We're Holding them Over There, So We Don't Have to Give Them a Fair Trial Over Here

Court Backs Administration on Detainee Issue

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: February 20, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a federal appeals court said Tuesday in a ruling upholding a key provision of a law at the center of President Bush's anti-terrorism plan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that civilian courts no longer have the authority to consider whether the military is illegally holding foreigners.

Barring detainees from the U.S. court system was a key provision in the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a system to prosecute terrorism suspects.

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Under the commissions act, the government may indefinitely detain foreigners who have been designed as ''enemy combatants'' and authorizes the CIA to use aggressive but undefined interrogation tactics.

But most criticized by Democrats and civil libertarians was a provision that stripped U.S. courts of the authority to hear arguments from detainees who said they were being held illegally.

Attorneys argued that the detainees aren't covered by that provision and that the law is unconstitutional.

''The arguments are creative but not cogent. To accept them would be to defy the will of Congress,'' Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote.

On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he would accelerate efforts to pass a revision to the law that would restore detainees' legal rights.

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The Military Commissions Act is a historically depraved piece of legislation. Our fear of phantom terror has lead to the complicity of the American people in something that will be recorded as the low point in our American Empire. Basic morality requires that the Democratic Party ignores political expediency in making the eradication of this legitimizing of torture and political imprisonment a fundamental priority of their charter. Or else I fear what the rest of the world will think of us (or do to us) as result.