The Senate just passed by a vote of 65-34 a bill that, among other things, allows the president to imprison forever, without trial, your neighbor's son -- a lawful permanent resident in the United States -- for emailing his Muslim roommate who went home to visit his family. Your daughter who organizes a protest at the Pentagon that gets a little more attention than the president thinks it should could become a detainee, held indefinitely. The bill says generally what activities qualify one as an "unlawful enemy combatant" subject to detention, but if the government can postpone that review indefinitely, who's going to tell the president that detention is illegal?
Think we're exaggerating? Think the bill goes after only terrorists or people who support them? Think again. The president is expected to sign it imminently. If you just read news reports, you won't have any idea how far this bill goes. Read it. Yes, it's too late to do anything, aside from letting your representatives know what they have done. They and the media have failed you. Read it.
But don't stop there. President Bush certainly hasn't. The bill's suspension of access to habeas corpus explicitly applies only to "aliens," which it defines as non-citizens -- in other words, legal permanent residents of the United States -- but the Bush administration has taken the position that it can detain anyone -- anyone, U.S. citizens included -- by, in its sole discretion, labeling that person an enemy combatant. Bush did that in the case of citizen Jose Padilla, simply asserting that he was a terrorist, and locking him up in a Navy prison in South Carolina for three years without charges. Padilla filed suit, and the Bush administration argued successfully to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that it could hold Padilla indefinitely as an enemy combatant. It was only following Padilla's appeal to the Supreme Court that the administration filed criminal charges against him, apparently fearful that the Supreme Court would rule in Padilla's favor. The Supreme Court refused to hear Padilla's case, writing that the criminal charges made it unnecessary at the time to rule on the issue of whether he was lawfully detained as an enemy combatant. Let's review: Padilla was held without charges for three years; the Bush administration took the position -- and continues to take the position -- that his detention was lawful and that it has the power to hold him until the conclusion of the war on terror. Rather than reining in the president, Congress has opted to make that unfettered authority clear only with respect to "aliens." The bill does include a definition of unlawful enemy combatants but, notably, does not limit the category to noncitizens. Congress has yet to act on Bush's assertion of power to detain U.S. citizens as unlawful enemy combatants.
The media have characterized the bill as one providing "Broad New Rules to Try Detainees" or, in the words of The Washington Post, a bill that institutes "landmark changes to the nation's system of interrogating and prosecuting terrorism suspects." Indeed, much of the media's focus on this legislation has been directed at the rift -- since healed -- between Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and John Warner (R-VA) on the one hand and President Bush and his congressional supporters on the other over such -- obviously important -- issues as the treatment of detainees. But to read these reports, you would think the bill targets only "them" (as in "us versus them") -- terrorism suspects only a mother or the ACLU could love.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200609300002#1
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