2008 Woodie Awards
Military Commissions Act ruling threat to U.S. liberty
Michael Bain
Issue date: 3/6/07 Section: OpEd Page
It is an unsettling lesson of history that the gravest threats to individual freedom come not from enemy governments or crazed alien ideologies, but rather from the gradual curtailment and erosion of rights and liberties at home. Recently, a narrow 2-1 decision by the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled to uphold last fall's reprehensible Military Commissions Act (MCA). The act, which strips people deemed "enemy combatants" of habeas corpus and thus their right to contest their imprisonment before a court, is a desecration of the basic ideological tenets this country was founded upon.
President Bush pushed the MCA through Congress last fall, and in doing so has left an indelible mark on a record already soiled by the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib and CIA torture facilities. However, the implications of denying habeas corpus are even more far reaching. Now American citizens, simply by being labeled "enemy combatants," can lose their right to challenge their confinement or plead their innocence before a court.
The counterargument, long ago cliché, posits that previous presidential administrations have similarly suspended habeas corpus and civil liberties in instances of extreme national crisis. It is a testament to the flawed reasoning of the supporters of this "security" measure, that they justify the current administration's policies by relating them to shameful curtailments of freedom in the past. Perhaps the sole exception to this rule was Abraham Lincoln's brief suspension of habeas corpus in 1861, which prevented Maryland's secession from the Union; however, by no means can the grandiloquent, fear-mongering rhetoric of the current "War on Terror" elevate the threat of terrorism into one of comparable magnitude and immediacy as the outbreak of the American Civil War. Rather a better parallel can be drawn between the MCA and the hysteria invoked Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, whereby Woodrow Wilson prosecuted and imprisoned scores of innocent American citizens for criticizing the government. Likewise, the rhetoric of "preserving national security and American freedom" was used to justify Franklin Roosevelt's Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
President Bush pushed the MCA through Congress last fall, and in doing so has left an indelible mark on a record already soiled by the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib and CIA torture facilities. However, the implications of denying habeas corpus are even more far reaching. Now American citizens, simply by being labeled "enemy combatants," can lose their right to challenge their confinement or plead their innocence before a court.
The counterargument, long ago cliché, posits that previous presidential administrations have similarly suspended habeas corpus and civil liberties in instances of extreme national crisis. It is a testament to the flawed reasoning of the supporters of this "security" measure, that they justify the current administration's policies by relating them to shameful curtailments of freedom in the past. Perhaps the sole exception to this rule was Abraham Lincoln's brief suspension of habeas corpus in 1861, which prevented Maryland's secession from the Union; however, by no means can the grandiloquent, fear-mongering rhetoric of the current "War on Terror" elevate the threat of terrorism into one of comparable magnitude and immediacy as the outbreak of the American Civil War. Rather a better parallel can be drawn between the MCA and the hysteria invoked Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, whereby Woodrow Wilson prosecuted and imprisoned scores of innocent American citizens for criticizing the government. Likewise, the rhetoric of "preserving national security and American freedom" was used to justify Franklin Roosevelt's Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
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