Just to add to the insanity...
Let's take a moment and think a little about some recent bills passed by our illustrious government: S. 3930 (Military Commissions Act of 2006) and H.R. 5825 (Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act)/S. 3931 (Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006). (Look them up here for the full text... the Library of Congress site seems to make it impossible to link directly to them through the search results.)
These bills have been in the news a lot lately. The first is well on it's way to becoming law (as soon as the President signs it). It's implications seem much more straight-forward than the surveillance acts, but both take direct aim at the very foundations of our (increasingly less) free society.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 does many things. Among them, it allows for the creation of a special court to deal with "unlawful enemy combatants"--those are people who have "engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant" or "a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."
The troubling part of that definition is the second part. Mostly the "before, on, or after" part. Retroactive lawmaking just smacks of trying to justify things that have gone on before. I've seen it done on the local level and saw it raise some eyebrows there. Why more people in the Federal level don't balk at it, I'll never understand.
That stomach-churning retro-activity aside, the simple fact is this bill allows for the creation of yet another "court" that stands outside of the systems already put in place. Not just in our own Constitution, but in the international community.
See, another thing this bill does is allow our President to decide what in the Geneva Conventions we should listen to and how we should interpret it. This once again sets our government as thinking it is above the law of the land ("the land" in this case being the larger, international community--you know, where all our enemies and allies live and work). If we don't like the rules, it seems, we're justifying our ignoring of them.
Other provisions in this bill absolve the administration from having war crime charges brought upon it in the international court. This absolution is for those nasty torture sessions that may or may not have gone on. (Of course, if they're making laws to shield them from the fall-out, you can bet something actually happened that wasn't on the up and up.)
The Washington Post in a recent artcile says of this bill:
The legislation, which sets the rules for court proceedings, would only apply to those selected by the military for prosecution and leaves mostly unaffected the majority of the 14,000 prisoners in U.S. custody, most of whom are in Iraq. The bill would protect detainees from blatant abuses--such as rape, torture and "cruel and inhuman" treatment--but does not require that each of them be granted legal counsel and specifically bars detainees from protesting their detentions in federal courts.
This would be the point where we should note that even a U.S. citizen can be considered an "unlawful enemy combatant."
But a country would never treat one of its own citizens like that, would it? Especially an industrialized, progressive nation like the United States or, say, Canada. Well, just ask Maher Arar about that. Who's he, you ask? According to a recent article in The Guardian:
Four years ago, Canadian Maher Arar was detained on a routine airport stopover in the United States. He ended up Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for 10 months.
When he was released by the Syrians and returned to Canada, he started asking how he had been targeted as an Islamist terrorist. His search for answers has made him into a national celebrity, and is likely to end with an apology from the prime minister himself.
Yes--it can and does happen here.
I could go on, but many others who know better than me already have.
Aziz Huq over at FindLaw talks about the role of the Federal Court in wartime matters and how this bill seriously sidesteps all precedents. That should be a good place to start.
A quick search online will turn up dozens more comments than I'm going to stuff in here.
The bottom line is this: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it so you can be tried and convicted of a crime without a way to adequately defend yourself. The Surveillance acts (which are still being debated and reconciled) make it so anything even vaguely suspicious can be used as a gateway to a full-on secret investigation. All this happens without Constitutional legal review.
Once these pass--and they both will, flying under the banner of patriotism and "for your own good"--the Executive Branch and it's military underlings effectively eliminate a good number of the checks and balances set up to protect us all. And this time around, it's not just our own Constitution that's being mucked with--it's the whole of international law, too.
These bills have been in the news a lot lately. The first is well on it's way to becoming law (as soon as the President signs it). It's implications seem much more straight-forward than the surveillance acts, but both take direct aim at the very foundations of our (increasingly less) free society.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 does many things. Among them, it allows for the creation of a special court to deal with "unlawful enemy combatants"--those are people who have "engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant" or "a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."
The troubling part of that definition is the second part. Mostly the "before, on, or after" part. Retroactive lawmaking just smacks of trying to justify things that have gone on before. I've seen it done on the local level and saw it raise some eyebrows there. Why more people in the Federal level don't balk at it, I'll never understand.
That stomach-churning retro-activity aside, the simple fact is this bill allows for the creation of yet another "court" that stands outside of the systems already put in place. Not just in our own Constitution, but in the international community.
See, another thing this bill does is allow our President to decide what in the Geneva Conventions we should listen to and how we should interpret it. This once again sets our government as thinking it is above the law of the land ("the land" in this case being the larger, international community--you know, where all our enemies and allies live and work). If we don't like the rules, it seems, we're justifying our ignoring of them.
Other provisions in this bill absolve the administration from having war crime charges brought upon it in the international court. This absolution is for those nasty torture sessions that may or may not have gone on. (Of course, if they're making laws to shield them from the fall-out, you can bet something actually happened that wasn't on the up and up.)
The Washington Post in a recent artcile says of this bill:
The legislation, which sets the rules for court proceedings, would only apply to those selected by the military for prosecution and leaves mostly unaffected the majority of the 14,000 prisoners in U.S. custody, most of whom are in Iraq. The bill would protect detainees from blatant abuses--such as rape, torture and "cruel and inhuman" treatment--but does not require that each of them be granted legal counsel and specifically bars detainees from protesting their detentions in federal courts.
This would be the point where we should note that even a U.S. citizen can be considered an "unlawful enemy combatant."
But a country would never treat one of its own citizens like that, would it? Especially an industrialized, progressive nation like the United States or, say, Canada. Well, just ask Maher Arar about that. Who's he, you ask? According to a recent article in The Guardian:
Four years ago, Canadian Maher Arar was detained on a routine airport stopover in the United States. He ended up Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for 10 months.
When he was released by the Syrians and returned to Canada, he started asking how he had been targeted as an Islamist terrorist. His search for answers has made him into a national celebrity, and is likely to end with an apology from the prime minister himself.
Yes--it can and does happen here.
I could go on, but many others who know better than me already have.
Aziz Huq over at FindLaw talks about the role of the Federal Court in wartime matters and how this bill seriously sidesteps all precedents. That should be a good place to start.
A quick search online will turn up dozens more comments than I'm going to stuff in here.
The bottom line is this: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it so you can be tried and convicted of a crime without a way to adequately defend yourself. The Surveillance acts (which are still being debated and reconciled) make it so anything even vaguely suspicious can be used as a gateway to a full-on secret investigation. All this happens without Constitutional legal review.
Once these pass--and they both will, flying under the banner of patriotism and "for your own good"--the Executive Branch and it's military underlings effectively eliminate a good number of the checks and balances set up to protect us all. And this time around, it's not just our own Constitution that's being mucked with--it's the whole of international law, too.