[Peace-discuss] A good, and frightening, NYT editorial!

[Morton K. Brussel]

September 28, 2006
EDITORIAL
Rushing Off a Cliff

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a  
profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm  
election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing  
their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that  
will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217- 
year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the  
nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid  
last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for  
charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting  
the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda.  
Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President  
Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them  
questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented  
a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.

It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling  
striking down Mr. Bush’s shadow penal system that he adopted his tone  
of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think  
they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing  
Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look  
soft on terrorism.

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a  
terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he  
wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have  
committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice  
President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of  
the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty  
much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them,  
to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what  
normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of  
men captured in error.

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy  
combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United  
States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to  
summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The  
president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of  
international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own  
what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his  
decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be  
published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the  
basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog  
the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly  
imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect  
of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill  
would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva  
Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to  
lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not  
have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge  
considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and  
relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done  
before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything  
else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and  
testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused  
is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as  
redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such  
evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual  
reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after  
9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that  
covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of  
nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of  
rape as torture.

•There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the  
few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into  
line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have  
misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster,  
this was it.

We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans  
have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone  
who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of  
the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to  
the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will  
be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s  
version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
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