And the cry from the lefty bastions of media and academia is that the rights afforded to American citizens are not available to the terrorists.
Oh cry me a freaking river already!
President Bush’s argument that the government requires extraordinary power to respond to the unusual threat of terrorism helped him win final support for a system of military trials with highly truncated defendant’s rights. The United States used similar trials on just four occasions: during the country’s revolution, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and World War II.
And those wars ended in victory for the U.S. unlike every single war we?ve fought after WWII which ended in a statemate.
Included in the bill, passed by Republican majorities in the Senate yesterday and the House on Wednesday, are unique rules that bar terrorism suspects from challenging their detention or treatment through traditional habeas corpus petitions. They allow prosecutors, under certain conditions, to use evidence collected through hearsay or coercion to seek criminal convictions.
The last thing we need is all these terrorists running to the ACLU (or the other way around) and then clogging up our courts. Also Abraham Lincoln, who was no wimp, suspended habeus corpus during the civil war. He?s not being posthumously reviled for it either. I guess to the left, it was ok for Lincoln as he was fighting against those white Christian Southern redneck types, as opposed to those poor downtrodden Muslims.
By writing into law for the first time the definition of an “unlawful enemy combatant,” the bill empowers the executive branch to detain indefinitely anyone it determines to have “purposefully and materially” supported anti-U.S. hostilities. Only foreign nationals among those detainees can be tried by the military commissions, as they are known, and sentenced to decades in jail or put to death.
No you idiot!!!! The definition of an ?unlawful enemy combatant? wasn?t written into law for the first time by the Bush Administration. It was written in the Geneva Convention, and it pertains to fighters out of uniform (as in terrorists!!!) None of this would even be an issue if the Supreme Whore Justices bothered to read the Geneva Convention in the first place.
At the same time, the bill immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year. It gives the president a dominant but not exclusive role in setting the rules for future interrogations of terrorism suspects.
The last thing our people need when they?re interrogating these beasts is to have to worry about some smarmy ACLU lawyer suing them for doing their jobs.
Written largely, but not completely, on the administration’s terms, with passages that give executive branch officials discretion to set details or divert from its protections, the bill is meant to provide what Bush said yesterday are “the tools” needed to handle terrorism suspects U.S. officials hope to capture.
Well, the President IS the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces. I would rather President Bush, decide how to prosecute this war, rather than a small group of unelected Supreme Court justices who have their jobs for life no matter what.
For more than 57 months after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush maintained that he did not need congressional authorization of such tools. But the Supreme Court decided otherwise in June, declaring the administration’s detainee treatment and trial procedures illegal, and ruling that Bush must first seek Congress’s approval.
Oh no no no no!!! We must never ever go against the rulings of our black robed deities!!! (Snort!) And frankly, when the lefty ?human rights? groups and college professors complain, I consider that a good sign.
But Tom Malinowski, the Washington office director for Human Rights Watch, said Bush’s motivation is partly to protect his reputation by gaining congressional endorsement of controversial actions already taken. “He’s been accused of authorizing criminal torture in a way that has hurt America and could come back to haunt our troops. One of his purposes is to have Congress stand with him in the dock,” Malinowski said.
Here’s what Human Rights Watch is really about.
{Snip}
University of Texas constitutional law professor Sanford V. Levinson described the bill in an Internet posting as the mark of a “banana republic.” Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh said that “the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it’s not clear that most of the members understand what they’ve done.”
No, a banana republic is Mexico and other corrupt Latin American countries. Now in terms of Congress stripping jurisdiction from the courts, that?s laughable. At least Congress is elected. These judges who legislate from the bench are not, and they often nullify what citizens have fairly voted for. And what?s with the ?politically created emergency? spiel. We are at war, which has been declared on us even before 9/11. Oy, I detest professors! They?re almost as slimy as lawyers and politicians.
Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal said the bill’s creation of two systems of justice — military commissions for foreign nationals and regular criminal trials for U.S. citizens — may violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which requires equal protection of the laws to anyone under U.S. jurisdiction.
I’m sorry, but our Constitution is not a suicide pact. And there should be no such thing as a Constitutional right for a terrorist to do us harm.
