For five years the Bush administration has waged a war of terror -- a war to make Americans afraid. In the name of terror President Bush has brought us secret courts, secret jails, secret surveillance and extraordinary renditions.
But it is with Bush's signing of the Military Commissions Act on Oct. 17 that we have the culmination of the hypocrisy and manipulation of this administration. After the show of Senators McCain, Graham and Warner and the failed habeas corpus amendment of Senator Specter, Congress gave Bush the act that he wanted. Bush is able to define torture secretly. Bush, as authorizing agent, is granted immunity along with the interrogators for past, present and future war crimes. Bush signed at a table bearing his campaign slogan of "Protecting America."
"We will look back on this day as a stain on our nation's history," said Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold. "It allows the government to seize individuals on American soil and detain them indefinitely with no opportunity to challenge their detention in court..."
While you may not worry about "some foreigner" being imprisoned indefinitely with "harsh" interrogation, will you accept it for yourself or your fellow Americans? Congress was in such a hurry to campaign with their new tool, that I wonder if they read it!
In an interview about the expansion of the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant," constitutional authority Jonathan Turley agreed that both Bush and Rumsfeld could declare anybody, citizen or not, innocent or not, to be an unlawful enemy combatant who could be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial. He added that giving to an organization that Bush deems connected is cause to be considered an enemy combatant.
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Where is the outcry at the destruction of due process and checks and balances? Thomas Paine wrote, "He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression."
Bush has said, "9/11 changed everything." I disagree. Oct. 17 changed everything when Bush signed the act that revokes over 200 years of American principles and values and gives Bush despotic powers.
Barbara M. Edwards
Spicer
