Dodd: New terrorism bill 'pretty devastating' (AP)

Dodd: New terrorism bill 'pretty devastating'
October 10, 2006, 9:01 PM EDT

NASHUA, N.H. (AP) _ Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, who has been
participating in discussions marking the 60th anniversary of the
Nuremberg war crimes trials, said the recently passed terrorism
bill wrongly gives President Bush the authority to detain people
without charging them with a crime.

"We don't distinguish; we don't apply it ethically," the
Connecticut Democrat said Tuesday during a two-day trip to
New Hampshire to help campaign for congressional candidates.
Earlier, he had taken part in a discussion of Nuremberg
at Keene State College's Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies.

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Dodd's father, the late Sen. Thomas Dodd, was the No. 2
prosecutor for the United States behind Supreme Court
Justice Robert Jackson in the Nazi war criminal trials.
The tribunal tried 22 leading Nazis for war crimes and
_ for the first time _ crimes against humanity. Some
were hanged, others received prison terms up to a life
sentence and three were acquitted.

"Almost on the day of the anniversary (of the verdicts),
Congress basically rescinded our commitment to the Geneva
Conventions, walked away from habeus corpus, and basically
gave the president the sole authority to determine what
constitutes torture, which is a major step from everything
that we constructed in the post World War-II period," Dodd
said. "We walk away from the rest of the world on these
very issues."

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