Habeas Corpus - Part I

Habeas corpus ... is Latin for "you may have the body" (subject to examination). It is a writ which requires a person detained by the authorities be brought before a court of law so that the legality of the detention may be examined.


It is important to note that the framers of the Constitution for the United States of America choose to include in the body of the Constitution the Writ of Habeas Corpus while other important individual rights, arguably as an afterthought, were included in the first ten amendments which were popularly called the Bill of Rights.

Habeas Corpus has been suspended at times during our history (Civil War, Japanese-American internments in WWII), but this is the first time it is being suspended indefinitely for any person determined, by the President and his administration, to be a threat in some way to the country.

For any of you with family members and friends in the military (as I do), this is truly frightening. Any other country may now feel free to do the very same thing to our sons and daughters.

The Repugnant Neocons can't stand it when you call them lawless, but there is now no other apt description. The Geneva Conventions are international law - we have been, up to now, signatories of that law for over 50 years - in fact helped write it.

The new 'detainee' law, no matter how they spin it, throws out that law and makes us seen as outlaws in terms of how we detain and try people and how we determine to do so.

More to come on this subject.