| December 25th, 2011 - COPY OF ARTICLE FROM
OATH KEEPERS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES.
Oath Keepers Launches National Effort to Recall and/or Remove Members of Congress Who Voted for NDAA Military Detention. Merry Christmas, U.S. Congress!“There are only two things we
should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of
Rights.”- Marine General Smedley Butler. Oath Keepers has launched a national effort to recall (or remove by any other lawful means) all of the oath breaking members of Congress, in both the House and Senate, who voted for the National Defense Appropriations Act of 2012 (NDAA), which contains provisions that authorize indefinite military detention and trial by military commission of “any person” – including U.S. citizens and lawful residents – upon the mere say-so of the President or one of his subordinates in the Executive Branch, such as within the Department of Defense or CIA. Number three on the Oath Keepers list of Orders We Will Not Obey states:
That is near the top of our list for very good reason – this claimed power will kill our Bill of Rights unless it is stopped. To be blunt, we consider the NDAA of 2012 to be a declaration of war on the American people, and an act of treason. But even if you disagree with that view, and merely consider those who voted for it to be oath breakers, please work hard to remove them all from office. Oath Keepers members across the nation will lead or assist efforts in their states to remove any member of Congress, regardless of party, who voted for this monstrosity. We encourage all Americans of whatever political party to set aside their differences and come together in defense of our Bill of Rights by rooting out this den of vipers in Washington D.C. who are either knowingly killing our Bill of Rights, were too concerned with their careers to take a principled stand by voting against the NDAA, or are useful idiots who don’t understand what they swore an oath to defend. Whatever their excuse, they have violated their oaths to defend the Constitution and must be sent packing. This is not about politics. This is about defending the Constitution. As Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes put it:
This is a bi-partisan assault on the Bill of Rights that will require a bi-partisan defense. We the People must adopt a scorched-earth policy against all who voted for the NDAA of 2012, regardless of party, using any and all lawful means available to remove them from office. If you can remove them by means of recall, then do so. If that option is not available in your state, consider working to make it an option in your state. If attempts to recall are stopped by the courts, then root the oath breakers out in the next primary of whatever party they are in, making this issue the litmus test and supporting a challenger who will pledge to repeal this dangerous law. Make this desecration of our Bill of Rights campaign issue number one. And if you don’t manage to root them out in the primary, then defeat them in the general election, again supporting a challenger who pledges to repeal the detention provisions of the NDAA. Use whatever lawful means or combination of strategies available to get the job done. And even when any particular method “fails,” it still succeeds in keeping the focus on this act of betrayal, and it serves to educate the American people, waking them up to the ongoing bipartisan assault on our Bill of Rights. Even if we lose a battle we can still win the war. We must keep this issue in the public eye, and keep the pressure on. Just as Jefferson and Madison were successful in rallying opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which clearly violated the Constitution, and used that opposition to sweep the Federalists from Congress in what was known as “the revolution of 1800,” we must rally opposition to this clearly unconstitutional act and use it to sweep all of the Bill of Rights killing career politicians, of both major parties, out of Congress. Clean them all out! To kick off this national campaign, Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes, along with Montana artist William Crain, will be personally spear-heading a recall effort in Montana, aimed at all three of Montana’s federal delegation - Senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus, and Representative Denny Rehberg – since they all voted for the NDAA. Stewart said:
And as for Senator Jon Tester, Stewart Rhodes had this to say, directly addressed to the Senator:
No More Pernicious DoctrineThe NDAA of 2012 is the single most dangerous and destructive anti-constitutional piece of legislation to ever pass through Congress since it strikes at the very heart of our Constitution and especially at our Bill of Rights, stripping away not just the ancient right of habeas corpus, but also directly violating the right to jury trial guaranteed by both Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution and by the Sixth Amendment, and also directly violating the Treason Clause of Article III, Section 3, which defines the crime of treason, stating:
Thus Article III clearly establishes what must be done with any Americans accused of making war against the United States or aiding the enemy – those Americans must be tried in an Article III civilian court, before a jury of their peers, and there must be two witnesses to the overt act or a confession in open court (extra evidentiary hurdles) before their lives or liberty can be taken from them, as Justices Scalia and Stevens aptly pointed out in their dissent in Hamdi. Despite that clear constitutional trial remedy for the only crime defined by the Constitution itself, with its extra due process protections for accused Americans, the NDAA purports to instead subject Americans to indefinite military detention without trial for the duration of the war on terrorism – which may last forever – or trial before a military commission, rather than before a civilian jury as Article III plainly demands whenever any American is accused of being a traitor. The NDAA detention provisions also directly violate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. There is no more unreasonable seizure of a U.S. citizen or lawful resident than having them black-bagged and “disappeared” by the U.S. military on the mere say so of the President or some subordinate within the Executive Branch, without a showing of probable cause in support of arrest before a neutral judge, and without an indictment by a Grand Jury as is required by the Fifth Amendment. And as already noted, the right to jury trial clearly mandated by Article III and by the Sixth Amendment is grossly violated. Such arbitrary indefinite military detention and military trial of civilians are the hallmarks of repressive dictatorships throughout history. This act by Congress is but the latest in a long train of abuses begun by the Bush Administration and carried forward by the Obama Administration. The Bush Administration began the assault on the Bill of Rights by using arbitrary military detention on two American citizens, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, with Padilla “captured” at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport and detained at a military brig in the United States for three and a half years. The Bush Administration based those detentions on a flawed World War II decision, Ex Parte Quirin (1942), wherein the same Supreme Court that gave us the horrendous Korematsu decision ruled, for the first time in U.S. history, upheld as “constitutional” the military detention and trial of American citizens as “unlawful combatants” under the laws of war rather than a trial for treason, in a civilian court, before a jury of their peers, as our Constitution demands whenever any American is accused of making war against the United States or aiding the enemy in wartime. Before that one incident in World War II, the only other time a President had applied the laws of war to the American people was when Lincoln detained approximately 15,000 Northern civilians and tried nearly 5,000 of them by military tribunal. That detention and trial under the laws of war was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Ex Parte Milligan (1866). Prior to that unconstitutional practice by Lincoln, all who were accused of making war against their own nation, or aiding the enemy, recieved a trial for treason, before a jury of their peers. And after Lincoln, such an attempt to use the laws of war on the American people was not attempted again until FDR did it during World War II. Nor was it attempted again until after 9/11. It was then, in 2001, that the Bush Administration used that nearly forgotten World War II Quirin decision to support a claim of power to treat America like a battlefield and to apply the laws of war to the American people, treating U.S. citizens and lawful residents the same as the people of conquered enemy nations, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where anyone merely accused of being an “enemy” can be detained indefinitely by the military, or tried by tribunal and executed. And the modern federal courts have given their rubber stamp of approval, most significantly in the Hamdi and Padilla cases. And so, the flawed Quirin decision that laid around like a loaded gun for sixty years has been picked up, dusted off, and used to bring the laws of war home to America, shoving aside our Bill of Rights, and transforming America, step-by-step, into the equivalent of occupied Iraq. Again, read Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi an in-depth analysis of the history and cases, see the paper on this topic that Stewart Rhodes wrote in 2004 while a student at Yale Law School, which won Yale’s Judge William E. Miller Prize for best paper on the Bill of Rights. Stewart also wrote a shorter article in 2005 for The Warrior, the journal of Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College, which summarized his findings. And you can listen to a recent radio interview Stewart did on this topic, where he lays out exactly how dangerous this law will be, and provides a summary of the relevant caselaw. As Stewart stated in his November, 2010 interview with The Daily Bell:
In Stewart’s above noted writings of 2004 and 2005, he warned that the logical conclusion of this application of the laws of war to the American people is not just detention and trial, but also simply killing Americans on sight, since that is what can be done to a military enemy in wartime. And that is exactly what has begun to happen. Obama, instead of rolling back such absurd claims of Executive Power like he promised during his campaign, has doubled down and has taken this claimed power to use the laws of war on Americans to its absurd logical conclusion by asserting that he has the power to order the killing of any American he determines is an “unlawful combatant” during the war on terrorism – just as he does with foreign enemies on a foreign battlefield. And Obama has done just that. He has had U.S. citizens killed. When the “leader” of a nation can put any citizen’s name on his secret list of people to be snuffed out - a list he concocts based on “secret evidence” he refuses to show anyone – and, without a trial, without a chance for the victims to defend themselves, and without even knowing they are on the list, those kill-on-sight orders are carried out, you are living in a dictatorship. The U.S. routinely condemns such extra-judicial killings in other countries as gross human rights violations, and rightly so. But now our own government claims the power to do that to any of us and has begun to do it. And now Congress has given its overwhelming vote of approval for this insane application of the laws of war to Americans. By passing the NDAA with these detention and trial provisions, Congress is piling on, and giving its overt support to that claimed power. What was once a power implied, ‘interpreted” and inferred by two administrations, and in various court cases has now been given overt approval by Congress, to “make it legal” while defenders of the act do the long-winded equivalent of “move along citizens, nothing to see here.” As Law Professor Jonathan Turley put it:
See also the analysis at the Law Prof Blog and by Glenn Greenwald, here. As Rep. Tom McClintock, speaking in opposition, aptly put it:
And Senator Bernie Sanders declared:
And Senator Rand Paul warned:
Across the political spectrum, Americans are waking up to what has been done, and are indeed standing up to defend our Bill of Rights against all comers. The apolitical nature of this alarm and resistance is well demonstrated by the fact that two retired four-star Marine Corps generals, Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, wrote a scathing condemnation in the N.Y Times, demanding that Obama veto the bill. Sadly, Obama himself is an oath breaker. While Congress does have both the power and the duty to remove oath breakers and traitors from office, with a House vote of 283 to 136 (with 14 members not voting), and a vote in the Senate of 87-13 in favor of this abomination, impeachment is a sick joke since they will not impeach themselves. Impeachment only works when a majority in Congress take their oaths seriously, have the requisite knowledge of our Constitution to know when it is being violated, an the courage and integrity to defend it. We are now faced with a super-majority in Congress who have amply demonstrated that they have either utter contempt for our Bill of Rights, are so ignorant that they don’t know when they are destroying the heart and soul of our Constitution, or are so cowardly that they will not take a principled stand. In any case, they will not correct themselves, by resigning or impeaching each other, and it thus falls to We the People to step in and correct them, by removing the oath breakers from office before they complete the destruction of our Bill of Rights. One thing that must be made clear to the oath breakers in Congress who voted for the NDAA is that there would be no Constitution if not for the promise of a Bill of Rights. So, by destroying our Bill of Rights, they are destroying the Constitution that created the three branches of the federal government. By destroying the Constitution, Congress is destroying itself. We must, and we will, exhaust all peaceful means we have left of defending our Bill of Rights. But make no mistake, we, the American people, and especially we, the American veterans, will defend our Bill of Rights at all hazards, up to and including by giving our lives in its defense. We are duty bound to do no less. We will not leave our children to a world without the Bill of Rights. Our fathers and grandfathers fought, bled, and died to defeat fascism over there. We will not abide it here at home. They honored their oaths, and we shall do the same. And we will set aside all other differences to take this stand. For without the Bill of Rights, America ceases to exist. For the Republic, Oath Keepers
COPY OF ARTICLE FROM OATH KEEPERS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. |