Keillor:Last Week-We Suspended Human Rights In America-Ixnay Habeas Corpus

[kpete]

Keillor: No need to worry about human rights - we're doing just fine
Garrison Keillor
Syndicated columnist

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you. Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, has decided that an "enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter. If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of "crimes against the state" and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned.

The Senate also decided it's up to the president to decide whether it's OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators. This is now purely a bureaucratic matter: The plenipotentiary stamps the file "enemy combatants" and throws the poor schnooks into prison and at his leisure he tries them by any
sort of kangaroo court he wishes to assemble and they have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal. This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by Mr. Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.

................

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.


more at:
http://www.sltrib.com/old/opinion/ci_4433433

[bonito]

1. Waiting for that due course and November n/t

[Marnieworld]

2. What's worse though is that I think they removed "non-citizen"

from the bill. What was most horrifying was that they removed any language that would protect an American citizen. Non-citizen and alien were taken out. All you have to be is an enemy combatant and all you have to be to be declared that is to support anti-american efforts according to the president's discretion. More or less the King can decide who lives or dies without any obstruction.

I may be wrong. I don't have a link to the actual text and I am not a lawyer. yet this is what I gathered so his thought that we'd only be in jeopardy abroad is false. We are in jeopardy here. Otherwise it's good someonelike Keillor is talking about it. More should know.

[bananas]

5. And god know what Bush wrote in his signing statement.

The actual text of the bill doesn't matter anymore.

[Rose Siding]

3. That bit about bush's church is spooky

:kick:

[pat_k]

4. War Crimes Proven: "Rights Not Judicially Enforceable"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=2286852#2288267

[Kurovski]

6. K&R

Lest we forget the other big news of last week.