The members of that court may as well have ordered the person stripped naked and humiliated, deprived of food and water, kept in a soundproofed cell with a sandbag on his head, wearing earmuffs, chained and shackled, soft mittens on his hands to deprive the victim even of the sense of touch for long periods of time. They may as well have personally kept the prisoner in extreme cold, doused with buckets of ice-water night and day to prevent sleep for days or even weeks at a time. They may as well have been the ones who ordered a detainee's hands cuffed behind his back and suspended by the wrists for hours on end.
Here is the bottom line: Individual rights are everything.
Without individual rights, there is no freedom, there is no nation. National security must be subordinate to individual rights. Indeed, national security is analogous to, and dependent upon, individual rights. All of our liberties, separate and as a whole, are derived from those rights. No President, no Legislature, and no Court can legitimately rob us of them. Moreover, those rights belong to all human-kind. The first basic principle of America is that everyone is created equal. The second principle is that all people are endowed with inalienable rights given to each of us by our Creator, and that no person or state possesses the authority to take away what God has given.
The most valuable possession any of us can have is freedom. If we truly believe in these basic Founding Principles, how is it that justice for Americans is different from justice for others? What happened to the blind lady? Why have the scales of equality tipped so far to one side? Why have we forgotten that in the absence of truth, there is no justice, and without justice, there can be no truth?
If we value our freedom and insist that the Rule of Law is paramount, if we truly believe the notion that all people are equal, and are presumed innocent until proven guilty, how can we have the nerve, the audacity - the self-righteous arrogance - to apply different standards to anyone else, regardless of their nationality or location? What part of the Constitution allows Americans to apply different laws at Guantanamo Bay than those we extol as necessary to basic human dignity here in the United States?
Because if those in power can steal one person's freedom, if they can rob even one person of his or her natural rights and strip him of his very humanity in the name of "national security," and then refuse that person access to the courts in the name of "state secrets" -
They can do it to all of us.
by JC Garrett
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