September 29, 2006
CONSTITUTION ON FIRE

Senate Passes Detainee Bill
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Senate approved legislation this evening governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, establishing far-reaching new rules in the definition of who may be held and how they should be treated.
The vote, 65-to-34, came after more than 10 hours of often impassioned debate touching on the Constitution, the horrors of Sept. 11 and the nation’s role in the world, but it was also underscored by a measure of politics as Congress prepares to break for the final month of campaigning before closely fought midterm elections.
The legislation sets up rules for the military commissions that will allow the government to prosecute high-level terrorists including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court and broadly defines what kind of treatment of detainees is prosecutable as a war crime.
Read More at The New York Times
DOWNLOAD: Bill Number H.R.6166 for the 109th Congress
Bush Faces Wave of Challenges to Terror Law
The Bush administration yesterday faced a raft of legal challenges to a sweeping new regime for Guantánamo that would deny court oversight to detainees in the war on terror, and would bar prosecution of US personnel for war crimes.
Mr Bush is expected to move within days to sign into law proposals for the treatment and trial before military tribunals of the detainees. The legislation, approved by the senate on Thursday, is a victory for the White House over senate Republicans, who had resisted attempts to relax standards on the treatment of detainees, and depart from standard rules of evidence in their trials.
Read More at Guardian Unlimited, UK
FACT
Subsection 4(b) (26) of section 950v. of HR 6166 - Crimes triable by military commissions - includes the following definition.
“Any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy, shall be punished as a military commission under this chapter may direct.” (emphasis added)
Response from The Center for Constitutional Rights
Congress gives the president the power to lock up almost anyone he thinks is a terror threat.
Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, “The compromise legislation….authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.”
More coverage:
Bush Given Authority To Sexually Torture American Children (Prison Planet)
Legal Residents’ Rights Curbed in Detainee Bill (Boston Globe)
Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Must Read, Constitutional Crisis, Facts: Breaking the Law
No Comments

I want to start with a point I made in my new book,
Bush and his warmongering supporters are dangerous for America. Anyone can pick fights, as Bush seems obsessed with doing. The question for America is, are we ready to fight more of Bush’s battles for him? The leaders of the world are lining up against him/us. Only blundering idiots would allow Bush to turn the world into his personal fight club. We’re the ones who are going to end up defending ourselves as we defend against his blundering interference in so many other nation’s affairs. His manufactured mandate supported less by the will of the American people than by his corrupt exercise of the awesome strength of our military and the sacrifices of those who do the fighting and the dying.
A bill now pending in the Senate would make the Bush administration’s enemy wiretapping program more practical and flexible, removing all doubt about its legality. But that worries some of Bush’s fiercest critics.
Author Pat Buchanan says President Bush should be impeached for failing to stop the invasion of illegal aliens across the U.S. border with Mexico.
WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis.
An entrepreneurial-minded Ned Lamont stopped by the Christian Science Monitor breakfast in DC today; 30 reporters, including the Hartford Courant’s David Lightman and reps from two of the three broadcast networks, attended.
WASHINGTON — One of the president’s most tenacious critics, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, said President Bush should not face impeachment.
The Bush administration’s full-court press against the Constitution is on, with the president getting closer to Senate, and possibly full Congressional approval of his warrantless spying program by the National Security Agency, and with a lobbying campaign on to get his program for kangaroo courts and life-time detention without trial for terror “war” detainees approved by Congress.
(Congresswoman and Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth)
Lyndon LaRouche has called on all patriotic Americans to join him in pressing for the immediate impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. LaRouche issued the call in the immediate aftermath of three developments in recent days:
The commemorations of 9-11 are being polluted by participation of President Bush and other administration officials who for five years have shamelessly used the deaths of 3000 people as an excuse for an unremitting assault on the Constitution and for a brutal and illegal war on the innocent and long-suffering people of Iraq.
The often illegal and un-Constitutional administration of President George W. Bush is not giving up on its program to use the National Security Agency to spy on Americans. The administration Friday asked a federal judge to delay enforcing her order for a halt to the NSA’s warrantless communications surveillance program.