Need to be able to concisely list the reasons why the detainee bill is awful? The terrorist-loving America-haters at the NYTimes have the editorial for you:

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: 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.

Habeas Corpus: 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.

Judicial Review: 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.

Coerced Evidence: 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.

Secret Evidence: 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.

Offenses: 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.

Read on.

“Hey, remember habeas corpus?”

Remember: Republicans are bad on terror.

A classified intelligence report concludes that the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat to the United States, U.S. officials told CNN Sunday.

Some intelligence officials have said as much in the past, but the newly revealed document is the first formal report on global trends in terrorism by the National Intelligence Estimate, which is put out by the National Intelligence Council.

Read on at CNN.

[I prefer] an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America’s checkbook for the next two years.

George Tenet’s WMD “slam-dunk,” Vice President Cheney’s “we will be greeted as liberators,” Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves “neo-conservative” (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons—bright people, all—are now clamoring, “On to Tehran!”

Who wrote these Bush-bashing cannonballs?

Joe Scarborough and Christopher Buckley.

Read their essays, along with those of five other right-wingers, in “Time for us to go: Conservatives on why the GOP should lose in 2006” in the Washington Monthly.

On the five-year anniversary, Keith Olbermann savages the Bush administration for its inaction over the last five years. I’ve been linking to Olbermann a lot lately, but this one is truly gripping and inspiring.

Who has left this whole in the ground? We have not forgotten, Mr. President. You have. May this country forgive you.

Sigh.

There’s no evidence Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaida associates, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. Democrats said the report undercuts President Bush’s justification for going to war.

The declassified document being released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee also explores the role that inaccurate information supplied by the anti-Saddam exile group the Iraqi National Congress had in the march to war.

Read on if you can keep from getting depressed.

Everyone’s favorite Web site from 2004 is back, now covering the 2006 Senate races: http://www.electoral-vote.com:2006/.

We here at Bray New World would like to welcome George W. Bush to October 2001, and wish him the best of luck catching up to the rest of us.

Read on.

Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald: Will the real cowards please stand up?

Excellent piece, this.

Do you want to hear what a person sounds like when they really are — to use Steyn’s words — “weak, that there’s nothing — no core, no bedrock — nothing it’s not willing to trade”? Here is Bush loyalist Sen. John Cornyn, explaining why we should allow the President to break the law and eavesdrop on our conversations without any oversight: “None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.” And here is Pat Roberts, showing how willing he is to trade all American values in the hope of being protected from the things he fears: “I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead.” That “rationale” means we do anything — give up all freedoms, relinquish all values — because desperately trying to stay alive is the only thing that matters.

So someone — like Centanni or Wiig — who recites a few words that they don’t mean in order to avoid death is a wretched, feminine coward who has no core values and nothing they are willing to die for. But if that’s the standard, then people like Steyn and his fellow neoconservative warriors — who want to place blind faith in the Government in exchange for promises of “protection,” vest in the President the most unlimited powers, and fundamentally change how our country functions and the values which define it, all because they think that doing so is necessary to increase their chances of living — are drowning in a self-protective cowardice that dwarfs by many magnitudes that which they mock in others.

The creepy spectacle of watching one warrior after the next insist that we must risk other people’s lives and bomb more people so that we don’t feel girlish and scared and submissive is repugnant enough, in itself, to have to witness on a daily basis. But the fact that these same people are the ones whose deep, irrational fears of The Terrorist override virtually all other considerations, and who demand that we change our nation and relinquish all of the values and liberties which have always defined it and which make it worth fighting for, all because they believe that doing so is necessary to allow them some marginally greater chance of avoiding death, renders their accusations and warrior dances — on top of everything else — an exercise in the grossest and most absurd hypocrisy.