Requiem for American Rights

I ask you: What is America without American Rights?

I intend to write a much longer and more in-depth post about the new "anti-terror" law, but for now, here's some excerpts from what other people are saying.

From the Washington Post:

Of all the stupid, lazy, short-sighted, hasty, ill-conceived, partisan-inspired, damage-inflicting, dangerous and offensive things this Congress has done (or not done) in its past few recent miserable terms, the looming passage of the terror detainee bill takes the cake...

The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights...

Do you believe the Administration has over the past five years earned the colossal expanse of trust the Congress is about to give it in the name of fighting terrorism? Do you believe that Administration officials will be able to accurately and adequately identify so-called "enemy combatants" here at home so as to separate out the truly bad guys from the guys who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did you want your legislative branch to abdicate so completely its responsibility to ensure that there are adequate checks and balances upon executive power even in a time of terror? You might have answered "no" to all three questions. But your answer doesn't matter. And neither does mine. To Congress, the answer is "yes, sir."

From TPMCafe:

Of the original 10 amendments to the Constitution of 1787 - IV, V, VI, VII and VIII are directed at arrest, trial and punishment. The bill passed by the Senate yesterday, and already rubber stamped by the house, effectively repeals all of these Amendments, because it allows a class of people declared by executive fiat to be treated in a manner which is separate from the rest of the judicial system.

The reason for the focus by the founding fathers on due process and the common law, was that they had been the intense focus of violations of the common law...We have now descended to the level of confused demogougery, where any right, however old and precious, may be revoked by a constitutional super-minority, a rump Congress with almost no support in the country, and supported by a supine press which insists in not reading the contents of the bill itself, but mischaracterizing it as applying to "terror suspects" as if this meant other people.

This is not, in short a bureaucratic red tape cutting exercise, but, in essence, and Amendment to the Constitution that reads: "All other rights are superceded by the needs of the state, under the sole discretion of the executive."

From the L.A. Times:

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops "during an armed conflict," it also allows him to seize anybody who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents...Legal residents who aren't citizens are treated even more harshly. The bill entirely cuts off their access to federal habeas corpus, leaving them at the mercy of the president's suspicions.

[T]he bill also reinforces the presidential claims, made in the Padilla case, that the commander in chief has the right to designate a U.S. citizen on American soil as an enemy combatant and subject him to military justice. Congress is poised to authorize this presidential overreaching...This is no time to play politics with our fundamental freedoms. Even without this massive congressional expansion of the class of enemy combatants, it is by no means clear that the present Supreme Court will protect the Bill of Rights. The Korematsu case — upholding the military detention of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II — has never been explicitly overruled. It will be tough for the high court to condemn this notorious decision, especially if passions are inflamed by another terrorist incident. But congressional support of presidential power will make it much easier to extend the Korematsu decision to future mass seizures.

From the Huffington Post:

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, of MCA, passed by the House and Senate and likely to be signed by the President tomorrow is a wholesale assault on the idea of a limited government under law.

It will be taken by the Bush Administration as a blank check to torture, to detain indefinitely without just cause, and to trample the values that win America respect in the world. From tomorrow, counter-terrorism is the "land of do as you please" for the President and the wise men of the Defense Department[.]

The MCA comprehensively assaults two ideas: The idea of checking executive power by laws. And the idea of a separate branch of government ensuring those limits are respected. These are the basic tools of accountability.

From Foreign Policy magazine:

Who can be an enemy combatant?

Answer: Anyone. The Washington Post is reporting that over the weekend the White House and its House allies successfully watered down an earlier version of the military commissions bill to include a less restrictive description of how the government could designate civilians as "unlawful enemy combatants."

The [unlawful enemy combatant] definition applies to foreigners living inside or outside the United States and does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant.

That means that anyone the government decides "has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" [ital mine] or its military allies can be detained indefinitely. In other words, a U.S. citizen in the United States. And they've successfully defined the "battlefield" as anywhere and everywhere. Plus, if Congress writes and passes it, it's unlikely the Supreme Court would step in and declare the definition unconstitutional. I'm less enthused by this military commissions compromise by the minute.

From Ellis Weiner:

[I]t is now within the regime's power to round us (self; the wife) up and throw us in jail, forever.

Literally. Period. No charges, no examination of the evidence, no counsel, no guarantee of trial, no habeas, no corpus, no shirt, no shoes, no due process. The Times, in an editorial, notes, "All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial."

Just like in--well, pick your poison. 1984. Fahrenheit 451. V for Vendetta. The Empire Strikes Back. Soviet Russia. Communist China. Pol Pot's New, Improved Cambodia. You-know-who's old, classic-style Nazi Germany. The Spanish Inquisition. (I know--you didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody does.)

And there you have it: from "compassionate conservative" to the abolition of common law, and all in a mere six years. Take that, Mao.

From the New York Times:

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.

[I]n 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy[.]

From Chris Durang:

These...people...voted to dump the Magna Carta protections of being able to confront your accuser, and said it's okay to lock up "suspected terrorists" FOR LIFE without trial or anyway of protestng their innocence[.]

We prefer that innocent people be locked up for life with no recourse, as long as we can feel safe. And so we can tell the scared people in America - we are protecting you! Because that's the kind of
America we love! Safety first, to hell with laws, they're inconvenient, they're for mushy liberals who don't know the value of shock and awe. Who cares if innocent people are harmed? Not us! Not John McCain or Lindsay Graham or John Warner, our maverick moderate Republicans. They turn out to be Mickey Mouse mavericks...

AND the Congress and the Mickey Mouse mavericks have allowed the Cheney-inspired rewriting of the term "enemy combatatant" so it has been broadened beyond people "found on the battlefield," and it now includes people who "aid and abet" the terrorists... and this open-to-interpretation phrase could probably be applied to American citizens -- it doesn't preclude that -- and it is all to be determined SOLELY by President Bush...

From David Wallechinsky:

It is shocking that sixty percent of the members of Congress, by voting in favor of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, would hand to the president of the United States the right to interpret, without Congressional oversight, the Geneva Conventions, to waive the right of habeas corpus, to authorize the use of information gathered through torture, and to, in effect, establish a separate judicial system that will be run out of the White House, willfully giving up powers that until now were reserved for the legislative and judicial branches of the government...

One of the many disturbing aspects of the Act is that the president now has the right to declare any foreign citizen, including a legal resident of the United States, an "unlawful enemy combatant" if that
person is suspected of giving money to an organization that supports terrorism, with the term "terrorism" defined by the president. Supporters of President Bush would do well to keep in mind that these new powers given to Bush will also be available to the next president of the United States...say, Hilary Clinton. The law's wording is vague enough to allow President Clinton #2, or someone more
maniacal, to kidnap and detain forever a broad range of people that most Americans would not consider terrorists.

Then there is the question of whether the Act gives the Bush administration permission to detain American citizens. Section 948a of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 defines "unlawful enemy combatant" as "an individual engaged in hostilities againtst the United States who is not a lawful
enemy combatant." Does the phrase "an individual" include U.S. citizens? Apparently we will have to wait for President Bush to make that decision.

Basically, I am not exaggerating when I say that you (and your family) can now be arrested without knowing why, held indefinitely with no trial and no lawyer, and executed without ever seeing the evidence against you, if the President (or someone who works for the President) is suspicious of you, for whatever reason.

Do you feel like you still have rights?

Do you feel like this is still the same United States of America that you grew up in?