Gitmo Destroyed Our Constitutional Order By Jacob G. Hornberger!!!!
(2019-04-23 at 14:30:42 )

Gitmo Destroyed Our Constitutional Order by Jacob G. Hornberger

Sundays Washington Post carried an article about the suicide of former Peruvian President Alan García, who Peruvian officials had charged with official corruption while he was in office.

The article posited the possibility that García committed suicide because under Perus judicial system, he would have faced up to three years in pretrial detention without actually being indicted, which the Post said was "a term unthinkable in many democracies, even for suspects facing overwhelming evidence of the most heinous crimes."

What the Post did not point out is that indefinite detention without a trial is not unthinkable in the United States.

Instead, thanks to the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, indefinite detention has now become a core feature of the United States of Americas criminal-justice system. As the Post implies, it is also a hallmark of tyranny.

Among the potential acts of tyranny with which our United States of American ancestors were most concerned was the power of the federal government to keep people in jail indefinitely without a trial.

That was why the United States Constitution, which called into existence a government of limited powers, did not delegate such a power to federal officials.

It is also why the United States of American people enacted the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, which expressly guaranty the rights of trial by jury, a speedy and public trial, bail, and protection from cruel and unusual punishments.

The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed those rights with the establishment of their prison, torture program, and "judicial" center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Today, there are people at Gitmo who have been languishing for more than a decade, denied the benefits of trial by jury, a speedy and public trial, and bail.

This should not surprise us.

In the long sordid history of the United States national-security establishment and its infamous regime-change operations in foreign countries, it has always stood for installing dictatorships into power, preferably military ones.

By their very nature, military establishments almost always lean conservative, viewing procedural protections as nothing more than "technicalities" that permit guilty people to go free.

Thus, the last thing that military regimes are going to do is honor and respect the principles enunciated in the United States Bill of Rights.

An example was the United States-inspired coup in Chile in 1973, where the regime of military Gen. Augusto Pinochet had his national-security state forces round up some 50,000 people, incarcerate them, rape them, torture them, and murder or disappear around 3,000 of them. No trial by jury. No bail.

Fearful of the power of the Chilean national security establishment, the Chilean federal courts went silent, as did the Chilean legislature.

The same thing happened in the Central Intelligence Agencys coup in Guatemala some 20 years before that. The Central Intelligence Agency succeeded in ousting the democratically elected president of the country, Jacobo Arbenz, and installed a brutal military general in his stead, who proceeded to round up, torture, and kill people without a trial.

We saw it with Iran, when a Central Intelligence Agency coup in 1953 ousted the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and restored the brutal tyranny of the Shah.

While the Shah was not a military general, his United States-supported rule was every bit as tyrannical as that of any military general. Indefinite detention and torture, without the benefit of a trial, were hallmarks of his brutal rule, which came to an end in 1979 when the Iranian people revolted against it.

We see it today in the military dictatorship in Egypt. Indefinite detention and torture, without trial. All fully supported by the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and most of the rest of the federal government.

Therefore, it should not surprise us that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency established this same type of system in Cuba, where the ruling leftist communist regime, ironically enough, engages in indefinite detention and torture without trial as well.

In fact, do not forget that that is why our ancestors demanded that the Bill of Rights be enacted - they were certain that federal officials would do the tyrannical acts proscribed by the Amendments.

What the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have done in Cuba is a confirmation of the concerns that motivated United States of Americans to enact the Bill of Rights.

One irony in all this, of course, is that United States military officials and Central Intelligence Agency officials take an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution.

But it is obvious that the oath is nothing more than a lie.

After all, the reason that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency established their prison and torture center in Cuba was precisely to avoid the provisions of the United States Constitution.

Their very aim was to establish a United States Constitution-free zone, one in which they could keep people jailed forever and torture them to their hearts content and never have to bring them to trial.

It is a sad and pathetic legacy of the decision after World War II to convert the United States government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, a type of governmental structure that is inherent to totalitarian regimes, one in which government officials wield tyrannical powers.

That is why it is not enough to close the Pentagons and Central Intelligence Agencys imperialist prison and torture center in Cuba.

To restore freedom and justice to our land, it is also necessary to restore a limited-government republic to ensure that this type of dark tyranny never afflicts our nation again.

Printed here with permission from Mr. Jacob G. Hornberger of The Future of Freedom Foundation!! Their Great Website!!