Republicans Anonymous

Looks like Democrats have bought into the "bleeding heart liberal judges are keeping the military from doing its job" Republican talking point:

A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise yesterday that would dramatically alter U.S. policy for treating captured terrorist suspects by granting them a final recourse to the federal courts but stripping them of some key legal rights.

The compromise links legislation written by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), which would deny detainees broad access to federal courts, with a new measure authored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) that would grant detainees the right to appeal the verdict of a military tribunal to a federal appeals court. The deal will come to a vote today, and the authors say they are confident it will pass.
(Source: Washington Post Senators Agree on Detainee Rights, Nov. 15, 2005.)

To repeat: that bastion of human rights, the United States of America, reserves the right to kidnap and torture interrogate using cruel, inhuman and degrading methods anyone in the world if they first unilaterally declare them an "enemy combatant." Only after significant periods of imprisonment and mistreatment are such decisions reviewed - and the military itself reviews those decisions via "military tribunals." These tribunals observe no firm rules, and have a reputation for convicting people despite significant evidence of innocence. Even if a tribunal finds a detainee innocent, there is no guarantee those innocent detainees will ever be released:

I can understand why a lot of people were scraped up from the battlefield and brought to Gitmo, because we didn't know what we had, but we didn't have any real mechanisms to sort them out. And I think once we started sorting them out, we'd already stated publicly that we had "the worst of the worst." And it was a little hard to go against that and say, well, maybe some of them aren't quite the worst of the worst, and some of them are just the slowest guys off the battlefield.
(Source: Lt. Col. Thomas Berg from an interview on FrontLine titledWhat Do We Know About the Guantanamo Detainees?

How has this country sunk from "human rights" to "might makes right" in such a short time? W and his Bush league minions have much to answer for - and the Hague's War Crimes Court would be a good place to get those answers.