Habeus Corpus…as Anti-American as Discussion and Organic Apple Pie October 25, 2006

A week ago, the President of the United States signed into law a bill that will give him international powers which would have made Napoleon uneasy. The Military Commissions Act not only affirms the American Executive branch’s ability to detain whomever it pleases for an indefenite period of time, it has removed their right of Habeas Corpus as well. This means that any non-American citizen named as an enemy combattant can be detained and then denied the right to a trial, or even to be told why they have been detained and under what evidence. The imagined national security risk held as the reason for not giving detainees a fair trial including the laying of charges and showing of evidence does not supercede the real risk inherent in any suspension of habeas corpus. These are rights affirmed to all under the Geneva Conventions, and just like that…poof! they are gone in a not-so-magical penstroke of the President. The implications of this law are so farreaching and precedent-setting that it should have dominated media discourse for a rather long period of time. However, the days proceeding this attack on liberty saw a media fixation on the juicier story of Repbulican Rep. Mark Foley’s peculiar use of only one hand while instant-messaging his teen pages, and the calls from Republicans about how convenient it was that this story is released just before mid-term elections??? WHAT!? It is not as if the rest of the Republicans voted for Foley to do what he did (though many of them apparently knew about it), but they did indeed vote for the newest installment of this administration’s attack on civil liberties. I imagine that the Republicans should thank Foley for stealing the headlines and not permitting the kind of in depth discussion necessary to reveal the consequences of teh Military Commissions Bill. Long after Mark Foley’s name has fallen out of the lexicon of political observers, this bill will be looked back on as one of the greatest steps back in legislative history. There is one mainstream media anchor who understood the importance of the story, and Keith Olbermann‘s report is below…