Yahoo! News - Constitution Battered by War on Terror, Says Lawyers Group: "Due process and privacy guaranteed under the U.S. constitution, open government, and respect for human rights around the world are taking a battering from the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush (news - web sites) in prosecuting its 'war on terrorism,' according to a new report released today by a leading international human rights group.
'The U.S. government can no longer promise that individuals under its authority will be subject to a system bound by the rule of law,' according to the report by the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR). 'In a growing number of cases, legal safeguards are now observed only so far as they are consistent with the chosen ends of power.'
...the Justice Department (news - web sites) has insisted that any U.S. citizen may be detained indefinitely without charges or access to counsel if it presents "some evidence" that he is an "enemy combatant," a status that has yet to be defined.
... "Terrorism has become the new rubric under which opportunistic government seek to justify their actions, however offensive to human rights," according to the report. Many authoritarian and some democratic governments, the report says, have enacted sweeping "anti-terrorist" legislation, many provisions of which dispense with due process standards. At the same time, the administration has helped to undermine the power of independent courts in countries, including Bosnia and Malawi, where it spirited individuals out of the country in defiance of court rulings."
- posted by geoff @ #