Habeas Shmabeas, apparently

So I’ve been somewhat busy with work lately and preparing talks and things and thus missed the signing into law of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 yesterday. I also kind of missed just how serious this is. Maybe everyone else didn’t, but in case you did, the president has suspended Habeas corpus for anyone he doesn’t feel it should apply to. He’s also determined that we’re only going to follow the portions of the Geneva convention that we think are important, and apparently we’re going to keep torturing detainees.

But let’s go back to that first point since it’s a pretty important one, actually. Keith Olbermann has a piece on it which you can see and read here and here (the video is better in the second link, but there’s a transcript in the first link). Habeas corpus is the right to demand to know why you’re imprisoned. Essentially it’s protection against arbitrary indefinite detention. It’s included in the Constitution (one of the very few rights that was included even before the Bill of Rights, actually) and has been considered a cornerstone of a justice system. Now, however, the idea is that if you are determined, by a committee or some other appropriate body (which could simply mean the President himself), to be an illegal enemy combatant, you no longer have this right. I guess the idea is that in the War on Terror we can’t possibly let it be known why we have arrested and detained these people and so we have to be able to detain them indefinitely. But once you don’t have this right, you don’t have any way of appealing to… anyone. Because you can’t even know why you’re being held, nor can you request to be released. Basically freedom stops being a right and becomes a privilege.

Now do I really think that Bush is going to start sending people to mass detention camps? Probably not. I doubt this will really signal a serious change in policy. Rather I think it’s a way for them to legalize what they’ve been doing all along and to prevent any of the current detainees to make any legal challenges to their detentions.

This does seem to be pretty clearly unconstitutional, incidentally, since that document states quite clearly: The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. I suppose the argument would be that the Constitution is just set in a pre-9/11 frame of thinking and that the War on Terror is an Invasion such that Public Safety requires it. Apparently there’s one swing vote in the Supreme Court who would decide this if it ends up there.

Anyway, I’m just horribly disheartened by this. I’m not really expecting to be sent off to Gitmo, obviously. But the administration doesn’t really have to justify it to anyone if they were to decide that they wanted to send me there. That is the scary thing.

EDIT: Reading the bill a little more closely, it is worded so that it does not allow for the arbitrary detention of US citizens, only foreigners. This does not actually make me feel any more at ease. While it’s not a generalized suspension of habeas corpus, it’s still a suspension thereof. And the fact that it’s ‘only’ for foreigners doesn’t really make it any less disturbing.

It’s just the idea that you can’t even ask why someone has been put in prison.