Justice is done One of your neighbors has a grudge against you and secretly informs on you to the police. The next thing you know you’re being held in a prison in a strange country. You don’t know what you’re charged with or what the evidence against you is, and you can’t go to court to find out. You end up staying in that prison for years without any trial.
That’s the position that many of the approximately 270 prisoners incarcerated at “Camp X-Ray” in the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, find themselves in. Thanks to a landmark decision last Friday by the US Supreme Court, that unconscionable situation will change.
The court ruled, 5-4, that the ancient principle of habeas corpus – the right of an accused person to know the evidence the government has against him – applies to Guantanamo prisoners. Under last week’s ruling, Guantanamo prisoners will be able to go into federal district courts to demand that the government show why they should remain incarcerated.
Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer made up the majority. The Gang of Four – Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, all appointed by George W. Bush or his father – dissented.
There is no principle in the Western legal tradition more fundamental or more important than habeas corpus. America’s founders explicitly wrote the protection of habeas corpus into Article I of the Constitution: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
There aren’t any rebellions or invasions underway in the United States, but in the atmosphere of national panic that followed 9/11 the Bush regime decided it could get away with scrapping habeas corpus. The people jailed at Gitmo – often under brutal conditions – are not convicted terrorists or even, in many cases, suspected terrorists. They’re people who George W. Bush or his surrogates have labeled “unlawful enemy combatants,” a catch-all category that can be stretched to include almost anybody – especially when we are fighting an open-ended “war” not against any defined enemy, but against the broad and elastic concept of “terror.”
There are those – including the four dissenting justices – who apparently believe the threat of terrorism is so horrific that it warrants tossing out the Constitution and essential human rights. They should remember that, as Justice Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” If we toss aside our fundamental freedoms to “save America,” there won’t be much left of America that’s worth saving.
It was truly frightening that last Friday’s victory for freedom was won by such a slender margin; one more Bush appointee on the court and the decision probably would have gone the other way. But narrow as the win was, we’ll take it – and give Justices Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer and Stevens the GLASS SLIPPER.
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2008.
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From today’s NY Times:
Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back
BAGHDAD â ” Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP â ” the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company â ” along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraqâ ™s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraqâ ™s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.
The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.
The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.
THIS, my friends, is what the Iraq invasion and occupation were and are all about. If you have a son, daughter, husband, wife, father, mother, brother or sister who died in Bush’s War, know that THIS is what they died for. Not to protect us against Saddam’s (imaginary) WMDs. Not to protect us against terrorists. Not to liberate the poor Iraqis. Not for “freedom” and “democracy.” For THIS.
Read it. Believe it. Know it. And be mad as hell.
If this country had an iron clad draft for all men and women, I believe this war would not have occured.