Are you an enemy combatant?
New facts keep coming out about the torture bill. The newest is that it expands the definition of who the White House can consider an enemy combatant. They are now anyone who “has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” This language does not rule out American citizens from being labeled as enemy combatants and being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. Obviously, that is not a good thing. And by specifying those who “supported hostilities” in addition to to those engaged in hostilities, it opens the door to detaining people who have never been anywhere near a battlefield. We are legislating a system where legal US citizens can be held indefinitely with no way to challenge the evidence against them. Gulity until proven innocent. Republican Senator Arlen Spector feels that the bill goes too far and is an unconstitutional suspension of habeus corpus. Of course, to get a ruling it would have to be challenged in court, which is prohibited.
Welcome to our future.
Hello, Big Brother…
Whats Next to nail us, our religions
“materially supported hostilities against the United States”
Aha, that means all taxpayers then?
By paying taxes you prolong the war in Iraq witch in turn creates more terrorists.
It goes deeper than this if you look a little more distant into the future. The next step is jailing political dissidents that rebel against the one party system masquerading as two. If you participate, you can easily be labelled as “supporting hostilities against the U.S.”
[…] Every American should read this statement from Sen. Leahy on Sen. Specter’s amendment to the torture bill. The Specter-Leahy-Dodd Amendment To Strike Section 7 Of The Military Commission Bill would have struck the provision regarding habeas review from the DTA. If we vote today to abolish rights of access to the justice system to any alien detainee who is suspected – not determined, not even charged, but just suspected — of assisting terrorists, that will do by the back door what cannot be done up front. That will remove the check that our legal system provides against arbitrarily detaining people for life without charge and, for that matter, could make any limits against torture and cruel and inhuman treatment obsolete because they will be unenforceable. We will have removed the mechanism the Constitution provides to check Government overreaching and lawlessness. If this bill became effective, it would make it impossible for aliens ever to challenge and prove such abuses. […]