Finally there's reason seeping back into the congressional debate. Speaking before the National Press Club today about the legislation on military commissions, Senator Arlen Specter said:
There is one aspect of the bill which I am strongly opposed to, and that is the aspect of taking away jurisdiction of the federal courts on... habeas corpus... it can be suspended only in time of insurrection or invasion... we don't have either of those present now.
Sen. Specter is proposing an amendment that represents what could be the last chance to salvage a measure of justice from this legislation. The introduction of Frist's bill (really the President's) was a transparent attempt to make the Warner torture bill look reasonable by comparison, and force the Democrats to 'compromise.' The Republican leadership is now staking the mid-term elections on torture. Will the Democrats let them get away with it?
More below...
There have been a lot of good diaries on this fight:
SusanG on the House torture bill,
DemFromCT on the reasons to think that the Republican infighting was not some Rovian master plan,
mcjoan on the compromise, georgia10's
call to arms, and particularly MediaFreeze's efforts to draw attention to the
gutting of
habeas corpus (about which more below). I run the Center for Constitutional Rights, and we represent more than 400 of the men imprisoned at Guantánamo, so we wanted to share our perspective on this legislation with the Daily Kos community.
Lost in the he said/he said cross-fires that pass for substantive debate in our media and the focus on the Republicans' back-room wheeling and dealing have been two crucial aspects of the torture legislation itself: its treatment of sexual violence and habeas corpus.
Under John Warner's or Bill Frist's definition, rape would have to "be forcible or involve coercion." That definition doesn't comport with the one provided by international law, not to mention most states in the U.S. Rape occurs when one party doesn't consent. Period. The legislation also narrowly defines sexual assault by specifying that it has to involve physical contact. The bottom line: under this legislation, many of the degrading practices used at Abu Ghraib would no longer count as war crimes.
This is the 'clarity' President Bush has been seeking.
Enough is enough.
Both Sen. Frist and Sen. Warner's bills will grant President Bush the power to seize almost anyone, anywhere in the world, and effectively throw them in jail forever. With few exceptions, none of the more than 450 men CCR represents at Guantánamo would ever see the inside of a U.S. court; for that you have to be charged with something, and the Bush administration has never bothered with such formalities. Prohibitions against torture won't be worth the paper they're printed on if the victims can't contest their treatment.
Enough is enough.
We can not let the Republicans deny the innocent the chance to prove their innocence.
These are "the worst of the worst:"
Adel Hassan Hamad has spent most of his adult life working for non-governmental relief organizations helping others. At the time of his arrest during a neighborhood sweep in July 2002, he was working in Pakistan as an administrator overseeing the work of a charitable hospital in Afghanistan. The only justifications offered for his continuing detention have been general allegations regarding the organizations for which he worked. A member of a Guantánamo Combatant Status Review Tribunal that reviewed Mr. Hamad's case called his detention "unconscionable" because, by this standard, every doctor, nurse, and relief worker associated with the charities that employed him would be guilty of terrorist activity.
During Mr. Hamad's detention, his infant daughter has died due to a lack of medical care.
Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish national, has a government file which actually demonstrates that U.S. intelligence sources concluded that he had no connection to al Qaeda, the Taliban or terrorist threats. In July, after more than four years at Guantánamo, he was finally released and allowed to return to Germany.
Mohammed Nechla was one of several men accused of planning to attack the American Embassy in Bosnia in October 2001. The 'diplomatic note' delivered by the Embassy making the accusation contained only partial names and nicknames. It didn't offer a shred of supporting evidence. A Bosnian-Algerian, Nechla worked as a social worker with orphans for the Red Crescent Society in Bihac, Bosnia.
He has been imprisoned at Guantánamo for more than four years.
We have 14 stories like these in our report, Faces of Guantánamo. We know there are more.
Enough is enough.
About a week before the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, President Bush said:
I'd like to end Guantánamo; I'd like it to be over with. One of the things we will do is we will send people back to their home countries... Our desire is to send them back... there ought to be a way forward in a court of law, and I'm waiting for the Supreme Court of the United States to determine the proper venue in which these people can be tried.
The Supreme Court has spoken. It has told the Bush Administration that:
These simply are not the circumstances in which, by any stretch of the historical evidence or this Court's precedents, a military commission established by Executive Order under the authority of Article 21 of the UCMJ may lawfully try a person and subject him to punishment.
Nothing in the President's torture legislation changes that. So instead of "ending Guantánamo," the President has demanded legislation that excludes sex without consent from the definition of rape for purposes of war crimes and strips the innocent of their right to appear in court.
Enough is enough.
We need the help of the DailyKos community if we're going to defeat this legislation. In a speech before the National Press Club today, Sen. Specter has said he will introduce an amendment to the torture bills that would protect the right of habeas corpus. Please contact your Senators and Representatives and let them know that torture and indefinite detention can never be legal in America; urge them to support Sen. Specter's amendment when it is introduced.
It's long past time to end this stain on our nation's reputation. Enough is enough.