I had just finished reading
the uncensored edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book, In
The First Circle (Harper Perennial, 2009), when I came across
Chris Hedges article, "One Day We'll All Be
Terrorists" (Truthdig, Dec. 28, 2009). In Hedges'
description of the US government's treatment of American
citizen Syed Fahad Hashmi, I recognized the Stalinist legal system
as portrayed by Solzhenitsyn.
Hashmi has been held in
solitary confinement going on three years. Guantanamo's
practices have migrated to the Metropolitan Correction Center in
Manhattan where Hashmi is held in the Special Housing Unit. His
access to attorneys, family, and other prisoners is prevented or
severely curtailed. He must clean himself and use toilet facilities
on camera. He is let out of solitary for one hour every 24 hours to
exercise in a cage.
Hashmi is a US citizen but
his government has violated every right guaranteed to him by the
Constitution. The US government, in violation of US law, is also
subjecting Hashmi to psychological torture known as extreme sensory
deprivation. The bogus "evidence" against him is
classified and denied to him. Like Joseph K. in Kafka's The
Trial, Hashmi is under arrest on secret evidence. As the case
against him is unknown or non-existent, defense is
impossible.
Hashmi's rights have
been abrogated by his government with the allegation that he is a
potential terrorist or perhaps just a terrorist sympathizer.
Another American citizen, Junaid Babar stayed with Hashmi for two
weeks and allegedly delivered ponchos and socks to al Qaeda in
Pakistan. Allegedly Babar used Hashmi's cell phone to reach
others aiding terrorists. The US government says that this suffices
to implicate Hashmi in Babar's activities.
Babar made a plea bargain to
five counts of "material support" for terrorism, but is
working off his prison sentence by testifying as a government
witness in other terror trials, including in Canada and the UK, and
as the US government's only evidence against
Hashmi.
Hashmi's real offense is
that he is a Muslim activist defending Muslim civil liberties and
making provocative statements about the US. As Michael Ratner,
president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has pointed out,
federal courts have given the US government wide latitude to use
Hashmi's exercise of his constitutionally protected rights to
free speech and association as evidence of a terrorist frame of
mind and, thereby, of intent to commit terrorism.
Brooklyn College professor
Jeanne Theoharis warns us that an American citizen can now be tried
on secret evidence. "You can spend years in solitary
confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been
attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo and Abu
Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United
States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantanamo to happen
was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not
only happening to Hashmi."
Indeed, Hedges reports that
"radical activists in the environmental, [anti]-globalization,
anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements are
already being placed by the state in special detention facilities
with Muslims charged with terrorism." Hedges warns: "This
corruption of our legal system will not be reserved by the state
for suspected terrorists or even Muslim Americans. In the coming
turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who
are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many
others, who are not Muslim, will endure later."
The silence of bar
associations and law schools indicates an astounding insouciance to
Thomas Paine's warning: "He that would make his own
liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he
violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to
himself." Some of my Republican and conservative acquaintances
are even gleeful that, finally, we are going to get tough and deal
forcibly with "these people." They naively believe that
they themselves will remain safe when law ceases to be a shield of
the people and becomes a weapon in the hands of
government.
In "A Man For All
Seasons," Sir Thomas More cautions against cutting the law
down in order to chase after devils, for with the law cut down,
where do we stand when the devil turns on us?
Clearly, these fundamental
questions are of no concern to the US Department of Justice (sic),
to Congress or the White House, to the "mainstream
media," to the American people, or even to very much of the
federal judiciary.
Glenn Greenwald pointed out
in Salon (Dec. 4, 2009) that the Convention Against Torture,
championed and signed by President Ronald Reagan and ratified by
the US Senate, states: "Each State Party is required either to
prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite
them to other countries for prosecution. No exceptional
circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or threat of war,
internal political instability or any other public emergency may be
invoked as a justification of torture. Each State Party shall
ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal
law."
Two decades later the US
government tortures at will. Justice (sic) Department officials
write memos authorizing torture despite the ratified Convention
Against Torture, US law, and the Geneva Conventions. The Pew Poll
reports that 67 percent of Republicans and 47 percent of Democrats
support the use of torture.
And Americans think they
have freedom and democracy and live under the protection of the
rule of law.
The law is lost, and with it
American liberty.
