When we first learned that Hamdi and Padilla were being held in military brigs inaccessible to their lawyers, most of us here in America were shocked. These are U.S. citizens who were arrested and detained as "enemy combatants" and denied the ordinary due process rights that we had always thought we were entitled to under our Constitution.
Like many others, I wondered what would happen if there were some foul up of information in the White House and an innocent person was caught in their dragnet. We have seen this White House's incompetence in handling so many other things-- information that was available to them before 9/11 that 9/11 would occur, the bungled invasion and occupation of Iraq, their mishandling of Afghanistan where the Taliban still roam freely, their awful failure in handling the rescue effort connected with Katrina, their inability even to set up a transition of their prescription drug program so that needy seniors would not be stuck without medicines. About the only thing this group does well is create networks of cronies and crony companies that rip the government off and get waivers for not providing what they've been paid to provide. (Halliburton, anyone?)
What if they declared somebody an enemy combatant who is entirely innocent? What if that person were shipped off to a prison in some country that looks the other way when torture takes place? How often has that happened, in all those people imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and tortured, sometimes killed? How often in Guantanamo, where people have been held for years? How often in this country? How many other U.S. citizens have been seized and carried off to a military prison on the say-so of Mr. Bush and Mr. Gonzales? Do we know about all of them?
Now we know of one more. Read this story in the Washington Post. It tells how U.S. citizen Shawqi Omar was arrested in his home in Baghdad on October 24, 2004. He has been held, without charges and without seeing a lawyer, for 15 months in various military prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. When his American lawyers finally filed legal papers to contest the government's right to arrest and hold an American citizen, without acknowledgement that they were doing so, in military prisons in a country that we are occupying by miltiary force, the U.S. government announced that it had decided to transfer U.S. citizen Omar to the Iraqis to hold. This decision was made even though we have been informed directly that the Iraqi-run prisons use torture. The U.S. military informed Mr. Omar's attorneys that he would have a hearing in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq and that the attorneys would not be able to be informed any further about it.
In Argentina, such actions were called "disappearances." We scorned the lack of constitutional protections for citizens or foreigners, and prided ourselves on our system, which could never allow something like that to happen. Mr. Bush has changed that, with his imperialism and his "enemy combatants" categories of U.S. citizens. This nationalistic fervor that claims hegemony by might shows little understanding of what it means to claim hegemony by right.
Luckily, there is at least one district court judge who still thinks the Constitution counts for U.S. citizens. Judge Urbina stayed the transfer and asked both sides to brief the issues, including the Constitutional ones.
I wonder that it has been so easy to get Americans to give up the precious writ of habeas corpus. To have us allow an imperialistic executive to tell us that we no longer have privacy rights even within our homes, even to our children's information if the military wants it for their database, even to our telephone calls with friends, families, and random strangers. We now know that Mr. Bush decided, on his say-so, to authorize domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency.
Who else has been imprisoned? Who is being spied on tonight? Whose conversations are they listening to? Could it be me? Could it be you?
What are the media doing about these stories? Not much. Apparently ratings and dollars go up when they cover weeks and weeks of a sordid murder story, but they don't get much commercial value out of covering American liberty interests. The story of Shawqi Omar didn't make the Cable News 12 times in 12 hours and consistently from day to day, not like Gary Condit or the bridegroom lost at sea from the cruise ship. One has to wonder why not? Surely when our own government is the culprit it is worth talking about and pursuing the facts until we know and understand what is happening. This stuff should be covered relentlessly. After all, next time it could be you or me who is stowed away for years in a military brig. With this gang of incompetent bunglers, why should we think they're getting this right? That's why we have those Constitutional protections, checks and balances, and separation of powers. The whole idea is to prevent a president from acting like a monarch.
So where is the media on this stuff, anyway?