Word: corpus
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...that symbolic occasion, the Senate chose to retain a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) that prevents Guantanamo Bay inmates from challenging their detention in court. This de facto suspension of habeas corpus applies to foreign aliens as well as U.S. permanent residents, to those who have committed hostile acts as well as many who have not. Most frighteningly, it applies to detainees against whom military prosecutors lack enough evidence to classify as enemy combatants—but who may nonetheless be kept in Guantanamo limbo indefinitely...
...Those who supported the MCA made the mistake of viewing habeas corpus as nothing more than a limit on government power, ignoring how intimately tied it is to the respect for human dignity. To lock someone in a cell as a criminal without giving him a chance to confront his accusers, to see the evidence presented against him, and to plead his case is an indefensible act of cruelty. Most of us would not (and do not) tolerate that treatment even for alleged rapists and murderers...
...deceive you: Military panels are no substitute for habeas corpus hearings. Officials are pressured to rubber-stamp previously made judgments and accept “garbage” evidence, explains Lt. Col. Stephen E. Abraham, a military attorney who helped run the tribunals. “Nobody stood up and said the emperor’s wearing no clothes,” he writes in an affidavit. “The prevailing attitude was, ‘If they’re in Guantanamo, they’re there for a reason...
...does the Bush Administration work so hard to deny these detainees justice? Perhaps because habeas corpus proceedings could shatter the smokescreen they have built around the use of torture in CIA prisons. A Justice Department memo released last November spelled this out clearly: Terrorism suspects would be denied the right to meet with an attorney for fear that they might describe the methods of interrogation that had been used against them. How clever of our leaders, killing two birds with one stone: using an abrogation of one right to conceal the violation of another...
...government assures its critics that habeas corpus remains intact for U.S. citizens; the restriction applies only to aliens and U.S. permanent residents. But not only is this an arbitrary and unjust distinction, it offers little real comfort: Detaining a U.S. citizen without the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus may be illegal, but the only way to challenge an illegal detention—to assert that one is a citizen and deserves basic legal rights—is through a habeas corpus petition. The idea, then, that we are immune from government incursions on our legal rights...