Guantanamo in the US

I heard about this story over the weekend, but I lost the reference. Lucky me, I ran into it randomly today.

For those unable to work up any indignation over the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, this is about abuses of the "Material Witness" law.

The intent of this law (enacted in 1984) is to allow the government to hold people who have information about a crime and are deemed a flight risk or likely to be unwilling to cooperate.

Now, this is the first I'd heard of this law, and I don't particularly like it at all. It provides the government another way around the "no holding someone without charges or trial" rules. It allows fundamental freedoms to be overridden at the whim of law enforcement. And it's SUPPOSED to only be used in cases where there's real reason to believe there is benefit to be had in catching criminals that would otherwise be lost by NOT holding the detainee.

It is NOT supposed to be used as a blanket "Grab and hold" to allow the government to stash and hold anyone with only the allegation of some unproven link to terrorist activity.

The story I heard this morning centered on an American citizen (of Arab descent) who is a medical doctor, and was held for some time for what later turned out to be the fact that, as a medical doctor, one of the classes he had to take was... nuclear medicine. A sweep of people of Arab lineage connected to "nuclear" classes turned him up, and he was snatched and thrown into a cell.

Apparently it has happened at least 70 times since 9/11, about a quarter American citizens, all but one of Arab ancestry. Of these 70, only 7 ultimately turned out to have anything at all to do with terrorism or information thereon. (By the way, secrecy laws that have cropped up surrounding this Administration prevent an accurate count. There are at least 70, there may be more.)

So, even assuming you're willing to dismiss non-citizens' rights, and even assuming all of the 7 were American citizens, that still leaves 10 American citizens detained using this law, when they had no connection to terrorism, had no reasonable evidence that they HAD a connection to terrorism, and were not particularly a flight risk anyway. Certainly not what the law intended.

To me, this is just another case of wanton disregard for the rights on which our country is based. It may be only a small minority to whom this is happening, but this country is all about protecting the minority, the unpopular.

When will the majority of us wake up and recognize that these are some of the same tactics the Soviets used. Any time someone is held without charge and without significant legal justification, it is no different from the political prisoners in Siberia, detained not because of anything they'd done, but because it was politically inconvenient for them to remain free, or politically expedient for those in power to have the detainee disappear.

Oh, and Jose Padilla is one of the 70, later judged an "enemy combatant" and throw in Guantanamo Bay, still without charge or trial.

When are we going to stop letting this President and his Administration erode our freedoms, wear away our core principles and damage this country?

Copyright (c) June 27, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net