Tag Archives: Due Process

The Justice Department Was Dangerous Before Trump. It’s Out of Control Now, Part One, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on September 17, 2022 | 1 comment

The Justice Department has become a partisan enforcer of laws that are never applied to the favored. Trump, of course, is not among the favored. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

The current Trump investigation is just the latest chapter of a long-brewing civil liberties nightmare.

Clockwise from top left: The “Blind Sheikh,” attorney Lynne Stewart, singing Attorney General John Ashcroft, Enron defendant Ken Lay

On Monday, August 8, Justice Department officials spent nine hours raiding the Mar-a-Lago home of Donald Trump, carrying out 12 boxes of material. When criticism ensued, FBI spokespeople in wounded tones insisted the press eschew the harsh term “raid,” and use “execution of a search warrant” instead.

“Agents don’t like the word ‘raid,’ they don’t like it,” complained former assistant FBI counterintelligence director turned MSNBC analyst Frank Figliuzzi. He added with unintentional irony: “It sounds like it’s some sort of extrajudicial, non-legal thing.”

But it was a raid, as the surprisingly enormous number of people who’ve been on the business end of such actions since 9/11 will report. The state more and more now avails itself of a procedural trick that would have horrified everyone from Jefferson to to Potter Stewart to Thurgood Marshall. Investigating, say, one lawyer, prosecutors raid a whole firm, taking everything — emails, client files, cell phones and personal computers — then have a supposedly separate group of lawyers, called a “taint” or “filter” team, examine it all. In this way they learn the private details of hundreds or even thousands of clients in a shot, all people unrelated to the supposed case at hand.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Investigations, Law, Tyranny

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How Covid Put an End to Your Right to Due Process, by Daren A. Wisely

Posted on May 20, 2021 | 1 comment

Covid put an end to a lot of your rights, but the right to due process is definitely a big one. From Daren A. Wisely at mises.org:

Over a year ago, the covid panic shook the world. We were told it would only be “15 days to flatten the curve” as businesses were locked down, “nonessential” employees were forced out of work (I’ve written about the myth of the nonessential employee here), masks were mandated, and individuals were not allowed to gather in groups or attend religious services.

In typical fashion, a government-mandated “temporary” usurpation of liberty turned into an indefinite infringement, as shown by the fact that we’re still under covid orders four hundred days later. Regardless of the length of time, the question remains that few have asked: What authority does the government have to lock us down and force us out of work?

This brings us to the issue of due process, which at minimum requires the right to appear in front of a judge and represent oneself to a jury of his peers before being stripped of essential liberty. Did the thousands of businesses closed and millions put out of work get this opportunity? Of course not. They were unilaterally stripped of their ability to put food on the table and pay their bills without any opportunity to object.

Sick until Proven Healthy

The concept of “quarantine” has been well established in American jurisprudence for well over one hundred years. When an individual is sick, and at risk of infecting others, the individual could be put in quarantine or isolation by a court until they are no longer infectious. Quarantine still requires basic due process. The individual subject to potential quarantine is still entitled to a court proceeding and evidence must be established of the individual’s risk to public health.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Law, Medicine, Tyranny

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The Destruction of American Liberty, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

Americans are not free, not even close. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were a watershed event for the United States, not only because of the large death toll and property destruction but, more important, because they spelled the death knell for American liberty.

Americans had already lost a large portion of their freedom when the federal government was converted into what is called a “welfare state,” a governmental system that is based on the concept of mandatory charity. Examples of mandatory-charity programs include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, education grants, corporate bailouts, foreign aid, and every other program by which the government takes money from people to whom it belongs and gives it to people to whom it does not belong.

There is no way to reconcile a system of mandatory charity with the principles of a free society. A genuinely free society is one in which people are free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with their own money. An unfree society is one in which the government mandates that people be good and caring to others.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Intelligence, Law, Military, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance, Taxes, Technology

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A Silver Lining, by Robert Gore

Posted on October 7, 2018 | 21 comments

A political victory only, not a stand on principle.

No lion, tiger, bear, or wolf would, if it could choose, give up its claws or fangs. No poisonous snake or spider would surrender its venom. Only humans voluntarily abandon their means of survival.

Reason is humans’ tool of survival and separates them from the other animals. The Oxford Dictionary defines reason as: “the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.” Ayn Rand had it right when she warned that reason was under sustained attack. It has only intensified since her death in 1982.

Anybody can accuse anybody of committing a crime. The longstanding legal presumption is that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. Given a guilty judgment’s consequences, the burden necessarily falls on accusers to prove guilt. If it did not, mere accusation would be a verdict leading to punishment of the accused, or Salem Witch Trial justice.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Cronyism, Government, Law, Media, Morality, Philosophy

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Going Full Porn, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on September 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation or non-confirmation should establish once and for all if an accusation absent other proof is enough to derail a proposed appointment. It shouldn’t be. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

The Resistance didn’t quite hit it out of the park with Christine Blasey Ford. After all, how effective for the purpose of character assassination is a claim of “attempted rape” without even a when-and-where piece of the story? So the DC Dem-Progs have gone to their bench and found a real thumper in Deborah Ramirez who steps forward now with the ultimate giant-killer story of Brett Kavanaugh “thrusting his penis in her face and causing her to touch it without her consent,” (as reported in The New Yorker Magazine by Ronan Farrow, America’s self-appointed great white penis-hunter, and estranged son of filmmaker Woody Allen, infamous, reputed penis-mishandler).

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Law, Morality, Politics

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A Helpful Reminder Why Due Process Matters, by Ann

Posted on September 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

Give Christine Blasey Ford her case and assume her accusation is true. Why should someone be kept off the Supreme Court for a mistake they made when they were seventeen? What age is too young and how much time and exemplarary behavior have to occur before the hounds are called off? This article asks neither question, but SLL does. Instead, this article reminds us what happens when due process is tossed out the window. From Ann at politicalinsider.com:

Somewhere between the creation of the Magna Carta and now, leftists have forgotten why due process matters; and in some cases, such as that of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, they choose to outright ignore the judicial and civil rights put in place by the U.S. Constitution.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Law

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Is There Enough of America Left To Be Saved?, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on August 10, 2018 | 1 comment

The individual rights the government protects has dwindled to the point that very few are left. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

As many readers of this website have noticed, the United States has lost its character and become a dysfunctional society. In place of a largely homogeneous population once united in veneration of the Constitution, there exists today massive diversity which Identity Politics has used to disunite the population into separate interest groups.

No clause or article of the Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights, is safe. The George W. Bush and Obama regimes destroyed two of the most important protections of civil liberty—habeas corpus and due process. Bush declared indefinite imprisonment on suspicion alone without evidence or trial. Obama declared execution of US citizens on accusation alone without due process. The Justice (sic) Department wrote legal memos justifying torture, thus destroying the constitutional protection against self-incrimination. One of the authors of the memos is now a professor of law at UC Berkeley. The other is now a federal judge, indications that respect for the Constitution and enforcement of US and international laws against torture is fading in law schools and the federal judiciary.

A third important protection of civil liberty—freedom of speech which is necessary for the discovery of truth and to serve justice—is being destroyed. Apple, Google/Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, university speech codes, legislation against protesting Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians, and the presstitute media that has been turned into a propaganda organ in behalf of vested interests are all actively involved in protecting lies against truth.

Glenn Greenwald reported that “the single greatest threat to free speech in the West — and in the U.S. — is the coordinated, growing campaign to outlaw and punish those who advocate for, or participate in, activism to end the Israeli occupation” of Palestine.https://theintercept.com/2016/02/16/greatest-threat-to-free-speech-in-the-west-criminalizing-activism-against-israeli-occupation/

To continue reading: Is There Enough of America Left To Be Saved?

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Intelligence, Law, Morality, Privacy, Surveillance

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