Terrorism laws have strangled cherished US rights to freedom

Terrorism laws have strangled cherished US rights to freedom
Richard Ackland
Friday June 19, 2009

Poll results released this week this week show that 52 per cent of American respondents are opposed to closing the detention "facility" at Guantanamo Bay. Thirty-nine per cent thought it should be shut down, which leaves 9 per cent who perhaps thought it should be a little bit open and a little bit closed.

Less than half (48 per cent), according to The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, supported moves by the US President, Barack Obama, to ban "harsh interrogation practices", ie torture. Forty-one per cent thought torture of detainees is not such a bad idea.

Obama's promise to close Guantanamo by January is causing big headaches and is one of the reasons behind the slide in his job approval rating - down from 61 per cent in April to 56 per cent. Americans love their enemy combatants holed up in someone else's country and for the nasty interrogation to be done in offshore black-hole venues.

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The Sudanese journalist Sami Al Hajj is now working at Al Jazeera after his stint at Guantanamo. Binyan Mohamed is fighting the British Government in the courts over its complicity in his torture. Moazzam Begg is back home designing computer games about his prison days. The long-term detainee Lakhdar Boumediene, a Bosnian-Algerian, is in France, and the Uyghurs - Chinese Muslims - are headed for Palau and Bermuda.

Many of these people have been cleared by US courts as posing no terrorist risk whatsoever. They had to endure lengthy periods of custody before the authorities realised that.

Mohamed Jawad has been in Guantanamo for allegedly throwing a hand-grenade at an American soldier, not previously known to be a war crime. A military commission judge tossed out his confession as coerced, yet he remains locked up. There is also a suggestion that he was 12 years of age when he was detained, not 16 or 17 as the Americans claim.

On and on we could go. The point is that implicit in the terrorism laws is an overreach, to create a mechanism whereby anyone can be rounded up and labelled an enemy combatant, tortured, indefinitely detained and kept in a condition of constitutional

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/terrorism-laws-have-strangled-cherished-us-rights-to-freedom-20090618-clxl.html?page=-1

it was pretty specific about the destruction it sought to do to US civil liberties.