You may have read this. If you haven’t, you need to:
In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that Congress’s 2006 Military Commissions Act firmly blocked detainees from trying to appeal the president’s decision to hold them without charges and without any promise of release….
Many detainees, viewed by the military as potential terrorism suspects or people with valuable information about terrorist plots, have been seeking through pro bono lawyers to challenge their imprisonment using a longstanding American legal right called the writ of habeas corpus.
The Supreme Court ruled last summer in one case involving a detainee, Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, that pending habeas cases could continue — a decision that declared the Bush administration’s original rules for trying detainees before military commissions were unconstitutional. But four justices said the president could seek from Congress the authority they said he lacked.
At the urging of President Bush last fall, Congress passed The Military Commissions Act, stripping detainees at Guantanamo Bay of their right to try to bring their cases before federal judges.
In arguing the case decided by the appeals court today, attorneys for the detainees had said the Military Commissions Act should not apply to challenges already pending before the court.
But, given the new laws passed by Congress, “federal courts have no jurisdiction in these cases,” Circuit Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote for the panel.
That’s right. This is now the United States of America: People placed under indefinite detention on the President’s say-so. No right to be charged in a court. No right to have the evidence reviewed in court. No right to speak to a court. No right to have any access to a court. On the President’s say-so, these people rot in detention, possibly forever.
This is the United States of America, thanks to the Military Commissions Act, an act of the 109th Congress passed by a majority consisting of Republicans and a fair number of Democrats.
Is this your America?
I didn’t hear you. I said, IS THIS YOUR AMERICA?????
Tell me again: IS THIS YOUR AMERICA???
Well, then, damn it, do something about it!
At the very least, write your Senators and Representative. If you know they voted for the pro-tyranny Military Commissions Act (check here for the Senate and here for the House), castigate them. Unless your House Representative is Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas, ask why your Representative why she or he has not at the very least cosponsored H.R. 267, a very mild bill that would simply restore Habeas Corpus rights. Unless the Senator in your correspondence is Arlen Specter or Patrick Leahy, ask why she or he has not at the very least cosponsored S. 185, an identical bill which would only restore Habeas Corpus rights and do nothing else. The more thorough S. 576 has not been reported through to the Thomas disclosure database — ask them to specifically state their intentions regarding this bill.
I will be doing so right now. How about you?
Jim, you can increase the font size again, and they still won’t hear you. This is their America. They don’t care whether other people are thrown into prison without trial and without any hope of appeal, never to be seen again. They’d rather be talking about how Britney Spears shaved her head. In the new America, celebrity hair matters more than liberty.
Well, the only thing worse than trying and failing is not trying and failing. Here is my message posted to Senator Sherrod Brown. I have sent similar ones to Senator George Voinovich and Representative Deborah Pryce — all supporters of the Military Commissions Act.
Have you written your members of Congress on the issue? Post your responses here to show others (who might feel nobody cares about anything but Britney Spears) that some Americans actually give a crap about their country.
Nothing personal, Fruk. I just can’t stand the “well, we might as well all rot right into the ground” stance. Until we have rotted into the ground, there is still an opportunity to do something.
I’m starting a Squidoo lens entitled Repeal the Military Commissions Act which will point to resources aligned against the Military Commissions Act online.
Everyone wants to jump on a bandwagon, but where are all these wagons going? I read about half of Dodd’s bill in my “spare time” and it looks like it just tries to amend the original bill line by line, but not repeal it. The Republicans who voted for the bill said at the time parts of it were unconstitutional and the thing would be refined by testing in the courts, and i think it has come up in a court somewhere very recently, but how does that fit in? A link to Dodd’s bill is above the fold on DailyKos, but I haven’t seen any discussion. What are the differences between all the different bills? Obama criticized the passage of the first bill in part because it hadn’t been debated but simply rushed through passage without any one even having time to read it. Instead of typing larger case letters, can someone do some analysis? What are the lawyers saying?
All the different bills? What different bills are those?
I agree, though. A simple bill is all that’s required: It reads, “This bill repeals the Military Commissions Act of 2006″
HR 267, S. 185, S. 576, and the bill Dodd is linking to without any number at the top. Do we have any legitimate national interests that are protected by S. 3230 that need to be protected by a new law? Otherwise why is Dodd dissecting the bill and protecting parts of it? It looks like he’s turning it into swiss cheese. It’s like trying to follow a shell game, what is in which article of which bill under which shell? Dodd’s been on that senate subcommittee forever, so he has to know a lot about foreign relations. Britney who?
Okay, here’s a link to a WaPo piece about the Dodd bill apparently introduced Valentines Day, but no bill number.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/13/AR2007021301163.html
The detainee court case was yesterday, here’s a link to NPR piece about it:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7501314 There are more stories surrounding it.
Not good, but Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in yet. Maybe the fix will have to be legislative after all. Don’t have time to google the organizations mentioned in the pieces, but it looks like they have some philosophy about what needs to happen. Hope you can have some fun with these.
Thanks, Alan.
S. 576 is Dodd’s bill.
S. 185, the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007, looks even less adequate than S. 576. It doesn’t deal with the Military Commissions Act in a comprehensive way at all – only with a couple of lines in the MCA. The same is true of H.R. 267, submitted by Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee.
Just repeal the Military Commission Act. The law was completely unnecessary.