The Light goes out on "The Shining City on a Hill"

So, the Republicans have managed to push through their disgraceful new bill that allows the US to torture prisoners without fear of prosecution in American courts and to deny those same prisoners any right to question their detainment in front of those same American courts.

Some Republicans sought to defend this barbarity:

“We are dealing with the enemy in war, not defendants in our criminal justice system,” said Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “In time of war it is not practical to apply the same rules of evidence that we apply in civil trials or courts martial for our troops.”

Mr Hunter seems to be ignoring the fact that the way a nation treats it's prisoners defines how civilised that nation is. And that includes how fair are the trials that any nation gives to people it detains.

Leading Democrats said the approach would result in government-sanctioned mistreatment of detainees.

Fellow Democrats said the measure could be interpreted by other nations as reducing America’s commitment to the rights of prisoners of war.

“When our moral standing is eroded, our international credibility is diminished as well,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, characterized the bill as the product of an administration that “has been relentless in its determination to legitimize the abuse of detainees.”

The stain on America's reputation by the passing of this bill will be impossible for most Americans to realise. The Republicans are not even attempting to hide what this bill actually means:

But Republicans argued repeatedly that the nation is facing a faceless and brutal enemy that lurks in the shadows, requiring a new way of thinking on the part of the United States and giving new importance to the ability to freely interrogate them.

The entire world will recognise this as what it is. A euphemism for torture. This is surely one of the darkest days in America's history. The day the light went out on Reagan's Shining City on a Hill.

Of course, like all Republican rifts, the rebellion of the "brave" Republican Senators who opposed this disgraceful legislation was predictably short-lived. As always, they fell into line very quickly.

Let us be very clear regarding what these Republicans have just legalised. Interrogation techniques that the rest of the civilised world regard as torture is now permitted in the US. People held on suspicion of terrorism, like the men at Guantanamo Bay - many of whom were subsequently released without charge - and cases like Maher Arar - the Canadian citizen sent to Syria to be tortured - will now have no right to challenge their imprisonment in American courts.

The Republicans once again, disgracefully, invoked the memory of 9-11 as they tore apart the ideals that made the US great.

House Republicans blocked Democrats from offering amendments, including one that would have extended the habeas corpus right to detainees. House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) said terrorism suspects have enough rights without habeas corpus, including the right to a lawyer, to be presumed innocent, to cross-examine witnesses and to collect evidence. "Let's bring justice before the eyes of the children and widows of Sept. 11," he implored on the House floor.

But Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said: "This is how a nation loses its moral compass, its identity, its values and, eventually, its freedom. . . . We rebelled against King George III for less restrictions on liberty than this." Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said the habeas corpus right is so fundamental that it "is un-American" to deny it to detainees held by U.S. forces.

As a British Lefty, I will admit that I have at times had great difficulty with some of America's actions across the globe, but I have never been anti-American. Indeed, quite the opposite. I believe the world needs America, but it needs the America that gave the world the Marshall Plan, the America that stood for higher ideals and a fairer planet.

With the passing of this legislation that America is lost to all of us. What is exceptional about an America that locks people up in Russian style Gulags and denies them the right to challenge their imprisonment? What is the difference between this America and rogue nations that routinely use torture?

If there is any difference, then it is one of degrees where once there was a chasm. Bush and the neo-cons have taken official US behaviour much nearer to that of the regimes that the US used to routinely condemn than even a British Lefty like myself would have believed possible.

And that's not just the US's loss, that's a loss for all of us.

Reagan must be turning in his grave.

"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses . . ."

John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella, 1630.

Click title for full article.

UPDATE:

There is a superb New York Times editorial on this subject that is a must read.

Some clips to give you a taster:

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

•There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Tags: US, Republican, Republicans, Detainee Bill, torture, Geneva Conventions, Article 3