Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Get Your Shackles Here, Folks...They're Coming For YOU

About that new torture bill:
From the NY Times....
These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

•There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

Frist: "Gotta Love Those Taliban"

International Herald Tribune
U.S. Senate majority leader calls for efforts to bring Taliban into Afghan government
The Associated Press
MONDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2006
QALAT, Afghanistan U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.

The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished we'll be successful."

Frist said asking the Taliban to join the government was a decision to be made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida accompanying Frist, said negotiating with the Taliban was not "out of the question" but that fighters who refused to join the political process would have to be defeated.

"A political solution is how it's all going to be solved," he said.

In violence on Monday, a suicide bomber blew himself up next to a NATO convoy in the capital Kabul, wounding three soldiers and three civilians, while a roadside bomb in the eastern Paktia province killed three Afghan soldiers and wounded three others, officials said.

Afghanistan is being rocked by the worst outbreak of violence since the ouster of the Taliban regime in the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Militants have increasingly resorted to suicide attacks and roadside bombs.

Frist, who said he would announce whether he would run for the U.S. presidency in about a month, said he had hoped that the United States would be able to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan soon. But the 20,000 U.S. troops are still needed to help the 37-country coalition deal with an intensifying Taliban insurgency.

"We're going to need to stay here a long time," Frist said.

The senator said he had been warned to expect attacks in Afghanistan to increase. There appears to be an "unlimited flow" of Afghans and foreigners, he said, "willing to pick up arms and integrate themselves with the Taliban."

He said the only way to win in places like Qalat is to "assimilate people who call themselves Taliban into a larger, more representative government."

"Approaching counterinsurgency by winning hearts and minds will ultimately be the answer," Frist said. "Military versus insurgency one-to-one doesn't sound like it can be won. It sounds to me ... that the Taliban is everywhere."

Frist and Martinez flew to this dust-blown mountain city 350 kilometers (220 miles) south of Kabul during a one-day stop in Afghanistan on a regional tour that includes stops in Pakistan and Iraq.

The pair had intended to visit a new US$6.5 million (€5.1 million) hospital in Qalat built by the United Arab Emirates, but a group of wounded Taliban fighters were recuperating there, including a midlevel commander, and U.S. commander Lt. Col. Kevin McGlaughlin canceled the visit because of security concerns.

The senators saw firsthand the legendary hostility to outsiders of tribal southern Afghanistan. As Frist's helicopter landed, children just outside the base threw stones. And the senator's first act on Forward Operating Base Lagman was to pin a purple heart on the base's medic, Capt. Jacqueline King of Tinton Falls, New Jersey, who had been badly burned in a June suicide bombing.

"It's rough," King, 42, told reporters and members of Frist's staff. "They're not exactly thrilled to see us here."

Soldiers based in Qalat have been hit by more than 100 roadside bombs since arriving in April, said Air Force Capt. Kevin Tuttle.

The troops here monitor the headquarters for a provincial reconstruction team that has been repairing roads, mentoring doctors at the new hospital and operating a trade school that teaches nursing, welding, auto repair and plumbing.

Frist also chatted with fellow Tennessee surgeon Lt. Col. Steve Jarrard, 46, of Johnson City, in the base hospital.

"I really hope we're doing the right thing over here," Jarrard said, the late afternoon sun burnishing the neighboring mountain peaks. "It's too expensive. I've seen too many guys on the operating table. I try to bring them through and I'm not always successful."

Three NATO-led troops received minor injuries in the suicide bombing in Kabul. Maj. Luke Knittig, a military spokesman, said he could not disclose the nationalities of the soldiers. The attack came two days after another suicide bomber killed 12 people and wounded more than 40 outside Afghanistan's Interior Ministry.

In the southern province of Helmand, clashes on Sunday left 10 people dead, including five civilians, said Ghulam Muhiddin, the governor's spokesman.

The civilians were killed when their vehicle hit a freshly planted mine on a road usually used by NATO and Afghan security forces in Helmand's Musa Qala district, Muhiddin said.

Suspected Taliban on a motorbike, meanwhile, killed two policemen in Gereshk district, he said. Separately, NATO-led troops killed three militants in Nawzad district.