Action Alert

Great news from Congress yesterday. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) introduced the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007.

This Act would:

1)restore habeas corpus
2)reaffirm our commitment to the Geneva Conventions
3)disallow evidence obtained through torture
4)give judges leeway to disregard evidence based solely on heresay
5)expedite judicial review of the Military Commissions Act of 2006
6)narrow the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” to something reasonable where hospital administrators like Adel Hamad, where fruit vendors, landlords and cooks could not be considered combatants unless engaging in hostile acts.

In other words, this Act has teeth and Senator Dodd is asking us, as U.S. citizens, to be co-sponsors of the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007.

Go to:

http://restore-habeas.org/

and let Senator Dodd know you want this to go forward.

and encourage people to join Project Hamad at:

http://projecthamad.org/take-action/

Brandon Mayfield

We are proud to welcome Brandon Mayfield as our first guest blogger at Project Hamad. His story is a cautionary one for anyone who thinks the suspension of habeas corpus, or the passage of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), have no implications for the civil rights and liberties of law-abiding citizens. A Kansas-born U.S. Citizen, a former Army Lieutenant, an attorney in Portland, Oregon, Brandon Mayfield was wrongly accused and incarcerated for the terrorist bombings in Madrid, Spain. Prior to his arrest the FBI had Mr. Mayfield and his family under warrantless surveillance and Mr. Mayfield is reasonably certain they broke into his house twice during this time period.

The FBI was positive they had a fingerprint match with one found on detonators in Spain. The fingerprint was described as a “100% match”, an “absolutely incontrovertible match” and a “bingo match.” On the other hand, when they sent Mayfield’s prints to the Spanish authorities they replied that his prints were “conclusively negative.” The FBI later admitted that Mayfield’s Muslim faith may have caused them to disregard the repeated reservations of the Spanish authorities regarding the fingerprint.

Nevertheless the FBI proceeded with their investigation of Mayfield which ultimately led to his arrest, seizure of legal files from his law office, and further searches of his home. For the first week of his imprisonment he was confined to “lock-down,” unable to communicate with his wife or kids. Meanwhile on the outside, a media frenzy was occurring based on information leaked by anonymous government sources.

Three weeks later Mayfield was released when Spanish authorities found a match with the fingerprints of an Algerian man, Ouhnane Daoud. The FBI and the Attorney General issued a formal apology.

Brandon Mayfield is currently involved in several lawsuits against the Federal government. One, to reclaim materials removed from his home and office, including DNA samples taken from his family’s toothbrushes. The other, a challenge of the constitutionality of the U.S. Patriot Act, particularly the sections that allowed the warrantless wiretapping and secret searches of Mr. Mayfield’s home. This case could reach oral arguments in district court sometime this spring with potential implications for us all.

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Dear concerned citizens,

If you value the notions of justice, due process and human decency you will get involved in a worthy project. Project Hamad is such a project. It is beyond doubt that there are innocent people sitting in prisons, detention centers, and military facilities around the world as a result of the federal government’s mismanaged and misguided war on terror.

I can tell you from experience that the government does target innocent individuals and lauds their capture as victories in their fight. But this fight is ruining the lives of people. Real people, with families and spouses, and concerned friends and others who love them and count on them.

Mr. Hamad is one of these people, among scores of others, who had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, secretly abducted and stripped of his freedom.

I too was abducted and stripped of my freedom and subjected to personal pain, humiliation, threats, and uncertainty, not to mention the effect that it had and will continue to have on my family as well. I do not want what happened to me to happen to anyone else, to you and to your family.

I was fortunate enough to have the likes of Chris Schats, Steve Wax, and William Teesdale at the federal public defenders office to assist me at a time when things looked very bleak. They were caring, professional, and worked tirelessly to help me fight what seemed like at the time an insurmountable opponent.

They and the others who helped me and are now helping Mr. Hamad’s cause are warriors of justice and freedom. They care. But even though they are heroes (often unsung heroes) they do not possess superhuman strength and they do get tired. So that is where we can help. Collectively we can bring attention to an egregious wrong that has gone on much too long. That an innocent man or woman can spend even a moment confined against their will for unfounded and totally unsupported allegations of crimes they did not commit is a travesty. To spend years in such confinement is a crime in and of itself.

Please, help to stop the crime and to restore our time honored rights of privacy and due process. I implore you collectively to demand our individual rights be respected. to write your congressmen and women and insist that the men being held at guantanamo be given a right to an immediate trial, with the right to competent counsel of their choosing, to put on evidence and confront their witnesses and accusers, not a military tribunal.

Also insist that your representative abrogate sections 207, 213, and 218 of the Patriot Act (50 USC 1804 and 1823); get rid of NSA warrantless and FISA warranted wiretaps, and ask them to restore Habeus Corpus and to completely get rid of the recently enacted Military Commission Act, which strips us of an 800-year-old English right to challenge your arrest, and provides punishment without a judge and jury (known as a bill of attainder), both of which are prohibited by the original articles of the Constitution itself, Art.1 Sect. 9 and Art. 3 Sect. 2 sub. 3.

And also tell your representatives to free another innocent man: Adel Hamad. A man with a smile who cared about people. Ask them to care too.

By writing your local senators and representatives with detailed requests, you can put a check and balance on our governemnt branches and keep the tree of democracy strong.

I am proud to be an American and the ideals it has traditionally stood for. But we are a government of laws and not men. No man is above the law and no government is above the constitution. The Patriot act is unconstitutional, as is the recently enacted Military Commissions Act.

Mr. Hamad was targeted for who he is and for his beliefs, but religious profiling is not acceptable. The power of the government to secretly search your home or business without probable cause or to arrest and abduct you anywhere in the world under the guise of an alleged war on terror must be stopped. I look forward to the day the Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act are no longer law or are declared unconstitutional and all citizens are safe from unwarranted arrests and searches by the federal government.

Sincerely, Brandon Mayfield.

The Devil is in the Details

Habeas corpus has been eliminated by the Military Commissions Act.

You didn’t hear about it?

Relax, you aren’t the only one. Latin legalese doesn’t sell papers. But out it went nevertheless.

To dispel the disquiet you would have had, had there been a public debate, we were assured that this would only apply to non-citizens. No matter that the Founding Fathers intended habeas corpus for alien and citizen alike, we were meant to find comfort that this would not apply to us.

Yet there were tiny disquieting cracks in this argument even then.

To paraphrase Congressman Wu (D-OR): on page 93 of the Act it says the word “alien” but wait, here on page 61 it leaves it out. On its own this could be dismissed as a quibble perhaps. Certainly this little ambiguity, this oversight, wouldn’t be exploited, would it? Congressmen who worried that this inconsistent language left citizens vulnerable were just a little paranoid. Or were they?

Attorney General Gonzalez’ statement to Congress last month –”The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas,’”— should have put this debate to rest.

But if that wasn’t clear enough, this week in federal appeals court, government lawyer David B. Salmons argued that “A citizen no less than an alien can be an enemy combatant.”

You are thinking, so what. Of course anyone can be an enemy combatant.

Lets look back at the Miltiary Commissions Act. The MCA explicitly denies habeas corpus to all enemy combatants. Thus, by simple deduction if the MCA denies habeas corpus to all enemy combatants and U.S. citizens can be enemy combatants then doesn’t it follow that the MCA applies to U.S. citizens as well?

Why should this concern us law-abiding citizens however, you ask? We would never be considered an enemy combatant and for that matter foreign combatants at a time of war have never been granted habeas corpus, you say.

That’s where last week’s federal appeals court becomes interesting because Judges Robert Gregory and Diana Gribbon Motz seem willing to entertain these larger questions as part of the the case brought by Ali al-Marri, the only person held on the mainland as an enemy combatant.

“What would prevent you from plucking up anyone and saying, ‘You are an enemy combatant?’” asked Judge Gregory.

What would have happened to Brandon Mayfield, a law-abiding U.S. citizen wrongly incarcerated for the Madrid bombings due to faulty fingerprint analysis, if as the administration’s lawyer asserts, the executive branch is entitled to arrest and label someone an enemy combatant without interference from the courts?

Judge Motz continued along these very lines. Could members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals be designated enemy combatants? “Couild the president declare war on PETA?”

Mr. Salmons responded, “The representative of PETA can sleep well at night” because the executive branch is very careful in how it designates enemy combatants.

But this leaves us with the problem of having to assume the benevolence and intelligence of whoever happens to be the president at the time. The framers of our Constitution had the exact opposite in mind. James Madison, referred to by some as the “Father of the Constitution” described our system as designed with enough checks and balances so that it could be run by devils. These devils couldn’t cause us harm because these checks prevent us from having to rely on their good intentions. But now apparently that is all we have to rely upon.

This leaves us with the last question of foreign combatants during a time of war, who have never been granted habeas corpus, before or after the MCA.

Judge Motz points out that we are not at war in the traditional sense of the word. “Nations have wars against each other,” he states.

It is clear we are not at war with a nation but at war against such vaguely defined concepts as “terror” and “evil.” When is a war of that nature over? If the war is indefinite and its conclusion can only be decided by the executive branch without judicial or legislative oversight, it seems that people, citizens and aliens alike, can be detained by the U.S. government indefinitely and indiscrimately. And if some of the so-called “enemy combatants” were arrested from their beds, and 5 years later have not been accused of a belligerent act or thought against the United States, how do we define the battlefield?

John Turley, a professor of constituional law at George Washington University sums it up well:

“People have no idea how significant this is. What a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values. It couldn’t be more significant. And the strange thing is, we’ve become constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the president despotic powers, and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ It’s otherwordly.”

David
Project Hamad

Update from Sudan

I received an update from Adel Hamad’s laywer, William Teesdale, today.
He had a long conversation with Adel Hamad’s family in Sudan and they
send their heartfelt thanks to everyone working for justice on his
behalf.

Just this week there has been a lot of positive news from Sudan:

–the Sudanese Parliament has demanded the release
of the 9 Sudanese detainees at Guantanamo, urging the Sudanese President to advocate on their behalf

–Adel Hamad’s story was on the front page of, Al-Watan, one of the major
Sudanese newspapers; it is part one of a two part story; the
journalist told Adel’s family that Adel’s situation, along with the
Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj, is becoming quite well known in Sudan

–There were protests outside the U.S. embassy in Khartoum
demanding justice for the detainees at Guantanamo

One of our Project members informed me she is going to the peace rally
in D.C. this weekend and would protest on Adel Hamad’s behalf there.
Hopefully we’ll get some updates (and photos) to post later this week.

We also received a mention on Harper’s magazine’s website, entitled
Gitmo Tube.

David
Project Hamad

Welcome to Project Hamad

It has been three weeks since we launched Project Hamad. And
looking back over that short time frame we are pleased with how far
things have come.

–The YouTube video Guantanamo Unclassified has already been viewed
40,000 times.

–Articles have been written about Project Hamad in publications as
diverse as Street Roots, a paper run by the homeless, to LeMonde, the
main newspaper in France. You can read these at our News link on
our site.

–And to top things off, Amnesty International approached us with the
desire to take action on behalf of Adel Hamad’s case.

Nationally, the last three weeks have been at times very
encouraging, with the new Congress bringing hope of revisiting the
Military Commissions Act and restoring habeas corpus, and with
worldwide protests calling for the closure of the Guantanamo detention
center. Our project even led a grandmother in Tallahassee
to drive to Miami, don an orange jumpsuit and protest on Adel Hamad’s
behalf, making the front page of the Miami Herald. You can see her
in our photo gallery.

But the last three weeks have also reminded us that this is not going to
be an easy fight. First, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Detainee
affairs, Cully Stimson, questioned the patriotism of defense
attorneys who provide legal counsel to Guantanamo detainees. He
raised the specter of McCarthyism by threatening to make public the
names of all lawyers who defend “terrorists,” acting as if the
detainees had already been convicted of a crime rather than the
shameful reality—that many remain in jail year after year not charged
with anything. Second, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, in a
painfully Orwellian exchange with Senator Leahy, defied logic, and
left the nation speechless, in asserting that the Constituton does not
grant the right of habeas corpus.
–
Meanwhile, from the Department of Defense’s own data, from CIA
reports, from the mouth of the former commander of Guantanamo, it is
clear that many people sitting in Guantanamo are innocent.

What can we do?

It is going to take a grass-roots effort to get our representatives to
realize this is a priority, to end this shameful period in our
history, but end it with our civil rights and liberties intact.

We will regularly update our blog with news about Adel Hamad,
Guantanamo and habeas corpus. And periodically we plan to invite
guest bloggers to write pieces on these topics.

In the meantime, take a look around the Project Hamad website. Add
your name and voice to the hundreds of others who are speaking out for
those silenced by the likes of Gonzalez and Stimson.
And let us know what you want to see here at Project Hamad.