“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

In October, President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law after rushing it through in the final days of a Republican Congress. The act, ostensibly designed to allow the administration to “facilitate bringing to justice terrorists and other unlawful enemy combatants through full and fair trials by military commissions, and for other purposes,” is one of the most frightening pieces of new legislation I’ve ever seen–and no one seems to care.

The guts of the act are this: President Bush or the secretary of defense can gather up a group of people he selects and declare anyone an “unlawful enemy combatant.” If you are declared an “unlawful enemy combatant,” you lose one of your basic human rights, that of the writ of habeas corpus. Those confusing Latin words allow you get a lawyer, confront your accuser and hear the crimes levied against you after being arrested, as well as for the court to determine whether or not your imprisonment is valid.

According to the Military Commissions Act itself, it only removes the writ if you are not a legal citizen of the United States. Putting aside the fact that if you’re traveling here you could be snatched up, put in a jail somewhere, and never heard of again, how could you prove your own citizenship were you accused of being an “unlawful enemy combatant?” How could you get in front a judge to prove it? Though the Act may pretend it is inapplicable to U.S. citizens, in practice, there is nothing stopping the government from using it on anyone, for no reason at all. All they have to do is decide you qualify as an “unlawful enemy combatant,” a term which has no explicit definition, other than being someone Bush considers outside of the protections of the Geneva Convention.

Of course, the entire reason for the act was that prisoners thrown in the Guantanamo Bay prison facility wanted to know what they were accused of, exactly, and if they were ever going to be given trial. I have no doubt that the place contains some of the scum of the Earth, but there are innocent people in there. Innocent people have been released as the result of now-impossible habeas corpus cases. Do these people somehow not deserve a basic human right that has been in place since the year 1305, simply because they are accused of being involved in a terrorist act?

The Constitution states, “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” As far as I can tell, we are not under invasion, nor rebellion, nor is there a grandiose, uncontainable threat to public safety right now. Terrorism? The 9/11 attacks were preventable with our pre-9/11 intelligence capabilities, had the administration actually paid attention to all those memos.

Before 2006, the only time habeas corpus has been suspended was in the midst of the Civil War, by President Lincoln in response to widespread riots and militia actions. Even then, it was only in small areas of the country that were experiencing chaos, not the entire thing. Should we not be up in arms about this? At the very least, we might be aware of the broad redefinition of the Constitution present here.

Ostensibly, President Bush and his administration are doing their best to defend our country from terrorists attempting to destroy our freedoms. I can scarcely imagine a situation the terrorists could create that would damage our essential liberties more than they have been in the name of protecting us. I don’t think people are going to start mysteriously disappearing any time soon, but we have (or had) that Bill of Rights for a reason.