In yet another example of the extraordinary death of freedom in America, on October 17 2006, George Walker Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act 2006 which states,
(A) The term 'unlawful enemy combatant' means -
(ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.
Which means, that any citizen of the United States can now be imprisoned indefinitely, without trial, and tortured, should the President of the United States, or his Secretary of Defense, declare them an "enemy combatant".
Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law Professor was quoted in a television interview on the Countdown news program with Keith Olbermann as stating,
"If you even give material support to an organisation that the President deems as connected to one of these groups, you too can be an enemy combatant, and the fact that he appoints this tribunal was meaningless, standing behind him, was his Attorney General, who signed a memo that said that you could torture someone, you could do harm to someone, to the point of organ failure or death. So, if you appoint someone like that to be Attorney General, you can imagine who he's going to be putting on this board"
He later added,
"People have no idea how significant this is, really what a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did, what the President signed today, essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values. It couldn't be more significant.
The strange thing is, we've become sort of constitutional couch potatoes, the Congress just gave the President despotic powers, and you could hear the yawn across America as people turned to "Dancing with the Stars" It's other-worldly!"
As Keith Olbermann pointed out, ultimately this means that the only thing keeping any American citizen out of Guantanemo Bay, is the sanity (or otherwise), of the President of the United States.
Do you feel like gambling the future of your freedom on your President's soundness of mind America!?
