Meanwhile

What should still be the biggest event of the entire Bush Administration, the culmination of the effort to centralize and expand executive, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, took all of 24 hours to become completely forgotten. Talk about Short Attention Span Theater!

You all remember the reason for this legislation. According to the President, it was because it was simply impossible to decipher the precise meaning of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. George simply couldn't get his head around the phrase "outrages upon human dignity." What does that mean? Like a metaphysics student working on his Heidegger paper, Bush sought to deconstruct each word, each syllable, in a search for meaning.

Of course, he's thrown around the phrase human dignity plenty of times before and never had a problem with it:

In the National Security Strategy of the United States, Section IIA:

The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere. These nonnegotiable demands of human dignity are protected most securely in democracies. The United States Government will work to advance human dignity in word and deed, speaking out for freedom and against violations of human rights and allocating appropriate resources to advance these ideals.

President Bush also made use of the term "human dignity" in his UN speech of September 21, 2004, suggesting that a belief in human dignity led to a concern for the problems of poverty, AIDS, human trafficking, and human cloning.

So I guess vocabulary and reading comprehension wasn't the real reason for setting up the commissions and restricting heabeas corpus and gaining the ability to declare anyone an unlawful enemy combatant. I guess there was more to it than that.

The answers lies, as I've stated, in lines like this from the final bill:

(b) Protection of Personnel- Section 1004 of the Detainee Treatment Act [DTA] of 2005 (42 U.S.C. 2000dd-1) shall apply with respect to any criminal prosecution that---

(1) relates to the detention and interrogation of aliens described in such section;

(2) is grounded in section 2441(c)(3) of title 18 [the War Crimes Act of 1996], United States Code; and

(3) relates to actions occurring between September 11, 2001, and December 30, 2005.

They knew they were on the hook for some very bad things. If you think what Mark Foley wanted to do to a 16 year-old was bad, try this on for size... and at least this kid was Al Qaeda, unlike so many at Guantanamo. Like this fucking cameraman:

Throughout, they are impossible to corroborate.

Sami claims he and other prisoners are beaten and that medical treatment is used as an inducement to cooperate with the interrogators - the US authorities strongly deny this.

But the Americans will not say why Sami is being held or why he has been interrogated more than 130 times.

They have not charged him with any offence, he has not been tried, he has not been sentenced - and therefore he has no hope of one day being freed, except at the whim of those holding him.

It is possible Sami could be some kind of terrorist.

But in months of talking to his family, relatives, lawyers, former detainees, and US sources including the commander of Guantanamo Bay, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, we have found absolutely no evidence which would suggest Sami is anything other than what he claims - "a man of peace."

By the way, later in this article is a chat with the rear admiral in charge of Gitmo, who is so deluded that he thinks that... well, here, just read it:

ear Admiral Harris is adamant that the people in his care are well looked after and are enemies of the United States.

He told me they use any weapon they can - including their own urine and faeces - to continue to wage war on the United States.

The suicide of three detainees, he reaffirmed to me, amounted to "asymmetrical warfare."

These are the "young professionals" who are doing such a great job getting intelligence that they need to be protected. He actually thinks that men so beaten that they're harmlessly flinging shit amount to "attacks on the United States." And indeed, through this bill, anyone seen to be attacking the United States, or giving material support to that effort, can be indefinitely detained without explanation or recourse. And just so you aren't lulled into thinking that a Rear Admiral like this isn't a 'rogue' running the show from Cuba without the support of the United States, how about this chilling statement:

Goldenberg is most personally engaged -- aside, perhaps, from his episodes on Paul Martin -- when he describes Chrétien's post-9/11 sessions with U.S. President George W. Bush, understanding that his boss's decision to decline a role in Iraq -- whether ultimately right or ultimately wrong -- would define Chrétien's foreign-policy legacy. He is as candid here, portraying the "West Texan," as he is elsewhere reserved. "If I catch anyone who leaks in my government," Bush tells Chrétien in March, 2002, "I would like to string them up by the thumbs -- the same way we do with prisoners in Guantanamo."

Welcome to Cambodia America, Mr. President!

And not only does the White House want to wall off themselves and their employees from prosecution for the obvious crimes they have committed, they want to wall off any challenges to the legislation:

No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever, including any action pending on or filed after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions under this chapter.

Well, that's just completely unconstitutional. You can't just write denial of judicial review into a bill. It's not possible. At least it wasn't. But the Bush Administration has a way of opening up the realm of the possible.