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Imagine this:
After a late night discussing politics with a friend or posting a message online, your front door is blown open. Twelve men in black uniforms – you can't tell if they are military or police – storm through your home. Within fifteen minutes, your computer, your phone, your answering machine, your filing cabinet, even your book collection has been confiscated. You and your possessions are loaded into a nondescript black van. Your captors have not said a word to you, and will not respond in any way to your questions.
 You might be in Guantanamo Bay, you might be in Guam, you might be in
Cairo – there's absolutely no indication where in the world you might
be. And still, nobody tells you anything. 
You ride in silence for 45 minutes. A bag is placed over your head, and you are taken off the van and, judging from the sound, onto a plane of some kind. 17 hours later, you are brought into your new prison cell. You might be in Guantanamo Bay, you might be in Guam, you might be in Cairo – there's absolutely no indication where in the world you might be. And still, nobody tells you anything.
And then they torture you. At first it seems silly, but then it's painful, humiliating, degrading. You tell them just about anything they want to hear – and they want to hear it all.
Three weeks later, you finally get your chance in court – but it's not a court, it's a military tribunal. The whole proceeding is different from what you've seen on TV courtroom shows, and you can barely understand what's going on. Just a few hours later, all the "evidence" has been submitted, including the files on your laptop, the titles of the books you owned, all the emails and IMs you've written or received in the last year, and recordings of what you told your interrogators to get them to give you food.
You are found guilty of treason and aiding the enemy. You are to be held indefinitely in this prison, and you don't even know what continent you're on. You're innocent, of course, of any such crime, although at this point, that doesn't make any difference.
Or, even worse, you never even see a tribunal. They just toss you in prison and forget about you.
What can you do?
This post was supposed to be a how-to guide for being "disappeared." I sincerely thought that a well-reasoned, logical investigation would turn up all sorts of useful tricks to try – although it's never wise to try to represent yourself in the courtroom, your only alternative is the tribunal-appointed attorney who just wants to submit a guilty plea.
I thought that you could challenge jurisdiction, or demand your own attorney. I thought you might challenge the constitutionality of the law. I looked for loopholes, for loose ends, for any little scrap of hope.
I'm sorry to say, folks, but I came up with nothing. As far as I can tell, if you're taken into custody under the 2006 MCA, you're going to be in your secret prison until they decide to let you out. No appeals, no other judicial oversight, no writing your Congressman – all avenues have been cut off. Even if you do get into one of these military tribunals, there's not much you can do except sit there and hope the judge finds you innocent.
Well, that's not the way the justice system was supposed to work, obviously. But this is where we're at: everything you knew – everything anyone knew – about how the law works is, in this case, irrelevant. Judicial review is the most powerful tool in the world for idiot laws like this. The MCA can't possibly withstand judicial review, so they made sure that no court would ever get to review it, except for the secret courts that they can engineer however they wish.
I'm still looking, though, for any little bit of strategy that our hypothetical secret prisoner might be able to use. But in the meantime, you ought to be looking over your shoulder – the days of "innocent until proven guilty," the days of getting a fair trial, the days of justice are over.
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