Shame

Seven years after being detained as a teenager in Afghanistan, Mohamed Jawad is set to be released from Guantanamo Bay.

Jawad was 12 years old when he was detained in 2002 by Afghan police who were looking for the perpetrators of a grenade attack.   He was beaten by the Afghanis and then handed over to American forces, who transferred him to Guantanamo Bay. 

In October 2008, a US military judge ruled confessions Jawad had made were inadmissible because they were obtained under torture.

In July 2009, the judge overseeing Jawad’s military tribunal described the US government’s case against him as “an outrage” that was “riddled with holes”.

It is a true testament to government bureaucracy that a twelve year old child caught up in a military sweep was forced to wait seven years before anyone thought the initial mistake should have been corrected.

And it is a true testament to the fear and hypocrisy engendered by the ‘war on terror’ that a young teenager was subject to torture and indefinite detention for close to a decade before anyone decided it was time to make it stop.

What security comes from the torture of an innocent child?  Such a shameful question — a question only asked of a handful of criminal regimes in the world.  Today, Americans are forced to ask this question about the behavior of their own government.

This is not the first time that fear has been used as a weapon against a specific group of people.  During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of anyone with Japanese ancestory in the United States — some 120,000 people.  In Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), the Supreme Court ruled that the order was permissible and turned a willfully ignorant eye to the constitutional injustice perpretated on 120,000 innocent individuals. 

After World War II, the American legal system promised itself that it had learned a lesson; that it would no longer engage in abusive practicies antithetical to democratic values based on fear.  In voiding the factual basis of the unlawful detention some forty years later, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel wrote that the internment of Japanese citizens and the Supreme Court’s willful ignorance of Constitutional abuse stood as a “caution that in times of international hostility and antagonisms our institutions, legislative, executive and judicial, must be prepared to exercise their authority to protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused.”

Her decision echoed Justice Frank Murphy’s original dissent in the Korematsu case:

I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

Tellingly, Fred Korematsu, who brought suit against the United States during World War II and succesfully had the factual basis of the decision thrown out in 1984, filed a friend-of-the court brief in Rasul v. Bush, in which Guantanamo Bay detainees challeged their detention as unconstitutional.  “[H]istory teaches that we tend to sacrifice civil liberties too quickly based on claims of military necessity and national security, only to discover later that those claims were overstated from the start,” he wrote in his brief.  ”Typically, we come later to regret our excess, but for many, that recongition comes too late.” 

For Mohamed Jawad, such recognition came after seven years of torture and indefinite detention.  No doubt, there will come a time when Americans will conclude that the government abuses that took place after 9/11 could have been avoided; in time, the people will realize the extent of lawlessness that occupied the Bush regime and the degree to which torture and constitutional deprivations were the rule, and not the exception. 

But it is shameful that America refuses to reflect on the abuses of its past and to learn from them — the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Espionage Act of 1917, and the internment of Fred Korematsu, to name just a few examples.  One day, we must hope, abuses will be curtailed because they won’t happen in the first place; that government leaders, when faced with a critical decision, will expose whatever fears they have to the illumination of reason, and will act in confidence based on the bullwark of constitutional principle.  And if they do not — one can only hope — they will be held accountable to an angry population that will not tolerate the deprivation of their precious freedoms for the false exigencies of a panic, or based on the whim of ambitious politicans who prey on the fears of the innocent.  What value does liberty really possess, if centuries of cultivation are thrown away because of the events of a single day?

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Executive Power, Fear and Tyranny, Government Accountability and tagged with criminal behavior, the constitution, torture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.