Today, Detainees Have No Rights; Tomorrow, You And I Will Have No Rights

[Ed. note: And yet, despite the Bushies' constant rhetoric of fear, the MAJORITY of American citizens believe detainees at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) and elsewhere not only deserve rights but already have them. Sounds like America's citizens are far smarter, not to mention more compassionate, than their president.]

The Bush administration said Monday that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have no right to challenge their detentions in civilian courts and that lawsuits by hundreds of detainees should be dismissed.

In court documents filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Justice Department defended the military's authority to arrest people overseas and detain them indefinitely without access to courts.

It's the first time that argument has been spelled out since President Bush signed a law last month setting up military commissions for the thousands of foreigners being held in U.S. prisons abroad.

Bush hailed the law as a crucial tool in the war on terrorism and said it would allow prosecution of several high-level terror suspects.

Human rights groups and attorneys for the detainees say the law is unconstitutional. Prisoners normally have the right to challenge their imprisonment.

The Justice Department said Monday that the detainees have no constitutional rights because they are being held overseas. Giving military detainees access to civilian courts "would severely impair the military's ability to defend this country," government attorneys wrote.

"Congress could have simply withdrawn jurisdiction over these matters and left the decision of whether to detain enemy aliens held abroad to the military," the Justice Department wrote.

Instead, Congress set up a military commission structure establishing "unprecedented" levels of review for detainees, the attorneys wrote.

Until the Bush Administration rolled into town on a steam roller of money and corruption, it was largely believed that the documents carefully forged by our forefathers - and I take these especially seriously because my ancestors were signatories of these - afforded rights and protections for ALL people. You did not have to be an American citizen to be afforded basic rights when you were on American soil.

But the Bushies - happily able to annihilate habeus corpus which was first awarded in 1215 or nearly a millennium before the latest King George arrived - eagerly redefined laws to make them apply only to U.S. citizens. Then, in the six years that have passed, we've seen rights and protections become more and more something a Bush-friendly corporation or very wealthy individual may have but which the poor, the Bush-unfriendly, and those detained "secretly" do not have.

So will you and I have ANY rights left by the time the Bushies leave office?