Centerblue.org

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.

Despite Bush’s every effort to try having the Senate enact his autocratic version of a bill for interrogating and trying terrorist suspects–even going to Capitol Hill himself yesterday–a small group of GOP Senators (Collins, Warner, Graham, McCain) is standing firm and refusing to let the administration trample the Geneva Conventions.

The issue is simple, really. Either we obey the provisions of the Geneva Convention and the rule of law, or we do not. Bush thinks that the “war on terror” gives him license to suspend just about every right that America holds dear (habeas corpus, right to speedy trial, right to know the evidence arrayed against you, right not to be tortured). It seeks to interpret the Geneva Convention in conformity with its wishes. These Senators understand that the Conventions apply to everyone, and that our failure to observe them undermines our moral high ground in the war on terror. It would also place our troops in jeopardy since our failure to adhere will give license to other countries to also not do so.

Conservative blogs such as this one are outraged at the “turncoats,” not being able to grasp why the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution might apply to terrorists.

Let’s see if we can describe it in language easy enough for them to understand: the war on terror is either a war, or it’s not. If it’s really a war, then the Geneva Conventions apply as against prisoners of war and its human rights requirements must be followed. Terrorists want to kill us no more and no less than any nation’s soldiers at war with us would want to do so, and their being terrorists does not exempt them from basic human rights accorded all prisoners of war. Spare me the blather that they’re different because they target civilians; there’s a list of of innocent women and children a mile long in Iraq who’ve been killed by American bombs (not to mention incidents like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam). We are America, not Taliban Afghanistan; we do not maim and torture regardless of the reason or intent of our enemies.

In regards to constitutional rights, not all terrorists are foreign nationals, some of them are Americans. For those that are, the Constitution does not distinguish between Americans in its granting of basic rights. All of our rights are threatened with extinction once we start to pick and choose who among us is entitled to the Constitution’s protections and who is not. Today it’s them, tomorrow it’s us–at the whim of a Chief Executive with no checks on his power. We can streamline warrant requirements, allow for better emergency response, make things faster, allow for quicker judicial review, weigh the benefits vs. burdens of intrusions on our privacy, and adopt other measures to fight terrorism…but we cannot give the president unlimited license to interpret, grant, and remove constitutional rights as he sees fit.

This is not about appeasement, not about being soft on terrorists. It’s about not forgetting we are all Americans and there are some values that cannot be given up without surrendering who we are as a nation.

It’s good to know there are still some Republicans out there with enough sense to oppose the autocratic madness oozing out of the White House these days.

Dick Cheney was sent to Capitol Hill today to try whipping Republicans into accepting Bush’s proposals on surveillance and military tribunals. I can’t help but wonder whether Cheney will call his fellow GOP’ers unpatriotic “appeasers of terrorists” for refusing to give Bush the blank check he’s looking for.

Bush is seeking legislation that would:

• provide immunity from prosecution to interrogators who “mistreat” (a/k/a torture) detainees;
• allow an alleged terrorist defendant to be convicted with hidden evidence to which he has no access;
• give legal status to Bush’s warrantless surveillance efforts, despite their running afoul of the Fourth Amendment.

Republican Senators like Collins, Warner, McCain, and Graham thankfully remember that this is America, not Taliban Afghanistan. You simply do not convict anyone in this country or in any advanced democracy without so much as letting him know what evidence is laid out against him. You do not give license for interrogators to torture anyone. You do not wipe your ass with the Constitution.

I may want Republicans out of power because I believe they’ve lost their ability to lead…but I respect these Senators for understanding their current role as the last bastion against a White House that seems bent on pulling this country down into fascism.

This morning I tuned into CNN’s video pipeline where the news network is re-enacting coverage of 9/11 as it took place five years ago. The raw emotions I felt that day have come back in full force as I see for the first time how the crisis unfolded on television.

I knew two people who died that day, one on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania and one in the World Trade Center towers. Also, someone very close to me now was in the Pentagon but narrowly managed to escape injury.

Unfortunately this tragedy has been spun out of all recognition for political purposes. It has been used to justify the invasion of another country not involved in any way with the attacks of September 11th. A “docudrama” grinds a partisan ax on national television trying to rewrite history by creating fiction and attempting to pin the blame where it doesn’t belong.

In light of the disgraceful twisting of the tragedy that has taken place I thought it important to view the raw unedited footage as it happened, free of political agendas and partisan spin. The images themselves speak loud and clear as to how America changed that day.

Clearly we lost something dear and precious to us on that fateful morning. America is not what it was. Today’s news and debates of what constitutes torture, of secret gulags, of indefinite detentions of Americans without access to courts or a lawyer, of warrantless wiretapping would have been utterly unthinkable five years ago. We live in a different world now, and obviously we need to aggressively pursue our national security…but we must do so in a way that doesn’t compromise our core values. We can fight terrorism without trampling the Constitution.

I watched the ABC docudrama disgustedly last night as it attempted to make the case that it was because of pesky “obstacles” like the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement that prevented the US from fighting terrorism–clearly implying that such obstacles should be eliminated. They should not. We can streamline the process, quicken the decisionmaking, allow emergency arrests and searches to take place without a warrant as long as you get one later–all these measures address national security concerns. But when you entirely remove the authority of our justice system from judging the fairness of a search or seizure against Americans then we no longer live in a democracy, but in a police state.

The legacy of September 11th five years later is that we are handing the terrorists a victory by threatening to become that which we once hated. Bin Laden remains free to laugh at us in a cave somewhere. We are creating terrorists by the day throughout the Arab world by virtue of our irresponsible military “adventure” in Iraq. We are not safer as our ports and cities remain vulnerable, though credit must be given for the fact that there has not been another attack. The treasury continues to bleed money at an alarming rate.

Yet there is hope–Americans are waking up from their stupor and seeing the wolf in the henhouse. They are angry. They know in overwhelming numbers that America is headed in the wrong direction. They are understanding that our national identity, security and prestige are at stake both at home and abroad. They understand that we can fight terrorism and win without losing our nation’s soul in the process. They will hopefully vote their minds in November.

In the meantime I continue to watch the footage to remind myself of how much is at stake, lamenting the loss of a carefree America that our kids will probably never know, hopeful for a safer nation that hasn’t completely lost sight of its values.

We must never forget.

“The president has basically said: “I’ll agree to let a court decide if I’m breaking the law if you pass a law first that says I’m not breaking the law.”

–Dem. Senator Russell Feingold.

Feingold has summarized perfectly what is so arrogant and so wrong with the President’s “request” to Congress that it grant him “additional (synonym: autocratic) authority” to implement unconstitutional warrantless surveillance and wiretapping. Bush tried to make his case today, invoking the memory of 9/11 as the fifth anniversary of that event approaches. In response to the strong rebuke from a federal court in Michigan banning the warrantless surveillance and wiretapping program as unconstitutional, Bush is seeking to strengthen the legal underpinnings of his program while he appeals the case by strong-arming Congress into endorsing a blatantly unconstitutional process. To get that consent he threw a carrot to Congress, agreeing to submit the program to a one-time FISA constitutional review–but only after Congress had approved it. Feingold is protesting that Congressional “blessing” before submission to judicial review.

Good for him, although i’m not clear how obtaining Congressional approval would somehow make the program meet constitutional muster. The program was struck down because it violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches, in addition to slapping the president’s overstepping his constitutional authority in ordering the warrantless surveillance. Congress can’t legislate away the Fourth Amendment, making the efficacy of its approval questionable.

At any rate, it is clear that Bush will stop at nothing to be a king, and has no shame in using the 9/11 anniversary for political purposes in attempting to obtain that power.