This American Life: Habeas Schmaebeas
Just finished listening to a very moving radio piece from This American Life — an amazing public radio show that every week brings the sort of stories to its audience that informs, moves and presents the world as if one were seeing it for the first time. This week This American Life brought us the stories of some Guantanamo Prison detainees. These are men so dangerous, so monstrous that the Bush Administration had to build a prison camp 90 miles outside of the US, so that these men, err, terrorists, could not harm American citizens… well, at least that’s what Administration tells us.
Of course, given all that we’ve learned about this incompetent Republican Administration over the past five years, if one still believes what comes out of their press office, then one might as well still believe in the tooth fairy, that clouds are made of cotton and that the moon is composed of cheese — only children are excused for believing in such fantasies. As this week’s This American Life episode shows us, much — if not all — that the Bush Administration has told us of the men imprisoned at Guantanamo are plain lies. For instance, according to stats mentioned in the program, only 5% of the Guantanamo detainees were processed by US forces in the field of battle; instead, the vast majority of the prisoners were handed over by "bounty hunters" in Afghanistan and elsewhere, looking to cash in on the reported $5,000 to $10,000 per head that the US military was offering locals in exchange for Al Queda or Taliban fighters. Now, one can easily imagine that, in a lawless country, like Afghanistan was right after the US invasion, that some opportunistic men would take advantage of such a situation and collect what must be a tidy sum for that part of the world — and keep in mind how much more difficult it all must have been to sort things out in the middle of an armed conflict, with language barriers and all, where virtually anybody could be the enemy… well, these are the conditions that ensnared many unwitting and innocent young men, some of which are now in Guantanamo, where they can do no harm to American citizens — and, too, where the Bush Administration does not have to abide by habeas corpus.
The radio episode also asks some more substantive questions about our legal system and about whether the current Administration has violated the long held principled of habeas corpus — a principle that’s at the very heart of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and, too, a principle that was at the center of our American Revolution. Now, it is unmistakably clear to me that, yes, the Bush Administration has lied to us about virtually everything that’s happened since 9/11, just as it is unmistakably clear to me that this Republican president has violated and soiled the founding principles of the American Revolution; yet, in spite of it all, the most harden of his supporters, the self-deluded morons that consider themselves uber-patriots, are complicit with the Bush Administration in betraying the spirit and legacy of our nation’s war for independence.
Here’s a synopsis of this week’s This American Life episode:
The right of habeas corpus has been a part of this country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. It means the government has to explain why it’s holding a person in custody. But now, the war on terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that the prisoners should not be covered by habeas – or even by the Geneva Conventions – because they’re the most fearsome terrorist enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?
And you can hear this week’s episode here — it’s a great show, as always.
