Glenn Greenwald and Peter King respond to Obama’s NSA ‘Reforms’
1.19.2014 Leave a comment
A political blog written from a left populist perspective
9.22.2013 Leave a comment
Rob Urie has provided us with a concisely written essay which identifies the predicaments generated by the capitalist democracies in the West as well as by the global empire governed by power elites located in Washington, DC and Wall Street. Reading Urie’s essay is worth the effort.
5.4.2012 Leave a comment
Glenn Greenwald castigates the Judicial Branch because of its cowardly support for the ‘war on terror’ methods used by the Executive Branch:
The abdication of U.S. federal judges in the post-9/11 era, and their craven subservience to Executive Branch security claims, has been a topic I’ve written about several times over the past couples of weeks. Yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ that John Yoo is — needless to say — fully immune from any and all liability for having authorized the torture of Jose Padilla, on the ground that the illegality of Yoo’s conduct was not “beyond debate” at the time he engaged in it. Everything I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the identical shielding of Donald Rumsfeld by federal courts and the Obama DOJ from similar claims applies to yesterday’s ruling, and The New York Times has a good editorial today condemning this ruling as “misguided and dangerous.”
In sum, this yet again underscores that of all the American institutions that have so profoundly failed in the wake of 9/11 to protect the most basic liberties — Congress, both political parties, the establishment media, the Executive Branch, the DOJ specifically — none has been quite as disgraceful as the federal judiciary, whose life tenure is supposed to insulate them from base political pressures that produce cowardly and corrupted choices.
Fazaga v. FBI
8.18.2012 1 Comment
Writing for the People’s Blog for the Constitution, Shahid Buttar observed that:
What Buttar depicts above and throughout his article is a dualism intrinsic to a political system which observes the rule of law in some areas but not all areas. This dualism features prominently in Ernst Frankel’s seminal The Dual State. Frankel’s analysis focuses on the post-Weimar German state as used by the National Socialist to govern Germany. The gist of his analytical edifice rests upon a division of the German state into two coexisting but not equal domains. He calls one domain the Normative State. The Normative State is a domain in which the rule of law regulates social life. He calls the second and superior domain the Prerogative State. The Prerogative State is a domain defined and governed by the prerogative powers of the political sovereign, the kind of powers once available only to a Monarch. In the Prerogative State the law becomes a component of force available to the sovereign. Thus it can be said that the rule by law and coercion replaces the rule of law and legitimate authority in domain of the Prerogative State. In Nazi Germany, the object of Frankel’s analysis, Der Führer was the source of the state’s prerogative powers. In the United States today the state’s prerogative power originated in the President construed as Commander in Chief and the source of authority for the massive security-surveillance apparatus which now exists in the United States. It is this apparatus which operates beyond the reaches of the Normative State, a claim supported by Fazaga v. FBI. In his principal Fazaga ruling, a Federal Judge, Cormac J. Carney, ruled in favor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation:
In his ruling Judge Carney recognized the separate and superior domain of the Prerogative State. It is, by definition, a legal space which lacks rule of law safeguards, as the victims of the FBI in Southern California can claim based on their experiences.
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Filed under Commentary Tagged with Coercion, Commander in Chief, Cormac J. Carney, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Force, Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, Lawlessness, Muslim, Normative State, Privacy Rights, Rule by Law, Rule of Law, Security-Surveillance State, State secrets privilege, Survaillance Everywhere, United States, War on Terror