The deterioration of the American concept of justice under Geroge Bush's watch has been difficult to watch. Although the United States has never been the beacon of justice its own mythology has always proclaimed it to be, there was usually a sense that the niceties of presumption of innocence and relatively humane incarceration formed some fairly importnat pillars of a modern justice system.
My, how times change.
After he was arrested in 2002, Jose Padilla was considered so dangerous that he was held without charges in a military prison for more than three years -- accused first of plotting a radiological "dirty bomb" attack and later of conspiring with al-Qaeda to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas.But now, nearly a year after his abrupt transfer into a regular criminal court, the Justice Department's prosecution of the former Chicago gang member is running into trouble.
A Republican-appointed federal judge in Miami has already dumped the most serious conspiracy count against Padilla, removing for now the possibility of a life sentence. The same judge has also disparaged the government's case as "light on facts," while defense lawyers have made detailed allegations that Padilla was illegally tortured, threatened and perhaps even drugged during his detention at a Navy brig in South Carolina.
The Justice Department denied the allegations of torture last week and is pursuing an appeal of the conspiracy ruling in hopes that the charge will be reinstated. Prosecutors on Thursday also took the unusual step of revealing that Abu Zubaida, an al-Qaeda lieutenant now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a key source who led authorities to capture Padilla.
But some legal scholars and defense lawyers argue that the government's case is so fundamentally weak, and its legal options so limited, that Padilla could draw a relatively minor prison term or even be acquitted. The trial has already been postponed once, until January, and is almost certain to be delayed again.
And what sort of treatment has this man who is looking less guilty al the time allegedly endured? Stuff like this:
Among other things, the defense alleges that Padilla was held for 1,307 days in a 9-by-7-foot cell, isolated for days or weeks at a time, physically assaulted and threatened with execution and other violence, kept awake with lights and noises, and forced to take mind-altering drugs, possibly PCP or LSD.The government counters that Padilla offers no evidence to back up the allegations and that, besides, his treatment by the military is irrelevant to the criminal case against him.
How's that for a non-denial denial? "You can prove it, and besides, it doesn't matter."
We need to absorb the ramifications of this mindset, folks. Torture is not happening only in secret prisons throughout the world, but in military prisons on American soil. What we are witnessing is the destruction of behavioural norms that western society has held as core values (whether they were lived up or not) for centuries. Now, they are being discarded as values altogether.
The weapon used to destabilize these bedrock concepts of western justice has been fear. Fear of terrorism has been used to stifle many rights, including the right to privacy, the right to free speech and so on, but it is the right to be free of indefinite detention without charge that we can see full malignancy of the current right wing thinking on justice. In the case of Padillo, he was imprisoned without charge for three years and eight months, and was allegedly tortured quite brutally during that time. Where has this journey of fear taken western society when so large of segment (i.e. the conservative side) of the population can look at the current American justice system and not feel deep and abiding shame? The lesson of 9/11 has basically been this: if Americans are frightened enough, you can do pretty much anything, and long-held principles of freedom and justice be damned.
The ramifications of fear-based thinking is worth considering in our own context, because the Canadian fear industry is certainly working overtime these days.
OTTAWA — Al-Qaeda terrorists intend to attack Canada, says the head of the RCMP's national-security branch."I firmly believe it is a question of not if, but when," Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell said yesterday. "The threat is growing."
He said the threat is real, though it is impossible to say whether it is imminent.
"I can't speak to it being imminent. I have no knowledge of that," he said.
"That's the nature of this threat. . . . There are things we don't know. It lives amongst us."
Think about what MacDonnel is saying here: the threat is "real" and "growing", terrorists "lives amongst us", but we can't yet say whether or not an attack is "imminent." This creates the perfect amorphous fear that renders populations susceptible to fear-based thinking and bad decision-making. I appreciate MacDonell letting us know there is a threat, but why couch it in such unnecessarily dramatic terms? Why leave the threats so open-ended, complete with a little hint in that our neighbours can't really be trusted. What an effective way to start simmering the sort of low-level ambient fear that can be whipped into a frenzy at the right moment.
It may be that terrorists are targeting Canada. It may be that we have homegrown terrorist cells. But how is battling either of these served by instilling into the populace fear and suspicion? The answer is that people ruled by fear are easier to control, and make poor decisions regarding appropriate laws to protect themselves from whatever fear is being promoted as the threat of the week. For this message of fear to come from one of our top cops is disturbing, but I am willing to bet we hear a lot more of it. This is the type of rhetoric that works well for "law and order" parties, and I would not be surprised to learn McDonnell's little trip through the limelight was encouraged by his governmental masters.
This is not a call for more secrecy from the police, or for us to ignore the threat of terrorism, but rather another in a long line of warnings that we cannot let ourselves be ruled by fear. We have seen the nightmare society that creates. McDonnell's task is to make Canadians feel more secure by doing his job well everyday, not by hitting th emedia and dropping vague hints of impending doom. Engaging in fear-inducing rhetoric is best left up to the right wing hacks who have made living in fear their stock in trade.
Every time I read one of these news stories, I hear Charlotte Diamond singing:
"Looking for Dracula,
but I'm not afraid,
I've got binoculars
I've got my cape and my fangs
Uh-ooo, what do I see?
A spooky swamp.
Can't jump over it,
can't go under it,
can't go round it..."
so, three years of torture, a weak case, a judge who is seeing the light, and perhaps,, PERHAPS the court system in the u.s. has been shaken enough by the turn of tides to realize 'if you rule con, you may pay deeply for it after'.
hope we'll hear more of this along with war crimes.
Some NYC tabloid recently had a picture of Padilla, saying he was the new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
In Canada we now have a justice minister who wants a privileged spot for police on the committees that assess our candidates for the judiciary. We also have a provincial attorney-general, Wally Oppal in BC, who seems to think it's ok for him to politicize an important criminal trial (the Pickton trial) by "taking sides" (who does he think he is? Richard Nixon on Charlie Manson?), thereby endangering the whole process and demonstrating that the A-G hasn't the foggiest notion of the role of the Crown in criminal prosecutions.
In McDonnell we have a police officer stepping over the line, going beyond his duty to assess a genuine criminal threat to Canadians by endorsing a political decision to go to war overseas. And McDonnell is hardly the first. (Hi, Julian Fantino!) Some of our senior military officers have been doing the same thing.
Seems to me we're watching a dangerous sort of creep here as various interested people begin fuzzing all the lines between justice, politics, policing, and the military. What's next? A crusading evangelical general as chief justice of the Supreme Court?
We gotta go back to democracy 101 for some of these people. North America: get a grip!
skdadl, geeeeeze.....the worst part is you're probably only listing the tip of the ice-berg.
we need to go back further then democracy 101....the iroquois constitution is the truest form of democracy on the planet and a good base (not something to just borrow bits and pieces from, which the u.s. did while forming their constitution).
http://www.angelfire.com/folk/sovereignty/constitution.html
Mind you, it's not like brutality in American prisons is a new thing. Or Canadian ones, for that matter.
Three years without charge for nothing in particular is perhaps a new low, though.
The whole thing rather reminds me of England years ago when the IRA was still active:
"There were six men in Birmingham
In Guildford there's four
That were picked up and tortured
And framed by the law
And the filth got promotion
But they're still doing time
For being Irish in the wrong place
And at the wrong time"
--Pogues, Birmingham Six