Law & Disorder

From SFGate.com:

The Pentagon has drafted a manual for upcoming detainee trials that would allow suspected terrorists to be imprisoned or put to death using hearsay evidence and coerced testimony.

According to a copy of the manual obtained by The Associated Press, a terror suspect's defense lawyer cannot reveal classified evidence in the person's defense until the government has a chance to review it.

Complete Article Here

This article from SFGate.com makes me think about why our country is in serious trouble. I am no legal genius but I do understand history well enough to understand why the framer's of the constitution included the Bill of Rights for those accused of crimes.

I am a avid consumer of the Law & Order series on television, I know that this is fiction, but it does show to some extent the workings of the US justice system. Or rather how it is suppose to work. On the show they portray the constant tension in the system between the desire for retribution and vengeance by victims, public opinion, and law enforcement and the rule of law. The public's perception that our justice system is broken, is a combination of media exploitation of our fears and an overwhelmed system.

The issue of how the rule of law is applied to "suspected terrorist" is one that I feel a need to comment on.

"[A] bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse."
--- Thomas Jefferson December 20, 1787

I would challenge that the greatness of a country is measured on how the rule of law is applied to anyone accused of a crime. On 9/11 when we learned that the FBI and other law enforcement organizations were conducting round-ups of Arabs whether citizens or not, made my blood boil. Now we sit here almost six years later, with all we are allowed to know about Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and other horrors out of Afghanistan, and now this. How can anyone contend we are even a civilized country, when we participate in, condone or simply ignore the actives our government is engaged in under our name?

Once a bell is rung, it can't be unrung. The same holds true with precedence in the law. Everyone of us should be furious at the this administration for the way inwhich enemy combatants, terror suspects, or whatever the latest buzzword is for US political prisoner. The point being that the people being tried before a military court today, maybe Iraqis, but sometime in the not to very distant future could very well be Americans.

Pictures like this one make me sick, it reminds me of a slave ship in the middle passage, and it makes me want nothing more then to burn that tainted flag hanging over these people's heads. If our current administration continues to insist that these people cannot be tried in a civil court and afforded all the legal right afforded in the Bill of Rights, then they are in fact saying, our country is finished, over, lights out! It is then in fact they are saying it is time for a new American Revolution!