La votación queda 65 contra 34; "nuestra democracia, la gran perdedora": New York Times. Bush promulgará en breve la ley que le otorga el poder de "designar a los enemigos extranjeros". En duda, el compromiso de Washington con los principios fundamentales de justicia, dice AI.

DAVID BROOKS, corresponsal

Washington, 28 de septiembre. El Senado aprobó hoy la tortura y la anulación del derecho fundamental de un acusado de acceso a las pruebas en su contra para todo extranjero (incluidos inmigrantes) que sean designados "enemigos" por el presidente de Estados Unidos, convirtiendo a este país, según un ex abogado militar, en una "república bananera".

El presidente George W. Bush promulgará esta ley a la brevedad, la cual él y sus aliados consideran una "herramienta vital" en la lucha contra el "terror", cuyas medidas, dicen, ya han evitado atentados "terroristas" en los últimos años.

La votación de esta noche en el Senado fue de 65 contra 34 en favor de la llamada Ley de Comisiones Militares (nombre del sistema judicial para "combatientes enemigos ilegales"). Con la previa aprobación de este proyecto en la Cámara de Representantes y su aprobación en el Senado esta noche, el presidente Bush y su Gobierno se anotaron un triunfo al legalizar una serie de medidas autorizadas por el Ejecutivo en el curso de los últimos cuatro años como parte de la llamada "guerra contra el terror" y que recientemente fueron consideradas inconstitucionales por la Suprema Corte y violatorias de las Convenciones de Ginebra.

Bush realizó una inusual visita al Senado esta mañana para promover la aprobación del proyecto, que ha sido denunciado por visitadores de la Organización de Naciones Unidas, ex abogados militares, varios legisladores, organizaciones nacionales e internacionales de Derechos Humanos, editorialistas y expertos en ley constitucional e internacional.

La iniciativa de ley otorga un tipo de amnistía para posibles crímenes de guerra cometidos por personal estadunidense en los últimos años (por tortura, encarcelamiento clandestino, desapariciones y otros), redefine por primera vez en más de cincuenta años las Convenciones de Ginebra, autoriza la tortura (oficialmente se llama "técnicas de interrogación"), y anula para siempre el derecho de los detenidos a cuestionar las razones de su encarcelamiento o su trato.

Bajo el proyecto aprobado hoy, el presidente y sus representantes tienen el poder de designar a casi cualquier ciudadano del mundo, incluidos los inmigrantes legales en este país, como "combatiente enemigo ilegal" con lo cual podría ser detenido indefinidamente sin acceso a un tribunal. La ley también permitirá los "métodos de interrogación" que se consideran "permisibles", o sea, qué es o no tortura lo define el presidente, lo cual, además, es secreto.

Los tribunales estadunidenses no tienen poder para interceder en el nuevo sistema judicial militar para procesar a los "combatientes enemigos", sólo hasta después de que se emita un veredicto. Nadie podrá presentar demandas legales contra el Gobierno estadunidense por estos casos con base en las Convenciones de Ginebra. Pruebas que son resultado de tortura podrán ser presentadas en estos procesos si el juez determina que son "confiables".

Pero la anulación del derecho de habeas corpus, un principio legal que antecede a la Carta Magna del siglo XIII, que forma la base de los sistemas legales occidentales y que está consagrado en la Constitución de Estados Unidos, no tiene precedente. Este concepto establece el derecho de un prisionero de conocer las razones por las cuales está detenido.

John D. Hutson, ex almirante y ex abogado militar uniformado de mayor rango de la Marina, argumentó esta semana ante legisladores que el derecho de habeas corpus era fundamental para la identidad estadunidense. "Sin este tipo de protecciones, sólo somos una república bananera más", declaró en una audiencia del Comité Judicial del Senado.

Hoy, el director ejecutivo del Centro de Derechos Constitucionales, Vincent Warren, dijo que esta legislación "otorga al presidente el privilegio de reyes, permitiéndole encarcelar a cualquier crítico como supuesto 'combatiente enemigo', que jamás verá el interior de un tribunal o tendrá la oportunidad de cuestionar su detención o su trato. "¿Qué diríamos si otro país aprobara una ley haciendo legal el secuestro de un ciudadano estadunidense y su detención indefinida?".

Otros abogados han señalado que el habeas corpus ha sido suspendido en cuatro ocasiones en la Historia de este país, pero sólo brevemente y en territorio que era zona de combate.

Esta noche Amnistía Internacional expresó su desilusión y declaró que la aprobación "pone en duda el compromiso de Estados Unidos con los principios fundamentales de justicia y juicios imparciales".

"Nuestra democracia es la gran perdedora", opinó hoy el New York Times en su editorial, al señalar cómo los republicanos y su presidente, así como los demócratas, estaban por aprobar esta ley por razones electorales en esta coyuntura política. Concluyó que los estadunidenses en el futuro recordarán que "en 2006, el Congreso aprobó una ley tiránica que será comparada con los momentos más bajos de nuestra democracia".

By passing the Military Commissions Act, the United States Congress has, in effect, given its stamp of approval to human rights violations committed by the USA in the "war on terror". This legislation leaves the USA squarely on the wrong side of international law, and has turned bad executive policy into bad domestic law.

On 27 September, the House of Representatives passed the Military Commissions Act by 253 votes to 168. On 28 September, the Senate passed the Act by 65 votes to 34. After any discrepancies between the Senate and House bills are reconciled, the legislation will go to President Bush for signing into law. If President Bush signs the bill, as expected, Amnesty International will campaign for repeal of the Act. The constitutionality of the legislation is also likely to be challenged in the courts.

In the "war on terror", the US administration has resorted to secret detention, enforced disappearance, prolonged incommunicado detention, indefinite detention without charge, arbitrary detention, and torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Thousands of detainees remain in indefinite military detention in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Congress has failed these detainees and their families. President Bush has defended the CIA’s use of secret detention and in the debates over the Military Commissions Act, members of Congress have done the same. Yet this is a policy in clear violation of international law.

Accountability among higher officials for Human Rights violations authorized or committed by US personnel in the "war on terror" has been absent, as has been reparation for such abuses. Investigations into alleged war crimes and Human Rights violations have lacked independence and have not gone up the chain of command. Not a single US agent has been charged with war crimes under the USA’s War Crimes Act or torture under the extraterritorial anti-torture statute, despite compelling evidence that such offences have occurred.

Meanwhile, the Military Commissions Act provides for trials of the "enemy" in front of military commissions using lower standards of evidence than apply to US personnel, and with the power to hand down death sentences. Whether charged for trial or not, those detained by the USA as "enemy combatants" will not be able to challenge the lawfulness or conditions of their detention in habeas corpus appeals. Habeas corpus is a fundamental safeguard against enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention and torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

The legislation will lead to violations of international law and standards. Among other things, the Military Commissions Act will:

• Strip the US courts of jurisdiction to hear or consider habeas corpus appeals challenging the lawfulness or conditions of detention of anyone held in US custody as an "enemy combatant". Judicial review of cases would be severely limited. The law would apply retroactively, and thus could result in more than 200 pending appeals filed on behalf of Guantánamo detainees being thrown out of court.
• Prohibit any person from invoking the Geneva Conventions or their protocols as a source of rights in any action in any US court.
• Permit the executive to convene military commissions to try "alien unlawful enemy combatants", as determined by the executive under a dangerously broad definition, in trials that would provide foreign nationals so labeled with a lower standard of justice than US citizens accused of the same crimes. This would violate the prohibition on the discriminatory application of fair trial rights.
• Permit civilians captured far from any battlefield to be tried by military commission rather than civilian courts, contradicting international standards and case law.
• Establish military commissions whose impartiality, independence and competence would be in doubt, due to the overarching role that the executive, primarily the Secretary of Defense, would play in their procedures and in the appointments of military judges and military officers to sit on the commissions.
• Permit, in violation of international law, the use of evidence extracted under cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or as a result of "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating or degrading treatment", as defined under international law.
• Permit the use of classified evidence against a defendant, without the defendant necessarily being able effectively to challenge the "sources, methods or activities" by which the government acquired the evidence. This is of particular concern in light of the high level of secrecy and resort to national security arguments employed by the administration in the "war on terror", which have been widely criticized, including by the UN Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee. Amnesty International is concerned that the administration appears on occasion to have resorted to classification to prevent independent scrutiny of human rights violations.
• Give the military commissions the power to hand down death sentences, in contravention of international standards which only permit capital punishment after trials affording "all possible safeguards to ensure a fair trial". The clemency authority would be the President. President Bush has led a pattern of official public commentary on the presumed guilt of the detainees, and has overseen a system that has systematically denied the rights of detainees.
• Limit the right of charged detainees to be represented by counsel of their choosing.
• Fail to provide any guarantee that trials will be conducted within a reasonable time.
• Permit the executive to determine who is an "enemy combatant" under any "competent tribunal" established by the executive, and endorse the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), the wholly inadequate administrative procedure that has been employed in Guantánamo to review individual detentions.
• Narrow the scope of the War Crimes Act by not expressly criminalizing acts that constitute "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating and degrading treatment" banned under Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions. Amnesty International believes that the USA has routinely failed to respect the human dignity of detainees in the "war on terror".
• Prohibit the US courts from using "foreign or international law" to inform their decisions in relation to the War Crimes Act. The President has the authority to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions". Under President Bush, the USA has shown a selective disregard for the Geneva Conventions and the absolute prohibition of torture or other ill-treatment.
• Endorse the administration’s "war paradigm" – under which the USA has selectively applied the laws of war and rejected international Human Rights law. The legislation would backdate the "war on terror" to before the 11 September 2001 in order to be able to try individuals in front of military commissions for "war crimes" committed before that date.

There appears to be little doubt that President Bush will sign the bill. He had sent a version of it to Congress on 6 September at the same time that he had announced the transfer of 14 "high value" detainees from years in secret CIA custody to detention in Guantánamo. He said that these detainees could be tried if Congress authorized military commissions acceptable to the administration.

Amnesty International deeply regrets that Congress failed to resist this executive pressure and instead has given a green light for violations of the USA’s international obligations.

See also:

• "USA: Military Commissions Act of 2006 – Turning bad policy into bad law" (29 - IX - 2006)
• "USA: Rendition – torture – trial? The case of Guantánamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi" (20 - IX - 2006)
• "USA: Justice at last or more of the same? Detentions and trials after Hamdan v. Rumsfeld" (18 - IX - 2006)

Washington, D.C., September 26, 2006. The U.S. Congress should vote down the draft military commissions and detainee treatment bill, Human Rights Watch said today. In denying the fundamental right of habeas corpus to detainees held abroad, defining "unlawful enemy combatants" in a dangerously broad manner, and limiting protections against detainee mistreatment, the bill would undermine the rule of law and America's ability to protect its own citizens from unjust treatment at the hands of other governments.

In its immediate practical impact, the most damaging of the bill's provisions is clearly its "court-stripping" provision, which would bar detainees in U.S. custody anywhere around the world from challenging the legality of their detention or their treatment via habeas corpus actions, even if they have been subjected to torture. Innocent people could be locked up forever, without ever having the facts of their case reviewed by an independent court.

If held to be constitutional, the court-stripping provision would result in more than 200 pending cases being ejected from the courts, including the case that resulted in the Supreme Court's landmark detainee ruling in June.

"It's no secret that the Bush administration deeply resents the court rulings that have recognized basic legal protections that shield detainees from abuse," said Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. "Congress should reject the administration's blatant attempt to eviscerate the courts' role in the U.S. system of checks and balances".

The right to habeas corpus is one of the oldest and most fundamental of human rights protections. By stripping the courts of habeas jurisdiction over detainees, the U.S. would be signaling to the rest of the world that it is not bound by the rule of law in its treatment of them.

The bill has other dangerous provisions as well. The latest version of the legislation includes an extremely dangerous expansion in the bill's definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" – a phrase used by the administration to justify holding a combatant outside of the usual protections given to combatants by the Geneva Conventions. It now explicitly deems persons who have "purposefully and materially supported" hostilities against the United States to be combatants, an unprecedented redefinition of "combatant" that could potentially cover a range of innocent people. Financing and support for terrorist activities are already criminal offenses in the civilian justice system. This definition would pervert any reasonable concept of what a combatant is.

"This provision expands the concept of combatant way beyond anything that is traditionally accepted, and it could come back to haunt Americans," Roth said. "This definition would make every civilian cafeteria worker at a U.S. military base, and every worker in an American uniform factory, someone whom enemy forces could shoot to kill".

Moreover, the provision also gives carte blanche to the Pentagon to call anyone an "unlawful enemy combatant." All it requires is that the person be deemed an unlawful combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (the administrative bodies used at Guantánamo) or "another competent tribunal" established under presidential or military authority.

Another damaging amendment is the bill's provisions on procedures and rules of evidence for military commissions. Courts-martial proceedings are no longer the starting point for such rules and procedures; instead, the Secretary of Defense is to be delegated the power to create new rules and procedures if he or she considers the use of their courts-martial equivalents to be impracticable.

The legislation rejects the Bush administration's attempt to explicitly rewrite the humane treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions and to decriminalize all interrogation practices short of torture. On "Face the Nation," last Sunday, Senator John McCain made clear that practices such as waterboarding, extreme sleep deprivation and induced hypothermia will continue to be war crimes if the legislation is passed.

The bill does, however, narrow the scope of the War Crimes Act; it bars the Geneva Conventions from being invoked in any suit against the U.S. government, gives the president power to interpret "the meaning and application" of the Geneva Conventions, and prohibits the courts from relying on foreign or international law sources in deciding cases involving certain violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

The bill's changes to the War Crimes Act are particularly worrying. While the most abusive of the CIA's techniques should be prohibited, the administration may try to interpret the draft legislation as allowing other humiliating and degrading practices universally banned by Common Article 3.

Amendments to the draft legislation are due on Wednesday, and it will probably come to the floor for a vote sometime this week.

"The bill effectively rewrites key pieces of the Geneva Conventions and takes away the most fundamental right of detainees to be heard", said Roth. "It should be rejected as a whole".

The bill's court-stripping provisions have drawn critical congressional scrutiny. At Senate hearings on Monday, former diplomats and others underscored the damaging implications of such rules for the treatment of U.S. soldiers who are captured abroad. If the U.S. supports stripping captives of all legal protections, they emphasized, so might other countries.

Source: http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/26/usdom14266.htm

La Jornada

Amnesty International

Human Rights Watch

Enlaces sobre Direitos Humanos