The Supreme Court has refused to hear a case to decide whether the government acted properly toward Arab and Muslim detainees who were taken into custody after Sept. 11, despite an audit by the Justice Department inspector general that found significant problems - including physical abuse allegations - and a friend of the court brief filed by 23 news organizations. By not acting, the Supreme Court has implicitly condoned the treatment of the detainees, a decision both unwise and dangerous.
Our government relies on the delicate system of checks and balances, and the Supreme Court's refusal to act will give the Bush administration unchecked authority to do as it pleases. The Court's job is to ensure our trifold of government powers maintains its equilibrium.
A study from the Center for National Security has alleged that the Justice Department took innocent Arabs and Muslims into custody, held them with flimsy evidence and upon finding they had no ties to terrorism, deported them. Sometimes this process took months, an obstinate defiance of a law requiring illegal aliens to be either deported or freed within 90 days. To cover their misconduct, the Justice Department has sealed the detainees' immigration records and erased their names from jail rosters, claiming that the information would compromise both the ongoing terrorist investigation and national security. If they were released, then how could they pose a threat?
Another blemish on the Bush administration is Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, where 660 enemy combatants are being held, three of whom are boys ages 13 to 15, and many who have been detained for more than two years. Had the detainees been labeled prisoners of war
they would have been given more legal protection, but the Bush administration has resurrected the phrase enemy combatants a term coined in the 1942 trial of seven German saboteurs that loosely translates to you're ours now and there's nothing you can do about it. But interestingly enough, the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein has been accorded prisoner of war status, a move that reflects our government's desire for Saddam's future trial and fate to be seen as legitimate. Good thing - for him - he's well known. Nobody will care what happens to the anonymous prisoners in Cuba.
The Bush administration has vehemently insisted that it, and it alone, possesses the power to label someone an enemy combatant and, for national security reasons, detainees can be denied access to a lawyer or family members. They can also be held indefinitely without formal charges and repeatedly interrogated. According to The Associated Press, last month marked the first time that military defense lawyers were assigned to Guantanamo Bay detainees - and only to two prisoners.
And even though the U.S. government has denied allegations of mistreatment among detainees at Guantanamo Bay, there have been 21 prisoners who have attempted suicide, most by hanging themselves and some more than once.
With the Supreme Court falling into its absentee role, and the empty promises of tribunals for detainees, the question of when and how the enemy combatants will be dealt with remains a mystery. During the past two years, only 88 people have been released from Guantanamo Bay and new detainees keep coming in. The base has recently expanded to hold 1,100 prisoners. This raises the question of what, exactly, does the government plan on doing?
We must also consider the eerie resemblance between our handling of the enemy combatants and the Japanese internment during WWII. A plaque at the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona, home to many Japanese Americans during the internment, reads ...May it serve as a constant reminder of our past so that Americans in the future will never again be denied their constitutional rights and may the remembrance of that experience serve to advance the evolution of the human spirit... The Court once ruled the Japanese internment was legal, and history has condemned this. It also will not look favorably on the Guantanamo detainment.
The Supreme Court must weigh in on the terror question. The issue of human rights is not one to be taken lightly, nor is it one to delay until most people have forgotten. Although it has missed this opportunity to issue an opinion on the terror situation, there will undoubtedly be others. The justices should take another case soon and issue a ruling that will clarify the fate of terror suspects, as well as the government's new powers for conducting investigations and handling terror suspects.
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