By: Jim Taylor

Bush administration takes U.S. backwards


I’m finding the presidential primaries desperately disappointing. Barack Obama preaches hope. Hilary Clinton promotes experience and ability. Mike Huckabee plays his guitar and John McCain – well, let’s just ignore John McCain.

        But they all seem to operate within a fantasy that ignores what’s going on in their country.

        Where is the voice of outrage? Where is a candidate with enough backbone to say that the Bush administration is evil, that it has done dreadful damage to America and to America’s reputation?

        I am not, you may have guessed, a fan of George Bush and Dick Cheney.

        For me the final straw came Friday January 11 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the inmates of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre are not persons.

        Technically, the court’s decision dealt with harsh interrogation tactics – a euphemism for torture – by intelligence officers and military personnel. The court ruled, two to one, that actions “ordinarily considered ‘seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.”

        Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote the dissenting opinion. “It leaves us,” she said, “with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare that those held at Guantanamo are not ‘person(s).’

        “This is most regrettable… in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human,” Brown wrote.



Aliens, outside the law

The four detainees who brought the case against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ten senior Pentagon officers were all British citizens. All argued that they were wrongly seized and detained. In 2004, they were repatriated to Britain and freed within 24 hours without ever facing criminal charges.

        Forget their guilt or innocence – that’s not the point. They claimed persecution under the U.S. Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits the government from “substantially burdening a person’s religion.”

        The court ruled against them because they were aliens held outside the United States.

Aliens. Therefore not entitled to the protection of U.S. law.

Held outside the United States. Therefore, U.S. law does not apply.

        Wait a minute—there’s something wrong here. American embassies around the world are considered American jurisdiction. But they’re not on American soil.

        Back when I travelled to the U.S. four or five times a year, I had to pre-clear U.S. Customs and Immigration at the Toronto airport. Signs at the entry told me I was leaving Canadian jurisdiction. I was entering U.S. territory, where U.S. law applied.

        The difference was evident as soon as I passed the gates. The officers wore sidearms. They flew the American flag.

        By what convoluted logic, then, do the justices simultaneously affirm that American officials have authority to mistreat prisoners in Guantanamo, while placing Guantanamo itself outside American law?



Suspension of rights

  It was bad enough when the Bush administration suspended the right of habeas corpus for suspects.

        The principle of habeas corpus – basically, that any person being detained has the right to appear before a judge for a hearing to determine whether the detention is lawful – goes back to at least 1305 in British law, and was specifically carried over into American law at the time of Independence.

        But the suspension was, at least, constitutionally permissible. Article One, Section 9 of the Constitution states: “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

        In practice, though, persons denied the right of habeas corpus could still appeal through the legal system.

        But the inmates of Guantanamo have been declared non-persons. They don’t exist in law.

        Corporations exist. The law recognizes them as “fictional persons” with rights to hold property, etc. just like a real person.

        But real persons – with flesh, blood, and human DNA – are now not “persons” any more.

        Granted, George Bush did not do this personally. But the decision happened on his watch. It mirrored his views. When he chose Guantanamo Bay to hold suspected terrorists, he argued that U.S. laws did not apply there because it was not part of the United States.



Voldemort meets his match

   Slaves were not legal “persons” until Abraham Lincoln took up their cause. Blacks were treated as “less than human” until Martin Luther King Jr. roused the nation’s conscience.

        Where is King today? Or, for that matter, Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X?

        This is not a time for measured nuances and carefully calculated sound bites. It’s a time when an entire country should rise up in rejection of a demonic regime.

        As an evangelical, Bush professes that he takes Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. But his actions constantly deny that Lord and Savior.

        In the synagogue of his home town, Nazareth, Jesus read a political manifesto from the prophet Isaiah: “to preach the good news to the poor… to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed…”

        Then he said, according to Luke’s testimony, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

        Compare Bush’s policies. Prison populations continue to grow. Fences exclude immigrants seeking freedom. Bills passed by Congress to provide better medical care for children get vetoed.

        What happened to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”? What happened to the “home of the brave and the land of the free”?

        Bush and his cronies need more than just to be defeated. They need to be expunged, blotted out, utterly repudiated. Like the evil Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter stories, their name should be so repugnant that it is not even whispered any more.

        Instead of offering pious platitudes, at least one presidential candidate should be screaming that the last eight years have been a ghastly mistake, that America needs to wipe the slate clean and start again.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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