So the other day I read a headline from the BBC news site which stated that Bush wants to shut down Guantanamo . Wow, I thought to myself, has he finally realized what a human rights mess that place is? Nope. Of course not. Turns out he was just passing the blame along to the Supreme Court.
It’s their fault that we’re still illegally detaining people because he says they haven’t decided yet “whether the people need to have a fair trial in a civilian court or in a military court”. Uhm, no. Read a newspaper sometime, Mr. President, or read this story from NPR. What the Supreme Court is deciding is whether or not the military tribunals you created are legal given that the rules governing them violate several key aspects of a “fair trial”, such as the right to confront your accuser and see the evidence against you and the right to representation.
That’s not what caught my attention though and got me riled up enough to make this subject the first about which I’m writing since I’ve moved. No, another quote in the article struck me as even more horrendous especially given that it pointed to a problem permeating the rest of America as well. Before I wrote about it though I made sure to read the full interview to be sure the quote wasn’t out of context or a misquote. Turns out it was a misquote (and seems to have been removed from the BBC article), but the actual quote isn’t any better.
But in either case, they will get a trial which they, themselves, were unwilling to give to the people that they’re willing to kill….
See there’s this sort of universal idea that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty. I know it sounds weird since we’ve just about done away with it here in the U.S. For example, consider how odd it sounds if I say that Ken Lay of Enron is innocent. Yet according to the concept of presumption of innocence that is a true statement. He hasn’t been convicted of any crime, but everyone already considers him guilty.
And Bush apparently presumes that the prisoners in Guantanamo are guilty despite that fact that none of them have been proven guilty in a court of law. If we’re going to try them, it doesn’t matter if one of them was captured while shoving a knife into a U.S. soldier’s eye socket. Innocent until proven guilty.
All things being equal, the President presuming guilt wouldn’t be too big a problem. After all, he’s the head of the executive branch. All he and the people below him are charged with is arresting people, waging war, and otherwise executing the law. We’ve got the judicial branch for deciding guilt or innocence and carrying out trials. Except in this case he says his branch is the one which should be giving them a “fair trial”. He’s already publically declared that he considers them guilty yet wants to be allowed to try them. If the Supreme Court allows that, if the Congress allows that, if we allow that then we might as well declare him King Bush and just disbanded the other two branches because they will have lost all purpose.
(Yes, I’ve moved, but I’ve not yet settled in. As such I don’t know if you can expect daily posting again yet, but it’s coming soon.)
[...] Catching up on some news while watching tonight’s Thrashers game and came across a brief story about an inmate in Guantanamo. It didn’t stir up any thoughts different from what I wrote about nearly a year ago, but one Kafka-esque detail caught my attention. [...]