Bush protested by tens of thousands in Ireland and Turkey

Compiled by John Lapp

June 30 (AGR) -- Smiling and waving, George W. Bush glided down the steps of Air Force One at Shannon airport last night, seemingly unfazed by his tag as the most unwelcome American ever to set foot on Irish soil.

The president and his wife, Laura, were spared the sight of thousands of Irish protesters at the airport entrance and whisked off in an armoured Cadillac to the 16th century Dromoland castle in County Clare, the site of a US-European Union summit.

An estimated 8-10,000 anti-war demonstrators that marched through the streets of the Irish capitol of Dublin to the Shannon Airport on June 25, in order to show resistance to the US occupation of Iraq. The protestors were blocked by a line of Gardi riot police 218 yards from the airport, and soon peacefully dispersed.

The president attempted to use the US-EU summit to try to heal the transatlantic rifts over Iraq before the Nato summit in Turkey.

Many controversial issues were slated for the meeting: the handover of sovereignty to Iraq took precedence over the other topics for discussion, including Afghanistan, trade, and the global AIDS epidemic.

The liberal establishment is fuming that Bush might use his visit to Ireland for electioneering. Ireland is a favorite location for US presidents seeking re-election and, as one Irish journalist put it, “looking statesmanlike in a pretty Irish castle” will do no harm to Bush’s efforts to appeal to an estimated 34.3 million people of Irish descent at home. Bill Clinton was greeted like a film star when he visited Ireland, but Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon met protests.

Mary O’Rourke, leader of the Irish senate, said she had turned down the US embassy dinner to mark Bush’s visit. She said: “I have no animosity for the US but I have animosity for the president who pushed through the war policy in the absence of a UN mandate.”

More than 170 Irish lawyers signed a petition against Bush this week. Fergal Kavanagh, who was defense counsel for a Rwandan government minister accused of war crimes at the UN tribunal, said Mr Bush should be arrested by Irish police when his plane lands if it emerged that he had knowledge of the torture of prisoners in Iraq.

Six thousand police and Irish army personnel and nearly 1,000 US and private security guards have shut down a swath of County Clare, sealing manholes, building security fences and sparking rumors that a local golf course is being scoured with metal detectors. Some indignant residents were issued with passes and forced to name all those living in their homes. They have likened it to life under the notorious Black and Tans, British police auxiliaries of the 1920s.

Thousands protest Bush in Turkey

Tens of thousands of Turks chanting anti-Bush slogans demonstrated against the president’s visit to their country on June 27 and a NATO summit.

Bush is unpopular in Turkey, where the overwhelming majority of the public opposed the Iraq war.

As the president arrived in Turkey Saturday, supporters of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said they kidnapped three Turkish workers in Iraq, Arab TV station al-Jazeera reported.

The group has threatened to behead the hostages, an al-Jazeera employee told AP.

The protest in the Kadikoy district, on the Asian side of Istanbul, attracted more than 40,000 people, mostly members of leftist groups, police said.

There were some 100 foreign protesters from Greece, Britain, The Netherlands, Portugal, and Syria.

“We want to throw NATO out of Istanbul,” said Dogan Aytac, a Turkish protester with a flag in his hat that read: “Get out Bush!”

A 20-year-old Greek protester, Odysseas Maaita, said, “We are here to express our solidarity with the Turkish people, with the people of the Middle East, and all others that are under attack, to say that we are against NATO.”

The summit is to be held on the European side of the city, across the Bosporus, about six miles from Kadikoy.

Turkey dramatically boosted security before Bush’s arrival and in preparation for the NATO summit, which began June 28.

F-16 warplanes patrolled the skies of Istanbul on June 27. AWACS early warning planes, dispatched by NATO will help monitor a no-fly zone over the city. More than 23,000 police will be on duty during the summit. Turkish commandos are patrolling the Bosporus in rubber boats with mounted machine guns.

At the protest, demonstrators chanted, “Istanbul will be a grave for NATO.”

They carried banners, reading: “Down with American Imperialism,” and “Go away Bush!”

In Ankara on June 26, Turkish police fired tear gas at scores of stone-throwing leftist demonstrators, just hours before Bush arrived in the country. Shortly after the protest began, about 150 people rushed a police barricade, hitting the blue iron barrier with sticks.

“We will go beyond barricades protecting Bush,” the group shouted.

Police fired tear gas at the group from an armored personnel carrier. Police said 13 officers were injured by rocks hurled during the rally, the Anatolia news agency reported.

On June 27, police rounded up some 15 leftist demonstrators in downtown Ankara, saying the group was planning to stage a firebombing in the city.

Bush’s arrival was preceded by a series of protests and bomb blasts, including one June 24 that injured three people outside the Ankara hotel; where Bush is expected to stay. Another blast that same day on an Istanbul bus killed four people and injured 14.

The bombings have been blamed on militant leftists.

Militant Kurdish, Islamic, and leftist groups are active in the country, and security in Istanbul has been of special concern since November, when four suicide truck bombings blamed on al-Qaida killed more than 60 people.

Resistance within NATO

President George Bush was facing stiff French-led resistance last night to his efforts to persuade his Nato allies to agree to train Iraqi security forces.

The French president, Jacques Chirac, is determined to thwart any deal that allows the US and Britain to claim that the alliance has a formal role in the disputed occupation.

France has signalled that it will approve the training of Iraqi forces but it opposes the presence of any NATO flag or insignia on the ground in Iraq.

Sources: AP, Guardian (UK), The Observer (UK)

Queer pride celebrated in Asheville

Supreme Court rules on ‘Enemy Combatants’

Compiled by Shawn Gaynor

June 29 (AGR) -– In a rebuke to the Bush Administration, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled that while the executive branch technically has the power to designate “enemy combatants,” prisoners have a right to challenge their detention in court.

In one opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Conner wrote the “We have long since made clear that state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”

In one of the major Supreme Court decisions, the justices ruled 8-1 that US-born citizen and enemy combatant Yaser Hamdi could not be detained without giving him a way to challenge the government’s evidence.

The eight justices rejected the Bush administration’s treatment of Hamdi on some grounds. Only Justice Clarence Thomas, by many measures the court’s staunchest conservative, found no fault with the government.

In the second, more complicated ruling in the Hamdi case, the court divided by a 5-4 vote ruled that Bush has the power to detain American citizen Yaser Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan as a suspected Taliban fighter and who has been held in a US military jail.

In a second case, the justices ruled 6-3 that federal courts do have jurisdiction over “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay even though it’s not on US soil.

Some 595 foreign nationals, designated “enemy combatants,” are being held at the base in Cuba as suspected al Qaeda members or Taliban fighters.

All but a handful of those at the base are being held without being charged, without access to lawyers or their families and without access to courts or a proceeding of any kind.

The Bush administration came up with the term, “enemy combatants,” to separate them from “prisoners of war” in an attempt to deny them the same rights as prisoners of war.

“The Bush administration has disavowed the Geneva Conventions in both its actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And what the court was saying is that, ‘we don’t have to reach the Geneva Conventions, because what we’re saying is that you could cannot constitutionally do this within the United States.’ We know that the Geneva Conventions also prohibit this, but that the administration can’t do what it wanted to do here,” said Barbara Olshansky an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who argued one of the cases.

This declaration was not just valuable but essential, for in each of the cases, the White House made unprecedented assertions of executive privilege. Two of the cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Padilla v. Rumsfeld, involve American citizens -- one captured in Afghanistan, where he was suspected of fighting on behalf of the Taliban and the other caught in Chicago and suspected of involvement in a plot to set off a “dirty bomb” in the United States. Unilaterally labeled “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla are being held indefinitely at a naval brig in Charleston, S.C. They have never received any formal charges or any legal proceedings.

All this means that whether the prisoners will be released or not -- and on what terms -- will be decided in time by the federal courts. The court upheld the Bush administration’s practice of declaring a person an “enemy combatant”, by either forcing the administration to declare a detainee a prisoner of war or treat them like domestic arrestees.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, conceded that Congress had given the president the power to detain citizens in the war, albeit under “very limited circumstances,” but went on to assert that, “(d)ue process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision-maker.”

At least two court members — Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — would have released Hamdi immediately.

The four dissenting judges in the decision to send the case back to a lower court, in an opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, said constitutional due process rights demand that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant must be given “a meaningful opportunity” to contest the basis for the detention before a neutral party.

In light of O’Connor’s strong language in the Hamdi decision, however, legal experts said Padilla is likely to get at the very least a ruling similar to Hamdi’s, although Shapiro suggested that a court may require the government to either charge him with a crime or release him. The fact that he was detained so far from the battlefield will make it more difficult for the government to persuade a court that he should be designated as an “enemy combatant,” Shapiro said.

Both men have been held more than two years and interrogated repeatedly.

Though the high court’s ruling on the Guantanamo detainees applies only to Guantanamo detainees, the case has additional resonance because of recent revelations that the US is running similar, but secret detention facilities elsewhere.

“We have a very big hurdle with regards to those facilities. So far we have really not been able to ascertain where all of those facilities are. We are going to be working very diligently to find out where those other facilities are, and insure that people get the benefits of the Geneva Conventions at the very least,” said Olshansky.

“You know, we want them for our soldiers, those benefits and protections, and we have to give them to everyone else. If the United States exercises jurisdiction and control over those facilities, we, of course, will try to make the argument that this decision means that people there have access to habeas corpus.”

Sources: AP, Democracy Now, Newsday, One World, Reuters