Prisoners of the War on Terror

The United States is a nation of laws.

The police arrest suspects they reasonably believe to have broken the law, not citizens who happen to disagree with the government's politics. Cops don't go after people preemptively because they might commit a crime someday. In America, people are considered innocent until they're proven guilty in a court of law. They enjoy the right to a fair trial by a jury of their peers as quickly as possible. And of course they're entitled to the counsel of an attorney.

These fundamental rights, taught in every civics class, define what it means to be American. When other countries fill their prisons with political dissidents, we wonder aloud what it must be like to live in such lawless places. When we watch films like "Midnight Express,"in which an American drug smuggler rots in a Turkish prison, we shake our heads not at the sentence -- after all, he's guilty -- but at the lead character's railroading through the court system and the abuse he suffers at the hands of his guards.

Before Sept. 11, no patriotic American would have disputed the last two paragraphs. Sadly, legal guarantees that every American considered a sacred birthright have been shredded virtually overnight, and many people don't seem to care. Just as a World Trade Center built over the course of five years was destroyed in under two hours, a presidential impostor has used a phony "war on terror" to systematically unravel two centuries of basic jurisprudence in less than a year.

George W. Bush may not have read Gibbon but he possesses the morals and cunning of a gangster; in a country still stunned by last fall's attacks, that seems to be enough.

The "war on terror," we're told, requires new tactics. Law enforcement -- which somehow now includes the military, CIA, FBI and NSA -- needs stronger tools. Terrorists are sneakier and smarter than your garden-variety mafia don. So now they're no longer "accused terrorists" but rather "enemy combatants." Who cares if these "enemy combatants" are American citizens? They can be held forever, or to be more precise, until the federal government "defeats terrorism." And while they're awaiting that distant day, Bush's "detainees" -- not prisoners, since his first decisive victory has been in his jihad against the English language -- don't get to see a lawyer. This works out well because Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- who has anointed himself judge, jury and executioner -- won't offer them a chance to prove their innocence in court.

For the Bushies, see, guilt and innocence aren't the point. The detainees aren't in prison for what they've done. They're there because of what they might do, for whom they know, for what they think. They are political prisoners.

Americans have watched with aggressive disinterest as images of 564 captured Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters squatting in their Guantánamo dog pens fill their living room screens. Human rights activists warn that these inmates, who hail from 38 countries, are being abused. At Camp Delta in July and August, three men tried to hang themselves and another slashed his wrist with a plastic razor. According to the Army, Guantánamo internees have staged hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their captivity. Others are being forcibly medicated with antidepressants and anti-psychotic drugs.

Even worse than the day-to-day torture is the interminable legal limbo. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled July 31 that "the military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is outside the sovereign territory of the United States." So Guantánamo isn't the U.S., which means that the prisoners can't seek redress in American courts. But it isn't Cuba either. The POWs can go to the World Court in The Hague, notes Kollar-Kotelly -- but the United States routinely ignores international rulings.