I haven't been looking, so has anyone seen this in the US Press?
Observer
"Human rights campaigners are calling it the 'November surprise' - a last-minute amendment smuggled into a Pentagon finance bill in the US Senate last Thursday.
"Its effects are likely to be devastating: the permanent removal of almost all legal rights from 'war on terror' detainees at Guantanamo Bay and every other similar US facility on foreign or American soil.
The bill suspends habeus corpus, which goes back in our legal tradition to 1215AD! And who gets to say someone is an enemy combatant? Why George Bush, and no one else can contradict that.
At least we know how far back in time these thugs want to take us. The bill still has to be worked out in the House, and that is the only place we can stop it.
We've got to raise a stink to high heaven, and tell your family, co-workers, co-worshippers, and the guy on line next to you at the grocery.
If you know your zip code, search here for your Representative and Senators name Once you have that, you can either e-mail them from there and/or ask for them at the Capitol's main switchboard 1-800-SOBUSOB (1-800-762-8762).
Tell them you will not surrender our freedom because of al-qaeda's threat. That here in America we have a president subject to the people and the Constitution, and not a people subject to the whims of a king. And maybe some threats of exile to Communist China for anyone in Congress supporting this.
A little more from the Observer story quoted above:
'What the British law lord Lord Steyn once called a legal black hole had begun to be filled in,' said the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, speaking from Guantanamo, where he represents more than 40 detainees. 'It looks as if it is back, and deeper than before.'
...If the amendment passes the House of Representatives unmodified, one of its immediate effects is that Stafford Smith and all the other lawyers who act for Guantanamo prisoners will again be denied access, as they were for more than two years after Camp X-Ray opened in 2002.
...Michael Ratner, the director of New York's Centre for Constitutional Rights which brought the 2004 case, said the amendment 'will create a thousand points of darkness across the globe where the United States will be free to hold people indefinitely without a hearing, beyond the reach of US law and the checks and balances in our constitution.'
A senior Pentagon lawyer who asked not to be named said that the Graham amendment will have another consequence. The same Pentagon bill also contains a clause, sponsored by Graham and the Arizona Republican John McCain, to outlaw torture at US detention camps - a move up to now fiercely resisted by the White House. 'If detainees can't talk to lawyers or file cases, how will anyone ever find out if they have been abused,' the lawyer said.