But what do I know? I'm just a schmuck who happens to believe normal people can read and interpret the constitution on their own.
Say you have 5 arrests warrants for members of a gang, you often can't arrest them all the once so here is where the "secret" comes into play when they are arrested and the arrest is maintained confidential for 24-48 hours depending on the jurisdiction.
This is done to prevent the rest from scattering into hiding as soon as the news of one or more of them getting arrested breaks, this also means they won't hold down somewhere and be ready for a fight, or even go and do something worse like take hostages in order to try to get out of dodge.
This also means that in some rights are withheld for the duration of the "gag order" like access to a phone or an attorney, however the police is not allowed to question or formally charge the subjects during that period either, so while there is some violation of rights it is not egregious.
The longer ones are usually to protect the arrestee if they are being put into protective custody / witness protection or are released as an informant.
Since this is national security related who knows, I don't even know if these cases have been brought up to the supreme court before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_St...
A piece of paper and its surrounding political philosophy may empowering in theory but is decidedly not in practice. At the end of it all, it is the threat of adverse action, hopefully through re-election or worst-case through violence, that keeps power in check. The majority is too unwilling or too ignorant to oust those that are given the power to strictly enforce the philosophy, and thus the Constitution is emasculated.
That being said, I do think we whould always be wary of police and generally question the government. It's important we keep into perspective what's actually a threat and whats just unfortunate. Both should be improved, but one (the NSA) can prevent any sort of improvement, the police shooting rate seems to be more of an over reaction and mistake that almost everyone agrees should be fixed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a...
http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/through-the-wormhole/...
Well, actually... no, I don't find needles scary.
To be scared is an emotional response, and you can't really tell pother people what their emotions are.
And so, in giving a democratic Government ridiculous amounts of power, we give it power to harm pretty much any minority it chooses, so long as it doesn't piss off too many other people.
But the law is not equally applied in the US, though it's more often here a case of being powerful than being rich. See how General Petraeus was treated (for retaining eight notebooks full of "highly sensitive information" and giving them to his biographer/paramour) compared to Stephen Kim (who discussed one classified report about North Korea with a reporter): the former was fined, the latter was jailed.[0]
Now, Kim has since been released due to the outcry over the disparity of the sentences, so in this case the subversion of the rule of law coupled with public pressure ended up working out. But that is not an inspiring system. It did little for instance to help Jeffrey Sterling[1] (charged with espionage, in part for doing something that sounds a lot like what Hillary Clinton did with her emails).
This is to say nothing of things that have gone the other way, such as a complete lack of prosecution for those behind the 2008 financial crisis, retroactive telecom immunity, etc. The message that this sends is, "The rule of law applies to you unless you are close enough or important enough to whoever is in power." Which is not really the rule of law at all.
[0]https://theintercept.com/2015/03/03/petraeus-plea-deal-revea...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Alexander_Sterling#Con...
More importantly, these powerful people effectively write the laws themselves - why break a law when you can simply cause whatever action you wish to take to become legal?
Torturing prisoners? Crashing the world's financial system? Spying on millions of Americans without any kind of warrant? Lying about the spying to congress? All no problem! Just make up a law and get it passed, or if you forgot to do that, get retroactive immunity granted or just ask the President to pardon you directly.
The only thing that matters is how much power (influence, force, money etc.) you can bring to bear and who your opponents are. Law is irrelevant. To put it in plainer terms: people who own nuclear weapons don't have to pay their parking tickets.
Of course, just as you might look like the article's Socrates for suggesting free markets of law, you'd look even more like him for suggesting that maybe some issues are best resolved through means other than markets or monopolies.
To be fair, what if two people did that and disagreed?
This is a lot of obfuscation. What happened here? How did they smear him?
> From the external actions of the characters who oversee the legal professionals who are drafted into service in these secret systems, they definitely have their own, uh, interpretation of law and ethics.
I am friends with some ex-IC guys; from their stories they appear closed in rank more than police, and are indoctrinated to the point that they see themselves as the paladins of American values and democracy. In reality, they are usually only upholding the interests of the powerful, where corporate interest and political value coincide, and those with real power know and reinforce this. To see this is too much cognitive dissonance for the ones that aren't secretly there just because they get off on the power.
The paranoia and the power trip are good at reinforcing the "us vs. everyone" mentality that we know is pretty dangerous psychologically.
An infamous case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield
It performed under section 1021 of the original National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA 2012), which has been upheld as constitutional by an appellate court, a ruling which the supreme court declined to subsequently hear.
"Moreover, I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law."
Hedges v. Obama did not affirm the constitutionality of that law, but rather that that plaintiff did not have a sufficient interest in that provision in order to ensure that they would present the best case that can be made, which is important because US Court's follow precedent. If you'd like to read more, look for the constitutional requirement of Standing.
There's no statute or authority or even articles at ACLU or in law journals I can find that suggest that federal law enforcement can detain US citizens without counsel in "secret arrests", or, for that matter, suspend habeas.
Obviously: they can do that. But it's a very big deal when they do. They had to back off charges from Jose Padilla because of how they mishandled that case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
... under the NDAA "an American citizen can be detained forever without trial, while the allegations against you go uncontested because you have no right to see them"
No, they don't either in principal (the application in the text is much broader than specifically al-Qaeda -- it includes al-Qaeda, the Taliban, "associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners", and other who commit a belligerent act against the US or its coalition partners that is seen to be "in aid to" those organizations), nor in practice, because the specific allegations justifying the detention need not be disclosed, nor even the specific detention publicly disclosed, and detentions under the act, while they permit trial by military tribunal, do not require any juridical process or access to counsel to be provided -- that's rather the point of indefinite detention -- there's essentially no practical boundary to their application (if some sympathetic third party becomes aware of the detention, its possible they might be the subject of habeas corpus proceedings, which would require some showing that there was reason to believe that the person was within the fairly broad scope in the text of the act, but that's by no means a certainty in any particular detention.)
You might also look at Obama's signing statement of the NDAA for more evidence for that argument.
No, I'm respodning to you as if you were making an inaccurate fact claim about the NDAA, which you were, whether you refer to what the act says on its face or, even moreso, what the practical result of the authority in the act is.
> I am saying it does not apply here
No, that's not what you said that I responded to. Had you said that, I would not have responded as I did. In any case, theft of secrets in aid of an enemy is a belligerent act, so (even if subsequent investigation ruled out that the acts were done in support of al-Qaeda), were the Administration to, in good faith, believe that the acts were carried out on behalf of or in aid of al-Qaeda, the act here would fall within the ambit of the bare text of the NDAA.
(It wouldn't fall within the requirements of PPD-14, but PPD-14 by its own terms addresses only executive policy on the applicability military custody requirement of Section 1022 of the NDAA, a requirement which applies to a subset of the population for which indefinite detention is authorized by Section 1021 of the NDAA.)
Note I am not saying that the administration treated this as a detention under the NDAA, merely that the concept that the NDAA could -- consistent with the text of the Act -- have been applied here is not at all farfetched.
Again, also, please take a moment to read Obama's NDAA signing statement. He is still the President.
I'm not. I'm saying if, at some stage of the investigation it was believed that he did, then even if that was later determined not to be true and regular criminal charges in the civilian justice system were determined to be appropriate, the NDAA detention provisions could have been applied at that earlier stage. Since the whole NDAA discussion was about what the "secret arrest" that preceded the publicly-revealed charges means, while I absolutely don't believe the NDAA was applied or that that was what was actually referred to, nevertheless, its not a categorically implausible interpretation.
> Again, also, please take a moment to read Obama's NDAA signing statement.
I have. If you'd like to make an argument about its specific relevance (as you have so far, notably, not done, despite vaguely waving your hand in its general direction), please feel free to do so.
The signing statement says basically two things of significance: (1) That Section 1021 authorizing indefinite detention is unnecessary and duplicative of the authority already existing in inherent executive powers and the 9/11 AUMF, and (2) That Section 1022, seeking to mandate military custody for certain of those detained under the power referred to in Section 1021 seeks to impose an inappropriate constraint on executive discretion as to how detainees are held, but that its text provides enough flexibly for a minimally-acceptable interpretation which preserves substantial executive discretion (which Obama that implemented as the executive interpretation through PPD-14, which I've referenced earlier, and which, in any case, is irrelevant since, whether or not 1021 could have applied in this case, its clear that 1022 -- and thus Obama's reservations about the NDAA beyond that it restates existing authority, and the interpretations in PPD-14 -- would not apply.)
Well, they could say he was a member of Al Qaeda, too. What couldn't they do? If we want to stipulate a lawless government, why bother mentioning the NDAA at all? They could just drone strike him.
The NDAA has nothing to do with this story. I don't know why you're so diligently trying to make the case that it does.
Mostly, I'm saying that "sure, they may have determined now that is theft was not to aid al-Qaeda, but they may have initially believed it was for that purpose; an NDAA detention on that basis would be supported by the text of the NDAA -- and uncontradicted by any public executive policy -- and consistent with the 'secret arrest' description, and not inconsistent with a later determination that that status did not apply accompanied by a decision to pursue normal criminal charges in the civilian justice system."
(I did mention further upthread that the procedural nature of the NDAA detention also practically makes pretextual ascription of association with al-Qaeda or other groups covered within the NDAA a real risk, but that wasn't my primary contention.)
> The NDAA has nothing to do with this story.
I've actually explicitly said that that is most likely the case.
> I don't know why you're so diligently trying to make the case that it does.
I'm not. I only got into the NDAA because of your factually inaccurate description of its requirements in your overzealous attempt to support your equally factually incorrect claim that there is no statutory basis for federal law enforcement to detain U.S. citizens without counsel in "secret arrests".
Had you merely argued that the circumstances here made it appear unlikely that the statutory authority authorizing such detention would either be strictly applicable or invoked by the administration, the character of my response (if I even saw a point to responding) would have been very different.
The "tilt" appears to have been caused by your lack of acknowledgement that the quoted statement was inaccurate. Distinct from this particular instance, "dragonwriter" is asserting that contrary to your statement, the NDAA is legally applicable to a wider class of people than just members of al Qaeda.
Do you agree that one may be subject to the NDAA without being (or being even accused of being) a "member of al Qaeda" and that there are cases where the NDAA can be used as basis to "detain US citizens without counsel"? If so, please correct the tilt by acknowledging the correction. If not, perhaps further explain your position?
And, no, I do not agree with your second paragraph.
Finally: this has nothing to do with the comment I made upthread. Jose Padilla is literally the motivating example for the 2012 NDAA provision!
You just need ambitious, aggressive prosecutors.