Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006) by Molly Ivins

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I know this isn't usually my area of the forum, but I got this email from a friend and thought I'd throw it out there...


Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006)

By Molly Ivins


With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.

09/29/06 "TruthDig" -- -- AUSTIN, Texas—Oh dear. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. In Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, of planning to “cut and run” on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. “I just could not believe he would say that to me,” said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane. Every election cycle produces some wincers, but how do you apologize for that one?

The legislative equivalent of that remark is the detainee bill now being passed by Congress. Beloveds, this is so much worse than even that pathetic deal reached last Thursday between the White House and Republican Sens. John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The White House has since reinserted a number of “technical fixes” that were the point of the putative “compromise.” It leaves the president with the power to decide who is an enemy combatant.

This bill is not a national security issue—this is about torturing helpless human beings without any proof they are our enemies. Perhaps this could be considered if we knew the administration would use the power with enormous care and thoughtfulness. But of the over 700 prisoners sent to Gitmo, only 10 have ever been formally charged with anything. Among other things, this bill is a CYA for torture of the innocent that has already taken place.

Death by torture by Americans was first reported in 2003 in a New York Times article by Carlotta Gall. The military had announced the prisoner died of a heart attack, but when Gall saw the death certificate, written in English and issued by the military, it said the cause of death was homicide. The “heart attack” came after he had been beaten so often on this legs that they had “basically been pulpified,” according to the coroner.

The story of why and how it took the Times so long to print this information is in the current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. The press in general has been late and slow in reporting torture, so very few Americans have any idea how far it has spread. As is often true in hierarchical, top-down institutions, the orders get passed on in what I call the downward communications exaggeration spiral.

For example, on a newspaper, a top editor may remark casually, “Let’s give the new mayor a chance to see what he can do before we start attacking him.”

This gets passed on as “Don’t touch the mayor unless he really screws up.”

And it ultimately arrives at the reporter level as “We can’t say anything negative about the mayor.”

The version of the detainee bill now in the Senate not only undoes much of the McCain-Warner-Graham work, but it is actually much worse than the administration’s first proposal. In one change, the original compromise language said a suspect had the right to “examine and respond to” all evidence used against him. The three senators said the clause was necessary to avoid secret trials. The bill has now dropped the word “examine” and left only “respond to.”

In another change, a clause said that evidence obtained outside the United States could be admitted in court even if it had been gathered without a search warrant. But the bill now drops the words “outside the United States,” which means prosecutors can ignore American legal standards on warrants.

The bill also expands the definition of an unlawful enemy combatant to cover anyone who has “has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” Quick, define “purposefully and materially.” One person has already been charged with aiding terrorists because he sold a satellite TV package that includes the Hezbollah network.

The bill simply removes a suspect’s right to challenge his detention in court. This is a rule of law that goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215. That pretty much leaves the barn door open.

As Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, wrote, an intelligence service free to torture soon “degenerates into a playground for sadists.” But not unbridled sadism—you will be relieved that the compromise took out the words permitting interrogation involving “severe pain” and substituted “serious pain,” which is defined as “bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain.”

In July 2003, George Bush said in a speech: “The United States is committed to worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes, whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.”

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary—these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.

I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

To find out more about Molly Ivins and see works by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
 
Does this surprise anyone? Despite all the criticism of GWB (the Dim Reaper etc) he has shrewdly managed to do more to curtail freedom than any President I can recall. This is a disgrace...
 
How does this bill bypass the judiciary exactly?

I think Bush is full of shit and this is yet another example of his attitude at work, but I wonder what, practically speaking, this bill accomplishes once the courts get involved?
 
With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.

Now who's peddling fear?

Sorry Molly, but Sinclair Lewis you're not.
 
It's clearly time to pull this gorgeous, eternal piece of Truth out again.

One of my favorite poems eva! :rockon:

First They Came for the Jews

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

~Pastor Martin Niemöller


Then go here. Let's not wait until it gets worse.

http://amnestyusa.org
 
It's clearly time to pull this gorgeous, eternal piece of Truth out again.
Of coarse the "they" being Nazis and the implication being "Hitler ignored human rights--Bush wants to ignore human rights--Therefore, Bush is like Hitler. Is that the warning?

Tell you what, when George W Bush starts making soap from the bodies of murdered innocent civilians, you can say "told you so!" But until that time, might I suggest a little more faith in the character of the American people and maybe, just maybe, a little more trust that the motives and values of the government are intrinsically good.
 
Molly Ivins acticle
I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

As someone that supports that "evil bill," I was just waiting for the "comparing us to Nazis" to commence. The leap in logic to me, is believing that America under George Bush is on the threshold of becoming The Fourth Reich...unless, presumably, we start electing Democrats.
 
Yeah, I guess the whole nazi analogy has lost all relevancy. I agree it gets overused but it also goes misunderstood many times. Somehow nazi automatically equals Hitler.

People forget the actual beginnings and definition of nazism, but somehow it only means making soap out of murdered people.
 
Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006) By Molly Ivins

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus WITHOUT consulting Congress.
So why is it that Bush and his policies are never compared to "the tyranny of Lincoln?"
 
INDY500 said:

might I suggest a little more faith in the character of the American people and maybe, just maybe, a little more trust that the motives and values of the government are intrinsically good.

Faith in the American people, yes. You will see this in a few weeks and again in '08
Values....intrinsically good.. these are oxymoronic terms when speaking of this administration.

But a change there is a coming.
 
The motives and values of governments is to stay in power and nothing else.
 
The New Detainee Law Does Not Deny Habeas Corpus
Fear not, New York Times, al Qaeda’s lawfare rights are still intact.

By Andrew C. McCarthy


There are innumerable positives in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the new law on the treatment of enemy combatants that President Bush will soon sign. Among the best is Congress’s refusal to grant habeas-corpus rights to alien terrorists. After all, the terrorists already have them.

That the critique on this entirely appropriate measure has been dead wrong is given away by its full-throated hysteria. Typical was Richard Epstein, a distinguished constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, who admonished the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Bush administration and a compliant Republican Congress were unconstitutionally “suspend[ing]” the great writ. The New York Times editorial board, in its signature hyperbole, railed that “[d]etainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment.” What bunkum.

AL QAEDA TERRORISTS HAVE NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
First, Congress cannot “suspend” habeas corpus by denying it to people who have no right to it in the first place. The right against suspension of habeas corpus is found in the Constitution (art. I, 9). Constitutional rights belong only to Americans — that is, according to the Supreme Court, U.S. citizens and those aliens who, by lawfully weaving themselves into the fabric of our society, have become part of our national community (which is to say, lawful permanent resident aliens). To the contrary, aliens with no immigration status who are captured and held outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and whose only connection to our country is to wage a barbaric war against it, do not have any rights, much less “basic rights,” under our Constitution.

Indeed, even when the Supreme Court, in its radical 2004 Rasul case, opened the courthouse doors to enemy fighters in wartime for the first time in American history, it relied not on the Constitution but on the federal habeas corpus statute. So put aside that Rasul was an exercise in judicial legerdemain whose holding depended on a distortion of both that statute and the long-established limitations on the Court’s own jurisdiction (which does not extend outside sovereign U.S. territory to places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). Even in its willful determination to reach a result that rewarded al Qaeda’s lawfare, the Court declined to rule that alien combatants have fundamental habeas rights. Instead, they have only what Congress chooses to give them — which Congress can change at any time.

AL QAEDA TERRORISTS HAVE NO TREATY RIGHTS
But wait. Isn’t habeas corpus necessary so that the terrorists can press the Geneva Convention rights with which the Court most recently vested them in its 2006 Hamdan case? Wrong again.

To begin with, although its reasoning was murky, the Hamdan majority seems technically to have held that Geneva’s Common Article 3 applied to military commissions because of a congressional statute, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Again, if a right is rooted in a statute, not in the Constitution, Congress is at liberty to withdraw or alter the right simply by enacting a new statute. Such a right is not in any sense “basic.”

But don’t some human-rights activists contend the Hamdan ruling means Common Article 3 applies not just because of a statute but because of its own force as part of a treaty that the United States has ratified? Well, yes, they do make that claim — and (as I recently argued here) they have gotten plenty of help from the recent debate prompted by Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others who insisted Hamdan meant Common Article 3 controls interrogation practices.

Even with all of that, though, it remains a settled principle that treaties are compacts between sovereign nations, not fonts of individual rights. Alleged violations are thus grist for diplomacy, not litigation. Treaties are not judicially enforceable by individuals absent an express statement to the contrary in the treaty’s text. By contrast, Geneva's express statements indicate that no judicial intervention was contemplated.

This, no doubt, is why the Geneva Conventions, qua treaties, have never been judicially enforced. Consequently, if Congress had actually denied al Qaeda detainees a right to use Common Article 3 to challenge their detention in federal court (and, as we’ll soon see, Congress has not done that), that would merely have reaffirmed what has been the law for over a half century.

If the political representatives of a nation believe one of its citizens is being unlawfully held at Gitmo, the proper procedure is for that nation to protest to our State Department, not for the detainee to sue our country in our courts. In fact, several nations have made such claims, and Bush administration has often responded by repatriating detainees to their home countries … only to have many of them rejoin the jihad. In any event, though, there would be nothing wrong with declining to allow habeas to be used for the creation of individual rights that detainees do not in fact have under international law.

AL QAEDA TERRORISTS DO GET TO CHALLENGE THEIR DETENTION
But let’s ignore that the critics are wrong about the entitlement of al Qaeda terrorists to constitutional or treaty-based rights to habeas. There is an even more gaping hole in their attack on the new law. Congress has already given al Qaeda detainees the very rights the critics claim have been denied.

Last December, Congress enacted the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA). It requires that the military must grant each detainee a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) at which to challenge his detention. Assuming the military’s CSRT process determines he is properly detained, the detainee then has a right to appeal to our civilian-justice system — specifically, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. And if that appeal is unsuccessful, the terrorist may also seek certiorari review by the Supreme Court.

This was a revolutionary innovation. As we’ve seen, Rasul did not (and could not) require Congress to allow enemy combatants access to the federal courts. Congress could lawfully have responded to Rasul by amending the habeas statute to make clear that al Qaeda terrorists have no more right to petition our courts in wartime than any other enemy prisoners have had in the preceding two-plus centuries. Instead, Congress responded by giving the enemy what are in every meaningful way habeas rights.

For the enemy combatants, habeas corpus, to borrow the Times’s articulation, is simply a “right to challenge their imprisonment” in federal court. So what does the DTA do? It allows a detainee who has been found by the military to be properly held as an enemy combatant to challenge his incarceration in federal court. Under DTA section 1005(e)(2), that court (the D.C. Circuit) is expressly empowered to determine whether the detention is in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States — which, of course, include treaties to whatever extent they may create individual rights.

Thus, the DTA has already granted to our enemies the very remedy critics claim is now being denied. Moreover, the new Military Commissions Act (MCA) does not repeal the DTA. It strengthens it. That is, because the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision created confusion about whether the DTA was meant to apply retroactively to the 400-plus habeas petitions that were already filed, the MCA clarifies that all detainees who wish to challenge their imprisonment must follow the DTA procedure for doing so. But, importantly, the right to challenge imprisonment is itself reaffirmed.

That the DTA does not refer to this right as habeas corpus is irrelevant. It’s not the name of the remedy that counts; it’s the substance. The DTA gives the detainee exactly what habeas provides. Therefore, it would have been pointless for the MCA to add yet another round of habeas.

To understand why this is so, one need only consider the legal restrictions on imprisoned American citizens. If they wish to claim their detention is baseless, they are not permitted to file habeas petitions which simply re-allege claims they have already made (or at least had a fair opportunity to make) during prior legal proceedings (such as the appeal of a criminal conviction, or a previously filed habeas petition). Repetitious claims are instantly disregarded by courts as a form of procedural default known as “abuse of the writ” of habeas corpus.

Given that habeas would not be available to an American for the purpose of rehashing a previously unsuccessful challenge to his imprisonment, why on earth should we extend habeas to an alien al Qaeda terrorist so he can re-litigate under the MCA an argument against his detention that has already been heard and rejected by a federal appeals court under the DTA?

WHO’S MANIPULATING HISTORY?
Epstein’s arguments are especially unbecoming. First, for all his bombast about the storied history of the habeas writ, he neglects to mention that the thousands upon thousands of alien enemy combatants our military has detained outside the U.S. in the long history of American warfare have never had a right to challenge their detention by calling on the judicial branch of our government at the very time the political branches have taken our nation into battle. It was Rasul that broke with tradition here. Even if enemy combatants had been denied habeas in this war — which, of course, has not happened — that would not have been a departure from tradition at all.

Second, it is simply preposterous to suggest, as Epstein does, that the government is likely to frustrate the DTA’s judicial review procedure by such shenanigans as starting a CSRT but then suspending it indefinitely without ruling on a detainee’s status (so the DTA right to appeal to the D.C. Circuit would never be triggered). The DTA not only directed the Defense Department to come up with CSRT procedures, including an annual review of the status of detainees found to be enemy combatants; it expressly contemplated oversight by the Armed Services committees in both Houses of Congress. There is no basis to believe either that the Pentagon is engaged in the kind of gamesmanship Epstein imagines or that Congress would tolerate such antics were they to occur.

It would be the height of folly to confer additional rights on alien enemy combatant terrorists — which, by the way, would be far better rights than honorable alien enemy combatants who do not mass-murder civilians get under the Geneva Conventions — for no better reason than to prevent an abuse that is virtually inconceivable in the real world. Such thinking reflects the same September 10th mentality that gave us the Justice Department’s infamous “wall” — which prevented criminal investigators and national security agents from pooling threat information in order to forfend hypothetical and empirically unheard-of civil-rights violations.

Been there done that.
 
INDY500 said:


Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus WITHOUT consulting Congress.
So why is it that Bush and his policies are never compared to "the tyranny of Lincoln?"



the Civil War would have a definitive endpoint.

when, pray tell, is the endpoint of the GWOT?
 
Irvine511 said:




the Civil War would have a definitive endpoint.

when, pray tell, is the endpoint of the GWOT?

At the time Lincoln signed this - there was no end in sight of the Civil War. As a matter of fact, it seemed the North was losing.

There was also fears of a Southern insurgency. Thankfully General Lee considered that to be too dishonorable.
 
AEON said:


At the time Lincoln signed this - there was no end in sight of the Civil War. As a matter of fact, it seemed the North was losing.

There was also fears of a Southern insurgency. Thankfully General Lee considered that to be too dishonorable.



an end not in sight doesn't mean that there wasn't a definitive end point -- the surrender of either the North to the South, or the South to the North. the same cannot be said about the GWOT.

are we going to suspend our civil liberties until every last terrorist is eliminated?
 
A_Wanderer said:
Theres an oxymoron.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.”--James Madison
We can all play the role of civil libertarian and yes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty but...
Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity.--George W Bush
..sounds intrinsically good to me.
 
Irvine511 said:

are we going to suspend our civil liberties until every last terrorist is eliminated?

Let's have that discussion, but can't we keep the Nazis (not by you) out of it?

To answer that question, first you'd have to ask; Which is the greater threat? Terrorism or a loss of constitutional rights? Both long term and short term.

Second, what is our greater concern. Having it happen here again, possibly on a much grander scale. Or "Becoming the monster in defeating the monster."
 
INDY500 said:
To answer that question, first you'd have to ask; Which is the greater threat? Terrorism or a loss of constitutional rights? Both long term and short term.

No amount of terrorism will ever justify the erosion of our constitutional rights. That is the erosion of the document on which our nation is based. If the document is eroded, so is the nation.

Saying that it is worth it to give up constitutional rights or civil liberties just to 'beat' terrorists(whatever the hell that means) is basically saying, 'Better to take our rights away ourselves than allow terrorists to do it'.
 
INDY500 said:

Second, what is our greater concern. Having it happen here again, possibly on a much grander scale. Or "Becoming the monster in defeating the monster."

I love how everything is so black and white with the right.

Either or, and that's it...
 
namkcuR said:


No amount of terrorism will ever justify the erosion of our constitutional rights.

The Constitution applies to US citizens. These are not US citizens.
 
AEON said:


The Constitution applies to US citizens. These are not US citizens.



ah, but the Congress has given Bush to determine who is and who is not considered an enemy combatant, and that is now defined as someone who has "materially" supported terrorism, and that could include US citizens. it could be you. this is what's at stake here.

Jose Padilla is a US Citizen. and just what has he been charged with after 5 years?
 
INDY500 said:


Let's have that discussion, but can't we keep the Nazis (not by you) out of it?

To answer that question, first you'd have to ask; Which is the greater threat? Terrorism or a loss of constitutional rights? Both long term and short term.

Second, what is our greater concern. Having it happen here again, possibly on a much grander scale. Or "Becoming the monster in defeating the monster."


1. a slippery question -- i vote for the loss of constitutional rights combined with the increased power in the hands of the executive branch; we are all far, far more likely to be killed in an automobile accident than to be killed by terrorists. i can understand, to an extent, a loss of certain kinds of privacy and increased surveillance, but i cannot understand the executive looking for the right to torture and to determine who is, in his own personal judgement, who is and who is not worthy of being detained and then, by extention, tortured. the caveat is, were another terrorist attack to happen on US soil, what that might drive this particular administration to do (since their actions have definitively made us less safe, according to the current NIE) and if that might necessitate the further erosion of civil liberties, the invasion of yet another country, fiscal disaster since there's no money left to pay for said invasion, and the reinstatement of the draft so that we have enough soldiers.

2. it depends on who's in charge -- far, far, far more Iraqis have died than Americans died on 9-11, and soon the number of American troops who have died in Iraq will supass the number on 9-11.
 
AEON said:
The Constitution applies to US citizens. These are not US citizens.

Wonderful. So if you're visiting a foreign country and get arrested, you're entitled to get locked up with no recourse?

Such a great precedent that sets.

Melon
 
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