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| Rulings on prisoners would make Founders proud
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| Op-Ed - USA Today - Wed 7th, July 2004 |
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The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a much-needed message Monday about one of the bedrock principles of liberty rooted in the American Revolution:
In this country, unlike Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the government doesn't have the right to imprison people indefinitely without having to justify its actions.
What's more, that rule applies to citizens and non-citizens alike — even in the current war against terrorism and on U.S.-controlled territory such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
That message will need to be repeated if terrorism again ignites public passions.
The court's rulings came in a cluster of cases involving men captured during fighting in Afghanistan or suspected of plotting new terrorist attacks in the USA. The court rejected the Bush administration's claims that it doesn't have to answer to the courts about those it has jailed.
The decisions uphold a legal tradition that stemmed from a backlash against British colonial rule. The Founding Fathers had seen the injustices that occur when authorities can throw people into jail indefinitely. In the Europe they and their forebears had left, such practices had been routine.
So they wrote it into the Constitution. It is called habeas corpus, the right to have an independent judge review whether a prisoner is being held without justification. The idea, which originally dates back to reforms of brutish abuses during the Middle Ages, was to prevent endless imprisonment without trial and to deter torture.
Amid the public furor that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the administration sought to bypass those constitutional safeguards. It claimed the right as part of the war on terror to hold both U.S. citizens and non-citizens indefinitely — without trial, without charge, without access to a lawyer. Since then, it has repeatedly told the courts to butt out.
When the cases were argued before the high court in April, a lawyer for the administration told the justices that national security demanded such unchecked power as an essential tool in the conflict.
A string of ugly wartime precedents suggests that uncritical acceptance of that national-security claim can lead to abuse. When Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, without Congress' approval, civilians found themselves hauled before military courts far from the field of battle, even though regular courts were functioning.
Franklin Roosevelt's internment of more than 100,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II was upheld by a wartime Supreme Court, but is now regarded as a deeply embarrassing stain on U.S. history. In 1988, Congress apologized and agreed to pay reparations.
The court held Monday that Congress gave the administration the power to detain suspected terrorists, just not indefinitely. Congress can surely write new procedures and protections into law if it chooses.
Meanwhile, Yaser Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, can ask a judge to consider whether the government has good reason to keep him jailed without charging him. Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport as a terrorist suspect in 2002, can refile his suit with every expectation of obtaining a similar review. And a group of Australian and Kuwaiti prisoners who say they have been wrongly held at Guantanamo for more than two years can finally make their arguments in an independent court.
In the war to protect freedom and extend it to others, the Supreme Court has reminded the nation that liberty doesn't have to be sacrificed in the pursuit of security. |
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