Groups of Interest

From the WP came news that the Bush administration is trying to figure out what to do with enemy-combatants who cannot be tried due to lack of evidence but cannot be set free because we have no clue who or what they are and what they might do to us in the future. A possibility on the discussion table is lifetime imprisonment in an US built jail in a host country like Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Afghanistan. Rumor has it that these places are not as nice to their prisoners as the US ones - which are bound by laws and such - and can be persuaded to tighten the not-so-proverbial screws.

Let us assume that everyone in detention at Gitmo or in a naval brig is guilty. Let us further assume that the US never uses torture as an interrogative or retributional technique. If our assumptions, based on our adherence to moral and legal doctrines, are true, how can we send these prisoners to camps (or prisons or gulags) in countries where we know that they will be treated in inhumane and torturous ways for the rest of their lives? Not just for the short-term"investigations" as is the case currently. And who is to say that these prisoners, back on their soil, won't bribe the guards (baksheesh is a BIG problem in the Orient, let me tell you) and manage to escape? Or that the despot in charge at the moment in Egypt or Pakistan won't be overthrown and the prisons become the latest staging of Bastille Day? Isn't it in the best interest of our nation's security to keep these dangerous people within our control? But hey, far be it for me to defend the people in Gitmo. Whatever happens to them, I am sure they deserve it. I have my own hide to worry about.

In a New York Sun piece, reproduced on his site [http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2309], Daniel Pipes says that if one is"searching for rapists, one looks only at the male population. Similarly, if searching for Islamists (adherents of radical Islam), one looks at the Muslim population." Using the recent survey done by Cornell which shows that 44% of Americans can live with some curtailing of civil rights for Muslims in America, he praises Malkin's work on Japanese internments and hopes that the Muslims in America can be"observed, registered, profiled, monitored".

Feeling unequal to the task of re-writing the Gulag Archipelago, I went and looked up the dissent opinions in the Supreme Court decision that upheld Japanese American internments in 1944. It is a fascinating read. Justice Murphy writes:

The main reasons relied upon by those responsible for the forced evacuation, therefore, do not prove a reasonable relation between the group characteristics of Japanese Americans and the dangers of invasion, sabotage and espionage. The reasons appear, instead, to be largely an accumulation of much of the misinformation, half-truths and insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese Americans by people with racial and economic prejudices-the same people who have been among the foremost advocates of the evacuation. A military judgment [323 U.S. 214, 240] based upon such racial and sociological considerations is not entitled to the great weight ordinarily given the judgments based upon strictly military considerations. Especially is this so when every charge relative to race, religion, culture, geographical location, and legal and economic status has been substantially discredited by independent studies made by experts in these matters.

The military necessity which is essential to the validity of the evacuation order thus resolves itself into a few intimations that certain individuals actively aided the enemy, from which it is inferred that the entire group of Japanese Americans could not be trusted to be or remain loyal to the United States. No one denies, of course, that there were some disloyal persons of Japanese descent on the Pacific Coast who did all in their power to aid their ancestral land. Similar disloyal activities have been engaged in by many persons of German, Italian and even more pioneer stock in our country. But to infer that examples of individual disloyalty prove group disloyalty and justify discriminatory action against the entire group is to deny that under our system of law individual guilt is the sole basis for deprivation of rights. Moreover, this inference, which is at the very heart of the evacuation orders, has been used in support of the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy. To give constitutional sanction to that inference in this case, however well- intentioned may have been the military command on the Pacific Coast, is to adopt one of the cruelest of the rationales used by our enemies to destroy the dignity of the individual and to encourage and open the door to discriminatory actions against other minority groups in the passions of tomorrow[emphasis added]

Surely, we shall not see a serious discussion of Muslim civilian internments in the public sphere unless another attack occurs on US soil. Still, as a group, the Muslim-Americas have to be less-opaque, less-other, less-foreign, to those who pay"a lot of attention to television news". This can be achieved with a clear and public leadership that can articulate their rights in their own country. A veiled sister on Real World Houston might also be good.