Letters to the Editor

• Diana Jane Gribbon Motz

  [Read the article: Joe Klein's stirring defense of Lewis Libby]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Diana Jane Gribbon Motz is in the news tonight.

  http://nytimes.com/2007/06/11/washington/11cndcnd-combatant.htm
  Court Says Military Cannot Hold 'Enemy Combatant'
  “To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians," Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, “even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country.”
  
  http://nytimes.com/2007/06/12/opinion/12tue1.html
  Editorial
  A Ruling for Justice
  For years, President Bush has made the grandiose claim that the Congressional authorization to attack Afghanistan after 9/11 was a declaration of a “war on terror” that gave him the power to decide who the combatants are and throw them into military prisons forever. Yesterday, in a powerful 2-to-1 decision, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit utterly rejected the president’s claims . . .

  She comes from a not exactly radical background.

  Her father, Daniel M. Gribbon, was a clerk for Judge Learned Hand, and was later a conservative pro-business lawyer in D.C. at a famous firm, Covington and Burling, where he was the managing partner in the 1970s.

  President Reagan appointed her husband, J. Frederick Motz, first as a federal prosecutor, in 1981, and then as a federal district judge, in Maryland, in 1985.

  She has outranked her hubby since 1994, when President Clinton appointed her to her current position.

  Four years ago, when she was on the losing side of the 8-4 appeals court decision in the Hamdi case, she wrote a dissent that was mostly ignored, except by a few reporters such as Nat Hentoff.

  http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0331,hentoff,45847,6.html
  Who Made George W. Bush Our King?
  He Can Designate Any of Us an Enemy Combatant
  by Nat Hentoff

  July 25th, 2003

  Courts have no higher duty than protection of the individual freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. This is especially true in time of war, when our carefully crafted system of checks and balances must accommodate the vital needs of national security while guarding the liberties the Constitution promises all citizens. —Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judge Diana Gribbon Motz, dissenting, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, July 9, 2003.

  Some of the most glorious illuminations of the Bill of Rights in American history have been contained in Supreme Court dissents by, among others, Louis Brandeis, William Brennan, Hugo Black, and Thurgood Marshall.

  Equal to those was the stinging dissent by judge Diana Gribbon Motz when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (8 to 4) gave George W. Bush a fearsome power that can be found nowhere in the Constitution—the sole authority to imprison an American citizen indefinitely without charges or access to a lawyer.

  This case is now on appeal to the Supreme Court, which will determine whether this president—or his successors until the end of the war on terrorism—can subvert the Bill of Rights to the peril of all of us.

  Judge Motz began her dissent—which got only a couple of lines in the brief coverage of the case in scattered media reporting—by stating plainly what the Bush administration has done to scuttle the Bill of Rights:

  "For more than a year, a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, has been labeled an enemy combatant and held in solitary confinement in a Norfolk, Virginia, naval brig. He has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. The Executive [the president] will not state when, if ever, he will be released. Nor has the Executive allowed Hamdi to appear in court, consult with counsel, or communicate in any way with the outside world."

  I have not seen what I am about to quote from her dissent anywhere in the media. You might want to send what follows to your member of Congress and senator. Judge Motz said accusingly:

  "I fear that [this court] may also have opened the door to the indefinite detention, without access to a lawyer or the courts, of any American citizen, even one captured on American soil, who the Executive designates an 'enemy combatant,' as long as the Executive asserts that the area in which the citizen was detained was an 'active combat zone,' and the detainee, deprived of access to the courts and counsel, cannot dispute this fact."

  As I have detailed in two previous columns ("A Citizen Shorn of All Rights," Voice, January 1-7, 2003, and "Liberty's Court of Last Resort," Voice, January 29-February 4, 2003), Hamdi was taken into custody by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and then declared an "enemy combatant" by order of George W. Bush on the flimsiest of "evidence" that he had been a soldier of the Taliban—an accusation that Hamdi has not been able to rebut in a court of alleged law.

  
  Judge Motz is not engaging in scare tactics when she says that with the president having assumed the powers of an absolute monarch, in this kind of case, any American citizen can be hauled off an American street and stripped of all his or her rights. On June 5, Attorney General John Ashcroft unequivocally told the House Judiciary Committee that the streets of America are now "a war zone." . . .

  - - Nat Hentoff, July 25, 2003

  The next step for the current case will be up to the Fourth Circuit, "en banc". Has the infamous Fourth Circuit changed in the past four years? Will they still be in the mood to allow monarchical powers to President Bush? Or, maybe, this time around, Judge Motz will be on the winning side.

  Permalink Monday, June 11, 2007 08:48 PM