New Laws For Bush Administration And The CIA Prisons

The high court rejected Bush’s military commissions, which were set to begin trying detainees at Guantánamo, because they violated basic due process principles laid down by the US Constitution—allowing the use of secret evidence, coerced testimony and hearsay evidence, and even permitting trials to be held in the absence of the defendant. The court also declared that all those held by the US had to be treated in accordance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The administration’s bill on the military commissions retains the trial procedures rejected by the Supreme Court and seeks to evade the court’s injunction regarding Common Article 3 by “clarifying” its meaning in such as way as to emasculate it and allow cruel and abusive methods of interrogation. In a September 14 editorial, the Washington Post summed up the substance of the administration’s bill as “legislation that would authorize the CIA to engage in interrogation tactics the world understands as torture, rewrite America’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions, and authorize trials whose fairness many people at home and abroad will question.” Last Thursday, four Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee—Chairman John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine—refused to back Bush’s bill and instead backed an alternate, somewhat less brazenly repressive measure, which was passed by the committee with the support of its Democratic members. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/bush-18.shtml

Note: http://www.wsws.org/art...