For openers, there is no reference in the MCA to “illegal enemy combatants.” The category is “unlawful enemy combatants,” a descriptive term recognized by the Supreme Court in its few decisions on the subject.

(ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.

No hope of appeal? Only to the Convening Authority, the Court of Military Commissions Review, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and perhaps even the Supreme Court of the United States.

The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there's no requirement that this list be published.

Second, while Subchapter I also provides that “[n]o alien unlawful enemy combatant . . . may invoke the Geneva Conventions,” those terrorists are not prisoners of war and thus have no claim to protection under the Geneva Conventions—as even the Supreme Court has recognized. Maybe there is “international precedent” to the contrary, perhaps in France or Sudan, but even if there is, that has no binding effect in the United States. I'm sure that the President will be delighted to know he can “decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considers permissible.” Ask McCain if that's true. Indeed, my comments above make it only too clear that just the opposite is the case, and that an Islamic terrorist can actually litigate the degree of coercion allegedly used on him, while standing on his rights under the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to our Constitution.

Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Talk about begging the question! Of course the appeals are from the military commissions, because that's where the trials take place—trials that the Times and their acolytes have been demanding for five years. As to not having a trial, much to the chagrin of the Times and its legal left foot soldiers, the Supreme Court has ruled that alien enemy combatants can be held until the end of hostilities, but that if we are going to try anyone (to impose punishment, rather than mere confinement), we need a better system than the pre-MCA military commissions. One wonders what the Times would have had our military do with the countless prisoners we took during WW II—and they were not even “unlawful” enemy combatants. Neither regular enemy forces nor guerillas are released, if at all, until the end of hostilities.

Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Perhaps the Times's lawyers have not informed their client that for years before the criminal justice revolution of the sixties, even coerced evidence was admissible if it was trustworthy. The newspaper apparently doesn't understand that coerced testimony can be reliable, as for example when a threat or arm twisting produces information leading to the apprehension of another Islamic terrorist. Sure there was coercion, but it certainly was reliable! As to the definitions, see above, and remember that the accused can challenge the coerced evidence in several different ways.

American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

In the first place, “American standards of justice” are applicable in a domestic criminal court and protect defendants like O.J. Simpson, not in a military commission trying the mastermind of the 9/11 reign of death and destruction on Americans, their property, and our democratic institutions.

Secondly, as I make clear above, there is no “secret evidence”—unfortunately. Is the Times actually saying that we should provide Islamic terrorists with information about the CIA's “sources, methods, and activities”? As it has already done by revealing our telephone surveillance, money tracking, and secret prisons programs?

The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

None of this bluster, misrepresentation, distortion, and special pleading from the Times is surprising, and none of it should be taken seriously.

On the other hand, what must be taken very seriously is the road we have been sent down by rogue justices of the Supreme Court, inept apparatchiks in the White House, political opportunists in the senate, and terrorist lovers in the media.

As our nation treads that road—with platoons of the Legal Left and its fellow traveling lawyers in the vanguard—we will see it littered with the road kill resulting from our lost right of self defense against not the O.J. Simpsons of the world, but the Khalid Sheik Mohammeds.

This is cache, read story here