Last week, President Bush declared he’d like to see democracy break out in the Middle East (whether they want it or not; whether they can manage it or not; whether or not they even know what it is). Well, I say, if charity begins at home, then so does democracy. And if democracy means anything, it’s that rule of law ought to rule, that due process is always due and that the innocent are presumed to be, well, innocent, at least until proven guilty.
Given our treatment of the 650 or so prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Bush has as much business holding this country up as a beacon of human rights as President Lincoln did – before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation!
I come to this issue with an ever so tiny bias. Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the man who has persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to grant judicial review (or is it only a judicial blink) of the Gitmo prisoner’s plight, is my brother. But, no matter whose brother he is, when he states that under Bush Gulag rules “we can label anyone we want as an enemy combatant, stick them at Guantanamo and not have any court review it,” he’s right. And no, neither he, nor I, nor millions of others around the world are “soft on terrorists.” What we are is hard for democracy.
For starters, detaining these people without affording them access to counsel or a hearing to determine if there’s even probable cause to believe they’ve committed a crime, is, in the famous words of Tallyrand, worse than a crime – it’s a blunder. That’s because numbered among the 650 are citizens of some of our closest allies in the War on Terror – Great Britain, Kuwait and Australia. And if you read some of the newspapers of those countries, you’d know that our continued detention of their citizens has been a major (and unnecessary) irritant in our relations.
The Bush administrations justifies this by a pettifoggery worthy of Dickens’ “Bleak House.” It says we’re at war, as in the War on Terror, which gives us the right to take and hold these prisoners. But according to the law firm of Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft & Curley (as in Curley from the Three Stooges), they’re not really prisoners – at least prisoners of war, even though we’re supposed to be at war and they were imprisoned as a consequence thereof.
And why not declare them POWs? Because that means that they’d be entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions and that means visitors, intermediaries, rights, letters, due process, etc. And since many of them were grabbed in Pakistan (a country with which we’ve never been at war) or Afghanistan (isn’t the war over over there?), the Bush administration has simply designated them as “enemy combatants,” which means we can hold them until the “war” is over even though no war has ever been formally declared.
When do you suppose the War on Terror will be over? When they’ve nabbed the last telemarketer who violates the Do-Not-Call list? Seriously, the war on terror – which is certainly a legitimate act of self-defense – could easily continue for 10, 20 or 30 years. In the meantime, the Gitmo suspects (what else can they be called) will languish in Cuba to the detriment of this country’s foreign relations, not to mention the possibility that some of these 650 may actually be innocent.
And, at bottom, that’s what this is about. Due process is not a fund-raising mantra for me, it’s a concept that has a purpose – do everything possible to maximize the chances of punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent. It’s an issue that shouldn’t break down along ideological lines. Conservatives, liberals and moderates should be equally concerned any time the letter – not to mention the spirit – of the Constitution is being violated, as it is in this case.
It’s a sad thing when otherwise decent Republicans blindly rally to President Bush’s side on this one, and when Democrats – especially those running for president – are too gutless to raise the issue on the campaign trail for fear of being slandered by Karl Rove’s Gotcha Machine.
If any of the human beings held at Gitmo (I’ll probably catch flak for even referring to them as such) is guilty, I say punish them to the full extent of the law. But first, let’s apply some law. As an American, I don’t like to be thought of by “them feriners” as a hypocrite.
