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.
How does a free society protect itself from terrorists who appear normal and break no laws until the day they execute a mission that murders thousands.
Even if you have intelligence that ties individuals to a planned attack, how do you prosecute them under conventional means without revealing your intelligence portfolio, or worse yet your active sources to your enemy?
Our criminal justice system provides little preventive capability in regard to terrorism, and even less deterrence. It is primarily a reactive, not proactive process.
The seriousness of the terrorist pledge to destroy us demands a proactive approach.
Bob, things can be sealed and judges can gag order, but we cannot give up our freedoms even in the face of terror or we become that which we fear.
OK, So where should one draw the judicial line? What level of Judiciary (Supreme, State, Circuit, Justice of the Peace, etc) should have control over critical intelligence?
I think this describes one of the major challenges of defeating the threats of terrorism. To give up freedoms for the cause of protection is to surrender, yet it is the very nature of our free society that terrorists seek to exploit in their execution of evil. They view our freedom and the fact that our constitution limits the power of government as a weakness.
Hard questions like this are answered by a proactive, aggressive approach that forces those who declared war on the United States to fight their battles on their turf, not ours. Historically, these people have demonstrated a tendency to attack opponents they view as weak.
BTW, they think the UN is LAME, and I agree...
So we seek them out and destroy them abroad, where they live and hide. (of course they were not hiding in Iraq, where we are expending enormous resources)
Do you think that the men who have been locked up in Gitmo for about two years are a direct threat to us or even have any meaningful intelligence for us any more?
We are a country of laws, sometimes they are inconvenient or even painful, but it those same laws that ENSURE our freedoms and keep us from falling into chaos.
Well, the twins have drunk the kool aid.
You know, there's this pervasive demand for security at all costs out there now.
It's not the way our parents/grandparents would have handled this.
They didn't, in fact, whine about how they should have been protected from every possible danger. They developed the sense to avoid, or overcome, dangers -- and then they went out and made the world safer for their kids (us). Were they perfect?
Uhm, no. (CF the Japanese internment camps, and arguably the deployment of the atomic bomb #2.)
Did they do the best they could?
Yes.
Are we doing the best we can today, in honor of what they fought for?
Uhm, no.
Can we do better?
We HAVE to. We're all there is. The Soviet approach failed miserably. The Nazi approach failed atrociously. The jihadi approach is even now succeeding catastrophically, to paraphrase our chief crusader.
What remains?
Reason. Evidence. Logic. Real caring about other people and other nations. Real empowerment for the disenfranchised. Real justice. Alternative energy.
We're burning daylight, people.
We can thank our post-modernism and progressives for this, as it was before , a common value, and knowledge , for a guide for all conduct to be judged, has been replaced with the rediculess Idealogue and Repressive regeme to counter the obvious, the attempt to substitute reality with mind numbing consepts of the rediculess, is tantermount to the psychopathic's of this earth to make up the rules as they progress, and to hold the rest of us in contempt, because we the dissidents or so they lable, could not believe that the near scytsophrenic atitudes of the elites. Corrupt thinking has made this environment to day and must be countered at all cost. riding the dead horse Phillosophy applies to this canundrum, and reality tells us it is dead, they don't see that in their parralell universe.