If You Thought the Bush Administration Really Wanted to Clean Up Its Act on Detainees Held Indefinitely Without Charges...

Then please send me email because I have some gator-filled land in Florida you'll just die for...

Posted by TChris at TalkLeft:

Not unexpectedly, the White House is doing its best to circumvent the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision. A draft of the administration's proposed legislation would purport to codify the president's authority to try (if and when he gets around to it) detainees before the same military commissions that the Court found wanting in the Hamdan case.

The draft bill would permit secret trials, secret even from the detainee, who could be excluded. The bill would allow convictions to be based on hearsay, depriving the detainee of the opportunity to confront his accuser, and would allow evidence obtained by coercion to be used against the detainee.

Rather than requiring a speedy trial for enemy combatants, the draft proposal says they "may be tried and punished at any time without limitations." Defendants could be held until hostilities are completed, even if found not guilty by a commission.

Few things could be more offensive to our constitutional values than indefinite detention without trial (or any detention after an acquittal), but that's been the hallmark of the Bush administration's approach to detainees. It would continue under the administration's proposed legislation. And because the pesky Supreme Court thought the president should give detainees the rights to which they are entitled under the Geneva Conventions, the proposed law states that the Conventions "are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights."