Reply #16: It looks like they made an offer Levin couldn't refuse according to the [View All]

[Trevelyan]

courageous CCR.com Center for Constitutional Rights who have been fighting against torture and the Iraq war.

http://www.witnesstorture.org/
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/report.asp?ObjID=VJQl1vGD5N&Content=684==Center for Constitutional Rights Statement on Dangers of Court-Stripping and Graham-Levin Amendment

Synopsis

As Congress supposedly outlaws torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by its support of the McCain Amendment, it will at the same time foster both torture and indefinite detention without judicial oversight if it supports the Graham-Levin Amendment. What McCain gives with one hand, Graham-Levin, as now proposed takes away with the other.

McCain forbids torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation. Graham-Levin, on the other hand, authorizes the use of evidence obtained through these methods in military tribunals, "if probative," ie, if it is useful or relevant to the proceedings. Since virtually all information is "probative," this provision opens the door wide to the torture that McCain supposedly shuts. In addition, while we have one public document, the Army Field Manual, that forbids torture, the Administration has just introduced a secret "Addendum" to the manual that essentially sanctions torture.

Further, Graham-Levin prevents any victim of torture at Guantánamo from filing a lawsuit against those responsible. The message that Graham-Levin therefore sends is that regardless of what Congress says in McCain, there will be no public airing of torture when and if it happens, no sanctions for engaging in torture, and no compensation for victims of torture. For centuries, torture has been the most reviled thing that one person can do to another. This law will deny to victims of those acts the right they have held for centuries, to go to court and sue.

Most disturbing, Graham-Levin will eliminate the historic right of habeas corpus for anyone held at Guantánamo. Federal courts will be stripped of habeas jurisdiction for the first time in well over a century. By undertaking a major change in the jurisdiction of federal courts, by way of eliminating a right, the origins of which go back to the Magna Carta in 1215, Graham-Levin constitutes a beachhead in what we fear to be a campaign to undermine fundamental rights in the United States and around the world.

The New York Times called the Graham-Levin amendment "a malignant measure" in a critical editorial today, and warned that it "would do grievous harm to the rule that the government cannot just lock you up without showing cause to a court. This fundamental principle of democratic justice must not be watered down so the Bush administration does not have to answer for the illegal detentions of hundreds of men at Guantánamo Bay and other prison camps." The Center for Constitutional Rights stands with all the leading civil and human rights organizations to condemn the Graham-Levin amendment.

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