A sad, sad day in America
President Bush signed into law the new Military Commissions Act, which, among other things, allows him to designate anybody as an “enemy combatant” and hold them indefinitely. No trial is required, no hearing before a judge where the government must present reasons for detention is allowed, and there is no guarantee that anybody anywhere will ever review the circumstances of the case.
This should really frighten people.
Consider this scenario: You are traveling overseas. You are out one night and you strike up a conversation at a bar with a person and a pleasant evening ensues. Maybe you are in Eastern Europe. Perhaps you’re in Israel, or China, or Canada. You share a few rounds of drinks. Maybe American foreign policy comes up and you express your disdain for some of Bush’s statements and blunders. You slap each other’s backs and share some laughs.
On your way home a few days later you get stopped at the airport. Security personnel ask you to accompany them into a room off to the side of the metal detectors. There you are roughly searched and questioned on how you know the man/woman that you were seen with a few nights ago. It turns out that he/she is a known terrorists and is under surveillance. Some of the folks that you were drinking with at the bar are members of a terrorist cell and you kind of look like somebody that was seen with him in Tangiers a few years back.
Uh, oh.
You are handcuffed, blindfolded and hustled onto the tarmac and into a waiting private, unmarked jet. You hear more voices in unaccented English barking questions and letting you know that it will go much easier if you just come clean.
After a few hours the plane lands and you are taken into a building (or maybe it’s a cave; you can’t tell because you are still wearing a blindfold). After another, short conversation with some new people, who now have Middle-Eastern accents, the pain begins.
This is not an excerpt from a Tom Clancy novel. Its not a theoretical nightmare scenario thought up by left-wing activists at the ACLU. This has already happened.
Just ask Canadian citizen Maher Arar. He was picked up by US authorities at JFK airport on his way home from a vacation in the Middle East. He was arrested without notice, flown to various countries that explicitly sanction torture and violently interrogated… For an entire year. Nobody notified his family. No charges were ever filed. His family showed up at the airport to pick him up and he just never got off of the plane. Only a massive, intense investigation by independent parties even revealed that he had been taken prisoner in the first place.
Again, this is not fantasy or conspiracy theories. This has all been documented and proved by court proceedings and independent government investigations in Canada that took place after the fact. The Prime Minister had to apologize and more investigaions are forthcoming. Read about it here.
This is just one of the cases that we know about, and it is our fault. Ours.
Every single one of us kidnapped Mr. Arar. Each American citizen tied him up and blindfolded him. All of the men, women and children in the US attached electrodes to his body and flipped the switch. We took a year of his and his family’s lives life away from them for no reason other than we are scared and we want to lash out at anybody who looks funny to us.
Instead of learning from incidents like this, we have embraced them. Instead of saying to ourselves that this was wrong and we need to make sure that we live up to our ideals, we have institutionalized the practice. We didn’t even bother to consider what some of our friends do in situations like this. Our indifference and ignorance sentenced this man, and may be sentencing others who are just as innocent.
But thanks to this law, we’ll never know.
Our Founding Fathers could never have imagined a situation like this and they knew it. They knew that it would be useless to try and anticipate every conceivable situation and write laws to cover them. They weren’t fortune-tellers. But they did now something about unjust imprisonment and torture. They understood that at the very heart of a free society is the idea that the government can’t exert power over your life or property without a really compelling reason; and even then only when an impartial a-political judge agrees.
Without that most basic of safety nests, how can we really call ourselves free people? And why do we want to live our lives any other way? How can we win if we do?
This should really frighten people.
Consider this scenario: You are traveling overseas. You are out one night and you strike up a conversation at a bar with a person and a pleasant evening ensues. Maybe you are in Eastern Europe. Perhaps you’re in Israel, or China, or Canada. You share a few rounds of drinks. Maybe American foreign policy comes up and you express your disdain for some of Bush’s statements and blunders. You slap each other’s backs and share some laughs.
On your way home a few days later you get stopped at the airport. Security personnel ask you to accompany them into a room off to the side of the metal detectors. There you are roughly searched and questioned on how you know the man/woman that you were seen with a few nights ago. It turns out that he/she is a known terrorists and is under surveillance. Some of the folks that you were drinking with at the bar are members of a terrorist cell and you kind of look like somebody that was seen with him in Tangiers a few years back.
Uh, oh.
You are handcuffed, blindfolded and hustled onto the tarmac and into a waiting private, unmarked jet. You hear more voices in unaccented English barking questions and letting you know that it will go much easier if you just come clean.
After a few hours the plane lands and you are taken into a building (or maybe it’s a cave; you can’t tell because you are still wearing a blindfold). After another, short conversation with some new people, who now have Middle-Eastern accents, the pain begins.
This is not an excerpt from a Tom Clancy novel. Its not a theoretical nightmare scenario thought up by left-wing activists at the ACLU. This has already happened.
Just ask Canadian citizen Maher Arar. He was picked up by US authorities at JFK airport on his way home from a vacation in the Middle East. He was arrested without notice, flown to various countries that explicitly sanction torture and violently interrogated… For an entire year. Nobody notified his family. No charges were ever filed. His family showed up at the airport to pick him up and he just never got off of the plane. Only a massive, intense investigation by independent parties even revealed that he had been taken prisoner in the first place.
Again, this is not fantasy or conspiracy theories. This has all been documented and proved by court proceedings and independent government investigations in Canada that took place after the fact. The Prime Minister had to apologize and more investigaions are forthcoming. Read about it here.
This is just one of the cases that we know about, and it is our fault. Ours.
Every single one of us kidnapped Mr. Arar. Each American citizen tied him up and blindfolded him. All of the men, women and children in the US attached electrodes to his body and flipped the switch. We took a year of his and his family’s lives life away from them for no reason other than we are scared and we want to lash out at anybody who looks funny to us.
Instead of learning from incidents like this, we have embraced them. Instead of saying to ourselves that this was wrong and we need to make sure that we live up to our ideals, we have institutionalized the practice. We didn’t even bother to consider what some of our friends do in situations like this. Our indifference and ignorance sentenced this man, and may be sentencing others who are just as innocent.
But thanks to this law, we’ll never know.
Our Founding Fathers could never have imagined a situation like this and they knew it. They knew that it would be useless to try and anticipate every conceivable situation and write laws to cover them. They weren’t fortune-tellers. But they did now something about unjust imprisonment and torture. They understood that at the very heart of a free society is the idea that the government can’t exert power over your life or property without a really compelling reason; and even then only when an impartial a-political judge agrees.
Without that most basic of safety nests, how can we really call ourselves free people? And why do we want to live our lives any other way? How can we win if we do?
posted by Unknown at 7:55 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home