[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Page 20265]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             HABEAS CORPUS

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, because the truncated time on the 
amendments to the underlying bill includes a very short amount of time 
for the Specter amendment, I am going to use only 5 minutes now to talk 
about my support of the Specter amendment.
  The Specter amendment is about habeas corpus. That is a big term, a 
kind of complicated term. Let me describe it by describing this 
picture. This is a young woman. She is a young woman named Mitsuye 
Endo. Mitsuye Endo looked out from behind barbed-wire fences where she 
was incarcerated in this country some decades ago during the Second 
World War. Let me tell you about her. She was a 22-year-old clerical 
worker in California's Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento, CA. 
She had never been to Japan. She didn't speak Japanese. She had been 
born and raised in this country. She was a Methodist. She had a brother 
in the U.S. Army, unquestioned loyalty to the United States of America, 
but she was incarcerated--picked up, taken from her home, her job, her 
community, and put behind barbed-wire fences.
  Now, she eventually got out of that incarceration, and her plea to 
the courts was what really led to the unlocking of those camps, and let 
those tens of thousands of Japanese Americans out of those camps. They 
had been unjustly viewed as enemies of our country and incarcerated. 
And with one young woman's writ of habeas corpus, an awful chapter in 
our country's history soon came to an end. Her question to the courts 
was a simple but powerful one: Why am I being detained?
  What is habeas corpus? Well, it answers the question, by giving 
access to the courts, of whether you can hold someone indefinitely 
without charges, without a trial, and without a right for anyone to 
have a review of their circumstances. When someone has the right to 
file a habeas corpus petition, it is the right of someone to go to the 
court system in this country to say to that court system: There has 
been a mistake. I am innocent; I didn't do it; I shouldn't be here.
  The court then asks the question: Why are these people locked up? 
Should they be locked up? Is there a basis for it? Is it a mistake? Is 
it wrong?
  Everyone in this Chamber will have read the story in the Washington 
Post about a week ago, and after I read that story, I just hung my head 
a bit. A Canadian in this country was apprehended at an American 
airport, at a U.S. airport in New York City. That Canadian citizen, 
apprehended in New York City by our authorities, was then sent to 
Syria, where he was tortured for some 8 or 9 months. He was put in a 
coffin-like structure, a cement coffin-like structure, in isolation, 
and tortured. It turns out, at the end of nearly a year of his 
incarceration, it was all a big mistake. He wasn't a terrorist. He 
wasn't involved with terrorists. But he was apprehended and held 
incommunicado, in fact, rendered to another country where torture 
occurred. A big mistake. His wife didn't know where he was. He has a 
young 2- or 3-year-old child.
  What does all this say? Why is this country a country that is 
different from others? We have been different from others because it is 
in this country where you can't be picked up off of a street and held 
indefinitely, held without charges, held without a trial, held without 
a right to go to a court. It is this country in which that exists.
  Let me make another point. Why should we care about how the United 
States treats noncitizens and taking away the right of habeas corpus 
for noncitizens? Because every U.S. citizen is a noncitizen in every 
other country of the world. There are 193 countries in this world. We 
are citizens of only one. And when an American travels--any American, 
anywhere--we are noncitizens in those countries.
  What would our reaction be? What will our reaction be as Americans 
if--as an example, recently, a journalist who was detained and arrested 
and put in jail, I believe in Sudan, who then asked his captors to be 
able to see the American consulate: I need the ability to contact the 
American consulate.
  His captors said: You have no such rights.
  He complained: But I do have that right.
  His captors said: No. Those you have detained in the United States 
are not given those rights, and you are not given those rights, either.
  This is why this issue is so important, and that is why I support the 
Specter amendment. I hope very much the Senate will not make a profound 
mistake by turning down that amendment.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut is 
recognized.

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