Glenn Greenwald: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/09/habeas_corpus/index.html

Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is, without question, the single worst law enacted during the Bush presidency, and is one of the most destructive laws passed in the last several decades. It is not merely a bad law. It vests in the President the power to detain people indefinitely with no meaningful opportunity to contest the government's accusations. That is the very power the Founders sought first and foremost to prohibit.

More significantly, whether a country permits its political leaders to imprison people arbitrarily and with no process is one of the few defining attributes dividing free and civilized countries from lawless tyrannies. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it in his 1789 letter to Thomas Paine: "I consider as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." To vest the President with the power to imprison people indefinitely with no charges is fundamentally to transform the type of country we are.

House Democrats are apparently now debating whether to vote on a bill to restore habeas corpus. Matt Stoller provides some of the legislative details and information needed to pressure them to do so, and he explains why quick action is required. This morning, The New York Times and even The Washington Post editorialized in favor of habeas restoration. It would be a profound -- and truly inexcusable -- abdication of Democrats' responsibilities for them to do anything other then devote full-scale efforts to restoring habeas corpus.

It is worthwhile to review briefly the history of how this legislative atrocity came to be. When the White House proposed this bill, Democrats were as meek and as silent as could be. They literally disappeared from the debate, allowing the illusion of "negotiations" between the White House on the one hand, and a handful of allegedly principled and independent Republican Senators (McCain, Warner and Graham) on the other.

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[Bandit]

1. What is there to debate?

Let us become a country of Law and Order once again...

[ninkasi]

2. Restoring Habeas Corpus

should be the priority of the Dems. It is essential to a free society, and to allow an uncivilized, corrupt, arrogant, unintelligent sham of a president to bully the Congress into passing something as anti-democratic as the Military Commissions Act is one of the most shameful actions allowed by a cowed Congress.

We do not elect people for their timidity, we elect them to represent our wishes. No true American patriot would allow Habeas to be abolished or diluted, because it has been a law guarding our liberty since King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215. Doing away with legal principles that have been in place for 800 years is certainly nothing to be proud of. The whole sorry story of the Bush presidency will long be remembered as one of the worst, most destructive periods in American history.