October 25, 2004 7:03 AM

So much for the presumption of innocence

After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law

We think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve.

  • Vice President Dick Cheney

It’s one of the most potentially far-reaching legal “reforms” in our nation’s history, and yet it has been accomplished in almost complete secrecy by a cabal of neo-Conservatives who seem to care not a whit for the Constitution or simple human decency. If this doesn’t concern you, it should. Once we begin heading down this slippery slope, where does it stop? I would submit that once we have started down this slope, it’s not going to stop.

No one will argue that terrorists deserve anything but swift, certain justice. Yet, above all else, one of the things that sets the US apart from countries like Iraq or Afghanistan is that we are STILL governed by the rule of law. That means due process, the right to face your accusers, being presumed innocent until proven guilty- all those things that we as Americans take for granted from our legal system.

Now, we have apparently have a new system in place, one that would appear designed to dispense streamlined “justice” on anyone labelled a “terrorist”. This “justice” has little in common with the systems Americans have long taken for granted. In fact, merely placing the “terrorist” label on someone would appear to remove the due process requirement altogether. Of course, the question then becomes exactly what defines a “terrorist” and who makes that decision?

In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.

Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.

The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress….

But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists.

“We’ve cleared whole forests of paper developing procedures for these tribunals, and no one has been tried yet,” said Richard L. Shiffrin, who worked on the issue as the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence matters. “They just ended up in this Kafkaesque sort of purgatory.”

The story of how Guantánamo and the new military justice system became an intractable legacy of Sept. 11 has been largely hidden from public view.

But extensive interviews with current and former officials and a review of confidential documents reveal that the legal strategy took shape as the ambition of a small core of conservative administration officials whose political influence and bureaucratic skill gave them remarkable power in the aftermath of the attacks.

No reasonable person would deny that those responsible for terrorist acts deserve to be brought to justice. The problem with the tribunal system is that people our government believe to be terrorists are only afforded the absolute bare minimum of rights normally afforded to accused criminals. The fact that most of the accused are not American citizens makes it that much easier to abuse them and deny them due process rights. By keeping them outside the borders of our country and in a virtually hermetically sealed environment, it is easy for our government to limit annoying and incovenient press coverage.

Do these people deserve fewer legal rights because we believe them to be guilty of committing acts of terror or of conspiring to do so? Why not just sit them on the back of a horse, tie one end of a rope around their neck and the other to a tree limb, and spook the horse?

By affording those accused of terrorism a lower level of legal protection, do we not in some sense begin to lower ourselves to their level? Is not part of what makes us the most powerful country in the world the reality that we have historically endeavored to provide even those suspected of the most heinous crimes with basic Constitutionally-guaranteed rights?

By providing a lower level of legal protections and rights to those accused of terrorism, I fear we have begun to slide down a slippery slope. If we can do this to this class of accused criminals, how long before we apply it to others? Child molesters? Murderers? Drug dealers?

Before you attempt to shout me down, try to keep in mind that our legal system is based on the idea of precedent. Once you’ve set a precedent for denying certain rights and protections to one class of people, it becomes MUCH easier to extend that precedent to other classes. Is this the kind of justice system we as a people deserve? Are we prepared to run the risk of seeing the Constitution reduced to a set of “good ideas” by a small group of neo-Conservatives who think they know what’s best?

Is it any wonder this has been done in the strictest of secrecy? If the neo-Conservatives responsible for this are convinced that the tribunal system will pass Consitutional muster and the test of public opinion, why have the shielded the process from public scrutiny? Is it because they KNOW it runs counter to virtually everything this country stands for?

If we pay attention to what is happening in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, we might just recognize it as the precursor to what could happen to us if we don’t recognize this system for what it is. If we’re not careful and vigilant, what is happening to detainees could eventually happen to all of us. Is that what we want? WE DESERVE BETTER.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on October 25, 2004 7:03 AM.

Who's this "Bambino", anyway?? was the previous entry in this blog.

And this is what passes for reasoned public discourse for Republicans is the next entry in this blog.

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