Bush Suspends Habeas Corpus
Bush and the rest of the Republicans have suspended habeas corpus. Are you outraged? You should be.
17 Responses to “Bush Suspends Habeas Corpus”
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October 18th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
I’m outraged.
I’m also a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to discover the actual bill number until last night. You would think someone would mention it, seeing as I read a dozen or so requests in blogs that I contact my congress-thing.
It’s HR 6166, if anyone wants to read the language of the bill after the fact.
October 18th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
I don’t think this applies to US citizens. Does it? If not, does it matter? I don’t really understand the ramifications if it only applies to “illegal enemy combatents.”
October 18th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
ben,
I haven’t read the bill, so I don’t know the extent of the problem. From press reports, the bill is gives the gov’t the right to seize American citizens on American soil and lock them up without habeas corpus rights. Once locked up, you lose your constitutional protections and get only the due process that a military tribunal sees fit to give you.
Let’s hope it’s not as bad as all that.
And Standard Mischief, thanks for passing on the bill number. I’m going to hold my nose and read the damn thing.
October 18th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Habeas Corpus – Don’t be taken from home without it.
October 18th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Technically, it can’t cover American citizens (see Hamdan v. Rumsfield), nor does it attempt to – the act only covers “aliens detained by the United States.” It’s argueable whether non-citizens are protected by the article 1 section 9 protections, as not even the Bill of Rights is universally provided to non-citizens (who, for example, are not allowed to own a firearm), but that’s not really relevant.
Nor does it truely strip the right of habeus corpus : “enemy combantants” may have their status as such overturned by “”The jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on any claims with respect to an alien under this paragraph shall be limited to the consideration of whether the status determination … was consistent with the standards and procedures specified by the Secretary of Defense for Combatant Status Review Tribunals (including the requirement that the conclusion of the Tribunal be supported by a preponderance of the evidence and allowing a rebuttable presumption in favor of the Government’s evidence), and to the extent the Constitution and laws of the United States are applicable, whether the use of such standards and procedures to make the determination is consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
Of course, why let facts get in the way of screaming about conservatives stripping away the rights of citizens.
October 18th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
gattsuru,
As I said, I haven’t read it, but just because it *can’t* suspend habeas corpus does not mean it doesn’t purport to and attempt to. Leaving the courts to clean up the mess is a pretty poor excuse for blatantly flouting the Constitution. It also leaves an awful lot of people in legal limbo (i.e. languishing in secret prisons) while the courts work it out. How many years did it take Hamdi to get his day in court?
And while I was wrong about its applicability to citizens, it still operates on resident aliens. More importantly, you can’t say it doesn’t suspend habeas corpus:
“No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”
October 18th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
I hate to point out non sequitors, but you can’t actually find out whether something is constitutional or not by falling the side of caution. To give a basic example, take incitement to violence over the internet. If it’s not really apparent that this is constitutionally protected or not (I’m not really an expert on freedom of speech law), then choosing to protect such speech makes it impossible to determine the constitutionality. Choosing to prosecute such speech may inconvenience individuals already committing very risky behaviour, but it’s a far better option than ignoring half of a murder conspiracy because you’re worried about the courts.
And detainees can have their status as an illegal combatent, and thus their imprisonment, reviewed by the United States DC Circuit of Appeals court, meaning that the retain the writ of habeus corpus. This law only makes it so detainees can not shop for favorable judges (if there are any more favorable than DC’s…) and that they actually need to look at the laws regarding detention.
October 18th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Jose Padilla was a US citizen, and he was held for 3 years before being charged. Ashcroft even interrupted an international trip to announce they’d prevented a “dirty bomb” attack by him (an accusation now largely considered to have been hysteria). Like gun restrictions, I suspect it is a slippery slope our idiots in Congress are flirting with.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
I believe Abdullah al-Muhajir was caught on an expired visa, D, and also got his writ of habeus corpus looked at by several courts.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
Technically, it contains a whole bill full of unconstitutional crap. it does not follow that we don’t have to worry about unconstitutional law.
Hell, even when we get dramatic sweeping smackdowns (and I’m thinking of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor here) we get nothing:
Wow, that sure looks good on paper. Although she granted a permanent injunction to halt the domestic spying, She then “stayed her order pending a appellate hearing expected in September 2006”
The Sixth District then stayed the order pending appeal.
We get the words on paper, but not the deeds.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Yeah, that sounds great, if you’re into lefty garbage. “We don’t have heriditary kings”… if someone responded that way to the “Violent Crime Control Act” under Clinton, he or she’d be out in a few seconds.
Now that you’re done copying text from a Carter appointee, can you [b]READ THE DAMNED LAW[/b]?
October 19th, 2006 at 10:00 am
Folks, read the bloody thing before y’all start spouting stuff. Habeas corpus has not been suspended; it certainly is nothing like the suspension enacted by Abraham Lincoln
First, what this bill does is to provide for military trials for alien unlawful combatants. The day we extend constitutional protections, and all that that entails, to people like the late Mohammed Atta, then we will have lost. Look what happened with the trial of Lynne Stewart: for passing messages from Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman to his terrorist supporters (i.e., treason), she gets 28 months in prison. Now, we move on to the inevitable, endless chain of appeals. Now, imagine, if you will, Osama bin Laden on the stand.
Second, the provisions of this bill are such that it isn’t much different from the kind of court-martial that an American soldier, airman, Marine, or sailor would receive if charged with a crime. It takes a special kind of warped logic to accept (even implictly) the notion that that our enemy deserves the full protection of the law, but our own guys can go rot in hell.
Finally, the criticisms leveled at this law encapsulate perfectly core problem with this war. We are so enmeshed in legalistic notions of “rights”, “procedures”, and “articles of convention”, that we’re forgetting the bigger picture. To wit, we are fighting a war; this isn’t a game. We are fighting a war with an enemy that cares nothing for our rules or procedures, and only abides by the rules set down by a seventh-century Arabain Bedouin. So why the hell should we go out of our way to make it even easier for him to kill our people? To the Islamic enemy, the choice is clear: we convert, submit to Islam and pay the jizya (poll tax), or we die. Where do you see “habeas corpus” in those three choices? There is nothing noble or “morally superior” about losing your head (literally) to a fanatic waving the “little green book” of Islam.
October 19th, 2006 at 10:39 am
It’s strange that people keep saying that this law is ok because it only applies to non-citizens. Non-citizens in America are people. They deserve legal protections just as anybody else does.
My problem isn’t that Mohammed Atta loses his habeas rights. My problem is that lots of innocent people are going to get swept up, locked up and shut up with no recourse and no review. Look at all the people we held in Guantanamo. As soon as it looked like the goverment might have to actually justify holding them, they started letting people go. More importantly, until they were pushed, our government was content to hold people indefinitely, without regard to them being a threat in any way.
Mixed in with the bad guys are a bunch of innocent, harmless people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s really hard to tell them apart, and the best way to do it is to give them recourse to the judicial system. The whole point of our criminal justice system is to separate the good from the bad.
We should respect the rights of non-citizens in our judicial system not because we respect the terrorists, but because we respect the innocent men who get caught up in the system. And more importantly, because we respect ourselves.
October 19th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
gattsuru Says:
agreed, it’s the weasel equivalent to giving someone 99 years for murder, and then letting him out on parole that same day.
I was actually begging people to tell me the bill number before it was passed, now that it has, the priority has slipped a notch. I’m sure there’s a number of stuff that allows people to ignore parts on the constitution. but well, let me read it first. I’ve only skimmed it.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Suspend Habeas? My God, he’s as bad as Lincoln!
October 20th, 2006 at 1:28 am
Yeah, Holly, the terror threat is *just* like the war between the states that almost ripped this country apart. Man, it’s like you live in Flatland.
October 20th, 2006 at 5:16 am
The bill is about 17544 words
Seems pretty clear to me. if you get labeled “enemy combatant”, you suddenly don’t have the right to contest that label.
And a little Ex post facto icing on the cake.
Bonus: YouTube