President Bush today signed into law S. 3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The ACLU has issued a statement calling the law "one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history."

"With his signature, President Bush enacts a law that is both unconstitutional and un-American. This president will be remembered as the one who undercut the hallmark of habeas in the name of the war on terror. Nothing separates America more from our enemies than our commitment to fairness and the rule of law, but the bill signed today is an historic break because it turns Guantánamo Bay and other U.S. facilities into legal no-man's-lands.

"The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act."

The ACLU took out a full page ad in today's Washington Post to protest the law. You can view it here (pdf).

President Bush signed the Port Security bill today. Tagged onto it is the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act which essentially kills internet gambling in the U.S.

Attached to a port-security bill signed by President Bush yesterday was the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibits online gamblers from using credit cards, checks and electronic fund transfers to place and settle bets. The law puts enforcement on the shoulders of banks and other U.S. financial institutions, some of which fought the legislation.

Who's responsible for this dog of a bill? Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.).

Yesterday the House voted to pass Bush's warrantless surveillance plans. Will the Senate ignore us again and capitulate to Bush's lust for executive power by passing this bill too?

Democrats shot back that the war on terrorism shouldn't be fought at the expense of civil and human rights. The bill approved by the House, they argued, gives the president too much power and leaves the law vulnerable to being overturned by a court.

Here are the details of the bill:

The ACLU puts the lie to Republican spin on S. 2453, the National Security Surveillance Act (Received by e-mail, it's not up on their website yet, so I don't have a link.)

First, the background:

On Monday, Senator John Sununu (R-NJ) distributed a press release heralding an .agreement reached between the White House and Senators Larry Craig (R-ID), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and himself on S. 2453, the National Security Surveillance Act. These three senators had previously raised concerns about legislation on the NSA warrantless surveillance program.

In his release, Senator Sununu said the bill, "protects the rights afforded to citizens in the Constitution." Nothing could be further from the truth - the bill would authorize what the president has admitted and then some-- more wiretapping of Americans without court oversight of individual wiretaps than has ever been approved in US history. The press release goes on to spin three areas in which the new bill is a supposed win.

Here is the ACLU's breakdown of the Republican rhetoric and the reality of what the bill would do:

by TChris

This is good news, if the prediction is accurate:

Congress is unlikely to approve a bill giving President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program legal status and new restrictions before the November midterm elections, dealing a significant blow to one of the White House's top wartime priorities.

With domestic wiretapping off the table, those who care about their country can spend the rest of the week worrying about the administration's attempts to gut habeas corpus and build expensive fences.

by TChris

The Justice Project reminds us that the president's attempt to strip detainees of their right to habeas corpus review is only the most visible Republican assault upon the Great Writ.

[O]ther members of the Republican leadership are trying to strip away this right for U.S. citizens convicted of crimes. With only days left before Congress adjourns for mid-term elections, some members of Congress continue to skirt regular order in an attempt to attach widely-criticized habeas repeal measures to unrelated legislation. While attempts to keep these unpopular measures off the DOD bill were initially unsuccessful, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is now insisting that a controversial "judiciary package" of crime legislation, which includes habeas-stripping measures, be attached to the DOD bill. We are also keeping an eye on another possible vehicle for the judiciary package -- the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, which is presently in conference and will likely be finalized in the coming days.

The details of the "judiciary package" are unclear, and Republicans appear to be tinkering with it among themselves. One of the most extreme proposals would insulate sentencing decisions from habeas review, permitting unconstitutional death sentences to escape correction by the federal courts. The package apparently incorporates elements of the dangerous Streamlined Procedures Act (more aptly known as the Kill 'Em Quicker Act), a bill that TalkLeft protested in posts collected here.

by TChris

In the few remaining legislative days before the November election, the president would like nothing more than the enactment of a law authorizing his continued wiretapping of Americans without being bothered to get a warrant (unless it would be a law authorizing him to use sham tribunals to justify the continued indefinite detention of individuals at Guantanamo).

Topping the to-do list is passing legislation officially sanctioning the National Security Agency's secret wiretapping of suspected terrorist communications. The eavesdropping has been carried out without warrants since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A federal judge in Detroit recently ruled the program illegal. ...

The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider as many as four contradictory bills on the issue tomorrow and could approve all of them.

The Specter-Cheney proposal is probably the worst of the bills, but none are necessary. Republican legislators (as well as Democrats who are willing to sell out freedom for fear that they will otherwise appear "soft on security") need to know that we value our right to be free from warrantless invasions of our private communications. They'll know that when they hear from you. Some Republicans are already getting the message, but many of those still advocate changing FISA, even if the changes are less sweeping than those proposed by Sen. Specter. The message they need to hear is: There's no need to fix what ain't broke.

The Chicago Tribune today credits and praises "pork-busting bloggers" with outing Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and W. Va. Senator Robert Byrd as the anonymous senators blocking a bill that would establish a database showing how the Government spends our tax dollars.

Sponsored by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the measure would create a searchable online database of federal grants and contracts. An unnamed senator (or senators, as it turned out) was blocking that bill from coming to the floor. Under an arcane Senate rule, any member who has concerns about a bill can block it--anonymously. Party leaders know the blocker's identity but don't have to tell anyone, even the bill's sponsor.

Porkbusters, a group of bipartisan bloggers, went on the warpath. They asked bloggers to contact their senators and ask outright if they were one of the anonymous blockers of the bill. 98 Senators said "no." That left Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd, both of whom eventually 'fessed up.

by TChris

Update: The ACLU's response is here.

original post:

Should the United States help a foreign country investigate conduct -- political activism, for instance -- that wouldn't be illegal in the U.S.? That's one of the controversies surrounding an international treaty to combat cybercrime that the Senate ratified yesterday.

It says Internet providers must cooperate with electronic searches and seizures without reimbursement; the FBI must conduct electronic surveillance "in real time" on behalf of another government; that U.S. businesses can be slapped with "expedited preservation" orders preventing them from routinely deleting logs or other data.

What's controversial about those requirements is that they don't require "dual criminality"--in other words, Russian security services investigating democracy activists could ask for the FBI's help in uncovering the contents of their Yahoo Mail or Hotmail accounts, or even conducting live wiretaps.

by TChris

Curing disease and disability isn't on the president's list of American values, leading to a veto of the stem cell research bill. Of the ten bills that comprise "The American Values Agenda" (crafted by House Republicans to energize a disenchanted base before the midterm elections), only one has passed: a bill that prohibits condominium and homeowner associations from restricting the display of the American flag. The president signed that bill yesterday, showing that he values the federalization of local condo rules more highly than he values your health.

Bump and Update (TL): The ABA issued its task force report today. The task force was chaired by Neal Sonnett of Miami. You can access the report here. From the ABA press release:

The task force determined that signing statements that signal the president's intent to disregard laws adopted by Congress undermine the separation of powers by depriving Congress of the opportunity to override a veto, and by shutting off policy debate between the two branches of government. According to the task force, they operate as a "line item veto," which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional.

Noting that the Constitution is silent about presidential signing statements, the task force found that, while several recent presidents have used them, the frequency of signing statements that challenge laws has escalated substantially, and their purpose has changed dramatically, during the Bush Administration.

Sen. Arlen Specter has an op-ed today in the Washington Post asserting that his bill to fix the problem of warrantless electronic surveillance by the National Securuity Agency is the way to go because it will provide us with "surveillance we can live with."

Many disagree. In fact, as Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin writes, this bill is a capitulation and gives Bush everything he wants.

Specter's bill looks like a moderate and wise compromise that expands the President's authority to engage in electronic surveillance under a variety of Congressional and judicial oversight procedures. But read more closely, it actually turns out to be a virtual blank check to the Executive, because under section 801 of the bill the President can route around every single one of them. Thus, all of the elegant machinery of the bill's oversight provisions is, I regret to report, a complete and total sham. Once the President obtains the powers listed in section 801, the rest of the bill is pretty much irrelevant. He will be free of Congressional oversight forever.

Note, this is Specter's second attempt at a bill. It's a modification of the bill he originally proposed -- modifications he made after closely consulting with the White House and Dick Cheney in particular. The text of this latest bill, introduced on July 14, is here. If you are not into legalese, a summary is here.