Update: I’ve bolded key passages in the bill below the fold to whet your appetites.
My Fellow Prisoners, High-Value Detainees, and Unprivileged Enemy Belligerents,
I would like to introduce to you the legislation that gets our accelerator stuck on the floor mat on the road to full tilt boogie, banana republic-style dictatorship, Senators John McCain’s and Joe Lieberman’s Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.
This proposed legislation manages not just to “twist” the Constiution, but a does the physically impossible inward-rotating armstand flying forward back double reverse three-and-a-half somersault pike with a synchronized hand-in-butt-tuck. The essence of the bill aims to completely destroy the concept and practice of due process, shoot America in the face, and throw it straight off the cliff.
I suspect that this bill was written with indefinitely, and illegally detained Guantanamo prisoners in mind, i.e., to keep them from being prosecuted in civilian criminal courts, but the scope of the language goes well beyond those poor suffering bastards and explicitly includes YOU, my fellow high-value detainees. Someone needs to take a flamethrower to this odious piece of garbage.
Any person suspected of being an “enemy belligerent,” explicitly including U.S. citizens, can be detained without Miranda warnings, interrogated, and be imprisoned indefinitely at the whim of interrogation groups, the FBI, CIA, DNI, Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, “appropriate committees of Congress,” and the President, with the President making any final calls in cases of dispute. Any alien determined to be a “high-value detainee,” the law would explicitly prohibit Article III jurisdiction, that is, it would prohibit the judicial branch from any consideration of due process requirements. As a bonus, the bill would also essentially usurp any local, state, and federal law enforcement for military purposes. Thus the President trumps the judicial branch on due process for non-citizens in all circumstances. However, during a time of war, the President trumps justice on due process for citizens, as well:
SEC. 5. DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL OF UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS. An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article 5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities.