It's bad. But how bad is it?
Sep. 30th, 2006 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
falcongrrlI'm going to quote from the article "Tortured Justice" by Mark Benjamin and Walter Shapiro (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/28/habeas_bill/), but feel free to point me in other directions.
The legislation, which was prompted by a June Supreme Court decision applying the Geneva Conventions to prisoners held by U.S. forces, had originally provoked a well-publicized struggle over placing legal limits on interrogation techniques. While a White House effort to redefine the anti-torture provisions of the Geneva Conventions was largely rebuffed by a recent bipartisan Senate rebellion, the compromise that three Republican senators negotiated with Bush officials included provisions eliminating the right of habeas corpus for all detainees.
So...eliminating habeas corpus for the detainees was a compromise? Egads. And while I think that the 'redefinition of the Geneva Conventions' is basically a CYA attempt for the torture that's already been documented...how can one singlehandedly redefine them? They're an international set of guidelines developed by many different countries. I guess I can see how Bush could now have permission to interpret how the US should implement the conventions (or not)...but torture is torture; there's not a huge gray area there.
What I get is that the old version said that we did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions, and the new version says that the Conventions can be interpreted as our executive branch sees fit? Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I don't see much of a compromise there either.
One way that rights will be eroded by the bill is through a change in the meaning of the legal term "enemy combatant." 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.
If this last sentence is true, it's scary as hell. Basically, you're an enemy combatant because our 'combatant status review tribunal' says so? Who reviews/checks the actions of the tribunal? I mean, the other stuff is concerning - if doing something like giving to the Red Crescent or the former Cat Stevens's charity organization can get you thrown in jail indefinitely...that's not good...but the argument can certainly be made that that's alarmist thinking. However, the circular definition of 'you are the enemy 'cause we say you are' is much more disturbing. Maybe it's a question of 'engaging in acts' OR 'supporting hostilities' AND being so designated by the tribunal. Though hopefully, in that case, the tribunal has to have some sort of proof of one of the former two charges.
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.
Waterboarding is torture, based upon the description I read in Wikipedia. I don't see how ymmv on that one.
The citizen question is one that I want to see answered definitively, because that seems at the heart of how bad it is. Yes, it's horrendous to detain someone from another country indefinitely and not give them the right to a fair trial. However, if we're potentially doing that to US citizens, the situation moves from being externally unstable (in terms of how we will be treated by other countries when traveling abroad as well as our international reputation) to internally dangerous, if Big Brother really is watching us. Either way we're threatening to undermine the Constitution. However, I think there's a matter of degree involved here - though non-citizens living here may disagree with me.
The Senate's rush to judgment underscores the dangers of negotiating with the Bush administration once the White House takes an extreme position. The three GOP dealmakers (Graham, John McCain and Senate Armed Service Committee chairman John Warner) succeeded in their effort to get the president to retreat from his deliberate attempt to eviscerate the Geneva Conventions and undermine the Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan case. The Senate Republican troika were aided in their headline-making efforts to outlaw torture by an army of former military lawyers and such high-profile recruits as former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
This quote makes it sound as if the Reps did have a minor victory here, but I don't see what it is. I don't see that the new bill, the one that's passing, does take a stand against torture - quite the contrary. I don't see how the Supreme Court decision isn't undermined anyway by the subsequent removal of habeas corpus (see next paragraph). I'm not sure what Colin Powell and all those lawyers were DOING, exactly. The proposed bill was worse before? How?
But history may judge this to be a Pyrrhic victory. In exchange, the White House was allowed to blatantly rewrite the pending legislation in regard to habeas corpus and the definition of enemy combatants. This time around, amid the mind-numbing blur of end-of-session legislative maneuvers, these 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.
If action definitely needs to happen, other than voting for the Dems in '06 (and trying to knock out the Dems that voted yay during the primaries), I'm not sure what to do. It makes my stomach turn to think of actively campaigning for either party at this point, but maybe I need to? I know everyone's saying, "write to your congressperson." Both of my senators voted for it, but I can't bring myself to believe that if I write emails asking them to explain their reasoning, I'll get anything other than a form letter asking for money. I believe that more people will read about it here in livejournal than will ever read a letter I send to my elected official. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe that in and of itself shows a breakdown in the process?
I'm really hoping that some of you will respond, because I'm just not sure if I'm seeing things clearly. I'm worried, and I want to make sure I'm worried for the right reasons - not jumping onto the alarmist bandwagon, but seeing things logically and then acting in a way that makes sense, that might help. The trouble is, I'm not sure that there's anything that CAN be done at this point, any way to act that will prevent us from going down this road as a country.
So...how bad is it?
The legislation, which was prompted by a June Supreme Court decision applying the Geneva Conventions to prisoners held by U.S. forces, had originally provoked a well-publicized struggle over placing legal limits on interrogation techniques. While a White House effort to redefine the anti-torture provisions of the Geneva Conventions was largely rebuffed by a recent bipartisan Senate rebellion, the compromise that three Republican senators negotiated with Bush officials included provisions eliminating the right of habeas corpus for all detainees.
So...eliminating habeas corpus for the detainees was a compromise? Egads. And while I think that the 'redefinition of the Geneva Conventions' is basically a CYA attempt for the torture that's already been documented...how can one singlehandedly redefine them? They're an international set of guidelines developed by many different countries. I guess I can see how Bush could now have permission to interpret how the US should implement the conventions (or not)...but torture is torture; there's not a huge gray area there.
What I get is that the old version said that we did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions, and the new version says that the Conventions can be interpreted as our executive branch sees fit? Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I don't see much of a compromise there either.
One way that rights will be eroded by the bill is through a change in the meaning of the legal term "enemy combatant." 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.
If this last sentence is true, it's scary as hell. Basically, you're an enemy combatant because our 'combatant status review tribunal' says so? Who reviews/checks the actions of the tribunal? I mean, the other stuff is concerning - if doing something like giving to the Red Crescent or the former Cat Stevens's charity organization can get you thrown in jail indefinitely...that's not good...but the argument can certainly be made that that's alarmist thinking. However, the circular definition of 'you are the enemy 'cause we say you are' is much more disturbing. Maybe it's a question of 'engaging in acts' OR 'supporting hostilities' AND being so designated by the tribunal. Though hopefully, in that case, the tribunal has to have some sort of proof of one of the former two charges.
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.
Waterboarding is torture, based upon the description I read in Wikipedia. I don't see how ymmv on that one.
The citizen question is one that I want to see answered definitively, because that seems at the heart of how bad it is. Yes, it's horrendous to detain someone from another country indefinitely and not give them the right to a fair trial. However, if we're potentially doing that to US citizens, the situation moves from being externally unstable (in terms of how we will be treated by other countries when traveling abroad as well as our international reputation) to internally dangerous, if Big Brother really is watching us. Either way we're threatening to undermine the Constitution. However, I think there's a matter of degree involved here - though non-citizens living here may disagree with me.
The Senate's rush to judgment underscores the dangers of negotiating with the Bush administration once the White House takes an extreme position. The three GOP dealmakers (Graham, John McCain and Senate Armed Service Committee chairman John Warner) succeeded in their effort to get the president to retreat from his deliberate attempt to eviscerate the Geneva Conventions and undermine the Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan case. The Senate Republican troika were aided in their headline-making efforts to outlaw torture by an army of former military lawyers and such high-profile recruits as former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
This quote makes it sound as if the Reps did have a minor victory here, but I don't see what it is. I don't see that the new bill, the one that's passing, does take a stand against torture - quite the contrary. I don't see how the Supreme Court decision isn't undermined anyway by the subsequent removal of habeas corpus (see next paragraph). I'm not sure what Colin Powell and all those lawyers were DOING, exactly. The proposed bill was worse before? How?
But history may judge this to be a Pyrrhic victory. In exchange, the White House was allowed to blatantly rewrite the pending legislation in regard to habeas corpus and the definition of enemy combatants. This time around, amid the mind-numbing blur of end-of-session legislative maneuvers, these 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.
If action definitely needs to happen, other than voting for the Dems in '06 (and trying to knock out the Dems that voted yay during the primaries), I'm not sure what to do. It makes my stomach turn to think of actively campaigning for either party at this point, but maybe I need to? I know everyone's saying, "write to your congressperson." Both of my senators voted for it, but I can't bring myself to believe that if I write emails asking them to explain their reasoning, I'll get anything other than a form letter asking for money. I believe that more people will read about it here in livejournal than will ever read a letter I send to my elected official. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe that in and of itself shows a breakdown in the process?
I'm really hoping that some of you will respond, because I'm just not sure if I'm seeing things clearly. I'm worried, and I want to make sure I'm worried for the right reasons - not jumping onto the alarmist bandwagon, but seeing things logically and then acting in a way that makes sense, that might help. The trouble is, I'm not sure that there's anything that CAN be done at this point, any way to act that will prevent us from going down this road as a country.
So...how bad is it?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-02 01:25 pm (UTC)It's obvious that Bush is trying to install a fascist empire. 9/11 was a generous boost to his efforts. I think the efforts of McCain et al to "moderate" the legislation are great press for the Republican party, and as you note, really don't do much to appease those of us who agree that torture is never acceptable. I think your feelings are appropriate.
I think it's a great idea to write your representatives, tell them what you think, and ask for an explanation of their views. I did this once with the Republican Senator who claims to represent me in Washington. After a few months I received a six page letter explaining his views. Okay, actually it was a six page regurgitation of the smack from the lobbyists who butter his toast, and I responded letting him know I knew that. It didn't solve anything, for sure, but I was Doing Something. I think the more reasonable citizens speak up, the harder it will be to ignore our intent to have a humane government.
Great post, yo.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-02 07:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-02 07:13 pm (UTC)