What’s the matter, is your dialing arm broken? Don’t just sit there, call your senator - toll-free Capitol switchboard: 1 866 808 0065.. Nothing fancy: “I’m a constituent, and I don’t want you to vote to support this torture bill, and I don’t want the administration to get a free pass on torture.”

Glenn Greenwald:

Put another way, this bill would give the Bush administration the power to imprison people for their entire lives, literally, without so much as charging them with any wrongdoing or giving them any forum in which to contest the accusations against them. It thus vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists — namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations. Just to look at one ramification, does one even need to debate whether this newly vested power of indefinite imprisonment would affect the willingness of foreign journalists to report on the activities of the Bush administration? Do Americans really want our government to have this power?

Even the BushCo company newsletter has a problem with this:

A second major problem with the bill is its definition of who could be regarded as an enemy combatant and thus be subject to the exceptional detention and trial procedures. Another hasty agreement over the weekend would allow foreign civilians in the United States or even U.S. citizens to be arrested and held without charge indefinitely on grounds that they “supported hostilities against the United States.” This goes far beyond current case law, which reserves unlawful-combatant status for detainees engaged in an armed conflict against the United States or its allies. Endorsement of this standard by Congress would give extraordinary power to the Defense Department to arrest and hold foreigners and Americans without charge, and it would set a dangerous precedent for other nations. It’s not hard to imagine civilian American aid workers being arrested by foreign governments as “enemy combatants” for helping people deemed to be terrorists.