A list regarding The Military Commissions Act of 2006:

  • John Rockefeller (D-WV)
  • Tim Johnson (D-SD)
  • Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
  • Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
  • Ben Nelson (D-NE)
  • Debbie Ann Stabenow (D-MI)
  • Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
  • Bill Nelson (D-FL)
  • Thomas Carper (D-DE)
  • Joseph Lieberman (I-CT)
  • Ken Salazar (D-CO)
  • Mark Pryor (D-AR)

This is the list of democratic Senators that voted FOR the enactment of this bill in 2006, and the list of Senators (who are now part of the majority) upon whose shoulders the responsibility now falls to restore Habeas Corpus.

As Glenn Greenwald so perfectly puts it on Salon.com…

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is, without question, the single worst law enacted during the Bush presidency, and is one of the most destructive laws passed in the last several decades. It is not merely a bad law. It vests in the President the power to detain people indefinitely with no meaningful opportunity to contest the government’s accusations. That is the very power the Founders sought first and foremost to prohibit.

More significantly, whether a country permits its political leaders to imprison people arbitrarily and with no process is one of the few defining attributes dividing free and civilized countries from lawless tyrannies. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it in his 1789 letter to Thomas Paine: “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” To vest the President with the power to imprison people indefinitely with no charges is fundamentally to transform the type of country we are.

The administration sought to turn the debate over this bill into a partisan issue while claiming that the prisoners, including innocent ones, at Guantanamo Bay do not deserve a hearing. The administration also claimed that the burden of proof fell on the defendant to prove their innocence. Anyone who thought otherwise was declared a friend of the terrorists. As you can see from the votes above, this effort was fairly successful.

Currently, there are as many as half a dozen bills on the floor of the House and Senate that would restore the fundamental rights of Habeas Corpus and rescind the powers of a King that were granted to W. Bush last year. One of them is a DoD budget authorization bill, but the Chairman of the House Armed services Committee, Ike Skelton, has so far refused to add the Habeas Corpus restoration provision to that bill. Certainly, Ike is worried that such a provision would cause the thinker-in-chief to veto a larger bill. But one would hope that the republicans in congress would have enough of a backbone to recognize that it is time to stand on their principles, without voting out of fear of being painted as a terrorist lover, and have a little faith that the American people will be able to recognize it when they override the I-want-all-the-power veto from the “commander guy”.

Nowhere in the world is this kind of power more hypocritical to our foundation as a country than in the United States, or at least we would like to think so. As Greenwald cited in his article…

As but one of the countless heinous examples of what this law authorizes, review the plight of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who, in 2001, was living with his wife and five children in the U.S. legally — as a computer science graduate student at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois — when he was detained and then charged with making false statements when he was questioned as part of the 9/11 investigation.

Al-Marri vehemently denied the accusations, and his criminal trial was scheduled for July, 2003. But the trial never happened, because President Bush, one month before it was to begin, declared him an “enemy combatant,” leading to the dismissal of the charges in court and his transfer to a military prison, where he has remained ever since — indefinitely — with no opportunity to contest the charges or to prove his innocence.

…or opportunity to ask the government to prove his guilt. This is the kind of behavior that the Military Commissions Act makes perfectly legal, without any forum for questioning it. I don’t know about everyone else, but this doesn’t even make me feel any safer, much less have any tangible positive effect of that nature.

In fact, like most everything else this administration has done in the name of terror, I think it has made us less safe. Holding prisoners without access to courts does nothing more than feed a terrorist’s propaganda machine. Much like Iraq, it increases their ability to recruit and provides easy access to a wider audience of impressionable individuals that they will easily sway in their direction. It also increases the risk to our military by setting a precedent that other governments could use to justify the detainment of American troops, civilians, or foreign nationals in their country without charges or appeal for an indefinite amount of time. Doing such a thing would be perfectly legal and okay, according to the principles and reasoning of the current administration.

The president signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 on October 17th. As of this post, it has been 7 months too long that we have allowed one man the kind of power that our founders were seeking to escape. It’s long past time to require that our government live up to the principles that have made this a great nation and restore Habeas Corpus.

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