Another Harvest of Shame

For those few--probably among the 16% of Americans polled who approve of this Republican Congress--who believed or wanted to believe that the Bush administration sought extraordinary and ultimately unConstitutional legal powers to deal with some extraordinary future threat of terrorist attack, Karen DeYoung in the Washington Post reports today:" Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba."

The Military Commissions Act takes away basic rights of the accused for anyone the feds call an enemy combatant. This Post story is a good one to reference because it goes on to discuss the legal challenges pending and the principles involved, including the often-mentioned but rarely defined doctrine of habeus corpus:

Habeas corpus, a Latin term meaning "you have the body," is one of the oldest principles of English and American law. It requires the government to show a legal basis for holding a prisoner. A series of unresolved federal court cases brought against the administration over the last several years by lawyers representing the detainees had left the question in limbo.

Denying this right is even worse than "guilty until proven innocent," because it doesn't require a trial, a hearing, a show of cause, not even a kangaroo court, for people to be imprisoned more or less indefinitely, as many in Guantanamo have been. But the overall principle is the same: it makes every last one of us subject to being locked up and considered guilty, without the basic rights to enable us to prove innocence, including the right to a speedy and fair trial.

As Keith Olbermann pointed out in his impassioned attack on this Act, there is no procedure in it for anyone who is accused of being an enemy combatant or even a non-citizen eligible to be so classified, to prove these accusations false.

The Act also formalizes torture and attempts to immunize torturers from being subject to the Geneva conventions. So in addition to being held indefinitely with no need for evidence, and subject to tribunals without meaningful legal rights, we can all be legally tortured at the whim of our captors.

The U.S. Supreme Court is just about the only hope of overturning this outrage in the near term. But a Democratic Congress can make an issue of it, and should prevent any further outrages of this kind. These and a yet to be outraged citizenry are the only protections we have against this extremist dereliction of America's most cherished and most proud principles. But it's now inevitably that there will be more victims of this shameful episode.