You could well be an innocent person, even a teenager, just going about your daily business, but you wander into the wrong place at the wrong time. You are captured by foreign soldiers and thrown into a detention camp. You are treated like a criminal, although you did nothing wrong. Your family has no idea where you are. You are not allowed to see a lawyer. And you are not charged with anything. You just rot in that prison cell, month after month, year after year.
The Senate just told us that this sort of thing is perfectly fine.
Of course, if their own loved ones were to be captured and detained by a foreign government, I'm sure that these Senators would be singing a very different tune, wouldn't they?
From the New York Times via truthout.org:
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The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts.
The vote, 49 to 42, on an amendment to a military budget bill by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, comes at a time of intense debate over the government's treatment of prisoners in American custody worldwide, and just days after the Senate passed a measure by Senator John McCain banning abusive treatment of them.
If approved in its current form by both the Senate and the House, which has not yet considered the measure but where passage is considered likely, the law would nullify a June 2004 Supreme Court opinion that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had a right to challenge their detentions in court.
Nearly 200 of roughly 500 detainees there have already filed habeas corpus motions, which are making their way up through the federal court system. As written, the amendment would void any suits pending at the time the law was passed.
The vote also came in the same week that the Supreme Court announced that it would consider the constitutionality of war crimes trials before President Bush's military commissions for certain detainees at Guantanamo Bay, a case that legal experts said might never be decided by the court if the Graham amendment became law.
Five Democrats joined 44 Republicans in backing the amendment, but the vote on Thursday may only be a temporary triumph for Mr. Graham. Senate Democrats led by Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico said they would seek another vote, as early as Monday, to gut the part of Mr. Graham's measure that bans Guantanamo prisoners from challenging their incarceration by petitioning in civilian court for a writ of habeas corpus.
So it is possible that some lawmakers could have it both ways, backing other provisions in Mr. Graham's measure that try to make the Guantanamo tribunal process more accountable to the Senate, but opposing the more exceptional element of the legislation that limits prerogatives of the judiciary. Nine senators were absent for Thursday's vote.
Mr. Graham said the measure was necessary to eliminate a blizzard of legal claims from prisoners that was tying up Department of Justice resources, and slowing the ability of federal interrogators to glean information from detainees that have been plucked off the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere.
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