Category - Prisons

My wife and I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper yesterday. Out of respect for the paper’s request that submitted letters be otherwise unpublished, I won’t copy it here, but I will spell out some of what we were writing about.

So it started with an article about the recently successful filibuster by Senate Republicans, to prevent a vote on a bill that would allow Guantanamo Bay detainees, and other prisoners in the “war on terror,” to have access to the court system for review of their cases; that is, to return to them the right of habeus corpus that was stripped in previous legislation. (We read it in our local Valley News, but it was originally from the Washington Post.)

A Republican filibuster in the Senate yesterday shot down a bipartisan effort to restore the right of terrorism suspects to contest in federal courts their detention and treatment, underscoring the Democratic-led Congress’s difficulty with terrorism issues.
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The detainee rights amendment was an effort to reverse a provision in last year’s Military Commissions Act that suspended the writ of habeas corpus for terrorism suspects at the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other offshore prisons.
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The authors of last year’s bill said that advocates of such rights would open the federal courts to endless lawsuits from the nation’s worst enemies. “To start that process would be an absolute disaster for this country,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), an Air Force Reserve lawyer who was instrumental in crafting the provision in question in last year’s bill. …