A Secretly Detained American Has Asked for a Lawyer – But Gov Won’t Give Him One | Hacker News Reader

A Secretly Detained American Has Asked for a Lawyer – But Gov Won’t Give Him One

aclu.org

211 pointsgehwartzen101 comments

https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/7631...

The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were held in strict secrecy. Consequently, anxious citizens gathered outside Independence Hall when the proceedings ended in order to learn what had been produced behind closed doors. The answer was provided immediately. A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."

we couldn't keep it because we thought we could just leave it in a corner and do nothing with it

turns out democracy is hard work

Democracy != Republic

They aren't even close to the same

Republic : Rule of Law

Democracy : Rule ( tyranny) of majority

And here I thought res publica meant something like common good, and describes a system of government that derives its power from the people.

Democracy: actual equal access to decision making for everybody, majority decides.

Republic: from latin, res-publica, elected representatives manage public affairs, once removed from the people (and cozy with powerful interests).

(Law still "rules" in both democracy and a republic -- to the extend that special interests don't bribe and influence their way into it, which is easier in a republic than in an actual democracy ancient-Athenian style, where people directly vote).

If we're going to argue definitions, might as well see what more conventional definitions from the dictionary look like (from Google's Dictionary)

  re·pub·lic
  /rəˈpəblik/

  a state in which supreme power is held by the people
  and their elected representatives, and which has an
  elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.

  de·moc·ra·cy
  /dəˈmäkrəsē/
  a system of government by the whole population or all
  the eligible members of a state, typically through
  elected representatives.

Now, the next thing we should probably figure out is in what sense did Franklin mean it? Did he believe that the word 'Republic' conveyed merely that the country would be governed by Rule of Law? That seems extremely unlikely.

You would do well to do more research than a simple google dictionary lookup.

But you likely wont put the work or the effort into understanding the difference nor would you understand the inherent dangers of democracy

I believe this grand experiment of a constitutionally bound republic has ran its course and what follows will be more misery for the poor.

Property rights, free markets, individual rights.... these are the eroded cornerstones folks are crapping on ... while reaping the benefits of them

The senate didn’t used to be elected by the people

What we have now is much closer to rule of majority than what Benjamin Franklin was referring to

>Democracy : Rule ( tyranny) of majority

Thanks! That's accurate. Majority= asses.

First, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Second, doesn't matter whether a person is an ass or not. When it comes to deciding things that affect their life too, they should have a say. And that's the whole point of actual democracy.

It's not for deciding on some BS "best course" (which doesn't even exist, different people want different things and see them as best), but of giving people an equal say to public matters.

Saying: these people shouldn't have a say because they're "asses" is not really different that saying these people shouldn't have a say because they are blacks, women, etc.

Couple reasons why direct democracy is terrible and your concept of people being able to care for themselves to the point they should influence society as a whole is also terrible.

“Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli

“Men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

If anything, those examples, negate your argument.

Machiavelli offered this advice to the "Prince" -- that is, to an authority who rules outside of democracy.

And he told the prince that it's easy to dupe men.

That more of a reason for democracy -- direct and real, not representative. In which, there are neither princes, nor representatives to try and dupe people for their own interests.

And where, if people find out someone duped them (eg. someone that they appointed to do something), they can immediately arrange for their removal (not after a 4 year term).

This is a crime that violates the 5th and 6th amendments, and we should be arresting and prosecuting those who gave the order to violate this man's constitutional rights.

Are our rights worth less than the paper they are written on?

>This is a crime that violates the 5th and 6th amendments, and we should be arresting and prosecuting those who gave the order to violate this man's constitutional rights.

Funny. They can get in line behind John Yoo, J. Edgar Hoover, Henry Kissinger and thousands of others. They'll have to pull Yoo away from the prestigious appointment at UC Berkeley he got as a reward for his crimes, strip the name Hoover got to place on the FBI building for his, and take away the adoration and respect murderous war criminal Kissinger gets from politicians of all stripes first.

There has been an argument going on for some time about whether or not the domestic legal system is capable of handling terrorism cases -- cases have recently been prosecuted in civil courts like the Boston Bombing, etc. Perhaps it's time to think about whether or not the domestic legal system is capable of handling crimes committed by the powerful (rich, politically powerful, etc). The answer is obviously no, but what could we do to make it so? Would that be good?

Do you think Mueller indictments and guilty pleas contradict you?

These are powerful people who had to go to court just like an average person.

Powerful people get much better treatment and representation than the common person, despite the best intentions of equality in front of the law that our court system was meant to create.

What makes this even more annoying is that people making these decisions will not be held personally responsible. Instead the government (aka "all US citizens and tax payers") will have to pay for this. There are people undermining our democracy and they likely will get away with a fraction of the punishment a petty criminal gets. To me this kind of behavior should be prosecuted tougher than murder.

Edit: typo pretty -> petty

Rights are only worth what people are willing to fight for. However, as most people don't care, rights for most are just ideas.

Most ppl didn't care/do anything when the previous Nobel Prize winning guy droned an American and his son (and other crimes). Why should ppl care now about this if the guys doing it are quite honest in their contempt for the rule of law? Say what you will about DJT, but he's quite honest (mostly 'cause he can't control the diarrhea from his mouth).

If one is unwilling to raise one's voice for political expediency reasons when the "good guys" are doing "bad" things then all this hoopla about this admin pulling back const. protections is a bit of a laugh, aint it?

Except of course that people that the ACLU and others absolutely did raise their voices about the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki. Indeed there was quite a lot of legal back and forth about its legality.

Personally, I see pragmatic difference. It is easily within the within the U.S' capabilities to give this person a lawyer. It's not clear how the U.S would have bought Anwar al-Awlaki to justice for the crimes that he was proud of committing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

Yes, a "lot of legal back and forth" by Government lawyers writing secretive memos that are nothing but a sham. Throw them in the same cell.

They also of course killed his U.S. citizen son ("I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father") and 8 year old daughter (not a U.S. citizen, so clearly worthless).

It must be comforting to live in a world that is so black and white. That legal back and forth isn’t worthless. It’s what systems based on the rule of law do when faced with knotty problems. You’ve decided that they are a sham and that the lawyers should be thrown in jail without due process.

Find me anyone other than the people in your head who believe the daughter was worthless.

There is no legal back and forth! There was no legal process! You seem to have a hard time understanding this.

Writing secretive memos on how to extra-judicially kill U.S. citizens is little different from Freisler giving his expert opinion to the Wannsee conference.

I've always thought Anwar al-Awlaki was a somewhat odd example.

Suppose an American man is found guilty of war crimes in, say, France, and is ordered captured dead or alive. While conducting military exercises in France, the US, an ally of France, gets the opportunity to capture him, dead. They do so. Are you outraged?

Replace France with Yemen and you pretty much have the situation with this individual.

I should say, I agree with you on the point that drone strikes in general are not good policy. I'm more concerned about civilian casualties than the actual targets, though. I've yet to come across a case to change my mind.

> found guilty

I think the point is, "found guilty" _by whom_?

The Yemeni court system?

> Say what you will about DJT, but he's quite honest

Yeah, uh, no.

It case it wasn't clear, the "Nobel Prize winning guy" was Obama

Why does it even matter te person is American, anybody in detention should have the right to some kind of legal assistance.

I think everyone should have rights but him being American is significant because most people's impression is that as an American the right to a lawyer is protected by the Bill of Rights to our Constitution and Americans take any violation of the Bill of Rights very very seriously.

Those protect people not citizens. You’re right that’s not how it’s popularly understood but it’s why we have Gitmo: it’s an attempt to apply a thin veneer of legitimacy by pretending it’s a military proceeding (as if theres exceptions for those in the documents you mentioned) and keeping it as far outside the purview of judicial legal analysis as possible.

People dispute what the government “should” do, but when it comes to citizens, there are certain things the government “must” do, regardless of what people think.

Because the purpose of a government is to keep its citizens safe, not act as world police.

Do you really believe that giving lawyers to people you have already detained is acting as "world police"?

The detainee is a citizen and as such is afforded the same protections as any other citizen. By definition, not providing him with an attorney is not keeping him safe.

Great on the ACLU for making progress :)

Incredible, the average HNer here is naive enough to thinks he has 'rights'. Rights are something that governments 'grant' when it is convenient so that citizens do not rebel and can be exploited appropriately. You generally have no protection form the state if they decide to make your life miserable.

Rights aren't granted to you by any government, they're universal, even if you happen to be living under a regime which violates them.

Hate to break it to you, but this very thing happening is proof of the grandparent.

Unless you have lots of guns and are willing to go to war with $government , you're going to have a very bad time. And even if you armed to the teeth, you still going to have a very bad time, but instead you're shot at.

That's why people use the phrase 'defending their rights'.

Governments can not "grant" rights, they can only "violate" them.

Want to join the ranks of political prisoners? It's really easy, just get worked up and be outspoken about it publicly. You have everything to lose, and nothing to gain. If you must meet about it, do so in secret, not here in front of everyone.

Enemy combatant "held without charges" sounds a lot like any vanilla prisoner of war.

So they took in some POWs, one says "no, wait, I'm really one of you, just kidding about the shooting and stuff" and the military needs some time to figure out whether normal rules of war apply in this case. Hard to get too worked up over this, if you ask me.

No, not at all! The US doesn't give it's "detainees" official POW status because, POWs actually got rights, too! So they are held without legal basis or recourse. That's all fine and dandy, as far as foreigners are concerned. Except, of course, that USians are special and have special rights, so it's bad to treat them the same way.

Reminds me of when a USian was droned in 2011. Suddenly there's an outcry in the US! Never mind that guy was probably more guilty than hundred-thousands of other victims of the US "bringing peace and democracy".

The key word you used here is "probably". No-one will ever know because he was vaporized before anyone got a chance to assess the situation. This is why we have trials.

The key word he used is, that allmost everyday people get vaporized by US drones, who are clearly innocent but are just foreigners and so the outcry happens when a US citizen got hit, who probably was one of the bad guys. He criticizes the unbalance and did not said, that also that guy deserved a trial.

But on the other hand, there is a war going on. And in a war you can't really held a trial for every person you shoot while in a COMBAT .. but if you have a death lists of people you are planning to kill, then yes, if you claim to base your actions on human rights and freedom etc. you should prove that those persons actually are the enemy. Otherwise the step into dictatorship with deathsquads will be only a matter of time, if the best way of problem solving is secretly killing people the government claims to be bad.

Isn't the whole point of "enemy combatant" that it allows people to be held in a state not governed by national, or international law or treaty? "PoW" has actual meaning, rules, treaties etc.

Or they could be treated like a criminal, but that would give them a lawyer, due process and so on.

I think that the US, and most western European governments still shy away from torturing PoWs or criminals. "Enemy combatants" however, are the dixie cups of modern policy. Fill 'em up, suck 'em dry, and throw the crumpled remains in the trash. All with a clear conscience.

> Enemy combatant "held without charges" sounds a lot like any vanilla prisoner of war.

This is a convenience because war is chaotic, and prisoners of war could be held near the front, where people have more pressing duties than to worry about the comfort of prisoners that they only took out of a sense of civility (above some minimal consensus standard.) Once prisoners are away from the front, and resources are available, there's no reason why a prisoner of war should be any different from any other prisoner.

When this treatment becomes "the normal rules of war" and active for years on end, nowhere near a front, it has become a rationalization and a loophole.

I undrestand that there's a good amount of carve outs for wartime stuff.

However, if there's any doubt about whether they even belong in the "enemy combatant" category, it seems pretty basic to allow them their attorney. Otherwise the gov't could claim you're an enemy combatant every time they want to take your rights away, and then lock you up forever.

Sure, eventually it will be overturned, but if the gov't just wants you in there for a bit then that's enough.

There's perhaps a more ambitious argument to be made here about the AUMF, what is actually a war, the classification of ISIS as such, etc. But good luck making that argument in this environment

> "Otherwise the gov't could claim you're an enemy combatant every time they want to take your rights away, and then lock you up forever."

Which is exactly what the judge in this case is afraid of:

Judge Chutkan recognized how dangerous the government’s claims are.

“The government could snatch any U.S. citizen off the street and hold them as an enemy combatant… for as long as it took to come to some ‘final disposition,’” she posited. “That kind of unchecked power is, quite frankly, frightening.”

Unless the US has declared war on itself, the capture of an American POW by the US seems contradictory in principle, and should make any American at least a bit uncomfortable.

If it's difficult to consider whether or not the rules of war apply in this case, then maybe that's because the war being waged is unjust in its scope or fraudulent in its definition.

The reason there are detainees and enemy combatants in addition to POWs is that a POW is someone who was fighting under the banner of another state. If the person isn't wearing a uniform or if they fight for a group that isn't recognized as a state, they are not generally a POW. "Rules of war" apply to POWs in this system.

Boy that sure would be messy if we ever ended up waging war on a series of nebulous non state actors.

Exactly the point!

There's no contradiction of principle, a US citizen can fight against the US in a war without the US having declared war on that individual.

It's happened, some number of US citizens fought for Germany and Japan in World War 2 (and paranoia about it lead to the Japanese internment camps).

One driver for American internment camps for Japanese citizens appears to have been the actions of several Americans of Japanese descent immediately after Pearl Harbor - the Niihau incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident

It’s an American citizen, not an enemy combatant. But sure, not worth getting worked up over - the concept of rights under the American empire is laughable.

The normal rules of war always apply. Famously, that's the point of them. A state isn't allowed to ignore the rules of war if it finds them inconvenient.

The Geneva Conventions are quite clear that PoWs are allowed to communicate with the outside world, subject to militarily necessary censorship. If charged with a crime, they have the right to choose their legal representative.

> A state isn't allowed to ignore the rules of war if it finds them inconvenient.

Actually, that's exactly what the government is doing. The convenient thing about the "War on Terror" is that "Terror" isn't a nation, so, by the government's logic, they get to call them "enemy combatants" not "prisoners of war" (avoiding all that pesky Geneva Convention business).

>The convenient thing about the "War on Terror" is that "Terror" isn't a nation

The convenient thing about the "War on Terror" is that like the "War on Drugs" it is not an actual war at all...

This allows unethical people to justify all manner of abuse, and inhuman treatment of Individuals

Actually you've got it exactly wrong.

The term 'enemy combatant' was an invented categorization of antagonist during the GW Bush administration to skirt the protections offered by the United States Constitution and the formal rules regarding Prisoners of War, which are of course part of the Geneva Convention to which the US is a signatory.

The rules are pretty specific, and preclude the sort of treatment we've afforded 'enemy combatants.'

https://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/priso...

The reason we call them 'enemy combatants' is so that we can torture them, detain indefinitely contrary to the Constitution of the United States, and hold show trials where we prosecute them for fighting against the US in wars that are certainly illegal from an international standpoint.

More than two months is quite a bit of time to 'figure things out', even by military standards, and I don't see any good reason to deny him access to a lawyer during that process anyway.

I'm trying to find the passed Congressional bill for the authorization of use of military force in Syria that would have declared an actual war, but cannot seem to find which bill it was.

American citizen Enemy combatant and Trump didn’t just drone him?

Wow his guy respects more rights than Obama

Let’s see if he lasts long enough to get a lawyer! Anyone got a prediction market we can bet with?

I don't trust the ACLU. Black lives matter is about the dragon-king of poverty and crime, not police. They don't get that, and so no solution they offer is capable of engaging the root cause. They don't understand because they are unwilling to ask.

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