Tagged: US Constitution
US Republicans mimic Harper’s disdain for the census
The ultra-conservative US Tea Party movement is taking a page from Stephen Harper’s playbook: gutting the census. Last week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that would shutter several Census Bureau projects and programs. Robert Groves is the Bureau’s director:
My mother, a school board member in her tiny Maine town, had a bumper sticker that read, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” You might equally, if less pithily, say, “If you think the census is expensive, try not knowing what’s happening to your country’s population.”
Gathering statistical information about a country’s demographics has been a hallmark of civilized countries for centuries. The requirement for a decennial census is embedded in the US Constitution. Nothing better illustrates the no-nothing arrogance of neoconservatives, US and Canadian, than their contempt for evidence that might betray flaws in their ideology.
H/T: Nathan Yau
What’s happened to the United States of America?
For all its foreign policy lapses, the United States has long stood as a beacon of individual freedom. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights constrain government action against individuals to a degree unimagined elsewhere in the world. Even the most criticized parts of the Bill of Rights, like the Second Amendment guarantee of the right ro bear arms, are, in William O. Douglas’s felicitous phrase, “designed to take the government off the backs of people.”
It is commonplace to observe that the September 11 attacks undermined those constraints.
In the run-up to Christmas, Glenn Greenwald, Salon’s tenacious legal affairs reporter, produced a series of stunning posts about the US military’s inhumane treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of passing a massive diplomatic cable trove to Wikileaks currently detained in solitary confinement in a two-meter by three-meter cell.
Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.
From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.
Remember, Manning hasn’t been convicted of anything. He is merely in pre-trial detention. A blog post by Lt. Col. David Coombs, Manning’s lawyer, fleshes out the picture:
Under the rules for the confinement facility, he is not allowed to sleep at anytime between 5:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. If he attempts to sleep during those hours, he will be made to sit up or stand by the guards….
PFC Manning is held in his cell for approximately 23 hours a day.
The guards are required to check on PFC Manning every five minutes by asking him if he is okay. PFC Manning is required to respond in some affirmative manner. At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay.
He is not allowed to have a pillow or sheets. However, he is given access to two blankets and has recently been given a new mattress that has a built-in pillow.
He is prevented from exercising in his cell. If he attempts to do push-ups, sit-ups, or any other form of exercise he will be forced to stop.
He does receive one hour of “exercise” outside of his cell daily. He is taken to an empty room and only allowed to walk. PFC Manning normally just walks figure eights in the room for the entire hour. If he indicates that he no long feels like walking, he is immediately returned to his cell.
When PFC Manning goes to sleep, he is required to strip down to his boxer shorts and surrender his clothing to the guards. His clothing is returned to him the next morning.
The New York Times picked up the story this morning, albeit in a blog post, not in the paper itself. The UN’s top torture official is now said to be investigating Manning’s case.
Find Greenwald’s initial post on Manning’s treatment here. A later post theorizes that the military is trying to break Manning down to obtain evidence of collusion with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Despite florid rhetoric directed against Assange (including repeated nonsensical demands he be charged with treason, a crime of which no non-citizen can be guilty), there is no credible basis for a charge against him.
Leave Khadr in Guantanamo – reader
Contrarian reader Jon Coates of Halifax has no trouble with the kidnapping, rendition, and indefinite detention without due process to which Omar Khadr, a Canadian juvenile, has been subjected for seven years. He writes:
Omar Ahmed Khadr at age 14, one year before his capture and removal to Guantanamo.
I believe that Khadr is a prisoner of war and should stay right where he is until the war in Afghanistan has run its course, just like any other prisoner of war. As he is also being charged with criminal activity – killing an American medic, a non-combatant – and since he is in American custody for that crime, he should face American justice first. The United States is not some third world dictatorship and I am sure he will receive a fair trial – certainly fairer than he would have received in Afghanistan.
Once guilt or innocence has been established, then the Canadian government might act to have him returned to Canada. Or, as a prisoner of war, he might be repatriated to Afghanistan, the place where he was captured. In that case, he’d better hope the Taliban wins the war.
Well, either Khadr was a soldier and is now a prisoner of war entitled to the protections affording by the Geneva Conventions, or he is a civilian accused of a criminal act and entitled to the protections afforded accused persons under the US Constitution. Instead, for the first four years of his detention, Khadr was not treated as a prisoner of war but as “an enemy combatant,” whom the US denied Geneva protections. The Bush administration also argued that because Guantanamo prisoners were non-citizens held on foreign territory, the US Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear their appeals, a contention the court rejected in a 2006 decision.
Two points are missing from Coates’s analysis: First, as a 15-year-old, Khadr was a child soldier, a category civilized countries generally treat as victims not as perpetrators. Second, after widespread and credible accounts of torture inflicted on Guantanamo prisoners, every other western democracy has asked for and received the release of nationals detained there. The Harper government stands alone in its refusal to do so, and is even now appealing a federal court order requiring it to make such a request.
Coates’s faith in Khadr’s prospects for receiving a fair trial in the US no doubt reflect that country’s long and admirable tradition of devising, enshrining, and upholding Constitutional safeguards against police, prosecutorial, and judicial abuse. Whatever you think of its foreign policy, the US has shone a beacon a freedom to the world in this respect. That’s precisely what makes its despicable behavior at Guantanamo so dismaying.
