The Non-elected Rulers of Earth
The monsters who just wantonly blew away over 40 men, women and children at a wedding party in Iraq near the Syrian border are the same U.S. forces who authorized vicious tortures and killings around the world. Daily new Internet pictures of Abu Ghraib reveal fresh glimpses of hell: a combination of the techniques of Southern racist terror with pornographic humiliation and the CIA's "scientific" infliction of pain. Now that some of the photos are out, the capitalist media admit that the White House and Pentagon had their bureaucrats and lawyers advise on just how much murderous terror they could get away with.
This world of fear is what the government wants to apply to any "dissenters" here at home. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has cynically manipulated the population's horror at the heinous attack on the World Trade Center to massively intensify an assault on civil liberties and vastly expand police powers. Untold thousands have been swept up in racist roundups of mainly Near Eastern, South Asian and Muslim people, detained without charges, tortured and abused in prisons across America. Thousands more have been deported, often to be tortured and killed. The anti-terror laws are now being used to prosecute people who have nothing even allegedly to do with "terrorism." This May a Mexican street gang in the Bronx was indicted on 70 counts, including murder and robberies, under New York's new anti-terror law. Bronx district attorney said the terror stipulation was justified while noting the statute is "to protect society against acts of political terrorism."
This April the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in three important "war on terror" cases challenging some of the government's most aggressive efforts to shred civil liberties. The stakes in these cases are high, for what the government is asserting is nothing less than its right to disappear citizens and strip them of their formal and fundamental democratic rights. There has always been a wide gulf between formal bourgeois legality, race- and class-biased repression and violence that are routine to capitalist rule. If the government does away with even the formal nods to democratic rights, then "justice" in this country is going to resemble the rule of reactionary juntas and dictatorships propped up by the American imperialism around the globe. If they can effectively abolish citizenship rights, then the plight of immigrants here and foreign victims of U.S. policies will be even worse.
On April 28, appeals were presented on behalf of two American citizens held indefinitely as "enemy combatants" without charges or a hearing. One of these prisoners, Yaser Esam Hamdi, was detained in Afghanistan in late 2001. The other, Jose Padilla, was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago O'Hare airport on a material witness warrant and then turned over to military authorities. This year, on April 20, lawyers presented the appeal of foreign nationals arrested in Afghanistan and dragged to the hellhole U.S. military camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, where over 600 are now detained.
The Guantanamo prisoners are seeking the right to challenge their captivity in American courts through a habeas corpus petition. With supreme arrogance, the government asserts that American courts have no right to review a presidential decision, and that the U.S. has no jurisdiction over Guantanamo prisoners because the American army base is on Cuban territory. We Trotskyists suggest then that the Cuban government assert its authority over this imperialist beachhead on the Cuban- deformed Workers State. U.S. out of Guantanamo! Free all the detainees, from Guantanamo to Iraq to the U.S.!
The Padilla Case: Evisceration of Citizenship
"Today the government asks this court for a broad ruling that would allow the president unlimited power to imprison any American anywhere at any time without trial simply by labeling him an enemy combatant," warned Padilla's attorney, Jennifer Martinez, in the Supreme Court hearing. On April 9, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee filed a brief of amici curiae (friends of the court) on Padilla's behalf, just as in July of 2003 when his [Padilla's] case was argued in the U.S. court of Appeals in New York. The brief argues that this case "tests the very existence of the fundamental rights and privileges of citizenship embodied in the Bill of Rights, and secured on the battlefield of the Civil War and in class and social struggle over the past hundred and more years. If the imperial President is upheld, Padilla's detention threatens to become the Dred Scott case of our time, a declaration that "Citizens have no rights that the government is bound to respect."
Born in the Brooklyn of Puerto Rican background, Padilla grew up in Chicago and as a young man converted to Islam, changed his name to Ibrahim and moved to Egypt, where he now has a wife and two children. In May 2002, he was traveling back to Chicago to visit his family, but was seized at the airport on vague claims that he was associated with Al Qaeda, and involved in a "plot" to detonate a "dirty bomb" in the U.S. No charges have been presented against Padilla, and the government has admitted that it is a "weak case". Yet Padilla has been denied any ability to challenge his detention, and has not been allowed to see a lawyer since he's been in military detention except for one visit a month ago, with military brass watching and taping the whole discussion so that no confidential legal defense could be discussed.
Meanwhile as theNew York Times (13 May) reported, Padilla's name was extracted under "intensive questioning" (a euphemism for torture) of a man captured by the CIA. Authorized "intensive questioning" techniques include strapping down a prisoner and pushing him underwater until he nearly drowns. As the Times noted, "These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A." The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.
Another extremely ominous case brought down by the government seeks to shut down free speech using the USA-Patriot Act, which was passed with bipartisan support after the September 11 attacks. Sami Omar al-Hussayen, the father of three children, has been in prison over a year. He is a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Idaho, where he led a candlelight vigil the night of the September 11 to condemn the World Trade Center attack. Now al-Hussayen, a leader of the university's Muslim Student Association, is accused of "terrorism" based solely on the fact that he set up some Islam-oriented Internet Web sites and e-mail discussion groups on which people posted arguments for and against "jihad." It is not even clear, or relevant in the government's view, whether al-Hussayen even knew these postings were being made. Such attempts to prove guilt by Internet association could target anyone who ever logged on to any site with a link to anything, whether the content is known or not. The USA-Patriot omnibus witchhunting act outlaws "material support" to "terrorists," but this "crime" is so vaguely defined that it could include giving money away to a bake sale to fund health clinics in Turkey or Sri Lanka, if the recipients were affiliated with groups such as the Kurdistan Workers Party or Tamil Tigers, both designated "terrorist" the U.S. government. The U.S. government's "terrorist" label is to be applied as broadly as suits its nefarious purposes.
Reprinted from The Workers Vanguard, 28 May 2004, pg. 1, 8