CHICAGO UNDER SEIGE

 Ice has been very aggressive in Chicago this past week- targeting peaceful communities and rounding up both citizens and non citizens. Protests have remained strong, well attended and peaceful. I expect a huge crowd at Chicago's "no kings day" event. Unlike the earlier protests (at the federal building and the state court house) this will be held at Grant Park. A space that can accommodate the expected hundred thousand people. We will not be intimidated and we will stand firm. AND WE WILL WIN.

 

THE GUANTANAMO PLAYBOOK AGAIN....

 Bush and his war criminals came up with the idea of classifying people they had no authority to "detain" as "unlawful enemy combatants." And they declared them to be outside of the Geneva conventions and therefore not subject to any rules or laws. That gave them the "permission" to detain those men at Guantanamo. It led to 100's of men being held for literally decades without charge. I wrote about one of these men for Huffington Post almost twenty years ago. Many people in this country still do not understand the grave harm this caused to the U.S.  and the rule of law.

The trump war criminals understand the license that this gave them. Now they are taking it to another step and declaring supposed drug dealers as "unlawful enemy combatants." And killing them- not only to provoke a war - but to give them free reign to round up people here in this country under the guise of the "terrorist drug war."

In the early days of the "war on terror" we dropped leaflets on Afghanistan and Pakistan offering bounties for "terrorists."  Will that be next? Will we offer bounties for turning over supposed drug dealer  "terrorists."

Stay tuned.

Chicago Under Siege

 The ICE thugs are roaming Chicago streets- randomly picking up mostly non white people who don't have proper ID. Chicago has a big and active biking community and this man taunted the ICE thugs--

I think it is fair to say that Chicago will not go quietly in the night....

THE OPPOSITE OF "WOKE" IS ASLEEP

 We are in dangerous times here in the good old U S of A. Unfortunately many people here are not paying attention or just don't care. Next week will be pivotal on many levels and I hope Americans are ready to take to the streets to try to save our democracy.

Stay tuned.

meanwhile:

 

Paper Clip Protest Joyce Vance Sep 20   On Thursday, E. Jean Carroll started it: Paper Clip Protest. “Comely Reader! I suggest we all start wearing the paper clip. Subtler than a red hat, more powerful as a CONNECTION,” she wrote, explaining they were also worn during World War II as a sign of resistance against the Nazis. Norwegian teachers and students wore paper clips to signal their opposition to Nazi occupation. They attached them to their lapels and wore them as jewelry, a symbol of solidarity binding them together as paper clips did with papers. It was a quiet act of defiance, expressing that Norwegians remained united against Nazi rule. Friday, when I signed on to tape the #SistersInLaw Podcast, Jill Wine Banks had a clip delicately attached to the collar of her shirt. It made me smile. In that moment, I knew E. Jean was onto something. Our defiance can and must be loud and public at this point. But the quiet symbol of solidarity on someone’s collar when you walk into a crowded room? Genius. And much better than a red hat. You probably have a paper clip in your desk or junk drawer that you can put on straight away. You can be a subtle signal of support for people who need that right now. You can be a conservation starter. Jill tells me she’s having special paper clips made for the occasion—very fitting for a woman known for wearing pins—and has promised to send me one. Small efforts can bear fruit when we’re all in on them. I’m going to find a paper clip before I head out to the farmers’ market. We’re in this together, Joyce

Lift every voice and sing...

 The Black National Anthem

(h/o to Walt)

LEST WE FORGET

Apartheid police always maintained that the Black Consciousness Movement leader died after accidently hitting his head against his prison cell wall. Now the South African government wants to establish what really happened in "room 619," where Biko spent almost a month in custody naked and shackled in leg irons.

On Friday, the 48th anniversary of the liberation icon's death, the government reopened the inquest into the 1977 case, in what Luxolo Tyali, a spokesman for South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), said was an effort "to address the atrocities of the past and assist in providing closure to the Biko family and society at large."

 

The Talking Dog on 9/11

 

On this day I always turn to my friend the talking dog who was in NYC - not far from where the towers of the WTC once stood.

9.11 + 24.0

And so we’re back. It’s 24 years on. Almost 10% in the life of our relatively young republic, almost 40% of my own life, since that fateful day (it was a Tuesday, and quite sunny, not unlike today in downtown N.Y.C., where I sit a few hundred yards from the WTC, as I did on the day itself; but I digress).

Given how traumatic 2024 was in Stately Dog Manor (I am pleased to report that the Loquacious Pup appears to have come through with a good recovery from her extremely unpleasant illness and has resumed her studies in graduate school), I have very little to say about 2025. Political violence, including but certainly not limited to the improper use of federal military personnel on the streets of American cities, has now been normalized, as has the use of “executive orders” at odds with statutes and the constitution, all while a supposed “opposition party” appears to have disappeared. The murder of a [Republican] political troll is an occasion for national lowering of flags to half mast, unlike the murder of [Democratic] lawmakers and legislative leaders.

READ THE REST HERE.

CHICAGO UNDER SIEGE

 

The Artists who Carried Guantanamo in their hands...

 Find the link below...

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

---

SPENCER HERE. Longtime subscribers will remember our occasional contributor Mansoor Adayfi, who spent 15 years caged at Guantánamo Bay. Mansoor recently reconnected with two friends from Guantánamo who were part of the Biden administration's final detainee release. His friends, Moath al-Alwi and Khalid Qassim, were known within the detention camp for their artwork and solidarity. When Mansoor sent me the piece that follows, I wanted to make sure you got to know Moath and Khalid as well. 

The Artists Who Carried Guantánamo in Their Hands

From our friends down under at Justinian

 Fitch claims he is retiring.... I hope not. read the whole Fitch here.

Wither the Republic

Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Justinian in Donald Trump, Murdoch, Roger Fitch Esq, US Supreme Court, US politics

Twenty years of Roger Fitch ... He says this is his last column from Washington ... A brief history of American law and governance since Bush II ... The Roberts' court and reshaping the Constitution ... Hollowing out the Bill of Rights ... Murdoch's malign influence ... Shakedowns and bribes 

 

The American republic that followed the revolution is gone, overthrown, not by a subsequent revolution, but following an election, by the autogolpe of a fascist. 

 

History will record that the coup had the passive assistance of congress and the active support of a supreme court that, especially during its last two terms (here and here), exploited constitutional weaknesses, effectively abandoning the rule of law established by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The federal republic launched by North American colonies in 1789 lasted 236 years, more than any other modern republic. France, which began its initial republic about the same time, is in its Fifth Republic.

The American constitution was novel and superior, despite allowing the continuation of slavery in some states (slavery was at that time countenanced in many nations), and notwithstanding the fact that it was set-up by a non-representative group of white male property-owners.

There are many reasons the Americans' constitution eventually failed: the unplanned party system and bad faith of party members; the rude understanding of its basic tenets by the citizens; and ultimately, by indifferent or (as now) openly hostile supreme courts.

It's fitting that Roger Fitch has appeared in the pages of a legal journal like Justinian, as the decline of the US is closely associated with perverse actions of institutional lawyers. Under George Bush, they were incompetent (e.g, Alberto Gonzales), immoral (e.g, the Torture Memo lawyers) or simply unethical; under Donald Trump they are dedicated lawbreakers.

We've seen it before. This column began in August 2005, at the birth of the Roberts Court, with your columnist writing about the Australian David Hicks and Guantánamo, the illegal offshore detention camp set up by GW Bush in January 2002. 

Guantánamo was and remains a blot on the rule of law, with invented "enemy combatants" and kangaroo military commissions for prosecuting civilian terrorists and, sometimes, lawful belligerents. It prefigured Trump's due process-free migrant detention at Guantánamo and abroad, and officially-sanctioned torture, now outsourced to foreign despots like El Salvador's Nayib Bukele.

Bukele: running Trump's offshore prison

In August of 2005, the supreme court's chosen president, George Bush, had recently obtained a second term in an election he actually won. The supreme court's "swing vote" in decisions, the Reagan-appointed Sandra Day O'Connor, had announced her retirement. O'Connor had been one of two members of the Bush v Gore majority with no ethical conflict, and was the only one of the five majority justices to regret, if not repent, that case.

The present chief justice, John Roberts (then a DC Circuit judge) was being considered for O'Connor's position, and then, when CJ William Rehnquist died, for chief justice. Cynics said he auditioned for appointment through his role in a pending DC Circuit case, one of two Guantánamo Cases of utmost concern to the Bush administration, treating, as they did, the legality of Bush's Guantánamo scheme to imprison newly-invented "enemy combatants" in his figurative "war on terror", men apprehended, not just in Afghanistan, but as far away as the Gambia, and Bosnia, where "combatants" were abducted by the US despite rulings by that country's highest courts. 

Helpfully, Roberts ruled against habeas.

When Roger Fitch took up his pen 20 years ago this month, early in the second Bush administration, he thought the republic had already been fatally injured by the judicial coup of December 12, 2000, the supreme court's unprecedented and partisan intervention on specious grounds in a presidential election in order to install a mediocrity as president, apparently based on the brand he was wearing. 

With that president's appointments to the court, a new majority faction of conservatives coalesced with a  mission to reshape the constitution. It depended largely on altering the precedents previously established by justices of every hue, and entailed constitutional alterations that hollowed-out and subverted some of the most important protections of the Bill of Rights. 

Roberts CJ: Trump's man

Over time, the Roberts Court converted those amendments into tools and playthings of corporations, religious zealots, gun fanatics, and other corporate or religiously-badged special interests. 

The winners have been mostly conservative groups allied with and depending upon the venality of Republicans, whose election successes and fund-raising have been turbocharged, respectively, by the court's Shelby County and Citizens United decisions. The final blow: the Rucho decision greenlighting partisan gerrymanders.

The Republicans used to be the party of the establishment and upper-crust, their voices heard in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, a party that included liberal and independent voices. Sadly, after Eisenhower, and under Richard Nixon's cynical Southern Strategy, the "Grand Old Party" was taken over by special interests who had not previously played the leading role.

It was the time when the old class system in the US began to crumble under the assault of television and popular culture, when the nouveaux riche arrived on the partisan scene, when the polemicist William F Buckley and subversive economist Milton Friedman introduced a new and edgier conservatism where corporations and (conservative) Catholics began to more openly ally with monopolists and the previous untouchables: evangelicals, and the dregs of white southern segregationists. 

The finishing touches to today's Republican party were provided by the malignant influence of Australian blow-in Rupert Murdoch and his fanatical rightwing News Corp, which now owns the Wall Street Journal. 

Murdoch: fanatical

Many of the party participants in the December 2000 Putsch are still around, including two of the Bush v Gore rogue justices (Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas), the present chief justice, John Roberts, and two Republican lawyers who have since joined the court, appointed by Donald Trump.

2000 also entrenched the Republican Party in the rising sunbelt states of Florida and Texas, with the results we have seen, both nationally and in other ex-Confederate states.

≈   ≈   ≈

In 2025, the US may have the trappings of a government, but Trump's administration is a giant protection racket, a MAGA mafia presided over by the Capo and chief gangster, the convicted fraudster and felon Donald Trump, supported by a supine congress and neo-fascist popular movement. Cruelty, greed and revenge are the ruling passions of this corrupt, illegitimate regime.

Trump's shakedowns are working. Large "settlements" have been extorted in claims with no legal basis (e.g, foreign tariffs, Big Law threats and media intimidation), and Trump's crude ransom demands are being met by universities (e.g, Columbia and Harvard).

Trump and his Project 2025 minders still have a to-do list, involving destruction of various parts of the US constitution, most notably the separation of powers, by usurping the powers of congress and the judiciary. 

Trump is meanwhile flouting the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments, ignoring Article I's prohibition against bills of attainder, and emasculating civil rights in general.

Roger Fitch bids farewell to all that.

RIP Tom Lehrer

 

RIP Tom Durkin

 Fellow Chicago Guantanamo attorney Tom Durkin, died yesterday. Tom was my friend and a legendary defense attorney in Chicago -- even before he took on Guantanamo cases. You can read more about Tom here.

“We’re having a two-tiered system of justice in the federal criminal courts,” Mr. Durkin told a Sun-Times reporter during Daoud’s case in 2014. “We have cases in the war on terror, which we allow secret proceedings in because it’s so sensitive, and then we have our regular old justice system, and I think that’s … very frightening.”

Rest in peace Tom.

MEN IN CAGES

 I hope the American people are more alarmed about the men in cages today than they were in January 2002: a time when my government opened Guantanamo to the men who were randomly picked up in its "war on terror." Those men, who as we later learned were primarily innocent of any crime, were also put in cages- subjected to the elements and with buckets for toilets. 

Camp X-Ray was ultimately closed when the men were moved to a "more sheltered" prison setting (but similarly inhumane). However, if you look at the photos from Wikipedia (at the link) setting up Camp X Ray was eerily similar to the scene at today's Internment Camp being set up in Florida.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) was the umbrella organization for the Guantanamo attorneys. At one point CCR moved to preserve Camp X Ray, so that we here in the U.S. do not forget our inhumanity.

Unfortunately, it seems the trumpers have not forgotten. 

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, these goons are continuing to follow the Guantanamo rule book. One big difference, is that they are now doing this on U.S. soil.  

The only question is, will they get away with this too?

I hope CCR will pick up the mantle and enlist a cadre of attorneys to fight this new battle.

Please donate to CCR NOW.

DC Circuit Court rules against plea deal

 On Friday the federal court of appeals for the district of columbia ruled that the Sec'y of Defense (under Biden) had the authority to scrap the plea deal for the men subject to the military commission and held at Guantanamo (note only 7 of the men currently held at Guantanamo are subject to the military commissions the other 6 men still being held at the base have never been charged with anything!). The deal, which was being negotiated over a period of two years, was for 3 of the men to plead guilty in return for not facing the possibility of a death sentence.  Biden's sec'y of defense Benson, who in theory should have had no say in the deal, tried to cancel it. The military court said Benson had no authority to stop the deal. However, the majority of the Court, in what the dissent called a "stunning" decision, agreed majority that Benson had the authority. It will be interesting to see if the en banc court will take the case.

I discussed the military court's decision here.

Read more about Friday's decision here.