Anthonares

From the title I’m sure you can guess to what I am referring: yesterday the senate approved a bill on terrorism-suspect detainee treatment. For those of us who watched and applauded Governer Warner, John McCain, and Lindsay Graham stand up last week and defy the President on this issue, it is perhaps a more bitter dissapointment. The bill that passed yesterday contains very few of the safeguards those three had wanted, but it contains nearly everything the President did. If you haven’t gotten a chance to read through some of the key parts of this bill, read the summary in the NYTimes article linked to above, or perhaps even read the full text on Thomas.

Those who have been reading Anthonares for a while know that I am a heterodox on political issues, but that I tend to vote Democrat. I am not a Democrat, nor am I a liberal, but I more closely identify with those two positions than anything else out there in politics today.But it is not as a liberal or a Democrat that I say this: this is an extremely dangerous path down which we tread.

• We have stripped foreign detainees declared “enemy combatants” from the right to appeal their imprisonment.
• We have given the President and the Secretary of Defense the ability to set up “competent” tribunals to declare individuals to be “enemy combatants.”
• We have given the government the right to detain indefinitely any non-citizen, be they permanent residents of the US or not, if they are suspected of “materially aiding” terrorism.
• We have NOT limited the President’s ability to use practices that (perhaps arguably) violate the Geneva convention. Merely, we have given him the right to judge what is in violation or not
• We have declared retroactively that Americans accused of war crimes for such practices in the past are immune from prosecution.
• We have given detainees the right to respond to any evidence against them, but we have not allowed them to see that evidence if it is classified.
• We have barred the use of information gained through cruel and inhumane treatment in trials of terrorists and enemy combatants, though any information gained through those means before December 30, 2005 would be admitted
• and the list goes on…

Even Andrew Sullivan, a political heterodox who tends to vote Republican, finds great danger in this bill. In his blog today, he published the text of Hillary Clinton’s speech against the bill on the floor of the senate. Here’s a short excerpt:

General Washington announced a decision unique in human history, sending the following order for handling prisoners:

“Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”

Therefore, George Washington, our commander-in-chief before he was our President, laid down the indelible marker of our nation’s values even as we were struggling as a nation – and his courageous act reminds us that America was born out of faith in certain basic principles. In fact, it is these principles that made and still make our country exceptional and allow us to serve as an example. We are not bound together as a nation by bloodlines. We are not bound by ancient history; our nation is a new nation. Above all, we are bound by our values.

We have, with this bill, abandoned the moral and ethical high ground in the name of expediency. We have sacrificed one of the core values of our nation in order to squeeze a few tainted drops of information from our prisoners. This is not a liberal or conservative value, its an American one. We just witnessed not only the fault of the Republican majority but the failure of the Democrat minority. We have given broad new powers to a President who has shown that he will use them to the utmost and beyond, all in the name of our safety, of course.

All I can hope is that either a challenge of this law makes it to the Supreme Court, or that before such time as that occurs, Congress realizes that it is failing its basic duty to check the power of the Executive, and repeals the onerous portions of this bill.