On 24/10/2006, at 11:44 AM, Dan Minette wrote:
Meanwhile, you spend 4 years in a jail, possibly in Syria, and get
tortured. Great.
Charlie
Charlie, why are you mixing up cases of the treatment Syrian/Canadian
citizen who was sent to Syria (under the well established legal
precedent)?
I'm not mixing them up, I'm saying that now, while you are waiting
for your status as a citizen or otherwise and therefore the
applicability of the Military Commissions Act to your case to be
determined, there is no personal right to appeal to the courts, and
you can be detained anywhere they choose, and you can be tortured
legally, and there is a window under the new act which will take a
while to close, under which citizens of the US could be detained.
What I'm trying to argue is certainly not that Bush did the right
thing in
these cases. Rather, that he didn't break any new ground. In
particular,
the law we are discussing breaks no new ground. All the problems
that could
be posed by this law were already better established in precident.
...and you are still missing the crucial part of the new act.
"`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly
detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting
such determination."
The last bit is the crucial bit. While you're awaiting determination,
you can't file habeus corpus (or petition any court for any
reason...). Once the determination is made, then you can appeal in
court. But there's no way to put a time limit on a Combatant Status
Review Tribunal hearing. So, in this period, you can be illegally
detained indefinitely.
Charlie
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