Category Archives: Civil Liberties

Marty Lederman, a man not given to false alarms, eyes the panic button as he contemplates Sen. Specer’s ‘reform’ of FISA. See Balkinization for the gory details.

Ann Bartow points to this very odd and worrying incident: VA Nurse Investigated for ‘Sedition’ for Criticizing Bush:

Laura Berg is a clinical nurse specialist at the VA Medical Center in Albuquerque, where she has worked for 15 years.

Shortly after Katrina, she wrote a letter to the editor of the weekly paper the Alibi criticizing the Bush Administration.

After the paper published the letter in its September 15-21 issue, VA administrators seized her computer, alleged that she had written the letter on that computer, and accused her of “sedition.”

That’s right: writing a letter to the editor accusing the administration of “criminal negligence” gets you investigated for sedition in today’s USA.

I suppose this will surprise some people somewhere, but it seems totally logical to me. If

• the President has the power to order Predator drones to file missiles killing people — including US citizens– abroad, and
• the President has the right to grab US citizens in the US and hold them in a military prison without trial, an attorney, or any contact with the outside world, on the grounds that he thinks they are terrorists or terrorist supporers or might someday in the future be up to something, and
• the President has the power to order the crushing of a child’s testicles to make the parent talk

surely it follows natuarlly that, as a Dept. of Justice official recently argued, this same President may have power to order people he considers to be “terror suspects” killed in US:

Steven Bradbury, acting head of the US Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, told Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in a closed Senate Intelligence Committee meeting last week that the president may have the executive power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the US…

But don’t worry!

An unnamed Justice Department official has since said Bradbury’s comments were in the context of a theoretical discussion and that practical policy would be to capture the terrorist alive in order to interrogate him.

Good thing it’s only a theoretical danger. Sort of like Saddam Hussein…

Marty Lederman deconstructs what he calls — with positively British understatement — a rather remarkable and unusual event: “the Chair of a congressional intelligence committee asserts that the landmark framework statute over which his committee has jurisdiction is unconstitutional.”