Don't like indefinite internment? Try torture!

The BBQ Pit
1

(This post has been treated with Sarcasm, to protect the sanity of the poster. Do not use internally.)

Are you morally fatigued by the indefinite presence of terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay? Tired of worrying about whether or not American soldiers and law enforcement personnel are behaving ethically in the war against terror?

Well, fear not! Congress has a solution! Yes, they’ve added language to the proposed bill H.R. 10, the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act, which would retroactively legalize the deportation of terrorism suspects to countries which practice torture. Now all those pesky, messy, never-proved-effective torture techniques can be outsourced to countries like Syria, Jordan, and Uzbekistan, leaving American hands squeaky-clean!

So what if it violates the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment? Who cares if the 9/11 commission didn’t actually recommend this in the first place? Isn’t that a small price to pay to keep morally abhorrent practices out of the sight of U.S. voters?

But wait, there’s more! Section 3032 of the proposed bill explicitly prohibits judicial review! And section 3033 explicitly allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to deport such suspects to any country that will take them, regardless of the suspects’ country of citizenship or residence, provided that in the opinion of the Secretary it would be “prejudicial to the United States” to deport them to a country where they, you know, actually live.

It’s the outsourcing of torture…sorry, “extraordinary rendition”, gotta use the euphemism…and it could be legal as early as next week! So call TODAY!

(Okay, seriously for a moment…isn’t one of the current rotating justifications for the war in Iraq the fact that Saddam tortured his own citizens? Dennis Hastert introduced this bill…why is his head not exploding? Is torture supposed to be okay if you only torture other people’s citizens, or only if it’s non-Americans, or what?)

2

Well, Orbitfold, some old time wise guy once said that in war the first casualty is truth. In pseudo-wars after we finish off truth we go looking for principle and rationality with equal malicious intent. It is, however, not to worry since we know just as surely as we can know anything that the Secretary for the Defense of the Motherland is privy to much infallible intelligence to which we cannot for out own safety have access. We also can be confident that the SDM would never, never under any circumstances abuse his authority. It is good to live under the protection of the great bird of America and enjoy the system of ordered liberty that prevails there.

3

I would like to encourage you to read the text of the bill in question. I read it over(it’s uncharacteristically brief), and it doesn’t seem to be saying that we can and will extradite people to abusive countries. It essentially says we will catalog and maintain a list of countries that DO espouse torture, separate fromt he UN’s list, and update it twice yearly.

It also goes on to say that written verification is not enough to qualify for the list.

It doesn’t seem as sinister as your post indicates it may be.

Sam

4

GaWd, all of this is in the context, to some extent, of the incident involving Maher Arar. In case you haven’t heard of him, he’s a Canadian citizen (dual with Syria, although he hadn’t lived there since he was 16) who had a stopover in the US on the way to Ottawa. He was deported to Syria and tortured.

5

GaWd, are you sure you didn’t read Edward Markey’s bill instead, the one that would outlaw this? The stuff that’s being decried on Obsidian Wings is in Title III, Subtitle A, Chapter 2 of H.R.10.

Check out Sections 3032 and 3033. The stuff reported in the blog seems to have at least a passing relationship with the truth.

6

All right, I don’t trust links that say “temp” in them… so if this quits working, you can find it again by going to this page on the house site, and clicking “House Bills 1-100,” then " 8 . 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act (Introduced in House) [H.R.10.IH]," then scrolling down till you see the links for sections 3032 and 3033.

7

I have, thank you very much. As elfbabe suggests, look up the text of H.R. 10 on the thomas.loc.gov site and refer to the sections I mentioned.

Section 3032 part (a)(2)(A), referring to the revision of regulations prescribed to implement the U.N. Convention against torture, says “the revision shall exclude from the protection of such regulations aliens described in section 241(b)(3)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1231(b)(3)(B)) (as amended by this title), including rendering such aliens ineligible for withholding or deferral of removal under the Convention”. In other words, terrorism suspects in the U.S. will be denied the protection of the U.N. Convention.

Section 3032 part (b) is the part specifically prohibiting judicial review of the regulations.

Section 3033 parts (a)(1)(B), (a)(2)(B), and (a)(2)(C) amend the Immigration and Nationality act to allow the Secretary of the DHS to deport terrorism suspect to any country that will accept them.

And section 3033 part (b) applies the changes to any deportation ordered before the law enacted that hasn’t happened yet.

Brief? You must be talking about a different bill. The table of contents for H.R. 10 is 20 screens long on my monitor.

8

Ugh, let’s try that again with grammar. It applies the changes to any deportation which hasn’t happened yet but was ordered before the enacting of this particular law.

9

Maybe I’ve read the wrong bill? WTF?

Ignore me…

Sam

10

Can someone explain to me how a bill can prohibit judical review?

11

Well, I don’t think a bill can be written to prohibit judicial review of itself. Still, I imagine it is possible to craft a bill authorizing the creation of an entity whose decisions are not subject to judicial review. And I would imagine that such a feat was made easier by the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act.

I also imagine that an actual legal scholar can provide a better explanation than I have just attempted.

12

There’s more, of course.

13

These people are evil. There just ain’t no two ways about it.

If they’d kindly go off and be evil by themselves, in a way that didn’t affect anyone else, that would suit me just fine.

I don’t wish death (or even torture, which would be appropriate) on George W. Bush and his gang of thugs. I’d be satisfied with Bush’s early retirement to Crawford, TX, and the dispersal of the rest of that bad lot to the four corners of the earth.

14

Why, yes, please, I’d love to partake in a little Torture, right after I’ve had my Bit-O-Kittens for breakfast!