[NetBehaviour] Bush signs torture bill; Americans lose essential freedom.

[marc]

Bush signs torture bill; Americans lose essential freedom.

George W. Bush got what he wanted, ostensibly as a tool in his unfocused 
"war on terror": By signing into law the Military Commissions Act of 
2006, Bush has made it legal for the C.I.A. to continue operating 
torture facilities in undisclosed, foreign countries, and for the writ 
of habeas corpus to be suspended for individuals who are designated 
"enemy combatants" against the U.S. (Designated by whom? That question 
remains unanswered.) The law also "establishes military tribunals that 
would allow some use of evidence obtained by coercion [that is, 
torture], but would give defendants access to classified evidence being 
used to convict them." (Reuters)

The provisions of Bush's new torture law mean that Americans have lost 
the key, constitutional right on which Anglo-American criminal law (and 
criminal-law procedures in true democracies in general) is founded; 
that's the basic right of an individual to know why he or she is being 
apprehended and detained. Now, technically, as in Stalin's Soviet Union, 
Hitler's Germany, Mao's China or Pol Pot's Cambodia, anyone labeled an 
"enemy combatant" - again, by whom; by Bush? - can be whisked away and 
never heard from again. That kind of authority, in the hands of corrupt 
or untruthful politicians, may or may not be an effective tool in some 
kind of "war on terror," but it certainly can be a useful tool when it 
comes to silencing their opponents.

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