Editor's Notes

The US has fundamentally changed in the last few years, culminating with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in which our fundamental Constitutional rights were destroyed.

Here's the progression as I understand it:

1. After 9/11, the President begins the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

2. After capturing numerous alleged terrorists, the Bush team decides that it wants to interrogate those detainees outside the bounds of the US Constitution and international convention. Although the US military is sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution, the Bush administration decides to push the position that foreign territory held by the military does not fall under Constitutional jurisdiction. Therefore, the US establishes a prison camp in Cuba and proceeds to 'interrogate' prisoners there.

3. The Bush administration asserts at one point that it doesn't have to follow the Geneva Conventions, but it generally is anyway.

4. In several different tests of the detention of American citizens and the attempt to apply closed military tribunals to terrorist trials, the Bush administration was eventually rebuffed by US courts, threatening the application of Bush-type justice. The courts even suggested that American prisoner detention needs to follow the Geneva Conventions.

5. The Bush team goes on the offensive, suggesting that the Geneva Conventions are too vague and that habeas corpus and the right of a defendant to see evidence against him cannot be applied in terrorism cases for national security purposes.

6. The Bush team pushes a group of bills through Congress and the Senate that eventually do the following in the form of the Military Commissions Act of 2006:

a. States that the Geneva Conventions shall not be applied in any court of law in the US
b. Explicitly defines torture so that the Act will need to be amended in the future if new technologies or techniques of interrogation are used in the future that are not expressly denied in the Act
c. States that unlawful combatants do not have the right of habeas corpus and that no US court shall respect or respond to a writ of habeas corpus for an unlawful combatant
d. States that the president or secretary of defense may convene commissions that may determine that any person (that's right... any person on the planet including you and me) may be declared an unlawful combatant

Unfortunately, under this whole scenario, the Bush administration has asserted that the US military is an extra-Constitutional entity, unlawful combatants are not allowed rights under the US constitution, and any person can be declared an unlawful combatant and immediately transferred to military custody at which point the person may be held indefinitely with no court appeal and the person is not required to see the evidence against him. Dictatorship... here we come.