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Facism?

In the Washington Post yesterday, there was a story about a draft proposal for "special" military courts. I'll let you all read the article to get the details, but I wanted to point out a couple of proposals that, quite frankly, scare the shit out of me.

  • allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction
  • defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations
  • They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors
  • not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials (trial in absentia!!! WTF!???!!!??)
  • To secure a death penalty under the draft legislation, at least five jurors must agree

So, the upshot is that ANY crime can be prosecuted under this special military tribunal, defendants would have their constitutional right stripped from them - completely - and there would only need to be 5 of the 12 jurors in agreement to confer the death penalty on a possibly absent defendant who had NO DUE PROCESS RIGHTS. Sorry about the yelling there, but the idea that this is being considered makes me completely insane. I can't even imagine the state that this country would have to be in to allow this sort of thing to happen - I can only hope that I'm not seeing America and Americans through rose-colored glasses and I'm not overlooking the seeds of that sort of facist "court" system being planted right now.
I ran across this story on Fark.com and just reading through the comments almost made me cry. No, there are no *serious* defenders of this sort of thing posting yet (though I've barely read 100 of  the 800+ comments - there will likely be someone defending it before the end), but the confusion and the disbelief that this could be happening makes me nuts. As one Farker put it - Bush wasn't a stealth candidate - we all knew he was going to be a nut, but we allowed him to steal one election and then we allowed our fear to put him in office again.

1 comment Tags: politics, bush