Fox News lies to its viewers

Glenn Greenwald points out that Fox News is out-and-out lying to its viewers about the powers granted the President by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [PDF text; S 3930 summary]:

What is “flatly false” is what Kondracke told Fox viewers about the Military Commissions Act. It is true that the Act creates military commissions and establishes rules for those commissions in the event that the President wants a certain detainee tried, convicted and punished (almost certainly execution). Not even the Bush-led U.S. will openly execute detainees without a finding that they are guilty of terrorism. The commissions exist so that the Executive branch can impose sentence (such as the death sentence) on detainees who are found guilty of engaging in terrorism (or some other war crime).

But there is no right for detainees to be tried before a commission, and there is no obligation for the President to bring any detainee before a military commission. If the President does not want to obtain a finding of guilt and impose punishment, he has no reason to bring them before a military commission. He can just keep them detained forever without any finding of guilt and without any punishment being imposed (just as many of the Guantanamo detainees, and even U.S. citizens, have been kept in cages for years with no finding of any kind of guilt).

…This is not some obscure mistake on Mort Kondracke’s part. As he himself pointed out, the power to detain people indefinitely with no process is one of the principal objections made by opponents of the bill. How can he—along with Brit Hume and Fred Barnes—not know that the bill provides the President precisely that power? Yet Kondrake told the Fox audience that the bill gives the President no such power, while Hume and Barnes sat there and never corrected it… That our so-called “journalists,” even on Fox, are looking into the camera and giving such emphatic, false assurances to millions of Americans about one of the most critical issues of our time explains a lot about our current political predicament.

Fox News is part of the right-wing noise machine — and that machine has never bothered with the inconvenience of sticking to the facts.