Over the weekend, I wrote a series of articles about how Republican Seantor Lindsey Graham got the Senate to approve a legislative amendment giving Bush the power of a dictator – to arbitrarily imprison people and take away their right to file habeas corpus petitions, merely by using the label “enemy combatant”. The amendment also would have taken away the right of any court to challenge any aspect of the President’s imprisonment of these people.
This week, it seems that a compromise has been reached in the Senate which makes matters a little bit more complicated. The original amendment will be scuttled. Replacing it will be another amendment that goes about two-thirds as far as the original amendment.
Prisoners categorized as “enemy combatants” will still have no habeas corpus rights. This categorization does not just apply to Bush’s nebulous “war on terror”, but would also apply to people captured in a classic battlefield environment, and also to people taken prisoner off the battlefield, even within U.S. borders, without being charged with a crime. The Secretary of Defense will have the power to declare someone an “enemy combatant”, keep all purported evidence against that person classified “top secret”, and then whisk that person off to a secret prison with no habeas corpus rights. Now, habeas corpus is what lets the courts know that you’re even in a prison. So, if Bush and Rumsfeld can just put a person in prison, what possible role could the courts play?
The new amendment does not explicitly take away the power of the courts to hear cases related to the imprisonment of “enemy combatants”. It merely severely restricts the power of the courts to do in a very limited number of situations, while giving the Bush Administration more power to hide prisoners from the courts in the first place.
The new amendment also does something else very dangerous that the old amendment did not explictly do. The amendment provides a legal endorsement of Bush’s military tribunals, which are set up with such extremely low threshholds of conviction that they can fairly be called kangaroo courts.
It’s ironic that this amendment provides a legal foundation for kangaroo courts for prisoners of war, because Senator Lindsey Graham started out this whole mess with the complaint that the prisoners in Guantanamo are not criminals, and don’t deserve to be treated as such. Now, Senator Graham has a new amendment that still takes away legal rights of people held prisoner by the Bush Administration, with the justification that they are not criminals, and yet firmly establishes the means through which these prisoners can be put through unjust trials because they have committed crimes.
The Bush Administration, Senator Graham, and the Republican Party are trying to have it both ways. First, they want to take people’s rights away by saying that they’re prisoners of war, not criminals. Then, they want to put these same people through kangaroo courts and give them legal punishments by saying that they are criminals, not prisoners of war.
Senator Graham’s new amendment to the Defense Authorization Act puts this bizarre doublethink into law, and in doing so, seriously undermines the legal rights both of people accused of crimes and of people held as prisoners of war. Although the amendment’s language is softened, it remains as a serious attack on American liberty.
Some Democrats, in an effort to save face, seem to be agreeing to let the new amendment through. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, for example, calls it “a significant improvement”. When it comes to keeping our liberty, however, a “significant improvement” is not enough. Making a compromise with the Republicans so that we only lose half of the liberty that we would have otherwise lost is a fool’s compromise.
