I (Heart) Internet Cafes

It's allowed me to get back online as I wait for my hotel room during my mini-vacation. (apartment's being fumigated. Major annoyance)

So I want to urge you to contact your Senators and ask them to support Jeff Bingaman's amendment which would overturn the suspension of habeas corpus for detainees at Guantanamo). We simply cannot have a bunch of ghost prisoners without rights under our permanent care and control. This is especially true since the Supreme Court has already ruled last year that denying the right to trial to prisoners under US control is unconstitutional.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, a former Navy JAG lawyer who should know better, pushed through this amendment, and the fact that he would simultaneously do so while being one of the leaders of the anti-torture amendment shows a real contradiction. In Graham's view, the US should accede to federal and international laws prohibiting torture, but allow prisoners to languish at Guantanamo without legal rights. How would anyone know that they're being tortured then? It seems to me that these amendments cancel each other out. And McCain voted for the habeas corpus suspension as well. Puzzling.

This New York Times editorial spells out the danger of this amendment:

But what started as an admirable attempt by Senator John McCain to stop the torture and abuse of prisoners has become a tangle of amendments and back-room deals that pose a real danger of undermining the sacred rule that the government cannot just lock people up forever without saying why. On Thursday, the Senate passed a measure that would deny foreigners declared to be "unlawful enemy combatants" the right to a hearing under the principle known as habeas corpus, which dates to Magna Carta [...]

Fewer than 200 of the approximately 500 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have filed petitions for habeas corpus hearings. They are not seeking trials, merely asking why they are being held. And according to government and military officials, an overwhelming majority should not have been taken prisoner in the first place. These men have been in isolation for nearly four years, subject to months of interrogation. Do they really have anything left to say?

The habeas petitions are not an undue burden. And in any case, they are a responsibility that this nation has always assumed to ensure that no one is held prisoner unjustly.

The problem in creating one exemption to habeas corpus, no matter how narrow, is that it invites the creation of more exemptions. History shows that in the wrong hands, the power to jail people without showing cause is a tool of despotism. Just consider Natan Sharansky or Nelson Mandela. The administration hates that sort of comparison, so we wonder why it keeps inviting it. Just the other day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said with a sneer that the Guantánamo prisoners on hunger strikes had gone "on a diet where they don't eat" for publicity.

This all goes back to who we are as a country. Do we stick with the principles of constitutional democracy that have served us so well for centuries, or do we revert to the tools of tyrants and despots, the techniques of secret prisons and torture chambers and rights for some but not all?

Sen. Bingaman's Amendment (S. AMDT 2517), which you can find extensive information about here, would roll back the suspension of habeas corpus and solidify this bedrock American principle. Call your Senator and make sure we don't backslide into some very dangerous territory. Uphold American values. Support the amendment.