Restore habeas rights.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Earlier this month, a federal judge tossed out the case of Guantanamo Bay detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, citing the Military Commissions Act that Congress approved last September. This ghastly law gives the president unlimited authority to interrogate and detain captured enemy combatants and strips detainees of habeas corpus rights.

Senate Democrats should use their newfound power to repeal this tyrannical law. It has done such grave damage to the Constitution and to this nation's credibility on human rights issues that it rivals the Alien and Sedition Acts as a low point of American democracy.

In the wake of the Nov. 7 elections which shifted control of Congress to the Democrats, lawmakers should waste no time in revisiting this retrograde law, which violates the most sacred American values and runs the Constitution through a paper shredder.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who will assume control of the Senate next year as majority leader, appears to be laying the groundwork for such a review. A spokesman this week said Reid intends to reconsider "some of the most extreme elements" of the law, including odious language that specifically bars detainees from protesting their detention in court.

The ban on habeas corpus petitions has left the vast majority of the estimated 14,000 military detainees in U.S. custody without any hope of pleading their cases.

The new Congress will consider two bills that would help undo some of the damage caused by the Military Commissions Act. Both the Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act (Senate Bill 4060 by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.) and the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act (SB 4081 by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.) would restore the federal courts' constitutionally mandated oversight role. Dodd's bill also would restore traditional standards of U.S. military justice, including a ban on evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant.

Lawmakers should go even further by changing provisions that allow coerced evidence to be introduced under some circumstances and that allow the president to decide what interrogation methods are acceptable and when Geneva Conventions standards should be applied.

Republican leaders in Congress pushed through the Military Commissions Act before last November's election in an effort to convince voters that they were tough on terrorism.

A dismaying number of Gumby-spined Democrats, fearful of being accused of coddling terrorists, also supported the law.

Now that the election fog has cleared, lawmakers should go back and fix this terrible law and, along with it, the damage it has done to the Constitution and this nation's international reputation.

Those who are tempted to move on without doing so might consider how swiftly they would rise - and how loudly and eloquently they would protest - if any other nation deprived U.S. citizens of their most fundamental legal rights.