Be Afraid

[amari_z]

On Monday, the government made its first attempt to use the recently passed Military Commissions Act against a person detained on U.S. soil. See here.

Among many other things, the law basically strips U.S. immigrants of their right to challenge their detention in U.S. court, if they are designated by the administration as an "enemy combatant." In other words, if you are not a U.S. citizen, even if you are in the U.S. legally, even if you are a permanent resident with a green card and have been living in the U.S. for decades, the government has given itself the power to detain you unilaterally at its whim for as long as it wants and has stripped you of the right to challenge its actions in any civilian court.

Comments

[darklyscarlett.livejournal.com]

Or as my aunt says, you can be disappeared. I can't believe it's only 2006; it's tough to bear witness to all of this and not be able to do much. Two more effin' years...

BTW, did you see this piece in The Times over the weekend? The weird thing is that this is legislation like what we have is being proposed in traditionally liberal, pro-immigration countries like The Netherlands.

[amari-z.livejournal.com]

Sadly, they were disappearing people before, but now it's legal. Freaking federal courts had better strike this thing down, otherwise they can just hand in their robes to the White House and go home.

I am also sadly not convinced that the dems will do anything about this travesty of a law (or any of the other "security" laws). Oh, they may poke at Bush on the wiretapping thing, but actually passing legislation that reverses these "tools" for the war on terror? I don't think they have the guts to stand up to the way the Republicans will attack them--not with a presidential election coming up (and besides, the majority of the American public doesn't even seem to care about the civil liberties issues--they voted out the Republicans because of Iraq not because Bush has been systematically eviscerating the Constitution). But I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

Yeah, I saw that article. The immigration laws are really a mess, and have been long before the war on terror thing, which just stepped up the idiocy level. In my family, who came to the US over the last 40 years or so, everyone of the holdouts were scared into getting US citizenship during the Gingrich years. I remember my parents having arguments about it--my mom had been resisting changing her citizenship since she married my dad, but she finally gave in at that point.