Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, today I am reintroducing the Detention of Enemy Combatants Act. This legislation authorizes the detainment of ``enemy combatants'' in the war on terrorism while guaranteeing that they are granted timely access to legal counsel and judicial review.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in South Carolina ruled that the Administration lacks statutory and constitutional authority to indefinitely imprison without criminal charges a U.S. citizen designated as an ``enemy combatant.'' Last month, another federal judge ruled that holding individuals indefinitely as ``enemy combatants'' unconstitutionally violates their right to due process and that some foreign terror suspects held in Guantanamo Bay can challenge their confinement in U.S. courts. That ruling came some eight months after the U.S. Supreme Court held in Hamdi that while the President has the authority to detain ``enemy combatants'' captured in the battlefield, detainees are entitled to lawyers and the chance to challenge their imprisonment.
The Court, however, left a host of unanswered questions that Congress should seek to resolve. Justice Scalia, in his dissent, called on Congress to act, noting: ``I frankly do not know whether these tools are sufficient to meet the Government's security needs, including the need to obtain intelligence through interrogation. It is far beyond my competence, or the Court's competence, to determine that. But it is not beyond Congress's.''
The Supreme Court also side-stepped the case of Jose Padilla and will likely be forced to speak again on these issues should a vacuum still exist due to congressional inaction. Until then, enemy combatant law will continue to be written in a piecemeal fashion through a series of conflicting lower court decisions.
I believe that the federal government must have the authority to detain terrorists as ``enemy combatants'' to protect the public, gather intelligence and safeguard national security. But we must also ensure that the accused are afforded the due-process rights guaranteed under the Constitution. I am particularly concerned with the detention of U.S. citizens and lawful residents.
In the last Congress, I introduced the Detention of Enemy Combatants Act to authorize the government to detain suspected members or associates of al Qaeda, but requiring that U.S. citizen detainees be granted access to legal counsel and due-process hearings. The bill called for standards to be set for such detentions that distinguish these cases from other Americans held for trial on criminal charges.
While we must grant broad latitude to our armed forces when it comes to protecting national security, American citizens should not be held indefinitely upon the sole determination of one branch of government without access to counsel or proper judicial review of those determinations.
These same concerns have even been echoed by Michael Chertoff, the newly-confirmed Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and former head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice, who has suggested that policymakers now ``may need to think more systematically and universally about the issue of combatants'' and to ``debate a long-term and sustainable architecture for the process of determining when, why, and for how long someone may be detained as an enemy combatant, and what judicial review should be available.''
In addition, Viet Dinh, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy has called ``unsustainable'' the government's current insistence on detentions without meaningful oversight or any sort of due process.
I am currently examining ways to heed this invitation for congressional action and hope to introduce a piece of legislation in the near future that establishes specific standards and procedures under which terrorism suspects may be detained as enemy combatants and provided due process.
In the interim, I am reintroducing this piece of legislation in the hope that Congress and the Administration will finally work together to create a workable framework to deal with these matters of significant constitutional import. In addition, I have renewed my call for congressional hearings to examine proposals for congressional action in this area. After the shameful internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, we must be vigilant to protect against the government's decision to detain, perhaps indefinitely, any American without adequate review of the basis of its decision.