coldhearted scientist وداد

The new legislation on torture and detention will permit the President of the United States to define anyone, including citizens and legal residents, as an ‘enemy combatant’ and to treat them as such. This means we can be ‘disappeared’, and that the Bill of Rights is unenforceable.

Kactus brings our attention to a lucid post on the matter by Glenn Greenwald. Here are some sections of it I would like to emphasize.

[A]s Law Professors Marty Lederman and Bruce Ackerman each point out, many of the extraordinary powers vested in the President by this bill also apply to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil.
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Similarly, Lederman explains: “this [subsection (ii) of the definition of ‘unlawful enemy combatant’] means that if the Pentagon says you’re an unlawful enemy combatant — using whatever criteria they wish — then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to ‘hostilities’ at all.”

This last point means that even if there were a habeas corpus right inserted back into the legislation (which is unlikely at this point anyway), it wouldn’t matter much, if at all, because the law would authorize your detention simply based on the DoD’s decree that you are an enemy combatant, regardless of whether it was accurate.
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I fully understand, but ultimately disagree with, the viewpoint, well-argued by Hunter and others, that this bill constitutes merely another step on a path we’ve long been on, rather than a fundamental and wholly new level of tyranny. Or, as Hunter put it: “So this is a merely another slide down the Devil’s gullet, not a hard swallow.” But even with the extreme range of abuses the Bush presidency has brought, this is undeniably something different, and worse, by magnitude, not merely by degree.

There is a profound and fundamental difference between an Executive engaging in shadowy acts of lawlessness and abuses of power on the one hand, and, on the other, having the American people, through their Congress, endorse, embrace and legalize that behavior out in the open, with barely a peep of real protest. Our laws reflect our values and beliefs. And our laws are about to explicitly codify one of the most dangerous and defining powers of tyranny – one of the very powers this country was founded in order to prevent.
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[O]ur Government is controlled by people and their followers who literally don’t understand and, worse, simply do not believe in the defining values and principles of America. They know that this bill is a seizure of the most un-American powers imaginable, but their allegiance is to the acquisition of unlimited power and nothing else.
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We’ll never really know whether Americans really wanted to do this or not because the debate was never engaged. It was ceded.

And as a result, we are now about to vest in the President the power to order anyone — U.S. citizen, resident alien or foreign national — detained indefinitely in a military prison regardless of where they are — U.S. soil or outside of the country. American detainees are cut off from any meaningful judicial review and everyone else is cut off completely. They can be subject to torture with no recourse, and all of this happens on the unchecked say-so of the administration. Really, what could be more significant than this?

Indeed, what could be more significant?

Axé.