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Banned
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
Hal, I'm not sure why you don't like McCain. He seems to be the one Republican that's absolutely AGAINST mistreatment of POW's/enemy combatants. He's probably the Republican I'd vote, just like Obama would be the Democrat....
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
Oh, I agree with that completely. My point was more about the POW question. On that topic, at least, he seems pretty much beyond reproach. <b>He's been very consistent about trying to get the Bush Administration to own up to practicing torture and to stop.</b>
Beyond that, he's an absolute hawk, which shouldn't surprise anyone who knows much about his biography (former fighter pilot and service academy grad).
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Huh? Did you miss McCain's collossal "flip flop", cave-in, roll over, on his "core values", a year ago?
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http://mccain.senate.gov/public/inde..._id=&Issue_id=
MCCAIN URGES FINAL PASSAGE OF THE MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT OF 2006
September 28, 2006
Washington D.C. omg- U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today delivered the following remarks on the floor of the Senate regarding the Military Commissions Act of 2006:
....."Finally, I would note that there has been opposition to this legislation from some quarters, including the New York Times editorial page. Without getting into a point-by-point rebuttal here on the floor, I would simply say that I have been reading the Congressional Record trying to find the bill that page so vociferously denounced. The hyperbolic attack is aimed not at any bill this body is today debating, nor even at the Administration's original position. I can only presume that some would prefer that Congress simply ignore the Hamdan decision, and pass no legislation at all. That, I suggest to my colleagues, would be a travesty.
"I urge my colleagues to support this legislation."
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<h3>Wait a minute....shouldn't John McCain have written this statment, instead?</h3>
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http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200609/092806c.html
Republican-Led Senate Endorses White House-Backed Bill, 65-34
Leahy Opposes ‘Flagrantly Unconstitutional’ Military Commission Bill --
Statement of Senator Patrick Leahy
On the Military Commissions Act, S. 3930
September 28, 2006
It is from strength that America should defend our values and our Constitution. It takes commitment to those values to demand accountability from the Government. In standing up for American values and security, I will vote against this bill.
A Giant Step Away From Fairness And Accountability....
......We have taken our eye off the ball in the fight against the terrorists. That is essentially what all of our intelligence agencies concluded in the National Intelligence Estimate that the Administration has had for six months, but that the rest of us just learned about this weekend. Our retooled and reorganized intelligence agencies, with leadership hand-picked by this Administration, have concluded, contrary to the campaign rhetoric of the President and Vice President, that the Iraq War has become a “cause celebre” that has inspired a new generation of terrorists. Surely, the shameful mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, at secret CIA prisons and which were facilitated by torturers in countries where the U.S. Government shipped people, have become other “causes celebre” and recruiting tools for our enemies. Surely, the continued occupation of Iraq, when close to three-fourths of Iraqis want U.S. forces to depart, is another circumstance being exploited by our enemies to mischaracterize America.
Passing laws that remove the few checks against mistreatment of prisoners will not help us win the battle for the hearts and minds of the generation of young people around the world being recruited by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Authorizing indefinite detention of anybody the Government designates, without any proceeding and without any recourse, is what our worst critics claim the United States would do, not what American values, traditions, and our rule of law would have us do. This is not just a bad bill, this is a dangerous bill. .......
..... Chilling Implications
The proposed legislation would also allow the admission of evidence obtained through cruel and inhuman treatment into military commission proceedings. This provision would once again allow this Administration to avoid all accountability for its misguided policies which have contributed to the rise of a new generation of terrorists who threaten us. Not only would the military commissions legislation before us immunize those who violated international law and stomped on basic American values, but it would allow them then to use the evidence obtained in violation of basic principles of fairness and justice.
Allowing in this evidence would violate our basic standards of fairness without increasing our security. Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen arrested by our government on bad intelligence and sent to Syria to be tortured, confessed to attending terrorist training camps. A Canadian commission investigating the case found that his confessions had no basis in fact. They merely reflected that he was being tortured, and he told his torturers what they wanted to hear. It is only one of many such documented cases of bad information resulting from torture. We gain nothing from allowing such information.
The military commissions legislation departs in other unfortunate ways from the Warner-Levin bill. Early this week, apparently at the White House’s request, Republican drafters added a breathtakingly broad definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” which includes people – citizens and non-citizens alike – who have “purposefully and materially supported hostilities” against the United States or its allies. It also includes people determined to be unlawful enemy combatants by any “competent tribunal” established by the President or the Secretary of Defense. So the Government can select any person, including a United States citizen, whom it suspects of supporting hostilities – whatever that means – and begin denying that person the rights and processes guaranteed in our country. The implications are chilling.
I am sorry that the Republican leadership squandered the chance to consider and pass bipartisan legislation that will make us safer and help our fight against terrorism. There was an opportunity today for the Senate to provide the tools we need to fight terrorism while showing the world the values we cherish and defend, the same values that make us a target. I will not participate in a legislative retreat out of weakness and fear that undercuts everything this nation stands for and that makes us more vulnerable and less secure. Consistent with my oath of office, my conscience, my commitment to the people of Vermont and the nation, I cannot and will not support this bill.
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http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman...cle_4269.shtml
Friday, October 20, 2006
Law legalizes shameful treatment
By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has signed the law that legalizes the administration's shameful treatment of detainees suspected of terrorism.
The same measure also empowers the president to define torture. It's a sad legacy for the U.S. and its already-tarnished world image.
The new law -- the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- establishes a system for trying suspects in military tribunals. It was enacted after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration plan for trials by military commissions violated U.S. and international law.
In effect, Bush got all he wanted from a submissive GOP-dominated Congress and a few spineless Democratic lawmakers. The president did not issue his customary signing statement interpreting implementation of the law. <h3>He didn't have to because lawmakers on Capitol Hill had handed him total victory.</h3>
The far-reaching legislation gives Bush the right to decide what constitutes torture.....
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Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15318240/
‘National yawn as our rights evaporate’
New law redefines habeas corpus; law professor explains on ‘Countdown’
TRANSCRIPT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC
updated 4:49 p.m. ET, Wed., Oct. 18, 2006
OLBERMANN: Leading Democrats view it differently, Senator Ted Kennedy calling this “seriously flawed,” Senator Patrick Leahey saying it’s, quote, “a sad day when the rubber-stamp Congress undercuts our freedoms,” and Senator Russ Feingold adding that “We will look back on this day as a stain on our nation’s history.”
Outside the White House, a handful of individuals protested the law by dressing up as Abu Ghraib abuse victims and terror detainees. Several of them got themselves arrested, but they were apparently quickly released, despite being already dressed for Gitmo.
To assess what this law will truly mean for us all, I’m joined by Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University.
I want to start by asking you about a specific part of this act that lists one of the definitions of an unlawful enemy combatant as, quote, “a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a combatant status review tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the president or the secretary of defense.”
Does that not basically mean that if Mr. Bush or Mr. Rumsfeld say so, anybody in this country, citizen or not, innocent or not, can end up being an unlawful enemy combatant?
JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY CONSTITUTIONAL LAW PROFESSOR: It certainly does. In fact, later on, it says that if you even give material support to an organization that the president deems connected to one of these groups, you too can be an enemy combatant.
And the fact that he appoints this tribunal is meaningless. You know, standing behind him at the signing ceremony was his attorney general, who signed a memo that said that you could torture people, that you could do harm to them to the point of organ failure or death.
So if he appoints someone like that to be attorney general, you can imagine who he’s going be putting on this board.
OLBERMANN: Does this mean that under this law, ultimately the only thing keeping you, I, or the viewer out of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of the president of the United States?
TURLEY: It does. And it’s a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president. In fact, Madison said that he created a system essentially to be run by devils, where they could not do harm, because we didn’t rely on their good motivations.
Now we must. And people have no idea how significant this is. What, really, a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values.
It couldn’t be more significant. And the strange thing is, we’ve become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. I mean, the Congress just gave the president despotic powers, and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to, you know, “Dancing with the Stars.” I mean, it’s otherworldly.
OLBERMANN: Is there one defense against this, the legal challenges against particularly the suspension or elimination of habeas corpus from the equation? And where do they stand, and how likely are they to overturn this action today?
TURLEY: Well, you know what? I think people are fooling themselves if they believe that the courts will once again stop this president from taking over—taking almost absolute power. It basically comes down to a single vote on the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy. And he indicated that if Congress gave the president these types of powers, that he might go along.
And so we may have, in this country, some type of uber-president, some absolute ruler, and it’ll be up to him who gets put away as an enemy combatant, held without trial.
It’s something that no one thought—certainly I didn’t think—was possible in the United States. And I am not too sure how we got to this point. But people clearly don’t realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us. And I’m not too sure we’re going to change back anytime soon.
OLBERMANN: And if Justice Kennedy tries to change us back, we can always call him an enemy combatant.
The president reiterated today the United States does not torture. Does this law actually guarantee anything like that?
TURLEY: That’s actually when I turned off my TV set, because I couldn’t believe it. You know, the United States has engaged in torture. And the whole world community has denounced the views of this administration, its early views that the president could order torture, could cause injury up to organ failure or death.
The administration has already established that it has engaged in things like waterboarding, which is not just torture. We prosecuted people after World War II for waterboarding prisoners. We treated it as a war crime. And my God, what a change of fate, where we are now embracing the very thing that we once prosecuted people for.
Who are we now? I know who we were then. But when the president said that we don’t torture, that was, frankly, when I had to turn off my TV set.
OLBERMANN: That same individual fell back on the same argument that he’d used about the war in Iraq to sanction this law. Let me play what he said and then ask you a question about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yet with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few. Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously? And did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
OLBERMANN: Does he understand the irony of those words when taken out of the context of this particular passage or of what he perceives as the war against terror, and that, in fact, the threat we may be facing is the threat of President George W. Bush?
TURLEY: Well, this is going to go down in history as one of our greatest self-inflicted wounds. And I think you can feel the judgment of history. It won’t be kind to President Bush.
But frankly, I don’t think that it will be kind to the rest of us. I think that history will ask, Where were you? What did you do when this thing was signed into law? There were people that protested the Japanese concentration camps, there were people that protested these other acts. But we are strangely silent in this national yawn as our rights evaporate.
OLBERMANN: Well, not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but I think we’ve done a little bit of what we could have done. I’ll see you at Gitmo. As always, greatest thanks for your time, Jon.
TURLEY: Thanks, Keith.
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Quote:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/065...f,75320,2.html
Our Own Nuremberg Trials
In 2007, the 'reality show' of the American rule of law, for the world to see.
by Nat Hentoff
December 17th, 2006 9:27 PM
...A Seton Hall Law School report from February 8, which I did not cite last week, by professor Mark Denbeaux and Joshua Denbeaux and law students at this exemplary school, presents the case against the United States in anticipation of the war-crimes trials at Guantánamo next year. "A Profile of 517 Detainees Through Analysis of Department of Defense Data" provides "a window into the Government's detaining only those the President has called 'the worst of the worst.' " You can now determine for yourself how dangerous the great majority of the defendants are in the forthcoming American Nuremberg trials:
"Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban."
The report continues: "The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that are, in fact, not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist . . . A large majority—60 percent—are detained merely because they are 'associated with' a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. (And members of almost 72 percent of those groups are allowed into the U.S.)"
Remember, these findings are based entirely on Department of Defense records. (Robert Gates can fact-check them.) Also, among "the worst of the worst":
"Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. Eighty-six percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time when the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies." No questions asked.
<h3>Remember, too, that in the 2006 Military Commissions Act, Congress stripped from all these prisoners any meaningful right to utilize our federal courts, thereby defying our own Supreme Court.</h3>
Co-author Joshua Denbeaux tells me: "The government's own documents proved that the government's claims that the prisoners were the 'worst of the worst' was a false and shameful public relations ploy . . . We hope that our reports will convince Congress to amend the Military Commissions Act and restore federal jurisdiction." If that happens, the prisoners could contest their conditions of confinement, their imprisonment, and their sentences....
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