September 28, 2006
US CONGRESS CAMPAIGNS WITH TERROR DETAINEES
Tortured Justice
[...aggressive efforts by the administration to be allowed to hold detainees for years (and even maybe decades) without judicial review has provoked only dutiful resistance from most congressional Democrats and a so-what shrug from the press and the public.]
Current Pentagon regulations describe an enemy combatant as anyone who "engages in acts" against the United States. The new legislation would broaden that to also include anyone who "has purposely and materially supported hostilities" against America. And to add a further note of confusion, elsewhere in the bill an enemy combatant is defined in circular fashion as anyone so designated by a new Defense Department entity, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal.
Defending this accordion-like definition on the Senate floor, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham -- one of the three Senate Republicans who negotiated with the White House -- said, "I am firmly in the camp that when it comes to determining who an enemy of the United States is -- who has taken up arms and presents a threat to the nation -- that is not something that judges have been trained to do, nor should they be doing. That is something our military should do."
Many of the provisions of the legislation are so new or so murkily drafted that legal experts and human-rights advocates have not reached a consensus about their implications. There is considerable debate, for example, about whether the bill's treatment of the Geneva Conventions would permit the CIA to continue such notorious interrogation techniques as waterboarding. There also remains some question whether it might be permissible under the bill to declare an American citizen an "enemy combatant," thereby stripping him of any access to the courts. Graham and other Republican senators stoutly denied this possibility during Wednesday's debate.
story | Spiegel thanks Conscientious
~The Republicans in a matter of hours can have their "church groups" tie up for days the phones and emails of any legislator, of any media outlet in America. Within two weeks radio-newspaper-tv ads, letters to the editor and editorials to further enlighten the lawmaker and his/her constituents of the error of her/his ways have been known to appear. The Republicans are very organized with many anointed volunteers and generous funds to help party members exercise these specific rights. On the other hand, their grass-roots' reactions to US military policies do not seem to be as circumspect nor possess the same immediacy, or require a similar democratic spirit. Go figure.
(I wonder what percent of US military officers are registered Democrats?)
>conspiratorially related: US Soldiers' Overseas Votes Ripe for Fraud
[photo not with above]