Not Noticing

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We went to the movies Sunday afternoon, and on the way out, I looked down and discovered I had lost a shoe. It probably sounds pretty strange that I had to see this loss, that I didn’t feel it, but that’s the result of my peripheral neuropathy, which makes my feet numb. It didn’t take long to find the shoe, but I’m lucky I noticed it before we got very far.

We’ve been losing something far more important without noticing it, these past eight years. We’ve been losing the American idea, the basis upon which the Founding Fathers built a governmental system that has been copied the world over, and we’ve been going right on as though the losses were not happening.

I’m talking about the inroads made into our civil rights by the illegitimate acts of the Bush administration.

Probably the worst of those is the loss of the right of habeas corpus. This is a right so fundamental that it was included in the main body of the Constitution. It didn’t have to be added by the Bill of Rights. The phrase “habeas corpus” is Latin, and that may be one reason so few Americans understand its importance.

Wikipedia describes it thus: “Habeas corpus (Latin: [We command] that you have the body) is the name of a legal action, or writ, through which a person can seek relief from the unlawful detention of himself or another person. It protects the individual from harming himself or being harmed by the judicial system. The writ of habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action.”

What that means is that the government cannot hold a prisoner in secret and must give him access to an attorney to help him/her negotiate the legal system. It has also come to be strongly associated with the right of speedy trial accorded us in the Eighth Amendment.

So how does that fit with the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo or the enemy combatants such as Jose Padilla? The answer is that it doesn’t. The detention of these prisoners without the right to a writ of habeas corpus is clearly unconstitutional and should not have been allowed.

I understand the panic that led to the detention of thousands of legal residents who just happened to be Muslims right after 9/11, but I don’t understand how the Bush administration talked itself and us into not only detaining these people but also denying them their basic rights to counsel and a speedy hearing. And I don’t understand how the American people not only condoned those detentions but even endorsed them when they voted to retain George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in office.

Didn’t they notice what was happening?
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