At last this GOP Congress has lived down to its lowest expectations. It has passed a bill that will be considered a shameful episode in the legal and constitutional history of the United States by anyone who comes to it in future research.

First, our enlightened selfish interest as U.S. citizens here. The law purports to establish procedures whereby alien unlawful enemy combatants can be processed and tried by military commissions, and the act purports to define aliens as persons who are not citizens of the United States.

It would be unwise, or at least wildly optimistic, to accept this definition at face value. Since the entire thrust of this bill is to keep the capture, captivity, treatment, defense and prosecution of the incarcerated as secretive as possible, it can hardly be assumed that a U.S. citizen rounded up and brought in would have the protection of law and the Constitution. Protection of citizens is not a given behind closed doors.

We can but hope that fewer citizens than other persons will be thrown into prisons in something vaguely designated by the elastic reach of this law as combat.

Second, and more terribly, this bill offers wide ranging and virtually elastic protections to anyone in the great global dragnet.

Someone working for Team Bush, from Uzbekistan to Turkey to Saudi Arabia, who pulls in the wrong person, wrongly identified as vaguely combatant, or related to the wrong person, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, is now not accountable for accuracy. There are no teeth in this law to incentivize getting the right person rather than the wrong one. Quite the contrary. Dead men tell no tales, and now men locked up for weeks or for months or for years can pretty confidently be treated in such a way that they will also tell no tales.

President Bush, you are guilty of an act of cowardice. Human beings owe an accountability for their actions to others, and nothing in what you falsely designate a War on Terror changes that.