NYT Calls On Congress To Repeal Bush's Shameful Laws On Torture & Habeas Corpus

[kpete]

American Liberty at the Precipice
Published: February 22, 2007

In another low moment for American justice, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that detainees held at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, do not have the right to be heard in court. The ruling relied on a shameful law that President Bush stampeded through Congress last fall that gives dangerously short shrift to the Constitution.

..................

Congress should not wait for the Supreme Court to act. With the Democrats now in charge, it is in a good position to pass a new law that fixes the dangerous mess it has made. Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, have introduced a bill that would repeal the provision in the Military Commissions Act that purports to obliterate the habeas corpus rights of detainees.

The Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties does not end with habeas corpus. Congress should also move quickly to pass another crucial bill, introduced by Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, that, among other steps, would once and for all outlaw the use of evidence obtained through torture.

When the Founding Fathers put habeas corpus in Article I of the Constitution, they were underscoring the vital importance to a democracy of allowing prisoners to challenge their confinement in a court of law. Much has changed since Sept. 11, but the bedrock principles of American freedom must remain.

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/opinion/22thu1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[Hubert Flottz]

1. K&R

Bush is shameful in every way.

[postulater]

2. Congress must give us back our freedom

or they don't support the troops.

[magellan]

3. We can look forward to years if not decades of torture as a legitimate tool

...as well as gazing wistfully at the shredded writ of habeas corpus, before the US decides our pre-Bush** stance on both was proper and we rejoin the civilized world.

[cali]

4. Not if Senator Leahy gets his way

This is where a huge percentage of his energy is being focused. He's obsessed with getting the MCA repealed and doing something about the provision in the the Defense Budget to make Martial Law easier for the prez to declare.

[WyLoochka]

5. I've decided to support Dodd

at this point because he is the only declared candidate who has made overturning these anathemas his primary issues.

I don't expect to hear Ms Rodham Clinton take a similar stand - her advisors would say she would lose too many votes by supporting a law that for 800 years provided the most essential underpinning to the subsequent burgeoning of liberty through succeeding cultures and societies. And they'd say it would make her appear "weak" to come out in favor of repealing state sanctioned torture.