It's a covert attack on the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution by many on the Right.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20060705.html">Senators Kyl and Graham's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Scam: The Deceptive Amicus Brief They Filed in the Guantanamo Detainee Case
By JOHN W. DEAN
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Wednesday, Jul. 05, 2006
Last week, the Supreme Court issued its historic decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. There, it dealt a substantial blow to the Bush/Cheney Administration's plans for the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and, potentially, elsewhere as well - ruling out, for instance, the option of using military commissions without due process to try detainees.
The decision itself has been widely discussed. Less widely discussed, however, has been its backstory.
The Bush/Cheney Administration has been doing everything possible to keep its treatment of purported terrorist detainees out of the federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court. To assist the Administration, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jon Kyl of Arizona engaged in a blatant scam that was revealed during the briefing of Hamdan.
Senators Graham and Kyl not only misled their Senate colleagues, but also shamed their high offices by trying to deliberately mislead the U.S. Supreme Court. Their effort failed. I have not seen so blatant a ploy, or abuse of power, since Nixon's reign.
The Administration’s deceit on this eavesdropping issue began shortly after it started eavesdropping in violation of FISA. At the July, 2002 Senate Intelligence Committee hearings to debate the FISA amendments introduced by Senators Kyl, Schumer and DeWine, the Justice Department’s James A. Baker -- also under oath -- falsely assured the Committee that the Senate could liberalize FISA without worrying about incursions into civil liberties:
So you would be, you know, connecting electronic surveillance and potentially physical search of those targets and that raises all the same kinds of civil liberties questions that FISA does to begin with. But nevertheless, you would have had--before you get to that point, you would have had a finding by a neutral and detached magistrate, and indeed in this case a sitting federal judge, district court judge, that all of the requirements of the statute are met and that there's probable cause to believe that this individual is engaged in international terrorism activities, or activities in preparation therefor.
A statement more starkly false is difficult to imagine. What Baker swore was true to the Committee (and, by implication, to all of us) -- namely, that no eavesdropping occurs without a federal judge first finding that all of the requirements of FISA were met -– was completely false. Unbeknownst even to the Senate Intelligence Committee, eavesdropping without warrants had been ordered by the President many months earlier.
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_glenngreenwald_archive.html Limiting Endless Death Penalty Delays
By Jon Kyl
Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on a bill I introduced to reduce the backlog of federal court appeals in major criminal cases and help bring closure to the victims of violent crime. Entitled the Streamlined Procedures Act, it is an update of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), which was passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.
The AEDPA was designed to limit endless death penalty appeals in state convictions, imposing a limit for all appeals relating to the right to writ of habeas corpus in capital cases, and reducing the length of the appeals process by limiting the role of federal courts. (Habeas corpus is the legal procedure by which persons accused of crimes seek to be released from custody - it is frequently used by death row inmates.) When the AEDPA was enacted, then-President Clinton remarked that “it should not take eight or nine years and three trips to the Supreme Court to finalize whether a person in fact was properly convicted or not.”
Ten years later, unfortunately, things have gotten worse, not better. The backlog of “habeas” claims has actually increased, and so has the workload of prosecutors, which is why Kent Cattani, chief counsel for the capitol litigation section of the Arizona Attorney General’s office, appeared before the committee to testify in strong support of my bill.
http://kyl.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=240769 Thirty-two states have already made provisions for victims' rights, either through state legislation or amendments to their state constitutions. But supporters insist a national amendment is still necessary. "It hasn't produced the kind of transformation that is needed," says professor Paul Cassells of the University of Utah, a leading legal voice for a Victims' Rights Amendment. "When you are trying to change the process on a day-to-day level down on Main Street, you need a very potent weapon and the Victims' Rights Amendment is it." Cassells has also crusaded against Miranda rights for years, and will soon argue for their abolition before the Supreme Court.
But uniting against this measure is a bevy of lawyers who might ordinarily scowl at each other from opposite sides of the courtroom, including criminal defense attorneys, a prosecutor in the Oklahoma bombing case, the American Civil Liberties Union, a Reagan administration lawyer, battered women, 450 law professors, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
These detractors urge that enshrining victims' rights in the Constitution will damage the justice system, bend constitutional rights in an unhealthy way, and do little to help victims. It arrives at the public doorstep, they say, only because politicians are afraid to appear heartless toward victims. Many also say they are troubled by practical problems the amendment raises, beginning with the basic and seemingly obvious questions: Who is the victim? And is the person arrested really guilty?
http://www.vote.com/magazine/editorials/editorial1709598.phtml Just this short search found limits on Mirarnda rights, habeas corpus (again) and privacy. They are all connected by either Steve Twist or Sen. Kyl. It could be Feinstein is getting played, not sure yet. But it is obvious the only way to defeat, or at least limit, the Bill of Rights is to have an opposing, better, Victim's Bill of Rights to keep traditional rights in check. A Victim's Bill of Rights is fine, but as we found in California, that was not the real goal. Victim's got used and are still getting used.