1 post tagged “detainees”

I've been reading on an outburst by a US deputy assistant secretary of defense against law firms who defend Guantanamo detainees.  He apparently hinted that these well-known and respectable firms may be bankrolled by terrorist money and suggested that their corporate clients will want to boycott them.

While I am keeping an open mind about this, it does bring unpleasant memories of communism, with its rigged trials of "enemies of the people" and their "collaborators."  True, the DoD's task of trying to capture and interrogate terrorist suspects is difficult enough without the legal eagles inserting themselves into the picture.  But history warns us against leaving overzealous government agencies without oversight.  The US track record is already spotty, what with Maher Arar and Lynndie England.  Resisting honest inquiry now does little to inspire confidence in the system.  And shouldn't we leave the smearing of Amnesty International to Kim Jong-Il and his ilk?

There is, of course, some doubt on whether Guantanamo detainees deserve the protection of the US legal system.  They are deemed enemy combatants, putatively captured in armed conflict with the US forces.  They don't belong to an official army of a signatory to the Geneva Convention.  Even for the US citizens among them, the constitution apparently allows suspension of habeas corpus.

But these questions are separate from the issue at hand.  Even assuming that detainees deserve no sympathy, aid, or the right to have their story heard, it is still not a crime for someone to offer it to them.  And it is chilling to hear sinister allegations from government officials directed against those who dare uphold the very principles distinguishing civilized society from totalitarianism.  We have been warned before not to confuse dissent with disloyalty.

In one of America's past witch-hunts, a man named Joseph Welch distinguished himself and entered history by uttering "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"  How ironic that he was a US Army attorney, defending with this sentence someone in his law firm absurdly accused of aiding the mysterious enemy du jour.