Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Battlefield Earth


Entire US a Battlefield - Constitution Suspended


The Bush Administration has declared the entire world a battlefield in the Global War on Terror - including every square inch of United States territory.

Article two of the Constitution grants the President war powers that give him full authority over the battlefield.

Clearly the forth Amendment is not valid - an army scout does not need to present probable cause to a judge in order to receive a warrant that allows him to spy on the enemy.

The 2nd Amendment does not apply - weapon possession is subject to military authority exclusively.

The First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, press, and religion cannot be extended to the battlefield.

All operations, activities, and personel on the battlefield are under the absolute authority of the commander in chief until such time that hostilities cease.

Sounds like a story from The Onion. But it isn't. The Bush administration has quietly used the 'battlefield' argument to justify its illegal acts, such as wiretapping, detention of Americans without charge, and the violation of privacy laws.

The administration claims that the Supreme Court has approved this doctrine in the Hamdi case, even though they lost that case.

This is no joke, this doctrine is the basis for absolute dictatorial powers for George W. Bush, and this doctrine has already been claimed as law;
A top government attorney declared Tuesday that, in the war on terror, the United States is a battlefield, and therefore President Bush has the authority to detain enemy combatants indefinitely in this country.

...
Bush & Co., however, has not only turned loose the military to spy extensively on the American people, but has also asserted the right to do so in perpetuity. Its claim is that 9/11 turned the homeland into a foreign battlefield, so the nation's historic prohibition against military surveillance of Americans is null and void. And since this war on terrorists has no end ("the long war," Rumsfeld calls it), the Bush-ites maintain that the Pentagon can engage in domestic spying ad infinitum.

...
The core problem—for Gonzales and for the nation—is that the administration’s constitutional assertion of war-making authority at home contains no plausible stopping point. By its own terms, it demolishes restraints not only on surveillance, but also on indefinite detention, on coercive interrogation and even on torture. As the Solicitor General Paul Clement revealingly asserted last summer in oral argument to a federal appeals court, all the world’s a battlefield, and the United States is but one front.


U.S. a Battlefield, Solicitor General Tells Judges
Myth #7: The Supreme Court approves
Seeking Truth On Wiretaps
Inside Donnie Rumsfeld's Orwellian Pentagon