Editorial
Los Angeles Times
June 29, 2004
What gives the government the right to arrest you and imprison you indefinitely
without offering a reason or opportunity to appeal? The answer, in the United
States, is: Nothing gives the government that right. It is hard to see what is
left of American freedom if the government has the authority to make anyone on
its soil — citizen or noncitizen — disappear and then rule that no
one can do anything about it.
Or so we once thought. But the Bush
administration — whose convoluted memos on defining torture now rank with
Bill Clinton's definition of sex — says Congress gave it exactly this
power. And when was that? Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, Congress passed a
two-line resolution authorizing the use of military force against "nations,
organizations or persons" engaged in terrorism. We would like to hear from any
member who intended by this vote to repeal the Bill of Rights.
Shockingly, though, in rulings issued Monday about the rights of terror suspects
being held at Guant anamo Bay, Cuba, and in a military brig, four justices of
the U.S. Supreme Court bought the administration's argument. In better news, a
6-3 majority flatly rejected the administration's arguments that the prisoners
were not even entitled to a court hearing. One of the plaintiffs — an
American citizen named Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan —
has been held in a military brig with no charges brought against him for nearly
three years.
The court said that even the Guantanamo detainees who were
not citizens were still "persons" under the Constitution. That gives them the
right to challenge their detention, with a lawyer to help them. Even Chief
Justice William H. Rehnquist couldn't swallow the administration's notion that
these prisoners had no rights at all.
President Bush and his
administration say: Look, there's a war on. And anyway, the United States is
not some Latin American dictatorship of the 1970s; we can trust our government
not to abuse the extraordinary pow er it claims. But this administration's
record of incompetence and callousness does not inspire us to lightly kiss away
our constitutional protections.
Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, was
arrested by the FBI in connection with the Madrid train bombings in March. His
fingerprints were supposedly on a bag of detonators found in Spain. Having been
tarred as a murderer and terrorist by his own government, he was released with
little more than an "oops." More than two dozen Guantanamo prisoners were
released earlier this year after Pentagon lawyers decided they were not
terrorists after all. Meanwhile, they had been imprisoned for two
years.
The whole point of the substantive freedoms and due process
guarantees in the Bill of Rights is that freedom should not rest on any
government's claims of benevolence. Now that the Guantanamo detainees have been
given the right to a hearing, Americans will learn a bit more about what has
happened there. As with the abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, it' s likely
that the more they learn, the less they'll like it.