INVESTIGATION: Graham, Levin, Kyl Amendment allows Prisoner Abuse!

[KoKo]

Failures of Imagination

By Eric Umansky


What’s more, McCain’s amendment was undercut by another little-noticed amendment that was passed as part of the same defense appropriations bill. Sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham, Carl Levin, and John Kyl, the amendment — which was combined with McCain’s measure to become the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) — states that testimony gained through “coercion” can be used in military tribunals. Unlike the McCain amendment, which merely reaffirms existing laws, the Graham-Levin-Kyl measure muddies what had been clear waters. The amendment’s portion of the DTA also severely restricts detainees’ access to U.S. courts and strips them of the right to habeas corpus. It limits detainee cases to a single hearing in front of an appeals court, at which detainees have no clear right to present the facts of their case.

Cheney and his allies “took their opponents to the cleaners,” Marty Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown who served in the Justice Department until 2002, wrote at the time on a blog called Balkanization. “The Graham amendments . . . are far more beneficial to their detention and interrogation policies than the McCain amendment is detrimental.”

But that’s not how the matter has played in the media. The triumph of the McCain amendment was a compelling story, a personality play in which the little-liked Cheney was brought to heel by the much-adored maverick senior senator from Arizona. The Graham-Levin-Kyl amendment — a legalistic, obscure, and at least nominally bipartisan effort — had no such drama. And it got no equivalent coverage. The morning after that amendment passed, only one major paper, The New York Times, gave it front-page treatment, and it simply wasn’t mentioned on the network news.

“I don’t think the media were connecting the dots,” says Marc Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University who represents seventeen Yemenis detained at Guantanamo. “They never realized” that the McCain bill “gave the detainees a right, but without a remedy.”

The undercutting pattern continued with the president’s “signing statement,” in which he asserted that he didn’t consider his administration to be bound by the McCain ban but instead would interpret it “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president.” With the statement’s practical implications unclear — Was the president reserving his right to ignore the ban? Was he giving fair warning of what he was already doing? — and the whole notion of signing statements a confusing, unfamiliar, and often headache-inducing legal topic, most news outlets, with the notable exception of The Boston Globe, ignored it. (Coverage of the signing statements did eventually pick up after bloggers and others harped on them.)

If the ramifications of the signing statement are murky, the practical effect of the combined McCain and Graham-Levin-Kyl amendments — stripping the ability of prisoners to challenge their treatment — may be less so. Falkoff says that when he last visited the prison, in April 2006, one of his clients showed up badly beaten. “One eye was swollen shut, the other a deep black and blue. Contusions all over his body, cuts on his head and legs,” recalls Falkoff. “He couldn’t swallow and could barely talk.” The client had been forcibly “extracted” from his cell. The offense meriting the move “was that he stepped over a line that they painted in his isolation cell.

Much more of this long read...a damning investigation spanning the whole Torture Time Table of the Bushofascists.......

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Umansky.asp