Stumble it!Leiter Reports: A Group Blog: Regime Change (Edmundson)
posted in Politics, Society, War by themaiden |Yesterday, I linked to a post about torture at The Allen Almanac; today Leiter Reports has a piece on the subject. Most of the article is a series of excerpts. I am requoting parts I find interesting and am providing links to the original sources.
The compromise legislation…authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.
The fundamental documents upon which our Nation was founded were drafted to prevent such behaviors. We went to war with England because that nation had policies such as this one. Jefferson provides a list of reasons for that war– the reasons for which we seem to have forgotten.
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
…
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
…
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
And let’s not forget the first on the list:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
An article in The Wall Street Journal differs from the article posted at The Allen Almanac, on the subject of water-boarding, so that is worth mentioning.
And Congress doesn’t seem to know what it has voted into law.
Congress doesn’t want to know what it’s bargaining away this week. In the Boston Globe this weekend, Rick Klein revealed that only “10 percent of the members of Congress have been told which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act.”
Nor does some of Congress want to know. What a staggering collapse of leadership.
Klein quotes Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican, as saying, “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” Evidently, “widely distributing such information could result in leaks.”
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