Now the stupid Congress try to rubber stamp the outregous "terror bill" that will end the concept of Habeas Corpus (the right to face your accuser) - jezz, the War in Iraq has turned the US congress to a Saddam Parliament.
"
Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a
profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm
election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing
their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that
will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our
217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect
the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid
last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.
Republicans
say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and
trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11
attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men
could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose
not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways
that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently
illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.
It was only
after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr.
Bush’s shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It
serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this
fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote
against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.
Last
week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a
terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he
wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have
committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice
President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the
measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much
anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to
unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what
normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men
captured in error.
These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:
Enemy Combatants:
A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill
could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign
citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and
indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give
the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.
The Geneva Conventions:
The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by
allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation
methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret —
there’s no requirement that this list be published.
Habeas Corpus:
Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to
challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor
coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance
to prove their innocence.
Judicial Review:
The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system,
except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and
bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or
indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is
to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.
Coerced Evidence:
Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable
— already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined
in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005
Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.
Secret Evidence:
American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is
kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate
executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney
seems to weaken protections against such evidence.
Offenses:
The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of
the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape
and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only
forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex.
The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.
•There
is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few
Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line,
and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its
spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.
We
don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have
made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who
votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the
future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the
administration.
They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a
tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American
democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Act" (NY Times Editorial)