Although this is not a national issues blog, this topic is dramatic and will manifest over the rest of our lives, and I want to bring it up.
On Tuesday President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
Broadly, the new Act does 3 things:
1) Gives the US President the power to detain indefinitely anyone he or she deems to have provided material support to anti-US hostilities, and to use secret and coerced evidence to try detainees who will be held in secret US military prisons;
2) Strips the right of detainees to habeas corpus (the traditional right of detainees to challenge their detention);
3) Gives US officials immunity from prosecution for torturing detainees that were captured before the end of 2005 by US military and CIA.
Read the President's speech about the bill here. Read the depiction of what the new laws mean from the other point of view on ZNet here.
The key point to take away is that anyone can be deemed a threat and jailed indefinitely based on the President's perogatives.
As Doonesbury has been sarcastically pointing out lately, the federal government has been peddling fear of terrorism, and as our greatest threat terrorism is the justification for this new authority. Given that a free society can never eliminate the possibility of every conceivable threat, there has to be logical, mature and informed trade-offs made. Sacrificing our morals to allow the interrogation techniques outlined in the Act and the removal of habeas corpus for U.S. residents is shameful, pandering and ultimately worse than the threats the Act fantasizes it deflects.
Congress has given all future presidents the power to arrest and detain indefinitely anyone the president, whoever that is, deems as threats. This is a staggering failure for our Congressional representatives to vote to approve such sweeping authority into the executive branch.
Watch with dismay Keith Olbermann's equally sarcastic dissection of this travesty on YouTube. Why is this Act discussed by opponents with such irreverence? Because it is so illogical a serious conversation is impossible.
Tomorrow, back to the issues in East BoCo. Thanks for the indulgence.
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2 comments:
The law also legalizes torture by defining it out of existance. So John McCain can't go around saying he was tortured by the North Vietnamese anymore. According to the new law, he wasn't tortured. And he voted for it.
It's especially absurd when one considers how many members of Congress have law degrees.
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