Canadian Polemic

And the American Senate never fails to disappoint me:

Senate Approves Limiting Rights of U.S. Detainees

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts.

The vote, 49 to 42, on an amendment to a military budget bill by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, comes at a time of intense debate over the government's treatment of prisoners in American custody worldwide, and just days after the Senate passed a measure by Senator John McCain banning abusive treatment of them.

[...]

Mr. Graham said the measure was necessary to eliminate a blizzard of legal claims from prisoners that was tying up Department of Justice resources, and slowing the ability of federal interrogators to glean information from detainees that have been plucked off the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"It is not fair to our troops fighting in the war on terror to be sued in every court in the land by our enemies based on every possible complaint," Mr. Graham said. "We have done nothing today but return to the basics of the law of armed conflict where we are dealing with enemy combatants, not common criminals."

[...]

(Full article found here.)

Do they not realize how backwards this is? I understand the argument that can be made for this for national security reasons, and those grounds certainly seem expedient and appropriate if our blinders limit our sight to the here and now. You know, it probably does make prosecuting the war on terror easier - but limiting these people basic rights under U.S. law? Even if it's not against the letter of international conventions or even the U.S. Constitution (I don't know as I'm no legal scholar), it's certainly against the spirit of many documents. Was nothing learned by the ordeal of the Japanese-Americans interned without basic legal rights during and after the Second World War? Backwards, backwards, backwards.

In other news, kudos to John McCain for his principled stand against the abuse of prisoners - at least someone recognizes that terrorists or not, there's a certain line that developed society shouldn't cross. I'm finding myself more and more encouraged by him and more and more supportive of the idea of a President McCain. But that's still a good 3 years away yet.