CONSTITUTION OVERTURNED BY HR 6166

Enemy Combatant
Concerned Citizen

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

 Still think America is the ‘Land of the Free’? We’re free to do as we’re told. Effective September 27, American citizens who dissent and protest the unconstitutional practices of the Bush Administration are subject to be labeled ‘enemy combatants’ and indefinitely detained and tortured without due process of law.

 While our mass media syndicates were distracting you with the Mark Foley pedophilia scandal, the House discreetly passed House Resolution 6166: The Military Commissions Act of 2006, also known as “the torture bill”. 219 Republicans and 34 Democrats voted to strip basic human and legal rights from U.S. citizens.

 More specially, HR 6166 will effectively:

 give the President amnesty for committing war crimes.

• provide amnesty to war criminals in the military.
• revoke habeas corpus rights, which allows U.S. military detainees a right to appeal charges.
• render the Geneva Conventions null and void.
• allow the police to search your home without a warrant.
• revoke legal protection from self-incrimination.
• eliminate the idea of rape and sexual assault as torture.
• allow the government to use testimony extracted through torture.
• allow the government to imprison people based on secret evidence without telling them the charges.
• remove the right to cross-examine witnesses.
• allow the records of trials to be kept secret from the public.
• take away the right to a speedy trial.
• enable trials to begin before a thorough investigation.
• allow people to be put on trial in front of a military tribunal, even if they aren’t in the military.
• create a secret committee appointed by Bush and Rumsfeld that has the power to declare any person an ‘enemy combatant’, depriving them of basic human rights, legal rights, or an appeal.
• label a legal resident of the U.S. ‘legal’ and ‘illegal enemy combatant’ subject to indefinite detainment without an appeal.
• label a foreign citizen living in their own country ‘illegal enemy combatant’ subject to indefinite detainment without an appeal.

 

Clever. The bill both permits the Bush Administration to violate international rules of war and protects them from any repercussions for doing so by prohibiting the court from striking down the entire Act preemptively, and retroactively, ex post facto defines new crimes and punishments. Therefore, this legislation provides amnesty for unreliable WMD and 9/11 data extracted from illegal simulated death-burials in Egypt and the treatment of Guantanamo Bay POWs during 2001-06 which failed to meet Geneva requirements. Can we expect U.N. intervention? Not likely, especially considering the U.S. retains the power to veto.

 Anyone who donates to a charity considered by the Bush Administration as a ‘terrorist organization’ could be declared an ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ and imprisoned indefinitely. In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents. Anyone who speaks out against the government’s policies is subject to the same treatment in our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

 The dissidents of today are tomorrow’s political prisoners. Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer warned Americans, “They better watch what they say, watch what they do.” And if they don’t? No problem. Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR announced on January 24 that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps in the U.S.

 Still not worried? Please to take the time to consider why the Bush Administration felt it necessary to pass HR 6166, destroy our Constitution, and legalize torture and war crimes. The Founding Fathers understood that the biggest threat to a country comes not from an external enemy, but from the government itself. “They hate our freedoms,” President Bush is so fond of saying. With bills such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the Military Commissions Act, doesn’t it make you wonder who the real terrorists are?