The Senate has voted 65-34 in favor of S. 3930, “A bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes.” Here, “trial by military commission” means that, if you are an unlawful enemy combatant, you have no right to a trial by your peers or any other basic protections of the Bill of Rights. (Who counts as an “enemy combatant”? Whomever the government says. Even U.S. citizens who haven’t even left the country, much less engaged in combat? Yes.) And “other purposes” means torturing people.
I remember when Republicans used to look at government with suspicion. Now the motto of the Republican Party is “Trust us, we’re the government, we know what’s best and we don’t make mistakes.”
I have nothing to add to the discussion that hasn’t been said by more expert people elsewhere. I just wanted it on record, if the internet archives last a thousand years and I’ve been cryogenically preserved for the same length of time, that I was one of the substantial number of people who thought the bill was repulsive and anti-democratic. It will go down in history as one of those sad moments when a basically good nation does something that makes later generations look back and think, “What made them go so crazy?”
I can just quote other people. Jack Balkin:
The current bill, if passed [as it just was], will give the Executive far more dictatorial powers to detain, prosecute, judge and punish than it ever enjoyed before. Over the last 48 hours, it has been modified in a hundred different ways to increase executive power at the expense of judicial review, due process, and oversight. And what is more, the bill’s most outrageous provisions on torture, definition of enemy combatants, secret procedures, and habeas stripping, are completely unnecessary to keep Americans safe. Rather, they are the work of an Executive branch that has proven itself as untrustworthy as it is greedy: always pushing the legal and constitutional envelope, always seeking more power and less accountability.
Almost all the Republican Senators, of course, voted for the bill, Lincoln Chafee being the lone honorable exception. As Glenn Greenwald notes,
During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus rights and allows the President to detain people indefinitely. He also said the bill violates core Constitutional protections. Then he voted for it.
Most Democrats were against (although not all, sadly). Hillary Clinton:
The rule of law cannot be compromised. We must stand for the rule of law before the world, especially when we are under stress and under threat. We must show that we uphold our most profound values…
The bill before us allows the admission into evidence of statements derived through cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation. That sets a dangerous precedent that will endanger our own men and women in uniform overseas. Will our enemies be less likely to surrender? Will informants be less likely to come forward? Will our soldiers be more likely to face torture if captured? Will the information we obtain be less reliable? These are the questions we should be asking. And based on what we know about warfare from listening to those who have fought for our country, the answers do not support this bill. As Lieutenant John F. Kimmons, the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence said, “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive interrogation practices.”…
This bill undermines the Geneva Conventions by allowing the President to issue Executive Orders to redefine what permissible interrogation techniques happen to be. Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach? By allowing this Administration to further stretch the definition of what is and is not torture, we lower our moral standards to those whom we despise, undermine the values of our flag wherever it flies, put our troops in danger, and jeopardize our moral strength in a conflict that cannot be won simply with military might.
Habeas corpus is a fundamental recognition that in America, the government does not have the power to detain people indefinitely and arbitrarily. And that in America, the courts must have the power to review the legality of executive detention decisions.
Habeas corpus is a longstanding vital part of our American tradition, and is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
As a group of retired judges wrote to Congress, habeas corpus “safeguards the most hallowed judicial role in our constitutional democracy — ensuring that no man is imprisoned unlawfully.”
Mr. President, this bill would fundamentally alter that historical equation. Faced with an executive branch that has detained hundreds of people without trial for years now, it would eliminate the right of habeas corpus.
But words are cheap, and nobody stepped up to filibuster the bill. Democrats, as usual, put their fingers to the wind and decide to be spineless. The calculation seems to be that they won’t look sufficiently tough if they come out strongly against torture. They don’t get it. “Tough” means that you stand up for what you believe in, and that you’re willing to fight for it if necessary. How are you supposed to keep the country safe when you’re afraid to stand up to demagoguing Republicans? People know this, which is why it’s been so easy to paint Democrats as weak.
The “tough” stance of the Bush administration has taken Iraq, a country that formerly opposed al-Qaeda, and turned one-third of it over to al-Qaeda, in the process fueling Islamic radicalism and making the threat of terrorism significantly worse. If that’s what you get from “tough,” I’ll stick with “smart” and “principled” any day.
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Hmmmm… Iceland has only been ruling itself since 1904, And Switzerland only established a proper democracy in the 1800s (nevermind that Women’s sufferage was only established in 1971), In 1780 about 3% of the Engliah population were eligible to vote, so it’s by nature a gradual process and depending on where you draw the line I guess you could arrive at different countries.
I think what’s safe to say is that none of these nations had a text beginning with the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” at their basis. That slaves, black and women should be counted among men came gradually, but the US was a bold step, in France similar and bolder steps led to catastrophe and relapse into absolutism.
However, my point was merely that this is something worth remembering for critics of the US. Whether or in what sense they were “first” is not that important in this context.
It sounds as though the Democratic Party has carelessly spun-off a senatorial breed of Blue Dog Democrats: a vicious breed that ought to be ejected from the premises of the US congress.
fh, I agree the words and the intent behind them is very noble. But in the end one gets judged by ones actions, not words. When I first came here I had a perhaps naive/idealistic picture of of the US as a beacon of democracy and hope to the world. However, over the past few years that view has been gradually eroded by reality. One’s vote doesn’t even count if one doesn’t live in the right place, and then only if some sort of fraud is not being perpetrated. Whether one can run for office successfully is directly dependent on how much money one has. Don’t get me even started about the sorry state of the press. The population is largely ignorant about important issues affecting their country and the world. Non-citizens are not treated with much friendliness by the authorities – these days you are made to feel very unwelcome when you enter the country. Sorry if I sound very critical but its the voice of disillusionment speaking.
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If facts are of any interest on this blog (and they so seldom are in political debate) Sean’s original post on the new law is factually incorrect in a very significant way.
U.S. citizens are NOT subject to being tried by military commission. The law specifically defines the persons subject to trial by military tribunals as ALIEN unlawful enemy combatants (at Section 948c) and defines alien as a person who is not a citizen of the United States (at Section 948a).
A lawful enemy combatant is not subject to trial by military tribunal either.
Only an ALIEN UNLAWFUL ENEMY COMBATANT
Oops! Last post was incomplete.
Only an ALIEN UNLAWFUL ENEMY COMBATANT is subject to trial by military tribunal. Could Sean or one of the posters who is opposed to trying such indviduals by military tribunal make clear what their alternative would be? A criminal trial with full consitutional protections including taxpayer funded defense counsel, Miranda warnings upon capture, and full discovery of all intelligence upon which their capture was based?
Sorry, folks. I don’t remember Lincoln, Wilson, FDR or Truman granting such rights, so why the Bush hatred for his failure to do so?
And anyone who is offended by legislation attempting to define torture hasn’t read much legislation. The whole point of a law is to make as clear as possible what it applies to and what it doesn’t. You may think waterboarding or sleep deprivation is torture, even though I’ve heard both are used in training our own soldiers and new parents are routinely subjected to sleep deprivation, but not everyone would agree with you. A non-believer touching the Qu’ran with ungloved hands may be torture to some people, while forbidding it might be considered pandering to bigotry by others.
As for the historical review devoted to addressing whether the United States is good or evil, or overall has acted for good more than for evil, or whatever: A lot of interesting points are being made, but I am reminded of discussions I have had with suicidal people. There’s a strong underlying premise that if parts of your life really suck, it’s not worth living. A lot of the arguments about Amercia’s problems seem more to be justifications for why it should not consider itself worth saving, especially if saving itself entails any unpleasantness.
I guess I am one of those ignorant, stupid, fearful individuals who continue to support Bush. That’s because he’s President and he seems to be more interested in making war on Al Qaeda than on Walmart, and he seems to have a plausible though not guaranteed long-term strategy for diminishing their number and appeal to their co-religionists. I have plenty of complaints about how he’s done his job, but they are largely irrelevant because I don’t think the alternative I had in the last election, John Kerry, would have done as well, and there were, after all, only two choices.
In the final analysis, there usually only are two choices – [metaphor alert] drown or come up for air. When people complain bitterly how the country is going to hell in a handbasket because Bush is engaging in the very mildest versions of actions FDR is still lauded for having taken to extremes, I can’t help thinking that drowning is only way we’ll satisfy some of them that we are pure enough. Much like the people who complain about how we squandered all of the world’s goodwill by going to war after 9-11. We could surely have kept that goodwill – if we’d kept on dying.
Your guess is correct! You are one of those ignorant, stupid, fearful individuals who continue to support Bush.
Value issues aside, support for the Bush agenda is based on a misunderstanding of the facts. The threat from terrorism is real but entirely managable–terrorism tends to be self limiting unless it wins the tacit support of its erswhile opponents. Bush would have to be nuts to allow a real victory over Islamic terrorism since his political fortunes absolutely depend upon scaring the wits out of the public. If his administration defeats terrorism, it will be by mistake. On the other hand, if grownups were in charge, the radicals in the Middle East would be marginalized in short order. What the heck do they have to offer to anybody?
Jim Harrison has given us a good example of why Bush Derangement Syndrome seems a reasonable diagnosis for some people.
The diagnostic criteria for this Syndrome seem to be:
– the conviction that no intelligent, informed and rational person outside the Bush Administration could possibly agree with Bush, and that no person inside the Bush Administration holds any honest convictions on the matter of how to deal with terrorism if those convictions conform to Bush policies. In this sense, the Syndrome shares some features with paranoid personality disorder, although limited to the political context.
– the belief that an assertion of opinion, such as the claim that “terrorism tends to be self-limiting unless it wins the support of its erswhile (sic) opponents,” if stated in strong enough terms and with enough contempt for skeptics, becomes a fact, and the belief that a prediction of the outcome of a policy has the same logical weight as a fact. The Syndrome therefore shares some of the characteristics of schizoid personality disorder, notably the tendency toward magical thinking;
– a memory defect that prevents the sufferer from recognizing that President Bush’s last term expires in two years, and that therefore there is no rational basis for believing that Bush’s “political fortunes absolutely depend on scaring the wits out of the public.” Memory also appears to be affected in other areas, such as the belief that “if grown-ups were in charge the radicals in the Middle East would be marginalized in short order,” a belief that requires forgetting the history of the current threat since its beginnings in the late 1920s, as well as the history of other regimes such as the Nazis and the Communists, which also offered an overarching ideological framework, a sharp delineation between the pure adherents of the ideology and all others, and an exclusively utilitarian view of the individual human being.
– in an environment where both available choices involve risks, a compulsive need to minimize to the point of insignificance the threats from one choice, “What the heck do they have to offer to anybody?” while exaggerating the threats from the other, Bush, precluding any rational analysis of the choices. Jim ought to understand one of the things that the Islamists have to offer, since he derives it from his own political beliefs, and that is a certain conviction of one’s superiority over other people who don’t share one’s views.
Hey, there’s small glory in outstripping donkeys, but it’s a living.
i thought (R) Sen. John McCain voted against the bill too. maybe i just heard wrong from somebody.
Most of us do not know the history of economics of mankind…Creation of wealth,private property and all value productions were the source of HUMAN LABOUR.The origin of all kind of prosperity was human labour and still it is the same source…Here the criminal Philosopers like PLATO-ARISTOTLE changed the future real human path by Criminaly creating slavery as just and moral.Human beings the inocents were braught in as slaves by the criminal consciousness to loot the labour of slaves and to deprive them all kind of rights as human being.These were the seeds of future crimes,wars for more human labour,to get more prosperity for more crimes and more wars.The road was set for the criminals to rule the world by criminal force.We will never be able to live like HUMAN BEINGS with out wars with human rights unless we removes the criminality of slavery…HR
Keith Olberman on The Beginning of the End of America. Frighteningly good commentary about this topic.
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