Bush signs anti-terrorism lawfrom news.com.au: US President George W. Bush has signed a controversial law legalising secret CIA prisons, harsh interrogation practices and military trials as weapons against suspected terrorists...
The measure was drafted in response to a US Supreme Court ruling in June that Mr Bush had overstepped his powers and breached the Geneva Conventions by setting up special war crimes tribunals for “war on terror” suspects...
Since the opening of a US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the September 11 terrorist attacks, not one of the several hundred prisoners held there has been afforded a trial...
Detainees would be deprived of all legal recourse to protest the conditions of their detention.
The American Civil Liberties Union in a statement called “the new law one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history”.
But Mr Bush hailed the law as “one of the most important pieces of legislation in the war on terror”.
“This Bill will allow the Central Intelligence Agency to continue its program for questioning key terrorist leaders and operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man believed to be the mastermind of the September the 11th, 2001 attacks on our country.”
military commissions law elicits strong emotions
from cns news: President Bush Tuesday signed into law the much contested Military Commissions Act of 2006, the law aimed at defining how suspects in the war against terrorism will be interrogated and prosecuted. Despite much criticism, the president insisted that the act would provide a just response to those accused of terrorism...
Bush repeatedly stressed that the bill is just, not simply an unprecedented move of a power hungry, war mongering executive branch, as some have argued...
Despite Bush's insistence that the act provides a fair, legal and just response to terrorists, critics of the law say it is unjust, unconstitutional and un-American.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow - director of the Shalom Center, a network for Jewish thought, is one of those critics.
"It seems quite possible that the president thinks he has the power to take any person, citizen of the United States or not, inside the territory of the United States or not, and declare that person an enemy combatant. And since habeas corpus and other access to the courts under the law is presumably denied, his decision would be final," Waskow told Cybercast News Service.
Waskow added that such authority is "vile, disgusting," and violates the U.S. Constitution. "It violates the solemn treaties of the United States from both a religious perspective and the perspective of a democratic society itself. Totally unacceptable," said Waskow.
The Shalom Center is affiliated with the Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture (WRRCAT) which released a statement saying that the legislation "deeply shames America" and that members of the group were "prepared to commit acts of civil disobedience" in order to deliver a statement to the president.
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