- NEW YORK--The United
States is a nation of laws. The police arrest suspects they reasonably
believe to have broken the law, not citizens who happen to disagree with
the government's politics. Cops don't go after people preemptively because
they might commit a crime someday.
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- In America, people are considered innocent until they're
proven guilty in a court of law. They enjoy the right to a fair trial by
a jury of their peers as quickly as possible. And of course they're entitled
to the counsel of an attorney.
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- These fundamental rights, taught in every civics class,
define what it means to be American. When other countries fill their prisons
with political dissidents, we wonder aloud what it must be like to live
in such lawless places.
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- When we watch films like "Midnight Express,"
in which an American drug smuggler rots in a Turkish prison, we shake our
heads not at the sentence--after all, he's guilty--but at the lead character's
railroading through the court system and the abuse he suffers at the hands
of his guards.
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- Before September 11, no patriotic American would have
disputed the last two paragraphs. Sadly, legal guarantees that every American
considered a sacred birthright have been shredded virtually overnight,
and many people don't seem to care.
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- Just as a World Trade Center built over the course of
five years was destroyed in under two hours, a presidential impostor has
used a phony "war on terror" to systematically unravel two centuries
of basic jurisprudence in less than a year.
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- George W. Bush may not have read Gibbon but he possesses
the morals and cunning of a gangster; in a country still stunned by last
fall's attacks, that seems to be enough.
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- The "war on terror," we're told, requires new
tactics. Law enforcement--which somehow now includes the military, CIA,
FBI and NSA--needs stronger tools.
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- Terrorists are sneakier and smarter than your garden-variety
mafia don. So now they're no longer "accused terrorists" but
rather "enemy combatants."
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- Who cares if these "enemy combatants" are American
citizens? They can be held forever, or to be more precise, until the federal
government "defeats terrorism."
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- And while they're awaiting that distant day, Bush's "detainees"--not
prisoners, since his first decisive victory has been in his jihad against
the English language--don't get to see a lawyer.
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- This works out well because Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld--who has anointed himself judge, jury and executioner--won't offer
them a chance to prove their innocence in court.
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- For the Bushies, see, guilt and innocence aren't the
point. The detainees aren't in prison for what they've done. They're there
because of what they might do, for whom they know--for what they think.
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- THEY ARE POLITICAL PRISONERS!
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- Americans have watched with aggressive disinterest as
images of 564 captured Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters squatting in their
Guantnamo dog pens fill their living room screens. Human rights activists
warn that these inmates, who hail from 38 countries, are being abused.
At Camp Delta in July and August, three men tried to hang themselves and
another slashed his wrist with a plastic razor. According to the Army,
Guantnamo internees have staged hunger strikes to protest the conditions
of their captivity. Others are being forcibly medicated with antidepressants
and anti-psychotic drugs.
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- Even worse than the day-to-day torture is the interminable
legal limbo. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled July 31 that
"the military base at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, is outside the sovereign
territory of the United States." So Guantnamo isn't the U.S., which
means that the prisoners can't seek redress in American courts. But it
isn't Cuba either. The POWs can go to the World Court in The Hague, notes
Kollar-Kotelly--but the United States routinely ignores international rulings.
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- Bush asserts that we're at "war" whenever he
calls for increased government surveillance and tax cuts, and decreased
freedom and social programs. But then he turns right around and claims
that the Guantnamo captives, soldiers captured while bombs fell and bullets
flew, aren't "prisoners of war" at all.
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- Being declared a POW, after all, would entitle these
schlubs to certain rights under the 1949 Geneva Conventions: freedom to
refuse to answer questions, release at the end of hostilities, decent treatment,
i.e., not being held in six-by-eight-foot dog pens under the blazing tropical
sun.
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- This linguistic chicanery is amusingly convenient, but
it will look like madness the next time American soldiers captured overseas
apply for POW status.
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- If you think about it--and there's been very little serious
thinking since September 11--what did these guys do to deserve being imprisoned
in the first place, much less indefinitely? They fought for the Taliban.
In Afghanistan. Against the Northern Alliance. In Afghanistan.
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- These prisoners--er, detainees--didn't attack the United
States. They didn't even know anyone who attacked the United States. They're
being held not because of who they are, but because of what they might
do--and because of what they think.
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- THIS IS NOT THE AMERICAN WAY!
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- The same goes for the 750 people the Justice Department
picked up on visa and immigration charges since September 11. There are
millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, but Bush's feds only
sought out those whose ethnicity (Arab), ancestry (Muslim) and political
beliefs (opposed to U.S. foreign policy) made them a target. These people
aren't terrorists, or even accused terrorists--they're political prisoners,
doing time for what they think and what they might do.
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- Not even Americans are safe from Bush's anti-constitutional
assaults on law and basic decency. Remember Jose Padilla? Attorney General
John Ashcroft crowed in June that his men had "disrupted an unfolding
terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty
bomb." Now government officials admit that they've got zero evidence
and that Padilla is at best a "small fish." Nevertheless, they
plan to detain this American citizen indefinitely, without trial.
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- Similarly Yaser Esam Hamdi, the "other" American
Talib captured in Afghanistan, has been held in the brig of the Norfolk
Naval Station since April 5. On August 16 U.S. District Judge Robert Doumar
demanded that the government, which hasn't even bothered to explain why
Hamdi should be held as an enemy combatant, must do so. "This case
appears to be the first in American jurisprudence where an American citizen
has been held incommunicado and subjected to an indefinite detention in
the continental United States without charges, without any finding by a
military tribunal, and without access to a lawyer," Doumar wrote.
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- There are few more sickening sights than George W. Bush
wearing a lapel pin bearing an image of the American flag.
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- Bush and his creepy henchmen can wrap themselves in nationalistic
symbolism all they want, but these right-wing thugs aren't patriots.
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- THEY MAY PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG, BUT THEY **DESPISE**
THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS.
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- COPYRIGHT 2002 TED RALL
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- Ted Rall's new book, a graphic travelogue about his recent
coverage of the Afghan war titled "To Afghanistan and Back,"
is now in its second edition. Ordering and review-copy information are
available at nbmpub.com.
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- http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/site/viewru.cf
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