{"id":188749,"date":"2010-08-03T20:27:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-04T01:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/03\/obama-administration-goes-full-eric-blair\/"},"modified":"2010-08-03T20:27:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-04T01:27:00","slug":"obama-administration-goes-full-eric-blair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/03\/obama-administration-goes-full-eric-blair\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Administration Goes Full Eric Blair*"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or maybe Franz Kafka.<\/p>\n

You see, last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, “the father of Obama assassination target (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki,” to get a court injunction to keep him from being killed by the U.S. government..<\/p>\n

The government’s response was declare Anwar al-Awlaki a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” which meant that lawyers could not represent him without a special license from the government<\/a>.<\/p>\n

George W. Bush never asserted a right to assassinate American citizens, and they never used Treasury Department anti money laundering legislation to prevent lawyers from representing someone pro bono<\/span> in a case to prevent their assassination:<\/p>\n

Left with no choice, the ACLU and CCR this morning filed a lawsuit on their own behalf against Timothy Geithner and the Treasury Department. The suit argues that Treasury has no statutory authority under the law it invokes — The International Emergency Economic Powers Act — to bar American lawyers from representing American citizens on an uncompensated basis. It further argues what ought to be a completely uncontroversial point: that even if Congress had vested Treasury with this authority, it is blatantly unconstitutional to deny American citizens the right to have a lawyer, and to deny American lawyers the right to represent clients, without first obtaining a permission slip from Executive Branch officials (the Complaint is here). As the ACLU\/CCR Brief puts it: “The notion that the government can compel a citizen to seek its permission before challenging the constitutionality of its actions in court is wholly foreign to our constitutional system” and “[a]s non-profit organizations dedicated to protecting civil liberties and human rights, Plaintiffs have a First Amendment right to represent clients in litigation consistent with their organizational missions.” The Brief also argues that it is a violation of Separation of Powers to allow the Executive Branch to determine in its sole discretion who can and cannot appear in and have access to a federal court.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obama’s positions on national defense and surveillance indisputably worse than those of George W. Bush’s.<\/p>\n

Bootnote:
After stonewalling for weeks, the Treasury Department granted a license<\/a> once the ACLU and CCR filed a separate lawsuit against the denial of such a license, probably because they want to assert the right again, even if it is just for a few weeks to f%$# with the ability of some guy to get proper legal counsel.<\/p>\n

I am so writing in “Howard Dean,” in the 2012 general.<\/p>\n

*<\/sup>George Orwell’s real name.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or maybe Franz Kafka. You see, last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, “the father of Obama assassination target (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki,” to get a court injunction to keep him from being killed by the U.S. government.. The government’s response was declare Anwar al-Awlaki a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1142,969,972,1041,1076,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-evil","category-justice","category-law-enforcement-misconduct","category-terrorism","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188749"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}