http://musliminsuffer.wordpress.com/
bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
San Francisco Chronicle
________________________________________________________________________
Detainee bill lifts Bush's power to new heights
President now has legal authority even courts can't challenge
Scott Shane, Adam Liptak, New York Times
Saturday, September 30, 2006
(09-30) 04:00 PDT Washington -- With the final passage through Congress
of the detainee treatment bill, President Bush achieved a signal victory
Friday, shoring up with legislation his determined campaign against
terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts.
Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers that Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law
gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it
allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and
interrogate them -- albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment --
beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded
criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners.
Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over
terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this
summer in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of
White House policy. It does, however, grant detainees brought before
military commissions limited protections initially opposed by the White
House. The bill, which cleared a final procedural hurdle in the House on
Friday and is likely to be signed into law next week by Bush, does more
than allow the president to determine the meaning and application of the
Geneva Conventions; it strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear
challenges to his interpretation.
And it broadens the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" to include
not only those who fight the United States, but also those who have
"purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United
States." The latter group could include those accused of providing
financial or other indirect support to terrorists, human rights groups
say. The designation can be made by any "competent tribunal" created by
the president or secretary of defense.
In very specific ways, the bill is a rejoinder to the Supreme Court's
Hamdan ruling, in which several justices said the absence of
congressional authorization was a central flaw in the administration's
approach. The new bill solves that problem, legal experts said.
"I think he can reasonably be confident that this statute answers the
Supreme Court and puts him back in a position to prevent another attack,
which is the goal of interrogation," said Douglas Kmiec, a conservative
legal scholar at the Pepperdine University School of Law.
But lawsuits challenging the bill are inevitable, and critics say
substantial parts of it may well be rejected by the Supreme Court.
Overall, the legislation reallocates power among the three branches of
government, taking authority away from the judiciary and handing it to
the president.
Bruce Ackerman, a critic of the administration and a professor of law
and political science at Yale University, sharply criticized the bill
but agreed that it strengthened the White House position.
"The president walked away with a lot more than most people thought,"
Ackerman said. He said the bill "further entrenches presidential power"
and allows the administration to declare even a U.S. citizen an unlawful
combatant subject to indefinite detention. "And it's not only about
these prisoners," Ackerman said. "If Congress can strip courts of
jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial
independence is threatened."
Even if the Supreme Court decides it has the power to hear challenges to
the new law, the Bush administration has gained a crucial advantage. In
adding a congressional imprimatur to a comprehensive set of procedures
and tactics, lawmakers explicitly endorsed measures of the sort that in
some other eras had been achieved by executive fiat. Earlier Supreme
Court decisions have suggested that the president and Congress acting
together in the national security arena can be an all but unstoppable
force.
The debate over the limits of torture and the rules for military
commissions dominated discussion of the bill until this week. Only in
the last few days has broad attention turned to its redefinition of
"unlawful enemy combatant" and its ban on habeas corpus petitions that
suspects have traditionally used to challenge their incarceration.
Law professors will stay busy for months debating the implications. The
most outspoken critics have compared the law's sweeping provisions to
dark chapters in history, comparable to the passage of the Alien and
Sedition Acts in the fragile years after the nation's founding and the
internment of Japanese Americans in the midst of World War II.
Conservative legal experts, by contrast, said critics can no longer
maintain that the Bush administration is guilty of unilateral executive
overreaching. Congressional approval can cure many ills, Justice Robert
Jackson wrote in his seminal concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube vs
Sawyer, the 1952 case that struck down President Harry Truman's
unilateral seizure of the nation's steel mills during the Korean War.
Supporters of the law, in fact, say that its critics will never be
satisfied. "For years they've been saying that we don't like Bush doing
things unilaterally, that we don't like Bush doing things piecemeal,"
said David Rivkin, a former Justice Department official in the
administrations of Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush.
How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is
used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If major terrorist plots
in the United States are uncovered -- and surely if one succeeds -- it
may vindicate the congressional decision to give the government more
leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.
But if the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy,
the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill.
source:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
f=/c/a/2006/09/30/MNGNKLFO3P1.DTL
===
-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Ajaklah teman dan saudara anda bergabung ke milis Media Dakwah.
Kirim email ke: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/media-dakwah/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/media-dakwah/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
