Imagine yourself arrested and jailed by captors who offer no explanation of your charges and no right to challenge your imprisonment. Then you are tortured: anything is allowed, even rape. If and when you do go to trial, the prosecutors can present evidence without notifying you or your lawyer—because that evidence is secret. Everything you ever said under torture, no matter how outlandish, is used against you. That’s if you’re lucky.
Now imagine these are your own government’s rules, and that it’s all legal. Last week, the Senate passed a law, commonly known as the “detainee bill,” to give the President broad new capabilities to try “illegal enemy combatants,” including those who are U.S. citizens. Of course, he can choose not to try them, because the new laws suspend habeas corpus for so-classified detainees. Not since Reconstruction has a president been gifted with such free reign to exercise his power. In a legal system anchored so strongly in precedent, this sets a dangerous one.
Under the new detainee bill, the president can even OK specific interrogation techniques, as long as they do not fall under a few very broadly defined categories designated as cruel and inhuman treatment, and then keep them secret from the public. Every ounce of evidence obtained through torture before Dec. 30, 2005—including at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib—is now admissible in military courts.
And all of this a week after three Republican Senators—including the famous John McCain (Ariz.), an ex-prisoner of war—acted like they might stand up to the cowboy tyrant. Instead, they gave him almost everything he wanted, and the Democrats didn’t think to filibuster—because they were afraid of being viewed as soft on terror so close to an election. How can we have faith in our leaders when they support a law so patently unethical? Any Georgetown student, whether a College Republican, College Democrat or somewhere in between, knows that this erosion of constitutionally guaranteed liberties goes against everything our country has traditionally represented.
It seems unbelievable that in America today, you or I could be imprisoned as an “illegal enemy combatant,” shipped off to a military jail and never let out. With the consent of our leaders, our civil liberties have been drastically curtailed. Now, isn’t that something to stand up against, to protest? We are a generation constantly criticized for our political apathy, our inability to organize. Here at Georgetown, students take United States Political Systems, Constitutional Law and American Political Theory, all for the sake of understanding our government so that they might someday be able to govern. But just a few miles away, those senators whose shoes we someday hope to fill seem to have forgotten what they learned in their basic government classes. It is our duty to be vocal and to remind them. This issue is not a fleeting or superficial one, but rather one which will change the entire legacy of American freedom for the worse if we simply stand passively by.
