The Depublicans Strike Again

12 Democrats voted for to suspend the rights of habeas corpus. The rationale is that enemy combatants aren't covered by Constitutional protections.

What about the citizens and legal residents who are being detained? The problem with the justification of denying habeas corpus to enemy combatants is that it's left to the executive branch to decide just who these "enemy combatants" are. The bill is clear that these "enemy combatants" need not be engaged in any, you know, actual combat in order to be classified thus.

Even the good bits of this bill are an obscurantist fiction. The bill outlaws torture, while letting the President determine how suspects will be interrogated. Huh?

This bill continues the program of denying us the means of making our government accountable. Elaine Scarry's essay on The Patriot Act says it better than I can:

The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these outcomes would imperil democracy; together they not only injure the country but also cut off the avenues of repair.

This new bill also cuts off the avenues of repair. Without any adversarial process or any means of appeal, there's no way to rectify wrongs or even to see if wrongs have been committed. There are people who have been detained for five years with any judicial review.

Remember judicial review? That thing that keeps us from absolutism, martial law, etc? Remember that? Me neither.

If the terrorists really hate us for our freedoms, I guess they'll hate us a little less now.

Is that a victory?

Addendum: Perhaps my favorite part of the bill is the bit that gives retroactive immunity to the torturers. So the logic of the bill goes like this, I guess: We know you don't like it when we torture people, so we are going to make sure that we do it in private from now on. BUT we really need all those torturers to do the job, so let's just wink at the law so that we can set up our secret government in peace. M'kay?

And the Democrats say "yea."