NYT Editorial: "Suspending habeas corpus is an extreme notion on the radical fringes..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/opinion/09wed1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Editorial
The Democrats’ Pledge

Published: May 9, 2007
Last year, Congressional Democrats allowed the Bush administration to ram through one of the worst laws in the nation’s history — the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This year, the Democrats pledged to use their new majority to begin repairing the profound damage the law has done to the nation’s justice system and global image.

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But let’s be clear. There is nothing “conservative” or “tough on terrorism” in selectively stripping people of their rights. Suspending habeas corpus is an extreme notion on the radical fringes of democratic philosophy. As four retired military chief prosecutors — from the Navy, the Marines and the Army — pointed out to Congress, holding prisoners without access to courts merely feeds Al Qaeda’s propaganda machine, increases the risk to the American military and sets a precedent by which other governments could justify detaining American civilians without charges or appeal.

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There are a half-dozen bills in the House and the Senate that would restore habeas corpus. But the Democratic leadership has not found a way to bring the issue to a vote. The first vehicle is the Defense Department’s budget authorization bill. But Representative Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, chose not to include habeas corpus in his baseline version of the measure, known as the chairman’s mark, which will be taken up by the committee today.

We hope habeas will be added to the bill by the committee, or that other sponsors of measures to restore the ancient right, including Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Jerrold Nadler of New York, and Senators Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, will find ways to bring their bills to a vote.

MORE

Some days I get so tired.

I need a hot shower, and a lot of soap.

No...no no no, can't have that! Would violate grand theft by the BFEE! Can't have that!

COMMENTARY
Countdown
Updated: 10:35 a.m. PT Oct 11, 2006

Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'

On “Countdown” Keith Olbermann examined the Military Commission’s Act of 2006 and what it does to something called habeas corpus.

The following is a transcript of Keith Olbermann's special report on habeas corpus, as reported on Tuesday, October 10th:

The president has now succeeded where no one has before. He’s managed to kill the writ of habeas corpus. Tonight, a special investigation, how that, in turn, kills nothing less than your Bill of Rights. Because the Mark Foley story began to break on the night of September 28, exploding the following day, many people may not have noticed the bill passed by the Senate that night...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15220450/

video - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2473008175261026427

...to have access to the courts and a sympathetic judge who won't take anyone trampling the writ of Habea Corpus:

Judge throws out Posada Carriles' indictment

:mad:

When Congress rolled over and let the Bush Administration suspend a cornerstone of modern democracy that is more than 700 years old, I'm afraid I had already reached outrage fatigue. The ramifications of such a decision were so mind-boggling that I felt like pinching myself to see whether I was dreaming.

Read They Thought They Were Free, an oral history by Milton Mayer of Germany's descent into Nazism. Things happen incrementally, folks. Each outrage is a little bigger than the previous one, but people keep waiting for something so flagrant that it sends citizens into the streets in protest. But it never comes. Each new incursion into our freedoms builds upon previous ones (Patriot Act I begets Patriot Act II) and by the time we realize what's happened, it's too late. It's the famous frog in a slowly heating saucepan of water.

the NYT is just now realizing it has happened?

I guess they think they are ahead of the times. :sarcasm: