The must-read Jack Balkin article here:
The choice quote:
The bottom line is simple: The MCA preserves rights against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but it severs these rights from any practical remedy.
This means, as a functional matter, there is no recourse for the innocently accused. More:
There are many things that are deeply
distressing about the Military Commissions Act of 2006. One of the most
distressing is its deeply cynical attitude about law. The President has
created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of
prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws,
and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to
break the law. And all the while he insists that everything he does is
perfectly legal, because, the way the law is designed, there is no one
with authority to disagree.
It is a travesty of law under the
forms of law. It is the accumulation of executive, judicial, and
legislative powers in a single branch and under a single individual.
It is the very essence of tyranny.
Also of note in the main article, is that a collection of religious groups were the protestors, in this case.That shows one of the essential functions of a working religious or spiritual consciousness - the refusal to find acceptable degraded forms of treatment.
