The Allen Almanac

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.

This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American. It is designed to ensure that the Bush-Cheney Administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power. The conservative Supreme Court, with seven of its nine members appointed by Republican Presidents, has been the only check on the Bush-Cheney Administration lawlessness. Certainly the rubberstamp Republican Congress has not done it, or even investigated it. With this bill, the Congress will have completed the job of eviscerating its role as a check and balance on the Administration. The Senate has turned its back on the Warner-Levin bill, a bipartisan bill reported by the Armed Services Committee, to jam through the Bush-Cheney bill. With a few corrections, the Senate committee bill would have done the job. This bill gives up the ghost. This bill is not a check on the Administration but a voucher for future wrongdoing.

He goes on to say:

What has changed in the past five years that justifies not merely suspending, but abolishing the writ of habeas corpus for a broad category of people who have not been found guilty or even charged with any crime? What has changed in the last five years that our Government is so inept and our people so terrified that we must do what no bomb or attack could ever do by taking away the very freedoms that define America? Why would we allow the terrorists to win by doing to ourselves what they could never do and abandon the principles for which so many Americans today and through our history have fought and sacrificed? What has happened that the Senate is willing to turn America from a bastion of freedom into a caldron of suspicion ruled by a Government of unchecked power?

Under the Constitution, a suspension of the writ may only be justified during an invasion or a rebellion, when the public safety demands it. Six weeks after the deadliest attack on American soil in our history, the Congress that passed the PATRIOT Act rightly concluded that a suspension of the writ would not be justified. Yet now, six weeks before a mid-term election, the Bush-Cheney Administration and its supplicants here in Congress deem a complete abolition of the writ the highest priority – a priority so urgent that we are allowed no time to properly review, debate and amend a bill we first saw in its current form less that 72 hours ago.

In case you were wondering, the amendment was defeated by 3 votes shortly before noon in an almost completely partisan vote. The House has passed the DTA unamended and the Senate is expected to do so shortly. What a shameful day.