Today, 135 years to the day after the last American President (Ulysses S. Grant) suspended habeas corpus, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. At its worst, the legislation allows President Bush or Donald Rumsfeld to declare anyone — US citizen or not — an enemy combatant, lock them up and throw away the key without a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law. In other words, every thing the Founding Fathers fought the British empire to free themselves of was reversed and nullified with the stroke of a pen, all under the guise of the War on Terror.
Jonathan Turley joined Keith to talk about the law that Senator Feingold said would be seen as "a stain on our nation's history."
Turley: "People have no idea how significant this is. Really a time of shame this is for the American system.—The strange thing is that we have become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars. It's otherworldly..People clearly don't realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us. And I'm not too sure we're gonna change back anytime soon."
Thank You for posting this important piece of information. I wonder if people like TLBSHOW support this. TLBSHOW if you don't support this then let us know. If you do support it remain silent and I will act accordingly.
Well you didn't answer the same question on another thread. So are you saying that this is wrong? It is part of the so called war on terror which you say you support.
Its arrival is welcome by government officials everywhere
by Bob Barr as published in Creative Loafing
Thursday, June 24, 2004 at 2:00 PM
From Boston to Sea Island, from the Pentagon to the state Capitol in Atlanta, from the small town of Winder to the major suburban county of Gwinnett, the police state has definitively arrived in America. And moves afoot both in Congress and at the local level indicate that its grip is tightening.
The fear of terrorism -- indeed, the fear of the possibility of any act of violence by anyone -- has prompted the undermining of civil liberties in the United States on a scale never before witnessed in our history, including during times of declared war.
The mentality giving rise since 9/11 to oppressive government power has arrived at a truly breathtaking speed. In the process, old attitudes in both major parties toward overbearing government are falling by the wayside.
The rationale for this sea change is painfully simplistic yet alluring: "We can't be too careful in preventing terrorism, you know." "It's a new world out there, which requires new rules." If the Bill of Rights stands in the way of police exercising whatever power they feel they need, or if the president as commander in chief of the armed forces believes it necessary to ignore domestic law or international treaties to elicit intelligence he feels is important to fighting terrorism, well, then, who's going to begrudge them a little leeway?
In Massachusetts, long perceived as a bastion of pro-civil liberties political figures, the transit police are poised to exercise the self-granted power to stop, question, frisk and detain citizens without first having to establish even the slightest reason for suspicion that their detainees have done or are about to do anything wrong. And why would such power now be assumed by the Boston transit police -- in clear violation of the "reasonable suspicion" standard embodied in the Fourth Amendment? Simply because a public transit system is a "possible target" for terrorists.
A possible target? What isn't a possible target? If everything is a possible target, which it is, then these law enforcement types are claiming the power to search anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason -- or no reason. So much for the Bill of Rights in one of its birthplaces.
In Sea Island, during the recent G-8 "Summit" ("photo op" would be a more apt characterization), our Republican governor declared a "state of emergency," including the power to exercise "martial law" (that is, absolute power) in advance of the gathering of the free world's high and mighty, simply because there was a "threat" of problems.
A threat or "possibility" of a problem? Since when did that constitute an "emergency"? But hey, the leaders of the self-proclaimed G-8 had a grand time strolling along beaches and other public areas forcibly deserted. Their wives were able to shop unmolested by the riffraff that is common citizenry. Weren't they? Wasn't it more important that the foreign leaders felt "welcome" because the streets were forcibly cleared of common Americans? Isn't that more important than Americans being able to exercise their rights to assembly, speech, petition and travel?
Organizers of the G-8 told the media afterward that such unprecedented security measures, including the imposition of martial law, were proven successful because there were no pesky "incidents." Well, I suppose so. If you plop 20,000 troops -- attired in full riot gear that would be the envy of our troops in Iraq -- into the middle of a peaceful ocean-side community a few miles square, and back those soldiers up with enough surface-to-air missiles, Humvees, cavalry, surveillance systems and automatic weaponry to equip the armed forces of most Third World nations, you probably would end up with a tranquil setting. But at what cost? Oh, there I go nitpicking again. Isn't the goal to prevent any possible problems? And if the government does that, doesn't that make it all worthwhile?
If -- as many in Congress hope -- legislation passes that would exempt the Defense Department from such nuisances as the Privacy Act (which limits government spying and dossier-collection on American citizens), won't that simply reflect the "new world order" in a way that will make us all sleep better at night? School administrators and prosecutors in one place in particular -- Winder -- certainly would have no problem with such a broad and frightening specter as having Pentagon analysts covertly spying on American citizens. Claiming it amounted to a terrorist conspiracy, those same local officials recently prosecuted -- unsuccessfully, it turned out -- two idiotic 14-year-old students for trying to scare their classmates by pretending they had a gun. And county commissioners in Gwinnett County and City Council members in Marietta also might feel right at home in such a world as they implement plans to place surveillance cameras on street corners.
I suppose, though, that none of this should surprise us. After all, while freedoms are being trimmed at the local level, our top federal leaders are interpreting laws and treaties to which the United States is a party to exempt government employees from constraints on the use of torture, simply because they have decided such a move is necessary. It might not surprise us, but it ought to frighten the daylights out of us.
Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, a Cobb County Republican
