The Mengele Act

The passage of the Torture Act Military Commissions Act continues to be a shame on America’s history and a danger to our civil liberties daily. Take, for example, the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri.

In 2001, al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was in the United States legally, on a student visa. He was a computer science graduate student at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he had earned an undergraduate degree a decade earlier. In Peoria, he lived with his wife and five children.

In December, 2001 he was detained as a “material witness” to suspected acts of terrorism and ultimately charged with various terrorism-related offenses, mostly relating to false statements the FBI claimed he made as part of its 9/11 investigation. Al-Marri vehemently denied the charges, and after lengthy pre-trial proceedings, his trial on those charges was scheduled to begin on July 21, 2003.

But his trial never took place, because in June, 2003 — one month before the scheduled trial — President Bush declared him to be an “enemy combatant.” As a result, the Justice Department told the court it wanted to turn him over to the U.S. military, and thus asked the court to dismiss the criminal charges against him, and the court did so (the dismissal was “with prejudice,” meaning he can’t be tried ever again on those charges). Thus, right before his trial, the Bush administration simply removed Al-Marri from the jurisdiction of the judicial system — based solely on the unilateral order of the President — and thus prevented him from contesting the charges against him.

Instead, the administration immediately transferred al-Marri to a miltiary prison in South Carolina (where the administration brings its “enemy combatants” in order to ensure that the executive-power-friendly 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over all such cases). Al-Marri was given the “Padilla Treatment” — kept in solitary confinement, denied all contact with the outside world, including even his own attorneys, not charged with any crimes, and given no opportunity to prove his innocence. Instead, the Bush administration simply asserted the right to detain him indefinitely without so much as charging him with anything.

Last month, Congress endorsed this behavior and expressly vested the President with the power of indefinite, unreviewable detentions when it enacted the so-called Military Commissions Act of 2006.

If this doesn’t shock you into action or revolt your sense of justice and what it means to be American, then nothing will. As Greenwald notes, the US Department of Justice is now officially claiming that immigrants seized on our shores can be held indefinitely, with no recourse to any element of our judicial system. No habeas corpus, no open trials, no advocates for their cause, no fair trials.

I’m proud to be an American.

I have no idea what this country I’m currently residing in should be called.