Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Resurrecting the Star Chamber
by Scott Horton When the Founding Fathers looked for a model that reflected the abuses they objected to—in short what they intended to forbid by their new Constitution and Bill of Rights—they turned to an English institution, the Court of Star Chamber.
It was a state security court with ancient roots which flourished under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs.
The Star Chamber court operated in secrecy, was not bothered by the picky evidentiary rules that emerged in other courts, and did not believe that those appearing before it on state security charges had many rights—certainly not the right to counsel, nor even the right to conduct a defense.
It relied very heavily on torture to extract the evidence it
sought to convict, usually a confession—though rarely, of course, a
confession with any validity, since the application of the rack would
quickly get the subject to say whatever was desired, truthful or not.
Although scholars have been complimentary of the Star Chamber for
its work on commercial matters, when politics was at issue, we see that
it acted with little independence from the monarch.
It was a tool for
lashing the political opposition. And freethinkers were its particular
victims. The mistreatment dealt to religious dissenters in particular,
men like “Freeborn” John Lilburne and John Pym, caused the public to
turn strongly against the Star Chamber and to demand its abolition. In
the end, the Court of Star Chamber stood as an image for the tyrannical
excesses of King Charles. And the American colonists, being
overwhelmingly Roundheads, were among the loudest voices raised in
opposition.
The Bush Administration is slowly introducing the
Court of Star Chamber to the process of American justice. We see its
elements everywhere. In the farcical Combat Status Review Tribunals
created in Guantánamo, now repeatedly denounced even by judges serving
on them as a travesty. In the Military Commissions, crafted in
conscious avoidance of the standards both of American military and
civilian justice. And in the steady press to lower the standards of our
federal courts to introduce practices that continually tip the scales
of justice in favor of prosecutors. Reports have begun to circulate
that the Administration has put together a group of scholars headed by
a right-wing activist judge to craft legislation to introduce a new
court of Star Chamber, perhaps to be floated in the coming year. As we
see in the public pronouncements of the Bush Administration,
accusations leveled at detainees in the war on terror are leveled for
political effect, and often to parallel partisan political campaigns.
If those accusations are rejected by a court, it therefore undermines
confidence in the Administration and the Party. Which is why, in the
Bush view of justice, a failure to convict is unacceptable. And which
is why the Bush view of justice is no justice at all.
Two
stories in the press this morning give more evidence to the Bush
Administration’s on-going assault on the courts and the concept of
justice. Each is worthy of study and observation because of what it
portends for the future of our languishing justice process.
Al-Timimi
In
the Eastern District of Virginia (the Bush Administration’s favorite
district court, in its favorite circuit), federal prosecutors secured a
conviction and life-sentence against an Islamic scholar in 2005. His
attorneys have attacked the conviction, claiming that he was the target
of illegal surveillance. The Bush Administration has intelligence
authorities making classified submissions directly to the judge in the
case, without allowing either the defense or the prosecutors access to
them. The New York Times reports:
"A federal judge warned Tuesday
that if the government did not allow lawyers to review classified
material on possible wiretapping of an Islamic scholar convicted of
inciting terrorism, she might order a new trial for him. The unexpected
development is the latest legal complication involving the National
Security Agency’s wiretapping program, which has produced challenges
from criminal defendants as well as civil lawsuits against the
government and phone carriers.
"Lawyers for Ali al-Timimi, an
Islamic scholar in Northern Virginia sentenced to life in prison in
2005 for inciting his followers to commit acts of terrorism, maintain
that he may have been illegally wiretapped by the agency as part of its
program of eavesdropping without warrants that was approved by
President Bush soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. In April 2006, four
months after the N.S.A. program was publicly disclosed, an appellate
court directed the trial judge in Mr. Timimi’s case to reconsider it in
light of his lawyers’ accusations.
"But the issue has been
bogged down in court for 18 months, with intelligence officials making
a series of classified appearances before the judge, Leonie M.
Brinkema, to explain the government’s position. Lawyers for Mr. Timimi
and even the trial prosecutors have not been allowed to hear the
closed-door discussions. Jonathan Turley, the lead appellate lawyer for
Mr. Timimi, said the defense’s lack of access to crucial evidence had
made it hard to litigate the case. “We’re shadowboxing in the courtroom
with unnamed officials at unnamed agencies,” Mr. Turley said in a
telephone interview."
Like defendants before the Star Chamber,
the defense is being denied the right of confrontation, the most basic
of defense rights. This means that they do not know what is being said
against them, nor even who is saying it. And accordingly, they are not
able to point out to the Court what is false or suspect in these
statements, or to introduce information which would rebut them. And all
of this is transpiring in an American court room today, in one of many
courts in America in which the Constitution has become a dormant
document–at the urging of the Bush Justice Department.
Omar Khadr
Five
news organizations, The AP, The New York Times Co., Dow Jones &
Company Inc., The Hearst Corp. and The McClatchy Company have filed a
complaint stating that they are being denied access to critical
information that would allow them to report on the Guantánamo Military
Commissions proceeding against Canadian Omar Khadr.
"Various
arguments in the case of Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are
apparently made via e-mail — a communications channel to which the
public has no access — and issues apparently are being raised in closed
sessions for which no transcripts or summaries are available, the news
organizations, including The Associated Press, wrote in a filing.
"In
addition, the filing stated, the public is not permitted access to
motions and other documents submitted by the parties and “even the
existence of a motion is not currently disclosed in any publicly
accessible way.”
Khadr is now 21 years of age and has been in
prison for five years, since he was 16. He is accused of having
committed crimes as a minor. Radkhika Coomaraswamy, the UN Special
Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, has registered strong
complaints about the treatment of Khadr, as have other nations and
human rights groups. “She raised her concerns about the creation of an
international precedent where an individual is being tried for war
crimes with regard to alleged acts committed when he was a child,” said
a UN spokesman.
Specific charges against Khadr include having lobbed a grenade that killed an American medic in Afghanistan.
The
US strategy of closely guarding the proceedings and restricting media
access to arguments and materials submitted is, however, highly
selective. The Department of Defense leaked to CBS News’s “Sixty
Minutes” program what prosecutors have long viewed as their “bombshell”
evidence: film which they assert shows Khadr involved in insurgent
activities in Afghanistan.
The Government strategy is that the
Government will exercise tight control over what the public learns
about the trial and what transpires there. That, of course, was the
very abuse against which “Freeborn” John Lilburne railed in his assault
on the injustice of the Stuart courts, and the right to an open court
is often cited in legal history books as having been established by
him, in the middle of the seventeenth century. Which is why the Bush
Administration is so much more at home with sixteenth century concept
of judicial conduct.
But the major issue that critics raise
here is not Khadr’s guilt or innocence, but the procedural fairness and
transparency of the process by which he is being tried.
As
things stand now, whatever results from the trial of Omar Khadr, no
serious observers are going to consider them to be fair. So what
purpose is served by them? The answer to that question is fairly
obvious: domestic political propaganda. This is a political trial, not
an exercise in justice.
Writings 
When the Founding Fathers looked for a model that reflected the abuses they objected to—in short what they intended to forbid by their new Constitution and Bill of Rights—they turned to an English institution, the Court of Star Chamber. 
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