rights – Hank Kalet

The debate over yesterday’s verdict in the terrorism trial of Ahmed Ghailani, which resulted in the Guantanamo detainee being convicted on only one of nearly 300 charges, is ignoring a basic precept of American democracy. The conviction on a charge related to a 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Africa — a conviction that has Ghailani facing between 20 years and life in prison — has conservatives renewing their call for those facing terror charges to be tried by a military tribunal and not in civilian criminal courts.

The verdict has been discussed within a context of effectiveness, using the assumption that failure to convict is a conviction of the system itself, one that requires us to suspend the basic rule of law and to move to an extra-judiciary measure.

“This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo.”

No one, however, is asking the question that needs to be asked. Were the acquittals due to the system itself, which is designed to defend the rights of the accused (a goal at which the system too often fails, but that is a topic for another post), an indictment of the system or did they occur because of a failure to collect the necessary evidence?

There is something more than a little disturbing about a mindset that demands we change the rules for a subset of people because we did not get the result we want, a mindset that endangers all of us because it chips away at the rights not only of Guantanamo detainees, but of everyone accused of a crime. It flips the basic premise of American justice — everyone is presumed not guilty until proven otherwise — and allows the presumption of guilt to become the standard.

This is far more of a threat to our country than anything threat we face from terrorism.

Sometimes even Ruth Marcus makes sense. She writes in her column today that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week to let stand a federal ban on so-called partial birth abortions “was alarming for a number of reasons.”

First, the majority’s unstated but unmistakable willingness to dispense with inconvenient precedent. As nominees, the president’s two choices for the high court treated us to pious pronouncements about their respect for the rule of law.

But they didn’t flinch in overturning, in all but name, a seven-year-old case in which a differently constituted court, considering a nearly identical statute, came out the other way. For all that talk about impartially calling balls and strikes, Mr. Chief Justice, it turns out that it matters a whole lot who the umpires are.

Second, the Father Court Knows Best tone of Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion. “Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child,” Kennedy intoned. This is one of those sentences about women’s essential natures that are invariably followed by an explanation of why the right at stake needs to be limited. For the woman’s own good, of course.

Women, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, may come to regret their decision later, especially “when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.”,

This, of course is a slippery slope, as Marcus points out, the state’s right to step in here easily expanded to include a broader array of prohibitions.

But if Congress can ban the partial-birth procedure, why can’t it express its “ethical and moral concerns” with the standard procedure for second-trimester abortions, dilation and evacuation? As Kennedy notes, this procedure, in which the fetus is dismembered before being removed, is “in some respects as brutal, if not more,” as the partial-birth procedure.

Why can’t Congress impose its ethical views by requiring any woman seeking an abortion to wait a few weeks, watch a sonogram of her developing fetus, listen to an antiabortion lecture?

The decision is a real reminder of what is at stake in 2008, especially when you consider that Justice John Paul Stevens, the court’s most liberal judge, is likely to retire. A conservative Republican is likely to follow the script written by President George W. Bush, a script that gave us Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sam Alito.

The decision, for me, is not just about abortion (I remain ambivalent about abortion), but about the rights of women to decide for themselves how to live and what to think, and it is about respect for precedent and the longterm impact that a conservative court that is hostile to the notion of individual rights but sanctions executive privilege might mean for the future of America.

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Broken Cord: An Anthology of Writing on Alzheimer’s and Dementia

We are looking to raise seed money for an anthology of writing on Alzheimer’s and dementia. The anthology will be the first project from a new small press. All proceeds will go to research and care groups. Contributors who donate $20 or more will get copies of the anthology and a mention on the acknowledgements page. Writers, we are looking for poems, fiction, and essays on dementia and Alzheimer’s. They can be from any perspective — care-givers, family, the person with dementia.

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Tag: rights

The wrong debate

The Bush court strikes