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"Preventive detention goes against every principle our nation was founded on. We have courts and laws in place that we respect and rely on because we have been a nation of laws for hundreds of years; we should not simply discard them when they are inconvenient."
At the same time, CCR President Michael Ratner called military commissions "irredeemably flawed." In an earlier article, he described them as "kangaroo courts" no different than ones in police states. The combination of lawless arrests, torture, military commissions and indefinite detentions describe today's America accurately, especially for anyone, rightly or wrongly, accused of terrorism or conspiracy to commit it.
Last March, after reports about new military commission trials, the ACLU bought a full-page Sunday New York Times ad urging the Justice Department to try high-value" terror suspects in civil courts, calling commissions:
"a second class system of justice which should be shut down for good. The Constitution is not optional, and the rule of law must be restored."
The ad showed an Obama picture morphing into Bush, asking: "What will it be Mr. President? Change or more of the same." ACLU's executive director Anthony Romero said "it's critical that Americans know what is at stake here: nothing less than America's commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law."
Post-9/11, both were trashed. Bipartisan complicity in lawlessness followed. Most all Guantanamo and other offshore prison detainees are innocent. In January 2010, The New York Times said:
"in the eight years since the Bush administration first set up military commissions, only three Guantanamo detainees have been convicted, in part because of legal challenges to the tribunals. Two of the three received modest sentences and are now free," showing there was no basis for trial in the first place, and a year later the conviction number is still three.
Moreover, the many hundreds held offshore are wrongfully called terrorists. Yet they've been tortured, denied counsel and due process, contact with family members, and in some cases murdered, though innocent of any crime. Today's America institutionalized injustice, and not just offshore given the hundreds of political prisoners languishing domestically under gulag conditions.
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