Last week, the Bush administration’s “compromise” with Senate Republicans on detainees was bad enough. Now we learn that the Bush gang, with support from House Republicans, have quietly altered the deal, apparently making it slightly worse.
Republican lawmakers and the White House agreed over the weekend to alter new legislation on military commissions to allow the United States to detain and try a wider range of foreign nationals than an earlier version of the bill permitted, according to government sources.
Lawmakers and administration officials announced last week that they had reached accord on the plan for the detention and military trials of suspected terrorists, and it is scheduled for a vote this week. But in recent days the Bush administration and its House allies successfully pressed for a less restrictive description of how the government could designate civilians as “unlawful enemy combatants,” the sources said yesterday. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of negotiations over the bill.
The Bush administration believes anyone it labels an unlawful enemy combatant can be held indefinitely at military or CIA prisons. But what’s an “unlawful combatant”? According to administration’s latest language, it’s anyone who “has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States” or its military allies. (The original simply said “engaged in hostilities against the United States.”) With this more expansive definition, and with “supported” being a little vague, the Bush gang will have even more leeway.
Let’s also not forget that, as the WaPo noted, the administration’s latest definition “does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant.”
And where are Sens. for John Warner (R-Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)? According to the Post, Capitol Hill sources said “the three had accepted” the administration’s revised language.
And then there’s denying habeas corpus.
The Senate Judiciary Committee went through the motions of discussing the move yesterday, and heard quite a bit from legal experts.
Thomas P. Sullivan, a former United States attorney in Chicago who has represented detainees at Guantanamo, testified that it was “beyond my capacity to accept” that the Senate would push through a habeas provision “on the eve of elections” with so little public hearing.
“I believe that if this bill is passed with these habeas-stripping provisions in it, then after I am dead and the members of this Senate hearing are dead, an apology will be made,” Mr. Sullivan said, “just as we did for the incarceration of the Japanese citizens in the Second World War.”
“This is shameful,” he added, to the applause of protesters dressed in the orange of Guantanamo jumpsuits, “and it is momentous.”
As Slate’s Alexander Dryer noted, Sullivan added, “There was no lawyer given to the defendants. They didn’t speak English, most of them. They were young men who had no training in law. There were no rules of evidence applicable… Now, [do] you call that due process, Your Honor? Do you? … This is a historic moment in our time. To suspend the writ of habeas corpus without hearings, rushing it through just before elections, where people are afraid to vote against this bill because somebody on the other side is going to hold up a TV commercial and criticize them for it, is phony.”
Indeed, it is. Of course, that’s apparently isn’t enough to stop it.