Elaine Meinel Supkis
I remember when our wanna-be-Führer opened Gitmo, our illegal torture pens in Cuba. He claimed it was for those 'combatants' from Afghanistan. Anyone arrested in America would be held in American prisons and be covered by American laws. Well, now that has changed and LEGAL immigrants can be arrested and carted off to Cuba and will end up in the same black hole, not covered by either the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions!
And this pisses the hell out of me!
By MATT APUZZO
Associated Press WriterWASHINGTON (AP) -- Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism and may not challenge their imprisonment in civilian courts, the Bush administration said Monday, opening a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.
In court documents filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to foreigners captured and held in the United States.
When Padilla was arrested, he was virtually kidnapped by the Feds from a courthouse in NYC and carried off to an undisclosed location within our corrupt military system and held for several years while Bush and the GOPredators tried desperately to pass a law outlawing Habeas Corpus, a core civil right buried deep within our Contitution and held up by judges for over 200 years.
Well, they just got rid of that pesky right our Founding Fathers thought was so important, they put it in the original document called 'the Constitution.' And lo and behold, Bush and his gang rush out to implement this odious new modus operandi and extend it as far as possible.
As the unlawful detentions of ‘enemy combatants’ at the US detention centre at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, Cuba, enter their fifth year, Amnesty International is renewing its call for the detention centre to be closed and for all those held to be released or given fair trial according to international law and without recourse to the death penalty on the US mainland. Four years since the first transfers to Guantánamo, approximately 500 men(1) of around 35 nationalities remain held at the detention facility unlawfully. Reports from the detainees and their lawyers suggest that many have been subjected to torture or other forms of ill-treatment in Guantánamo or in other US detention centres. Some have embarked on a prolonged hunger strike, among them those who have requested not to be force-fed in order that they may be allowed to die. There have been numerous suicide attempts and fears for the physical and psychological welfare of the detainees increase as each day of indefinite detention passes.
The unfortunate men and I firmly believe 666 of them including children, were held there originally because it is a magic number and very coyly, our dictator and his gang like to say, we had 'about' 660 prisoners there, I am, as usual, right about this. Anyway, they were carried off from Afghanistan and held without charge or trial or covered by any international laws or convents, we were told this was a temporary matter and it wouldn't affect us here at home.
Well, it has as all of us Cassandras online explained from day one: the minute we sanction torture, holding eternally without trial or charge and of course, arrests on whim, it would spread like a virus and so it is: the plague ship has already disgorged its rats upon our shores and they are scurrying all over the place, spreading the Black Plague.
Couple this with the news reported here on my blog about Halliburton getting secret contracts to build massive holding pens in the USA and we can see what is the fate of all immigrants here: to be rounded up and carried off into our growing gulag. All we need is an economic downturn and guess what?
The housing market is collapsing as we Cassandras predicted it would around this time.
By June Fletcher and Ruth SimonA little over a year ago, buyers couldn't wait to sign contracts to purchase homes. Now, many can't wait to get out of them.
With real-estate prices falling around the country and even pro-industry trade groups predicting further declines over the next year, buyers are backing away from deals in droves. At a semiannual housing forecast conference in Washington, D.C. recently, economists reported that contract-cancellation rates for big builders were running around 40 percent — about twice as high as last year's levels. Anecdotally, real-estate professionals say they are seeing a similar dynamic in existing-home sales.
Some of the cancellations are by people who signed new-home contracts at one price months ago, haven't yet closed, and are now stunned to see the builder drastically cutting prices on identical properties. Some are by speculators caught short by other investments they can't unload. And some are by people trapped in a chain reaction: They can't sell their old home — or the buyer has canceled the contract — so they are being forced to cancel the deal on a new house they are buying somewhere else.
Dictators flourish during times of trouble and we are in deep trouble now. Of course, this dictator is bankrupting us because he is incompetent and craven. So we will get a 'better' dictator unless the Democrats are not traitors and decide to heed voters and vote down all the Patriot Act laws, close Gitmo and free the unfortunate Muslim fighters from Afghanistan and bring in international pressure into the negotiations of the unarmed Palestinian people vis a vis the heavily armed Israeli Jews and straighten out the huge, mangled mess in the Middle East.
Then we can have Congress seize all the oil and coal resources and nationalize them! HAHAHA.
Gads. Will we get smarter or stay stupid? We have to pay off all our massive debts and this is how Russia did it! Of course, the bills aren't coming due...yet. But back a year ago, I predicted the housing boom would end the day China pulls our credit lines and sure enough, here it is. No more free ride from China.
BEIJING, Nov. 13 -- China's household savings posted their first monthly decline in more than five years in October as residents looked for better investment returns on the nation's recovering stock markets, the central bank said yesterday.Yuan-denominated personal deposits fell 7.6 billion yuan (965 million U.S. dollars) from a month before to 15.8 trillion yuan (2.0 trillion dollars), the first contraction since June 2001, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said on its website.
The drop-off pared the growth in China's household savings to 15.5 percent in the first 10 months of the year, down 0.5 percentage points from the figure for the first three quarters, the statement said.
"Some of the savings have been channeled into the equity markets," the central bank said in the statement.
Client deposits at domestic stockbrokers totaled 604.2 billion yuan (76.8 billion dollars) at the end of last month, up 216.1 billion yuan (27.5 billion dollars), or 183 percent, from the end of September, it said.
OK: our savings rate is a miserable, insane, stupid, totally ridiculous 0%!!!! And the Chinese have saved over 15.5% and on top of that, they have saved a total of two TRILLION last year alone? Um...wow. Add the two trillion sloshing around to the FOREX fund of a trillion and we see China as a mega-fiscal power. Amazing. Stupendous. They are gigantic and we are the fleas sucking blood from this great dragon.
This, in a nutshell, is why we are losing our civil rights. We are at war with the Muslim world because a minority religion which great power in America wants to use military force to steal the pitiful olive orchards, little gardens and mud huts of the natives living in Palestine. Period. And we want oil on our terms so we can drive gas guzzlers. Whoopee. These various things are causing social and political instabilities that we can only contain by killing and imprisoning millions of people.
Like the German Third Reich, we slowly evolve into a monster, citing the need of security in our slave state as we give up doing business with anyone and resort to simple force. Alas, the force is not working. Yesterday, the Pentagon, in order to scare us, admitted a Chinese sub shadowed our fleet tootling around deep within Chinese spheres of influence in the China (note the name) Seas. This means they can sneak up on our sitting duck navy and sink the entire thing without so much as a boo.
Of course, anyone can sink all our ships and all our troops, spread across the planet at tremendous expense here at home, will and shall be surrounded like Custer's Last Stand and wiped out by raging mobs of people infuriated by our foreign policies and burning our Constitution and setting up America to be a Soviet Police State won't bring us any security nor victories, it means we will destroy ourselves just so we can have our cake and smear it all over our fat faces, too!
Good grief in hell. Will Americans figure this out before we morph into the Fourth Reich? Or rather, melt down from being the Fourth Reich. I can't see us expanding further.
Which takes me to an iron law of Mother Nature: not only does she abhor a vacuum, she also hates infinity equally. And this means we can't expand our empire forever nor can we accumulate IOUs forever, there is a limit to the oil, to food, to any earth resource and there is also a limit to other people's patience with us.
Our country survived hideous historical events while keeping the Constitution. The most American soldiers to die in any war is, to this day, still our own Civil War and even then, when Habeas Corpus was suspended, it was instantly reasserted as soon as the first cases hit the Supreme Court. And in WWI and WWII, laws protecting immigrants were suspended, they were cut off from our dear Constitution and then these were found to be improper and they were restored. And still, it took 40 years for the USA to apologize to Japanese citizens and immigrants who were held for no reason, their homes and businesses consfiscated.
That was 100% wrong back then and these laws supporting unconstitutional denials of civil rights are wrong, too. And before Congress can fix our economic messes, they must first restore our right to assemble and petition, our right to a fair trial by our peers and all the other things our Constitution granted us citizens AND anyone living legally in our great lands.
Hell, even ILLEGALS have the right to a trial, to lawyers. It is a HUMAN right!
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