Cleaning up after the elephants
News Observer
Tom Teepen, Cox News Service
June 12, 2007

ATLANTA - It's like cleaning up after the elephants in the circus parade -- unpleasant but necessary.

The challenge after the disaster of the Bush presidency will be to regain our once-good international standing, essential precursor for the durable cooperation abroad which, in turn, is essential to blunt and parry terrorism.

To do that, we first will have to repair our national soul.

The Senate Judiciary Committee made a start on that recently when it approved the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act. Habeas corpus is the legal means by which prisoners can challenge their detention in a neutral court and require the government to justify their imprisonment.

That right is the historic and crucial wellspring of civil liberties. Among the worse crudities of Bush and his Republican Congresses has been their claim to an extra-constitutional privilege that somehow licenses them to deny habeas to detainees held as, maybe, terrorists just on Bush's say-so.

As part of his larger scheme to aggrandize the executive branch -- and himself in it Bush has insisted that, if he cries terrorism, he may, as no previous president has, hold captives for whatever real reason he likes, for however long he cares to, wherever he chooses to put them.

The administration has accused the Guantanamo detainees of terrorism -- even though, oops, many have been quietly let go, usually only after years of apparently needless detention. Most Americans have shrugged, but Bush's indifference to plain justice offends our founding principles and the ones which we have lived by since.

The habeas restoration must be adopted, but far more is needed as well.

Congress also should embrace the amendment put into play by Carl Levin, D-Mich., which would secure due process for detainees. Congress last year hurriedly, at administration urging and just in time for the elections, authorized drumhead military commissions to accept testimony forced by torture, deny captives access to the evidence against them and permit hearsay testimony.

BUSH HAS STUBBORNLY REFUSED either to let civil justice take its course or to defer to traditional military courts-martial. He has cut every legal corner, miring prisoners and the national interest alike in one after another jurisprudential mess. Ironically, the Justice Department in the meantime has been successfully trying and imprisoning terrorism suspects the old fashioned way.

Congress has a lot of clean-up ahead of it. It must end such abominations as torture and kidnapping. It must embrace anew the Geneva Conventions. It must bar this and future administrations from farming out prisoners to other nations for second-hand torture.

The obvious problem with starting now is that Bush seems certain to veto any legislation Congress completes. Even so, the process can clarify the imperatives for next year's elections.

Voters need to have the stakes firmly in mind. We will be deciding what kind of country we want ours to be -- an honorable and an effective one, prepared and able to protect itself respectably, as it usually has, or a morally shabby and merely grandstanding one.

(Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.)

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