Below is an excerpt from Senator Dodd’s website about a bill that he will be introducing today to restore Habeas Corpus rights that were eliminated during last year’s passage of the Military Commission Act. Habeas corpus essentially requires that a person in custody brought before a court to determine if that imprisonment is lawful, basically that they have been charged with a crime and thus could answer those charges in a court of law. Dodd has also set up a website www.restore-habeas.org which outlines the background on his bill, Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007.
The United States has always distinguished itself from the history of countries where the power of the few governed people. While the history of the rule law of law can be traced to the Magna Carta, I can argue that it was the aftermath of WWII, that set the stage for the United States to demonstrate by action, rather than by rhetoric what it meant to be governed by the rule of law.
Well I was terribly disappointed when the Senate of the United States adopted the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This was a major step back for our country in my view. I was terribly disappointed that the Senate of the United States decided to retreat from the Geneva Conventions, retreat from the insistence of avoiding torture as a tactic for gaining information. It seems to me that this was a blow for those of us who really are interested in bringing terrorists to the bar of justice, getting convictions, providing protection for our own soldiers and building the kind of international support we’re going to need to have in the 21st century.
The reason I care a lot about this beyond just what’s happened here, is that I grew up in a household where my father talked about the rule of law all the time. He was a prosecutor in 1945 and ‘46 at the Nuremberg trials. And he believed very strongly, as did Robert Jackson, who was the Supreme Court Justice who was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, that the defendants at Nuremberg should be governed by the rule of law, that they would actually get lawyers, present evidence. There were people who had brutally incinerated 6 million Jews, and were responsible for the deaths of 50 million people as the result of their aggressive war. And many people felt they should just be summarily executed. In fact, Winston Churchill advocated that result, the Soviets did at the time, the French went along with that result. It was only the United States that said ‘No we’re different than that and we need to show the world that there is a difference between what the Nazis did and who we are.’
And so they prevailed in the argument of giving these thugs, these brutal individuals, something which they never gave to their victims. And that was a day in court, to present evidence, to make a case for themselves. And it’s that standard upon which we built the international relationships in the post World War II period, that the United States can be so deeply proud of. In a sense we’re alone when we started and today most nations embrace the international institutions that we helped create. The irony of ironies, that the United States at a critical moment in the 21st century would walk away from the very institutions that we helped build was a source of my great disappointment. Knowing the genesis in history of how those organizations had been created.
So the results of the Military Commissions Act was a dark day, in my view, for our country. A major step back, to walk away from habeus corpus, to walk away from the Geneva Conventions, to allow for torture to be used again. Let me tell you why the torture, and Geneva Conventions, and habeus corpus, provisions of that bill are so troubling to me. First and foremost, here we need to get convictions of these people who are charged with terrorist activities against our country. My view as a result of the adoption of this legislation in October – that we’re going to have a very hard time getting convictions. I suspect many of these cases will now languish in the courts for years, arguing over the rights, the habeus corpus rights. So rather than getting convictions and seeing people punished who would do us great harm, I think as a result of this legislation being adopted, we’re going to have a much harder time getting those convictions and punishing the people responsible for doing what they have to our country and to others.
Too often the nature of sound bites on television form the structure of the debate on important issues. Dodd is showing us that the debate of narrowly focused sound bites has led the United States astray from the guiding principals that served as a moral compass.
