It consists in this, that innocent persons are accused of guilt, and senseless proceedings are put in motion against them..." The Trial --Franz Kafka
When I read The Trial at age 14 or so, it scared the hell out of me. A child of the Cold War, when I closed the book, I thanked my lucky stars and every God in the pantheon that I was born an American, with inalienable Constitutional rights that protected me from such abuses. But I also sent ten dollars to the ACLU that very day, realizing that my Civil Liberties were precious, yes, but also extremely fragile. I have been a card-carrying member of that organization for 30 years now because as a smart and serious adolescent taking a college literature class, I read a book that scared me witless.
Come we now to the last day of 2006, and the nightmare Franz Kafka brought to life in my young mind all those years ago has come to pass. People are scooped up, held indefinitely, not allowed to see the evidence against them and presumed guilty until proven innocent - a tall order indeed when one doesn't even know what one is charged with.
When they appear before the military tribunals that are set up to determine not guilt or innocence, but whether they should continue to be detained - while keeping them away from the protections of the United States legal system - they are not even represented by lawyers, as the process they are subjected to might vilolate the professional ethics of those attorneys charged with representing them.
Habeas Corpus, the right to know what one is charged with and whether ones imprisonment is lawful, has been a cornerstone of the Common Law tradition since the Magna Carta was signed in that meadow known as Runnymede in the year 1215 which enumerated certain rights inherent to all humanity.I look around me, and I do not recognize the America I see today. We have forsaken our freedoms and our tradition in an effort to make ourselves "safe" in an uncertain world. We have dishonored the sacrifice of all those who came before us who knew what freedom was and who were willing to put their necks on the line to establish it, not merely for themselves, but for everyone. As a nation, we have turned our back on the civilizing documents of western civilization and we should not be surprised when our grandchildren scorn us for our fecklessness; and when they bury us, their words at our gravesides will be invective rather than eulogies.
Because we have yielded to the politics of fear, we have allowed shameful abuses to be committed in our name. We have allowed people to be imprisoned indefinitely although they have been charged with no crime. We have allowed our president to abandon the Geneva Conventions. We have betrayed the past in which our founders risked everything to create a Republic. We have betrayed ourselves and the present, and we have betrayed a future that does not belong to us; rather it belongs to those yet to come.
Ninety miles from our shores, across the Straits of Florida, hundreds of people are being held in a United States operated prison camp at the U.S. Naval installation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many more have been released after long imprisonments after it was finally determined that they were guilty of no crime.To skirt the Geneva Conventions, they did not call the detainees prisoners of war, even those picked up on the field of battle. Instead, the Orwellian-sounding unlawful enemy combatant was coined. When detainees are determined to be wrongly held, they are not released with apology and deemed innocent, their names cleared. They are instead reclassified as no longer enemy combatants. Weasle-words for the complicit to hide behind, lest lawsuits be filed for false imprisonment.
The bar of complicity has been set so low that virtually anyone, anywhere in the world can be snatched and detained with no recourse, all in the name of fighting a "war" against a transitive adverb; against an ideology that gains strength and adherents as our abuses and crimes of hubris mount unchecked.
Just who the hell do we think we are, anyway? For what we have allowed to happen as so many among us quaked in fear, we owe a massive debt and a deep apology. If we do not take immediate steps to set things back right we are deserving of neither security nor freedom, as we obviously can't be trusted with either.
