by John David Rose
June 3, 2003
Think About It. In the Stalin era of the Soviet Union, Americans
arrested for spying disappeared into the gulag without an opportunity
for legal assistance or even to contact their families.
My high school social science teacher illustrated how different
America was from Russia by explaining to us the 14th Amendment to the
Constitution: "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or
property, without due process of law."
We were proud to be citizens of a country where peoples' rights were
guaranteed, protected against even the government. We foolishly
believed those rights would last as long as the United States.
Today, through presidential fiat, the 14th Amendment to the
Constitution is no longer in force. The government can take liberty
from American citizens without a trial.
Attorney General John Ashcroft asserts that President Bush has the
power to hold any American citizen incommunicado, in solitary
confinement for a month, a year, even life if Bush designates that
citizen an "enemy combatant." The accused may not have access to a
lawyer or visits by a member of the family or even a priest.
Shades of Joseph Stalin...
The prisoner has no right to know what proof
the government has of the offense and is given no opportunity to
present a defense.
If a court orders a hearing for habeas corpus, the government can
assert that you're a danger to the country, and presto, even that
right is revoked.
Ironic, isn't it? To protect our "freedom" and preserve our
"liberty," the administration takes away the most basic right of all,
our right to life, liberty and property protected by the courts. Yet
that is exactly what happened to U.S. citizen John Padilla, a
small-time crook now held in a Navy brig in Charleston. When Padilla
was arrested, the attorney general crowed that he'd "disrupted an
unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a
radioactive 'dirty bomb.'"
It's possible that Ashcroft's charges are based on fact. It's also
possible that they are totally bogus, tricked-up by an administration
searching for any bit of "success" against terrorism. Padilla is a
Muslim. He's a crook. He may even have contemplated a terrorist act.
But he is also an American citizen. Until Ashcroft repealed the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution, citizens had certain rights.
We'll never know the truth of Ashcroft's charges because the
administration won't allow it to be challenged in court. If one
American citizen can rot in jail for the rest of his life on the
orders of one government official, it can happen to any of us. Today
the excuse for setting aside the Constitution is to protect us from
terrorists. Tomorrow it may be to protect the nation from people who
believe that George W. Bush is a not very thoughtful man manipulated
by far-right conservative warmongers into sending American troops to
their deaths over fictitious threats of weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq.
That's how it started in Nazi Germany. Hitler convinced a small core
of Germany-first fanatics that Jews were a threat and the cause of
their economic distress. "Good" Germans sat on their hands because
they didn't want to be unpatriotic or unsupportive of their nation's
leader.
It can happen here. It may already have started.
John David Rose is a long-time Hilton Head Islander and political
observer.
