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Habeas corpus

The Todd Feinburg Show – Thursday night 9 pm – 680 AM, Listen Live: http://www.toddradio.com/. Sponsored by the Center for Naturalism.

Habeas Corpus – sacred right or luxury than cannot be afforded during war?

This week Congress passed a bill which gives the president the right to detain foreign suspects deemed as enemy combatants indefinitely.

See below:

“On a cliffhanger vote, Senate Republicans on Thursday beat a key challenge to a bill setting rules for interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects shortly after President George W. Bush went to Capitol Hill urging them to deliver the bill. Voting 51-48, the Senate rejected an amendment that would have restored the rights of foreign suspects deemed as enemy combatants and mostly held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their detentions. That cleared a major hurdle and the Senate was expected to pass the bill later in the day and send it to Bush.”  Reuters: Bush urges senators to send him detainee bill

A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody. The writ is “the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.” Harris v. Nelson, 394 U.S. 286, 290-91 (1969).

This protection was considered so fundamental to the framers of the Constitution, that they included it in the first articles of the Constitution, unlike the Bill of Rights which were added later.  The writ of habeas corpus has only been suspended once in our nation’s history, by Lincoln during the Civil War.  It was reinstated shortly after the war.  The law passed in the House and expected to pass the Senate today are the first erosion of this right since then.

We will debate this point – Todd believes that it is acceptable to suspend the right for those who are trying to kill us.  I say, if we have evidence that they are dangerous, charge them with a crime and let the wheels of justice turn.

• who has identified them as enemy combatants?
• how can we assure that people aren’t wrongfully accused by others with malicious intent (jealous neighbor, guilty person seeking to deflect attention, spurned lover)?
• will the writ be re-established?  when?
• do our American values allow us to say that our rights are for us only and we can abuse others?
• are we truly more at risk now than ever before in our history?  if not, are we overreacting?

I believe that this is a dangerous turn of events, both for the principle (this is what we are defending), and for the practicality (we lose our moral authority, enemy combatants are less likely to surrender, rest of world less likely to support us).