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"...to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests."
The National Lawyers Guild is dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system. Through its members -- lawyers, law students, jailhouse lawyers, and
legal workers united in chapters and committees -- the Guild works locally, nationally and internationally as an effective political and social force in the service of the people.
Our aims:
. to eliminate racism;
. to safeguard and strengthen the rights of workers, women, farmers and minority groups, upon whom the welfare of the entire nation depends;
. to maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them;
. to use the law as an instrument for the protection of the people, rather than for their repression.
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Thank You! — Michael Avery Event a Success
"Illegal Domestic Spying — The Case Against Bush
"
with Michael Avery
President
National Lawyers Guild
Friday, April 28, 2006
NLG President and Suffolk law professor
Michael Avery brought down the house Friday, April 28, hammering on the need to impeach George W.
Bush and to pursue litigation against the illegal NS
A
eavesdropping.
Avery opened his talk, before law students from
Northwestern, Chicago-Kent, and DePaul, as well as attorneys, legal
workers, and activists, by comparing the CIA and FBI with history's
other infamous secret police forces.
Avery represents attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in CCR et al. v. Bush et al. (06-CV-313, Southern Dist. NY).
The CCR plaintiffs in March asked the Court for summary judgment, arguing that the defendants, the Bush White House and executive agencies, had already admitted Constitutional and statutory violations in their public statements about the eavesdropping.
A social-control or political police agency requires secrecy, and state secrecy needs a political police, Avery told Chicago Guild members and others.
The National Security Agency eavesdropping program, Avery went on, violates four key requisites of an open society: Freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, a "particularity" requirement for a probable-cause-based search, and judicial review of executive department action.
The spy scandal is occurring in a context in which racial profiling and torture are national policy, Avery said to applause.
In attacking Bush's meritless claims of unchecked executive power, Avery directed students to read Justice Robert Jackson's powerful and historic concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), the famous "steel seizure" case.
Guild lawyers litigated a similar, and likewise historic, case more than 3 decades ago. In U.S. v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972), NLG luminary Arthur Kinoy persuaded an increasingly conservative Supreme Court that the Nixon administration lacked the sweeping power it claimed to carry out warrantless surveillance.
In Kinoy's autobiography, Rights on Trial, he speculates that the Watergate burglars were caught because news of the unanimous decision against Nixon's executive branch leaked the weekend before it was to be announced. The "plumbers" were arrested on a Saturday night in the Democratic headquarters while removing bugs they had planted months earlier.
Avery also sketched the history of Congressional action limiting what the executive branch may do, even for national security purposes during wartime.
With the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Pub.L. 95-511, 92 Stat. 1783 [1978], Codified at 50 USC §§ 1801-62), the legislative branch responded to years of executive branch abuse of the claim that "national security" allowed wiretapping without any judicial oversight. FISA created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
In the NSA spying scandal, Avery said, Bush has admitted to committing multiple felonies.
"He should be impeached," Avery thundered repeatedly, to applause.
Avery also cited the example of U.S. v. Salah, a pending criminal case in Federal court in Chicago, as an example of the way torture as national policy is eroding due process of law. Mohammed Salah, a U.S. citizen, faces racketeering and conspiracy charges based largely on statements made under torture in Israel. The admissibility of the statements is under litigation now.
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