From our Friends Down Under.... at Justinian.

Race based vote gutting

ROGER FITCH ESQ • TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2018

Post mid-terms ... Trump toady takes over as AG ... Voter suppression in overdrive ... Racial tone to election rigging ... Roberts court heads off the "danger" of non-white voting ... Trump's election stunts ... From Roger Fitch ... Our Man in Washington 

THE US political climate remains dire following the elections. A venal authoritarian remains president, and the senate, America's own "unrepresentative swill", is still controlled by a dangerous political party ready to rubber-stamp appalling appointments to government agencies and federal courts.

Thanks largely to Republican gerrymanders, there was no "blue wave" in the US House (contra here), but Democrats managed to wrest control of it, while breaking the "death-grip" of their opponents on a number of state governments. 

A new level of Trump bad behaviour followed. Ominously, the president sacked his long-suffering attorney-general and replaced him with a controversial Trump loyalist who could stifle the special prosecutor's investigations, and even disclose to Trump the deliberations of Robert Mueller's grand jury. 

Fortunately, the timely release by the National Archives of the 1974 "Watergate Road Map" suggests a way forward for the special prosecutor, e.g. a report to congress, where a war is brewing: Democrats promise house investigations of their spectacularly corrupt president, while Trump threatens senate investigations of Democrats.

The senate could remain Republican for years, frustrating efforts to rectify the vote suppression, i.e. election fraud that enables minority Republicans to stay in office. Fortunately, 15 states had voting measures on their ballots this year, mostly to broaden the franchise, more here. 

The biggest rout of Republican representatives was in the Northeast, but there were gratifying results elsewhere, e.g. in southern California, where "Russia's favourite congressman", Dana Rohrabacher, was ousted after 30 years. 

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker was defeated, though the Republican legislature quickly began stripping the incoming Democrat of his powers; an identical phenomenon occurred in 2016 in North Carolina when another Democrat governor won in a Republican state. 

Having tightened the recount provisions in 2016, Walker had to come within one percent of his opponent to qualify for a recount. To considerable Schadenfreude, he finished 1.2 percentage points behind. 

Governorships were also "flipped" by Democrats in Nevada, New Mexico and Kansas, where America's leading vote-suppresser, Kris Kobach, was defeated. There were further pickups in Illinois, Michigan, and Maine, where Paul LePage, the "craziest governor in the US", retired.  

Voters fought back with initiatives, e.g. in Florida, where 1.4 million people with past felony convictions were re-enfranchised, and in Michigan where an anti-gerrymandering measure passed (there were other initiatives, some with sad results, and state constitutional amendments, e.g. in Alabama, where "fertilised eggs are now people").  

Democrat senators in Indiana, North Dakota, Missouri and possibly Florida were knocked out, but the party picked up senate seats in Nevada and (apparently) Arizona, leaving the Republicans with a net gain of two senate seats (Democrats are expected to lose a Mississippi run-off). 

In Florida, Democrats seemed about to retain Senator Bill Nelson, but the results were so close that the Republican candidate, the cadaverous Rick Scott, pulled ahead and a recount was ordered. Scott, the outgoing governor, instantly accused the Democrats, without evidence, of fraud. Significantly, Scott seemed intent on stopping, not just a recount, but the ongoing initial vote count. 

Swiftly changing demographics

Despite the vote suppression, the turnout of  an estimated 48.1 percent of eligible voters was far better than the 2014 midterm's 36 percent, where candidates could have won office with 18.01 percent of the eligible electorate.

The Democrats would have done better but for the voter-suppression tactics of the Republicans, put into shameless overdrive as the election approached, more here. 

While Republicans disingenuously claim the measures are necessary to prevent voting fraud, the real fraud is denying the vote. Rarely is the tactic reported for what it really is: a racist vote suppression program, cut from the same cloth as unconstitutional poll taxes. 

As a new book notes, whites have suppressed black voters from the moment the latter won significant rights to vote, but non-white voting now presents a demographic danger to Republican rule. It is this perceived existential threat that has led Republicans to embrace minority rule.

Such election fiddling first appeared in the 19th century in the hands of southern whites, but oddly, not in  1877, at the end of Reconstruction and the federal occupation of the South that followed the Civil War. It wasn't until 1890 that the South began systematically stripping African-Americans of their vote, a practice that continued until the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. 

Before 2000, no America state had a strict voter ID requirement. Then, in Crawford v Marion County (2008), the supreme court upheld a law requiring photo IDs.  

Roberts: vote gutting CJ

In Shelby County v Holder (2013), the Roberts Court gutted the VRA's recently re-enacted enforcement provisions requiring Justice Department pre-clearance of proposed voting laws in historically-offending states. 

Mere hours after the 2013 decision, the reconstituted confederacy (now including states like Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota and Arizona) began deterring or preventing votes by those groups of people,  largely black or other minorities, seen as likely Democrat voters.

Shelby County v Holder is now seen as one of the supreme court's worst decisions, in a class with Plessy v Ferguson. In realising a long-held goal of hobbling Johnson's voting rights legislation, CJ John Roberts wrote that the VRA's essential pre-clearance enforcement section for bad-faith prior-offending states was no longer constitutionally warranted: racism was no longer a problem.

What followed Shelby County was a flood of new tactics, calculated, racially-motivated vote suppression schemes, conferring an advantage Republicans will still have when the 2020 census precipitates a new round of redistricting.

It seems to have been the successful partisan interference by Republicans in the razor-close 2000 election, culminating in the supreme court's Bush v Gore, that emboldened the party. 

Vote suppression will only get worse as Republicans try to stave off such apocalyptic, but inevitable, events as politically-suspect Latinos outnumbering "whites" in Texas, the second most populous state.  

*   *   *

One of Donald Trump's legally-dubious election stunts was to send thousands of US soldiers to Texas and the Mexican border. A probable violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, it was nicely timed to coincide with the midterm elections and intimidate (and deter from voting) Hispanic-Americans.  

Perhaps election interference, a real threat to "national security", should have prompted Bill Clinton to send federal troops (or national guard) to Miami on November 22, 2000. They might have quelled the election-changing "Brooks Brother riot", a faux demonstration by Republican staffers and operatives that prevented the recount of votes, giving Bush lawyers (including Brett Kavanaugh) time to get a temporary stay from a sympathetic supreme court justice.  

That order stopped the recount while Bush was ahead and the recount was never resumed, though it became clear afterwards that Gore actually won the popular vote in Florida, and thus the electoral college. 

The rest, as they say, is history.

From our friends down under at Justinian....

An illegitimate SCOTUS

ROGER FITCH ESQ • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2018

The US Supreme Court has been bought ... Long campaign to stack the court with judges favourable to corporate interests ... Huge lobbying and spending to secure Kavanaugh's confirmation ... Guns, God and presidential power ... The mid-terms and intensified voter purging ... From Our Man in Washington, Roger Fitch

"With Anthony Kennedy's retirement, there is no discriminatory voting restriction the justices will be unable to sanction, no immigration law born in animus they will be unable to approve, no expansion of corporate power they will be unable to accept, no grant of presidential immunity they will be unable to uphold, no financial or environmental regulation they will be unable to strike down, no religious objection to an antidiscrimination law they will be unable to recognize, no worker protection they will be unable to repeal, no limitation on abortion they will be unable to allow, and no abuse of power by law enforcement they will feel compelled to restrict" - The Atlantic.

The inevitable has happened. The US senate, unmoved by sexual assault allegations, the nominee's surly demeanour, and an open letter of opposition signed by over 2400 law professors, conferred a lifetime supreme court appointment on DC Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

A "movement conservative", Judge Kavanaugh is a Republican stalwart and former player in distasteful and highly partisan political operations. The party clearly believes he can be relied upon to bat away legal precedents standing in the way of party policy or the Republicans' hold on office (e.g, the coming troubles of Mr Trump), and his first case may offer him a chance to, uh, make a difference. 

At the supplementary senate hearings held following new accusations of youthful sexual assaults, Kavanaugh showed a palpable sense of self-entitlement, revealing an injudicious temperament, yet another cause for concern, including to the American Bar Association, who wanted to reopen its review of his qualifications.  

A snarling Kavanaugh lashed out at "the Clintons" and "left-wingers", ominously adding, "what's goes around, comes around". As it turns out, Kavanaugh's bad-boy drinking, woman troubles, and (perhaps calculated) senate counterattack have all been red meat for Trump's white male base in the lead-up to the November 6 elections.

Earlier hearings followed extensive legal blogging on Kavanaugh's judicial record and the likely consequences of his appointment; the senate focussed on his legal philosophy and attachment to precedent.

Conservative donors outspent liberals to influence the confirmation vote; corporate front groups keen to seat Kavanaugh spent $15 million. This was unsurprising; the nominee's double standard for corporations has already been the subject of a report by Public Citizen - more here.

By a happy coincidence, Judge Kavanaugh has a very broad view of campaign contributions, including those employed to place judges like him on state and federal courts.  

The supreme court was already lurching right, particularly after Trump's addition of the radical Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Kennedy's occasional departures from Republican party script usually involved social issues such as criminal justice or gay rights. Even if Kavanaugh had not succeeded, an equally odious justice would have been confirmed by the immoderate Republican senate.   

Although there is some suggestion that CJ John Roberts will provide a "swing vote", it seems more likely that an extreme far-right faction (comprising the CJ, Clarence Thomas, Joseph Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) will be in control for the first time since the early days of Franklin Roosevelt. All five of them lack legitimacy, in the view of the eminent law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. 

The Atlantic's Adam Serwer fears a return to the days of the 19th century "Redemption" supreme court; others worry that the court could be headed for the lawless laissez faire of the Lochner era, a business paradise where most social and economic regulation was constitutionally circumscribed. 

Some Democrats have threatened to impeach Justice Kavanaugh, and certainly a newly Democrat house of reps could investigate his misstatements to congress (and a lot more: Republicans are circulating a spreadsheet of potential unwelcome investigations if the Democrats "flip" the house in November). 

In the long run, there remains the option of "court-packing": FDR's proposed Judicial Procedures Reform Act of 1937, though never adopted, precipitated a salutary left turn on the court, enabling him to have his legislation upheld.

It's a big choice, but there's nothing to prevent the number of justices being increased under a Democrat administration; nine justices are really too few for the proper supervision of a vast judicial system with thirteen circuit courts of appeal.  

Law prof Michael Dorf thinks that two additional judges would be about right, and the best revenge for the Republicans' 2016 theft of Antonin Scalia's seat; there may also be a need for new court of appeals positions, to offset the Republicans' ongoing judicial sabotage in the lower courts. 

The supreme court's new term has meanwhile begun. Marjorie Cohn looks at the pending big cases that explain the Republicans' rush to get Brett Kavanaugh on the court.  On his first day on the bench, Justice Kavanaugh heard oral arguments in two of the cases making this term a "criminal law professor's dream".

*   *   *

As the elections approach, Republican-controlled states continue their methodical implementation of an array of voter restrictions aimed at non-white voters, not just in the South and Texas, but in Republican regimes throughout the country, e.g. in North Dakota, where Native Americans are a problem, more here.  

Ever since Shelby County v Holder, the still-astonishing 2013 supreme court decision striking out the essential section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (shortly after its near-unanimous re-enactment), the states that previously needed pre-clearance of their voting laws, drawing of electoral districts, and the like have been shameless in their vote suppression initiatives. 

In addition to voter purges (more here), there are such Republican state practices as Missouri's ban on its driver licensing department sharing changed address data with the state's voter registration authorities (quickly overturned by a federal court), or in Texas, simply closing selected drivers' licensing offices so that incipient Democrat voters won't be able to get the photo ID's needed to vote.       

As a reputed 52 percent majority-minority state, Texas leads the way in cutting-edge vote suppression schemes, e.g. ignoring legally-mandated translations, or providing false or robotic ones. Texas also has an effective voting deterrent in its recent five-year prison sentence for a black person whose (accidental) unqualified vote wasn't even counted.

With the popular African-American Stacey Abrams now the Democrat candidate for governor in Georgia, one county proposed closing 75 percent of the voting booths serving minority neighbourhoods, using as pretext, the Americans with Disabilities Act (the effort failed).

Georgia also blocked overseas access to its voting website, effectively ending the ability of overseas Georgians to vote absentee. 

Then there are Republican states where incumbent "secretaries of state" - the officials who control registration and voting - stand for higher partisan office using the advantages of their current position. Several such secretaries are supervising their own election contests this year. One of them is Brian Kemp, Stacey Abrams' opponent in the Georgia governor's race. So far he's managed to purge half-a-million voters, a tenth of the eligible electorate.

Is this a great country, or what?

From Roger Fitch and Our Friends Down Under

Our Man in Washington

ROGER FITCH ESQ • THURSDAY, AUGUST 9, 2018

Sleaze and corruption at the centre of US government ... Functioning democracy under threat ... Presidential pardons ... Voter purges ... International law of no consequence to Brett Kavanaugh ... Roger Fitch reports 

"It is hardly a coincidence that so many greedy people have filled the administration's ranks. Trump's ostentatious crudeness and misogyny are a kind of human-resources strategy. Radiating personal and professional sleaze lets him quickly and easily identify individuals who have any kind of public ethics and to sort them out ... Trump is legitimately excellent at cultivating an inner circle unburdened by legal or moral scruples. These are the only kind of people who want to work for Trump, and the only kind Trump wants to work for him" - New York Magazine 

Donald Trump recently lost the fifthmember of his needy and greedy cabinet. The comprehensively crooked Environmental Protection Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned "under a cloud of ethics scandals", as the NYT delicately referred to 13 separate investigationsfor misconduct and misappropriation of government resources. 

The EPA's targeted war on environmental, health and safety regulations will continue. Confident in the boundless ignorance of their leader's 46 percent base  - sufficient to win office with Republican gerrymanders - Trump appointees resort to absurd arguments to justify regulatory rollbacks.  

The latest, directed at California's progressive leadership, is the astounding claim that better fuel mileage is dangerous: it causes people to drive more.

Like many of Trump's counterintuitive innovations - more pollution, no health insurance, worse education - it reminded Fitch of Woody Allen's 1973 comic dystopia, "Sleepers", where everything harmful had become desirable.

*   *   *

Thanks in large part to the feeble opposition of complacent Democrats, Republicans are smiting America, and look likely to finish it off as a functioning democracy. The already-corrupt congress has been sidelined, the courts are compromised, and Mr Trump could plausibly win re-election.

With impeachment off the table, only confinement to a federal or state prison seems likely to restrain the Trump tribe, beginning with the increasingly mendacious president, who - amidst such government barbarisms as pro se infant deportation hearings and racist de-naturalization - actually rewards crimes. 

Mr Obama never considered pardoning imprisoned martyrs of the left like former Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal or the Native American Leonard Peltier, yet Mr Trump seems willing to give a gong to every rightwing extremist lingering in prison or about to go there, e.g. the Oregon arsonist family that wants to appropriate public lands for private use. Here's the back story and a comment on consequences for federal law enforcement. 

It all sets a bad example for the rule of law, something Mr Trump is hard at work undermining, including through the courts, where the recent upholding of the "Muslim ban" created particularly bad law, more here.

Even in the brief time he has held office, the president's stacked supreme court has managed to do significant damage, starting with the 1st Amendment, now "weaponised" for nefarious purposes. One example is the green-lighting of dark money transfers that prefigure outright bribery.  

It's already led to "shadow governance" in nearly half the states with Republican governors and one-quarter of those with Democrats. 

*   *   *

July marked the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment, the one that basically created the present bill of rights. While it protected black males, extreme Republican orthodoxy says it didn't apply to sexual discrimination, or even women.

Perhaps inadvertently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions observed the month's event by quietly rescinding a number of protections minorities have enjoyed. Is it the end of civil rights?

Voting rights remain under attack.  Shelby County v Holder, which began it all, still infectsthe legitimacy of elections in the US, particularly in the recent Abbott v Perez.  

The latest threat is voter purges. States knocked 16 million voters off the rolls before the 2016 election, and it's now an age of minority rule, with profound differences between the majority who identify as Democrats, and those who call themselves Republicans. 

*   *   *

Waiting to wreak havoc on voting rights is Mr Trump's latest supreme court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, a man expected to tip the scales in supreme court jurisprudence for a generation, the culmination of a 30-year Republican project. 

Kavanaugh has sterling academic and judicial credentials, but he's a partisan Republican who participated in many of the party's unsavoury political operations of the last twenty years: the endless investigations of the Clintons (Kavanaugh was principal author of the salacious Starr Report), the Florida recount in 2000, and more.  

The nominee's present views on criminal prosecution of sitting presidents will be closely examined by Democrat senators, but of more concern is his view of international law, e.g. in Guantánamo cases.

As Just Security noted in 2014, Kavanaugh's en banc concurrence in Hamdan II joined in striking out Hamdan's Material Support for Terrorism conviction on the limited basis that the acts occurred before the offence was created by congress.

That decision benefited David Hicks, Omar Khadr and others convicted of MST, a patently invented, non-war crime under international law.  

Kavanaugh, however, believes international law doesn't matter. In the DC circuit's 2016 al Bahlul case, involving Bahlul's conspiracy conviction, Kavanaugh's en banc concurrence argued that congress had the authority to use military commissions for non-war crimes - despite international law and US precedent to the contrary (the circuit upheld Bahlul's conspiracy conviction on other grounds).   

Bahlul's supreme court appeal was rejected, but another Guantánamo case, al-Nashiri, is still working its way through the courts and could present a Justice Kavanaugh with "recusal problems". 

*   *   *

Controversy continues at Guantánamo, with the political firing of the commissions' Convening Authority; the sudden retirement of the judge in the Cole bombing case; fresh revelations in declassified prosecution documents; and new disclosures of top-secret CIA cables from Thailand detailing al-Nashiri's torture at the time Gina Haspel (now CIA director) was in charge.  

The group habeas previously reported in Fitch, al-Bihani, has now been argued in Washington DC, with the Trump administration claiming it can hold the men (including this man) for "100 years", more here. 

It's not very different from the government's justification in 2003 before the 9th Circuit. There, in the Gherebi case, the Justice Department lawyers - led by Robert McCallam, afterwards ambassador to Australia - presented arguments the court characterised as follows:

"Under the government's theory, it is free to imprison Gherebi indefinitely along with hundreds of other citizens of foreign countries, friendly nations among them, and to do with Gherebi and those detainees as it will, when it pleases, without any compliance with any rule of law of any kind, without permitting him to consult counsel, and without acknowledging any judicial forum in which its actions may be challenged. Indeed, at oral argument, the government advised us that its position would be the same even if the claims were that it was engaging in acts of torture and that it was summarily executing the detainees."  

From Roger Fitch and our Friends Down Under at Justinian...

America! America!

ROGER FITCH ESQ • THURSDAY, JUNE 28, 2018

Judicial coup de état ... Partisan Republicans on the US Supreme Court purge the voter rolls ... Tainted appointee Neil Gorsuch does his bit ... No more swing decisions as Anthony Kennedy resigns ... Torture queen at the helm of the CIA ... The most absurd Guantánamo case ... Roger Fitch, Our man in Washington, reports  

US Supreme Court: pairing judges who detest each other

AS the end of its 2017 term approached, the supreme court punted on gerrymandering (but not all is lost); allowed a Republican-hatched voter purge scheme to go forward; and in deciding the "wedding cake" case, failed to do the damage to church-state separation that "religious conservatives" had prayed for.

The keenly-awaited internet sales tax decision, South Dakota v Wayfair, had a surprising alignment of justices.  

Civil libertarians welcomed Carpenter v US, in which Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court's liberals in a decision requiring police to obtain court warrants for mobile phone tower data.

Then came ominous signs, as the court gratuitously upset antitrust law in Ohio v American Express.  

Next, the court gave Texas a near-complete victory on its (racial) gerrymanders, overrulingunanimous lower court rulings, more here.  With Justice Alito deciding that good faith of states must be presumed, there will be lots more accidental-on-purpose discrimination favouring Republicans.

As in Husted, the Ohio voter-purge case, the Texas decision was assured by Trump's appointment of a partisan Republican, Neil Gorsuch, in place of Obama's moderate nominee, Merrick Garland. More here.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader married to the shipping heiress who is Secretary of Transportation, even Tweeted a photo of Gorsuch as part of his senate reelection campaign ... 

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In the court's final week, all the planning that went into the Republicans' 2016 year-long blockade of Garland paid off: in the "Muslim ban" case, the newly-packed court endowed a racist president with bold new immigration powers  (incidentally overruling the Japanese internment case Korematsu).  The court also assisted anti-abortionists in California, and, as expected, up-ended longstanding state laws on "agency fees" where non-union public employees contribute to the cost of collective bargaining.  

And finally, Justice Anthony Kennedy conveniently announced his retirement in time for a replacement to be confirmed by a Republican senate. Trump's candidates are here.

*   *   *

Haspel: ran the CIA torture camp in Thailand

With a morally bankrupt torture-embracing president, rubberstamp Republican congress, and torture supporters everywhere, it's possible that torture experience helped a torture-camp director become CIA Director.

Gina Haspel formerly ran the CIA's depraved Thai torture operation (on-going under local direction), and some - including conservatives - call her a war criminal. More here and here. Nevetheless, Haspel was narrowly confirmed when six Democrats crossed the senate floor.

It marked a continuation of the free pass Haspel received from the Obama administration for both torture and its cover-up.  She should, however, avoid future travel in rule-of-law countries, e.g, Germany.

Even as Haspel was being confirmed, the CIA's original "legal opinion" supporting its proposed use of torture was produced - after redacting the name of the "lawyer" who concocted it.  

Another incriminating response to FOI requests was the CIA's demand for an advance DoJ "declination of prosecution" for its planned violations of federal laws and the Covenant Against Torture.  

*   *   *

The most absurd case ever brought at Guantánamo, that of the Haspel-supervised torture victim Abt al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has been put on indefinite hold by the presiding military judge, more here.

In a companion nonsense case,  Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi has been repatriated to Saudi Arabia, having done his duty by grassing up Mr Nashiri in the MV Limburg and USS Cole cases. More here.  

The Limburg bombing involved peacetime piracy against a Panamanian-flagged French tanker in international waters. There's no connection to the US, but the Pentagon's reliable (if shambolic) Court of Military Commission Review reversed the military judge's dismissal of the claims.

The Cole bombing involved Americans, but still no war; even if hostilities had been implicated, the attack would be legal, absent "perfidy". 

All the other USS Cole defendants were successfully convicted in civilian US courts years ago, where Nashiri - now depicted in his military commission as the mastermind and architect of the Cole bombing - was just an "unindicted co-conspirator". He was unavailable for US trial because the CIA was busy torturing him in three countries overseas. Two of them, Poland and Romania, have been ordered by the European Court of Human Rights to pay Nashiri damages for their part in his CIA torture. More here.

Nashiri's ordeal in Thailand was personally supervised by the psychologists Mitchell and Jessen (the CIA has settled a civil suit for damages against them) and by Gina Haspel, the new CIA director.  

Steve Vladeck sorted out the Nashiri mess here and here.

*   *   *

The military commission of Abd al-Hadi is picking-up speed at Guantánamo. Al Hadi is one of the few at Gitmo charged with a real war crime - killing civilians. Many of the other charges seem doubtful in light of his combat status, but a freshly-stacked supreme court may ultimately rewrite international law, the Geneva Conventions and the US constitution to make "conspiracy" and other civilian offences valid tribunal crimes.

The 9/11 defendants are likewise accused of killing civilians, although there wasn't any war underway on September 11, 2001. The military judge in that case got around the lack of hostilities by deferring to the self-serving characterisations of military jurisdiction by congress and the executive.  

*   *   *

In a new global attack on Gitmo detention, a group habeas petition has been brought in DC supported by the human rights law firms Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights. More from Lawfare, HRW's Laura Pitter and Just Security. 

The case, styled al Hajj v Trump, emphasises Mr Trump's anti-Muslim animus, and is beginning to bear fruit under an Obama-appointed judge.  

*   *   *

Syrian refugee camp

Last year, it was revealed that a US citizen was being held by the Pentagon overseas, without legal rights. Captured in Syria, he was held in Iraq and threatened with repatriation to Saudi Arabia (he's a dual citizen). More here. 

In an action brought by the ACLU, the US refused to divulge the man's name but admitted he had asked for a lawyer, and following the judge's order, "John Doe" confirmed he wanted representation. More here.

The judge ruled that the citizen's lawyers were entitled to 72 hours' notice before any transfer. When notice was duly given, the judge refused to approve the transfer to Iraq, and the government now proposes to abandon the nameless man outside a displaced persons camp in Syria.

John Doe will have one advantage when he is released. Previously, the Pentagon confiscated the monetary property of  a released "war prisoner", Djamel Ameziane - clearly "pillage" and a war crime. In the case of John Doe, however, the Pentagon has generously agreed to return the citizen's money - $4,210. That's if the court allows the government to send a US citizen to a war zone: non-refoulement is another bedrock principle of international law regularly flouted by the Pentagon. 

*   *   *

Errant Americans not lucky enough to be seized alive still face the danger of US assassination, more here and here.