No Words Can Explain How Lost We Are

Manual to allow executions based on hearsay
Pentagon plan for detainee trials could spark fresh bipartisan debate

• Pentagon drafts detainee trial manual
Jan. 18: The Pentagon has completed a manual for upcoming detainee trials that would allow suspected terrorists to be imprisoned or executed using hearsay evidence.

Updated: 2:52 p.m. ET Jan 18, 2007
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has drafted a manual for upcoming detainee trials that would allow suspected terrorists to be convicted on hearsay evidence and coerced testimony and imprisoned or put to death.

According to a copy of the manual obtained by The Associated Press, a terror suspect's defense lawyer cannot reveal classified evidence in the person's defense until the government has a chance to review it.

The manual, sent to Capitol Hill on Thursday and scheduled to be released later by the Pentagon, is intended to track a law passed last fall by Congress restoring President Bush's plans to have special military commissions try terror-war prisoners. Those commissions had been struck down earlier in the year by the Supreme Court.

The Pentagon manual could spark a fresh confrontation between the Bush administration and Congress — now led by Democrats — over the treatment of the nation’s terrorism suspects.

Last September, Congress — then led by Republicans — sent Bush a bill granting wide latitude in interrogating and detaining captured enemy combatants. The legislation also prohibited some of the worst abuses of detainees like mutilation and rape, but granted the president leeway to decide which other interrogation techniques are permissible.

Anyone out there remember any of this being part of the civics & history classes that you took? Did YOU learn in school that the US was just another rogue nation that cut swathes thru it enemies with no regard to basic human decency? That tortured, maimed and KILLED in the name of "National Security"?

I must have been in the parking lot lighting up that day.