Restore Habeas
Posted by
Kevin
Do your good deed for the day:
This week, we have a critical opportunity to restore habeas corpus.
The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act gives us a chance to reverse one of the Bush Administration’s many assaults on our civil liberties.
We all want to make America safe from terrorism, but becoming a nation that sanctions the unlawful detention of its own residents — detaining and jailing them without the chance to appear before a judge — does not make us safe. Instead, it violates a value that we have held dear for centuries — safeguarding our individual freedom before arbitrary state action.
Please sign-on below as a citizen co-sponsor to the bipartisan Leahy-Specter-Dodd Habeas Corpus Restoration Act.
The right to challenge the government’s ability to detain you is fundamental to freedom. In a very real sense, no freedom can exist without it. Without it, the government can lock you away for ever and ever, with no hope of ever getting out, with no requirement that they justify that detention. The destruction of habeas corpus is the goal of men like Pinochet and Hussein. And our government willingly voted it away for a class of people. That’s not something to be proud of whatever the GOP frontrunners may tell you. The name for people who would vote away their foundational freedom is serf, not citizen.
Be a citizen, today, and help Dodd restore habeas corpus.
Link via Digby.
The one problem with this bill is that it in some sense legitimizes Bush’s argument that he had the authority to suspend habeus in the first place.
Comment 9/18/2007