It passed by a wider margin than I thought it would. Chock up another victory for this "Lame Duck" President.

Both chambers this week approved legislation that sets up "military commissions" to prosecute terrorists. It also would prohibit the severe abuse of detainees, like mutilation and rape, but grant the president leeway to decide which other interrogation techniques are permissible.

The Senate's 65-34 vote on Thursday followed a House vote of 253-168 on a nearly identical measure a day earlier. To avoid having to reconcile differences between the two bills, which were described as minor, the House planned to vote Friday on the Senate bill and send that version to the president to sign.

Of course, instead of protecting Americans the Democratic leadership would rather protect terrorists.

"I'm convinced that future generations will view passage of this bill as a grave error," added Reid, D-Nev.

There will always be a few that think talking in a loud voice is torture. Some do get it.

"In this new era of threats, where the stark and sober reality is that America must confront international terrorists committed to the destruction of our way of life, this bill is absolutely necessary," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.

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Mike,

Quite some time ago, at the foundation of the American republic, Americans soundly rejected kingships. Throughout American history, an imperial presidency has also been likewise soundly rejected. No one is above the law and no one, not even the president, should be granted "leeway" when it comes to torture and the denial of fundamental human rights, especially the writ of habeas corpus, the backbone of all human rights, which dates back to 1305. What a backwards step this recent foul legislation represents for American law and justice. What a load of hypocrisy it is when Americans say that they are "bringing democracy to the world" when, at home, the imposter who fouls the White House is busy attacking the backbone of human rights before the law. America has lost its moral credibility under this neofascist, authoritarian, imperial presidency. It is every American's patriotic duty to actively oppose it, and those who support it are the traitors of the Constitution and fundamental human rights - an enemy of humankind. The following article will give you some idea of what a setback it is and what to expect in the future as a result of it, that is, if it stands.

By the way, there is no war on terror. There is only Bush's war on American democracy, the American constitution and the American people. Those who support Bush in his warmongering are, in reality, fighting against their own people. This will soon become evident as the U.S. becomes a police state.

Terror 2016
Aziz Huq
September 29, 2006

This week, Republicans —aided by Democratic fecklessness—bargained away both liberty and decency in the name of partisan security

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives enacted the Military Commissions Act , a law that strikes harder at American liberties and at the fundamentals of American government than any since the authorization of the Japanese internment. Thursday, the Senate passed the same bill , and President Bush is expected to waste no time and sign it today.

Because the Act gives the president almost ultimate authority to detain, degrade (physically and psychologically), and detain forever both citizens and non-citizens, perhaps Bush will not issue a signing statement. He has used signing statements in the past to signal noncompliance with a duly enacted limit on his power. But the Military Commissions Act of 2006 places no limits on his power. It is a blank check cashed in the liberties of the country's citizens and in the wasted lives of the unfortunate innocent people swept up in America's global detention system.

Here's what happens next:

* * *

Ten years after the Military Commissions Act of 2006, they came for Bobby Jaffar and his family. Officers from a Joint Terrorism Task Force, clad in Kevlar and wielding assault rifles, didn't knock: They cracked the door down. Ten-year old Bobby and his 17-year old sister were seized. His father—Brooklyn-born with roots in Djibouti—and his mother—a Yemeni Green Card-holder—were taken away separately. It was the last time Bobby was to see them for many years.

Bobby’s father, he later learned had been declared an “unlawful enemy combatant” under the Military Commission Act of 2006. Under a last-minute amendment to the MCA, the President had power to designate any person—citizen or non-citizen—as someone who “purposefully and materially supported hostilities.”

But, asked Bobby, why them?

Bobby’s parents ran a bodega in Brooklyn. They sometimes handled money transfers for members of the Middle Eastern community there. Speaking to a lawyer many years later, Bobby learned that Lebanese immigrants had used the bodega to send money back to West Beqaa, an area within the Hezbollah protectorate. Because Bobby’s father knew what part of the world the money was going to, the feds concluded he had “purposefully and materially supported hostilities.” And that was enough: He could be detained indefinitely.

Before Congress passed the sweeping legislation in 2006, a lawyer ruefully told Bobby later, “material support” had been a criminal statute. People were prosecuted. They had juries. The chance to view and challenge the evidence against them. The chance to learn whether the government had exculpatory evidence about them. But that was in the day. Now, Bobby’s father had a cursory hearing at which he barely had the chance to make his story known.

Back in the day, the lawyer laughed, civil libertarians had expressed concerns about the breadth of the criminal material support prohibition and like statutes. Indeed, mere months before the MCA passed, there had been expressions of outrage about the indictment of a Staten Island man for allegedly broadcasting an Arab TV channel owned by Hezbollah, Al Manar. Surely that was speech, squarely protected by the First Amendment?

Ten years later, the federal government wasn’t even bothering with criminal charges: Federal and state agents swept in during the middle of the night, seized a person, and transported him to military brigs in Wallabout Bay, off Brooklyn. Ten years earlier there had been only two people designated as “enemy combatants” within the United States and they too had been held in military brigs in South Carolina. (Ironically, Bobby learned, Wallabout Bay was also where squalid British prison ships had anchored during the Revolutionary War, and where more than 10,000 Americans died in wretched, fetid cells).

Bobby never did learn what happened to his mother. She was probably taken to the swollen internment camp at Guantánamo Bay along with tens and then hundreds of other non-U.S. citizens. At first, Guantánamo held non-citizens seized abroad. There had never been much fuss about the fact that the camp held many people who were not picked from an actual battlefield, but were swept in from the streets of Pakistan or further afield. Despite an increasing accumulation of evidence that many of these people were wrongly detained , the MCA had stipulated by fiat that they all were “unlawful enemy combatants.” Locking up innocent people, it seemed, won votes in 2006—at least if those people had a different color skin and came from far away.

Until 2007, Guantánamo contained no one arrested in the United States. But the MCA signed off on an executive power to seize people within the States and detain them indefinitely. Before 2006, the executive branch had only tried this in two cases, most famously against Jose Padilla —although it had considered using it against citizens in at least two other criminal investigations in Detroit and Lackawanna, New York. Now, there was statutory authorization for these detentions in the MCA.

Domestic detentions did not start immediately. The first arrest of a non-citizen in the United States came a year after the Military Commission Act’s passage. It hardly received mention in the press. Indeed, Bilal Milos—an undocumented immigrant from Bosnia—never had a chance to press his case in any court—let alone the court of public opinion. He was seized in the dead of night and carried off to Guantánamo. Thanks to the MCA’s suspension of habeas corpus , he had no meaningful way to challenge the allegations against him. He slowly rotted away with the other detainees. Once that precedent was established, the government hurried more non-citizens down the same path. Fear settled like a choking fog around Arab and Muslim communities throughout the country.

To the best of Bobby’s knowledge, his mother was never designated an “unlawful enemy combatant” when she was seized and taken to Guantánamo. Still, she could not challenge her detention in the courts. The MCA did not just take jurisdiction away from the claims of all “enemy combatants”: It also applied to anyone “awaiting such determination.” So far as Bobby knew, his mother had waited and waited for her hearing, her hope and her sanity seeping slowly away in the withering Cuban heat.

What was done to Bobby’s mother to make her talk—well, Bobby tried not to think of that. He heard rumors. Days of confinement in a freezing pitch black cell. He heard about “long-time standing.” Innocuous-sounding enough, this technique had been pioneered by the KGB. After 18 to 24 hours of continuous standing, fluid accumulates in the legs. Ankles and feet swell. The skin becomes tense and intensely painful. Large blisters develop. Eventually, urine production ceases. Then, renal shutdown.

At least, Bobby thought, she was likely still in Guantánamo. Without judicial supervision, detainees were routinely handed over to Egyptian or Syrian hands, where they were subjected to even worse tortures. (Congress and the public ignored the warning bell sounded by the case of Maher Arar , a Canadian citizen mistakenly rendered to Syria for torture, simply because he happened to have lunch with the wrong person years before).

Bobby was baffled to learn later that most legislators didn’t even know what they were voting for when they cast “ayes” for the MCA. President George W. Bush, he learned, had barred all but a handful of legislators from even learning what interrogation measures they were decriminalizing. In the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans ran on a platform of fear and loathing. Democrats, frantic not to look weak on security, gambled away a historical heritage of anti-torture rules and accountable government, with virtually no outcry. But how, Bobby asked, can such vast and terrible powers be vested in one man—without any checks or restraints to make sure they were used wisely? Was this really how democracy was supposed to work? Did no one try to fix it?

The more he learned, the more he understood how a democracy could indeed enact laws that fly in the face of the fundamental values of fairness and decency that any law-abiding society requires. Ignorance and fear flow powerfully. It proved easy for Congress to blind itself to the facts. When a group of legislators visiting Belgium in 2009 were indicted and arrested for war crimes for their sanctioning of treatment illegal under international law, they found it harder to ignore the facts. But that was little comfort for Bobby, his mother or his father.

* * *

The final version of the MCA is as bad as this short tale suggests. Enacted out of selfish and stupid partisan motives, fuelled by fear and blind ignorance on both sides of the aisle, it is a shameful law. It will harm many innocent people and it will make the nation not a jot safer.

And any candidate for federal office who does not endorse its repeal—like every person who voted for its passage—is a candidate not fit to govern.

(Aziz Huq directs the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center for Justice . He is co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in Times of Terror (New Press, 2007), and recipient of a 2006 Carnegie Scholars Fellowship. This article, originally posted here Thursday, is updated to reflect Thursday's Senate vote on the Military Commissions Act.)

Very interesting tale! Kafkorea is a very good writer, and scored highly in our forum's first writing contest last year.

This subject Detainee Interrogation Bill, will raise some hackles, for sure. But this tirade, wherein the Bill is purported to be an affront, and perhaps an end to habeas corpus in the U.S., is quite a serious charge.

I will withhold further comments until I can become more informed as to the complete content of the Bill. However, I will say this; People who oppose our American way of life, and are sworn to convert all Christians and other non-believers to serve Allah, or kill us as the only alternative, are also serious.

Because of that, perhaps... "Fear settled (sic) down like a choking fog among Arab and Muslim communities around the country" would be a good thing!

Anyone is free to leave this country. Delta is ready when you are.

Actually, Kafkorea isn't the writer. Aziz Huq is the writer. Kafkorea is the cut-and-paster.

The detainee bill is indeed walking a fine line between American values and what is needed to win the War on Terror. We can pretend this isn't an actual war, but that's not going to stop those who declared war on us long ago.

Debate on this subject is necessary and should continue. No one wants to condone flat-out torture. On the other hand, if someone asked me to choose between making a terrorist uncomfortable and saving the innocent lives of the thousands who died on 9/11, I'd volunteer to do the water-boarding. Facing the tyranny of terrorism puts us on a slippery slope that does indeed require caution lest the above story someday come true. However, we can't let that caution paralyze us from doing those things necessary to protect ourselves just because they make us uncomfortable.

America is great because we disagree with each other and debate these tough questions. But incessantly falling back on calling the administration traitorous and un-American is foolishness and no better than those who would call you a traitor for not supporting the administration.

If we're going to debate this, let's talk specifics and be open and honest about our sources. Neither side of extremism is going to help us understand each other's points of view.

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Hook 'em
Bear


Texas Longhorns
2005 College World Series Champs
2005 NCAA Football Champs

KAFKOREA is indeed the "Cut and Paster" and also a very good writer, as I mentioned. I think he was also "open about his sources" in the last sentence of his first paragraph, where he says,"The following article will give you some idea of what a setback it is...", and later named the author, with a short biography.
Indeed, we will see more controversy, perhaps bringing out both Democratic rantings AND intelligent viewpoints!

I guess what I meant by open and honest about sources is using sources that aren't from an extreme point of view. You're right Joe, he's not hiding his sources. But, he's not being intellectually open and honest by using inflammatory sources. If we all just cut-and-paste extreme opinion pieces this will continue to be a waste of everyone's time. To be fair, though, this is one of his more even-handed sources--but it's still just an opinion piece.

And I wouldn't call those even Democratic rantings. They're well to the left of most Democrats.

__________________
Hook 'em
Bear


Texas Longhorns
2005 College World Series Champs
2005 NCAA Football Champs

I agree with the Bear, and I hope you are right about most Democrats!
Hook 'em.
I'm not against some "extreme" opinions though, or posting inflammatory
articles, as long as we stir up members to convert from "Lurkers" to "Participants"!!

There is something a little distressing about this bill... I'm not sure of the exact wording or phrasing on it, but it sounds like there's a huge amount of unwritten leeway given to the president when he authorizes interrogation techniques. It makes it sound like barring mutiliation or rape, anything goes. As it stands, the interrogation techniques that are being used are well within the bounds of international law and the law of war. The techniques being used previously were on the fringe before a lot of scrutiny was being cast on the interrogators, but still legal. In an effort to free military interrogator's hands, the president is hacking away at the civil liberties of detainees... more simply done because they are not American citizens but a morally reprehensible act in and of itself. The author of the paper is right. America is losing the moral high ground in this fight. Not that the terrorists are gaining ground, we're just losing ours... bringing us closer to their level.

The more Abu Graibs that occur, the more Marines who blatantly kill innocent people and make it look like they were terrorists... the worse the end state will be in terms of our morality as a nation. People used to look at America as the knight in shining armor... we're beginning to look more like mercenaries for hire. sad.

It is funny how people who don't read bill's like the Patriot Act and this one, always state sentences like this. "I didn't read the book, but it sucked and ...."

How can you make so many statements without reading it?

Bob, I suggest reading the Geneva Convention. I have read it twice and used to teach it to our pilots in Germany.

Men that wear NO uniform and do not fight under a country DO NOT receive Geneva Convention rights. I hear over and over that these men found planting IEDs and beheading civilians some how earn Geneva Convention rights. The Geneva Convention is VERY clear on this and states in War or Armed Conflict that these men do not receive the rights under the Geneva Convention because THEY broke the rules of the Geneva Convention when they put on civilian clothing and planted bombs and fired a gun.

Bob, I will agree with you as soon as I see Americans beheading civilians on tape and burning some civilians and hanging them from bridges. You are WAY OFF base on this. We are nowhere near their level. How many investigations has Al Queda conducted? How many bibles does Al Queda provide to their captures before they behead them? There is absolutely a clear difference between Al Queda and the U.S. today. If you don't see it then you are not watching TV.

.

Unlike you I have faith in our Marines and military men in Iraq to do the right thing. When did other nations ever look to America as the "knight in shining Armor?" Was it in the Vietnam War? When we dropped two nukes on Japan? How about when we killed thousands of indians? Or was America the beacon of the "high ground" when Bill Clinton had sex with several women that were NOT his wife then lied about it on TV? When we burned down Waco and killed 100+ civilians?

I standing in the world today is fine, unless you watch CNN and Michael Moore movies.

I would rather ask the millions of women in Afghanistan who can now go to school, or the Kurds in Iraq if they think America is good instead of taking the world of terrorists and a socialist fat man who preaches socialism while making millions on capitalism.

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