The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo 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.
From The NYT. The question being, when did giving Big Government more power become a Conservative value? When did the idea that you have to prove someone guilty of a crime before you lock them up and throw away the key become a radical idea rather than the bedrock of the US legal system? More importantly, why are GOPers only concerned about the rights of the accused when those accused are Rove, Delay, Cheney and Frist?
The Senate voted 82-9 for director of National Intelligence John Negroponte to provide Congress’ intelligence committees with a classified “full accounting” on any clandestine prison or detention facility run by the U.S. government at any location where terrorism suspects were being held.
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Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said most lawmakers learned about the covert prisons from the newspaper and said his amendment was to “reassert congressional oversight.”
From reuters. Thank you John Kerry for taking a stand against illegal secret prisons. And that 82-9 vote gives me some comfort that the Republicans in office now are not all insane. Clearly the leadership in the White House is the real problem.
Frist and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) surprised both Roberts and House intelligence committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) with a joint letter demanding a House-Senate inquiry after the Nov. 2 publication of a Post article detailing a web of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, maintained by the CIA to detain suspected terrorists.
From the WaPo. So on Planet GOP, the problem isn’t that the CIA is running potentially illegal secret prisons where torture may occur; the problem is that this revelation might embarrass them.
Maybe the GOP thinks that feudalism, despotism and sadism are traditional American values; rather than those radical values of respecting human rights, rule of law and due process.
