What a Mess.

So I just go away for a little while, and I come back to find that the Senate is seriously debating doing away with habeas corpus, and the President is actually threatening to veto a budget bill because it would re-assert that torture is illegal, while he simultaneously peddles the sadly-now-fictional story that "we don't torture" in public statements. What's up with that?!

At the same time, concerned that the tissue of lies that lead to war has suddenly started getting exposure in the media, W's aggressive response that involves flying all over the world and periodically making statements that consist of lies about the lies. Have things at the White House disintegrated so badly that the best they can do is the rhetorical equivalent of "Gee, ma, everyone else was doin' it!", and a quickly disproved one at that? Apparently so.

Let's start with the end of habeas corpus. Personally, I'm the kind of guy who believes that preventing governments from having the right to throw people in prisons for no reason, and to go without needing to tell anyone about it, or to ever let the prisoners go, is a fundamental part of civilized society. Apparently there are Senators who aren't so sure.

Before you do anything else, go read the series of postings at Obsidian Wings on this subject. And should you feel a moment's hesitation, consider this:

If there is not enough time for you to even read all these posts--how in the hell is one hour on Thursday, and maybe a few more hours tomorrow, enough time for the Senate to deliberate on this bill? Why on earth is this being pushed through on an appropriations bill, with no hearings, no debate, on the strength of arguments that are (deliberately or inadvertantly) quite misleading? When the Senators providing the margin of victory seem unaware of some key facts and of the legal implications of what they're doing? We're talking about habeas corpus here. We're talking about indefinite detention under conditions that have prompted a large number of suicide attempts. We're talking about serious charges of abuse. We're talking about human beings, some of whom are terrorists and some of whom aren't--some of whom even the pathetic CSRT process has determined are innocent. Could we maybe wait a few weeks, hold a hearing or two, have some real negotiations?

Third: if you agree, if not with our conclusions, than at least that this is maybe important and complicated enough that we could stand to wait a few weeks, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman's S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042. And please consider asking other people to do the same.

OK. Read up? Do you understand why what they are doing is a bad idea? Yes? Good. No? Maybe this from the Washington Post will help :

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later. And these facts would still be a secret but for one thing: habeas corpus.

Only habeas corpus got Adel a chance to tell a federal judge what had happened. Only habeas corpus revealed that it wasn't just Adel who was innocent -- it was Abu Bakker and Ahmet and Ayoub and Zakerjain and Sadiq -- all Guantanamo "terrorists" whom the military has found innocent.

Habeas corpus is older than even our Constitution. It is the right to compel the executive to justify itself when it imprisons people.

Among the reasons that habeas is important is, frankly, that we have good reason to believe that bad things are happening to people who have been taken into government custody.

The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

So, in order to defend our freedom, they've reverse-engineered Communist brain-washing techniques, and now that a man on whom the original techniques were tried, Sen. John McCain, has convinced his colleagues to ban them, they're threatening a veto.

And, just to make sure they don't look like wimps for being against torture, the Senate is looking to play politics with our most fundamental liberty, with no debate or hearings.

I hope it's just the full moon.