Today was really a sad day for this country, with the Senate’s passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. From the time that Bush signs this bill into law, consider what can happen in this country with this theoretical example:

A scholar from the Middle East comes to the United States on an academic visa, and is granted a green card. He becomes one of 12 million legal immigants to the United States. He contributes to the prosperity, wealth, and knowledge base of this country for years, and comes to love America.

One day he meets up with a relative of his who is visiting from the Middle East. The relative informs him of a charity that provides assistance to children orphaned in the Middle East as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The scholar decides to contribute money to the charity, as he believes it represents a noble cause.

Unbeknownst to him, the charity funds multiple causes, including one that the US government has arbitrarily deemed could be in furtherance of terrorism. Furthermore, the visiting relative is the cousin five times removed from one of the September 11th hijackers, raising more suspicions in the government.

The decision is made to place him under surveillance, without use of a warrant. He has done nothing wrong, but because a court is not allowed to judge the propriety of the warrant the sureveillance continues unimpeded. His phone records are searched, his house put under surveillance.

He meets with his relative again. They’re only swapping recipes, but the government becomes convinced that they are hatching a terrorist plot–especially because the scholar recently had some money wired to him from overseas as an inheritance left over after his grandfather died. But no, the government believes the money will fund an attack.

He is arrested and detained as an unlawful combatant. Now it gets really bad:

• He will be tried by a military tribunal rather than by a jury of his peers, and can be convicted merely by majority vote.
• He may only use a tribunal-appointed military lawyer.
• During his tribunal, the government can enter into evidence a confession made halfway around the world that the scholar hates America and wants to see it destroyed–something that is untrue, but because hearsay is now admissible the scholar has no way to refute it. Who knows if the confessor even exists, anyway?
• His relative is likely also being held as an unlawful combatant, and would be unavailable to provide an alibi.
• He has no right to challenge the legality of his detention via writ of habeas corpus to a federal court, a right well-enshrined in the Constitution. He can therefore be left to rot in jail indefinitely, because he also has no right to a speedy trial.
• He is subject to “harsh interrogation techniques” that meet the President’s interpretation of not violating the Geneva Conventions. Of course, nobody really knows what goes on in those prisons…a bit of “waterboarding” probably won’t hurt, right? Who’s going to know about it? He isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Even if the rest of the world does find out that torture took place the perpetrators are immune to prosecution, meaning there is almost no restraint on their behavior.

Can we really fathom this kind of thing happening in our supposedly advanced society? Some Republicans today couldn’t.

Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon said,

“The permanent detention of foreigners damages our moral integrity,” he said. “The power to detain people without showing cause is a tool of despotism. Stripping courts of hearing habeas claims is a frontal attack on our judicial system.”

He was followed by Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who said,

“[The bill] would take our civilized society back some 900 years [to a time before the Magna Carta was adopted. This is] unthinkable. What this entire controversy boils down to is whether Congress is going to legislate to deny a constitutional right which is explicit in the document of the Constitution itself and which has been applied to aliens by the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Legal analysts are weighing in too, and not in a positive way. Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, responding to Congress’s attempt to limit federal court review of the legislation’s constitutionality:

“[T]he image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it’s not clear that most of the members [of Congress] understand what they’ve done.”

Do you know someone with a green card? Indefinite detention and “harsh interrogation” (still just a euphemism for sanctioned torture) could now happen to them. And if it can happen to them, it won’t be long before it can happen to you.

Now only the Supreme Court stands in the way of our complete descent into despotism…and I’m not terribly confident given the recent appointments to that bench.

Tags: bush, congress, despotism, detention, habeas-corpus, military-commissions-act, surveillance, torture, warrantless