must be considered to be innocent unless proved guilty.

Of course.

Some time ago Haneef gave his mobile phone sim card to a second cousin who is somehow implicated in the alleged, failed London-Glascow bombing attempts. Even Keelty says “the specific allegation involves recklessness rather than intention”.

This raises the question of how vulnerable ordinary Australians may be if they, for example, inadvertently do something, meet or assist someone in some way who later turns out to be a criminal. That homeless person, for example, you gave a dollar to for “a cup of coffee”. What if it turns out he is a terrorist in disguise? Does the law now allow for a prison term of 15 years for that “reckless”, inadvertent act of charity? It seems to.

Nevertheless, as Keelty claims, Haneef should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

And apparently that is exactly how the AFP and the government felt until some maverick magistrate who didn’t understand the main game applied the law instead of the politics to the matter.

She granted bail!

This did not fit the game plan. This was an embarrassment, surely. 

After so long grilling the man – this glorious fat trout of an election godsend, this putative terrorist from whom John Howard wants us all to think he is so bravely protecting us – it turns out he was merely ‘reckless’ and not at all intending to terrorise anyone.

The AFP had no more admissible information, had no further charges to lay, it appears, and so the man was released on bail.

How could John Howard look brave and grave and fatherly and win back the love of his (newly) frightened people when the boogeyman was apparently just…reckless.

It had to be made bigger. This, after all, might be the government’s last throw of the dice.

The AFP had been made to look bad, the government too.

So did the AFP whisper, like Grima Wormtongue, in the ear of the Minister for DIC about information that was inadmissible in court and which was insufficient for any charge to be laid about this reckless Indian – information which the Minister for DIC never has to reveal and which therefore can never be tested?

It was enough for the Minister for DIC (and Re-Electing the PM) to revoke his visa and bravely consign him to one of DIC’s finest helliday camps.

If people of questionable character ought to be in detention, surely most of the Government front bench would be checking themselves into the nearest DIC concentration camp.

It won’t work, of course.

The coalition will lose the election.

Howard will lose his seat.

And all they will be left with is a shattered life, sacrificed to their pride.

But what of Labor?

They’ll come storming in like the cavalry to save the day.

Won’t they?

No.

It is now clear that Labor policy is “me too, only moreso”. They are gutless and as shallow and self-serving as the other mob – unless we insist that they take up the real challenge, the real reason we want a change, which is to restore decency and to honour true Australian values.

If Labor is indistinguishable from the coalition, if Rudd is merely Howard-with-hair, why vote for them? 

They are turning into the worst disappointment since Latham.

The SIEV X-Factor

Jul 7, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Corruption, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

The SIEV X-Factor

“A Certain Maritime Incident”

 

Richard Fidler interviewed  Tony Kevin on ABC’s Conversation Hour  last week.
Tony Kevin is an activist who was one of the driving forces behind the campaign to uncover, and especially to tell, the truth about the sinking of the SIEV X in which approximately 353 children, women and men drowned.

He was a highly commended and respected Ambassador, including to Russia, and to Cambodia in the 90s. He has written a book, Walking the Camino, about the experience of travelling the pilgrim route from Andalusia to the north of Spain.

However, his reputation as a diplomat was no defence against the vitriol which was spat at him when he dared question the government’s morality and border protection policies.

“   I guess I identified very closely with the human rights of refugees and Australia’s obligations… I was denounced in the parliament as a person of no credibility; I was abused by three senators in a senate committee…”

But Tony Kevin said some things that really struck a chord with us.

“  In a democracy every citizen is responsible for the conduct of their government and if their government behaves in unethical or even criminal ways every citizen has a responsibility within their capacity to challenge that and that’s why I was one of the forty-three former diplomats and former senior military personnel who signed the statement condemning the Australian involvement in the war in Iraq, which I believe was a criminal activity. And I guess you’ve just got to basically, sometimes, stand up and be counted. That’s the entry ticket we pay for continuing to enjoy a democracy.

And he says something about the illusion in which we all, journalists and pundits included, live and take for granted – that while most of us are decent and reasonably honest and fair-minded we assume politics and politicians are also.

Many of us have assumed that what has been going on in Australian politics has been business as usual with a right-wing twist. We have been in denial, in our complacency, that what has been going on in the past eleven and a half years has in fact been a shift to the extremist right and the debauching of basic Australian political and civil service standards. Surely there could not have been such a shift, not in our country.

Tony Kevin saw it clearly.

“  What I’ve tried to do myself is to challenge the idea that the last eleven years have been years of normality. I don’t believe they have. I believe they’ve been years of moral dysfunction in Australia and to the extent that I can continue to convey that, without blaming people, without pointing fingers at people, I plan to continue to do that.

In fact, in a speech at the Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas in April, Kevin spoke about the fragility and transparency of our illusion about our system and our way of life.

“  Confronting the SIEV X cover-up forced me to look down into the abyss that lies beneath our “presumption of regularity” – the phrase is Jack Waterford’s – a presumption that we rely on in our daily lives in society.

I understand now that my exposure to this abyss was a full grief trauma…Walking through Manuka, seeing people enjoying themselves in restaurants, I wanted to scream — “Wake up to the horrors of what our government is doing to defenceless people in our names! How can you still pretend that we live in a normal decent country”? It is hard to look into that abyss for a long time without damage, without succumbing to depression or self-destructive rage.

In this speech he also described what happened to him as a result of his outspoken dissent and activism.

“  These are the refugee dissent suppression strategies I encountered:

 

1. Put out claimed facts that are actually untrue, relying on the public’s presumption that governments normally do not lie to the public, except in grave national security emergencies.

2. Force truth-seekers into the roles of advocates or activists. Blur debates about the facts in specific cases of abuse of human rights, by trying to move the debate into unresolvable discussions about values.

3. Drive wedges to weaken the solidarity of dissent. Use frightener words to marginalize and discredit passionate or influential dissenters, words like “extremist”, “fanatic”, “conspiracy theorist”, “Howard-hater”, “disloyal”, “un-Australian”.

4. Workplace or NGO-funding sanctions. Implied threats against those in government or government-funded employment, or threats to cut off funding to NGOs that support refugee activism.

5. Guilt trips. Accuse dissenters of prolonging victims’ distress through holding out false hopes, or of undermining national security. Play games with dissenters’ minds, aimed at undermining their belief in the justice of their causes. Seek to make them feel more isolated.

6. Never give credit to dissenters when they succeed. Always pretend that any decisions to soften the system were not taken under pressure.

 

On point 1, the SIEV X public history is full of examples of false and shifting stories put out by government:

 

On where the boat sank: First, that it sank in Indonesian waters. Later, that “we don’t know where it sank”. Then, an admission that it sank in international waters. But then, a later reversion to “we don’t know where it sank”.

 

On what we knew about the voyage. First, that we knew nothing till we saw the TV news of the sinking. Then, that we knew the boat was coming, but we did not know when or from where. We cannot tell you what we knew, because it’s intelligence; or, because it is the subject of an ongoing investigation. Or a variant from Mick Keelty: that you will just have to take our word for it that we did not know about the boat until it was too late to save the passengers. Because it’s “operational”, we cannot offer proof of this claim.

 

Were we expecting the boat? Yes, we were expecting the boat at Christmas Island on 21 October and that is why we sent a distress message to Indonesian Search and Rescue when it failed to arrive on time. But later – no, we did not put out a distress call to the ADF or to all shipping, because we then assumed that the boat had never left or it had turned back.

 

Did we ever look for the boat? No, we didn’t. Yes, we did – and here to prove are the RAAF surveillance maps and records of boat sightings, plastered all over the front page of the Weekend Australian on 29 June 2002, when media concern about SIEV X was at its peak But later – Yes, we did fly over the area, but only as part of routine RAAF surveillance patrols, because our aircrews were never tasked to look for a missing boat. And the flight charts and sightings data we tabled in the Senate and that the Senate accepted as fact were really just approximate flight paths. No, you cannot see our aircrew flight reports or know the names of the crews, because that’s all classified information. And according to the Defence Minister in 2005, the evidence the ADF gave in 2002 — despite all the conclusively forensic analysis by Marg Hutton of its many inconsistencies — was the whole truth.

 

Do we know the names of the dead? Initially, as reported — the UNHCR is preparing and collating lists of the dead and survivors. Later from the AFP — there are no such lists. Later — there are some lists but it is unlikely they will ever be made public.

And so on and on. One phoney smokescreen was put up after another until a frustrated and jaded media abandoned the story, having found no way to distinguish between truth and lies.

You can read Kevin’s testimony to the Senate Inquiry into “A Certain Maritime Incident” at the SIEV X site.

Fidler asked Kevin whether his SIEV X research and advocacy since 2002 had been worth it.

“  Yes. I think my work achieved useful results going beyond SIEV X. It helped more people to see the truth behind the now discredited myth that John Howard is just another Australian politician trying to do his job more or less decently. Australians know the real Howard now. I think my SIEV X research and advocacy helped to expose the ugly truth about this man.

Quite so.

 

 

Dis-Honoris Causa

Jun 16, 2007 | Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Legal, Media Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Dis-Honoris Causa

 

In all its splendor and majesty

In September 2006 the US right pushed the country “a step toward totalitarianism” when the Republican Senate majority passed a bill which essentially stripped the US Constitution of the protection of habeas corpus, one of the foundational guarantees against executive injustice and abuse of power which has been an essential part the British legal tradition for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Garrison Keillor said at the time:

“  Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

[…]

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators….[T]hey have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

[…]

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

[…]

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: ‘Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.’

 

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

 

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.”

There were 65 Senators who voted in favour of the stripping of habeas corpus.

Three of them are now Republican Presidential candidates (none are Democrat candidates).

They were Brownback, Hagel and McCain. None of them now, as Keillor says, “has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal.”

Indeed, such “wretched figures” surely agree with the American military that the question of whether the Guantánamo prisoners – whose Military Tribunal cases were recently dismissed – were “Enemy Combatants” or “Illegal Enemy Combatants” is mere semantics. Of course. It is merely the law, and — as we know from the way that John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Andrew Card, George Bush and Dick Cheney (not to mention McCain, Brownback and Hagel) view the law in general — when it gets in the way of their own agenda the rule of law and basic democratic principles are of small importance and the law itself (even though passed by the same vile and obsequious Senate) merely a minor hindrance when it comes to the Machtergreifung ¹.

But the law is not nothing, and the difference between an “illegal” and an ordinary “enemy combatant” is neither trivial nor semantic, as “rmj” clearly explains at Adventus [and also here].

(These are the people and the sort of people, by the way, whom John Howard’s government – especially Billy Bunter Downer, Darth Ruddock and the man who has lost any idea of morality or democratic principles, Michael Joseph Keelty – uses as its moral, legal and ethical benchmarks.)

Garrison Keillor went on to say, “Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.”

So, speaking of universities granting honorary degrees to dishonourable people…

One-time Acting-Attorney-General James Comey “testified before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Judiciary subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal…In early January 2006, the New York Times…reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to “certify” the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time…After Comey’s refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program”.

(Ashcroft refused. See Comey’s description here).

Nevertheless, about three weeks ago, “Andy” Card got his reward from – to its eternal shame and disgrace – the University of Massachusetts. But not without the almost universal condemnation of students and faculty in perhaps the most astonishing display of opposition and dissent ever, certainly recently, in a formal academic ritual.

[See the video above]

 

 

¹ “Machtergreifung is a German word meaning “seizure of power”. It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933.

The term Machtergreifung was first coined by the Nazis themselves in order to portray their accession to power as an active seizure”