Rogue Regime Rides Roughshod over Human Rights
Military Commissions Bill (S. 3930)
The Senate voted 65-34 in favor of S. 3930 on Thursday evening, September 28. Vote on the measure followed the defeat of five amendments. The Senate bill will go to the House for a final vote, to replace a nearly identical bill, H.R. 6166, which the House approved Wednesday by a vote of 253 -168. The House is certain to approve the Senate bill in order to avoid the need for a House-Senate conference.
In the Senate, only 34 Senators voted against the White House-crafted Military Commissions bill that
- re-establishes President Bush's military tribunals, which were rejected by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional,
- legalizes U.S. war crimes committed before December 30, 2005,
- disallows any person harmed by the U.S., in violation of the Geneva Conventions, from filing a claim in U.S. court,
- strips legal residents of the U.S. of their right to challenge their detention in court if they're accused of being “enemy combatants,”
- abolishes the right of Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detention, which in effect pre-judges all of them as guilty,
- approves the “CIA program” that allows waterboarding and other forms of torture,
- and names any individual, including citizens, as an “unlawful enemy combatant” if they provide “material support” to those engaged in hostilities against the U.S.
"I would rather be exposed to the inconvenience attending too much Liberty than those attending too small degree of it." -Thomas Jefferson
"The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume." –Thomas Jefferson to A. H. Rowan, 1798. ME 10:61
“Of one thing we may be sure. The future will never have to ask, with misgiving,
what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will know
that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have
been given the kind of a trial, which they, in the days of their
pomp and power, never gave to any man.
But fairness is not weakness. The extraordinary fairness of these
hearings is an attribute of our strength.” -Nuremburg lawyer Robert
Jackson
The Center For Constitutional Rights, which coordinates the civilian attorney representation of Guantánamo detainees, has published an excellent analysis of the Military Commissions Act on their website.