by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
I don’t know for sure that McCain was “tried and executed” or even that he was “murdered” by lethal injection. I suspect the story is true. The source I got it from (G5 at Gumshoe) seems to be ex-CIA and has provided mostly very believable stuff. The smallness of the job (I mean, come on, the guy was old and was presumably unarmed) adds to its credibility, since, for an element of the CIA to have done such a job is not just tiny, it is nano-tiny.
They kill people all the time — who aren’t usually targets as soft as McCain. The fact that they would now boast of such a minor accomplishment makes me think it is true. Does not sound like bombast, that’s for sure. Mind you, I am ashamed of us all for not investigating McCain years ago based on the pleading of Vietnam vets as to his treachery.
By the way, do you recall that McCain was our other choice, the GOP choice, against Obama in 2008? Yep. He was a possible Commander-in-Chief. Yet even then, “reportage” — which is so vital in election years — gave no quarter to the aforementioned Vietnam vets. Similarly, in 2004, young George’s going AWOL from Texas Air National Guard back in 1972 was a no-no discussion for the MSM. It is said that at least one whistle blower died from revealing it. (Amazingly the voters’ choice that year was Bush or Kerry!!)
Nothing Succeeds Like Success
Whether or not the execution of McCain is true, the news of it could be very important. This is the first time we’ve been informed that anyone took the bull by the horns. The motto “Nothing succeeds like success” comes to mind, as does the motto “Well begun is half done.”
It is a huge relief to hear that someone who would otherwise escape punishment, as a protected person – and there are millions of protected persons – got collared. Did not get due process. I worry this could lead to a theme “You don’t need due process if there is certain knowledge that you did what you did.”
The first thing that’s springs to mind is the lack of due process for Martin Bryant (of Australian Port Arthur massacre fame) and Jahar Tsarnaev (of Boston Marathon bombing fame). They did not get due process, yet the public did not stand up for them — as “there was certain, MSM-provided, knowledge that they did what they did.
Ah, there’s the diff. If it is MSM-provided knowledge then they may or may not have done what they did. In the Bryant and Tsarnaev cases, they didn’t.
Should Due Process Be Given the Flick?
Whilst I have stated above that I am happy about a bull being taken by the horns (generically, the Deep State), and happy that a narrative about it – true or not – may reach folks’ central nervous system and cause them to stop being scared to the point of paralysis about the Deep State, I DO NOT recommend giving due process the flick.
There is nothing wrong with due process. No fault of due process caused McCain to go unapprehended. Rather, lack of courage did. Rather, a culture steeped in lies did. Rather, the fabulously criminal MSM did.
In days of olde, it wasn’t possible for each citizen to feel secure knowing that due PROCESS was there, right there on the books, public books, authorized books. Due process is a cumulative achievement – it is not to be thrown in the dumpster, thank you very much.
Military Tribunals? The UCMJ Is in Force
Re McCain. Military law pertains only to military persons. Conceivably that that could be extended to a sitting president while he/she is Commander in Chief of the armed Forces. I say that in spite of the fact that the reason the Framers of the Constitution made the prez the CiC was to underscore that a civilian is in charge of the military. It’s in Article II, section 2 of the parchment.
(Note: In Australia the Governor-General holds the position of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.)
To extend “military tribunal” to ex-Navy McCain is a bit of a stretch. Let’s look at the law that applies, In the US, to soldiers. It is not created by the Executive or by the military. The Constitution of the US puts the “raising of an army” and the “providing of a Navy” in the care of Congress. Article I, section 8, clause 14 also gives the First Branch the power “To make rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.”
Congress acted on that power by establishing the UCMJ – the Uniform Code of Military Justice. This law governs what you can do inside the army or navy and is different from what you can do outside. It also sets up a different court system from that available to civilians.
You may want to ask “My daughter is in the army, presently in Iraq. She does not approve of what she is asked to do. Can she go to civilian court over this? The answer is Yes.” Wearing a uniform does not mean you are no longer a citizen. However, any crime you commit while in active service must go to the military court, always rendered in French, the language of international law, as, “court martial.” That is true even if it is a civilian-type crime such as rape, and even if it took place off-base or during the soldier’s furlough.
War Crimes Can Be Prosecuted Domestically
I do want to specify – since one of the accusations against President GHW Bush is that he committed war crimes – that a war crime can be prosecuted by the Department of Justice in a civilian court. (Attorney General Ashcroft said otherwise but I think he was wrong.) As far as I know, the DoJ never does its duty, never prosecutes any American military person for war crimes. But trust me, it is right there in domestic law – see 18 USC 2441 – and it could be done this very afternoon. No prob.
Just for the record I will print it here, but this is an aside to my thesis about “the McCain situation.”
(a) Offense. –Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
(b) Circumstances. –The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act).
(c) Definition. –As used in this section the term “war crime” means any conduct– (1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party; [Etc].
What about Gitmo Prisoners?
Some of the Gitmo prisoners (I think) are soldiers from other nations’ armies who have been taken as POWs by the American military, and whose position is defined under the International Law of Armed Conflict. Do they have a right to due process? Yes, under “International Humanitarian law – which mostly means the Geneva Conventions – any prisoner of war anywhere is entitled to certain rights.
Also at Gitmo are some persons designated as terrorists – they were not “caught in uniform” as it were. (Note: “Gitmo” is army slang for a prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where the US has a lease of land.) The terrorists are called enemy non-combatants.
As this article addresses questions raised by the allegation that Senator John McCain was “executed,” the matter of Gitmo does not belong in the discussion. However, the judiciary got involved when a terrorist named Hamdan sued Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The case was decided in 2006.
You do have to hand it to SCOTUS for not letting the Powers That Be get away with a total mockery of law. They refused the idea that “Gitmo is lawless.”
In Hamdan v Rumsfeld (2006) the US Supreme Court’s decision caused Congress to enact The Military Commissions Act of 2009 – a replacement for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It was meant to give some rights, such as habeas corpus, to Gitmo prisoners. It was retroactive. Normally you can’t make a law retroactive where the “accused” has acted before the law was passed, but apparently you can extend rights back in time. Congress specifically said:
“The amendment made by [MCA , sec 7] shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001.”
In regard to the alleged executions of McCain or Bush, the MCA is irrelevant. The alleged killers may bandy about the term “Military Tribunals,” or anything they like, but it is not in the law.
The Law of Outlawry
Do we have persons in the US who are so powerful that the DoJ refuses to arrest them? If yes then those persons are outlaws and can be finished off any time by any American. Under the law of outlawry, the outlaw is no longer civilly alive. He can be killed and indeed to harbor him or feed him is a crime.
Personally I do not applaud the alleged killers of McCain and Bush. I would applaud some people having the guts to use the law, or failing that, to invoke outlawry. In 1996 it was rumored that Admiral Boorda planned to gather some “flag officers” and arrest the president. Boorda then died suddenly (suicide). It was also rumored around 2005 that US military officers had boarded a plane in Australia where Vice President Cheney was siting, with the intention of – whatever. Those men did not survive (or so the story goes.)
We have good law in both the US and Australia. Why are prosecutors hanging around as bored as the Maytag repairman? Come on, chaps, get a move on. If you hurry you can beat the Xmas rush.
— Mary W Maxwell is the author of Prosecution for Treason (2011). Her main target in the book was a treacherous Congress (Patriot Act type thing)
Mary,
How is the incarceration since about 2004 and water (83 times in one month!) torture of KSM, ‘admitting’ to planning 911 from A to Zee, going?
Is there to be a hearing date set down?
Is he still alive?
Has there been a hearing?
Why do we not hear of any progress?
I take my share of the blame, Ned.
Have a look at this new site and the good work they do .
thejuicemedia.com
Graham: So, if anybody doubts there’s a longstanding history in this country that your constitutional rights follow you wherever you go, but you don’t have a constitutional right to turn on your own government and collaborate with the enemy of the nation. You’ll be treated differently. What’s the name of the case, if you can recall, that reaffirmed the concept that you can hold one of our own as an enemy combatant if they were engaged in terrorist activities in Afghanistan. Are you familiar with that case?
Kavanaugh: Yes, Hamdi [v. Rumsfeld].
Graham: So the bottom line is on every American citizen know you have constitutional rights, but you do not have a constitutional right to collaborate with the enemy. There is a body of law well developed long before 9/11 that understood the difference between basic criminal law and the law of armed conflict. Do you understand those difference?
Kavanaugh: I do understand that there are different bodies of law of course, senator.
Part of https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/sen-lindsey-grahams-curious-questions-to-judge-kavanaugh-on-military-tribunals-for-u-s-citizens
This answers the question as to how Bush Snr and McCain may have been found guilty by a military tribunal. It appears that they would have been found guilty of supplying the enemy with arms in Bush’s case and fraternising with the enemy in McCain’s case.
Mal, thank you as always for guarding the store.
I see two of Graham’s remarks as non-sequiturs but it wasn’t Kav’s job to try to correct them:
Graham: “So the bottom line is on every American citizen know you have constitutional rights, but you do not have a constitutional right to collaborate with the enemy.”
Mal, he pretended to deduce that from Kav’s agreeing that 1. an American has a right to have his constitutional rights “follow him” around the globe” [which is correct] , and — unrelatedly — 2. That no American has the right to collaborate with an enemy [il va sans dire].
For starters, it’s foolish to refer to a person lacking a right to commit a crime. We don’t say “A person has no right to smash his neighbors car.” The list of rights has to do with preserving one’s life and freedom as against government. The list of crimes is another matter; they are agreed-upon no-no’s.
So that’s Graham’s first non-sequitur — the prohibition on me as an American against collaborating with the enemy is a part of criminal law, not rights law. And indeed it is one of only two crimes for which the US Constitution tells the legislature to provide a punishment (Article I section 8 clause 6 – “to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting) and Article III, section 3 – my fave which I call 3-3: “to declare the punishment of treason.
So Mal, Kav has not agreed to there being any connection. He would know, as we all know, that treason is a crime. (Congress did do what the Constitution instructed it to do – it declared the punishment for treason: basically, “swingin’ in the breeze” See 18 USC 2381.)
Then Graham makes another non-sequitur. Mal, maybe you are picking up a subtlety that I am missing. (And of course ol’ Graham has a right to free speech and can yak all he wants in hope of making some political point). He said “There is a body of law well developed long before 9/11 that understood the difference between basic criminal law and the law of armed conflict. Do you understand those difference?”
Again, Kav was only giving the correct answer, “Yes, senator I do know that dogs bark, the sky is blue and that there is a difference between criminal law and the law of armed conflict, thank you.”
Graham asks “What’s the name of the case, if you can recall, that reaffirmed the concept that you can hold one of our own as an enemy combatant if they were engaged in terrorist activities in Afghanistan?”
Frankly, Mal, if I were in the seat for confirmation to SCOTUS – oh, if I were in the seat for confirmation to SCOTUS! – I would have said, “Senator, the Hamdi case [not to be confused with the similar sounding case of Hamdan, oh those crazily named Muslims!] did not exactly ‘re-affirm’ a concept of an American being an enemy.
“That concept was used in the 1860s to declare all Confederate soldiers rebels, not ‘enemy combatants’ as such. After the Civil War, the rebels were given an amnesty — which I (SCOTUS candidate MM) believe was done to avoid the prospect of a finding that it is not a crime to secede from the union. (MM is a secessionist — of course. No wonder I liked living in Alabama.)
“Thus Hamdi was really innovative. And Justice Scalia – his mode of death being irrelevant here – dissented in Hamdi to say that US citizen Jose Padilla should have been tried for treason. I utterly agree and I have also said many times that Jahar Tsarnaev should have been tried for treason, not for ‘using a weapon of mass destruction.’ Any person who would bomb a crowd of people in Boston should be tried for treason. Of course, Senator, I mean that to include any member of the FBI who did such a bombing.”
There, Mal, wouldn’t that have been a sexier way to go at the hearings instead of rolling poor Christine Ford out to do her bedroom-stuff accusations?
Dear Gumshoe Faithful,
I have been trying to get Her WebsiteOwnership to agree to do what all good Australian tradies do – downtool for the month of January. So far she has not shown much interest. But I think we should go slower for a while. We often skate over important bits.
Thanks again to Mal for zooming in on McCain’s [putative] murder. There are many issues in both of the McCain articles — the one by G5 on December 14, 2018 (which got 44 comments, including an essential video sent by Terry Shulze), and the above article by me. Note: G5 is Aussie as far as I know, and I am, in matters of political philosophy, a mongrel.
Mal has come in on the issue of executing Poppy Bush for what he did as an American, but we all know Mal has in mind what Aussies do, especially as he got conscripted into the so-called Vietnam War.
I request any reader who can manage it to come in on this. (Use a pseudonym if you want. Even if you are a regular it is easy to establish a second name at Gumshoe.)
How do you feel about killing national leaders who are clearly traitors to their country? How could it be done? How should it be done?
Don’t worry about knowing of it really happened to Poppy or McCain. Let’s make a presumption – for purposes of this discussion – that it did happen and that the killers were disgruntled members of the Intelligence agencies. A mere allegation that it happened suffices to get our conversation going.
Regarding black-letter law in Australia about treason, it is woefully thin. I discussed it at Gumshoe in my October 17, 2014 article “Who Should Be Tried for Treason”. But luckily it contains this key phrase:
“A person commits an offence, called treason, if the person: …(b)…levies war, or does any act preparatory to levying war, against the commonwealth…” That’s in Criminal Code Part 5.1, Dicvison 80.1.
Consider the title of my March 16, 2015 Gumshoe article: “Who Signs the TPP commits treason.”
Although I am not in SA at the moment, I have been told that drilling is about to begin in the relevant ocean, and that Bob Brown has a protest group called “Save the Bight” that met in Adelaide yesterday, to confront Labor’s conference there.
Just my opinion: ocean drilling is treason. It is levying war against the Commonwealth.
Last Chance Gas Station
If you want to see the paragraph I wrote entitled “Executive Power” in the current article, better do it fast as I am gong to ask Dee to delete it.
It contains errors about the German saboteurs’ case — that was Ex parte Quirin not Eisentrager. I don’t have time to fix it — will write a separate article about it. If you need information, just go to the scholarly website LouFisher.org. He knows his onions.
Really annoys me to have to write anything about “enemy non-cpombatants” or what have you, as the whole War on Terror thing is a disgusting psy-op.
Bottom line: Is there legal backing for a military commission — as such — to have performed the killing of two US leaders, Bush and McCain? — not on your flippin’ Nellie.
(If the US had joined the Int Criminal Court, there may have been a way for non-Aremicans to hold these men to account. But as I said, ordinary domestic law will do the trick stateside.)
Note: The ordinary schedule of Gumshoe reporting has been majorly interrupted by the Protective Parent crisis. Dee spends her time sitting in the waiting room of attorneys general type thing. K?
Links to Mary’s two articles on treason that she mentioned in her comment:
https://gumshoenews.com/2014/10/07/who-should-be-tried-for-treason/
https://gumshoenews.com/2015/03/16/who-signs-the-tpp-commits-treason/
and the G5 article on McCain:
https://gumshoenews.com/2018/12/14/the-execution-of-mccain-and-related-matters/
And my article on McCain’s war-making:
https://gumshoenews.com/2014/09/18/the-maestro-of-the-arab-wars-senator-mccain/
As for having a go-slow at Gumshoe, we can do that but we can also mark a few articles as ONGOING and let everyone come in on the comments however long it takes.
The current article is such a one. For these ONGOING ones, I hope you don’t mind if I delete off-topic comments, for economy’s sake.
Thanks Dee, but since I already hogged 42 column inches of comment, let’s wait till soon when we post my article “Whom Can You Lynch?”
What appears to have been overlooked is that the covert topping of a politically influential figurehead is called an “assassination” not an “execution”.
The confusion no doubt goes to the fact that there’s not a single Country on Earth whose laws haven’t been tainted with aristocratic chicanery
and every festival is likewise based on deceit:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=unlearn+christmas&t=ffnt&ia=videos&iax=videos&iai=I6ZoRlkhVgw
In essence the teachings of Jesus are pure and true .
The money lenders have corrupted them in order to profit , but more so to lead us astray .
Interesting how , in this season of celebration , santa is everywhere .
At the same time His name and the nativity scene are forbidden and almost forgotten .
The exception being the believers .
It remains my belief that McCain & Palin were put forth as a foil. Their purpose was to be such an appalling alternative to Luther King version 2.0, that any argument about vote fraud would never gain traction. They were purposely unelectable. I think the election of 2000 marked the absolute end of democracy in the USA. Maybe the 2008 election was a (largely) honest result but featured dishonestly selected candidates?
Paul, please get a 50 cent copy of Jim Collier’s VOTESCAM and tell me what you think.
Collier apparently died for having written it. Circa 1970.
“A fare go for Australia .” – Labor party .
Also , according to the abc last night , we will be celebrating santa’s birthday next week !