News that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is negotiating with the White House on legislation to create a framework for handling terrorism detainees has some civil rights groups alarmed at the prospect of indefinite detention without trial being encoded into US law.
The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut reported Wednesday that Graham, who sits on the Senate’s Armed Services, Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, “has submitted draft legislation to the White House in an effort to create a broad framework for handling terrorism suspects, mapping out proposals that appeal to the administration and others that do not.”
Since when did we the people decide America should become the next Argentina under the Military Junta or Chile under Pinochet? Or, Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for that matter? How soon will “terrorism suspects” be expanded to other groups the next time a Republican is installed as President? And don’t tell me the Courts will stop this. I don’t trust the Roberts’ court at all when it comes to protecting the rights and liberties of individuals (as opposed to corporations).
Anyone in the Obama administration who is seriously considering this “negotiation” with Graham should remember that whatever political benefits may flow from it in the Fall (and those are highly doubtful to bear fruit in my view) will be small compared to the long term consequences of summarily constricting and deleting our essential constitutional protections. You would think we learned nothing from the excesses of the Bush administration and the past use of “bipartisanship” by Republicans over the last 14 months as a smokescreen to attack Democrats.
This stinks people. Try the terror suspects in court or release them. No more banana republic excuses for “indefinite detentions” of people who we often purchased from bounty hunters and then often tortured (and sometimes killed) to gain negligible and more often false intelligence.
